I. The Circle Closes
The doctor put on his glasses and stubbed out the cigarette that had burned practically down to his nails on an arm of his armchair, then, checking that the estate was all right by looking through the gap between the curtains and the window frame (‘Everything normal,” he noted, meaning nothing had changed) he measured out his permitted quantity of pálinka and added some water to it. The question of the level, a question that needed to be resolved to maximum satisfaction, had required careful consideration ever since his arrival back home: the balance between water and pálinka, however tricky the problem, had to be referred to the advice of the hospital chief who, rather tiresomely, tended to repeat his clearly exaggerated warnings (as in, “If you don’t stay away from alcohol and if you don’t radically reduce the number of cigarettes you smoke you’d better prepare right now yourself for the worst and call a priest. . ’) so, after an agonizing internal struggle, he abandoned the “two-parts-liquor, one-part-water” formula and resigned himself to “one-part-liquor-to-three-parts-water.” He drank slowly, drop by tiny drop and, now that he was over the undoubtedly agonizing “transitional readjustment period’, he decided that he could get used to even this “infernal slop’, and considering how he had spat the first taste of it straight out in disgust, he could swallow the stuff now without any major shock to the system and, he thought, might even master the art of distinguishing between such varieties of this “dishwater” that were beyond redemption and others that were tolerable. He put the glass back in its place, quickly adjusted the match that had slipped off the cigarettes pack, then ran his eye over the “battle order” of demijohns behind the armchair with a certain satisfaction and decided that he was now ready to face the approach of winter. That had not been “such a simple matter’, of course, two days before when they released him from hospital at “his own risk” and the ambulance finally entered the gates of the estate, when his ever keener anxiety had turned to what could simply be described as outright fear, because he was almost sure that he’d have to start everything afresh: that he’d find his room in a mess, his possessions all over the place, and, what was more, at that moment he did not think it impossible that the “thoroughly disreputable” Mrs. Kráner might have made use of his absence to go through the whole house in the name of cleaning “with her filthy brooms and stinking wet rags’, thereby destroying everything that had taken long years of enormous care, not to mention exhausting work, to assemble. His fears proved groundless however: the room was exactly as he had left it three weeks earlier, his notebooks, pencil, glass, matches and cigarettes precisely where they had to be, and, better still, he was mightily relieved to note that when the ambulance drew up outside the house, there was not one inquisitive face at the neighbors’ windows, nor did any of them disturb him when the ambulance crew — thinking to get a handsome tip — carried his bags full of food and the demijohns he had replenished at Mopsz, into the house. Nor indeed had anyone had the courage to disturb his peace after that. He couldn’t console himself with the thought that anything of consequence had actually happened to “these moronic nincompoops” in his absence, of course, and indeed he was forced to admit that there had been some very minor improvement: the estate looked deserted, there was none of the usual ridiculous scurrying around, and the constant seasonal rain that had set in, as it unavoidably had to, seemed to have kept them huddled in their hovels, so it was no surprise that no one stuck their heads out of doors, except Kerekes, who he spotted from the ambulance window two days ago as the man ambled along the path from the Horgos residence towards the metalled road, but even that was only for a brief second because he quickly turned his head away. “I hope to see neither hide nor hair of them till spring,” he noted in his journal then carefully raised his pencil so as not to rip the paper which — and this was something else he noted after his long absence — had grown so damp that it took only one clumsy movement for it to tear. There was no particular reason to be uneasy then, since “a higher power” had kept his observation post intact, and nothing could be done about dust or the damp for he knew that there was “no point in getting worked up” about the inevitable process of decay. He reassured himself of this because he had felt a certain shock on seeing everything in the place covered with a fine layer of weeks-old dust on his return, noticing how the delicate strands of the cobwebs that hung off the picture rails had more or less met in the middle of the ceiling, but he had quickly regained his composure, considering such things as unimportant trifles, and hastily dismissed the ambulanceman who was waxing sentimental in expectation of an “honorarium” for which he was clearly preparing to thank him. Once the man had gone, he had taken a turn about the room, and though in a rather preoccupied state of mind, he started to note the “degree and nature of neglect.” He immediately dismissed the thought of cleaning as “ridiculously excessive’, then, moreover, as “pointless’, since, it was perfectly clear, that would be to wreck the very thing that might lead him to more precise observation; so he simply wiped the table and what was on it, gave some of the blankets a shake, then set straight to work, observing the state of things as compared to weeks ago, examining each individual object — the bare bulb in the ceiling lamp, the light switch, the floor, the walls, the collapsing wardrobe, the pile of trash by the door — and, as far as possible, tried to give an exact account of the changes. He spent the whole of that night and most of the next day hard at work and, apart from a few brief moments of snoozing, allowed himself no more than seven hours of sleep and that only once he thought he’d done an accurate job of stocktaking. When he finished he was delighted to observe that, considering his enforced break, his strength and stamina seemed not only undiminished but even a little increased; though, at the same time, it was no doubt true that his capacity to resist the effects of “anything out of the usual” had noticeably weakened, so while the blanket that kept slipping off his shoulder as it always did, and the glasses that kept sliding down his nose did not in the least disturb him, the tiniest variance in his actual surroundings now demanded all his attention, and he could only recover his train of thought once he had dealt with various “annoying trifles” and restored “the original conditions.” It was this neglect that made him, after two days struggle, get rid of the alarm clock he had bought, albeit only after a thorough examination and a lot bargaining, at the “second-hand” store in the hospital, with a view to strictly regulating the order in which he took his prescribed pills. He was simply unable to get used to its earsplitting tick-tock, chiefly because his hands and feet naturally adapted to the clock’s infernal rhythm, so that one day, when the contraption had delivered its terrifying alarm call precisely on time, and he found his head nodding along to the satanic thing, he took it and, trembling with fury, cast it into the yard. His calm was immediately restored and, having enjoyed a few hours of his all-but-lost silence, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t decided on the deed earlier — yesterday or the day before. He lit a cigarette, blew out a long line of smoke, adjusted the blanket slipping off his shoulders, then leaned over his journal again and wrote. “Thank God, it’s raining without interruption. It’s the perfect defense. I feel tolerably well though still a little dull after all that sleep. No movement anywhere. The headmaster’s door and window are broken: I can’t begin to guess why, what has happened and why he doesn’t repair them.” He jerked his head up and listened intently to the silence, then the matchbox caught his attention because, just for a moment, he had a decided feeling that it was about to slip off the cigarette pack. He watched it and held his breath. But nothing happened. He mixed another drink, pressed the cork back into the demijohn, and topped up his glass from the jug of water on the table — he had bought the jug at Mopsz for thirty forints. Having done so, he pushed the jug into place and threw back the