Kornel Esti (5 page)

In fact, he had been hearing this whispering—if such it may be called—this sotto voce murmuring ever since entering the compartment. He had, however, paid no attention to it. After a while he had become accustomed to it, as to the droning of a fly in a room on a summer afternoon.

The girl clung to her mother’s arm and whispered into her ear. Sometimes she made her hand into a funnel and whispered like that. What she whispered couldn’t be heard. Her mother sometimes paid attention to it, sometimes not. She would nod or shake her head in denial. When the whisper—or rather rustling sound—rose to a mutter or a buzz, she would quiet it, try mechanically, with half-words, to check it: “Hush, dear.” “Yes, dear.” “No, no, dear.” But that was all.

Esti didn’t understand the situation. This business made him a little anxious. The girl’s disquiet unsettled him. As did—perhaps even more so—her mother’s calm. Now, therefore, he stopped peeping from behind his book in search of further data on the dear unknown acquaintance, and didn’t watch, but listened.

It was a feverish, hasty rustling, a confused flow of words, inarticulate, incomprehensible, and as gabbled as if it were being read from a book, badly.

Until then he had, so to speak, paid no attention to the girl, as her mother had fully absorbed his interest. On entering the compartment, he had seen that she was a teenager, at the most fifteen. He had also seen that she wasn’t pretty. That was probably the reason why he had instinctively avoided looking at her.

Now he squinted at her round the edge of Edmondo de Amicis.

She was a slip of a girl, insignificant, quite insipid. Skinny legs, a thin, piping voice. She was wearing a white, spotted cambric dress, an expensive Swiss brooch, and new, showy, patent leather shoes. In her lusterless, pale blonde hair gleamed a huge bow of strawberry-colored satin ribbon, which made her pale face seem even paler. She wore a ribbon of the same material at her neck, very broad, to conceal her scrawniness.

She was dressed as if she were being taken not on this summer journey but to a ball, a glittering winter ball, a quite improbable children’s ball, quite unsuitable for her.

Her small head, flat chest, lean shoulders, the two “saltcellars” that showed above the scooped neckline of her dress, her hands, her ears, her everything at first aroused pity, but then straightaway displeasure. This creature wasn’t only graceless; she was repulsive, definitely loathsome.

Poor thing, thought Esti. He couldn’t even bear to look at her for long. He looked out the window.

It was slowly getting dark. The girl was vanishing in the gloom, blending into her mother. All that could be heard was her whisper, her unending, irritating whisper, which in the darkness became more agitated, more rapid. She buried herself in her mother’s ear and whispered. It was beyond understanding that she wasn’t tired out after all those hours and that her mother wasn’t tired of listening to her. Why did she lisp all the time? Why wasn’t she hoarse by now, why didn’t she have to stop? Esti shrugged. It was all quite beyond him.

The train had long ago left Gyékényes
^*
and was heading at full speed into the starless summer night. Overhead on the ceiling the gas lamps were lit. Esti escaped into his book.

He made every effort to concentrate on the text. He had scarcely read four or five pages, however, when he noticed something that thoroughly annoyed him.

He noticed that the girl kept pointing at him. She was clinging to her mother’s arm and whispering, as ever, and pointing at him. That was too much, really too much.

At this, now, he became indignant. But he was so overcome by anxiety that his indignation cooled. He tried to think calmly. So the pointing was directed at him. But in that case the one-sided dialogue had also been about him from the start, and he had become the focus of an interest of which he knew neither the origin nor the purpose.

What the devil did this girl want of him? He had to suppose that she was making fun of him for some reason. Perhaps because of his clothes? He had dressed in his best for the journey, his dark blue suit, new that spring. He was distinctively attired. He wore a high collar, reaching to his chin, and a narrow, white, piqué tie, which made him resemble both an international tenor and a provincial clerk, but he was perfectly satisfied with it and thought that nothing could express more appropriately his bohemian nature, his whimsical poetic soul that sighed for the infinite. So perhaps that chit of a girl now found him amusing, or did she think he was ugly? But he knew that wasn’t it. He was a slight, slender boy. His brown hair, parted on the side, fell abundantly over his forehead. His gray eyes burned with a pained longing, a hesitant curiosity, at that time even much more clearly and fierily than later, when disappointment and doubt about everything had clouded the gleam of those eyes to as leaden and drunken-murky a hue as if he were in a state of permanent intoxication.

