Since the passenger train connecting the
icebound estates of the southern low-lands which extend from the banks
of the Tisza almost as far as the foot of the Carpathians, had, despite
the garbled explanations of a haplessly stumbling guard and the promises
of the stationmaster rushing nervously on and off the platform, failed
to arrive (“Well squire, it seems to have disappeared into thin air again…”
the guard shrugged pulling a sour face) the only two serviceable old wooden-seated
coaches maintained for just such an “emergency” were coupled to an obsolete
and unreliable 424, used only as a last resort, and put to work, albeit
a good hour and a half late according to a timetable to which they were
not bound and which was only an approximation anyway, so that the locals
who were waiting in vain for the eastbound service and had accepted its
delay with what appeared to be a combination of indifference and helpless
resignation, might eventually arrive at their destination some fifty kilometres
further along the branch line. To tell the truth none of this really surprised
anyone anymore since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to
the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and
one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming
chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable, and
ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could
be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building
it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the
earth not out of it, and that, since one could only note the symptoms of
disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable,
there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything
that was still tangible; which is precisely what people at the village
station continued to do when, in hope of taking possession of the essentially
limited seating to which they were entitled, they stormed the carriage
doors, which being frozen up proved very difficult to open. Mrs. Pflaum,
who happened to be on her way home from one of her customary winter visits
to relatives, took full part in the pointless struggle (pointless since,
as they soon discovered, no-one actually remained standing) and by the
time she had shoved aside those who stood in her way and used her tiny
frame to hold up the crowd pressing behind her in order to assure herself
of a rear facing window seat, she could no longer distinguish between her
sense of indignation at the intolerable jostling she had just endured and
a different feeling, oscillating between fury and anguish, occasioned by
the awareness that she, with her first class ticket, which was quite worthless
in this stench of garlic sausage blended with the aroma of mixed fruit
brandy and cheap pungent tobacco, surrounded as she was by an almost menacing
ring of loudmouthed, belching “common peasants”, would be faced by the
acute uncertainty faced by all those engaged in what was in any case the
risky business of travelling nowadays, in other words not knowing whether
she would arrive home at all. Her sisters, who had lived in complete isolation
ever since age had rendered them immobile, would never have forgiven her
if she had neglected to pay them her regular early winter visit and it
was only on their account that she refused to abandon this dangerous enterprise
even though she was as certain as everyone else that something around her
had changed so radically that the wisest course under the circumstances
would have been to take no risks at all. To be wise, however, to soberly
anticipate what might lie in store, was truly no easy task, for it was
as if some vital yet undetectable modification had taken place in the eternally
stable composition of the air, in the very remoteness of that hitherto
faultless mechanism or unnamed principle—which, it is often remarked, makes
the world go round and of which the most imposing evidence is the sheer
phenomenon of the world’s existence—which had suddenly lost some of its
power and it was because of this that the troubling knowledge of the probability
of danger was in fact less unbearable than the common sense of foreboding
that soon anything at all might happen and that this “anything”—the law
governing its likelihood becoming apparent in the process of disintegration—was
leading to greater anxiety than the thought of any personal misfortune,
thereby increasingly depriving people of the possibility of coolly appraising
the facts. To establish one’s bearings among the ever more frightening
events of the past months had become impossible, not only because there
was little coherence in the mixture of news, gossip, rumour and personal
experience (examples of which might include the sharp and much too early
cold snap at the beginning of November, the mysterious family disasters,
the rapid succession of railway accidents and those terrifying rumours
of gangs of criminal children defacing public monuments in the distant
capital, between any of which it was hard to find any rational connection),
but also because not one of these items of news meant anything in itself,
all seeming to be merely omens of what was referred to by a growing number
of people as “the coming catastrophe.” Mrs Pflaum had even heard that some
people had started to talk of peculiar changes in the behaviour of animals,
and while this—for the time being at least, though who knows what might
happen later—could be dismissed as irresponsible and harmful gossip, one
thing at least was certain, that unlike those to whom this signified a
state of utter chaos, Mrs Pflaum was convinced that, on the contrary, it
was perfectly appropriate in its timing since a respectable person hardly
dared set foot outside her house anymore, and in a place where a train
can disappear “just like that” there was, or so her thoughts ran on, “no
sense left in anything.” And this was how she prepared herself mentally
for the ride home which was bound to be far less smooth than the outward
journey, cushioned as she had then been by her nominal status as a first
class passenger, since, as she pondered nervously, “anything might happen
on these dreadful branch lines” and it was best to steel oneself to the
worst; so she sat like one who would happily make herself invisible, straight
backed, her knees schoolgirlishly clamped together, wearing a chilly, somewhat
contemptuous expression, among the slowly diminishing huddle of people
still tussling for seats, and while she kept a suspicious eye on the terrifying
gallery of undefined faces reflected in the window, her feelings swung
between anxiety and yearning, thinking now of the ominous distances ahead
and now of the warmth of the house she had had to leave behind; those pleasant
afternoons with Mrs Mádai and Mrs Nuszbeck, those old Sunday walks
under the tree-lined avenue of Friars’ Walk, and finally the soft carpets
and delicate furniture of home, that radiantly calm order of carefully
tended flowers and all her little possessions, which, as she well knew,
was not only an island in a wholly unpredictable world where afternoons
and Sundays had become merely a memory but was the one refuge and consolation
of a lonely woman the orderliness of whose life was calculated to produce
peace and calm. Uncomprehendingly, and with a certain degree of envious
contempt, she realized that her noisy fellow travellers—most likely coarse
peasants from the darkest nooks and corners of distant villages—were quickly
adapting themselves to even such straitened circumstances: to them it was
as if nothing unusual had happened, everywhere there was the rustling of
greaseproof paper being unwrapped and food being doled out, corks were
popping, beer can tabs were dropping to the greasy floor, and here and
there she could already hear that noise “so calculated to offend all one’s
finer feelings” but, in her opinion, “perfectly common among common people”
of munching and crunching; and what was more, the party of four directly
opposite her, who were among the loudest, had already started dealing out
a deck of cards—till only she was left, solitary, sitting even more stiffly
among the increasingly loud human hubbub, silent, her head determinedly
turned to the window, her fur coat protected from the seat by a sheet of
newspaper, clutching her clipped handbag to her with such terrified and
resolute suspicion that she hardly noticed the engine up ahead, its two
red lights probing the frozen darkness, drawing uncertainly out into the
winter evening. A discreet sigh of relief was her only contribution to
the noises of general relief (grunts of satisfaction, whoops of joy) that
after such a long and chilly period of waiting something at last was happening;
though this did not last long, since, having travelled barely a hundred
metres from the now silent village platform and after a few clumsy jerks—as
