Sunflower (2 page)

Yet he—at home in Budapest, at home among the famous and not so famous writers of the metropolis—did not write about Budapest at all. He wrote about melancholy provinces on the great Hungarian plains, about the little towns in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains, feeding his pen with the memories of the few, very few, years of his brief adolescence. He traced the still visible path of sunken memories: the still living fragrances, colors, shapes, clouds of the past. He did not need the taste of the
madeleine
; his delicacies were always fresh and ready, stored in his mind. The way he wrote at the age of twenty-five reveals something astonishing to anyone who is interested not only in writing but in the mysterious alchemy of the human heart: he knew everything about old age during the physical splendor of his youth; he knew everything about autumn in the spring of his life. He knew something that the psychiatrists of this century do not yet know, which is that in our dreams we really do not think differently, we merely remember differently. He was not only a Hungarian Proust; he was a Homer, not of certain places but of certain times, a Magyar-writing Homer of the great subterranean development near the end of the Modern Age—that of historical consciousness. And, unlike Proust's, his prose was different from fine prose; it was thoroughly lyrical. “I shall be a poet in Budapest,” he had said; but he never wrote a single poem there. Yet poet he was.

Much of his talent showed itself in his early books. His first volume of stories was published in 1899, when he was twenty. Now he wrote every day; his first long novel appeared in 1901. His wife gave up her writing but not her teaching. They had four children, of whom one died young. She supported the family. Before thirty, Krúdy was already a legendary figure—as a presence, not yet as a writer. He had no money; he lived on credit. That was not unusual—so lived many of the writers and the journalists of his day, dependent on small cash advances and on the good will of certain headwaiters. But there was something extraordinary, even awesome, in the appearance of Krúdy, who at twenty-five was no longer a youth but a powerful, ageless gentleman. He was unusually tall, his handsome head leaning, with a kind of melancholy modesty, always to the right. He had large walnut-brown eyes. He spoke slowly. His voice sounded like a cello, as did his writing. He carried a cane. He was taciturn. He had few clothes, but they were always immaculate—clean white linen and a dark suit.

He was seldom at home. His home life was a shambles. He would disappear for days and nights, sitting up in wineshops and taverns. He would come home with empty pockets, a burning throat and stomach, yet few people had ever seen him drunk. He had many companions but few close friends. Women flocked to him. Eventually, he came to know Mme Róza, the owner and manager of the most famous house of assignation in Budapest, whose guests included the nobility of the Dual Monarchy, and the Prince of Wales. Mme Róza had literary ambitions; she, too, fell in love with Krúdy. Some of her letters to him survive, “I am ancient now,” she wrote, “though, alas, not a venerable virgin. Were it so, I would offer that to no one but you.” Another madam harbored Krúdy for days in her less elegant establishment, where he would sleep off the alcohol till noon, after which she took good care to serve him his favorite soup. (Once, she begged him to spend the night with her, instead of engaging in the usual fast hurly-burly on the chaise longue. If he wouldn't, she would jump out the window, she said. Krúdy told her that he had more serious business at night, with his companions. She did jump out the window—fortunately, not a high one—and broke her ankle.)

Around the age of thirty, Krúdy came into his own—or, rather, success came to him, with some money. The money did not last. As the great Hungarian critic Antal Szerb would write about Krúdy, he kept running after money but wrote master-pieces instead. Here and there, people began to savor his talent. He had found his genre at an early age, but now he found topics of a certain interest to the Budapest public. He had lived long enough in the city and knew its multifarious society well enough to write about it. Essentially, he remained the painter of the dream world of old Hungary, not of modern Budapest, but the peregrinations of his pen now included some of the latter, too. He invented an alter ego—Sindbad, the itinerant sailor of the Thousand and One Nights. Yet Krúdy was sailing not only from place to place but from one time to another. His most famous books were the Sindbad stories and
A vörös
postakocsi
(
The Red Stagecoach
). Partly because some of their scenes took place in near-contemporary Budapest, partly because of their inimitable style, the reading public gobbled them up. Few people would now dismiss him as a journalist, an indefatigable scribbler, which, in practical terms, he was. A principal character in
The Red Stagecoach
, faintly disguised, was one of the few contemporaries whom Krúdy admired. This was the fantastic figure of M. Szemere, an aristocrat who had played (and won) in the Jockey Club of Vienna at such scandalously high stakes that the Emperor Franz Josef ordered his police chief to banish Szemere from the imperial capital for a while. Szemere was the lord of the Hungarian turf. On racing day, he would rise about noon in the old-fashioned hotel where he dwelt, descend among his respectful retinue, put twenty or more gold coins (his only instrument of exchange) in the pocket of his Prince Albert coat, and send a gold piece to the Mother Superior of an Inner Town church, where the young novices were requested to pray for the success of his stable. Then he would order a carriage and trot off to the races, sometimes with Krúdy. It was around this time that Krúdy became addicted to his third and perhaps most destructive vice: after women and wine, gambling—horses and cards. When it came to horses, wine, women, it was his custom to choose outsiders.

