The Diary of Geza Csath (2 page)

This is not the tale of someone willingly, enjoyably disintegrating towards later soft regret, wreathed in the smoke rings of a faux-romanticism, enjoying himself before checking in to rehab. Csath does not even claim to be the sort of drug user who willingly trades his life or success for pleasure, and then willingly faces death when the pleasure is over. No, Csath is more honest than that. He shows that addiction is much worse, much less “literary” (despite making for great literature). This is addiction: Csath pays for decreasing pleasure at increasing cost, and is forced with each transaction to
admit
that the payoff is not worth the price, before he is allowed to reach for his feeble reward. He descends against his will, knowing that the price is too high, and that his dominating mistress is cruel in her implacable selectivity, for she takes precisely what her victim prizes most, in increasing order of value. “The usurious toll it collects in exchange for this simple trick on human misery,” he writes, in one sentence overthrowing the fantasy of 1909 with the reality of 1913. And as she peels away her next slice of the victim’s life, her lover squeals that he doesn’t want to play anymore, that he wants to go back to a time before he knew her. She does not listen; she proceeds to take what she wishes.

In return, she still grants him her occasional favors, in decreasing intensity, until he is running after her, giving up everything, crying as he does so, and receiving nothing at all in return, but crumbling teeth and hellish insomnia and ceaseless vomiting. Casanova has become a pathetic boy in hopeless love. “I am so revolting, weak, and pitiful that I must genuinely wonder at Olga, that she still loves me…I cannot perceive the smell of my poorly wiped ass or my decayed mouth.” Here, then, is
Opium
’s promised reward for bold transgression, what awaits the “real human being” who trades bourgeois concerns for twenty million years.

By its horrifying last entry the diary has proven itself again to be potent literature, but this time didactic literature. Csath was opium’s lover and he was her slave, and he is one of the rare men eloquent enough to express the elusive ecstasy felt by the lover and the inescapable nightmare lived by the slave. In that dual eloquence he stands as a very human lesson, proof that the suffering of the latter far outweighed the pleasures of the former.

A terrible and depressing thought: I no longer have any inclination to write. Since I began to work penetratingly with analysis and to examine my unconscious spiritual life in all its facets, I have no more need to write. Yet analysis only brings suffering, bitter recognition, and disappointment, while writing brings joy and sustenance. But still I can’t! I write with difficulty, anxiously. The thought is killed in the bud by criticism. And I can’t put my innermost, unsettled affairs onto paper. I am inhibited by the feeling that others can read between the lines as clearly as I – the psychoanalyst
– can read into the writing of other authors. Nevertheless, with iron will, I force myself to write. I must write. Even if writing will never be my life’s work again, at least it should be fun. I must play, even if I can’t enjoy myself, because it’s the only chance I have of ever making a lot of money.

So, the summer of 1912! Dezso
¹
and I made the trip together. The boy came back from Szabadka
²
very thin and pale. He had a cough. I worried. He slept badly. It brought to mind nights we had spent together long ago when he was in his second year of pharmaceutical studies; then I slept poorly and disturbed him.

and within half an hour we were stocked with newspapers and having breakfast at Keleti palyadudvar
³
. Altogether we had perhaps 300 crowns left of the 1,500 I had withdrawn for the spa venture; the rest had been spent a good while ago.

We arrived at Stubnya
⁴
on a windy, chilly spring midday. The large restaurant presented an unfriendly picture. We were cold, strangers. I worried about every move I made, and tried to find a way of winning everyone over as easily and stylishly as possible. I was hounded by feelings of depression and anxiety, which I tried to conceal by behaving in a superior yet still modest manner.

In the mornings I usually sat in my office and wrote letters, or worked at arranging the furniture. Then I looked in on the bathing areas. Usually I found Dezso there alone, the bathing attendant massaging him while he groaned and laughed.

The behaviour of this bathing attendant was the first warning that I needed to be careful. When I came down from Budapest for two days to visit the spa, I was straightforwardly kind to him, offered him my hand, and attempted to charm him. Now, when I arrived for a longer stay, he came to me laughing, but offered his hand first. These sorts of things, to which I have never paid attention before, now prompt me to serious thought. In principle, I have always been contemptuous of people who try to elicit respect from others not by intellectual superiority but by proud, standoffish, arrogant, or reserved behaviour. Now I had to think of employing those silly conventions, which, I had to admit, were effective in regulating contact between people.

Mrs Braun, too, addressed me entirely differently after I was contracted to work at the spa. Before I signed the contract, she treated me like the spa’s pre-eminent professional, her own superior, and now she treated me like a businessman who had come to live off her and her spa. She clearly tried to sway her daughters against me too. They were not allowed to be kind to me, they could not enter into conversation of any length with me – or, if they did, they spoke as the daughters of a provincial pharmacist would speak to a trainee doctor, or the way a major’s daughter speaks to a cadet. Therefore I stopped concerning myself with them. I showed no signs of being offended, but greeted them in all friendliness, and took no notice of the fact they did not receive this in a manner I had every right to expect, considering my station.

When Dezso finished his cure, around 11.30, we usually took a long walk that lasted until 12.30. Then we had lunch. After lunch, we chatted with our partners at table, a veterinarian and a county assessor. Both were arrogant provincial fellows who thought themselves distinguished and very fine. Vibritzky, the assessor, had an especially high opinion of his own facial features, his clothes, and the effect he had on women. He never said a word about it, but it was clear just from looking at him. Both of them had dogs which they petted, patted, and fed during lunch, recounting endless idiotic anecdotes proving the intelligence and learning of the animals. Dezso and I couldn’t stand this company for long, and usually after three-quarters of an hour we were in our rooms, reading, washing, and chatting. During this time, I exercised moderation with the poisons. On average, I used .02-.03 of P
⁵
every other day at two in the afternoon, in a single dose. It did not produce harmonious euphoria, but it was necessary to quell sexual desire and allay my constant financial and moral worries. I was rightfully afraid that the
saison
would never really arrive. I saw no goodwill anywhere, I felt no warmth, no attraction. Only in Nandor Zaborsky, the chief magistrate, did I detect real sympathy.

