Kornel Esti (11 page)

For that, they thought, they had plenty of time, and called into the coffeehouse again.

There the elevated, intellectual drinking was now becoming a carousal. The second team had taken its place on the gallery, youngsters of eighteen or nineteen. Over espressos with rum and Egyptian cigarettes, Putterl, little Hajnal, and young Wallig were setting up a polemic periodical, of the highest possible quality, against ossified traditions, the Academy, and the old guard. Next to them Ab-mentis was writing words to music and singing his first line:
Oh, lágy madárkám
. Instead of
lágy
he could have gone with a two-syllable, iambic word, and so tried the line
Oh, kemény madárkám
.
^*
That he couldn't use either. As he sang he tried to find a new adjective which would do both for the text and for the little bird. The older generation was represented by Erdôdy-Erlauer. He was sitting hunched in the first cubicle, staring at his writing paper, on which all that he'd written all afternoon was
Such is my life
… And then he'd been unable to go on. He didn't know what his life was like, couldn't find anything to compare it to, which wasn't surprising: Erdôdy-Erlauer's life wasn't like anything; that was exactly how his life was.

They left them there to their manuscripts, their grief-filled lives. They strolled along the Danube embankment, round the Keleti station. In all parts of the city they picked up would-be writers who were wandering in the dark as if performing an all-night service: Exner, Szilvás, Dayka the Neo-Kantian, Moldvai, Czakó, and a few more besides, who likewise had something to do with the arts and the intellectual sciences: Orbán the music teacher, Csiszér, and Val-entini too, who must have been a cabinetmaker or something. This storm-swept little group drifted around the houses of Ferencváros at about three in the morning.

On the corner stood a girl of the streets. Exner spoke to her and the rest surrounded her. They allowed no opportunity to pass of studying the depths of life and, in the meantime, of showing of their well-informed state. They addressed these women with a superior, amiable informality, though they were usually much older than themselves, at least of an age with their mothers' women friends, whose hands they would politely kiss at home with a deep bow. This disrespectful libertinism increased their self-esteem.

They talked about something. A dialogue took place between the men and the girl, interrupted every few moments by the laughter of the group. In the middle Exner flourished his jaunty walking stick. The girl replied quietly.

Esti stood apart from them. He didn't want to become involved in that game. He thought it both tasteless and immodest. But he knew that part of the world better than any of them. He knew those streets at all times of day and night because some kindred horror drove him there, often in such a way that at home he jumped out of bed and ran there. He had known that quarter early in the morning, when there was no one about, on Saturday evenings between nine and eleven, when activity was at its peak, and on sweltering days at the height of summer between one and two in the afternoon, when the girls in their finery gleamed from the clinging heat like cheap sugar cakes. He knew the houses one by one, the doors and windows in which lamps burned and were extinguished. He knew the men too, who hung about here abstractedly, as if looking for something else, and scuttled in looking at the ground so as at least not to see anything else, and then the unfeeling and stupid, who openly inspected the goods on sale, the fat, lonely old gentlemen who puffed at their cigars in holders as they speculatively eyed the prostitutes walking the other sidewalk, and then with sudden decisiveness, as if something were pulling them on a string, made for a chocolate-colored gate. He knew the special expressions of the region, which constantly met his ear, concerning the objective details of the profession. Above all he knew the women, personally or by sight, the pleasant ones and the brutish-dulled, the ladylike and the uncouth, the tall and the short, those that had pink scars or bites like caterpillars on their chins, or who had dogs on leashes, or wore glasses, or the nightmares that sometimes appeared toward dawn, double black veils covering their faces because they had no noses. He knew this girl too, whom his friends were now entertaining: he had often seen her going this way, had watched her, kept an eye on her.

The girl took Exner's walking stick and set off slowly down the side street. The group followed her. Esti too trailed after them to see what else would happen. They rang at the gate. In they went, all eleven.

Inside, in the low, ground-floor room, the din was like that in a house on fire when the brigade arrives. They shrieked and cried out because of the strangeness of the situation. The woman was afraid that the police would charge her with disturbance of the peace and scandalous conduct. She hushed them, but to no effect. Five of them sat on the bed, so that it creaked and all but collapsed under their weight. The “marquis” spread out his arms and in rounded periodic sentences preached to the woman that she should flee from pollution, return to a better way, then blessed her as his daughter and called her “a violet.” Exner looked at her glue-backed photographs. Sárkány rummaged among her belongings. Czakó lifted the lid on the red glazed pot that stood on the iron stove, in which he found the remains of her dinner, cold beef stew with cold tarhonya,
^*
which was being kept for next day.

The woman stamped her foot demanding quiet. She kept an eye on the men in case they made of with anything. Her eyes flickered this way and that.

Kanicky whispered something to Sárkány. He passed it on, and the word went round, and as it reached all eleven eardrums a general, stormy guf aw broke out. Everyone looked at the woman.

In the lamplight one could see that in fact she was much older that they had thought outside in the street. She wore a round, black beauty spot above her chin and a heavy, red-blonde wig. According to Kanicky her head under the wig was as bald as a billiard ball, and she had not a single tooth. That was what they were laughing at.

The mood had turned sour. No one spoke. Now they regretted having come in and were considering how they could get out. The woman looked at them uncertainly. In her eyes flickered an anxiety that she dared not express.

Kanicky slunk to the door and sidled out without taking his leave. After him went Sárkány, then Szilvás, then Exner, then Moldvai, then Czakó, then Dayka, then Valentini, Csiszér, and Orbán.

The whole lot fled headlong.

