Kornel Esti (7 page)

This pretense was extremely tiring. Esti would have liked to escape from the trap, reach Fiume, be at home in Sárszeg, in the bedroom where his siblings were sleeping to the ticking of the wall-clock, in his old bed. But he dared not sleep, nor did he mean to. He clenched his teeth and struggled on. If he became a little more sleepy she would resort to all sorts of tricks. He frightened himself most of all with the idea that while he was asleep, that creature would crawl toward him and kiss him with her cold mouth—nothing could be more revolting and terrible.

And so at about three o’clock, Esti, constantly dwelling on these nightmarish thoughts and on his guard as to what to do—whether he should show that he was awake or pretend to be asleep—tried to open his eyes, tried to wake up, but couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe. There was something on his mouth. Some cold foulness, some heavy, soggy bath mat, lying on his mouth, sucking at him, expanding into him, growing fat on him, becoming rigid, like a leech, wouldn’t let go of him. Wouldn’t let him breathe.

He moaned in pain, writhed this way and that, waved his arms about for a long time. Then there burst from his throat a cry. “No,” he croaked, “oh.”

The woman leapt to her feet. Didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know what had happened. Couldn’t see a thing. It was completely dark in the compartment. Someone had put out the gas lamp. Thick smoke was billowing in through the window. Again, a cry for help. She thought that there’d been an accident.

When she had quickly lit the lamp, there stood her daughter facing Esti. She was holding her index finger mischievously to her lips, begging him to hush, he must keep quiet about it. Esti was standing facing the girl, in a fury, trembling from head to foot, deathly pale. He was wiping his mouth and spitting into his handkerchief.

“Oh,” said the woman dully, “I’m so sorry. But surely you can see …” That was all that she said. And she said it as if apologizing for her dog, which had licked a traveling companion’s hand. She was infinitely humiliated.

Then without looking at Esti she turned to her daughter.

“Edit!” she exclaimed, “Edit, Edit,” several times, one after another, perhaps just so as to hear her name. She pulled the girl this way and that. It seemed that her amazing poise had deserted her for a moment. That troubled her at once. She embraced her daughter, began to kiss her. Kissed her frantically, anywhere she could, even on her lips.

Esti, who had not yet recovered from the horror of the first kiss and was so disgusted by it that he could have vomited, watched this scene and tried to get his breath.

He could sense the enigma of the kiss. When people are helpless with despair and desire, and speech is no longer of use, the only means of making contact is by the mingling of their breath. They try in this way to enter into one another, into the depths where perhaps they will find the meaning and the explanation of everything.

The kiss is a great enigma. He had not been aware of it before. He had only known affection. Only adventure. He was still pure at heart, like most boys of eighteen. That had been his first kiss. He had received his first real kiss from that girl.

Edit was crouching at her mother’s side. Now she shrugged her shoulders. Every ten seconds—every ten seconds precisely—she raised her left shoulder almost imperceptibly. She wasn’t being defiant. She didn’t speak either to her mother or to Esti. She was making signs. To whom or to what she was making those signs no one knew, not even she herself. Only perhaps He knew, who created the world to His glory and set man therein.

The woman, who must have been overcome with remorse at forgetting herself, was clinging to both her daughter’s hands. By that she was showing that she was with her, now and always.

They were silent. All three were silent. Silent for a long time.

Suddenly the woman spoke. “Dawn’s coming,” she said to no one in particular. “It’ll soon be light.” Why was that so dizzily solemn? Because it meant, “Dawn isn’t coming, it never will.”

Esti ran out into the corridor. He had to go quickly. Scarcely was he out than he burst into tears. Tears streamed down his face.

But dawn was coming, it really was. A pale strip of light had appeared in the east.

He thought over what had happened. What had happened was tragic and interesting. It even flattered his pride a tiny bit that he had gone from the school bench—by some unforeseen process—straight into the darkest center of life. He’d learned more from this than he had from any book.

