Sunflower (25 page)

As if sent by fate, on this day there appeared in the vicinity of the house one Kakuk, a drunken hobo who had crisscrossed Hungary many times, had spent nights in jails of all types, and chalked the customary signs left by beggars and vagabonds on the gates of households where the poor wanderer is welcomed, or where the dog bites. In his old age he had settled down in these parts and was wont to rest his wine-saturated, red-as-the-winter-sun, cobwebbed head for hours at a time on the stone wall surrounding the manor until Mr. Pistoli condescended to toss him a word or two.

Originally Kakuk had settled in Pistoli's neighborhood with a different agenda in mind: he claimed to be an ex-hussar and notorious brawler, but the stout squire crushed all his ambitions. He made Kakuk mount a fiery stallion, and the famous hussar was thrown screaming right in front of the tavern called The Eagle; subsequently he had Kakuk beaten up so badly that the poor man was laid up in bed for weeks. At last the tramp confessed to being an itinerant cobbler all his life, patching and soling as he rambled the countryside. His real name was Ignatz, he had done time at the Veszprém jail as a suspected highway-man, and he ended up in Pistoli's permanent service, as if he had sworn fealty to a gang leader.

After a while Pistoli deigned to notice the cabbage-shaped, shaggy gray head resting atop his crumbling stone wall. It was a head that had groveled oftentimes in front of Pistoli's feet when the squire, lording it, made Kakuk kneel in the dust, or after returning from unfamiliar kitchens and servants' quarters where he had been beaten up with stakes and poles. Just now Pistoli was deeply moved, for he thought he caught strains of funeral music approaching from the direction of the birch grove where the highway bends. The violins sobbed and wailed, the contrabass growled, hollow like fate itself; the coffin must have enclosed some bride, accompanied on her last voyage by black-clad men holding gendarme swords tipped with lemons. Pistoli imagined it was his own true love being interred in the distance.

“Don't you want me to take a letter to some old lady or young miss?” Kakuk humbly inquired, and out of force of habit he chalked a hat on the stone fence, a vagabonds' sign for an unfriendly house, to be avoided.

It was with uncharacteristic kindliness that Mr. Pistoli received his shirtless serf, who in his time had delivered so many billets-doux in Pistoli's hand, enough to earn him a hundred deadly beatings. Lecherous widows, servant girls sent home from the big city, small-town waitresses, procuresses and noble ladies had received letters via this vagabond, letters that were sometimes totally uncalled for—Pistoli had simply picked the recipient as a potential paramour. This was cause enough for Kakuk to set out posthaste, clutching the message entrusted to him. He would lurk like the autumn wind around solitary houses. On bitter cold winter nights he would amble in godforsaken small-town alleys where women who had gone astray camped out in ramshackle hovels. A landlady named Stony Dinka would treat him to mulled wine, whereas the dove-souled Risoulette entreated him with clasped hands to persuade the saucer-eyed Pistoli not to harrass her any more. Both the messenger and the ladies had aged somewhat in the meantime. The owl hooted on storm-tossed nights, complexions had lost their apple-blossom pink, and fingers that used to rake through masculine hair now clasped only the prayer book.

“No, I'll never write another letter,” replied Pistoli about a quarter of an hour later, having behind carefully closed doors instructed Kakuk in a soft voice at length about what was to be done.

The very next day the tramp was back, and tugged Mr. Pistoli's leg which was dangling from the bed (for the squire could only fall asleep by swinging a leg).

“Back o'the garden,” Kakuk said, cryptic as some spy, before vanishing like a bad dream.

It was sunset: the trees in flower were listening for the footfalls of someone coming to pick their blossoms, while shadows, like exhausted hounds, stretched across the path. The hedge sent up a little bird, God only knows what business she had there, brooding the spring afternoon away...

There, where the lime trees huddle together like revolutionary generals before their execution, awaiting the crash of lightning with arms uplinked, there stood a memorable little garden bench, a secret spot on the grounds surrounding this red house, as private as the purity of a youth and the nobility of a heart. Formerly, when women had still travelled on clouds over this land, and a female foot was worth a kingdom, Pistoli spent hours seated there next to his soul mate, uttering never-to-be-recalled fine words; or else brooding alone like some knight whose unbalanced bride jumped from the castle ramparts the night before;—but he was never bored.

