Kornel Esti (3 page)

We agreed to meet more often in future, in the Torpedo or the Vitriol. If the worst came to the worst, on the telephone.

He walked me to the door.

“Oh,” in the corridor he slapped his forehead. “Something I forgot. What about the style?”

“We’ll be writing together.”

“But our styles are poles apart. You’ve recently been favoring calm, simplicity, classical images. Not much decoration, not many words. My style, on the other hand, is still restless, untidy, congested, ornate, racy. I’m an incurable romantic. Lots of epithets, lots of images. I won’t let you cut that out.”

“Tell you what,” I reassured him. “Let’s meet in the middle. I’ll take down what you say in shorthand, then erase some of it.”

“In what proportion?”

“Five out of ten of your images will stay.”

“And fifty out of a hundred of my epithets,” added Kornél. “That’ll do.”

He slapped my hand. It was a deal. He leaned on his elbows over the banister as I went down the spiral stairs.

No sooner had I reached the bottom than I thought of something.

“Kornél!” I called up, “Who’s going to put his name to our book?”

“Doesn’t matter!” he called down. “Perhaps you’d better. You put your name to it. And my name can be the title. The title’s in bigger letters.”

He kept his word marvelously. For a year we met once or twice a month, and he always brought some new experience or novel-chapter from his life. In between, he’d just go away for a few days. I put his tales on paper partly from my shorthand notes, partly from memory, and put them in the order he wanted. That’s how this book came to be written.

II

In which, on September 1, 1891, he goes to the Red Ox and there becomes acquainted with human society

IT WAS THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER, EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND
ninety-one.

At seven in the morning, in the modest apartment overlooking the courtyard, his mother opened the door to the longish room where her three children slept—he, his younger brother, and his sister.

She tiptoed to the mosquito-netted bed, unfastened the rod that held the bracken-festooned net, and gently touched the forehead of her eldest, six-year-old son to wake him. Today was to be his first day at school.

He opened his eyes immediately. His mother’s blue eyes were sparkling right above him. She smiled.

He was a skinny, anemic little boy, with transparent ears. He was still feeling the effects of his last serious illness, pleurisy, which had kept him in bed for several months that year. His heart now beat on the right, and they had been talking about surgically draining the fluid from his lungs when suddenly he had improved. He’d recovered, but then he’d begun to “have nerves.” All sorts of weird ideas plagued him. He was afraid of old women in headscarves, of policemen with their plumes. He was afraid—no telling why—that his father was going to shoot himself, and he’d suddenly cover his ears with both hands so as not to hear the report of the pistol. He was afraid of not getting enough air and walked from room to room, hugging various pieces of furniture so that his chest would expand with the effort and he wouldn’t suffocate. He was afraid of coffin makers and death. More than once, when the lamp was lit, he’d gathered his belongings around him and made arrangements for how he was to be buried and to whom each toy was to be given, should he happen to die in the night. The doctor didn’t consider his condition serious. Nevertheless his parents had planned to have him taught privately for the first year instead of sending him to school, but at the last moment they’d changed their minds.

Now he sat there on the edge of his bed, eyes full of sleep, yawning and scratching himself.

He’d known that this day would come sooner or later. But he hadn’t believed that it would come so quickly.

He would have liked to defer it somehow.

Reluctantly he pulled up his long black socks, which hung loosely on his legs. He stood for a long time at the washstand, dipping his hands and taking them out again and again, watching the rings of light that shimmered on the surface of the water.

His mother washed him herself and put him in a clean shirt. She’d got his best clothes ready, a dark blue linen shirt trimmed with white which she’d made from an old blouse of hers, set off with feminine heart-shaped mother-of-pearl buttons. She pulled a wet brush through his hair.

She put some coffee in front of him, and an
S
-shaped kifli. He didn’t want any coffee that day. Said he wasn’t hungry.

At that his mother pressed into his hand his ABC book, his slate and slate-pencil, and took him to the school.

The autumn sun was by then shining in its full splendor over the Alföld town. Peasant carts were jolting along in clouds of yellow dust. A train whistled on the bridge. In the market square sacks of red paprika and white dried beans were on sale.