if the order permitting them to start had been unexpectedly revoked—the
train came judderingly to a stop; and though the cries of frustration soon
gave way to puzzled and angry laughter, once people realized that this
state of affairs was likely to continue and were forced to admit that their
journey —possibly because of the extended chaos owing to the employment
of an off-timetable train—as sadly destined to vacillate between lurching
forward and lurching to a halt, they all relapsed into a jocky indifference,
the dull insensibility that ensues when one has been forced to accept certain
facts, which simply goes to show how people behave when, having failed,
infuriatingly, to understand something, they try to suppress the fear caused
by genuine shock to a system which seems to have been overtaken by chaos,
the nerve-rackingly repeated instances of which may be met with nothing
but withering sarcasm. Although their crude incessant joking (“I should
take so much care when I’m in bed with the missus...!”) naturally outraged
her delicate sensibilities, the stream of ever ruder cracks—with which
each hoped to trump the one-before-jokes, in any case, now dying away—had
a relaxing effect, even on Mrs Pflaum, and, every so often, on hearing
one of the better ones—and there was no real escape from the coarse laughter
that followed in each case—she herself couldn’t entirely suppress a shy
little smile. Slyly and carefully, she even ventured a few momentary glances,
not at her immediate neighbours but at those who were sitting further off,
and in the peculiar atmosphere of daft good humour—since, while the occupants
of the carriage (those men slapping their thighs, those women of nondescript
age cackling with their mouths full) remained rather fearsome, they seemed
less threatening than they had been—she tried to keep her anxious imagination
in check and tell herself that she might not actually have to face the
lurking terrors of the ugly and unfriendly mob by which, her instincts
told her, she was surrounded, and that it might only be because of her
keen susceptibility to omens of ill-fortune and her exaggerated sense of
isolation in such a cold and alien environment, that she might arrive home,
unharmed it may be, but exhausted by her state of constant vigilance. To
tell the truth there was very little real basis for hope of such a happy
resolution but Mrs Pflaum simply couldn’t resist the false enticements
of optimism: though the train was once again stalled nowhere, waiting minutes
on end for a signal, she calmly concluded that they were making “some kind
of progress”, and she controlled the nervous impatience occasioned by the
regular—alas too frequent—squealing of brakes and periods of unavoidable
immobility, since the pleasant warmth that had resulted from the heating
being switched on when the engine started had encouraged her to divest
herself of her coat, so she no longer had to fear that she might catch
a cold on stepping out into the icy wind on arrival home. She adjusted
the creases in the stole behind her, spread the fake fur wrap over her
legs, locked her fingers round the handbag swollen by the woollen scarf
she had stuffed inside it, and, with an unchangingly straight back, was
just looking out again through the window when there, in the filthy glass,
she suddenly found herself face to face with a “peculiarly silent” unshaven
man, swigging from a bottle of stinking brandy, who, now that she was clad
only in a blouse and the little jacket of her suit, was staring (“Lustfully!!”)
at her perhaps too prominent, powerful breasts. “I knew it!”—quick as lightning,
despite a hot flush running right through her, she turned her head away,
pretending she hadn’t noticed. For several minutes she didn’t move a muscle,
but stared blindly into the darkness outside, and tried, vainly, to recall
the man’s appearance (conjuring up only the unshaven face, the “somehow
so dirty” broadcloth coat and the uncouth, sly yet shameless gaze which
she was to find so disturbing...), then, very slowly, trusting that she
ran no risk in doing so, she allowed her eyes to slide across the glass,
withdrawing immediately when she discovered that “the creature in question”
was not only persisting in his “impudence”, but that their eyes had met.
Her shoulders, neck and nape were all aching because of the rigid posture
of her head, but by now she couldn’t have torn her eyes away even if she
had wanted to because she felt that whichever way she turned beyond the
narrow darkness of the window, his terrifyingly steady gaze would easily
commandeer every nook of the carriage and “snap her up”. “How long has
he been looking at me?”—the question cut Mrs Pflaum like a knife, and the
possibility that the man’s dirty raking eye had been “on her” from the
very start of the journey made the gaze, whose meaning she had understood
in a flash in the very second of meeting, appear even more terrifying than
before. These two eyes, after all, spoke of sickeningly “foul desires”—“worse
still!” she trembled—it was as if some sort of dry contempt burned within
them. While she couldn’t think of herself as an old woman, not precisely,
she knew she was past the age when this kind of attention—not uncommon
when paid to others—was still natural, and so, as well as regarding the
man with a certain horror (what kind of person is it, after all, who is
capable of lusting after elderly women?) she was frightened to realize
that this fellow stinking of cheap brandy wanted nothing more perhaps than
to make her ridiculous, to mock and humiliate her, then laughingly toss
her aside “like an old rag”. After a few violent jolts the train now began
to pick up speed, wheels clattered furiously on rails, and a long forgotten
feeling of confusion and acute embarassment took hold of her as her full,
heavy breasts started to throb and burn under the man’s fixed uncontrollable
and threatening gaze. Her arms, with which she could at least have covered
them, simply refused to obey her: it was as if she had been roped to a
tree, helpless to cover the shame of her exposure, and as a consequence
she felt ever more vulnerable, ever more naked, ever more conscious of
the fact that there the more she yearned to conceal her thrusting womanhood
the more it drew attention to itself. The card players ended another round
with an outburst of crude bickering which broke across the hostile and
paralysing hum—cutting, as it were, the bands that tightly bound her and
prevented her escaping, and she would almost certainly have succeeded in
overcoming her unfortunate torpor, had not something even worse suddenly
happened, the sole purpose of which, she realized in despair, was to crown
her suffering. Driven as she was by her instinctive embarassment and in
an act of unconscious defiance, she was just trying to hide her breasts
by tactfully inclining her head, when her back bent awkwardly, her shoulders
slumped forward and she realized in a moment of terror that her bra—perhaps
due to her unusual physical exertion—had come unclipped behind her. She
looked up aghast, and was not at all surprised to see the two male eyes
still fixed steadily on her, eyes that winked at her with an air of complicity
as if aware of her ridiculous ill fortune. Mrs Pflaum knew all too well
what would happen next, but this almost fatal accident so disturbed her
that she only sat stiffer than ever in the accelerating train, helpless
once more, her cheeks burning with embarassment, having to suffer the malicious
look of glee in those contemptuously self confident eyes which were now
glued to her breasts, breasts which, freed from the encumbrance of the
bra, jogged merrily up and down with the jolting of the carriage. She didn’t
dare look up again in order to check this, but she was sure it was the
case: it was no longer just the man but all those “loathsome peasants”
staring at her discomfort; she could practically see their ugly, greedy
grinning faces encircling her… and this humiliating torture might have
gone on for ever had not the conductor—an adolescent lout with a bad case
of acne—entered the carriage from the rear compartment; his harsh, recently
broken voice (“Tickets please!”) finally freed her from the grip of shame,
she snatched her ticket from the handbag and folded her arms below her
breast. The train stopped again, this time where it was supposed to, and—even
if only to avoid having to contemplate the genuinely frightening expressions
about her—she mechanically read the name of the village on the faintly
illuminated signboard above the platform, and could have cried out with
relief at recognizing it from the familiar but exhaustively perused timetables
she endlessly consulted before any journey, knowing that only a few minutes
from now they would be arriving at the county town where (“He’ll get off!