“Are you going as well?” asked the woman in surprise, looking at Esti, who was the last to make for the door.

“Yes,” and he put his hand on the door handle. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Esti opened the door, which his friends had slammed in his face as a joke. He listened.

In the stairwell the friends were conferring as they waited for the concierge. A dreadful shouting was heard, Sárkány's voice, then Kanicky's, bawling horrible things toward the room.

“What's that?” said the woman.

“Nothing,” said Esti, and shut the door so as not to hear it.

The woman looked at him.

“Have you changed your mind, then? Are you staying?”

“Yes,” Esti replied, “I might sit down for a minute,” and he continued to stand.

At that moment the gate banged shut as the concierge let them out. There was silence.

“They're mad,” said the woman in the sudden silence.

She shrugged, uncomprehendingly.

That movement made Esti feel sorry for her. His heart, his sick heart, filled with tears like a sponge.

A couple of moments later the din broke out again outside the window. The company were standing out there. Exner rattled his stick over the slats in the shutter, and familiar voices called good night to Esti, wishing him much good fortune and a good time.

He looked at the window like one who has fallen into a trap and would like to climb out.

They had abandoned him. He had been made the victim of a piece of fun, the ultimate ugly piece of fun. The noise had stopped. There was silence again, a decisive, great silence.

“They've gone,” said the woman, and locked the door.

Esti wanted to make amends for their bad manners. In his view, all “bad manners” were a fundamental flaw—there was no worse flaw than bad manners. He couldn't abide anyone being insulted to their face. Such a thing was so painful to him that he would stay with boring people for hours because he couldn't devise a decent way of tactfully shaking them off.

The woman pulled up a wicker chair toward him. She too sat down, facing him on the settee.

They'd been right: this girl was no longer young, she was worn out, and there was something idiotic in her smile. But she could be seen another way too. He began to work on his imagination, and then reality vanished. No, they hadn't been entirely right, they'd been exaggerating: her skin was faded, but it was white, lily white. And she
did
have teeth, nearly all of them. He liked her misty, green feline eyes, her round, hunger-pallid face, her narrow forehead.

“What's your name?”

“Paula,” answered the woman, in a soft, husky voice.

Words had an illogical effect on Esti. That name made him think of a wilting tea rose. He closed his eyes.

“What did you do before?”

“Hairdresser.”

Now Esti grasped desperately at her hands and her skirt.

•

Reveille had sounded in the barracks. A column prepared to move out of a courtyard. At the head was the captain, on a high-stepping horse, sword drawn, rapping out German words of command,
^*
at which that fearsome machine of human flesh and steel moved, wheeling out into Üllôi út.
^*
Young subalterns, redolent of eau de cologne, were at their posts. The morning sun gleamed on their swords, their black and yellow sword knots. King and Emperor Franz Josef I ruled, up there on his high throne in Vienna.

Esti strolled home along Üllôiút. The gate was open now, he didn't have to pay gate money. He rushed up to the fourth floor, to his room, where Sárkány had woken him at eleven o'clock the day before.

On his desk he found a postcard from the country, from his parents. That pleased him greatly.

They had sent him news of his uncle's splendid birthday celebration, at which every year the three related families gathered, the Csendeses, the Estis, and the Gáches. There had been
ludaskasa
,
cigán-ypecsenye
, vanilla and almond
kifli
.
^†
  Many, many greetings came from everyone, relations, friends, his sister's girlfriend too. His brother wrote that he had a strict schoolmaster, his sister, that she was going to dancing lessons, his mother, that she'd love to see him—he must come without fail at the end of the month for the grape harvest. His father just put his name in his severe, upright hand.

Esti read the messages several times one after the other, and was overcome. He was at home, in the vineyard, in the copse where the wild vines grew, among the green velvet chairs in the sitting room. He embraced his dear ones fondly, because after all he was still a good son and a loving brother. He thought, mother's got an amethyst bracelet just the color of her eyes. He thought, father's up there now, he's been working since four o'clock. He thought, I'm going to come to nothing, I'm wasting my time. He thought, I'm going to make good. He thought, I shall die next year, at the age of twenty-one. He thought, I'm never going to die. He thought of everything all at once.

The day which he had just lived through had been crowded and animated, but not much different from his other days. His agitation now froze into solid grief. He trembled and clutched the card to him for reassurance; he took refuge behind the peace of the countryside, where his roots were and his strength.

Remorse gnawed at him. He ran quickly over his Spanish irregular verbs. Then he undressed.

But he got up again. He wrote an answer to the card, so as to be able to post his letter as soon as he went down in the morning.

He wrote:

Dear parents, brother and sister, Thank you for your kind messages. I am always with you in my thoughts.

He also had to say something in reply to the invitation. Then he thought of Sárkány and Kanicky, whom he loved no less than his siblings. He went on:

I'm afraid I won't be able to get away just yet. New literature is in a ferment, I've got to stay here, watch for my opportunity.

He tried to think of a better excuse, but just added:

I'm working.

*
A suburb of Pest.

*
“
Independent Hungary
,” a fictitious paper.

*
A principal Pest street.

*
Strictly speaking, 1 korona = 100 krajcár. 100 fillér = 1 pengô´ or forint, but the terms were often interchanged in popular speech as the name of the unit of currency changed.

†
  “Having no ears,” but here a pun on
Független
, “independent.”

‡
The New York, in the Erzsébet Ring Road, was a principal haunt of writers and artists. Not only did it cater specially for the impecunious tastes of many, it also provided paper, pens and ink. A “dog's tongue” (
kutyanyelv
) was a slip of paper.