Sunflower (6 page)

At last the roosters began to crow.

And night shatters like a worn-out curse. At the call of that crazy bird, the sluggish, motionless curtain of darkness begins to stir. Other sounds filter from the far distances. Perhaps it is the wild geese passing high overhead, following their obscure paths, obeying a mysterious command to cross night's vast gulf like wandering souls conversing in otherworldly tongues.

But cock's crow signals the arrival of those never-glimpsed vagabonds who stand stock still under your window in the dead of night, with murder in their hearts, guilt and terror in their eyes. Come morning, they regain their original shapes and turn into solitary trees at crossroads or hat-waving, curly-haired young travelers with small knapsacks and large staffs, humming a merry tune and marching bright-eyed toward distant lands to bring glad tidings, fun and games, new songs and youthful flaring passions to small houses that somnolently await them. There they sit down at the kitchen table, earn their dinner by telling glorious tall tales, help pour the wine, chop the wood, nab the fattened pig by the ear; they also repair the grandfather clock that had not chimed in forty years and leave in the middle of the night, taking along the young miss's heart as well as her innocence. How enviably cheerful the lives of these vagabonds who pass your house at cock's crow after a night of sleeplessness...As if their knee-deep pockets contained some seed they drop in front of the window, to sprout into a yellow-crowned sunflower; no sooner are they gone than it is already tall enough to peek through the window pane. While, inside, the young lady of the house is already fast asleep, like Aladdin in the enchanted cave.

In the daytime Eveline dared not think of the night. Like a good child or an old-fashioned bride, she preferred to listen to tales told by Mr. Álmos-Dreamer who, being the village beau that he was, in order to keep the thread of conversation going, surely must have conned a page or two in some antique tome before leaving his island.

Mr. Álmos-Dreamer brought into the house a fresh winter scent that smacked of plain everyday life and prompted one to quickly confess everything—sins, diseases, meanness, weakness, desperation and bitterness—and rapidly reel off one thing after the other, to be absolved as quickly as possible, so that refreshed, reformed and bathed clean, one might turn a new leaf, and launch upon a carefree, openly selfish, relaxed and ordinary life. It meant leaving behind forever the curses of civilized life, its soulless pleasures, exotic agonies and neurotic dances. It meant pulling on a pair of peasant boots, biting into a garlic sausage, and joining the washerwomen on the frozen river by the hole cut into the ice; it meant lugging grimy little kids in a knapsack on one's back. It meant eating plenty and squatting on the snow like the nomadic Gypsy women who can run like gazelles, and give birth and die in birch groves, where crows congregate.

Eveline was petite, with black hair. She loved the color red. To amuse herself at home she dressed as a Gypsy girl, and told Mademoiselle Montmorency's fortune: she predicted the wilting old maid would have ten children.

One fine
day Mr. Álmos-Dreamer up and died.

He did this every year after spending some time in Miss Eveline's company, at times when love, the torments of lone wolves and the howling winds assailed him. At times like these, he started to play the violin in the house on this island frequented by the wind and storm-tossed birds. At such times his servant boy, with his brass buttons, shabby white gloves and antique spats, would retreat into a cubbyhole. Mr. Álmos-Dreamer played the violin from dusk to dawn in front of his lectern like an officer in Queen Maria Theresa's bodyguard preparing for a duel to the death. He played old melodies from a score on which the writer's hand had doodled roses and ladies' faces. French chansons: grandmothers' reveries. German student songs: souvenirs of Hungarian gentlemen traveling abroad. Viennese waltzes: the light-hearted, floppy perukes of forefathers. Compositions by Lavotta and Czerny: fantasies of musicians returned to their homeland to muse over the aimlessness of life.

While making music, Álmos-Dreamer neither ate nor drank. He sat wearing a black tailcoat, white vest and lacquered pumps. His face as serene as an autumn landscape, his eyes brooding over dry fallen leaves, his lips proudly pressed together—all this was no mere histrionics. He was in truth a specimen of the dreamy, retiring and scornful Hungarian country gentleman who asks nothing more of the world than a nook from where all obnoxious climbers are banished. A place where life's business may be conducted with the occasional small gesture or barely audible word. Such behavior would be called depressed by some people, yet it is in fact a splendid human trait, this regal disdain.