He must get off!”) she would almost certainly be free of her pursuer. Tense
with excitement she watched the slow approach of the conductor through
the derisive clamouring of those who wished to know why the train was so
late, and though she had intended to ask for help as soon as he had come
to her, his baby-face wore an expression of such helplessness in the surrounding
racket, an expression so unlikely to offer her the assurance of official
protection, that by the time he was standing next to her she felt so rattled
it was all she could do to ask him where the washroom was. “Where else
should it be?” the boy answered nervously as he punched her ticket. “Where
it’s always been. One at the front, one at the back.” “Ah yes, of course,”
mumbled Mrs Pflaum with an apologetic gesture and leapt from her seat clutching
her handbag to her, scuttling back down the carriage swaying now left now
right as the train lurched off again, and it was only once she had reached
the place of desolation masquerading as a WC and leaned gasping against
the locked door that she realized she had left her fur coat hanging on
the hook by the window. She knew she had to move as fast as possible and
yet it took her a full minute before—surrendering all thought of dashing
back for her expensive fur—she could pull herself together and, rocked
to and fro by the juddering of the train, divest herself of her jacket,
quickly pull the blouse over her head and, holding coat, blouse and handbag
under her arm, tug her pink slip right up to her shoulders. Her hands trembling
with nervous haste she brought her bra round and, seeing (“Thank heaven!”)
that the clip was not broken, sighed in relief; she had just begun clumsily
to dress when she heard behind her the tentative but clearly audible sound
of someone outside knocking at the door. There was about this knocking
some peculiar quality of intimacy, which, naturally enough in the light
of all that had happened so far, succeeded in scaring her, but then, on
reflecting that the fear was probably no more than a monstrous product
of her own imagination, she grew only indignant at being hurried like this;
and so she continued her half-finished movement, taking a perfunctory glance
in the mirror, and was just about to reach for the handle when there came
another burst of impatient knocking quickly succeeded by a voice announcing:
“It’s me.” She drew her hand back aghast, and by the time she had formed
an idea of who it was, she was overtaken less by a sense of entrapment
than a desperate incomprehension as to why this croaky strangled male voice
should bear no trace of aggression or low threat but sound vaguely bored
and anxious that she, Mrs Pflaum, should at last open the door. For a few
moments neither stirred a muscle, each waiting for some word of explanation
from the other, and Mrs Pflaum only grasped the monstrous misunderstanding
of which she had become the victim when her pursuer lost patience and tugged
furiously at the handle, bellowing at her, “Well! What is it to be?! All
tease, no nookie?!” She stared at the door, terrified. Not wanting to believe
it, she bitterly shook her head and felt a constriction at her throat,
startled, like all those attacked from an unexpected quarter, to find that
she had “fallen into some infernal snare.” Reeling at the thought of the
sheer unfairness, the naked obscenity of her situation, it took her some
time to comprehend that—however incredible, since... as a matter of fact...
she had always resisted—the unshaven man had from the very start believed
that it was she who was propositioning him, and it became clear to her
how, step by step, the “degenerate monster” had interpreted her every action—her
taking off her fur... the unfortunate accident... and her enquiring after
the washroom—as an invitation, as solid proof of her compliance, in a word
as the cheap blushworthy stages of a low transaction, to the extent that
she now had to cope with not only a disgraceful attack on her virtue and
respectability but with the fact that this filthy repulsive man, stinking
of brandy, should address her as if she were some “woman of the streets”.
