Kornel Esti (4 page)

III

In which, at night on a train, shortly after leaving school in 1903, a girl kisses him on the lips for the first time

WHEN, IN 1903, KORNÉL ESTI WAS DECLARED PRAECLARE
maturus
in his school leaving examination, his father laid before him a choice: either he would buy him that splendid bicycle for which he had long yearned, or he would give him the money—a hundred and twenty koronas—and with that he could travel wherever his fancy took him.

He decided on the latter. Though not without a little hesitation and soul-searching.

It was hard to be parted from his mother’s skirts. He had grown up in Sárszeg,
^*
among books and bottles of medicine. In the evening, before going to bed, he had always had to convince himself that his mother, father, brother and sister were in bed, in the usual place, and only then could he go to sleep to the tick-tock of the wall-clock. If, however, any of them had gone to visit in the country and happened not to be spending the night at home, he would rather stay awake and wait for their return, which would once more tip everything back into the old, happy balance. The family was for him the refuge from everything that he feared. It surrounded him like a dovecote, stuff y, dimly lit, tacky with rubbish.

On the other hand, he also longed to get away. He had never yet left that Alföld nest where there was neither river nor hills, the streets and the people were all alike, and days and years brought little change. Here were stifling, dusty afternoons and long, dark evenings. Exercise books and calendars filled the windows of the bookshops. His mind was waking, his tastes developing, but second-rate plays were put on in the theater and for want of better entertainment he watched these from a student seat in the rafters. He would have liked to see the world. Most of all, he would have loved to see the sea. He had imagined it while still in primary school, when he had for the first time looked at that smooth, endless blueness on the wall map. So, with an heroic decision, he proposed that come what may he would go to Italy,
^*
and alone.

One dull, hectic day in July he set off. The whole household was up and about at three in the morning. His worn and battered traveling basket had been brought down from the attic and a futile attempt made at mending its lock. He said good-bye with a smile, but his heart sank. He didn’t believe that he would ever return. Everyone went with him to catch the slow train for Budapest. They waved their handkerchiefs, while his mother turned away in tears.

After five hours’ rattling he reached Budapest without mishap. He immediately informed his parents of that fact by postcard. He took a room in a third-rate hotel near the station. There he spent only a single night.

That evening he used to get to know Budapest. Happy, electrified, he set out into the city,
this modern Babylon
, as he described it in another postcard to his parents. His self-esteem rose because he was going about all by himself. In the National Museum he looked at the antiquities, at the balcony from which Petőfi had spoken, at the stufffed animals. Later he got lost on Andrássy út. A policeman kindly put him on the right road. Map of Budapest in hand, he found the Danube and Gellérthegy. The Danube was big, Gellérthegy high. Both were splendid. Budapest was altogether splendid.

What interested him most of all were the people of Budapest. Everybody going along the street, sitting in a coffeehouse or on a tram, shopping in the shops, was a “Budapest person.” He could tell at a glance that they were very different from the people of Sárszeg, and as like one another in clothes, attitudes, and manners as members of a single family. In his eyes, therefore, a High Court judge, a horse-trader, the wife of a landowner, and a nursemaid were “Budapest people.” This statement—from a higher point of view—is undeniable.

The “Budapest person” was in a hurry and took no notice of him. He found that out immediately upon arrival. The porter who carried his luggage up to the third floor of the hotel likewise belonged to the people of Budapest. He didn’t say a single word to him, expect it though he might, but ill-humoredly deposited his basket on a trestle, muttered something, and simply left. Kornél found this behavior hard to bear, but it filled him with great admiration. He wrote to his parents—a third postcard—that
the people here aren’t coarse, in
deed, in a certain respect they’re more refined, more attentive than people in
Sárszeg
. Sometimes, however, they did seem cold, even heartless. No one asked him what at home everyone from the
fôispán
^*
down would certainly have done: “Well, Kornél, isn’t Budapest splendid?” “Isn’t the Danube big?” “Isn’t Gellérthegy high?” And then, neither did they look him in the face, so open, so yearning for affection, which at first—for the first few hours—he raised to everyone with such boundless confidence that some involuntarily smiled and laughed together behind his back at the sight of such naïveté and youth until—hours later—he learned that one should keep one’s face straight if one didn’t want to seem ridiculous. At this point the broad, convivial world ceased to be—that sugary toy world, that doll’s dinner party—which he had been so accustomed to in the provinces. Things were quite different from then on: both more and less.

Confused by these novelties, brought low in all situations and repeatedly cut to the quick, he sauntered hither and thither and, like someone flayed, things stuck to his flesh; he painfully tore off the healing scabs and became unhealthily receptive to every impression, his every sense became sharpened and refined, and a word that struck his ear, the smell of mash from a brewery, or a glass of unfamiliar shape—a “Budapest glass”—became, in the dingy back room of his hotel, a symbol, an unforgettable memory, and when at length, dazed from the comings and goings of the day, he took refuge in bed—the “Budapest bed,” among the “Budapest pillows”—there welled up in his heart a nostalgia for the old things, the old people, and in despair he yearned for home. Nor did sleep come to his eyes. He propped himself up on the pillows in his dark room and pondered.

