The Melancholy of Resistance Read Online Free PDF

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, 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 so scared her that she cut through the 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 ‘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 pediatric hospital, but not a soul did she encounter (meeting someone she knew might 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 sawmill. 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 have surrendered even the last traces of endangered human presence in the belief that while the streets and squares have been lost, the thick walls of buildings behind which they cower afford 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