Free The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai Page B

new age’ as, in all likelihood, ‘ragged ticket touts for the circus’, who, in their boundless avarice, were capable of suffering the whole night in the cold so that they could make a bit of money by buying up all the tickets in the morning once the booking office was open. Her disappointment was all the more bitter because, quite apart from the rude awakening it provided from her feverish reverie, it diminished the proud pleasure she had personally taken in the hiring and arrival of the by-now notorious company: the result of her first significant public victory a week ago when—with the decisive support of the police chief—she managed to crush the resistance of the more cowardly members of the town’s executive committee who, by referring to the fact that all reports from outlying villages and hamlets, not to mention unsubstantiated gossip, suggested that the weird troupe caused alarm and unrest wherever it appeared, and that, furthermore, there had been one or two ugly incidents, had wished to ban it altogether from the town’s precincts. Yes: it had been her first significant triumph (there were many who said that her speech about ‘the inalienable rights of common curiosity’ could easily have been printed in the papers), yet, despite this, she could not enjoy the fruits of victory, since it was precisely because of the circus that she discovered, too late, the laughably false nature of her misapprehension concerning the true identity of these loiterers about her. Since she felt the mordancy of ridicule more keenly than she did the attraction and mystery of the enormous wagon, she didn’t even bother to investigate it in order to satisfy her own ‘inalienable rights of common curiosity’ about a vehicle so exotic it fully lived up to its publicity, but with a withering glance of contempt turned her back on both ‘the stinking juggernaut and those impudent rogues’, and strode with clanging steps down the narrow pavement home. This fit of temper, needless to say—just like the one which followed her encounter with Mrs Plauf—consisted, as the idiom has it, more of smoke than of fire, and by the time she had reached the end of Honvéd Passage and slammed the frail gate of the garden behind her, she had succeeded in getting over her disappointment, for she had only to remind herself that by the end of the next day she would no longer be subject to her fate but the genuine master of it, and immediately she could breathe more easily and begin to feel the full import of her self once again, a self that chose decisively to dismiss any thought of premature daydreaming, since ‘it desired victory and was resolute in the pursuit of it’. The landlady, an old wine merchant, occupied the front block; she inhabited the rear building of the ramshackle peasant dwelling, and while the place could have done with some repair she was not dissatisfied with it; for though the low ceiling prevented her standing up as straight as she might have wished and undoubtedly made movement difficult, and while the tiny ill-fitting windows and the walls crumbling with damp left scope for improvement, Mrs Eszter was so far a disciple of the so-called simple life that she hardly noticed these insignificant details, since, according to her convictions, if there was a bed, a wardrobe, a lamp and a basin, and if the roof didn’t leak in ‘the living unit’, all possible human needs were satisfied. And so, apart from a vast sprung iron bedstead, a single wardrobe, a stool with basin and jug, and a crested chandelier (she tolerated neither carpet, nor mirror, nor curtains), there was only an unvarnished table and a chair that had lost its back to serve for meals, a fold-away music-stand for the increasing amounts of official paper-work she had to bring home, and a coat-stand for guests (should there be any) to hang their coats on. As concerned the latter of course, ever since she had met the chief of police, she received no one except