In later years, whenever Pistoli approached this small bench, he envisioned women who would quietly rise as he neared and vanish into the birches like a delicate mist withdrawing under fallen leaves beneath a frigid moon. Women he had yearned to meet sat there, and women he had tired of, but later wanted back with all the pain of a middle-aged man missing the joys of his youth. And since a real man holds no grudge against the women who robbed him of his youth, merely to pin his wings on their hats, Pistoli thought he saw seated on that bench mostly those ladies who had drawn blood.

And now, once more, a dearly beloved took her place on the little bench. The hat decorated with a pheasant feather shaded the face averted in surrender, like a bird being taught to sing. It was Eveline, sitting where Pistoli's former loves had sat, and she was listening to what Kálmán Ossuary had to say.

“Just look at him jabber!” reflected Mr. Pistoli bitterly, as he hid to eavesdrop behind the hedge, pricking up his ears like a horse.

Alas, Mr. Pistoli was too far away, though he would have gladly given a fine fur coat to overhear the lovers' conversation. But it was enough just to look at them: the eyes said it all, it was so obvious. A glove pulled off the hand might feel the way Mr. Pistoli felt. The russet brown cloak's undone buttons might have sensed his keen disappointment. Those soft curls lurking about her ear quivered like young maids when they find out the whys and wherefores of their coming into this world. The swan neck, the adorable mouth, the long lashes: they were all unaware of the hourglass and time's flight. The finely-shod foot, the liquescently smooth stockings, and the amulet heaving above the panting heart all imagined this was the first instance of love on earth, wherefore their sudden all-importance. The tender curves of the shoulder, the phenomenal lines of the arm, the miraculous shape of the hips: no way did they foresee lying someday in the grave pit's damp depth and infinite solitude, with no one to praise them. And the splendid cheek might be leprous after a few years—while this moment, this heartthrobbing hour, imagined by bird-bodied, bird-brained love to be eternal, would have become a matter of indifference.

All Pistoli could do was wriggle his big toe, as if it were a gopher, inside his boot. He regretted that not once did Ossuary kneel, during his endless warblings. Then the moment of farewell arrived. The exchange of abiding looks. The arm gliding off like foam down Niagara Falls. The departing lady's subdued, lingering, pensive footfall, as if she were leaving for good, for the infinite beyond.

Soon afterward came the clatter of a carriage, stealing off past the garden's far end, like a Gypsy kidnapper's cart.

“Tomorrow I'll sacrifice a pig to celebrate that it wasn't Maszkerádi with that joker,” resolved Mr. Pistoli, and made an effort to sneak back to his house without being seen by Ossuary.

By nightfall he had remembered all kinds of old songs he believed he had long forgotten. The ditties descended like a spider from the roof beam, and he snapped at them like a dog at a fly. Of some songs he recalled only a single line, but he still hummed through the entire melody. He laid his head on the tabletop, absorbed in woolgathering. From time to time he flung a ditty, as one would a bone, at Kakuk crouching in a corner. But he had little patience for another's singing. It didn't take long before he shouted: “Ah, nonsense!”

And whinnying, he struck up a new song, only to get stuck halfway through, like a rickety cart full of drunken wedding guests.

Ossuary was loitering in the moonlight like some terminally bored ghost.

Suddenly Mr. Pistoli stood in front of him with raised forefinger and declared triumphantly:

“I was a tougher kid than you...And I'm still the better man. The girls were weeping and wailing when they left me. For I am Pistoli, that's who I am.”

The moonlight over The Birches advanced hugger-mugger in the sky like a shepherd hiding a lamb under his coat.

And, wrapped in black veils, night crept away, like a woman's once undying love.

Kakuk spent all day lolling in a ditch, for the grass was growing in; he chewed grasses like a hound healing some ailment. And, anyway, he had been dropped into this world to lie about in ditches, while the flouncy-skirted, flowery-embroidered, rowdy marketing women pressed ahead to pass each other on the highway. Life does have its do-nothings who welcome as a matter of course each successive morn. They trudge, slothful and passive, into eternal darkness, for they never imagined that dawn would ever displace the night. All those daytimes must have been a misunderstanding, as was the aimless wind, rustling rainfall, wall-clawing torment, and bitter dementia. The truth lies in the great night that stretches from one end of the sky to the other in motionless eternity, where rockets devised by humans will never penetrate.

