Sunflower (15 page)

On buds, naked little fairies seat themselves astraddle (till now they were mute shadows in hidden groves); in the air, snaps and creaks, voices of unknown origin, as if underground germs and seeds sang a grand chorale; gusts of air scamper like crazed wheels, whistling clouds whoosh by streaming overland, solemnly still waters for no particular reason stir now as if they, too, wanted a part in the Spring Ball; it is a miracle that strident, bleating billy goats don't flood the field where everyone and everything aches to play. And still, in abandoned little autumnal niches hidden among trees in the depths of sad copses that seem to be created for solitary ghostly reveries with bent head—someone must certainly be sitting there, in a clearing that no one ever sees. But even such solitudes are approached by young snoopers on tiptoes, eager to spy on saddish old folks' thoughts.

“Spring!” thought Miss Maszkerádi. “You are an idiot. I just don't believe in you!”

And yet she must have believed in it a tiny little bit, for she searched out the tree she had been in love with for years.

It was a dwarf willow up on the bank of a stream gone dry, highly solemn, determined to hold its ground like some watchman. Its twigs had long ago gone with the wind, like unfaithful, flighty women from an old man's side. But the ancient tree maintained a virile, calm, patriarchal equanimity. This was one somber, manly male who never showed any hurt, rejoiced not at Eastertime, nor did it celebrate the coming and going of evanescent life all around.

Miss Maszkerádi had sought precisely such a gruff, ancient tree-like male all her life, to whom she could have been as faithful as to this rooted, bark-bound, impassive trunk that had a face, as in fabled forests of old, hands in pockets, and a waist aslant, in a bored pose. At times she fancied the tree as an aging vagabond who had weathered many a hardship in his wifeless life, tramped about aimless as a muddy dog, the kept lover of man-hungry females; he despised love's joys and woes, had plucked his share of triumph and hopelessness, taken quiet delight in success, had women on their knees to kiss his hand; passionless, not even pretending a semblance of emotion, he seduced the women in his path, then sent them packing, so many used-up playmates; they had loved and hated him, caressed him with trembling hands, then flung curses at his head, the way chambermaids in Pest toss trash out of a window...This manly one stayed calm and collected by living the inward life, thinking his own thoughts and always doing whatever felt good. He never kept a flower, a lock of hair, or remembrance of a kiss. He dealt with women as they deserved. Never did he wander with aching heart on moonlit nights, under anyone's window, no matter how much awaited...He might prowl about for a week or two like a dog in springtime, then, all skin and bones and weary of the world, he would return from his wanderings and never recall what happened to him, what women had said, what they smelled and tasted like...Miss Maszkerádi positively abhorred novelists who always write about old men remembering youthful adventures. Thus she could not stand Turgenev, whom Eveline would have read night and day.

The old rogue pretended not to notice last year's lover, Miss Maszkerádi. Indifferent and cool, he stood his ground by the vanished creek whose bed had perhaps drained off his very life, never to return, flighty foam, playful wavelet, rainbow spray.

“Here I am, grandpa,” Maszkerádi whispered, sliding from her saddle.

She beheld the ancient tree's inward-glancing eye, compressed, cold mouth, thick-skinned, impassive waist, and pocketed hands.

“I am here and I am yours,” she went on, after embracing the tree as an idol is embraced by some wild tribeswoman who can no longer find a mate that's man enough in her own nation.

The old willow's knotted gnarls and stumps, like so many hands, palpated all over Miss Maszkerádi's steel-spring body. The mossy beard stuck to the frost-nipped girl-cheek already quite cool to start with. Who knows, the old willow might even have reciprocated her embrace.

“I know you can keep a secret,” she mumbled. “Please don't tell anyone I love you.”

She hugged that tree as she had never dared to hug a man. Her arms and legs wound around the trunk, her incandescent forehead pressed against the ancient idol, this offshoot of Roman Priapus that had escaped being daubed in cinnabar by womenfolk.

“As long as I'm around, I'll visit you, old partner in crime,” she said.

Kati, the shaggy yellow mare, wearily lowered her head, suffered Miss Maszkerádi in the saddle, and carried her homeward, morose head hung low, as if they had been beaten up at a wedding.