The year before he’d had other struggles. He’d maintained in the literary circle that one of his poems was a ballad. The teacher in charge had opened the matter to debate, and after the opinions of the members had been heard had decided that the poem in question wasn’t a ballad but a romance. As a result Esti “immediately drew a conclusion.” He’d resigned as secretary, with which responsibility his fellow members had clothed him.

How that had hurt him at the time! Now he could see that it wasn’t so important. What mattered wasn’t ballads and romances. Life was what mattered, only that. That kiss too had come from the richness of life and had enriched him. He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it, not even his brother, because everyone would laugh at him. But in his own eyes he wasn’t ashamed.

“
Homo sum ,
”—he quoted Terence—“
humani nihil a me alienum puto
,” and thought back with a shudder to that shivering kiss. Perhaps his pleasure in it could have been full if he were a little more daring and could surrender himself completely, because sensual pleasure—he guessed—cannot be far from disgust. Nor should that be a cause for shame.
Epicurus non erubescens omnes voluptates nominatim persequitur.
Now who had said that? It had been somewhere in the middle of the grammar, on a certain page, at the top, a little to the left, an example of the use of the
participium praesens
with a negative particle. One must not be ashamed of anything. Our fate is stars and rubbish.

Now other people were standing around him, early risers, with mustache trimmers and traveling soap. Watching the sunrise. They pulled down the windows and drew into themselves the dawn air. Esti followed their example.

The lamps were extinguished. The train rumbled on, fleeing night and nightmares, toward the daylight. The first ray gilded a hilltop with magical speed. On it stood a little church with a wooden tower, awaiting the faithful. It stood so high that his imagination, by the time he reached it, was exhausted, collapsing and giving up the ghost right at the door of the church, but down below was a green valley at the bottom of a fearsome ravine so deep that his imagination fell headlong into it and was killed outright on a rock. It was a barren, picturesque landscape. Stone walls stretched along the hillsides, ramparts with which the local people defended their produce, their potatoes and oats, against the wrath of the elements. Here one had to fight a bitter battle against nature. Howling gales tore up trees, roots and all, flattened out furrows and flung seed into the air. In those parts even eagles were afraid. In those parts even cows looked interesting, they were so thin and melancholy. In winter, snow fell and covered everything. Packs of wolves plodded slowly through the whiteness, their tails shaggy.
Guzlica
and wailing songs were heard in huts. This was where he would have liked to live. He imagined getting of the train at once, settling down in this stony hell, becoming a forester, or rather a quarryman, marrying an apple-faced Croat girl with a black headscarf, white skirt, and black apron, then growing old without ever sending word of himself and being buried anonymously in the valley. But he also imagined himself owner of those hills and forests, rich, powerful, known and admired by all, greater perhaps than a king. He imagined all sorts of things. He played with life, for it was still before him.

At six o’clock an army doctor came on board—or as Esti later boasted to his brother, “a high-ranking regimental doctor.” He came without luggage, fresh, having slept. The gold stars sparkled cheerfully on his velvet collar. He lived in the region and was making for Fiume to bathe.

He was a very cultured man and widely traveled. He took honey-sweet snuf from a slender, colored snuffbox. He grew his manicured nails long and shaped to the pads of his fingers. He had often seen the sea, too.

Esti beset him with the most foolish questions, mostly to do with the sea. The doctor dealt with these as best he could. Sometimes at length, sometimes only briefly, with a yes or a no.

At half past six, at Plase, he pointed out that the gulf of Buccari would soon be in sight. The quivering of branches indicated that the sea wasn’t far away. There was a tang of salt in the air.

The sea could be there at any moment. But it still wasn’t. Esti believed by that time that the doctor was either mistaken or joking, it would never come, didn’t want to show itself to him. He walked up and down as if to speed up the racing train. In his agitation he composed a dithyramb, celebratory lines with which to greet the sea. His words slowly froze on his tongue. The sea was late in arriving.