Kakuk clambered forth from the ditch, tiptoed up to Mr. Pistoli, whose wide-open eyes stared at a demijohn of Bull's Blood while his left hand inscribed all kinds of sigils in the air to his familiar spirits. He was dour and woebegone, a wax figure at the waxworks. His mustache was curled to point up. His worn lacquered dress boots proclaimed to the visitor their superiority to everyday footwear: these boots would never trudge in the dust of the highway.

“The equestrienne,” Kakuk announced, as if he had been hanging out around a theatrical troupe, and had picked up the actors' accents.

Pistoli slowly shifted his weight to his feet, shoved himself and his chair away from the table, tore his eyes away from the wine bottle and gave a deep sigh like a prisoner on death row. The half-blind pier glass on the wall had long forgotten what womenfolk looked like, how they would once upon a time stop for a quick peek at themselves or to pin up their hair in a topknot. Nowadays the mirror always reflected Novemberish faces. Pistoli looked into the mirror, and twirled his mustache like a gray rodent.

“Ah yes, the equestrienne,” he murmured. He opened his mouth and spat at the mirror, practically reeling with bitterness. “The trollop!”

Had he a weapon on hand, surely he would have grabbed it. But firearms and even sharp knives had long ago been banished from his house. Pistoli feared suicidal schemes and death- craving moments. He wore only the flimsiest belt that was guaranteed to snap under his two hundred pounds. Many a dawn found the droll, carefree boon companion, the life of last night's party, ardently yearning for death, sprawled across the worn rug that served as a coverlet on his bed. He sank his teeth into the pillow, for that's how it was in a novel he once read. Suicide approached barefoot in the snow, and lurked around his property like some pushy beggar. He could never enjoy love unless it was totally hopeless.

And so, hands in pockets, it was with an impassive face that he noted the saddle horse tied to a sapling in the birch grove. He knew that yellow mare from Eveline's stables. Kati was her name. She flicked her short-clipped tail like a lady her fan, and trotted as obediently with a lady's saddle as if she were in collusion with her rider. Pistoli squatted down next to the saddle horse. In a fevered flush of humiliation he repeatedly resolved to take refuge in the shrubbery if and when Miss Maszkerádi returned from the garden cottage, but her visit was still very much in progress.

Pistoli's face flamed as he counted the minutes spent under his roof and shelter by this lascivious lady—in the company of that detestable youth.

“How could I so debase my lifelong pride, my manhood?” The reproach welled up inside him like a poorly swallowed dumpling. At the Ungvár theater he had seen the itinerant troupe perform a melodrama in which a woman was murdered. “Jacqueline, see you in hell!” the actor had declaimed. Pistoli never forgot these words. Drinking his wine, during lovemaking, or in his despair he had often uttered this exclamation until his heart nearly broke, for ultimately he came to feel sorry for each and every woman because of the frailty nature had given her...

At long last Maszkerádi emerged from the garden cottage. (Pistoli was most amazed at not seeing a dozen female hands clutch the departing lady's tresses—the fingers and nails of women who had in that cottage sworn him eternal faith and love unto the grave.)

Brightly and merrily swaying, like an April shower, came the young lady.

Perhaps if she had been sad and conscience-stricken, like certain dames of old who left the site of their illicit love as woebegone as the passing moment that never returns; if the lady had approached in full cognizance of her frailty, ready to forego a man's respectful handkisses of greeting, and trembling in shame at the tryst exposed in broad daylight, like Risoulette, sixty-six times, whenever having misbehaved, she hastened back home teary-eyed to her Captain; or if a lifelong memory's untearable veil had floated over her fine features, like the otherworldy wimple of a nun...Then Pistoli would have stood aside, closed his eyes, swallowed the bitter pill, and come next winter, might have scrawled on the wall something about women's unpredictability. Then he would have glimpsed ghostly, skeletal pelvic bones reflected in his wine goblet, and strands of female hair, once wrapped around the executioner's wrist, hanging from his rafters; and would have heard wails and cackles emanating from the cellar's musty wine casks, but eventually Pistoli would have forgiven this fading memory, simply because women are related to the sea and the moon, and that is why at times they know not what they do.