The Melancholy of Resistance Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sándor Road which, because the closed precincts of the law courts and the jail with their high, barbed-wire-topped walls running the length of it, was known by the locals simply as ‘Judgement Street’. Down in its depths, around the artesian well, she glimpsed a clotted mass of shadows, a dumb group, who, it suddenly seemed to her, were silently beating someone. In her fright she immediately took to her heels, every now and then casting a look behind her, and only slackened her pace once she knew that the law courts were far behind and that no one had emerged to pursue her. No one had emerged and no one was following her, nothing disturbed the deathly calm of the necropolis, except the increasingly loud puffing, and in the terrifying ripeness of that silence, to which the unbroken quiet round the artesian well, where some crime, for what else could it be, was being committed, raised an echo (not a single cry for help, not the single smack of a blow), it no longer seemed strange that there should be so few stragglers about, though despite the almost quarantine-like isolation of individuals in ordinary circumstances, she should by now have met one or two nighthawks like herself in a thoroughfare as broad and long as Baron Béla Wenckheim Avenue, especially so close to the city centre. Driven by her sense of foreboding, she hurried on, feeling ever more convinced that she was crossing some nightmare terrain permeated by evil, then, as she got ever closer to the source of that now clearly audible puffing, and through the bars of the wild chestnut trees could see the heap of machinery which produced it, she felt quite certain that, exhausted as she was by her struggles against the powers of terror, she was imagining, simply imagining everything, for what she saw in that first glance seemed not only stupefying but downright impossible. Not far from her, a spectral contraption was moving at melancholy pace through the winter night down the middle of the road—that is if this satanic conveyance, whose desperately slow crawl reminded her of a steamroller struggling to gain each centimetre of ground, could be said to be moving at all: it wasn’t even a matter of overcoming strong wind resistance on the normal road surface, but of ploughing through a tract of dense, refractory clay. Sheathed in blue corrugated iron and sealed on every side, the lorry, which reminded her of an enormous wagon, was covered with bright yellow writing (an indecipherable dark-brown shape hovered at the centre of the inscriptions) and was much higher and longer—she noted incredulously—than those vast Turkish trucks that used to pass through town, and the whole shapeless hulk, which smelled vaguely of fish, was being drawn by a smoking, oily and wholly antediluvian wreck of a tractor which was making fearful exertions in the process. Once she caught up with it though, her curiosity overcame her fear and she paced along beside the vehicle for a while, peering at the clumsy foreign letters—obviously the work of an inexpert hand—but even up close their meaning remained inscrutable (could it be Slavic … or Turkish? …), and it was impossible to say what purpose the thing served, or indeed what it was doing here at all in the very heart of this frosty, windswept and deserted town—or even how it had managed to get here since, if this was its normal speed, it would have taken years for it to have made it from the nearest village, and it was hard to imagine (though there seemed no alternative) that it would have been brought in by rail. She lengthened her stride again and it was only once she had left the awesome juggernaut behind and glanced back that she spotted a heavily built and bewhiskered man with an indifferent expression on his face, wearing only a vest on top, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, who—once he noticed her on the pavement—pulled a face and slowly raised his right hand from the wheel as if to greet the