Kornel Esti (23 page)

“The mentally ill didn’t interest Zwetschke. He said, with his strangely prolonged, slow laugh, that they were completely mad, not even worth bothering with, only their brain sections after dissection were of interest. He invited me to tea. He introduced me to his wife, a blonde, Madonna-like woman who wore her hair drawn tightly back from her prominent forehead, shook hands with me in silence, offered me things in silence, and didn’t say a single word the whole time. We ate liver pâté and drank beer. Finally I discovered what had become of the president. He’d survived everybody, even the war and the revolution. Generations had perished around him; futurists, expressionists, simultanists, neoclassicists, and constructivists alike had fallen on the battlefield or been ruined, but he had gone on working. He had the stamina of the sleeper. When he was ending his ninetieth year, he undertook even more presidencies on the advice of his general practitioner. In his final years he was presiding in seventeen places, uninterruptedly from morning to night. He’d died the previous winter at the age of ninety-nine. Poor fellow, he’d failed to see his century.

“I took leave of my friend to make a pilgrimage to his grave, there to discharge a debt of gratitude and piety. Zwetschke embraced me with a laugh. He stuffed a wrapped-up book into my raincoat pocket and commented that I would possibly need it. I took a car to the cemetery, leaving the company of the mad for that of the dead. I found the president’s grave right away. He lay in a grim family crypt, decorated with his family arms. On a marble column there was a single sentence:
Sleep in peace
. That man, whom in life nobody had dared to address by the familiar second person singular, was now thus unilaterally ordered about by the impudent living. ‘Be so good as to sleep in peace,’ I whispered with filial reverence, and thought with feeling of his memory and the vanished years of my youth. I brushed a tear from my eye.

“Sadly, I’d come empty-handed, in a great hurry, and hadn’t brought him so much as a single flower. But perhaps flowers would have been out of place on that severe tomb. In annoyance I began to search my pockets. I came across the book which Zwetschke had given me for the journey and unwrapped it. It was Klopstock’s
Messiah
,
^*
that heroic poem in hexameters which—in the unanimous opinion of generations—is the dullest book in the world, so dull that nobody’s ever read it all, neither those who have praised it nor those who have belittled it. I’ve heard it said that Klopstock himself couldn’t read it, only write it. I opened the book and leafed pensively though it. What part should I read? It didn’t matter. Since I was aware that the departed had valued repose most highly when he’d been alive, and that it must have been his wish, as it is everyone’s, to sleep in peace when dead, I began to read the first canto in a monotone. The effect was astounding. A convolvulus on a neighboring tomb quivered and closed its petals as if night were descending upon it. A beetle plopped onto its back in the dust and stayed there, hypnotized. A butterfly which had been circling above the crypt fell from the air onto the stone, folded its wings, and went to sleep. I had the feeling that the hexameters were piercing the granite of the crypt, stealing their way into the mortal remains of the departed, and that his sleep in the grave—that eternal slumber—was all the deeper for them.

I awoke to feel somebody shaking me by both shoulders. It was my watchful taxi driver, whom I’d left outside at the cemetery gate. About halfway through the first canto, sleep had overcome me too. Quickly I rushed to the car. We made a frantic dash for the station. I only just had time to jump, at the very last minute, into the D-train, by then already moving, which raced with me—sparks and steam and much whistling—at sixty miles an hour toward Berlin.”

*
A dry red Hungarian wine, by law a blend of at least three grapes.

*
Attributed to Pope Boniface VIII.

*
Sometimes even the worthy Homer nods. Horace,
Ars Poetica 359

*
A flattish roll, marked on the top with a radial pattern of grooves.

*
Friederich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), regarded in his time as a great religious poet, began
The Messiah
in 1745, completing it in 1773. Much influenced by Virgil and Milton, his odes and lyric verse helped inaugurate the golden age of German literature.

XIII

In which he appears as a benefactor.
He takes the part of an afflicted widow, but is finally obliged to strike her
because he is so sorry for her that he can do nothing else.

AT ELEVEN IN THE MORNING HE WAS ABOUT TO TAKE A BATH.

He ran toward the bathroom just as he’d jumped out of bed, wearing short underpants, his chest and arms bare, no nightshirt, just pushing his feet into his green leather slippers.

In that old-fashioned apartment he had to pass through three rooms on the way.

In the third, which was a sort of reception room, stood a woman dressed from head to foot in black, heavily veiled.

At the sight of the total stranger Esti recoiled. He did not know how she could have gotten there.

His first thought was of his undressed condition. He pressed both hands to his hairy chest out of politeness.

The lady gave a squeal of alarm. She stepped back, bowing. She was appalled at meeting in this way the person whom she had called on so often and was now seeing in the flesh for the first time. She thought that this had ruined everything.

“I beg your pardon,” she apologized, embarrassed.

“What do you want?” asked Esti.

