Kornel Esti (13 page)

At such times I’d hurry along holding my breath, like somebody up to no good. The trick often worked. But a couple of times people ran after me—once a schoolboy, once a lady in mourning—and brought my money back. I blushed, stammered something, and crammed the note into my pocket. They, poor things, took it amiss that I didn’t even thank them for their kindness or give them a reward for being honest.”

“Amazing.”

“You can’t imagine how little use money is if you really want to squander it. Then you simply don’t need it. Nobody wants it. I struggled bitterly on for a year like that. I handled it so badly that—as they say—‘after going over the books,’ I had 1,574 koronas left which had no owners anywhere. At the start of the third year my luck turned. I came across a nice little dentist who’d set up in Buda. He polished the plaque off my teeth and gave me that lovely gold tooth which has been part of my poetic persona ever since. There were four or five coats hanging in the waiting room, and in a moment when no one was watching I stufffed a couple of notes in the pocket of each. Next day I did the same. On the third day as well. In a week I’d succeeded in getting through all my backlog of money. The patients sat in the waiting room, eyes shining. They’d creep out one by one into the anteroom and come back happy and electrified with the money in their pockets which they had taken from their coats and put in a safer place. They usually hid their faces with their handkerchiefs, as if they had a toothache, so as not to show their pleasure and so the others wouldn’t know they’d been looking for money. Some of them strolled out into the anteroom more than once in the hope that this inexplicable natural marvel would be repeated several times in an afternoon, or perhaps they were afraid that somebody else would collect the present. I lay low in the middle of them. I was enjoying the situation. But I soon dropped that too.”

“Perhaps the journalist discovered that as well?”

“No. But the word went round that there was no dentist in Budapest as clever and gentle as mine, and his practice flourished so much that they had to draw lots for appointments. I drew number 628, so I wasn’t going to get an appointment for the foreseeable future. The receptionist wouldn’t even let me in. So I went elsewhere. I operated where my fertilizing golden rain hadn’t fallen before. By that time there was hardly anywhere left. Especially as I had to be more and more careful all the time. That’s right, my dear boy. The noose was tightening round my neck.”

“Poor fellow.”

“At the start of the fourth year I had a brilliant idea. I have a very good friend who’s served five years for picking pockets. I got him to teach me. The lessons were really hard. First he lengthened my index finger, stretched it, loosened the knuckles, to make it the same length as my middle finger, because pickpockets only ‘dip’ with those two fingers. When I’d finished the training I could work quite confidently, even daringly at times. On one state occasion I succeeded in smuggling my daily 150 koronas into the court dress of an elderly, widely respected Hungarian nobleman of European distinction, and another fifty into the fur of his egret-plumed hat. In fact, while I was in the corridor of Parliament, chatting with the finance minister about the economic crisis, I slipped a hundred into his pocket. For the most part I hung about in the crowds at soccer matches and amusement parks, where people are jammed together, lining up to get on the rides. One Sunday—I mention this as a particular piece of luck—750 koronas were taken from my pocket at the Hüvösvölgy tram terminus.
^*
That day I had nothing to do. At the time I only risked placing smallish amounts. It seemed that the detectives were keeping their eyes open. Just imagine, I was putting koronas into my fellow men’s pockets and bags. Gradually I became careless. I used to sit on trams from morning to night to achieve my self-imposed task. One day in May—I remember it clearly—an old man with blue eyes and a neat silver beard sat down beside me and rested both hands absentmindedly on the crook of his walking stick. He was wearing a threadbare coat. He looked like a tax-office clerk or something. I’d just got a silver five-korona piece out of my pocket and was about to slip it into his coat pocket with my two long, agile fingers, when the old man trapped my hand under his arm and shouted ‘thief.’ The conductor immediately rang the bell, stopped the tram, and called a policeman. It was no good my protesting. I’d been caught in the act. That was the end of my career …”

Kornél Esti was silent. He said no more. He walked pensively down the street, now flooded by bright sunlight, and stopped outside the big, dark red house where he lives on the sixth floor, in the attic. He rang to be let in.

“You’re mad,” I said, and embraced him.

“So it’s not dull?” he asked. “Interesting enough? Absurd, improbable, incredible enough? Will it be annoying enough to people who look for psychological motivation, understanding, even moral lessons in literature? Good. Then I’ll write it up. If I get paid for it I’ll let you have your fiver back tomorrow. Well then, good-bye.”