The wounded fury which seized her proved even more painful to her than
her sense of defencelessness, and—since, apart from anything else, she
could no longer bear the entrapment—driven by desperation, in a voice choking
with tension, she shouted to him: “Go away! Or I shall cry for help!” On
hearing this, after a short silence, the man struck the door with his fist
and in a voice so cold with contempt that shivers ran down Mrs Pflaum’s
back, he hissed at her: “Go screw yourself, you old whore. You’re not worth
breaking down the door for: I wouldn’t even bother to drown you in the
slop-pail.” The lights of the county town pulsed through the window of
the cabin, the train was clattering over points, and she had to stop herself
falling over by grasping at the handrail. She heard the departing footsteps,
the sharp slamming of the door of the compartment, and, because she understood
by this that the man had finally released her with the same colossal impudence
as he had accosted her, her whole body trembled with emotion and she collapsed
in tears. And while it was really only a matter of moments, it seemed to
last an eternity that in her hysterical sobbing and sense of desolation
she saw, in a brief blinding instant, from a height in the enormous dense
darkness of night, through the lit window of the stalled train, as if in
a matchbox, a little face, her face, lost, distorted, out of luck, looking
out. For though she was sure that she had nothing more to fear from those
dirty,
ugly, bitter words, that she would be subject
to no new insults, the thought of her escape filled her with as much anxiety
as the thought of assault, since she had absolutely no idea—the effect
of each of her actions so far being precisely the reverse of that calculated—what
it was she owed her unexpected freedom to. She couldn’t bring herself to
believe it was her choking desperate cry that frightened him off, since
having felt a miserable victim of the man’s merciless desires throughout,
she, by the same token, considered herself an innocent
and unsuspecting victim of the entire hostile
universe, against whose absolute chill—the thought flashed across her mind—there
is no valid defence. It was as if the unshaven man had actually raped her:
she swayed in the airless urine-smelling booth, broken, tortured by the
suspicion that she knew all there was to know, and under the spell of the
formless, inconceivable, ever-shifting terror of having to seek some protection
against this universal threat, she was aware only of an emerging sense
of agonizing bitterness: for while she felt it was deeply unfair that she
should be cast as an innocent victim rather than an untroubled survivor,
she who “all her life had longed for peace, and never harmed a soul”, she
was forced to concede that this was of little consequence: there was no
authority to which she could appeal, no-one to whom she might protest,
and she could hardly hope that the forces of anarchy having once been loosed
could afterwards be restrained. After so much gossip, so much terrifying
rumour-mongering she could now see for herself that “it was all the same
thing,” for she understood that while her own particular immediate danger
was over, in “a world where such things happen” collapse into anarchy would
inevitably follow. Outside she could already hear the impatient grumbling
of passengers preparing to get off and the train was noticeably slowing
down; realizing panic-stricken that she had left her fur coat wholly unguarded,
she hastily unbolted the door, stepped out into the press of people (who,
ignoring the fact that there was no point in it, engaged in the same storming
of doors on the way out as they had on the way in), and stumbling across
suitcases and shopping bags, struggled back to her seat. The coat was still
there but she didn’t immediately see the fake fur wrap and while conducting
a furious search and trying desperately to remember whether she had taken
it with her into the washroom it suddenly dawned on her that in all that
nervous excitement her assailant was nowhere to be seen: obviously, she
thought, much assured, he must have been one of the first to leave the
train. At this moment the train actually stopped but the briefly less stuffy,
partially vacated, carriage was almost immediately overrun by an even larger,
and, if possible, more frightening mass of bodies, more frightening because
silent, and while it was easy to see that this dark huddle would give rise
to equal anxiety over the remaining twenty kilometres, there was a still
greater shock in store for her: if she had hoped to be rid of the unshaven
man she was to be bitterly disappointed. Having gathered up her coat and
finally located her wrap under the worn and shining seat she gathered it
about her shoulders and had, just for safety’s sake, set out to find another
carriage in which to continue her journey, when—she could hardly believe
her eyes—there was the very same broadcloth coat (“As if he had left it
there expressly for me to see”), thrown carelessly across the back of a
distant seat. She stopped dead in her tracks, then hurried on, through
the back door into the next carriage where she pushed her way through another
silent mass of people to find another central forward-facing seat which,
in desperation, she immediately occupied. For some time she kept her eyes
fixed on the door, ready to leap up, though she no longer knew of whom
she was most frightened, nor from what direction the danger was most likely
to threaten, then, nothing untoward having happened (what with the train
still standing in the station), she tried to gather her remaining strength
so that should some awful adventure befall her she would at least be ready.
Suddenly she felt infinitely tired, but though her weak legs were practically
burning in the lining of her boots and her aching shoulders felt “ready
to collapse” she was unable to relax even a little, or only to the extent
of slowly turning her head about to relieve the pain in her neck, and reaching
for her compact box to cool her tearful flushed face. “It’s over, over,
there’s nothing to be scared of now,” she kept muttering herself without
believing it: for not only did she lack any such confidence, but she was
unable even to lean back in her seat for greater comfort without increasing,
as she thought, the risk of leaving herself unprepared. For the carriage
was being occupied by a crowd “every bit as ugly as the first lot” and
not a whit less frightening than that at the start of her journey, so she
could only hope that the three empty seats around her—the last empty seats—might
act as some kind of defence and remain unoccupied. There was indeed some
chance of that, at least for a while, because, for practically a whole
minute (the train blew twice in the interval), not a single new passenger
entered the carriage; but suddenly, at the head of a new wave, loudly puffing
and panting and carrying an enormous backpack and basket balanced by a
few well filled shopping bags, a fat headscarved peasant woman appeared
in the doorway, and turning her head this way and that way (“Like a hen...”
it occured to Mrs Pflaum), took a decisive step towards her, and grunting
and croaking, with an aggression that brooked no argument, proceeded to
colonize all three seats with her endless baggage which formed a barricade
for her as well as Mrs Pflaum from the throng of contemptible (or so her
expression suggested) travellers behind her. It would have been useless
of course for Mrs Pflaum herself to have muttered a word of complaint and
suppressing her fury she came round to thinking how it might even have
been a stroke of good luck that, having lost the comforting cushion of
space around her, she was at least preserved from the encroachments of
the silent band, but this feeling of consolation was short lived, for her
unwelcome fellow traveller (all she wanted was to be left in peace) loosened
the knot binding her headscarf under her chin, and, without moment’s hesitation,
launched into conversation. “At least the place is heated, eh?” The sound
of that raven-like croaking and the sight of two piercing malicious eyes
that seemed to leap at her from beneath the headscarf decided her immediately
that, since she could neither repel nor escape her, the only course of
action was to ignore her entirely and she turned her head away to look
out of the window in protest. But the woman, raking the carriage with a
few more contemptuous looks, was not bothered in the slightest. “You don’t
mind me talking to you? There’s just the two of us so we might as well
have a good natter, eh? Going far? Right to the end of the line, me. Visiting
my lad.” Mrs Pflaum glanced at her reluctantly, but seeing that the more
she ignored her the worse things would get, nodded in acknowledgment. “Cause,”
the woman perked up at the encouragement, “it’s the grandson’s birthday.
He said to me, at Easter, he did, sweet little bairn, cause I was there
then: You’re coming mam, aren’t you? That’s what he calls me, mam, that’s
his name for me the little lad. So that’s where I’m off to now.” Mrs Pflaum
felt constrained to smile here but immediately regretted it because this
opened the floodgates: there was no stopping the woman now. “If that little
bairn only knew what a hard life it is for an old woman like me! Spend
the whole day standing about in the market on your poor feet what with
the varicose veins and all, no wonder a body gets tired by the end of the
day. Cause, you know, tell you the truth, we have a little garden, but
the pension hardly stretches. I don’t know where all those shiny Mercedes
come from, all that money people seem to have, I honestly don’t. But you
listen here, I’ll tell you something. It’s thieving is what it is, thieving
and cheating! It’s a Godless crooked world, God has no say in it anymore.
