Sunflower (27 page)

Pistoli hoisted and squeezed his hulk onto the cart's forage rack. He was determined, tough and energetic, like one setting out to commit murder. He whistled for Kakuk, who hotfooted it after the cart like some canine.

The cart flew, as if blown by the breeze. It swayed and reeled, heaving Mr. Pistoli's bulk from one side to the other. He cackled or cried, as the mood seized him. At last he started to snore like a wounded wild boar. Even the man on death row has to sleep.

For the
third day now, Pistoli had been riding across the landscape of The Birches.

During his time he had visited all of his old hangouts, the taverns where he had once brawled, administered and received beatings. At the same time he said his farewells to former lovers, as if preparing for a very distant destination.

This journey revealed that Pistoli had not had more lovers than any other man who had spent his life in this sunflowery, tranquil, impassive land crisscrossed by highways. Just as in autumntime when women winnow, the wandering winds sometimes carry off both chaff and seed alike...Pistoli's lovers were the same as any other man's. Except other men forget these women as one forgets a song after the carousal is over; at the most, a bitter taste remains in the mouth on the morning after, as one contemplates with distaste the muddy boots. Whereas Pistoli never forgot the women who were kind to him. He would recall their words and gestures even three days later, when he would be already well on his way to recovery, taking the cure via the back alleys leading to out-of-the-way pubs where the beer tastes best, or else he would sit around in front of roadside taverns musing and admiring the red glow of wine in the sun, taking his delight in the birdlike song of the wench dipping water at the well. And he would go about wielding a crooked cherrywood staff on which he skewered fallen leaves like so many uncomprehending hearts. He would stop from time to time and laugh his horselaugh when he recalled some quaint oddity in his late drunken nights, on the back roads meandering toward taverns with names like The Linden Tree or Green Tree, or toward some girl's room reeking of cheap patchouli.

For he even got to know the kinsfolk of these loose girls, some of whom had asked him to be godfather to their child. He acted as sagely as the roadside crucifix that absolves the highway wanderers' every trespass. The music played at fairground barbecue stalls, the flutes at midnight serenades, a familiarity with feminine foibles, contempt for the world, which he shook off like rain fallen on his hat's brim—all this had made him acquiescent and resigned to the way things were. Rarely did life whoop it up inside him; he mostly went about purring like a cat rubbing against your feet. When something pained him unbearably, he would run off, until like a lost dog, he picked up the right scent, the trail of wisdom.

He found Stony Dinka in the same place where he had left her ten years before. Nothing changes in these parts: women either look like
Mrs. Blaha
(“the nation's nightingale”) or else like
Queen Elisabeth
. And hearts are as alike as inscriptions on headstones in the graveyard. (“One lived 72 years, another 83. Isn't it all the same, where one spends that extra decade: in hopeless love or on death row?” mused Mr. Pistoli, skulking around recently widowed women in village graveyards.)

Stony Dinka owned an inn overrun with wild grapes out near the limits of a small town, the
csárdá
known as The Rubadub. In the past Pistoli had crossed the threshold both at cock's crow and to the howling of dogs in the dead of night; he had arrived here to the thrumming of clangorous
cimbalom
music, ready to take Stony Dinka to a wedding—or else as cautiously as a construction worker climbing high up on a tower. At The Rubadub, Pistoli could always count on a hearty reception. “His heroics live on in memory,” as Pushkin sings of Zaretzky. He had especially distinguished himself in bowling—he was the best in the entire county—winning vast quantities of kegs from folks on outings from Nyíregyháza, tradesmen sporting
Kossuth-style
hats and bureaucrats of the county water regulation bureau, who affected checked pants. But he won Stony Dinka's favors only after “beating out” Pista Puczér, editor of the weekly
Awakening
. Editor Puczér, a man of short stature with a big bushy beard, the peppery, fiery village prank master, had from times long past staked some claim to Stony Dinka's heart. His rowdy behavior, his constant brandishing of the
fokos
(ax-headed staff), and his peacocklike screech had more than once turned what started out as a most promising May picnic into general mayhem. To Dinka's reproaches all he said was:

“But I'm faithful to you. And keeping the faith is golden.”