He was a nocturnal animal. His head towered over the tables of the cafés, the nightclubs, the taverns, the gaming rooms of the writers' and artists' club, through the night; he sat up straight for hours, monumentally silent. He would fall asleep for several minutes, sometimes for half an hour, but people did not know whether he was asleep or awake. One of his loyal companions would carefully, awkwardly, pull away his own chips from their joint pile. Krúdy's hand would move and hold the defector's wrist: “Put it back.” No one would dare to touch the carafe—always a carafe, never a vintage bottle—of the country wine that Krúdy drank (it was said that no one could lift a wineglass with comparable dignity). At late dawn, a tired colleague would attempt to leave, tiptoeing out of the cold smoky fug of the room. Krúdy's deep voice would break the silence: “Come back. Talk some more.” One famous midnight, a hussar officer, a champion rider and fencer, sat down in full uniform at the crowded table where Krúdy sat. This officer pretended to ignore the writer. Krúdy got his anger up. “We had not been introduced,” he said. The officer answered with an insult. Krúdy stood up, grabbed the hussar's sword, tore it off his waist, slapped his face, knocked him down, and threw him out on the pavement. Next day, he gave the sword to one of the afore-mentioned madams. The customary duel followed. The fencing champion was slightly wounded; Krúdy was not.

Sometimes he got restless. He would corral a companion, and they would drive to the station, board the Vienna express, sit down in the dining car. When their money or the wine ran out, they would get off. He would wire one of his editors for an advance and return to the city in a day or so. Once, in the pearly haze of a summer dawn, he climbed into a fiacre with another companion. “Where to, my lord?” the coachman asked. “Keep going,” Krúdy said. “Drive slow.” They came back four days later, having made a round trip of two hundred miles, with stops at the taverns and the garden restaurants around Lake Balaton. In the fresh breezes of the morning, he would order paper and ink, and in the empty restaurants he would write twelve or sixteen pages of magical, dream-haunted prose, sometimes about lonely travelers. In one of his finest short novels,
Az útitárs
(
The Traveling Companion
), he meets “an agreeable, quiet, sad-eyed, gray, and, above all, unpretentious gentleman.”

We were traveling in the moonlight; through the shimmering fields ran those invisible foxes who by some magic always elude the hunters; wild ducks flew at a distance above a pond breathing silver; the shadows of trees moved like heartbeats...Like sadness, rain reached and overtook us, and from the darkening night it beat strings of tears against the indifferent window...and now only the words of my traveling companion echoed around me, as if Death were reading the Scriptures.

“I don't want to bore you with my circumstances,” my traveling companion said. “That would be useless talk: like the usual, drowsy, uninspiring loquaciousness of fellow-travelers when they're waiting for the train in the musty room of a station and the signal bell is sullenly mute on the roof. I notice that most people travel for business. A bridegroom is the greatest rarity nowadays. And those fools out of certain romantic novels, with their bones shaken and hurting after ten, twelve hours on a train, in a stagecoach or a sleigh in winter—why? For the purpose of kissing a certain woman's hand, for being there to listen to her throaty mutterings, for the sake of getting a whiff of the scent of her petticoat or bodice; with their aim to say a few breathless words at the end of a path in a garden where the woman had stolen secretly from her bed—that kind of fool is now rare as a white raven. I was such a white raven once, exploding with love like dynamite in a quarry, the yellow smoke of which hangs for a while over the hillside until it disappears without a wisp of a trace.”

