suffering the stares of slyly gleaming pairs of eyes and the fumblings now and then of impertinent hands. The great majority of those present were foreign, clearly peasants, attracted here, thought Mrs Eszter, by news of the whale, but there was an unsettling alien quality about the local faces too, faces she vaguely recognized as belonging to small farmers at the outskirts of town who brought their wares to the busy weekly market. As far as she could judge from the distance between them and from the thickness of the crowd, the circus management had not given very much indication that they would soon commence their undoubtedly unique performance, and having attributed the icy tension evident in eyes which caught hers to this, she no longer permitted that annoying impatience to preoccupy her, but on the contrary allowed herself, for one clear minute, since she had had no opportunity yesterday, to enjoy the proud self-satisfaction of the thought that this great mass of people were ignorant of the fact that everything, but everything, was only there thanks to her, for without her memorable intervention there would have been ‘no circus, no whale, no production of any kind’. Only for a minute, one brief minute, for once having left them behind and finally found her route past the older houses of Híd Road towards Count Vilmos Ápor Square, she had forcefully to remind herself that her concentration must be focused entirely elsewhere. She clutched the creaking handles of the suitcase with even greater fury, and slammed her heels down on the pavement with an even heavier military stride, and so soon managed to re-establish the train of thought which had been so annoyingly interrupted and lose herself in the labyrinth of words intended for Valuska’s ears, so much so that when she practically bumped into two policeman—probably on their way to the market—who greeted her with proper marks of respect, she quite neglected to return their salutations, and by the time she realized what had happened and waved after them in a somewhat preoccupied fashion they were already a long way down the road. By the time she reached the junction of Híd Road and ápor Square, however, there was no time left to contemplate anything, and in any case her train of thought had drawn up at the station; she felt that every word, every useful turn of phrase was now securely under her command, and, happen what may, nothing now could take her by surprise: dozens and dozens of times she had run the scene through in her imagination, how she would begin, what the other would say, and, since she knew the other as well as she did herself, she could add the finishing touches and stand before the breathtaking tower of her most effective sentences not only in the likelihood but in the certainty that forthcoming events would be resolved wholly to her advantage. It was enough to conjure up the pitiful figure, the sunken chest, the crooked back, the thin scrawny neck and those ‘warm liquid eyes’ overtopping all; it was sufficient to recall his eternal hobbling as he carried that enormous post-bag, lurched by the wall and stopped intermittently and hung his head; like someone who at every step stops to check that she actually sees what no one else sees, if only in order that she should have no further doubts about its existence, so she kept reminding herself that Valuska would do what was expected of him. ‘And if he shouldn’t,’ she smiled coldly, transferring the suitcase to the other hand, ‘I’ll give his stunted balls a little squeeze. The runt. The nobody. I eat his kind.’ She stood below the steeply pitched roof of Harrer’s house, took a quick look at the glass-topped wall before it and opened the gate in a manner sufficient to attract the immediate attention of the ‘eagle-eyed’ Harrer, who was in any case watching from one of the windows, so he should be in no doubt that this was no time for idle chatter, and that she would ‘simply and
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