by this worthless old trick’; not even to the indifferent gaggle of drivers, painters, bakers and warehousemen who patronized the place and had grown as familiar with the set speech as with the coarse taste of the penny riesling in their scratch-marked glasses and would not hesitate to stifle Valuska if, in his enthusiasm, he attempted to steer ‘his dear friends’ on to the subject of ‘the mind-bending vastness of the universe’, which meant digressing to the Milky Way, because they were as certain as could be that new wine, new glasses and new entertainments were all doomed to be ‘worse than the old’, and were not at all interested in any dubious innovation, the common, unspoken assumption based on years of experience being that any change or alteration, any adjustment of any kind—and this was generally agreed—spelled decay. And if events had taken one turn so far they were all the keener that that was the way they should continue, especially now when a great many more events, particularly the extraordinary cold—fifteen to twenty degrees below freezing since the beginning of December—went worryingly unexplained, and not a single snowflake in all that time but a frost which broke on them and had remained, nailed, as it were, quite unnaturally to the ground, contrary to normal expectations at the onset of a season, so much so that they were inclined to suspect that something (‘In the sky? On erf?’) had changed in the most radical fashion. For weeks now they had lived in a state between confusion and unease bordering on nervous melancholy, and having, furthermore, taken note of the posters that had appeared this very evening confirming rumours from nearby suburbs that the enormous, almost inevitably ill-omened whale was certain to arrive on the morrow (after all, ‘Who knows what this means? What it will lead to …?’), they were more than a little drunk by the time Valuska had arrived at this particular station of his rounds. As for him, though he too, of course, adopted a puzzled expression and shook his overburdened head whenever he was stopped and questioned on the subject (‘I don’t understand, János, I just don’t understand these days of judgement …’), and listened open-mouthed to everything that passed in the Peafeffer about the vague and, in some fashion, incomprehensibly mysterious air of danger surrounding the circus and its local prospects, he was unable to attribute any special significance to it all, and so, in the face of the general indifference, he, and only he, never got bored with it, nor ceased to enthuse about it; on the contrary, the very thought of sharing his thoughts with the others and so living through ‘this sacred turning point in nature’, filled him with a feverish excitement. What did he care now about the discomforts of the ice-bound city? Why should it interest him when people said, ‘I wonder when we’ll get some bloody snow at last’, provided that the feverish excitement, that passionate tense feeling deep inside him experienced in the few dramatic seconds of silence once his wholly unvaried performance was officially over, swept over him with its unsurpassable sweetness and purity—so much so that even the alien taste of his customary reward, a glass of wine watered down with soda, something that, along with cheap brandy and beer, he had never learned to like but couldn’t reject (for should he refuse this regular, and presumably presently forthcoming, token of his ‘dear friends’ affection, and betray his hatred of it by ordering some sweet liqueur, thereby finally confessing that he had always preferred sugary fizzy drinks, he knew that Mr Haglemayer would no longer tolerate his presence in the Peafeffer), seemed less unpleasant than usual. In any case there was no point in risking the less than complete confidence of both landlord and regular customers for the sake of such a trifle, especially seeing that by about six in the evening the
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