Kornel Esti (6 page)

This moral position, which Esti developed in greater detail in his later work, even then was germinating in his youthful heart. He knew that there is little that we can do for each other, that for the sake of being happy ourselves we are forced to injure others, sometimes even fatally, and that in great affairs pitilessness is almost inevitable, but for that very reason he held the conviction that our humanity, our apostleship can only be revealed—honestly and sincerely—in little things, that attentiveness, tact, and mutual consideration based on forgiveness are the greatest things on this earth.

Following this train of thought he had come to the conclusion, bleak, even pagan though it seemed, that since we can’t be really good we should at least be polite. This politeness of his, however, was no mere ceremoniousness, not a thing of compliments and idle chatter. It often consisted of nothing more than subtly slipping in at a crucial moment a word which might seem noncommittal, but which someone was desperately awaiting from him as an acknowledgment of their existence. He considered that tact his most particular virtue. Better than so-called goodness, in any case. Goodness preaches constantly, wants to change humanity, to work miracles from one day to the next, makes a show of its substance, wants to question essentials, but in fact is most often just hollow, lacking in substance and merely a matter of appearance. Whereas even if politeness does look entirely formal, in its inward nature it is substance, essence itself. A good word which has not yet been put into practice holds within itself every virgin possibility and is more than a good deed, the outcome of which is dubious, its effect arguable. In general, words are always more than deeds.

He waited anxiously for his traveling companions to return. They didn’t come, didn’t come. He looked at his pocket watch. It was a quarter to one. It had been exactly three-quarters of an hour since they’d disappeared.

At one o’clock footsteps were heard in the corridor. The guard was passing his compartment with a lamp in his hand, the new Croat guard, a friendly man with a mustache, and looked in on him and asked in faultless German and with Austrian cordiality where he was going and why he wasn’t asleep. He couldn’t, however, enlighten him on the whereabouts of the woman and the girl. Then, in his perfect German and with Austrian cordiality, he said “
Ich wünsch’ Ihnen eine scheene, gute Nacht,
” saluted, and as he left, closed the door of the compartment after him.

A couple of minutes later the door creaked open. Esti thought that the guard had come back to chatter on, to fraternize, Slav fashion, in the hope of a tip, because life was hard, the children many, and so on. There wasn’t a word spoken in the corridor. It was as if the door had opened itself with the motion of the train. From where he was sitting he could see no one. This must have lasted ten or fifteen—very long—seconds.

Then a voice could be heard breathing, “Go in, dear. In you go.” It was the woman. They were back.

Minutes went by. Not another sound, no movement. Then the girl stepped in.

After her—on her heels—her mother. She shut the door, sat down by the window. Opposite Esti.

The girl didn’t sit down. She just stood there, moodily, obstinately, tensely. But those are just words, tentative words, an attempt somehow to appreciate her resolute petulance. She looked a little flushed, too, as if she’d taken a hot bath or had rouged her face a little—it was still very pale. Esti looked questioningly at the mother, as if to ask where they could have been. The mother’s face was unchanging and negative.

The girl—like lightning, like the snapping of a spring—knelt on the seat in the opposite corner, by the corridor window, face to the wall, turning her back on the other two. She knelt and didn’t move. Knelt rigidly. Rigidly and wilfully. Her neck muscles were tensed. Her back was as flat as an ironing board. Her long arms, her long rachitic arms, dangled. She was showing her long, rachitic legs—left uncovered by the short white stockings—her skinny legs and the almost unworn soles of her patent leather shoes. There was something comical about it all. It was like when someone’s made to “be a statue” in a game of forfeits and the company can do what they like by way of teasing the person concerned. Only there was something very serious and frightening in her immobility and her pose.

So what was all this about? Esti again gave the mother a questioning look. This time a couple of words were on his lips, he meant to implore her, to say that the time had come for her at last to explain things to him, because it was becoming a little unbearable. She, however, avoided his eye. Esti choked back his words.