And this awful weather, eh? You tell me what it’s all coming to. It’s all
round you isn’t it. Radio says it’ll be seventeen degrees or whatever—below
freezing, that is! And we’re only at the end of November. You want to know
what’ll happen? I’ll tell you. We’ll freeze till spring. That’s right.
Cause there’s no coal. I wish I knew why we had all those no-good miners
up in the hills. Do you know? There, you see.” Mrs Pflaum’s head was swimming
in the verbal downpour but however hard it was to bear she found it impossible
to interrupt her, to make her shut up, and eventually, realizing the woman
wasn’t really expecting her to listen and that she could get away with
nodding every so often, she spent more and more time looking out of the
window at lights slowly drifting by, attempting to bring some order to
her troubled thoughts while the train drew away from the county capital,
though hard as she tried she couldn’t banish the memory of the carelessly
discarded coat which bothered her even more than did the frightening ill-omened
crowd of silent faces that confronted her. “Was he disturbed?” she fretted.
“Did drink get the better of him? Or has he deliberately...” She made up
her mind not to torture herself with vain surmise, but, however risky the
enterprise appeared, to ascertain whether the coat was still there, so,
wholly ignoring the lumpen woman, she joined those loitering at the end
of the carriage, crossed over the coupling and peered as carefully as she
could through the gap of the door which had been left partly open. Her
intuition that it would be better to investigate the unshaven man’s unexpected
disappearance was immediately rewarded, for there, to her horror, he was,
sitting with his back to her, his head just tipped back to swig at the
bottle of brandy. Lest he, or anyone else among that dumb crew, should
notice her (for in that event God himself could hardly absolve her of bringing
her troubles on herself) still holding her breath, Mrs Pflaum returned
to the rear carriage, and was dumbfounded to see that a fur-hatted figure
had taken advantage of her brief absence to occupy her seat practically
unopposed, so that she, the only lady present, would have to travel standing,
pressed against the side of the carriage, and she realized she had been
rather stupid in deluding herself that, simply because she hadn’t seen
him for a few minutes, she had been freed of the man in the broadcloth
coat. Whether he had gone to the lavatory or popped out to the platform
(“Surely not without his coat?!”) to get himself another bottle of stinking
spirits was completely immaterial now, as she was not really worried that
he would try to get at her again here on the train, since the crowd—providing
it didn’t turn against her (“A fur coat, a boa or my handbag might be enough
for these people...!”) and the difficulty of making one’s way across it,
did, after all, offer some kind of defence; at the same time, her mistake
forced her to admit, since she might as well face the worst that could
befall her, that in the case of some beastly mishap (“...some incomprehensible,
mysterious act of fate”) she would be firmly trapped and that this time
there would be no escape. Next to her helplessness this was what most terrified
her, since with the passing of immediate danger, the greatest threat, on
reflection, was not so much that he would want to rape her (though, “Just
to pronounce the word is awful…”) but that he looked to be the sort of
creature who “knew neither God nor man”, who, in other words, had no fear
of hell fire, and was therefore capable of (“Anything!”) anything. Once
more she could see before her those ice-cold eyes, that bestial unshaven
face, once again she saw his sinister and intimate wink, once more heard
that flat, mocking voice saying: “It’s me”, and she was sure that she was
not dealing with a simple sex maniac but had in fact escaped some vast
murderous fury whose nature it was to crush under its heel whatever remained
whole, for the very concepts of order, peace, or the future, were to such
a monster inimical. “On the other hand,” she could hear the hoarse voice
of the old baggage who was now directing her never ending stream of conversation
at her new neighbour, “you look in a pretty bad way if you don’t mind me
saying so. I got nothing to complain of, you see. Just the usual troubles
of old age. And the teeth. Look,” and shoving her head forward she opened
her mouth wide for her fur-capped neighbour’s examination, drawing her
cracked lips apart with her forefinger, “time’s ravages, all gone. But
I don’t let them mess about in there! The doctor can waffle on as much
as he likes! I can get along with this set as far as the cemetery, eh?
They’re not going to get rich on me, all these scoundrels, may their innards
drop out, the lot of them! Cause you look here,” and from one of her shopping
bags she drew forth a little plastic soldier, “what do you think this cost
me, this little bit of rubbish! Believe it or not they wanted thirty one
forints for it! For this piece of trash! And what’s it got for that price?
A gun and this red star. They have a real cheek asking thirty-one forints
for that! Ah, but” she stuffed it back into her bag, “that’s all children
want nowadays. So what can an old girl like me do. Buy it. You grind your
teeth but you buy it! That’s right, eh?” Mrs Pflaum turned her head away
with loathing and took a quick look out of the window, and then hearing
a dull thump, her glance darted back at them and she found herself unable
to look away or stir an inch. She didn’t know whether it was a bare knuckle
that had done the damage, since the unchanging silence failed to reveal
what had happened or why, all she saw in that quick involuntary movement
of her eye was the woman falling backwards... her head slipping to one
side... her body, supported by her luggage, remaining more or less where
it was, while the fur-capped man opposite (“the usurper of her seat”) moved
from his forward leaning position, his face expressionless, and slowly
sat back. Even when it is only some annoying fly being swatted you expect
some general murmur, but no one stirred in response to this, not a word
was spoken, everyone continued standing or sitting in perfect indifference.
