The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai

him, and he came every evening, for, from the day when the leather belt and shoulder strap, the polished boots and the revolver hanging at his side had swept her off her feet, she regarded him not only as a close friend, a man fit to support a solitary woman, but as an intimate confederate to whom she could trust her deepest most dangerous secrets, and pour out her heart in moments of weakness. At the same time—apart from all the basic conditions—it was not a trouble-free relationship, for the police chief, who was in any case prone to morose silences punctuated by the odd sudden fit of temper, was preoccupied by his ‘tragic family circumstances’—a wife who died in the flower of her youth and two little boys left to cope without a mother’s affections—and was a slave to drink, and, on being repeatedly questioned about it, would often admit that the only true remedy for his bitterness lay in the feminine warmth exuded by Mrs Eszter, which, to this day, was a burden she could never escape from. To this very day indeed, for Mrs Eszter—who had expected him to have arrived well before her—feared that the chief was at this very moment sitting in one of those suburban bars in his customary state of tortured gloom, so when she heard footsteps outside she went straight to the kitchen table, immediately reaching for the vinegar and box of bicarbonate, knowing from previous experience that the only cure for his condition was that (unfortunately) highly popular local mixture known as ‘goose-spritzer’, which, in the face of general opinion, she believed to be the only efficacious—if emetic—treatment, not only for indigestion the day after, but for drunkenness on the day. To her surprise the visitor turned out to be not the chief but Harrer, Valuska’s landlord, a stonemason who, probably because of his pockmarked face, was known to locals as ‘the vulture’; there he lay, flat out on the ground, because, as one could see at a glance, his legs, which were incapable of indefinitely supporting his constantly collapsing body, had given way just before his helplessly dangling hands could grasp the handle of the door. ‘What are you doing lying there?’ she barked at him, but Harrer didn’t move. He was a small, puny homunculus of a man; lying crumpled on the ground, his feeble legs folded under him, he would have fitted perfectly into one of those large dough-baskets stored out in the garden—furthermore he stank so intensely of cheap brandy that within a few minutes the fearful smell had filled the entire yard and penetrated every nook and cranny of the house, rousing even the old woman from her bed, who, as she drew the curtain of her courtyard window aside, could only wonder why ‘decent people can’t be content with drinking wine’. But by that time, Harrer, who seemed to have changed his mind, recovered consciousness and leapt from the doorway with such agility that Mrs Eszter almost thought the whole thing a joke. Nevertheless, it was immediately clear that it wasn’t, for waving his brandy bottle with one hand, the mason suddenly produced a tiny bouquet of flowers with the other, and, swaying in the most dangerous fashion, squinted at her in a manner so intensely beyond fooling, so utterly unreciprocated by Mrs Eszter—especially once she could make sense of his gulping and gasping to the effect that all he wanted was for Mrs Eszter to hug him as she once used to (for ‘you, your ladyship, and only you, can provide consolation for this poor sad heart of mine …!’)—that, grabbing him by the shoulder-pads of his coat, she raised him into the air and, sans quips or jokes, heaved him in the direction of the garden gate. The heavy coat landed like a half-empty sack some few yards off (for the sake of accuracy, right in front of the window of the old woman, who was still staring and wagging her head), and Harrer, while not quite certain whether this new fall was in any significant sense different from