*
On the northwest edge of Budapest.

VII

In which Küçük appears, the Turkish girl, whom he compares to a honey cake.

“
IT WAS THE HEIGHT OF SUMMER, AND I WAS RACING HOME
ward,” said Kornél, “on the electrified line from the East.

“In the curtained first-class compartment where I was sitting, there were also three Turkish women, three thoroughly modern Turkish women without veils or prejudices: a grandmother, a mother, and a fifteen-year-old girl whom they called Küçük, that is, Little One, Tiny.

“I admired this delightful family for a long time. Grandmother, mother, and daughter formed a unity, were as close to one another as Winter, Summer, and Spring on certain mountains in the Alps.

“The grandmother, a gaunt matron in her eighties, dressed in black and with enormous black pearls round her neck, was sleeping on the seat. She spoke in Turkish in her sleep. From time to time she raised her hand, her wrinkled, blue-veined hand, to her face to cover it, because for the greater part of her life she had worn a veil, and even in her sleep she must have felt that her face was improperly exposed.

“The mother was more modern. She almost flaunted her progressiveness. She had dyed her hair straw yellow—it must have been raven black at one time. Her manner was free and easy. She smoked one cigarette after another. When the guard came in, she—democratically—shook his hand. Furthermore, she was reading Paul Valéry’s latest novel.

“Küçük was like a pink and white honey cake. She wore a pink silk dress, and her little face was as white as whipped cream. Her hair too was dyed straw yellow. In every respect she looked the disciple of her mother. She was almost ashamed of being Turkish. All that gave her away were the red leather slippers that she wore on the train and the huge bunch of roses that she had brought with her, all those fiery red, blood-red Constantinople roses, and then her Angora cat, for which she spread a Turkish mat to sit on, the blue-eyed, deaf Angora cat over whose slumber she tenderly watched.

“Mohammed came to my mind, their stirring, kindly prophet, who on one occasion when his cat had gone to sleep on his cloak, preferred to cut off its corner rather than wake his favorite kitty.

“They were making for Vienna, and from there for Berlin, Paris, and London. They were astoundingly cultured. The girl talked about vitamins B and C, and her mother about Jung and Adler and the latest heretical schools of psychoanalysis.

“They spoke all languages perfectly. They began in French, the purest literary language, then slipped into argot, followed shortly by German—alternating between the speech of Berlin and Lerchenfeld patois—passing meanwhile through English and Italian. This was not at all showing off. They were just content, like children making themselves understood in adult western European society, comfortable, finding themselves a niche everywhere. It seemed that their ambition was to be taken seriously and regarded as western Europeans.

“I felt inclined to tell them that they were possibly overesteeming western Europe a trifle, and that I was by no means as entranced by its culture. But I decided against doing so. Why spoil their fun?

“Instead I showed them my eight fountain pens, which I always keep in my pocket, my two gold fillings, which I likewise always have in my mouth, and I boasted that I had high blood pressure, a five-valve radio, and an incipient kidney stone, and that several of my relatives had had appendectomies. I tell everyone what they need to know.

“This had an extraordinary effect.

“Küçük smiled and stared at me with her dark, bewitching eyes with such honest, frank sincerity that she quite perturbed me. I didn’t know what she wanted of me. At first I thought that she was making fun of me. Then, however, she took both my hands and pressed them to her heart. A dove can thus attack a sparrowhawk.

“In all this there was no coquetry or immorality. She just thought that was how cultured, advanced, western European girls behaved toward men whom they met for the first time on trains. Therefore I too tried to behave as cultured, advanced, western European men do in such circumstances.

“Her mother saw this, but paid us little attention. She—as I’ve said—was immersed in Paul Valéry.

“We went out into the corridor. There we walked about, laughing, holding hands. Then we leaned out the window. And so I courted her.