He liked to call these hours “withdrawing from life.”

He did not have to go far, in his solitude, to arrive at his goal. The house, built on this remote island wilderness by an eccentric ancestor to escape the “yellow peril” that would one day overrun Hungary and all of Europe, was a natural home to death and extinction. Around this household there could be no lust for life, for life was a succession of monotonous, idle days, its sole purpose, a preparation for extinction. The gutter hung from the roof, slowly dying like a superannuated watchdog. There were chairs that limped like grandfather himself. The cupboard had a vertiginous stance, prone to fainting spells like a fat old lady. The lamps gave a tired light, the walls were crumbling, windowpanes cracked without being touched, the carpets shed knots like hair falling from a head and the chimney emitted laborious puffs of smoke, as if tired of life. Everyone and everything was getting ready to leave the place like rovers at a tavern when the wine gets tiresome after the dreams of ecstasy wear thin. The portraits on the wall, once viewed with such youthful pride, had yellowed to the point of unrecognizability. The ideals carried in the heart, the colorful chords, solitary caterwaulings and songs hummed by one's lonesome self had all turned into a meditation unrolled like some rare, treasured rug in the quiet hours around midnight. The wisdom of books, the dust of sunsets, the puppylike energy of the morning hours, had all faded away like the used-up toys of childhood.

Such reclusiveness, if intruded upon, comes charging out of its cave brandishing a club, like a hermit aroused from his dreams. One's mood reaches the freezing point, and becomes bearish, like a black cloud over the woods. At night the wind howls like some terrible hellhound immune to ordinary bullets. The furniture, as a rule so obedient, now turns obtrusive so that the room's inhabitant bumps knees and elbows against fiendishly protruding edges. The mirror's reflection grows faint, or perhaps the face itself does, taking on an acrid, fastidious look like that of a cobwebbed old daguerreotype set by sentimental hands on a headstone. In the pupil of the eye tiny, swimming dots appear: they are rowboats steered by melancholy boatmen conveying luggage and traveler—departing life—from the shore to the vast old bark awaiting.

At times like these the quiet man opted to die.

By way of the violin's melodies he took his leave of all that was pleasing and dear to him. Friendly faces cropped up in the hedgerows of miniscule black musical notes. Green mansions, porches wreathed in wild grape, stretching greyhounds, loud, friendly greetings, merry eyes and fancy bow ties. Men, companions who raised their glasses in a toast to homeland or womanhood. White table linen, cool arbors, fine, lingering autumns, frost-nipped leaves, orchard scents and places where he had been happy without being aware of his happiness. Years that yawned leisurely, poplar-bordered walking paths, rippling waterways, playfully curling chimney smoke, distant creaking of the well windlass, brown gateways and bedsteads that promised wonderful, untroubled dreams. The odor of fur on a winter's journey, a tavern room redolent with marjoram, a lady's name traced on a frosty windowpane, and a lingering pause over a small footprint in the freshly fallen snow. Women, glowing white under Christmas trees, indolent women whose soft flesh was made for embraces, romantic girls who tied their garters with fancy ribbons, reddish streaks in blonde hair and rings on slender fingers whose touch meant happiness once upon a time. Prayerbooks full of devotions, crucifixes at crossroads, high masses complete with kettledrum celebrated in childhood, playful strolls on the castle hill, girls with firm calves, and tiny earlobes that he could no longer place. Illnesses that were so good to recover from, convalescence like a breath of spring air, the buzz of the alarm clock signaling frozen dawns that smelled of the crypt, the coachmen's ample capes exuding the scents of the road, and the mysterious bearing of the lady who happens to be your fellow passenger. Memorable hounds and majestic trees in the corner of a courtyard, strange old men, red autumnal twilights, birds' cries and storytelling old women...All of life swept by during the violin's play. Now Mr. Álmos-Dreamer was ready to die. He sat in the armchair, wrapped a rosary around his hand, closed his eyes and expired, for that was what he wanted.

His servant boy rode off posthaste to relay the news to Miss Eveline.

She put on her fur-trimmed skirt and boots, called for her sled and drove off across the frozen Tisza taking along only two large hounds.