“Is it silent approval? Or am I imagining things again?”—Mrs Pflaum stared
in front of her, but she immediately rejected the possibility she had been
dreaming, because judging by all she had seen and heard, she couldn’t but
believe than that the man had hit the woman. He must have had enough of
her nattering and, simply, without a word, struck her a blow in the face,
and no, her heart thumped, no, it can’t have been otherwise, and in the
meantime all this of course was so shocking that she could only stand rooted
to the spot, her brow breaking out in perspiration at the fear of it. That
woman is lying there unconscious, the sweat poured down her brow, the man
in the fur cap is motionless, and so is everyone else, dear God, what terrible
low company to find oneself in. She was rooted to the spot with helplessness,
seeing only the window before her, the windowframe and her own reflection
in the dirty glass, then the train which had been forced to stall for a
few more minutes started up again and, exhausted by the furious succession
of images, her mind buzzing, she watched the dark empty landscape swimming
by outside under the heavy sky in which, even in the moonlight, the masses
of cloud were barely distinguishable. But neither the sky nor the landscape
meant anything to her and she only realized she had practically arrived
when the train clattered over the unlowered level crossing over the main
road leading into town, and she stepped out into the compartment, stood
before the door and, bending to the shadow cast by her hand, saw the local
industrial warehouses and the clumsy watertower looming above them. Ever
since her childhood, such things—level crossings on highways, long flat
sties steaming with the warmth of animals—were the first assuring reminders
that she had arrived home still in one piece, and although this time she
had particular cause for relief, since they would bring to an end circumstances
of no ordinary hardship, and she could almost feel the wild drumming in
her heart that used to start up whenever she returned from her infrequent
visits to relatives, or from the county capital where, once or twice a
year, she attended the performance of some favourite operetta together
with some members of her dispersed family and the friendly warmth of the
town served as a natural bastion protecting her home, now, and indeed for
the last two or three months, but particularly now, after the shameful
revelation that the world was full of people with unshaven faces and broadcloth
overcoats, nothing of that sense of intimacy remained, but a cold maze
of empty streets where not only the faces behind the windows but the windows
themselves stared blindly out at her and the silence was “broken only by
the sharp yelp of bickering dogs”. She watched the approaching lights of
town and once the train had passed the industrial estate with its sheds
and parked tractors and was making its way along the row of poplars lining
the track which was only just discernible in the darkness, she anxiously
scanned the as-yet pale and distant glow of street lamps and illuminated
houses to locate the three storey block containing her apartment, anxiously,
for the feeling of acute relief that at last she was home was immediately
succeeded by terror, because she knew all too well that the train being
now almost two hours late she couldn’t count on the usual evening bus service,
and so would have to walk (“And, what is more, alone...”) all the way home
from the station—and, even before confronting that issue, there still remained
the problem of actually getting off the train. Small allotments with kitchen
gardens and locked sheds sped by beneath the window, followed by the bridge
over the frozen canal and the old mill behind it; but they conveyed no
sense of
release, suggesting rather further, fearful
stations of her cross, because Mrs Pflaum was almost crushed by the knowledge
that while she was only a few steps from freedom, suddenly there, behind
her back, at any moment, some wholly incomprehensible something might leap
out and attack her. Her whole body was covered in sweat. Hopelessly she
observed the extended yard of the sawmill with its piles of logs, the tumbledown
railwayman’s hut, the old steam engine slumbering in the sidings and the
weak light percolating through the barred glass walls of the repair sheds.
There was still no movement behind her, she was still standing by herself
by the door. She gripped the ice-cold handle of the door but couldn’t decide:
if she opened it too early someone might push her out, if too late then
“that inhuman band of murderers” might catch up with her. The train slowed
alongside an infinitely long row of stationary wagons, and squealed to
a halt. As the door opened, she practically leapt off, saw the sharp stones
between the sleepers, heard her pursuers behind her, and quickly found
herself outside in the station forecourt. No-one attacked her but by some
ill chance which coincided with her arrival, the lights in the vicinity
suddenly went out, as did, or so it soon transpired, every other street
light in town. Looking neither left nor right but keeping her eyes firmly
at her feet so she shouldn’t stumble in the dark, she hurried over to the
bus-stop hoping against hope that the bus might have waited for the train
to come in, or that she might still catch the night-service, should there
be one. But there was not a single vehicle waiting, nor could she count
on the “night-service” since, according to the timetable hanging beside
the main entrance to the station, the last bus was precisely the one that
would have left soon after the scheduled arrival of the train, and in any
case the whole sheet was ruled through with two thick lines... Her attempts
to forestall the others were all in vain, for while she stood perusing
the timetable, the forecourt had become a dense forest of fur-caps, greasy
peasant hats and ear flaps, and, as she was gathering courage to set out
on her own, she was assailed by the terrible question of what all these
people were doing here anyway, and the feeling she had almost forgotten,
the awful memory of which had been practically washed away by other feelings
in the rear of the compartment, now stabbed at her again as she saw, among
the crowd loitering to the left of her, on the far side, the man in the
broadcloth coat; it was as if he were searching about him, looking for
something, then he turned on his heels and was gone. This all happened
so quickly, and he was so far away from her (to say nothing of the fact
that it was dark and it had become almost impossible to distinguish the
genuine from monsters of the imagination) that she couldn’t be absolutely
certain it was really him, but the mere possibility it might so scared
her that she cut through that idle ominous mass of bodies, and, almost
at a run, set off down the wide main road leading home. As it happened
she wasn’t altogether surprised, for however unreal this seemed, (hadn’t
her whole journey been utterly unreal?!) even on the train, when to her
great disappointment she spotted him a second time, something inside her
had whispered that her involvement with the unshaven man—and the terrifying
ordeal of the attempted rape—was far from over, and that now, when she
had not only the fear of “the bandits attacking her from behind” to drive
her forward but the prospect of him (“If it really was him, and the whole
thing wasn’t just imagination.”) leaping out at her from some doorway,
her feet stumbled on as if unable to decide whether it was more advisable
in such a tight spot to retreat or run ahead. She had long left behind
the enigmatic square of the station forecourt, had passed the junction
with Zöldág Road which led to the paediatric hospital, but
not a soul did she encounter (meeting someone she knew might well be her
salvation) below the bare wild chestnut trees of the unswervingly straight
avenue, and beside the sound of her own breath, the light squeak of her
footsteps and the humming of the wind in her face, she heard nothing, only
the steady quiet puffing of what might have been some distant, unrecognizable
machine whose sound vaguely reminded her of an ancient saw-mill. Although
she continued to resist the force of circumstances which seemed to have
been created expressly to challenge such resolution, in the complete absence
of streetlight and the still oppressive silence she began to feel ever
more like a victim cast to her fate, for wherever she looked seeking the
filtered lights of apartments, the place assumed the look of all cities
under siege, where, regarding all further effort as pointless and superfluous,
the inhabitants had surrendered even the last traces of endangered human
presence in the belief that while the streets and squares had been lost,
the thick walls of buildings behind which they cowered afforded shelter
from any serious harm. She trod the uneven surface of rubbish frozen to
the pavements and had just passed the minimal display of the ORTOPÉD
shop, a once popular showroom of the local shoe-manufacturing cooperative
when, before crossing over the next junction, more out of habit than anything
