The Union Jack Read Free

bigwig, his face boiled red as a lobster, sweat pouring from his brow, and literally trembling—from the effort, I supposed at the time (if I supposed anything at all at the time)—was in no great hurry to get down to the street; quite the contrary, he was hardly able to tear himself away from us, addressing several of us individually, until at long last we were rid of him, and I too was able to step out onto the balcony and, with a sigh of relief, look down at the street where, at that very moment, the bigwig stepped out of the building and, at that very moment, out of a black limousine that was idling by the pavement jumped two ominously helpful men to assist the bigwig most eagerly, but perhaps a touch insistently, intothe black limousine, while in that unexpected hush which sometimes falls for a brief moment, like a climax or an orchestral pause, to interrupt the din of the city in the settling twilight at the end of each unbearable day, the nightmarish lights of the street lamps suddenly lit up. It will come as no surprise to you, mature, cultured people that you are, I said to the friendly gathering, mustered mainly from my former students, which had been continually urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, to learn where that black limousine took its victim, or that the bigwig had been continually spying down from the balcony on the black limousine waiting below, hoping, for a while, that the black limousine was not waiting for him, then as time passed—during the lecture—slowly ascertaining beyond any doubt that it was indeed for him that the black limousine was waiting, and after that ascertainment all he could do was spin out the time, that is, as far as he was able, delay the moment of departure, the stepping out from the entrance gate of the building; as for me, however, I hardly know what surprised me more, and of course more disagreeably: the encounter four, five or six years later, on what was then still a tree-lined Andrássy (and later Stalin, Hungarian Youth, People’s Republic, etc.)Avenue, with a battered, half-blinded, broken old man, in whom, to my great horror, I recognised the erstwhile bigwig, or the “ad-hoc meeting,” as it was called, that was convened in great haste at the editorial office the day following the balcony scene, in the course of which I was obliged to learn certain things, each more absurd than the last, about this bigwig, who just the day before had been a figure of general terror, general homage, general creeping and crawling. These absurdities were brought to our attention now by the hysterically twitching ravings of a pampered youth, now by the incomprehensible outpourings of rage from the senior editor-in-chief himself, a being who, in his mortal terror, had been reduced to some primeval human state, a pulsating amoeba, a mere existential jelly, and had stayed utterly transfixed in that reduced state, yet who only the previous day, scared rigid, had kowtowed and smarmily crept and crawled in the presence of the selfsame bigwig. It would be utterly impossible, and utterly beside the point, for me to recall this man’s choice of words, more absurd even than his absurd assertions: they consisted of a farrago of allegations and abuses, protestations, excuses, insults, pledges, threats and suchlike, expressed in the most extreme manner, noteschewing the use of animal names, with the names of canine beasts of prey prominent among the abuses, for instance, and dragging in the language of the most bigoted religious sects amongst the pledges. Now, I would be very curious to know whether the friendly gathering that had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack was able, even dimly, to imagine that scene, as I asked them to do at the time, since I myself, sadly, do not possess the requisite powers of evocation or means of expression; however much they may have nodded, strained and tried, I am sure that, in the end, they were incapable of it, simply because it is