Next afternoon he boarded the express for Fiume.
^*
He quickly found a seat. There were not many traveling. In the second-class compartment where he first opened the door there were only two: a woman and her daughter. He greeted them. The woman received that with a wordless nod, good-natured but reserved, as if to inform him that she occupied a position of friendly neutrality. He crammed his basket onto the luggage rack and settled down by the window. The lady sat across from him, her daughter beside her, obliquely opposite him.

Esti fanned himself. An African temperature prevailed. The sweltering carriages, which had been baking all day in the blazing sun, were now oozing their poison, fuming and dusty, and the seats exuded the stench of some animal hide. The dark patches in the clouds of steam swirled drunkenly before his eyes in that yellow waxwork light.

He spared his traveling companions scarcely a glance. He didn’t even wish to know who they were. Schooled by bitter lessons, he feigned indifference. He could by then dissimulate better than those who had devoted their whole lives to it. He opened his book, Edmondo de Amicis’
Il Cuore
.
^*
It amused him that even with his patchy knowledge of Italian he could understand it perfectly and read it almost fluently on the basis of his Latin.

The train ran out of the glass cage of the station. The woman made the sign of the cross. That surprised him. It wasn’t customary in his family. But it made an impression on him. What beautiful, womanly humility. “We are all in the hand of God.” Indeed, traveling impairs our life expectancy. It isn’t a deadly danger, only about as bad as a quinsy from which can develop—perhaps—blood poisoning or heart failure. That journey, furthermore, was no trifling matter. It lasted twelve hours without a break: part of the afternoon, then the whole of the night until eight the next morning. When they arrived the sun would be shining again—who knew what might happen during that time?

He delighted in that uncertainty. He was also pleased that no other passenger had come into their compartment, so that he would probably have a comfortable journey all the way with only that woman and her daughter, who, if not actually friendly, were not hostile.

They rattled through the marshaling yards. Now they were out of Budapest, among the fields. The sticky heat had cooled, been diluted. There was even a slight breeze. He felt that he had become free, had left behind him all sorts of things, that all sorts of things no longer restricted him as they had previously, and that the young man who was sitting there with the Italian book in his hand was really him and not him, could be anyone he wished, because with the constant change of place he was entering an infinite variation of possible situations, a kind of spiritual masked ball.

The woman adjusted her ash-blonde hair, fiddled with the chignon at the back and her tortoiseshell hairpins. She had a calm face and an uncomplicated, clear forehead. Esti now discovered for the first time what intellectually fertile soil a railway compartment is. Here the lives of strangers appear before us in, as it were, cross section—suddenly and condensed—as in a novel opened haphazardly in the middle. Our curiosity, which otherwise we conceal by false modesty, can be satisfied under the constraint of our being enclosed together in a moving room, and we can peep into those lives and speculate on what the beginning of the novel must have been and how it will end. Esti had already, in his school literary circle, produced some decent work as both poet and novelist. Here too he could practice that craft. However gauche he was otherwise, he could cloak his intentions and give himself over completely to creative inquisitiveness, his eyes sliding more and more frequently from the guileless sentences of
Il Cuore
to the woman.

She must have been thirty-nine or forty, the same age as his mother. Straightaway, in the first moment, he felt an extraordinary warmth toward her. She had ivy-green eyes. She, however, looked at neither Esti nor her daughter, but stared into space—tired, sad, and perhaps even a little disinterested. She was looking into herself. She wouldn’t allow anyone else to look there.

She evinced a languid gentleness and trustfulness, like a dove. She wasn’t fat, not at all, but she was shapely, like a dove. The only jewelry on her hand was a gold wedding ring. That hand—the white hand of a mother—rested for the most part in her lap, in the pleasant, mystical softness of a mother’s lap.

She had with her two pigskin cases covered in coffee-brown canvas, decorated all over with the hummingbird brilliance of stickers from foreign hotels. Leather-framed name cards hung from the handles, swinging with the motion of the train. Beside her on the seat lay an elegant shagreen handbag.

Poise and taste were evident in her every movement. For that matter, she scarcely did move. That great calm was a trifle odd. She mused and did nothing. Sometimes Esti thought that at some point—when she sneezed or blew her nose—he would suddenly lose interest in her. But he was mistaken. As time went by, every such little tiny surprise merely reinforced his swift feeling of warmth toward her. Even inactivity didn’t make her boring. Everything that she did, or didn’t do, was good, beautiful, pleasing, and it was good, beautiful, or pleasing the way she did it, or didn’t do it.

As profound an affection for her awoke in him as if he were seeing his own mother. It did him good to look at that woman, to know that she was in the world and so close to him.

Meanwhile, time slipped by in such a way that he didn’t notice it.

Naturally, he gathered these observations slowly, bit by bit, something every minute, because he couldn’t be indiscreet, could only watch her for short periods, as if by chance, and then fly back with the precious, stolen pollen, to make it into honey in the buzzing beehive of his imagination.

Once, just as he was withdrawing again to hide behind the cover of
Il Cuore
, frowning and reading most intently, it struck him that the girl was whispering something to her mother.