Sunflower (8 page)

Mr. Burman's temples flushed red.

When the third warning arrived, Paul Burman stood tall as a poplar, clenched his fists and vowed that he would no longer suffer being made a fool of. He stealthily followed his spouse the next time she set out on a jaunt to the Üröm chapel. There he managed to catch Eveline in flagrante with a tomcat-whiskered officer of the cuirassiers who knelt as worshipfully in front of her as if she had been a holy icon untouched by human hands.

“You poor jackass,” shouted Mr. Burman and spat in Eveline's face.

“I hope you'll avenge this,” screamed Eveline, her eyes flashing, and indeed the honest cuirassier had no alternative but to challenge Mr. Burman to a duel.

The combat that ensued resulted in Mr. Burman's unnecessary death. In a wooded corner of the city park, perhaps the very same place where the Colonel's blood had spilled on the fallen leaves, Mr. Paul Burman dropped face first, the cuirassier's bullet in the middle of his forehead. It must be noted that this austere civil servant behaved most calmly before the duel, and stated in front of his seconds more than once that were he to die in the duel, he would consider his death as absolution, for his sad end would serve as a memorial to all husbands who, in spite of being deceived by their wives, still leave an exemplary last will and testament.

He left everything to Eveline, who had asked his forgiveness on the final night, confessing that she herself had written the anonymous notes because she had started to doubt her husband's love for her. She announced that she had always loved him, and him alone, just like a plant loves the soil it grows in. Thus she consoled and prepared him for death, giving much pleasure and gratification in the process.

And so, at the age of thirty, Eveline became Ákos Álmos-Dreamer's fourth wife.

All we know about Ákos Álmos-Dreamer, the father of our Andor, is that he was an even-tempered, phlegmatic village gentleman who enjoyed sound sleep and digestion, a man who had buried his three former wives without undue emotional distress. From each woman's trousseau and belongings he selected the useable items—clothes, shoes, furs, shirts—and carefully saved them for the next. For his fourth wife he did not bother to remake the marriage bed in which the previous one had expired in particularly agonizing circumstances. The ill-fated woman had swallowed poison, and the assembled midwives and medicine women did everything in their power to remove the ingested substance from her stomach. Repulsive traces of the sickness were still evident in the bedroom when Ákos Álmos-Dreamer brought the pampered Eveline from the capital down to his rustic mansion. Eveline immediately fainted upon arrival.

“My poor ex-wife,” murmured Ákos, “her passing was definitely not for the weak of heart. Well, it's up to you now to put the place in order.”

As it turned out, Eveline would even put up with the occasional beating, as long as she could amply console herself with vagabonds, peasants, and itinerant musicians. She routinely told her husband about all her affairs. Ákos Álmos-Dreamer roared like a lion, and with each passing day his love for his wife grew stronger. It was an aging man's desperate, sleepless passion.

Ákos Álmos-Dreamer suffered the torments of a woodcock winged by a poacher. He was the unhappiest man in the entire windy Nyírség—The Birches—a region wrapped in dreamy veils of mist. Men laughed at him and women scorned him; no one pitied him except his court jester, a failed student who in all likelihood had assisted at the former wives' burials. Older folk still recalled one subprefect of the county, a certain Krucsay, who had his faithless wife beheaded. They called Álmos-Dreamer spineless; in his defense, his well-wishers cited the old saw, “hoary-headed groom, fiery young bride.” Others opined that the old milquetoast ought to be horsewhipped out of the county. And so he took his shame into hiding, out on the remote Tisza island where Álmos-Dreamers have lived ever since, as if ashamed of a mother's misbehaving. But Ákos kissed his wife's hand for following him into exile and solitude.