He was no longer surprised at the girl. What surprised him was that the woman wasn’t surprised at her. She just sat there, staring at nothing. Clearly, she was used to her. Had she seen such things before, and stranger too? Clearly, she could have acted no differently. She made nothing of it. And that was the most natural thing.

The train clattered on. Esti took out his pocket watch every five minutes. Half past one. Two o’clock. The girl still didn’t tire. They were approaching Zagreb.

Now the mother got up and, like one acting against her principles and better judgment, went to the girl. Once more she was warmhearted, as she had been at the start of the journey. She knelt down beside her, put her face to hers, and began to speak. She spoke quietly, nicely, sensibly, cheek to cheek, spoke into her face, her ears, her eyes, her forehead, her whole body, talked and talked without tiring, with a constant flow and impetus, and it was all incomprehensible, as incomprehensible as the girl’s whispering had been before, and incomprehensible too that one could find so much to say: what old words, pieces of advice, exhortations, what banalities she must have been repeating—previously painful but now no longer felt, known by heart, deadly dull—banalities which she had obviously used thousands and thousands of times before in vain, and which had long since been gathering dust in a lumber room, unused.

The part of the heroine in a five-act tragedy can’t be so long, nor can a single prayer, not even the whole rosary, that a believer mumbles to his unknown, unseen god. The girl took no notice whatever. She wasn’t disposed to budge from the spot.

Thereupon the mother grasped the girl’s neck, pulled her hard to her, with great force lifted her into the air, and sat her at her side.

She stroked her hair. She dabbed her forehead with a cologne-scented handkerchief. She smiled at her too, once, just once, with a smile, a wooden, impersonal smile which must have been the remains, the wreckage of that smile with which long ago she must have smiled down at that girl when she was still in swaddling clothes, gurgling in the cradle, shaking her rattle. It was a wan smile, almost an unseeing smile. But like a mirror that has lost its silvering, it still reflected what that girl must have meant to her back then.

She was holding a silver spoon in her hand. She filled it with an almost colorless liquid which Esti—who was the son of a pharmacist—recognized from its heavy, volatile scent as paraldehyde. She meant to administer this to her daughter, and that was why she had smiled. “Now, dear, you have a nice, quiet sleep,” she said, and put the spoon to the girl’s lips. The girl gulped the medication. “Go to sleep, dear, have a nice sleep.”

They arrived in Zagreb.

The sleepy life of the train came to. There was shunting, whistling. The heated wheels were tapped with hammers, and the sound wafted musically through the nighttime station. The engine took on water, and a second engine was attached so that two could pull the carriages to the great height of the Karszt mountains. The friendly Croat guard appeared again with his lamp. Just a few passengers got on. They were not disturbed.

The woman gave the girl a sweater, pulled her skirt down to her knees, and retied—more neatly—her strawberry-colored bow. She dressed her for the night rather than undressing her. She spread a soft, warm, yellow blanket over her legs. The girl closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, evenly.

The woman too now prepared to rest. She tied a light black veil over her ash-blonde hair.

When they left Zagreb she looked at the lamp. Esti took the hint. He got up and closed the shade round the glass globe.

Eyes open, hands in her lap, the woman waited for sleep. The scenes that she had gone through couldn’t have excited her excessively because she soon fell asleep. She gave one sigh and was asleep. Her eyelids closed heavily. She must have been tired, deathly tired. Her face was motionless. She slept without breathing. The girl’s deep, even breathing became quieter too. It could no longer be heard.

There was silence in the compartment, complete silence. The gas lamp gave out a green misty light, the sort of opal-milky twilight that one sees in an aquarium or in underwater pictures.

Esti began once more to experience that sense of relief that he’d had when the two were away. This too was real solitude. His traveling companions—heads pressed against the back of the seat—sat there torpid and unconscious. While the train hurtled in one direction their spirits wandered elsewhere, who could say on what journeys, who could say on what rails. His soul wandered around those two souls, glancing now at the mother, now at the girl. What sufferings, what passions must tear at them. Poor things, he thought.

