Read Online The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai - Free Book Online Page B

cause for anxiety. We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society. There are new times just around the corner, my dear Piri.’ At these significant words, and more particularly because Mrs Eszter emphasized the last sentence by jabbing an admonitory finger in the air, the colour quite drained from Mrs Plauf’s face; but none of this rendered her any kind of satisfaction, because, however pleasant it was to see this and to know that the little ‘bag of tits’ would persist in hoping for one word, for one reassuring answer from her unintentionally provoked visitor all the way down the stairs, right until she had closed the gate behind her, and however clearly she realized that she should have accepted this as recompense, the wound to her self-esteem administered by Mrs Plauf, this ‘no’, like a poisoned arrow stuck in a tree, continued to quiver for an unaccountable length of time and she was forced shamefully to admit that what should have been merely an unpleasant sting (for she had after all convincingly accomplished her goal and this tiny setback was of little importance) was slowly intensifying to an ever more acute pain. If Mrs Plauf had agreed enthusiastically, as one had every right to expect she would, she would have remained an easily manipulated tool, unaware of the clash of events above her, events which, in any case, were of no account to her, and her insignificant role in them would, quite properly, have come to an end, but no (‘But no!’), with this rejection her superfluous being was now elevated to the role of what amounted to anonymous partner; this dwarfish nonentity (dwarfish, that is to say, compared with Mrs Eszter’s unquestionably intenser reality) had, so to speak, dragged her down to her own safely ignorable level, so that she might revenge herself on her visitor’s radiant air of superiority, which she could neither tolerate nor resist. And while of course this helpless sense of injury could not last for ever, it wouldn’t have been proper to claim, after all this, that she was quite simply over ‘the business’, nor did she claim it when later—at home by that time—she recounted the meeting to her friend, though she did perhaps skate over certain details, and remarked only on how ‘the wonderful, breathtakingly fresh air’, which revived her immediately she set foot outside Mrs Plauf’s stifling stairwell, had had ‘the most beneficial effect’ on her judgement, so that by the time she had reached Nadabán’s butcher’s shop, she had recovered her earlier equanimity, was once again decisive, invulnerable, absolutely calm and full of confidence. And this—the decisive effect of sixteen degrees of frost on her frayed nerves—was certainly no exaggeration, for Mrs Eszter genuinely belonged to that class of people who ‘sicken with spring and collapse in summer’, for whom enervating warmth, incapacitating heat and the sun blazing in the sky were a source of terror, confining her to bed with the most shocking migraine and a strong tendency to bleed; one of that class, in other words, for whom cold, not the glowing fireplace, is the natural medium that offers protection from unremitting Evil, those who seem practically resurrected once terminal frost sets in and polar winds sweep round corners, for it is only winter that can clear their vision, cool their ungovernable passions and reorganize that mass of loose thought dissolved in summer sweats; and so it was along Baron Béla Wenckheim Avenue, leaning into the icy wind that frightens weaker ordinary people with its hard early frosts, that she felt cured and properly prepared to assess her new burden so that she could rise above Mrs Plauf’s hurtful attitude. Because there was much to rise above and aspire to and much to look at: so, while the cold penetrated and refreshed every atom of her body, she propelled the vast weight of her importance along the unremittingly straight pavement with ever