He trotted irritably along at his mother’s side. He felt awkward, silly, and above all girlish in his “best” clothes—which he knew were the worst, both cheap and old. He’d have liked to tear them up and trample them into the ground. But he knew that his father was a poor teacher at the secondary school and couldn’t really afford anything else. He took revenge by not saying a single word the whole way.

Very soon they reached the Red Ox.

The Red Ox was the elementary school. This two-story palace of public education took its quite lamentable name from the fact that at one time a rickety, tumbledown inn had stood on the site, with a red ox daubed on its sign. The building had burned down a generation ago, but the drunkards of that wine-swilling town still liked to recall the nights of dissipation spent there, and so the name of the inn had been unkindly transferred to the school and in that way was passed down from father to son.

When they reached the dim entrance hall of the school he turned pale and had an attack of “breathing difficulty.” As was his custom, he leaned on a pillar and hugged it to him with all his strength. His mother bent over him and asked what was the matter. He didn’t answer. Just held her hand tighter and tighter.

First grade was upstairs. His mother gave him a kiss outside a brown double door and made to leave. But he wouldn’t let go of her hand.

“I’m frightened,” he whispered.

“What’re you frightened of?”

“I’m frightened,” he repeated.

“Don’t be frightened, darling. Look, the others are here as well. Everybody’s here. Can’t you hear how happy they are? Go and see your little friends.”

“Stay,” he pleaded, and clung to his mother’s skirt.

Waving good-bye to her son with the hand that he had released, she slipped away from him and walked slowly down the corridor. At the corner she took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. She even looked back once to encourage him with her smile. But then she suddenly vanished.

The little boy stood for a while rooted to the spot and waited, waited, staring after his mother. He hoped that perhaps she’d come back and that the whole thing was a joke. But it was
not
a joke.

When he realized that, and also realized that he was alone, more alone than he’d ever been on this earth before, a spasm seized his entire body, something akin to colic. He tried to run away. He slunk along the wall as far as the stairs, where that skirt had just then mysteriously vanished into nothing. There a staircase yawned, completely unfamiliar and cheerless, with a cavernous, gray, echoing vault. To go down there would have called for death-defying courage. With the instinct of the damned, he thought it wiser to creep back instead to where he had lost her, back to the door of the classroom. At least he was a little bit used to that.

He peered in through the gap in the half-open door.

He could see children, more children than he’d ever before seen in one place. It was a crowd, a crowd of completely unknown little people like himself.

So he wasn’t alone. But if it had previously plunged him into despair that he was so alone in the world, now an even more alarming despair seized him, that he was so very much not alone in the world, that all those other people were alive as well. That was perhaps even more terrifying.

Everyone was chattering at the same time. What they were saying he couldn’t make out. The noise was a babble, fearsomely swelling, roaring like a thunderstorm.

While he was thus musing, someone—a grown-up whom he didn’t know—picked him up and put him in the classroom. There he stood, his little cap crooked on his head.

He expected some miracle to happen. He expected all those children to jump up and shout his name. Expected them to greet him, waving their handkerchiefs. Only the miracle didn’t happen. No one took any notice of him.

He took his cap off , greeting them politely. They didn’t return the greeting.

It was a room, not like other rooms where there were sofas and curtains, but frigid, official, bare. Daylight poured in through three large curtainless windows. A table stood guard on the dais. Behind that a blackboard, yellow sponge, white chalk. In front of it the abacus stood erect and haughty, like a mad thing. All around on the whitewashed walls were colored pictures of animals, a lion, a fox, and sheets of cardboard on which things could be read:
man, animal, toy, work
. In his agitation he read them all. He had been able to read from the age of four.

His classmates were now all sitting down. He too would have liked to sit somewhere.

The front benches, almost inevitably, were occupied by the children of the “gentry”—the sons of landowners, town councillors. These good-humored, fair-haired, chubby-cheeked little boys were wearing sailor suits, starched collars, silk ties. Their faces were like roses dipped in milk. They surrounded the dais politely but selfconsciously, as the government supporting a Party edict surrounds the prime minister’s velvet chair. He likewise considered himself a “gentry” child. He therefore forced onto his lips a stupid smile and approached them to take his seat on the front row. Only almost every seat there was already taken. They didn’t exactly hurry to make room for him. They muttered among themselves like close friends, and looked with cold civility and some surprise at this timid latecomer. Some even smiled, enjoying his discomfiture.