“ ‘You’re the first Turkish girl,’ I told her—we were on
te
terms by then—‘the first Turkish girl I’ve met, Küçük, Little One, and I love you. Years ago, in school, I learned about the battle of Mohács. I know that your ancestors spilled the blood of mine and kept us in shameful slavery for a century and a half. But I’d be your slave for another hundred and fifty years, serve you, pay you tribute, my dear little enemy, my dear oriental relative. Do you know what? Let’s make peace. I’ve never been angry with your people—they have given us our most lovely words, words without which I’d be unhappy. I’m a poet, a lover of words, crazy about them. You gave us words like
gyöngy, tükör,
and
koporsó.
You’re
a pearl,
you’ll shine in the
mirror
of my soul until they close my
coffin.
Do you understand when I say
gűrű, gyűszű, búza, bor?
Of course you do, they’re your words as well, and
betû,
the
letters
by which I make my living. You’re my
ring,
my
thimble,
the
wheat
that feeds me, the
wine
that intoxicates me. I have your people to thank for our three hundred and thirty finest words.
^*
I’ve been looking for ages for someone, a Turk, to whom I could express my unfailing gratitude for them and pay back at least in part that loan of words, discharge that linguistic debt which has accumulated so very, very much interest for me.’

“I was burning thus in rapture when suddenly the train ran into a dark tunnel. Küçük sank warmly into my arms. And I, quickly and passionately, began to kiss her lips.

“If I remember correctly, I gave her exactly three hundred and thirty kisses.”

*
There are indeed quite a lot of Turkic loanwords in Hungarian, but most of them, including all eight that Kornél lists here, are of ancient origin, and far fewer date from the years of the Ottoman occupation (1526-1699).

VIII

In which the journalist Pál Mogyoróssy suddenly goes mad in the coffeehouse and is then confined to the lunatic asylum.

“
PÁL, PÁL,” THEY TRIED TO CALM HIM.

“Pál, be careful. Everybody’s looking at you.”

“Waiter!” Gergely, the long-established outstanding journalist, who knew of every secret scandal, clapped his hands, “Waiter! A large espresso! Pál, sit down and have an espresso.”

“Pál, sit by me,” urged Zima, who was on a German paper.

“Pál, take your hat off.”

“Pál, Pál.”

So said the journalists, all crime reporters, who, at about eleven on that delightful August evening, had dropped into the coffee-house which was their favorite nocturnal haunt.

In the middle of the group was someone who was not immediately visible. He was wearing a transparent raincoat and a brand new straw hat, and was likewise a crime reporter—Pál Mogyoróssy.

They’d settled down at the table that had been theirs for a decade. All five journalists were watching Pál with ill-concealed curiosity.

Pál took off his new straw hat. They looked at the silky blond hair, parted on one side, which covered his tiny, girlishly delicate head. When he’d hung up his splendid raincoat on the iron hook, a slim, very pleasant, gentlemanly fellow stood before them, who despite his forty years seemed almost a boy; he wouldn’t have looked out of place in short trousers. He was elegantly dressed: pea-green Burberry suit, zephyr shirt, and white silk bow tie on which gleamed a scarcely perceptible yellow stripe. It all looked brand new.

He tossed onto the marble tabletop a paper parcel, which contained another zephyr shirt and two pairs of buckskin gloves. That was all that he had with him.

He had arrived at the South station at half past one that afternoon on the express from the Balaton, and since then hadn’t even been home.

He had been taking his regular month’s summer holiday at Hévíz, where he rested, and combining the pleasant and the useful, attended to his health. He bathed in the warm, radioactive lake, on the dark mirror of which floated luxuriant, huge Indian lotuses, sprawled in the mud bath, slapping the greasy stuff on himself and especially on his left upper arm, in which he had recently had stabbing pains.

In a week his rheumatism had disappeared. With it went the headaches and the lassitude caused by keeping late hours. In his leisure he woke up. He wrote five “graphic” reports, which he sent by first-class registered mail to his editor. The weeks flew by with electric speed. But he could only hold out for three. At the start of the fourth he packed his bags, his patience exhausted, and abruptly went home.

As he got off the train and, at half past one, glimpsed the Vérmező and the Gellérthegy, an inexpressibly sweet joy filled his heart.
^*
A true son of the capital, he adored Budapest. The afternoon sun was shining, all was promise and happiness. Carrying his little light suitcase he went up into the Castle district, looked down from the promenade on the bastion, had his photograph taken—he had thirty prints made, so that he could hand them round to his friends and possibly get one into a picture paper—had a bite to eat in a coffeehouse, and then just strolled; the pleasant, refreshing hours slipped by until suddenly it was twilight, the beery sunlight turned rusty brown, and he wandered down from the hill beneath the cool branches, crossed into Pest, and looked up his friends at police headquarters.