“Please,” she stammered, “if you don’t mind … perhaps I’d better come back later … I don’t know … I beg your pardon.”

“Please go into the hall.”

“This way?”

“That way,” said Esti brusquely, “in there.”

The woman floated off, like a black cloud that had been filling the room, and Esti went into the bathroom, where his lukewarm morning bath awaited him.

He rang the bell in a rage.

Along came the maid. She stopped at the bathroom door.

“Jolán,” he shouted in that direction, “Jolán! Have you all gone quite mad? You’re letting everybody in.”

“I didn’t let her in. It was Viktor.”

“Where did he put her?”

“In the hall.”

“But she was here, in here, I walked straight into her. It’s outrageous. What does she want?”

“She’s asking for you, sir. She’s been here several times.”

“What’s she after?”

“I don’t know. Something to do with literature, perhaps,” the maid added, naively.

“Something to do with literature,” repeated Esti. “Wants to sell her collected works. Scrounging. Some kind of swindler. Or a sneak thief. She could have taken her pick. Cleaned the place out. I’ve told you a thousand times, give beggars something and let them go and God bless. I only see people on Sundays from twelve to one. Never any other time. Understand? And then people who come have to be announced. I’m not in now. To anyone. I’ve died.”

“Yes, sir,” said the maid.

“What’s that?” asked Esti, somewhat startled at her accepting this so quickly and naturally. “So get rid of her. Tell her to come back Sunday. Between twelve and one.”

When she heard the water splashing as her master took his bath the maid went away. Her quiet steps rustled in the next room. Esti called after her:

“Jolán!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Tell her to wait.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be ready directly.”

He did not even soap himself but got out of the bath, dressed, and called into the anteroom.

The black-clad woman came in. Once more the reception room became full of her. The white glass chandelier, with all its bulbs burning on that overcast winter morning, dimmed because of her; she was like a black cloud.

Outside snow was falling softly.

“What can I do for you?” asked Esti.

The lady did not answer. She merely burst out weeping. She choked down her tears with a thin, whining, old woman’s whimper.

All that could be made out was “Help … help … help …”

So: assistance.

Meanwhile she lifted her veil to wipe her wet face. She had dark green eyes. Dark green eyes surrounded by frosted curls, which had not yet had time to become gray. Disordered, almost frenzied, these tresses burst from beneath the black rim of her hat.

“The widow,” thought Esti, “the widow brought down into the dust. Ghastly.”

The woman blew her nose loudly, paying no attention to the fact that this disfigured her, made her seem ridiculous. In her confusion she had brought her umbrella in with her, as if she dared not leave it outside. It was dripping a whole little pond onto the mirrorlike varnish of the floor.

Her shoes and clothes were soaking wet.

But where had she come from, from what quarter of the inhabited zone, what lousy prison, what suburban slum or wooden shack? And why to him, him of all people, without any introduction or letter of recommendation?

Because she knew him. Not personally. She knew his writing.

Esti realized that.

He could tell people that knew his writing.

The widow spoke. It was impossible for so good a man as he not to understand her.

“I’m not a good man,” Esti protested inwardly. “I’m a bad man. Well, not a bad man. Just like anybody else. The fact that I retain my old, pure feelings—only and exclusively for purposes of expression—is a trick of the trade, a piece of technical wizardry, like that of the anatomist who can keep a heart or a section of brain tissue that hasn’t had a feeling or a thought for ages in formaldehyde for years and years. Life has left me numb, like it does everybody who reaches a certain age.”

The caller alluded to the fact that she had read several of his books of verse.

“That’s different,” Esti continued his silent argument. “Let’s not confuse the issue. That’s literature. It’d be dreadful if everything I’ve written were true. I once wrote that I was a gas lamp, but I’d object strongly to being changed into one. And I mentioned somewhere how much I’d like to go to sea. When I’m in ten feet of water in a swimming pool, however, I never stop thinking that I’m out of my depth, and I feel definitely relieved when I reach the shallow end.”

And such a refined spirituality shone from those pages, a quite extraordinarily refined spirituality.

“Refined as Hell,” Esti continued to weave his thoughts, probably disturbed by the word “spirituality.” “If people knew how hard, how cruel, how crudely healthy you have to be to deal with feelings. Anybody that’s gentle has to be rough as well. Gentleness is just roughness in disguise, and roughness, on the other hand, is gentleness in disguise. Really, goodness and badness, mercy and cruelty have that kind of strange mutual relationship. They go together inseparably, you can’t even imagine the one without the other, it’d be like someone with excellent eyes being unable to tell blue from red, or the butterfly from the larva. They are opposites, two opposing poles, but they’re in constant natural interaction and change places according to circumstances, they take one another’s names, fluctuate, change shape, like alternating electric current. Well, let’s leave it. What feels ‘refined’ on paper, however, is only so because it’s precise, finely tooled, and I am behind it, I—curse it!—who write for hours, work my stubborn fingers every day, come rain come shine, whether I’m in the mood or not, hissing and grinding my teeth. I’m supposed to be refined? In that case, so’s the blacksmith. I’m more like a blacksmith, madam. I pound the anvil with a hammer, make shoes for my horse, fine steel shoes, so that it can gallop faster on the highway. Because take note, the grif n can’t fly, it only looks as if it does, it gallops on the ground, and how! So I’m a craftsman. Look at these bones, this wrist, this chest, which you saw naked just now as it emerged from the creative workshop. Tell me the truth, do I look like a nasty, finicky poet, or more like a blacksmith?”

