Read Online Satantango by László Krasznahorkai - Free Book Online Page B

there till spring, because she said she wasn’t going to stay here up to her neck in mud, and, you have to laugh, the landlord has to go home once a month and when he comes back it’s like he’s had the shit kicked out of him, she lays into him so . . . In any case he has sold that great Pannón bike he had and bought some crap machine that he’s having to push round all the time, and everyone’s around, the whole estate when it starts up — because he is always delivering something to somebody — but then everyone has to push it, that’s if the engine starts at all . . . And, yes, he tells everyone that he has won some county race riding that wreck, you have to laugh! He’s with my little sister for now because we owe him for seed since last year . . .” By now the window of the bar is visible, glowing ahead of them, but there is no sound, not a single word to be heard, as if the place were deserted, not a soul . . . but now, someone is playing the harmonica . . . Irimiás scrapes the mud off his lead-heavy shoes, clears his throat, cautiously opens the door, and the rain begins again, while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale-blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees one from the other, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army.

III.
    To Know Something
     
    At the end of the Paleozoic era the whole of Central Europe begins to sink. Naturally, our Hungarian homeland is part of this process. In the new geological circumstances the hill masses of the Paleozoic era sink ever lower until they reach rock bottom, at which point the sedimental sea inundates and covers them. As the sinking continues the territory of Hungary becomes the northwestern basin of that part of the sea that covers Southern Europe. The sea continues to dominate the region right through the Mesozoic era. The doctor was sitting by the window feeling morose, his shoulder up against the cold, damp wall and he didn’t even have to move his head to look through the gap between the dirty floral curtain inherited from his mother and the rotten window-frame in order to see the estate, but had only to raise his eyes from his book, take a brief glance to note the slightest change and if it now and then happened — say if he was utterly lost in thought or because he had focused on one of the remotest points of the estate — that his eyes missed something, his exceedingly sharp ears immediately came to his aid, though it was rare for him to be lost in thought and rarer still for him to rise in his fur-collared winter coat from the heavily-blanketed, stuffed armchair — its position precisely determined by the cumulative experience of his everyday activities, succesfully reducing to a minimum the number of possible occasions on which he would have to leave his observation post by the window. Of course on a day-to-day basis, this was by no means an easy task. On the contrary: he had to collect and arrange, in the optimal fashion, all that was necessary for eating, drinking, smoking, diary writing, and reading as well as the countless other little necessary details of daily life and, what was more, it meant he had to give up the idea of letting the odd slip — due entirely to some personal weakness — go unpunished, for, if he did so, he would be acting against his own interests, since an error due to distraction or carelessness increased the danger and the consequences were far graver than a man might think: one