In the afternoon a fog settled over the fields, like gray souls assembled to rehash the mournful circumstances of their demise. Madmen made of mist occupied the upper galleries... apparently unable to recall how they had died.

Back at the country house, Miss Maszkerádi smoked one cigarette after another as she paced the rooms under the century-old vaults. She marched tall like a soldier, and appeared to be content, even happy. Yet when she spoke, her voice sounded weary:

“Good God, to think that some people live their whole lives unvisited by illness, accident, misfortune. Sometimes I think I'll be mauled to death by tigers.”

Eveline sat in the rocking chair, reading a novel: Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe
. From reveries of medieval knighthood she glanced up at her friend.

“You should read a good book, Malvina...We all die in the end...”

“But how?...You imagine yourself as mistress of a castle, because you have swallowed men's lies. Your death, too, will be theatrical, complete with the whole works: candelabras, priests praying, funeral bells, servants sobbing outside the door, a towering catafalque. A whole production with you in the leading role, you hope. But I just can't think that way, I'm a coward, a city bourgeoise, a
Bürgerin
of the Josephstadt...I am afraid of death.”

Miss Maszkerádi stood on feet wide apart in front of the window, like some actress in tights. (She would have felt tremendously embarrassed if someone had told her this.) On her forehead a brown curl stirred during her cogitations as if blown by a breeze. Her slender body was like a solitary fencing sabre stuck into the floor of the
salle
. She swayed and quivered, as if the pulsing of her blood moved steel springs coiled within her body. On foggy days she was always tense and she anxiously racked her brain as if her life depended on thinking of something new.

“I can't resign myself to the fact that I live in order to die some day. I'd love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn't bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree's. What I dread most is a fate like my alter ego's.”

Eveline finally gave up trying to follow the wanderings of the magnificent knight Ivanhoe in the Holy Land. The exotic mediaeval ladies flew up from her side like a covey of partridges, and Old England's oak forests receded, to murmur from far off, on the edge of the horizon.

“You mean to tell me you have alter egos?” she asked, as if discovering some dark secret here, of all places, on a boring village afternoon.

Miss Maszkerádi's steely-glinting eyes appeared as serene as an idol's or a maniac's.

“Yes, and I ran into one of them abroad, you know, the time I wintered in Egypt. This was a lady of distinction, a soulless vulgarian; she had both camel drivers and officers in red coats for lovers. She was sad only to the extent that a hotel orchestra's tunes remind you of sadness, and she was cheerful to the extent that life in Cairo, the nightly balls, the various entertainments devised against ennui, formal dinners and excursions into the desert are calculated to cheer you, with a hypnotic power that every rich and idle traveler surrenders to. She lived a life as inhuman, as empty of inner content as any of the society ladies who stay at the gilded white hotels down there, and can be seen tapping the caged parrot's beak with a finger that young men dream about. Perhaps her senses could only be aroused after she had gorged herself on rich, spicy dishes, danced at a ball, and listened to cold-blooded males calmly drawl incendiary words in her ear. She would settle into her seat at the theater with the indifference of an egret feather in a diamond hairpin. Sometimes she would leaf through a light French novel; among all those bald, grumpy, tired men she trod with silken footsteps. She had Creole or Gypsy blood, and she bore the name of a French prince who must have passed his days, advancing them like chessmen, in God knows what remote part of the globe.

“...Back then I was in love with an officer who spent an occasional evening with me.

“Did I say I was in love? No, Eveline, I must confess I've never been in love, just like that French princess. I simply happened to spend the winter and early spring in Egypt; went to lunch when the bell rang in the hotel, and had an affair with an officer of the local garrison. Simply because that was how things were done in the
haut monde
I frequented for entertainment, just like a servant girl who goes out to a masked ball.