What happened now to this robust, strapping man who used to laugh at women who shed tears for him? What changed this aloof man, so miserly with his words, kisses and caresses, who only once in a blue moon condescended to acknowledge a woman's loving stratagem or her artful attempt to please? His giant frame became broken and bent as a gatepost that has outlived its use. His bloodshot eyes watched over his wife's healthy, deep slumber; he savored each tender little moan, murmur and sigh that escaped during her sleep, and absorbed them into his heart. He would have loved to hear her call out lovers' names in her dream, so that he could have those men instantly assassinated, or at least beaten up, tarred and feathered, banished forever. But this woman playacted in her sleep like a born actress. She cooed and giggled, mumbling Ákos's name in a faint voice. She hugged a pillow as if it were her lover's muscular neck, her promise-laden mouth shaped into a kiss, as if she were wooing a swaddled infant or a gingerbread hussar. Her breathing was sheer music, like the delicate notes from a small wooden box lightening up one of those grim old Magyar dining rooms with silvery Viennese waltzes. Ineffable delights emanated from her neck, her shoulders, her full calves and thighs. Precious, savory love, sweet as ripe pears, love that has no need to conjure with closed eyes shapes of other women in place of this one, no need for furtive thoughts recalling memories of dear distant loves, like a retired guardsman licking his chops on recollections of the beauteous queen he had served in the days of his youth. Even Eveline's little toes radiated a love that is full recompense for all earthly woes. There was pleasure in her hair, in those fresh honey-blonde curls on the nape of her neck. For one of those locks in days of yore noble knights would have gladly returned from the most distant crusades in the Holy Land. Her shoulder alone was worth a kingdom. For one of her kisses, one of her embraces, a man would have willingly placed his neck on the chopping block, for possession of this exquisite woman meant knowing all of life's secrets and mysteries.

And so Ákos Álmos-Dreamer, contemplating Eveline's sleeping snow-white and tawny body, began to understand the Colonel and Mr. Burman, who had died for her sake. Ah yes, he, too, would gladly give his life if only Eveline forgave him the coarse, rude and unfeeling welcome he had contrived on her arrival at his house. But Eveline did not forget, did not relent, merely laughed at his threats, calmly faced the barrel of the shotgun he pointed at her, and simply shrugged off threats of deadly violence. She was not moved by Ákos Álmos-Dreamer on his knees, nor by his bitter sobs. Instead, she kicked like a mare attacked by wolves.

Ákos Álmos-Dreamer therefore ended up spending his nights alone, flanked by two candles in that great, grim hall that has ever since accommodated the occupant's gloomier moods. The torments caused by this remarkable woman were easier to suffer when she was not in sight. He read the French Encyclopaedists, the history of England, and
Fanny's Posthumous Papers
. These tomes still remain as he left them, the pages folded where the suffering man stopped reading. He fondled the loaded pistol and spent hours staring at the barrel. Later—during the second winter—he started to drink. At first, it was humble local wines that produced a light-headedness resembling early autumn's feathery clouds, with undercurrents of melancholy like mist floating above a thinning stand of gorse. Later came the gold inlay of Tokay vintages that buried life's unbearable torments within the triple coffins of Attila's funeral—and this made him see ghosts. He turned into a well-known Hungarian type: the village squire who is drunk day and night.

And so Ákos Álmos-Dreamer lived a life as melancholy as the jack of spades. He could never forget his wife's past. The many men who had figured in her life now stood like waxworks figures in the corners of the dour hall where Mr. Ákos doused with wine the fires of his body, the headless dragon thrashing in his soul.

He was stumped; he could not find the secret of winning his wife's love, even though in his time, in the salad days of his dashing, nonchalant, resilient youth, when rain and snow and frost had been no obstacle, he had made a whole slew of women cry. Yes, he had kicked about their hearts, trampled upon their fragile innocence. Enjoying women's gracious favors, he cavorted like a deaf hog in a field of corn, as the saying goes. He got tired of their embraces, their natural desires, their sonnet voices, their miseries. He would give his mustache a twirl, and one glance from him was enough to penetrate to the core of many a female's fancy, although these white-stockinged village women lived in daily fear of damnation and hellfire. When he spoke, his voice went straight to the heart. His caresses were like rare silk. Those passionate kisses of his, impossible to forget. And now every night he strode, bent, aimless and totally disillusioned, back and forth past the portrait of Eveline he had had an itinerant artist paint on the sly—for the woman was so determined not to serve him she refused to pose for her portrait in oils. And he moaned and groaned like an epileptic:

“Why can't you love me, my wife, my sweet angel?”

He paced under that framed face like a moon-sick child until one night it spoke up—the portrait did, or else its original had slithered into the room full of wine fumes:

“I'll love you when you're ready to die for me,” the voice cooed in answer to Ákos Álmos-Dreamer's laments.

Subsequent nights advised Álmos-Dreamer about how to execute his suicide.

