Sunflower (21 page)

Yes, Andor Álmos-Dreamer had knelt there, in front of this humble-eyed, blushing woman clad in white, her face always transfigured by happiness and pleasure, who raised her white hands as if to fend off her lover's confessions. “Please... don't...You know I don't deserve such a bounty, all this happiness. It's enough that you put up with me, that you think of me at times, as long as I can see you every now and then...You should save your heart's ardor, the hot lava of your emotions for worthier women. I'm only a roadside tree in your life, here to fan your face with a cooling breeze while you stop for a snooze in my shade.” Risoulette might have uttered these words...Or maybe she said nothing. Her two hands merely stopped the flood of words gushing from the young man's mouth, although it meant the fountain of life for her...“Anyway, one day you'll abandon me like an aimless vagabond does a
fille de joie
. And you'll recede into the distance, like a memory of one's youth. Hush now, don't explain, for my heart will break yearning for you...” But we have yet to see the man who will hold his peace when about to deliver a declaration of love. Next to ornate toasts, amorous declarations offer the greatest relief for men's need to talk. The feminine hand raises the floodgates holding the swollen river, and there comes a rush of words, from east and west, from fairy tales and dreams, like a colorful caravan that assembles at the caravansary from the four corners of the world. It's no use, trying to prevent men from knocking their foreheads against the ground when this gives them the greatest pleasure! Only make sure to send all crusty old men out of the room when the moment of a lover's confession has arrived. Their know-it-all, unlotioned, leaden, otherworldly complexion does not belong on the stage of gorgeous declarations. At the most, a superstitious ancient nanny might be allowed to huddle in a nook, to note the words and to parrot them later when the rainy days arrive.—Lovers' confessions! The happy hour, that always gets omitted from funerary orations by the graveside. Whereas that is all we should ask of the departed: hasn't he forgotten to declare his love during his days on earth?

Whatever Andor Álmos-Dreamer knew of life and love, he had learned from Risoulette. At intimate moments, eating and drinking, during long walks, while the fever of love took a brief respite, Risoulette taught Andor all that was worthwhile and amusing in life. Her store of knowledge included not only what she had learned from her old aunts at Szatmár; she was familiar with the notorious Marquis's book of recipes, as well. Her exterior was as wildflowery as a wandering Gypsy woman's, and her eyes flashed at times like a knifeblade honed at night near a nomadic campfire; and although she sometimes cried out like a wild bird before surrendering herself to her mate, still, her lips exuded the fragrance of French perfume, her raven locks were redolent as Carmen's on the operatic stage, and she groomed all parts of her body as well as a princely bride for her nuptials. She had mastered amorous enchantments of such sophistication that this petty nobleman of The Birches would have gladly split open his breast merely to have Risoulette dip her miraculously petite foot in his heart's cascading blood. This woman was truly remarkable in every respect: her mobile, expressive nose, her dark eyelashes and noble nape, her sensitivity to cold, her gullibility. In her whimsical moods she was the lady sung by poets, who found her intoxicating. Like a taciturn magician, she had her secrets. Her tears, her laughter could have sent men to the gallows. But she was mild as a dove...And like springtime itself, you could never get enough of her. Her conversation was always worthy of attention, it was like leafing through the pages of a fascinating travelogue. She played with her voice like a child with a ball. She existed in order to put you in a good mood. She was joy personified.

Andor Álmos-Dreamer, glimpsing his graying head in the Venetian pier glass—in which they had stared at each other so often like provincial couples engaged to be married—now wondered, amazed, how could he have ever left this woman? Here he had been kept as spoiled as a pet hedgehog, and still, he had wandered away from this household. He had gone away, to chew pumpkin seeds in his solitude, like an obstinate child.

At last a light spider cart wheeled into the courtyard, as in some period piece where the gentry are always carousing and no one has time to live an ordinary life.

Next to the coachman, who wore a beribboned hat sat Eveline, dressed in a dove-gray outfit. The short-tailed gray dapples that had gaily trotted along, while her hands held the reins, were now shaking their jingling accoutrements, as if this had been their sole raison d'être.