He didn’t beat about the bush for long. He waited for the girl to point at him again, and when her finger was next waving in front of her nose he dropped his book into his lap and turned toward her, requiring an explanation.

The girl, like one caught in the act, was taken aback. Her slender finger seemed frozen into ice. It hung in the air like that. Slowly she lowered it.

Yet even then her mother spoke not a word. She took the girl’s hand—the erring little hand, the one that had been pointing—put it between her two hands, enclosed it, and began with gentle, infinite gentleness and patience to pat it, as if she were playing “bunnies” with it. “This man went rabbiting … this man caught it …”

Something like an armistice ensued. The whispering died away, or became so quiet as to be almost inaudible. Midnight approached. The woman opened her handbag. She took out a knife, a golden knife with a sharp, pointed, slender blade. Next she took out something wrapped in cotton wool. From the cotton-wool wrapping there emerged a lovely, butter-yellow Calville apple.
^*
Dexterously and carefully she peeled it, cut it into segments, picked them up on the point of the knife, and raised them one by one to the girl’s mouth.

She ate. Not nicely. She chomped.

As she caught the segments between her slightly swollen lips a white, sticky froth began to form as on the beaks of swallow chicks, like a scum or foam setting under internal warmth. She opened her beak clownishly for every morsel. In so doing she exposed her anemic gums and her few rotten little teeth, which shone black inside her mouth. “D’you want some more, dear?” her mother asked from time to time. The girl nodded.

In this way she ate almost the entire apple. Only the last segment remained.

Suddenly she leapt to her feet and rushed into the corridor. Her mother tore after her in alarm.

Now what was happening? What was wrong with the apple and the mother? What was the matter with this girl? Esti too jumped up. He looked around the empty compartment.

He was left alone. At last he was alone. He breathed deeply, like one released from a spell. It was only then that he dared really to admit that he had been afraid. He understood his traveling companions less and less. Who were they? What were they? Whoever was that ignorant girl who whispered and pointed all the time, then rushed out, with her mother after her like a gendarme? What scene was taking place out there, and what scene had ended in the compartment just now—when at last the apple was being peacefully eaten in the silence which had suddenly fallen—the dénouement of which couldn’t be so much as guessed? Whoever was this mother who endured simply anything from her daughter, indulged her in everything, never ever called her to order, was indeed so soft—or so foolish—as to respond to her naughtiness with doting? It was now rather her that he blamed, not the girl. He began to be annoyed with that extraordinary, warm-hearted woman, whom he had become so fond of. She should be firmer, stricter. Or couldn’t she handle her daughter? Of course, that was the trouble. She’d spoiled her, brought her up badly.

He could easily have found out their names. He would only have had to look up at the leather-held labels that dangled above his head. But that he regarded as improper. And in any case, what good would it have done him to read their names? His curiosity went deeper; he wanted to penetrate not names—for what does anyone’s name matter?—but people, their lives, these two lives which were clearly highly enigmatic.

But enigmatic or not, he could stay there no longer. He couldn’t spend a whole long night under the same roof. He had to decamp. Fate had opened an unexpected way of escape to him so that he could leave without making a fuss, take his things to another compartment, anywhere. They still hadn’t come back. Now he thought with a sinking feeling that they might come back at any moment. He hurried to look around.

There wasn’t a soul in the narrow, dimly lit corridor. The mother wasn’t there, nor the girl. Where could they have disappeared to? The question made him anxious. He searched everywhere. He even looked in both toilets. They were empty. They were nowhere. Not a sign of them.