Coughing, panting heavily, with ever-increasing effort, the two engines set about the ascent into the barren rocks. Now they were in the mountains. This was an alien world. Dark forests murmured up and up, on the heights, with their impenetrable mysteries. Waterfalls splashed here and there, mountain streams and torrents, sometimes startlingly close to his window. Lights burned on hilltops. The single Cyclops eye of a forge glowed blood-red. Then came the mirror gleam of a river. Dark gray, ice-cold water swirled this way and that, stumbling from rock to rock. It followed the train a long way. It trotted after the train, racing it, until it tired. The air was suddenly cooler.

Esti was cold. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stared into the romance of the night.

Now strange little stations appeared from the darkness, bathed in yellow lamplight, with the deserted seats and table of a closed waiting room, a kitchen garden with lettuces and cabbages, grassy banks, the stationmaster’s wife’s cherished petunias and geraniums. Glass globes bulged on sticks in the garden. A black cat sprang across the path in a sudden ray of light. Even at that late hour the stationmaster saluted, raising a gloved hand to his hat. At his feet his knowing dog pricked up its ears faithfully. A summerhouse sped toward them out of the gloom, the chatter of sunlit family tea parties long silenced, and, quite out of place, a convolvulus quivered among the branches of wild vine, frightened to death, blackened by night, dark blue with terror. These things, those people and animals, however, at which Esti was now looking—like a person who throws off the blankets and talks in his sleep—exposed themselves to him almost immodestly; they allowed a good-for-nothing young poet like him to steal their lives, until then so jealously guarded, so carefully concealed, and to take them with him forever.

Since setting out on that “first Italian journey” of his, he hadn’t slept a wink in more than two days. The many experiences had taken their toll. His ears were burning, his spine aching. He shut his eyes to rest a little.

As he dozed, drifting between sleep and waking, he heard a quiet rustle of clothes. Someone was standing beside him, so close that a hand was poised above his. It was the girl. Esti moved. At that she crept back to her place.

That girl wasn’t asleep. She hadn’t woken just now, but long before. After Zagreb, she hadn’t gone to sleep under the drug but had deceived both him and her mother. She was waiting for something, meaning to do something. At the moment she was lying there, head back and breathing deeply, evenly. Pretending to be asleep, as before. Esti watched her through half-closed eyes. Her eyes weren’t completely shut. She was likewise watching him through half-closed eyes. Esti opened his eyes. The girl did the same.

She giggled at him. She giggled in so strange a way that Esti all but shivered. She was sitting cross-legged. Her lace-edged underskirt dangled, showing her knees and thighs, a bare part of her spindly thighs. Again she giggled. Giggled with a foolish, unmistakable flirtatiousness.

Oh, this was frightful. This girl had fallen for him. This ghastly, hideous chit of a girl had fallen for him. Those legs, those eyes, that mouth too had fallen for him, that dreadful mouth. She wanted to dance with him,
with him
, at that obscene children’s ball, with her hair ribbon, the strawberry-colored bow, that little dress, that little specter at the ball. Oh, this was frightful.

What could be done about it? He didn’t want to make a scene. That was what he dreaded most of all. He could have woken the woman sleeping opposite. But he felt sorry for her.

Perspiration broke out on his forehead.

His tactics were partly intended to restrain the girl, partly to trick her into action and discover her intentions. Therefore he showed at regular intervals that he wasn’t asleep by coughing or scratching his ear, but he also simulated sleep for equally regular periods because he wanted to find out what the girl’s intentions actually were. These two ploys he alternated, always being very careful that the one went on no longer than the other.

The contest went on for a long time. Meanwhile the train raced on toward its destination. Sometimes it seemed that it was held up at a station but then rattled on, sometimes it seemed to rumble on and on but then would loiter in a station, and the strangely watchful voices of linesmen would be heard and machinery would crunch over the track bed toward the coal store. Were they going backwards or forwards? Had half an hour gone by? Or only half a minute? The strands of time and space were becoming tangled in his head.