“One night the officer—and I can't for the life of me recall his face, or the camel driver's, who took me out into the desert—well, the officer had had a little too much to drink, and he confessed that on days when I did not require his services he spent the night with the Frenchwoman, and he swore upon his honor that he could barely tell the two of us apart. To him, our voices, bodies, hair, and gestures appeared mirror images of each other. What's more, while making love, the princess called him ‘sweet young master,' the same term of endearment that I had picked up from a peasant woman here in Hungary. The princess, like me, begged to die at the moment of consummation. She loved the same feature of his face as I did, kissed his hand the same way as I, and watered him like a lady gardener her violets. And she, too, was supremely happy when this thirsty violet, parched by the Egyptian night, lapped up her blonde French vintage with loud slurps.

“The man was totally drunk, and insensitive to the fact that he was skinning me alive by ascribing my most intimate amorous behavior to another woman.

“I'm not going to go into what I felt and thought at the time. All I'm going to say is that on that night he lovingly implored me to let down my long auburn hair so that he could tie it in a knot around his neck. In vain. Like a naive little girl from the Josephstadt, I never really fathomed the purpose of this production at the time. Back then I had not yet visited prisons and madhouses. I only knew the life around me, worlds apart from the tragic depths, or the solemn mysteries—as far apart as our luxury liner and that Black Sea steamer full of howling slaves, that we passed near the African shore. Back then I still believed that no matter how I lived, acted, behaved and felt, I would still eventually await, clutching an old prayerbook, my heart at peace, the arrival of the Jesuit father to administer the last rites in my white-curtained Josephstadt house, with the consecrated pussy willow on the wall. Back then I still believed that from that tranquil island of happiness one could roam without hurt on wild sargasso seas, and that adventures and experience would not blind my eyes like droppings from a swallows' nest.

“I'll make this short. The next morning, after an anxious night, I thoroughly scrutinized my French princess, who until then I had found quietly repulsive, like most of the ‘culture vultures' who spend every day of their lives in white ocean liners and hotels with gold trim.

“The princess undeniably resembled me. The saucy thing even imitated my style in clothes—or else I did hers. The only other thing I wanted to know was whether she had poor vision in her left eye, as I do. So I decided to test her. At lunch I sat immediately on her left and on my white lace fan I wrote in large, clear letters, ‘I hate you,' in French. I'd already made sure that my left eye could not decipher the letters. During lunch we exchanged a few neutral words. Then I opened my fan and conspicuously waved it near her face several times. Had her left eye not been as poor as mine, she would have certainly noticed the inked inscription. But she merely smiled neutrally, bored and indifferent as a puma at the zoo. Her hair emanated the scent of Japanese gardens. She was as weird as an exotic bird. A ghastly chill ran through my soul when I considered that, under certain circumstances, I resembled her.

“After lunch I spoke briefly with the officer. I told him I wanted to rest that evening, so why didn't he spend the night with my rival. ‘Besides, I'm curious to know what the princess thinks about this extraordinary similarity between us,' I told him. His eyes flashed like a knife in a scuffle. ‘I'll ask her!' he said, licking his chops, the poor fool. Service in the colonies had degraded him, as it does most Europeans. Looking at him, I thought that once upon a time this blue-eyed young man had been a blond-haired little boy who went to school wearing a white collar, the taste of cake in his mouth and the trace of his mother's kiss on his forehead.

“Next morning the officer was found strangled in the corridor outside the French princess's room. My alter ego had committed the deed that would have been my lot. She had tied her hair in a knot around the show-off's neck, and suffocated him.

“What happened to the murderous princess? That I can't tell you, Eveline, because I left Cairo before the results of the inquest into the officer's death were revealed. I arrived home in a state of nervous fever and hallucination. I don't think I'll leave this country for some time to come. After all, in this land we more or less know each other, men and women, and surprises are unlikely; our sins are of the usual sort, the modes of thought familiar. Sometimes I visit menageries, and the eyes of caged exotic predators remind me of looks I have encountered in my travels abroad. So I am a native of the Josephstadt, after all. Even though in make-believe I have rehearsed a happy and serene death scene—oh, I don't think I'll rest in peace when I kiss the crucifix for the last time. Although at times I still think that my alter ego, the unhappy French princess, has suffered and atoned on my behalf. She has done my penance, by living out the life that I should have lived, by rights. I am the shadow that remains after she has disappeared. For where do they go, the shadows of folks who have gone underground? They must live on, somehow. So maybe fate will deal me a merciful death.”