“Six more espressos!” called Gergely to the waiter, who was approaching their table. “Make that seven,” he indicated with his fingers, “seven,” because at that moment Esti came into the coffee-house.

They had phoned Esti half an hour before, asking him to come at once. And had told him why.

The articles that he wrote were not about aggravated robbery, bank swindles, or arrests, but stories about himself and his fellow men, things which perhaps had not actually happened, only might—poems, novels—in short, he was a practitioner of the stricter profession of writing.

He’d never before even set foot in that coffeehouse where the crime reporters smoked little, nervous cigarettes, hanging on the phone at about two in the morning, shouting into the mouthpiece to the duty stenographers accounts of rapists, murderous servants, and monsters who had exterminated their families, spelling out their names and those of their victims, or where they dozed until first light on the worn plush sofa, yawning, cursing, and keeping watch on the endless series of the nation’s dying, so that when an aging politician or an old and distinguished writer finally had the goodness to die, they could call the night editor to have the lead columns, set weeks beforehand, framed in black and oozing with fresh consternation and tears, inserted in the paper.

He looked around with unfamiliar eye.

Esti was a tall man of powerful physique, strong in appearance but inwardly soft and gentle. His watchful blue eyes constantly reflected alarm. His gestures were limp, hesitant. In his lack of confidence he was always inclined to let his opponent have his way. His skeptical spirit was ill at ease. His sensitivity used to be of such a degree that formerly he could have burst into tears at any moment over anything, at the sight of a battered matchbox or a tired face, but over the years he had schooled this inherent shakiness of nerve, hardening it to the point of harshness and consciously harnessing it to his art like a driving force. All he wanted was to see and feel. This was the one thing that kept him alive and to some extent bound him to the fellowship of men, together with the fact that he was afraid of the ultimate requirement of death. In his home, therefore, he barricaded himself behind medical books, washed his hands in disinfectant before meals, was appalled by and attracted to the sick and the sickly, the ruined and the special, and sought the opportunity of seeing deadly diseases, perhaps in the knowledge that if he could not overcome death, at least he could look into its entrance hall, and he was in general morbidly aroused by dreadful things, dramas small and great of annihilation, of destruction slow or swift, because he hoped that nonetheless he would be able to descry something of the moment when the unknown foot tramples us and being imperceptibly drifts into non-being.

Now too this was what had brought him there.

When he heard the news on the telephone at home he slammed the earpiece onto its hook, put out the light, left the manuscripts on which he’d been working in disorderly heaps on his desk, and rushed to the journalists’ coffeehouse.

His friends were installed beneath a chandelier: its half-burnt-out bulbs drizzled onto the company an inhospitable reddish light. In the thick, pungent smoke he could scarcely make them out. Gergely extended his right hand, in which a light Media glowed in a cigar holder.

Esti shook hands with his colleagues—Gergely, who had phoned for him, Skultéty of the long, sallow face, Vitényi, whom he was meeting for the first time, Zima, the German journalist, and dear, bald Bolza, who as a joke greeted everyone with “Lo.”

He left Pál Mogyoróssy for last.

Pál, it seemed, was pleased that Esti had come. He immediately stood up and waited while he shook hands with the others, and then would not release his hand for a long time, warming it in the velvety, glycerine-softened palm which was hotter than Esti’s own. He leaned toward him slightly too, as if intending to embrace him, to lay his head on his chest.

“Esti,” said he, in a quiet, hoarse voice, “it’s really good that you’re here as well. I need you tonight,” he said with a look of gratitude. “I was waiting for you.”

That took Esti by surprise.

The two of them had never been close friends, though they had known each other since childhood. Their work and spheres of interest had called them to different areas. In all their lives, therefore, they had scarcely exchanged more than thirty or forty sentences, and those too of disjointed words such as “Hello, what’re you up to?” “Nothing much.” “Good to see you, bye.” Esti, however—only now was he aware of it—had a secret sympathy for him. It suddenly came to him that in the course of the twenty years that had gone by while their youth was fading, he had, despite himself, been observing him and had paid more attention to him than he’d thought.