Finally they were standing in line in the carriage. Old civil servants, a honeymoon couple, women and children, even nursemaids with infants in their arms, even sick people, consumptives, incurables, traveling in search of treatment, all were standing side by side and behind one another, craning their necks so as to welcome the sea when the time came with uplifted hearts and a outburst of happy sighs. The sea had a full house. But nevertheless it didn’t appear. Like a prima donna it made itself wanted, aroused curiosity. It needed a crescendo, intensification, scenery even more impressive.

The two engines, coupled one before the other, climbed higher and higher up the steep mountain track. Now they too were becoming impatient, thirsty for the liberating, redeeming water. They increased their speed and hurled themselves toward it. So ardent was their desire that perhaps they didn’t care that they might slip and crash headlong down onto the limestone and be smashed to bits. Their wheels turned with such eye-baffling rapidity that they almost looked stationary. They rushed into tunnel after tunnel. First they gave terrifying whistles, then plunged between the streaming, black cliffs, rattled and snorted, and when they emerged gave shrieks of inquiry. They were looking for the sea, but still hadn’t found it. Their pistons gleamed, pumping on the oily bearings. Inexhaustibly they raced on. Again they thundered into a tunnel. Esti had by now abandoned all hope. As the train curved out of the tunnel, however, the army doctor stretched his index finger with its carnelian ring to the sunlight and said:

“There it is.”

Where was it? There below him, there it really was, the sea, the sea itself, smooth and blue as he had seen it on that wall map in primary school. Just one more point, the bay of Buccari, the Quarnero strip. He gaped at it, mouth wide open. But before he could admire it properly it had vanished. The sea was playing hide and seek with him.

Then it spread out before him, for a long time, in its calm majesty.

He had not imagined it any lovelier or bigger. It was lovelier and bigger than he had ever imagined. A smooth, blue infinity, and sailing ships on it leaning sideways, like the wings of butterflies, parched butterflies that had alighted on the mirror of the water and were drinking from it. From a distance it was a pure panorama, a picture in a book, silent, almost motionless. Not even the hiss of the waves reached him. Nor could their ripples be seen. The ships themselves moved no more quickly than that toy boat of years gone by which he had pushed around in the bath as a child. And yet it was festive, it was a giant, alone in the ancestral glory of vasty ages.

Then there burst forth within him that poem on which he had been working earlier, that dithyramb which he had conceived in the anguished hours of the night, and the shouts of Xenophon’s men, the scattered army of the Anabasis, that starving, homesick ten thousand, could have been no louder for all their ten thousand throats, than he himself:
Thalatta, thalatta, immutable, eternal one, thou art whole in the cathedral of mountain ranges, among the church pillars of peaks, thou the holy water of earth in the stoop carved out of the rocks, baptismal font of all greatness that has ever lived in this world, thou milk of mother earth. Suckle me, redeem me, keep evil spirits far from me. Make me what I
was born to be.
He immersed himself in the smell of the sea, washed himself first in its breath. He held out his arms to be nearer to it.

Later the Scoglio di San Marco loomed into view, the ancient, ruined pirate stronghold. After the crescendo, a decrescendo followed. The train was descending the stepped slope among the crags. The first Italian house came into view. It wasn’t as neat as a house in Hungary, nor as comfortable and clean. It was slim and airily graceful. Pieces of colored cloth and shirts hung from windows with the honest grime of life which here wasn’t concealed. Red, white, and green flags flapped in the wind on tall poles, triumphantly announcing the Hungarian seaport. He had to fetch his luggage.

Mother and daughter were still there together. He was almost horrified—he’d forgotten about them in the meantime. Hadn’t given them a thought for hours. This forgetfulness brought home to him how much together those two had been, and would forever be. Now he realized the meaning of fate.

They too were getting ready. The mother had put a broad-brimmed hat on the girl’s head, and slipped the elastic band under her bony chin. She herself was now wearing a hat. A nest-shaped straw hat. There were two white roses on it. Esti helped her get her cases down.