The beginning of June passed slowly. The instruments, the cabinet, the apparatus all arrived. The office was completely ready. I had work from the very first days. At first, the chronically ill of the surrounding villages consulted me. As I had plenty of time, I examined them with great care. In addition to a thorough internal examination I examined the nose, throat, and ears of every patient, although I had as yet little experience in the last two areas. By the time the real spa guests arrived, I was competent. The other advantage was that the patients spread my good reputation throughout the region and sent many new patients my way.

On the third day, a widow came in with complaints of tubercular toxicosis. I soon put her on iodine-potassium (IP) treatment and fattened her up nicely. Her condition improved surprisingly, and she bade me farewell with overflowing gratitude. That was the first success. I considered it a good omen that my first patient suffered from a disease I had already learned to cure.

In the afternoons, at 4.30, we would have a snack. Afterwards, we would take long walks over to the neighbouring villages, play a little piano, or – at the cost of great self-abnegation – we would engage in conversation with Vitvizky, Marovitzky (an addle-brained, bankrupt landowner), and the honorary chief magistrate, all of whom were always idling in the park. At other times, we visited here and there. Of these visits, I preferred chatting or playing billiards with Jakobovics, the hapless railway medic. At least his dry, crude humour was amusing, and I enjoyed the self-important way he described his medical cases.

We didn’t usually stay up long after dinner. One or two games of billiards and off to sleep we would go. In bed, we read Casanova aloud to each other, spoke about the girls, Olga and Blanky, and recalled the beautiful love affairs we carried on with the young lasses.

During this time, we slept poorly. Especially on days without P, sexual desire troubled me too. Recent trysts would replay themselves in my imagination with almost painful accuracy. I saw Olga as she walked to and fro in my room, in a shirt, as she bent at the waist, and the flesh of her little legs glowed through the thin black stockings.

That’s how I came, not long afterwards,
faute de mieux,
to seduce the hotel chambermaid, named Terez or something of the sort. I banged her hard a few times with a condom, because she had quite a tight vagina. Her virginity had been taken two years before by the spa’s Dr Mahler. This 21-year-old girl with her thin, pale body was not an appetizing morsel, but as soon as her vapid blue eyes grew inflamed by lust, as soon as her face blushed red and she started to make violent counter-thrusts, there was something interesting in that. Dezso tried communing with her as well, but the boy’s penis drooped, and he called off the attack in vexation.

Terez was naturally not at all satisfying for me, and I soon decided on a trip to Budapest. I only had three or four patients, none of them requiring constant treatment. Thus, at 7.00 a.m. on 12 June, I boarded a train. And at 1.00 p.m., after a long, tiring, and unendurably boring trip, I was finally able to embrace Olga. In the smoky black reflections of Keleti palyaudvar, she first seemed surprisingly fat and strikingly lined. But afterwards I found her lips all the more sweet. Throughout the trip from the station, on the street and in the cab, I embraced her and kissed her greedily. Her kisses sent me into genuine ecstasy. My God, those kisses. What they meant to me. How much joy, suffering, all the complex excitement of a dissonant chord: marriage? career? future? honour? prestige? love? giving up other women?

Sacrifice? For her, I felt I could easily give up all the women fate still held in store for me. Crossing at the end of Barcsa utca, we got off at a little restaurant to take some nourishment. Greasy soup. We ate greasy pork or some such thing. I was utterly without appetite, but still I wanted to be over the problem of eating, so that afterwards we could live only for love. I looked at her constantly, I kissed her sweet face, eyes, neck, her soft, cleansmelling little hands, and I caressed her back, her tightly corseted, beautiful big thighs, her ankles through the thin net stockings. Meanwhile I ran over to the café across the way to telephone home and ask the concierge if everything was all right. I had taken .014 P the day before. The effect had completely worn off, so the weak and not unbearable P-hunger dissolved into colossal, harmonious lust. Ezeizer, the concierge, notified me that my bed had been made and my room aired. Now every worry that things might not go smoothly disappeared, and we were home fifteen minutes later. I greeted the pleasant sundrenched room with a feeling of explosive happiness and satisfaction. Both of us undressed as fast as we could. Then I inserted a Vaginol suppository into her sweet little cunt, and five minutes later, mercilessly, with overpowering lust, lifting her little batiste shirt, I penetrated the thick black fur. In hardly more than a half-minute we reached the pinnacle of happiness. We had not even untangled ourselves from the enchanted kisses that followed when the second attack occurred. This we performed in stallion and mare position, lying on our sides. In sweetness it surpassed the first. We lay thus, almost unconscious with happiness, until 5.30 in the evening, kissing, embracing, deluging each other with praise and mutual confessions. The perfection of Olga’s happiness was only reduced by the four Vaginol suppositories which irritated her dear little chalice. In the meantime we had a snack, smoked cigarettes, and I sat down naked at the piano to bring to life music befitting the situation from Wagner and the repertoire of the Budapest music halls. Wotan’s farewell, Paraguay, Pali Palko … etc.

Dressed, I escorted my Olga to Kalvin ter
⁶
. We agreed that I would not go up to her place, so as not to put the delights of the following morning at the slightest risk, or provoke her father’s suspicions. We bade each other goodbye, and I went to the chemist to buy perfume,