Whereas Stony Dinka knew for certain that Pista Puczér had approached and propositioned not only her serving maids (who wore red slippers on their bare feet with a purpose after all), but all of her girlfriends as well. But she could never catch the wily editor in the act, and send him packing. All those henhouses, kennel bunks and haystacks knew how to keep their secrets. And so Pista Puczér persisted, rolling his hypocritically faithful eyes in the grape arbors surrounding The Rubadub, much as Pistoli rolled his iron bowling balls, whenever the outcome of a match was in doubt. For the very same reason, Pistoli was the only man Editor Puczér had never thrown out of The Rubadub, although in the kitchen he had repeatedly grumbled in front of a flushed Stony Dinka:

“Are you cooking again for that windbag? Sooner or later he'll run off to America.”

When the journalist Puczér began to swagger around The Rubadub, wearing a skullcap and smoking a long-stemmed
chibouk
pipe, Pistoli at last decided to get rid of him. His decision was followed by action. He sent one of his village familiars, a red-skirted Gypsy gal, to seduce Pista Puczér in the pantry, leaving the door ajar so that Stony Dinka stumbled upon the pair at the critical moment. Her screams brought the whole bowling party running, and P.P. had to flee in partial undress toward Nyíregyháza, pursued by broom-wielding serving women.

After that Pistoli was lord of The Rubadub. But he no longer participated in bowling tourneys, in fact he hardly showed his face among the guests. Instead he sat by himself in the innermost room playing the flute, talking to wine bottles, toasting Stony Dinka (née Jolán Weiss)'s aged parents who, in the medium of sepia-tint photographs, graced the walls of this quince-scented room. These onetime furriers in the town of Szerencs had labored with unceasing diligence stitching untold numbers of lambskin vests, jackets, coats, for they had fourteen children to raise. This made him meditate about life and death, and he came alive only when the clatter of smashed plates signaled a fight among the clientele in the taproom. Then Pistoli took his iron-studded, lead-weighted bludgeon and began a god-awful thumping on his inner room's door, bellowing oaths he had learned from convicts on the chain gang. Other than that, he kept as quiet as a hospitalized invalid. Normally he would turn up at Stony Dinka's only after having been ejected from twenty other pubs, after at least a dozen women had derided him, kicked him in the forehead, deceived him, rolled him in the tar and feathers of various torments, flashed him what the village madwoman flashes at the jeering children, poured water on him from upstairs windows, and finally put him out of the house. At times like that he went to bed early, before Stony Dinka called for the last round at The Rubadub. Half asleep, he would still hear the guests bawling, only to feel infinite scorn for those good-for-nothing carousers.

“Shall I make some caraway-seed soup for you?” asked Stony Dinka when Mr. Pistoli showed up at The Rubadub and reclaimed his place in the innermost room among the embroidered tablecloths, quilt- and eiderdown-laden beds, Hebrew blessings and wardrobes stuffed with many-pleated skirts—as if he had left here only the day before (although years had gone by).

His expression mute and tragic, Pistoli stared off into space. He had pulled his hat over his eyes, clasped his
fokos
in front of himself, without even bothering to loosen his belt. He fidgeted back and forth, implying that he meant to move right on, that he had merely dropped in to see his former lover for a moment, for a quick drink, and a kiss. But this time Stony Dinka did not take him by storm, to remove his hat and boots as she had in days of old. By now the lady was forty-two years of age, and instead of bangs, she now wore her bleached hair pulled back and in a coil on top.

“If you were still a brunette, you'd look just like Queen Elisabeth. What happened to all your dark hair?” Pistoli inquired with raised eyebrows.

“Never mind about me, you old scoundrel. You tell me, where have you been, what bitch in heat have you been after, since I last saw you? In fact I've seen you passing by whenever some devil-sent business brought you to these parts, but not once did you take the pains to show your wretched mug in here.”

“Simmer down,” replied Pistoli, who was taken aback by this tearless reunion. Stony Dinka usually took him in her lap and kissed him like a child that had been lost and found.

“Watch who you're ordering around,” the woman responded. But her voice had a softer tone now, a reminiscing note, like the sound of a hurdy-gurdy far off on the highway.

Pistoli was as quick to note the change as an outlaw the rainbow. He rested his chin atop his ax-headed staff, and affixed a prolonged gaze at the Madame.

