suppressing her repulsion with a great effort born out of tactfulness, she was constrained to examine every item in her hostess’s armoury with the gre-a-test of care. Accompanied by Mrs Plauf, who in her fury and confusion hardly dared to breathe a word, but ran along behind her, red-faced, treading on her heels and readjusting each disturbed item, she ran her eyes carefully over each nook and cranny of the flat, stifling under its load of bric-à-brac, and, with feigned appreciation (since ‘it wasn’t yet time to lay one’s cards on the table’), she deployed her booming alto voice to declare, ‘Yes, undoubtedly, women lend meaning to the lifeless objects around them; it is women, and only women, who can provide what we call that individual charm,’ while struggling desperately with the ever more intense temptation to crush one of those little knick-knacks in her enormous palm, to snap it as one would the neck of a chicken, since, damn it all, these comb racks and lace doilies, that swan’s-neck ashtray, the velveteen ‘Persian’ carpet, the ridiculously wispy tulle curtains and, behind the glass of the showcase, those straggling sentimental novels with their hot, sticky, airless contents, most graphically demonstrated to her where the world had got to with its petty unbridled indulgence in ‘idle pleasures and feeble desires’. She saw and made a mental note of everything, nothing escaped her attention, and taking it all in, having summoned all her self-control, she tortured herself further by taking a bitter delight in breathing in the scent-polluted air of the flat, which reminded her so precisely of ‘the sickeningly dainty pong of doll’s-houses’ and which, even a mile away, eloquently proclaimed the pitiable condition of its inhabitant, it was a stink from which she shrank, especially as, even on the threshold, it induced in her—or so she was wont to remark with withering sarcasm to the chief of police whenever she returned from one of her informal visits following her election—an earnest desire to vomit. Whether it was just her tendency to mockery or a genuine case of nausea, her friend could be quite certain that she was being subjected to no ordinary trials and tribulations, for ever since ‘the spirit of communal will had finally been recovered’ sufficiently to elevate her from the position of leader of the local male-voice choir (a post which occasioned her some humiliation and one whose demands were relieved only by that so-called ‘exclusive repertoire’ of marches, work songs and odes to spring) to president of the women’s committee, a figurehead of iron will, she had had to fritter her days away (‘hours at a time’) in such flats, if only to demonstrate to herself, again and again, that what she had suspected all along was in fact true beyond the shadow of a doubt. For clearly as she saw that it was precisely in such debilitating circumstances—among over-sweetened preserves and fluffy eiderdowns, among rugs with their fringes combed straight and armchairs protected by tightly knotted covers—that every powerful urge came to grief; that it was in this fatal slough—populated by those who considered themselves to be the cream of local society, who in their ridiculous house slippers devoured equally ridiculous operettas and treated simple healthier folk with contempt—that each decent impulse sank to oblivion; she understood the phenomenon all too well, and saw that despite, for example, the months of work following the presidential launch of the epoch-making campaign for renewal, the movement had unfortunately been frustrated. To be honest it was no more than she had expected so she wasn’t really surprised when this fine society of parasites, saturated by their own sense of self-worth, coolly rejected her carefully considered arguments, since behind the eternal excuses (such as, for example, ‘A clean-up in December? Perhaps later when it’s time for proper spring-cleaning
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