Ashamed and offended, he made his way toward the rear. If he couldn’t be first on the front bench—he thought—at least he would be last on the last. There at the back of the class the peasant children had taken their places, muscular, powerful lads, some barefoot, some in boots. They had unpacked their food from their red handkerchiefs. They were eating black bread and fat bacon with jackknives, and watermelon. He looked here and there. The stale smell that rose from their boots and clothes turned his stomach. But he would gladly have sat among them. He begged with his eyes to be accepted by them at least. He watched for a word to be spoken, a sign given. But these boys were otherwise engaged. They were throwing paper pellets and balls of paper filled with rinds of bacon and melon, and one such paper ball hit him on the forehead. The shock was greater than the damage, but he staggered against the wall. At that everyone laughed out loud, lower and upper houses alike, without distinction of party.

With rage and irritation in his heart he withdrew from there too. He didn’t know where to go, where he belonged. And so he went and stood alone by the stove. He felt ashamed at being so cowardly and gauche. From the stove he assessed the whole illiterate company with infinite disdain. If they only knew what he knew! He knew, for example, that the average temperature of a human was 98 degrees, and that anyone that had a temperature of 104 degrees was all but past saving. He knew that there was ordinary writing and shorthand. He knew that quinine was bitter and ipecacuanha sweet. He also knew that just then it was evening in America. But they didn’t know that he knew all that.

The little bell of the Red Ox tinkled melodiously in the little wooden tower on the roof, indicating that it was eight o’clock and lessons were about to start. While the bell was ringing, on and on, heartbreakingly, like the bell that mourns the dead, he took leave of everything that was dear, the rooms at home, the garden, and all his individual toys too, the soap bubbles and the balloons. Close to fainting, he clung to the cold tinplate stove.

Silence fell. The teacher had appeared in the doorway, a stout man with cropped dark gray hair and a very ample light gray suit. He took great strides, like an elephant. He rolled onto the dais.

The teacher asked the children one by one if they had slates and pencils, and then spoke of all the fine, noble, useful things that they were going to learn there. But then he suddenly stopped speaking. He had caught sight of the boy lurking beside the stove.

“Now then, what’re you doing there?” he asked, turning his great face in his direction. “Who put you there? Come over here.”

The little boy hurried, almost ran, to the dais. In terror, almost beside himself, he gabbled:

“Please let me go home.”

“Why?” inquired the teacher.

“I don’t want to come to school anymore.”

The class roared with laughter.

“Silence!” said the teacher. “Why don’t you want to come to school?”

“Because nobody likes me here.”

“Has anybody hurt you?”

“No.”

“Then why’re you talking such nonsense? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, you little sissy? Just understand, you’re the same as everyone else here. No exceptions here, everybody’s equal. Understand?”

The class nodded in approval.

The teacher looked again at the frightened little boy. This time he saw that his face was quite green.

“Are you feeling ill?” he asked, in a kinder tone.

“No.”

“Got a pain anywhere?”

“No.”

“All right,” he said, “go back to your place. Where is your place?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?” The teacher was puzzled. “ Well, sit down somewhere.”

The little boy turned toward the class. Faces grinned at him, lots and lots of little faces, which blended into a single huge, frightening idol-face. He stumbled unsteadily this way and that. Once more he had to pass the first bench, where there was no room for him. He found a tiny place somewhere in the middle, on the very end of a bench. He could only get one leg onto the seat, the other dangled in space. Anyway, it was better to sit there away from the eyes, to vanish into the crowd.

“Children,” said the teacher, “take your slates and pencils. We’ll do some writing. We’ll write the letter
i
.”

Slates rattled. He too tried to place his slate on the desk but the surly, swarthy boy at his side pushed it off in an unfriendly fashion. The boy didn’t let him write.

At that he burst loudly and bitterly into tears.

“What’s going on?” asked the teacher.

“He’s crying,” reported the surly, swarthy boy.

“Who is?”