Esti actually stood up, showed himself as he really was, went over to the caller, so that his rough proximity might influence her to come to the point.

Slowly she came round to it.

She unbosomed her complaints, brought them out one by one as if from an open drawer.

And that had a good effect on her. She stopped weeping.

Pain, in its abstract entirety, seen at a distance, is always more terrible than close up: attention to detail sobers us up, disarms us, at least demands our concentration, self-discipline, makes us produce order from chaos. At such times we find a wheel, a screw, a hinge, which does the trick. All is now a question of detail, an easy matter. Small things reassure us.

Esti was ready for anything. He expected death and famine, prison and plague, scarlet fever, meningitis, madness.

The particular, objective data followed:

The woman’s late husband had been a headmaster in a provincial town and had died the previous summer after a long battle with cancer at the age of fifty-two.

“Quite,” said Esti, as if approving of cancer.

They had moved from the country, the five of them, and were now in an apartment consisting of one room and a kitchen. She had four children, that was to say. Large family, small pension, as was nowadays the fashion. The smallest boy was twelve, and had been operated on for inflammation of the middle ear, and the wound was still open and discharging.

“Quite.”

His elder brother had gone to a factory and was learning to be an electrician, but was not being paid yet.

“Quite.”

The elder girl was a seamstress, but could not go out of doors because now, in the winter, she had no shoes.

“Quite.”

Esti was expecting consumption, and—speak of the Devil—the widow said the word:
consumption
. The smaller girl had consumption.

As for herself, the woman would like to find work, anything, because she could still work, she was thinking in particular of a tobacconist’s or at least a newspaper kiosk in which she could sit, summer and winter, from morning to night.

“Quite, quite.”

Esti was hearing a lot less than he had braced himself for.

After all, these were those modest—and uninteresting—complaints that life produces, for the most part with industrial, frightening uniformity. Mass production doesn’t permit anything original.

But perhaps it was just that lack of imagination that surprised him, this grayness and banality: the fact that such shoddy goods were set before him, and yet certain people to whom they were shared out tolerated them as destiny.

And he thought:

“Is that all?”

And he waited.

But there was no more. It was all gone.

Esti sat down. He turned to the woman:

“How can I help you?”

With a sum of money, which was not large—to him, really, nothing at all—but with which the whole unfortunate family, which deserved a better fate, could be put on its feet for the time being. He should not misunderstand all this. She and her hapless, sick children were not asking for this as alms or a gift, only as a loan which they would redeem by their hard work, or if necessary repay in kind, here or elsewhere, but in any case they would repay to the last fillér, the very last fillér, in precise monthly installments which could be fixed in advance.

This infuriated Esti. All these people offered deals, hinted at alluring profit on capital. They were all strictly based on capital. So reliable were they that the Bank of England seemed untrustworthy by comparison.

“Indeed,” he muttered, “the Bank of England,” and all but burst out laughing at the silly idea.

He liked idiotic things like that.

He was afraid that, faced by all that suffering, he was about to roar with laughter. He bit his lip so that physical pain should prevent anything so disgraceful, and began to speak rapidly and lightly, because he also knew that when we keep our lips and minds busy we find it easier to refrain from laughter.

“So that’s what you’d like, is it now? I understand about this money, temporarily, just to tide you over. Look, my dear lady. I myself have obligations of my own.” That was a phrase that he had heard years before from a banker from whom he had begged money no less desperately (though in more prepossessing circumstances), and as he vividly saw and heard that scene he went on even more rapidly. “I have relations and friends. My staff . Etc., etc. I too work. Like a slave. Quite enough. Every letter means a bit of bread.” “You mean cake,” whispered something inside him. “Cake, cake, you liar.”

The widow did not reply. She looked calmly into his eyes.

Esti could still hear the whispering voice. He jumped up. Hurried out into the next room.

From there he returned a little more slowly. He was holding his left fist clenched. He put down on the table a bank note. He did not look at it.

The widow, however, although she did not mean to, glanced at it at once, and amazement lit her face; it was distinctly more than she had asked for, he had rounded the amount up.

The frost which had held her almost rigid when she came in had melted, fallen away, like the melted snow on the floor. She did not know whether she could accept it. Of course, of course, just put it away.

She clutched the money in her hand. She expressed her gratitude. Expressed it with the greatest word, than which there is none greater.