Satantango by László Krasznahorkai

so he quickly found his favorites. There was one special picture — though the rank of favorites did change in due course — an aerial shot, that greatly appealed to him: an enormous, ragged procession winding over a desert-like terrain leaving behind them the ruins of an embattled town billowing smoke and flames, while ahead, waiting for them, there was only a large, spreading dark area like an admonitory blot. And what made the photograph particularly worthy of note was the equipment appropriate to a military observation post that — redundant at first sight — was just about visible in the bottom left-hand corner. He felt the picture was important enough to deserve close attention because it demonstrated with great confidence, in real depth, the “all but heroic history” of a perfectly conducted piece of research focused on essentials, research in which observer and observed were at an optimal distance from each other and where minuteness of observation was given particular emphasis, to the extent that he often imagined himself behind the lens, waiting for the precise moment when he might press the button on the camera with absolute certainty. Even now it was this picture he had picked up almost without thinking: he was familiar with it down to the most minute detail but every time he looked at it he lived in hope of discovering something he hadn’t yet noticed. However, despite wearing his glasses, it all looked a little blurry to him this time. He put the magazines away and took “one last nip” before setting out. He struggled to put on his fur-lined winter coat, folded the blankets and left the house, swaying a little. The cold fresh air hit him hard. He tapped his pocket to check he had his wallet and notebook, adjusted his wide-brimmed hat and started uncertainly in the direction of the mill. He could have chosen a shorter route to the bar but that would have meant passing first the Kráners’ then the Halics’s house, not to mention the fact that he was bound to bump into “some dumb ass” near the Cultural Center or the generator, someone who would detain him against his will and engage him in some crude or sly form of interrogation, disguised with so-called gratitude to satisfy the person’s repulsive curiosity. It was hard making progress in the mud and what was worse he could barely see his way in the darkness, but proceeding through the backyard of his house he found his way to the path that led to the mill and he was more or less familiar with that, though he hadn’t recovered his sense of balance so he swayed and tottered as he went, as a result of which it often happened that he miscalculated a step and bumped into a tree or stumbled over a low bush. He fought for breath, his chest heaving, and there was still that tight feeling around his heart he had endured since the afternoon. He walked faster to reach the mill as quickly as he could so that he might shelter from the rain, and he no longer tried to avoid the lurking puddles along the path, plowing through them ankle-deep if he had to. His boots were clogged with mud, his fur-lined coat was growing ever heavier. He shouldered open the stiff doors of the mill, sank down on a wooden chest and struggled for breath for several minutes. He could feel the blood pulsing through his neck, his legs were numb, his hands trembled. He was on the ground floor of the abandoned building, with two storeys above him. The silence was overwhelming. Ever since anything half-way useful had been removed from here, this vast, dark, dry hangar rang with its own emptiness: to the right of the door there were a few old fruit crates, an iron trough of uncertain function, and a crudely banged-together wooden box saying IN CASE OF FIRE without any sand in it. The doctor removed his boots, took off his socks and squeezed the water from them. He searched for a cigarette but the pack had soaked through and there was not one fit to smoke. The weak light that filtered