Krúdy would return to the city, but seldom to his family. He now lived in hotels that he could afford—or, more exactly, whose owners were pleased to grant him credit. Yet his memories coursed in the opposite direction. They poured into scenes of a bygone patrician world of domesticity, peopled by spotless wives and honorable old men, and suffused with the quiet loveliness of country mornings:

To breakfast on a light-blue tablecloth, smelling of milk, like a child in the family home...freshly washed faces, hair combed wet, shirtfronts bright and white around the table. Everything smells different there, even rum. The plum brandy men swallow in one gulp on an empty stomach is harmless at the family table. The eggs are freshly laid, the butter wrapped in grape leaves smiles like a fat little girl, shoes are resplendent, the fresh morning airing wafts from the beds the stifling, sultry thoughts of the previous night, on quick feet the maid patters from room to room in a skirt starched only yesterday. Even the manure carts on the road steam differently on frosty mornings from the way they do in the afternoons; the rattle of gravely ill gentlemen quiets down in the neighboring houses; the bright greens in the markets, the red of the coxcombs, the pink-veined meats shining in the willow baskets, the towers of the town had been sponged and washed at dawn; and a piebald bird jumps around gaily on the frost-pinched mulberry tree, like life that begins anew and has forgiven and forgotten the past.

His words flew with longing for the provincial Magyar Biedermeier of the previous century. He would paint such scenes over and over, with a magic of which the addicts of his writing never grew tired. And this was part and parcel of his character: again, he was not so much like Proust, who loved high society and yet condemned it, as like Monet, who painted beautiful gardens because he loved them. At the tail end of his alcoholic nights, his clothes were still spotless. He despised loud carousers. He would, on occasion, send a message and a few banknotes to his wife: “Forgive me. Take the children on a Sunday picnic.” “I'll be back soon.” “Buy yourself some fine perfume.” His wife had become corpulent and sad, tortured less by jealousy than by the continual lack of money. She did not forgive him. His children did. For decades after their father's death, they treasured their sad, loving memories, and even wrote short memoirs about him.

You do not understand, he told his wife and the other women trying to cling to him: I must be alone. I need solitude. We know, or at least we can surmise, that his incomparable scenes grew in his mind while he mused for hours, half awake. Yet they did not crystallize until he began writing. He let his pen saunter, amble, canter away, down endless roads and tree-lined paths laden with the honeyed golden mist of memories and the old Magyar names of innumerable flowers, trees, ferns, birds. I write “endless roads” because his novels and stories have only the thinnest of plots. They are four-dimensional paintings, whose magical beauty is manifested not only through shades and forms but through the fourth dimension of human reality—time itself—as the thin stream of the story all at once bursts into a magnificent fountain, the water splashing and coursing in rainbow colors. Like Balzac, Krúdy wrote every day, through his worst hangovers, because he needed money instantly and desperately. Unlike Balzac, he never corrected his manuscripts, and he cared little for the proofs. He possessed only a few books, and not many of his own. He wrote because he had to. He never cared for his reputation. Some of his companions and admirers were writers, but he would never— absolutely never—talk literature with them. The topics that interested him were the preparation of certain standard Magyar dishes, the odd habits of attractive men and women, stories of the turf, and the fascinating legerdemain of certain people able to lay their hands on money whenever they had to.

He would tuck his sixteen pages into his pockets, hail a carriage or walk to an editorial office, and request his honorarium. Then came a long midday dinner, well after the noon hour, in a half-empty restaurant, where he would be surrounded by the silent, respectful service of the owner and the waiters. Then the turf, the gaming table, and the night life. By midnight, he would have little or no money left. There was the memorable occasion when, having played and lost at baccarat for hours in his club, he stood up and said to an acquaintance, who was holding the bank, “Give me the
cagnotte
.” That was incredible. The
cagnotte
was a box with a slot, sunk in the center of the green felt table, where winners would occasionally drop a few chips after a successful run. That club of writers and artists depended on the nightly
cagnotte
for some of its upkeep. “But, Gyula—” this gentleman said. “No ‘Gyula'” Krúdy said. “The
cagnotte
.” After a moment of deathly silence, the gentleman lifted out the box, opened it with a key, and poured out its contents before Krúdy. Krúdy ordered a waiter to cash them in; then he swept the money into his pocket, stood up, and left. The club did not expel him.