Above all he had been intrigued by Pál’s boyish ways, which had preserved his exterior from apparent aging. He also liked the fact that he was an inexorable listener, who sometimes went weeks without speaking to anybody and never talked about himself. His financial problems, which were almost considered a glory in that set, he never mentioned. His suit, his shirt, his brilliantly polished finger-nails were always immaculate. He said nothing about his ancient noble family. In addition, he cultivated his shrewd professionalism to a high degree but with a certain dif dence, and though he treated people with fastidious politeness, he knew how to remain aloof. Consequently, Esti had involuntarily felt himself honored if Pál, with a barely perceptible lordly gesture, invited him to his table in a wine bar; he would sit down beside him and look at him for a couple of minutes but would soon go away, because Pál would not, on his account, forsake his obdurate, apparently enduring, silence. He would drink like a fish—wine, pálinka, whatever came his way. He used to “put away” a huge amount, and was almost constantly drunk. This, however, did not show on him. He merely became somewhat paler: a waxen mask would spread over his face which served rather to intensify his grave appearance.

All this Esti recalled so quickly and suddenly that at that moment he could scarcely have analyzed it into its component parts. Then he saw two further images, two scenes clipped long ago from films, which had not faded in his excellent memory. Once—it must have been twenty years previously—Pál had been drinking champagne in the Orfeum, in the small hours, and in the light of the arc lamps had his hand on the cellulite-flabby thigh of a yellow-skirted danseuse on whose face was a beauty spot, larger than normal, which was obviously covering some infection or wound. The other image was less significant, but still germane. A couple of years before, at a quarter to five one November afternoon, Pál had been sitting idly in the plateglass window of the big coffeehouse in the Ring Road, alone, lost in thought, holding a bamboo-framed newspaper in his hand but not reading it, while Esti, passing on the sidewalk right before him, tapped on the window student-fashion. Pál did not hear this and kept staring into space, but all the way home Esti wondered what Pál could have been thinking of.

Now Pál gestured him to his table with that grand, scarcely perceptible movement. Esti sat down. He asked what was new. But no one replied.

From then on the five reporters paid attention only to Esti. Pál was no longer the focus of their interest, as he had been the moment before, because they knew what they knew. Now they would have liked to see the surprise, which they themselves had painfully and with creepy pleasure drunk to the dregs, the horror, and the laughter spring up again on Esti’s face, as well-worn anecdotes acquire new charm if they are told to others.

Esti’s face gave nothing away. He lowered his head toward the floor, whether in embarrassment or arrogance. He picked up a newspaper from the marble table to hide behind.

From behind this he took just one glance at Pál. He was more restless than usual, and his face was a bright pink. It looked as if he had had more to drink, and stronger stuff too, than was good for him.

The espressos were brought, all seven together.

They were hot, undrinkably so. At least a hundred and forty degrees. The vapor condensed on the inner rims of the glasses in fat drops.

The reporters pushed them aside. Zima complained to the waiter for serving such things to “the press.”

Pál picked up his steaming glass, which must have burned the skin of his hand, and tossed it back to the dregs.

Esti dropped the paper. He leaned back in his seat, horrified, and stared at him. He was thinking—and the very thought was terrible—of that red-hot liquid scalding his esophagus and stomach wall.

Gergely observed the effect and glanced at Esti. Zima clasped his hands together. Vitényi and Bolza shook their heads. Skultéty, however, who had seen some strange things in his time and was almost immune to the stimulus to laugh, released a gale of laughter into his handkerchief.

Pál noticed the laughter and as a defense against it, joined in. He too laughed, abstractedly.

“Give me a cigarette,” he said.

Five cigarettes flew toward him from the five reporters. Pál lit one. He inhaled the smoke and blew it out. The others lit up too, with the exception of Gergely, who only smoked cigars. Otherwise they all lit cigarettes. Esti too.

Pál didn’t really want to perform to order. He merely said to Zima, sitting beside him:

“I’m going to have my teeth seen to as well.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He shrugged. “Well, so that they’ll be in order. You know, so that I can chew. I’ve just got to have two at the back here out. I’ve got a first-class dentist.”

He opened his mouth wide in an unsightly gape, and showed Zima, whom he scarcely knew, the back of his mouth. The gold of bridges gleamed darkly among the various saliva-bright stumps. He cautiously poked a finger toward the two which the first-class dentist would painlessly extract.

This was still not amusing. Gergely tried to provoke him into doing one or other of his better numbers.

“Fortunately Pál’s got a hearty appetite.”