Watching from behind the white-framed window, Mr. Álmos-Dreamer was moved to see the two women greet and kiss each other under the red awning of the verandah. Risoulette, solemn and deliberate, gently embraced the maiden as if coveting her innocence. She kissed Eveline on both sides of her face. Now that they met, they were no longer rivals. Side by side, the woman in her forties and the girl in her twenties banished the thought of competing for the same man. Eveline's bearing was noble, refined, and condescending, rather in the manner of a lady of the
haut monde
being amiable toward an acquaintance who must spend her life in a provincial village.

The Captain slapped his legs as one does an unruly horse, and advanced to receive the young miss at the front entrance.

When the white door opened, Eveline's eyes took in Mr. Álmos-Dreamer with equal portions of surprise and distraction, as if the last grains of fairy dust from solitary reveries were still dropping on her eyelashes. She turned around to look behind her. Risoulette, teary-eyed, nodded at her with boundless benevolence and made herself scarce.

“You wanted to see me?” Eveline asked.

She took off her deerskin glove and offered her hand like a flower to Mr. Álmos-Dreamer.

“Yes, I, too, should have thought of the Captain and his wife. But believe me, Andor, I've been as inactive as a lazy cat. Days go by and I hardly even have a thought. Life for me has receded into the far distance like the mountains on the horizon that I shall never get to. It doesn't even occur to me that there are cities, humans, and other lives in this world. I've made myself cozy on a pile of ashes. And as long as it stays warm, I'll be all right.”

Andor replied the way he had once spoken to Risoulette:

“I'm the kind of man it is easy to forget. But I had never wanted to attach any importance or significance to my person. So I live on, a man who is far prouder than he has any right to be. Life is a mere flick of the hand...It is not important. And not very interesting, either. Time goes by, meandering like an impassive wanderer who never sees new landscapes, different cities, fresh or hostile faces. I'm merely a watchman in the cornfield who observes, from under a hat pulled over his eyes, the passage of unknown and uninteresting strangers on the highway. They're all marching toward distant destinations, their eyes on the far horizon, their thoughts on foreign marvels. One will be shipwrecked at the Cape of Good Hope, another will be garroted in a Hong Kong opium den, the third will circle like a hapless bird of passage over alien lands...Everyone is on the go, dying to live, see, feel, and run amuck; wanting to inhale new scents, touch the hair of unknown women, taste strange cuisines, to make love and forget like sailors...this is what most men want. I alone seem satisfied by sitting on my hovel's threshold—haughty, frozen, stubborn like a rock in my voluntary and conceited renunciation—while over my little rooftop life flies past, insanely clattering, deranged and carefree. Could it be I am a gopher without a mate, or a melancholy blind crow at the forest's edge? For a human being I am most certainly not, no, no, I don't enjoy, I don't want, I despise what most men do. Possibly I am one of the dead who can see and look on, amazed by nothing and detesting everything that the living do. Or else once I was a pipe-smoking Turk on a shopsign in Munkács, and now I'm off on vacation. Truth is, I want nothing, my worshipful lady.”

“But you did want to see me, no?” said Eveline, who blushed a little, lowered her eyes a little, and adjusted her skirt a little, as women are wont to do, when they are unsure of themselves.

“Oh you, perhaps, are the only one for whose sake, at whose memory, I sometimes feel like bursting into a drunken or crazy sob so loud that it would be sheer pleasure...You are the one I think of, lying in my bed, you with your birdlike sadness, your eyes reflecting an otherworldy light...you are beautiful and alien, you are a whole different world...You contain archipelagos, Spice Islands full of unknown scents, joyous frenzies tumble from your eyelashes, many-colored shadows chase each other on your forehead, and hemp bursts into flower at your feet...For me, you are a mystery, although at night I scream out that you are simply a woman...You are a disheveled terror opening the door a crack in the middle of my reveries, like a murderer clutching a knife...you are a dead woman, a pale wraith hugging the door and summoning me to the netherworld...You are death and you are life.”

“Poor man,” said Eveline, and caressed his forehead, as any woman will, truly touched by hearing a man cry.

Now Álmos-Dreamer again addressed his words to the absent Risoulette. It was the final exam in all she had once taught him.