The Álmos-Dreamers died for women. These dreamers, loiterers on bridges, strollers under shaggy-browed weeping willows, musers on solitary dark benches surrounded by the burgundy red tones of autumn: by now all of them painted in oil and vermilion, and hanging on the walls of this ramshackle old island domicile, the mansard roof so thickly layered by moss that storks landed there as in a meadow. All of the portraits showed Andor Álmos-Dreamer's thin face as if every member of the family had been born into this world half- heartedly, tentatively, and always one-fourth obscured by shadow. Their true and majestic form had remained over there, in that netherworld, the solemn appendages of a headless, taciturn knight. Only their feminine aspect arrived in this world, like a white flower handed through an open window. Here they were, all of them, holding the wake over their dead impassively, without batting an eyelash. Over the past century every male in the family had ended his life with his own hand. Serene and resolved, having said their benisons and devised complicated last wills, they died premeditated, ritualistic deaths, for the same cause: the love of a woman.

They were called the crazy Álmos-Dreamers.

Once upon a time the family had possessed extensive holdings in the Uplands of Northern Hungary; these were probably not acquired in notably delicate ways. For centuries the Álmos-Dreamers had stalked wealthy widows, moneyed elderly women and females with prized dowries, pretty much the way they hunted the rarer kinds of egret in the marshy reeds of the Tisza.

That was back in the family's heyday.

As a result, they acquired historical ruins; forts, forests and castles. Women's curses, the shrieks of imprisoned spouses, the sad and vengeful shades of wives dispatched to the other shore haunted the Álmos-Dreamers. Back in those days women were given short shrift. Wild orgies, spilled ecstasies, virgins' red blood, the mad rage of frenzied hunting parties drugged and lulled the pangs of conscience. Most of the ghosts in today's castles had originated in those times. What else was left for these poor women? They would return from the other world, shrouded in white, to put the fear of God in their grandchildren. Ghosts are no mere figments of the popular imagination, cropping up like sempervivum on a stone wall. Curses turned into an owl's hoot, echoing crypts and mysterious moonlit forests loom in the remote history of many a Hungarian family. It was not unusual for one of these brutally powerful men to wear out three or four women in one lifetime. Men in their old age married as lightheartedly as the young. They would abduct their women if necessary. Their rivals' blood dripped from the steps of the wedding altar, and terrorized, violated brides covered their eyes in shame. The daggers were always close at hand, ready to be dipped into someone's heart. Old family histories all resemble each other. When the men were off on a crusade, the women were happiest, rocking the cradle by themselves. They could choose their own lovers.

After all this violence there came a turn in the history of the Álmos-Dreamer family.

One day they abducted a blonde witch whose blue eyes flashed with all the colors of a mountain stream. She was as supple as a silvery birch in springtime. And like tumbleweed, she clung to men. She spoke the language of grasses, old trees and crossroads. She could make herself understood to beasts. The windmill's blades stopped when she blew at them.

The name of this witch was Eveline.

Eveline managed to keep in line the men in a family where women had as a rule been locked away into caskets like old silver. Ákos Álmos-Dreamer, father of the newly-dead Andor, had unsuspectingly married her in the 1840s. He became the third husband of a woman widowed first by a colonel then by a high-ranking government official.

Eveline's former husbands met identical fates on the dueling ground; in those days this was a legitimate exit for men. The Colonel's heart was pierced by an épée, after an excruciating fit of jealousy inspired him to challenge an itinerant Frenchman whose only known occupation was kibitzing at the faro table and fleecing tipsy swine dealers playing billiards at the Turkish Sultan. This dubious foreigner had eyes for a Parisian dancer who happened to be a guest artist at the National Theatre. In the evenings he would leave the gambling casino to stand like a statue with arms crossed during performances, as it happens, just below the box reserved, on alternate days, by Colonel Sükray. The dancer appeared as an entr'acte between the second and third acts when she hovered, fairylike, over the stage, performing a dance of her own choreography, with superhuman grace.

“Madame, I adore you,” sighed the statue beneath the railing of Colonel Sükray's box, and, doing so, he happened to fix on the Colonel's wife the blazing torch of his eyes—eyes that were actually bestowed upon him by the Creator for the express purpose of keeping tabs on the legerdemain of one Buzinkai (a notorious local cardsharp) so that in the case of a successful deception he should imperceptibly yet significantly tap the gambler's shoulder.