else (owing to the petrol shortage there hadn’t been much traffic even
when she’d set out to visit her relatives), she took a glance down the
darkness of Erdélyi Sándor Road which, because the closed
precincts of the law court and the jail with their high, barbed wired topped
walls ran along the length of it, was known by the locals simply as “Judgment
Street”. Down in its depths, around the artesian well, she glimpsed a clotted
mass of shadows, a dumb group, who, it suddenly seemed to her, were silently
beating someone. In her fright she immediately took to her heels, every
now and then casting a look behind her, and only slackened her pace once
she knew that the law-courts were far behind and that no-one had emerged
to pursue her. No-one had emerged and no-one was following her, nothing
disturbed the deathly calm of the deserted town, except the previously
noted but now increasingly loud puffing, and in the terrifying ripeness
of that silence, to which the unbroken quiet—round the artesian well where
some crime, for what else could it be, was being committed—raised an echo
(not a single cry for help, not the single smack of a blow) it no longer
seemed strange that there should be so few stragglers about, though despite
the almost quarantine like isolation of individuals in ordinary circumstances,
she should by now have met one or two nighthawks like herself in a thoroughfare
as broad and long as the Wenckheim Béla Avenue, especially so close
to the city centre. Driven by her sense of foreboding, she hurried on,
feeling ever more convinced that she was crossing some nightmare terrain
permeated by evil, then, as she got ever closer to the source of that now
clearly audible puffing, and through the bars of the wild chestnut trees
could see the heap of machinery which produced it, she felt quite certain
that, exhausted as she was by her struggles against the powers of terror,
she was imagining, simply imagining everything, for what she saw in that
first glance seemed not only stupefying but downright impossible. Not far
from her, a spectral contraption was moving at melancholy pace through
the winter night down the middle of the road—that is if this satanic conveyance
whose desperately slow crawl in the direction of the town centre reminded
her of a steam roller struggling to gain each centimetre of ground, could
be said to be moving at all: it wasn’t even a matter of overcoming strong
wind resistance on the normal road surface, but of ploughing through a
tract of dense, refractory clay. Sheathed in blue corrugated iron and sealed
on every side, the lorry, which reminded her of an enormous wagon, was
covered with bright yellow writing (an indecipherable dark brown shape
hovered at the centre of the inscriptions) and was much higher and longer—she
noted incredulously—than those vast Turkish trucks that used to pass through
town, and the whole shapeless hulk, which smelled vaguely of fish, was
being drawn by a smoking, oily, and wholly antediluvian wreck of tractor
which was making fearful exertions in the process. Once she caught up with
it though, her curiosity overcame her fear and she paced along beside the
vehicle for a while peering at the clumsy foreign letters—obviously the
work of an inexpert hand—but even up close their meaning remained inscrutable
(“could it be Slavic...or Turkish?...”), and it was impossible to say what
purpose the thing served, or indeed what it was doing here at all in the
very heart of this frosty windswept and deserted town—or even how it had
managed to get here since, if this was its normal speed, it would have
taken years for it to have made it from the nearest village, and it was
hard to imagine (though there seemed no alternative) that it would have
been brought in by rail. She lengthened her stride again and it was only
once she had left the awesome juggernaut behind and glanced back that she
spotted a heavily built and whiskered man with an indifferent expression
on his face, wearing only a T-shirt on top, with a cigarette hanging from
the corner of his mouth, who—once he noticed her on the pavement—pulled
a face and slowly raised his right hand from the wheel as if to greet the
gaping figure outside. All this was highly unusual (to crown it all, it
must have been rather overheated in the cabin for the mountain of flesh
behind the wheel to feel so warm), and the more she kept glancing back
at the vehicle as she moved away, the more exotic a monster did it seem,
encapsulating in its appearance all that life had so recently thrown at
her: the past, it seemed to say, was no longer what it had been but was
crawling remorselessly ahead below the dark windows of the unsuspecting
citizenry. From this moment she was convinced she was in the grip of a
terrible nightmare, only there was no waking from this one: no, she was
quite certain that it was reality, only more so; furthermore she realized
that the chilling events in which she had been participant or to which
she had been witness (the appearance of the phantasmagorical vehicle, the
violence in Erdélyi Sándor Road, the lights going off with
all the precision of an explosive device, the inhuman rabble in the station
forecourt, and above all this, dominating everything, the cold unremitting
stare of the figure in the broadcloth coat) were not merely the oppressive
creations of her ever-troubled imagination, but part of a scheme so co-ordinated,
so precise, that there could be no doubt of their purpose. At the same
time she was constrained to make every effort to reject such an extraordinary
fantasy, and she kept hoping that there might be some clear, however depressing,
explanation for the mob, the weird truck, the outbreak of fighting, or,
if for nothing else, for the extraordinary power cut that affected everything;
all this she hoped because she couldn’t quite allow herself to lapse into
a wholesale acceptance of a state of affairs so irrational as to permit
the general security of the town to go down the sink together with every
other sign of order. Sadly she had to forgo even this slim hope: for while
the issue of the blacked out streetlamps remained unresolved, the destination
of the truck with its terrible load, and the nature of that load, were
not to remain a mystery for long. She had passed the house of the well
known local celebrity, György Eszter, had left behind night noises
of the park surrounding the old Wooden Theatre and had reached the tiny
Lutheran church when her glance happened to light on a round advertising
pillar: she stopped dead in her tracks, stepped closer, then simply stood,
and, in case she had made a mistake, read and re-read the text which looked
like the kind of thing a tramp from some outlying estate might scrawl,
though a single perusal should have been enough since the poster which
had obviously been freshly pasted over all the others and still showed
traces of fresh paste at the edges, offered an explanation of sorts. She
thought that if she could finally isolate one distinct element of the chaos,
she would find it easier to orientate herself and so (“God forbid it should
be necessary..!” of course) defend herself “in case of a total collapse”,
though the feeble light shed on this by the text only increased her anxiety,
the problem all along having been that nothing seemed to provide the faintest
shadow of an explanation of the whole cycle of events she had been forced
to witness as victim or bystander, till now—as if that “feeble light” (“The
worlds’ largest giant whale, mother natures’ secrat wondor”) were all too
much at once—when she was driven to speculate whether there might not be
some firm, yet incomprehensible reason at work in this. Because, well a
circus? Here?! When the end of the world was all too imminent? Fancy allowing
such a nightmare menagerie, to say nothing of that evil-smelling beast,
into the town? When the place is threatening enough as it is? Who has time
for entertainments now, when we’re in a state of anarchy? What an idiotic
joke! What a ridiculous cruel idea!... Or could it be... could it mean
precisely that... that it was all over and it was all the same now? That
someone... was “fiddling while Rome burned”?! She hurried away from the
pillar and crossed the road. There was a row of two storey houses on that
side, some with a faint light sifting through their windows. She gripped
her handbag firmly and leaned into the wind. Reaching the last doorway
she took a quick last look round, opened the door and locked it behind
her. The banisters were icy cold. The palm tree, which had been the one
jealously guarded splash of colour in the house—and which had been plainly
beyond rescue even before her departure—was now most certainly past resuscitation,
having frozen to death on the landing in winter. There was a suffocating
silence around her. She had arrived. A slip of paper with a message on
it had been stuck behind the handle of the door. She took the briefest
glance at it, pulled a face then entered, turning the keys in both locks
and immediately engaging the safety chain. She leaned leaned against the
door and closed her eyes.