Had they gone into another carriage? Unlikely. The communicating doors to the next carriage were closed. So had they jumped from the speeding train, and were they now lying, expiring, their skulls smashed and slowly oozing, on the stones of the track bed, or were they continuing their journey entangled in the wheels and accompanying him as mutilated corpses? That would be dreadful.

He opened every compartment in the carriage like a secret policeman, partly to shed light on the whereabouts of mother and daughter, and partly to find himself another seat for the night.

In most of the compartments it was dark. The passengers were snoring behind lowered curtains and tightly shut doors. The familiar idyll of the bedroom greeted him: sleeping children and half-oranges, wagons circled and walled for defense with suitcases, morose men in their shirtsleeves, milk gurgling in green water bottles and women, breathing heavily, heads bent over their chubby infants—cheese rinds, flowers, and shoehorns scattered in nightmare disorder on the floor as if after a savage attack, smelly feet in sweaty stockings on the seats, emitting storm clouds of fumes—and meanwhile simply dozing on the bombast of the patriotic leading articles in yesterday’s paper, spread out as a covering. Everywhere there had formed that hastily contrived, disgustingly family-like traveling companionship, that fortuitously forged train-fellowship, recruited of necessity from total strangers who greet another total stranger, arriving late and unexpectedly, not much more warmly than they would a masked robber equipped with chloroform.

Esti didn’t impose on anyone. Once he was convinced that mother and daughter really were not in a particular compartment and that there was no room for him, he apologized to everyone and discreetly withdrew.

He remained standing in the corridor. He enjoyed watching the sparks from the engine. At every moment it flung a shower into the sky. Myriads and myriads of sparks soared in great arcs, then were extinguished in a ditch like swiftly fading falling stars. One smut, however, went into his eye. He went back into his compartment.

This was still deserted, though with the memories of two lives in the air. He sat down in his old place. Now he himself took it for certain that he was trapped there. This bothered him, and yet it didn’t.

Even if he found a seat elsewhere—which he might, the train wasn’t full, he’d only have to speak to the guard—it was very doubtful that he’d move into another compartment and that his curiously prickly conscience would be able to stand the thought that by his furtive, panicky escape he might offend his traveling companions, those two people whom he had seen for the first and perhaps the last time in his life. It was probable, highly probable, that even then he would change his mind and turn back at the last moment and decide to stay there all the same, as he had now done.

The affair interested him, that was for sure. However much he dreaded the situation, he was curious about how it would develop. He wanted to see more clearly whom he’d been traveling with until then, he would have liked to clear up a thing or two.

His conduct couldn’t be explained by just that. Nor by the fact that he was a “well-brought-up boy.” Nor because timidity or a lively imagination made him indecisive—often when he avoided danger those were the qualities that urged him into it. Nor that he was, as it were, an excessively kindly soul, in the everyday sense of the word. There was a lot of cruelty in him, many bloodthirsty, evil instincts. He alone knew what he had done, as a small boy, to hapless flies and frogs in the secret torture chamber that he had set up in the laundry room. There he and his younger brother had dissected frogs and their grandmother’s cats with a kitchen knife, cracked their skulls, extracted their eyes, conducted real vivisection on a purely “scientific, experimental basis,” and their grandmother—that loud-voiced, addlepated, shortsighted woman—had been very cross that whatever she did, her cats kept disappearing, ten or twenty a year. If need be he could certainly have committed murder, like anyone else. But he was more afraid of hurting someone than of killing them.

He was always horrified that he might be harsh, merciless, and tactless toward anyone—a human being like himself, that is: frail, craving happiness, and finally in any case doomed to perish wretchedly—horrified of humiliating them in their own eyes, of upsetting them with even one innuendo, a single thought, and often—at least, so he imagined—he would rather have died than entertain the belief that he was someone superior in this world and that the person in question might blushingly repeat as he slunk away, “It seems I’ve been a burden to him … it seems he’s tired … it seems he looks down on me …”