“Listen to me Jolán Weiss, I'm taking my hands off you,” he said at last after a long pause. “I don't like your behavior. I don't like the tint in your hair. And I can't stand the way your red boots creak. And what's this new soap you wash your face with? Where are those freckles I used to love so much on your face?”

“Is that why you came here, to torment me?” said Stony Dinka, suddenly overcast, her mood shifting as rapidly as the weather on an April day. “Didn't I suffer enough since you abandoned me? First my father's illness. I thought the old furrier was on his last leg. I was rending my hair by his bedside—you know I love that man more than anyone in the world. And even then in my despair I thought of you, of the long winter nights I spent talking to you about Father. If only he could still sew, if only his blessed hands could still wield the needle... Why, he could sew you a black lambskin jacket to keep you from freezing when you stray after all those floozies...In my travels I got to see the River Sajó, where I grew up. Where I was a little girl in short skirts, listening to the foxes baying at the moon rising over the reeds. And even there I had to think of you, because I remembered how meekly you listened once when I told you about that place...Then, at a relative's cellar, I drank some vintage wine. And didn't I think of you right away...If only you could have been there, drinking this special wine...And now you've come to torment me?”

Pistoli wagged his head, twisted and turned his neck. Then slowly, solemnly, he extended one leg:

“It hurts,” he said.

“I knew it!” Stony Dinka suddenly shouted. “You get wrecked elsewhere, then come here to have me treat and cure you. You want my supernatural health and vitality to restore you. Well, until now I didn't mind. But from now on I'm going to be less generous with you.”

“Well, just this one last time...” Pistoli grunted like a big bear, lifting his leg repeatedly in the air. “Anyway: ‘
kampets dolores
'—it's all over for me. My boots will soon hang from the rafters. All I ask is: make my last days beautiful.”

“Hmph, you've said that before,” a teary-eyed Stony Dinka replied, and yanked the boots off Pistoli's feet. She immediately went off to soak his foot-rags. She rousted up a ruddy-cheeked serving girl from the courtyard and promised her two quick slaps for her sloth, or some pennies if she shined the frazzled boots. Pistoli just sat there like a Turk carved of wood in front of the tobacconist's. He felt most in his element when womenfolk took advantage of his physical impotence and handled parts of his body as a midwife does a newborn babe.

“Is it your heel?” asked Stony Dinka.

“Right there.”

“Yes, that's where all those witches went and hid. So tell me, you old rascal,” murmured Stony Dinka, taking in her lap Pistoli's ailing foot, and starting to rub it with a gentle hand, “how many women's heavenly salvation have you got weighing on your conscience?”

Formerly Pistoli would have laughed at this: he would have reeled off a list of the women who went mad on his account, and spent the rest of their lives dancing or rending their hair. But now he felt as melancholy as if the end were near. His enormous intake of alcohol during the three days' bender, combined with the events recently transpired, suddenly unhinged him. He burst into such choking sobs that he could hardly catch his breath. He sobbed spasmodically, almost joyfully, copious tears easing his heart's burden, like a woman beating her forehead against the stones. Of course he could not find his handkerchief, so that, childlike, he had to reach for Stony Dinka's skirt, to wipe his tear-soaked face. There followed a few more hiccups and shooting stabs of pain, much as the rattle of a cart recedes on the highway as it carries the bride far away from her true love. At last he recovered his ability to speak:

“Stony Dinka, you're the only love I ever had in this whole wide world. Oh, if only my mother were still alive, how happy you would have made her! You've been my mother's kind of woman all your life. Your oven-baked biscuits, the leeches you applied to my side when I had pneumonia, your barbecues and your Gypsy superstitions, your smoked sausages and your downy bed, your early springtime vegetables, your life-restoring chicken soups, the unforgettable aroma of your wieners and Eastertime baked hams, your faith-healing incantations and the way you turned me over in my sleep, your nocturnal bathings, your bread-kneading, your economies, your coat-ironing, your very nature always benevolent and faithful; your desire that I should always be free of care by your side, even when business went poorly for you; the pride you took in always seeing me off rejuvenated, cleaned up, ironed out, ‘fresh from the wash' when I took my leave, even when I'd come to you straight from the gutter besmirched with blood and mud...