The central image of The Melancholy of Resistance
is an enormous truck that moves at funereal pace through the half-lit streets
of an obscure town in eastern Hungary. Contained within the truck is what
is proclaimed to be The Worlds’ Largest Giant Whale, which is the ostensible
attraction of the company that offers it to public view. But also aboard
the truck is the real attraction, the evil Prince, a deformed creature
whose followers are swayed by his doctrine of vengeful nihilism. These
followers come from outlying villages and distant towns. They are gathered
here to wreak havoc upon the remnant bourgeoisie who are living out a twilight
existence in the last throes of political decomposition. The state is decomposing:
things go topsy turvy. Trains arrive and leave and no-one knows when the
next will arrive or what its destination might be. The smell of corruption
and anarchy infect everything and the town where the Whale and the Prince
have arrived has been thoroughly infected.
The characters whose fortunes we follow,
characters who move infinitely slowly in this black comedy—a black which
is as thick and sticky as treacle—are the widow Mrs Pflaum, a woman utterly
fraught with chintz, operetta, houseplants and conserves; her son Valuska,
to whom she refuses to speak, he having brought disgrace upon her by his
simpleton nature, his hopeless nocturnal wanderings, his idolization of
the planetary system and his general vagrancy (the only thing he is good
for is delivering papers and amusing the locals in the pub at closing time);
György Eszter, once head of the music school but now bedbound in an
Oblomov-like withdrawal from the futilities of the world and, indeed from
music too, with its impossible system of imperfect harmonies, a man to
whose needs Valuska now tends by delivering him meals, doing his laundry
and listening to his elegant but cynical monologues on the pointlessness
of everything; and, above all, the monstrous Mrs Eszter, Eszter’s ambitious
and mountaineous wife, whose moral zeal is indivorcible from her massive
will to power which draws into its ambit the drunken Chief of Police who
is also her lover, the vulture-like Harrer, who would, and eventually does,
make a perfect secret policeman in Securitate mode, and a number of other
dupes and intermediaries. Behind her, yet opposing her, is a terrifying
anonymous man in a broadcloth coat who appears in this first extract from
the beginning of the book, and recurs, dangerously, time and again, as
a leader of the anarchic crowd.
The book is packed with detail, its sentences
unwinding in long slow coils that hardly ever resolve themselves into paragraphs.
Once the slow lava flow of the narrative begins, there is no break, no
turning back, it surrounds the reader and pushes him along, much as the
vast truck with the whale might move down the streets of the imagination.
It is a dark and monumental work that the outstanding English-domiciled
German novelist, W.G. Sebald, has compared to Gogol’s Dead Souls, and yet
it is also funny; funny by virtue of its characters, its situations, its
dialogue and its sheer slow pace, as a collapsing chimney stack is funny,
as Oliver Hardy fiddling with his little tie is funny, the nonsense of
ornamentation and deliberation allied to weightless yet physically heavy
personae being, by its nature, funny.
It is in fact the book’s humour that prevents
it sinking under its pessimism, its portentousness. The darker it gets
the more wildly funny it becomes. Even at the very end when the reader
is provided with a minute description in micro-biological or pathological
terms of the decomposition of the body of one of the central characters,
there is something funny about the juxtaposition of microcosm with macrocosm,
about the portentousness of the human body and its rituals, something funny
yet miraculous too in the way it echoes the Carbon episode in Primo Levi’s
The Periodic Table, its existential absurdity and purposefulness.
For the translator, who has slaved four
years over it— and to be fair this is still two years less than it took
the author to write it—its finishing has represented a significant act
of liberation, but when he looks at the vast black river of type his translation
has released into English, he is very sorry to be leaving it too. Swimming
in that treacly black river had made life madder and more palatial. The
river had swept Valuska’s macrocosm of the stars along with the corpse’s
microcosm of cells and proteins, it had set the ideal of world of musical
harmonies against the demonic petty disharmonies of human ambition. It
had showed him Eszter’s meditations on the proper relationship between
a hammer and a nail at the point of swinging the former to bring it into
contact with the latter. It had shown him three rats emerging in the dark
recesses of Mrs Eszter’s bedroom, it had shown the Chief of Police’s two
feral children in a draughty apartment block, it had introduced him to
the languid army officer whose task it is to restore order to the benighted
town, and whose fate it is to become Mrs Eszter’s virile lover.
For all this, the translator, and the reader
in whichever language, have sufficient reason to be deeply grateful, much
as they might be grateful for Gogol, for Dostoevsky, for Hieronymous Bosch,
for Bruno Schulz, for Franz Kafka, for Tomi Ungerer, for all those medieval
paintings of demons under misers’ beds or, in a different key, for Charles
Baudelaire’s haggard and haunting Sept Vieillards. The book is a vision.
A dark entertainment. A diving bell at the bed of the black river situating
itself in the drift of its extraordinary plankton, its weird, dying creatures.
Though its theme is disharmony, it itself is constructed harmoniously,
every part echoing every other part with a rickety efficiency that amplifies
the dumb noises made by the vision’s underwater life. As the book begins,
we are at a railway station with Mrs Pflaum. Once we board the train, we
enter the godforsaken town never again to leave it.
George Szirtes
UNBELEVIBLE BUT TRUE
The Worlds’ Largest Giant Whale
MOTHER NATURES’ SECRAT WONDOR
TO BE SEEN
IN KOSUT SQU. (to the right of Piac squ.)
DECEMBER 1! 2! 3!
AFTER A MOST SUCESFULL JOURNY THE LENGHT AND BREATH OF EUROPE!
ADMISSION: 50
(CHILDREN AND SOLDIER 1/2 PRISE!!)
UNBELEVIBLE but TRUE
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