“I know it is cowardly to confess to a lady what we think in our weak, vulnerable moments...I'll have to drink enormous amounts of alcohol in my solitude to forget the things I'm saying now. I'll have to commit foul deeds to rid myself of these agonizing memories. I'll have to travel far, and in foreign cities buy myself brides at midnight from their cabdriver fathers... Have myself robbed in clandestine houses kept by procuresses with eyes like beasts of prey...But I have to tell you that I despise and hate you and still I cannot live without you. You are despicable, for I know you love another. He is probably some young Budapest cabby or gambler, or a carousel operator in fancy pants whom you, instead of some older woman, provide with spending money. I detest you for finding yourself a gigolo in your youth, when you are so fine that one night with you would cost a hundred sovereigns in Shanghai...And I abhor you, for you remind me of my grandmother—like a song that bubbles up from the throat—you kill me, you daze me, in my dream you suck my blood, you are a woman who has driven a man wild, a man who until then had only known the manly, spirited, self-sacrificing kind of love...You are ever new and foreign, and I cannot find you behind the skirt flounces of desirable women in the cities of the night. And yet I've looked for you so long that my feet went lame...Looked among whores and nuns.”

“Poor thing,” said Eveline, lowering her arms like a wounded bird her wings.

“You resonate inside me like Negro jazz...When there's a wedding at the sugar cane plantation and the slaves blow their mouth harps to produce a storm of dance music that makes everyone lose their minds...At other times you are a Hungarian folksong, heard on the Tisza's bank in the moonlight at a fishermen's tavern, when the heart is wounded, a suicidal hour...Grandfather's waltz or a Sunday afternoon at my piano...the squeaking of mice and circus music. You are an unending howl rising from the insane asylum...You are love.”

“Please don't hurt me...”

“Don't be afraid. I happen to be the kind of forty-year-old man who is dying to make love, maddened by thoughts of orgies, but whose body is a centenarian's, and has to import a street singer to satisfy his lady, while I sob in the next room...I am sick, old and mad. A used-up, tattered old hat that had once upon a time been worn at a crazy tilt by some girl at a boarding school and left behind in the corridor of the hotel where she rushed unthinking, riotous, crazed on the arm of the triumphant male...The night watchman stops to muse, as his old walking stick pokes at the hat with a numbered tag sewn in at the orphanage or boarding school...I can only crave you, crave you like sunshine that cannot be held.”

“I shall cure you. For I am a springtime woman. I admire and love you. I'll be the cricket in your house, who'll play the violin for you in your solitude. Please stop suffering.”

So said Eveline and she placed her hands together.

But the self-lacerator could not be stopped in his heart-rending séance. The cello that had lain silent for so long, and which was now brought out from a corner nook, poured forth songs of woe, like Baron Münchhausen's frozen post horn emitting melodies by the fireplace.

“Why have I summoned you here? Because in this house once I was young, like a wandering musician who, young and hungry and aimless, sings below the window. This is the house where I spilled all emotion so that there is not a drop of blood in me to take to the other world, so that a flower might grow on my grave. This is where I once knelt, like a happy jack of hearts that had somehow escaped from the pack...This is where I played the Ram, the Bull and the Lion...Here I once was a star on the ceiling that lit up the sleeper's dreams...I was the wind that blew in under the doorsill...clattering ghost rummaging among the dried hunting bags in the attic...I was the tomcat snoozing on the roofridge, gathering fresh strength for the morrow...Here I was love. And you, you could be Risoulette's own daughter, you dear love.”

Risoulette, when she heard mention of her name, entered the room quietly, humble and joyful like a serving woman on Christmas Eve.

“Wouldn't you like some tea?” she asked and cast a reproachful glance at Eveline, who sat, chilly and moved, in an ancient armchair. (She still had her shoes on—whereas Risoulette had always made sure to place her bare foot in her lover's hands.)

Mr. Álmos-Dreamer cast down his eyes like a guilty man caught in the act, while Eveline gave Risoulette an Eastertime smile, like a woman to her lifesaver on the riverbank after repenting the attempted suicide.

“Please sit down, Risoulette, and play the piano for us,” she said in a wheedling, cajoling voice that can never be attained by someone choking with emotion. Eveline spoke in calm and deliberate tones. Meanwhile Risoulette stood in the door, bewildered, like a woman who has spilled kerosene on her skirt but cannot find a match to set it aflame.