The island that sheltered from men's eyes his beloved wife (like stolen treasure) was surrounded by the Tisza floodlands. In the distance lay The Birches, monotonous sandy hills barren of all thought, darkling furze thickets asleep on the horizon like so many trembling widows, the wild geese departing from this region under night's dark tapestry like fleeing spirits honking their farewells in weird voices from the sad heights, as if summoning every unhappy person below.

“Ghee-gaw!” cry these enigmatic birds of other worlds and other shores.

That's what these voices sound like to the marshdwelling fisherman in his lair, but one who loves life's wonders will find all sorts of meaning in the voices emanating from the dark. Ákos Álmos-Dreamer awaited the wild geese to summon him into the blue yonder. He would depart from here like a drenched, dark, frost-winged wild goose and go far, far away... And once the gander is gone from the nest the female, too, would follow on the mysterious highways of the heavens. At sunrise, when it is still too dark, in high altitudes' golden oceans the bird would swim after her mate, just like a sad, worry-worn swan.

“Ghee-gaw!” comes from the other world Lord Álmos-Dreamer's cry, and Eveline, humbling herself, would obediently follow in his wake to the land of dreams.

Spring was on the way, the Tisza region full of witching vapors and miasmic exhalations. Sir Álmos-Dreamer spent a moonlit night in the boggy fen, with a clear view of the ladder stretching up on which souls like tiny dust motes climbed toward milky heaven. The spring night sparkled miraculously above the toady clods of earth. Fogs, mists, and plumes of fume floated up toward the heights like bygone beauties' curves on dallying display for the moonbeam's benefit. Now the water snake sheds its old skin, fish and lizards borrow their brightness from the moon and ancient, mute waterfowl vow eternal silence. The earth below splits open like a bivalve, and mysterious night betroths the seedling never yet seen by human eyes.

The time was here for Sir Ákos Álmos-Dreamer's tragic demise.

Swamp fever, on the Tisza island, stole snakelike into his indestructible system, slithered down his throat and through his eyes like poison fumes, terminally deranging an already unbalanced psyche. His case baffled doctors: the so-called malaria, like most other Indian diseases, usually treated with quinine, took the form of delirium in Mr. Ákos Álmos-Dreamer. His actions, at least, indicate that the tragic gentleman went mad in his insular solitude.

One May night, after prolonged staring at a rufous moon that appeared to squat on the marsh's edge, coming down on the furze thickets like visiting royalty among rustic wenches, the thought ripened: he must end his tortured existence. But first...

With the stealth of the insane he approached Eveline's bedroom. That merciless lady always bolted the oaken door for the night, although her husband had quoted the Bible to her to prove she had no right to do so. Eveline looked away and shrugged. Who cares about the Bible?

But on this night, as if she had had a premonition (the way her little finger could sense changes in the weather), this extraordinary woman left the door ajar, and woke from a deep slumber to a heavy hand on the nape of her neck, a trembling, joyously quivering palm cleaving to the mound, not unlike the mons veneris, found in buxom women below their neck vertebrae and from where miraculous cables and telegraph wires signal the nuptial moment. An ancient minstrel song already calls the nape the most desirable and most vulnerable bastion of that splendid castle known as the female physique. Eveline had a neck equally suited to the necklace and the noose. Beauteous feminine necks, as self-possessed as if they led their own swanlike existence, and seemingly without the brain's overlordship, execute their fairylike motions; they see and hear, speak, rise and humbly, submissively bend—such necks have been known to send the brains of many a man into his bootlegs.

Eveline suffered the caresses only until her dream had flown out the window. When the bird was gone, she hissed a question:

“Why did you wake me?”

“Why indeed...” mused Mr. Álmos-Dreamer. “Because I want to say good-bye to you, my dear wife, my darling.”

“Is that why you woke me?”

Mr. Álmos-Dreamer sadly nodded like a wanderer stranded in the night:

“That's right, my child. I shall be leaving life in an hour. Like a runaway cat, the movements of my hands and feet are abandoning me as I descend on slippery steps down to the icehouse and the door slams behind. I want this last hour of my life to be happy. Not to think, not to dread, not to quake, not to recoil from invisible blows...For one hour, eyes open or closed: to sense and see only you, oh ecstasy, whose chalice I never drank from.”