Kornel Esti (17 page)

“It seemed as if I was caught and that my luck had deserted me. But my superiority came to my rescue. I stood up straight and looked the guard up and down with cutting frigidity, and like one that considered it beneath his dignity to reply, turned on my heel and strode into my compartment.

“There I laid my head on my pillow. I went to sleep with the speed of a man dropping dead from a heart attack. I woke about noon to blazing sunshine. Somebody tapped at the window of my compartment. The guard came in. He advised me that I was to get of at the next station. But he didn’t move. He just stood there faithfully at my side like a dog. Once more he spoke—quietly, continuously, unstoppably. Perhaps he was offering an apology, perhaps accusing me over the painful nocturnal scene, I don’t know, but his face showed profound distress, heartbreak. I behaved coolly. I just let him pick up my bags and take them out into the corridor.

“At the last moment, however, I took pity on him. When he had given my bags to the porter and I was getting down, I glanced at him wordlessly as if to say ‘What you did wasn’t nice, but to err is human, and this once I forgive you.’ And I said in Bulgarian only, ‘Yes.’

“That word had a magical effect. The guard softened, cheered up, became his old self. A smile of gratitude stole onto his face. He saluted me, standing stif y at attention. He remained there at the window, rigid with happiness, until the train moved of and he vanished forever from my sight.”

X

In which Zsuzsika, daughter of a wealthy Bácska
^*
peasant, jumps into the well and gets married.

KORNÉL ESTI ARRIVED HOME FROM PORTUGAL. HE HAD BEEN
over to the Iberian peninsula just for a month, to have a rest. This rest had consisted of speaking exclusively to the natives during that time, and in Portuguese, the “language of flowers.”

It was late at night when he appeared at my door, dusty and travel-stained, on his way from the station. The Lisbon breeze was still on his raincoat, the gravel of the Tagus on his shoes.

He dragged me out to a bar in Buda. I thought that he was going to give me a lengthy account of his experiences on the journey, but he wasn’t disposed to talk about them. The conversation turned to affairs in Hungary, our native town, our student years, people and events of prewar days.

That night I came to know a new side of him. I admit that previously I had often thought of him as just a kind of dyspeptic international globetrotter, a half-baked literary freak. Now I saw that he was a man from head to foot, and from my part of the world. How typical of the Bácska was his every breath, his still irresponsible tomfoolery, and his breezy boastfulness. The Bácska is the Gascony of Hungary. There is a provincial quality in all eccentric behavior.

He guzzled wine. He began with Badacsony, moved on to Csopak, then turned to a heavy, perfumed golden nectar which had reached the age of thirty on the racks of the cellars of the priests of Arács.
^*
He stayed with that.

Toward dawn, when empty bottles
of kéknyelű
^†
and sundry other varieties were ranged in serried ranks on our table and we still had things to talk about, because by that time we had killed of most of our living friends and resurrected those who had died, he asked me:

“Now, do you remember little Zsuzsa? You know, Zsuzsa Szücs. The daughter of that peasant, that rich peasant. He used to live by the fire station, in a tumbledown cottage like any other peasant. But he had pots of money.

“When I was a boy I heard that he kept gold in the drawers of his chest and that he stuffed his mattresses with thousand-korona notes. How much of that was true I don’t know, but it was a fact that he was made of money. He lived like a typical cottager. He wore a blue
guba, a pörge
hat, and boots.
^‡
Smoked foul tobacco in a clay pipe, lit it with matches that made a terrible smell. In winter he would sit dozing on the bench of the
banyakemence,
wrapped in his
suba,
like a bear sleeping its winter sleep.
^§
Then when spring came he would settle down outside the house, on the wooden bench, and sit there until autumn. He didn’t say a word to anybody. Just sat in silence. Sat there as if he were sitting on his money.

“The old man was dreadfully mean. For all he cared, the whole world could rot. True, he spent money on his daughter. But she was his only child. Apart from her he had nobody. He’d buried his wife a long time before.

“Young Zsuzsa went to the convent school, learned French, and played the piano. She wore a hat, like all our girls. She was pretty and unhappy. There was no way that she could find her place in our accursed society, which had so much artifice and so many unfathomable rules and regulations that no schooling or etiquette could list them or even adequately cover the subject. If anyone spoke to her she blushed to the ears, and if anyone of ered his hand she turned pale and withdrew hers in alarm. She would smile when she should have been solemn, and vice versa. But what did that matter? Despite it all, she was gorgeous.

“You say you only saw her once or twice? She didn’t really go anywhere. She lived with her silent father and became as silent as him. For the most part she hid indoors. If she went into town she avoided people. She was permanently embarrassed. For instance, not for all the tea in China could you have got her to go into a
cukrászda
and eat a
szerecsenfánk
.
^*

“For a long time she didn’t marry. Yet she had so many suitors that she could scarcely manage to turn them down. The problem was that she didn’t know where she belonged. She looked down on peasant boys and they didn’t dare to approach her, while in the young men of the so-called gentry she saw gold diggers and in their company she was ill at ease—overcome by respectfulness and disdain together, like a sort of stage fright. Actually, do you know what it was? It was the historic stage fright of her emergent social class, which had not previously played a leading role on the stage of history, whose name wasn’t even in the program, because it had always approved or disapproved only in the background, and always anonymously.

“On Sundays she used to go to the
szagosmise
^†
  at half past eleven in the ancient Franciscan church. I saw her there several times. Oh, she was such a lovely creature! In summer she wore a white dress with a red leather belt and carried a red silk parasol through which the burning Alföld sun would filter, tinting her pale little face. She was like a lily under a Bengal light, like a posy of wild flowers, white and red, cowbane and poppies, white and red all together. Like a young noblewoman going incognito or a young duchess in disguise as a peasant. I wonder, was I in love with her too?

“Anyway, one Sunday, when the gilded youth of the town were standing in a semicircle outside the church, dangling their slender canes and brand new kid gloves, polishing their monocles in lordly fashion, and observing the ladies as they emerged, Pista Boros caught sight of her and fell fatally in love. He rushed after her and spoke to her. Zsuzsa screwed up her face in horror. But Pista went on talking. At that, Zsuzsa took her hands from her ears, began to pay attention, looked at him, and smiled—when she actually should have, for once.

“So how did Pista score that success which none of the rest of us had been able to claim? Well, you see, he was a wonderful fellow, an absolute marvel. First of all he was a handsome man, with curly hair and an aquiline nose. He dressed like Imre Lubloy, the famous actor, when he was playing a filthy rich count. Even in summer he wore spats. And then he had such an impressive natural air of culture, the kind that can’t be acquired, you have to be born with it.

“He knew everything. He knew at least a thousand Hungarian folk songs, all the words and tunes, he could handle Gypsies, give them instructions and keep them in order, check their familiarity with the flicker of an eyelid, then win their affection with a lordly, condescending, and yet fraternal-playful sidelong glance, he could call ’
‘ácsi
’
^*
perfectly, shout at the first violin when he didn’t strike up
Csendesen, csak csendesen
quietly enough and at the cimbalomist when the padded sticks didn’t make the steel strings thunder and rumble sufficiently in
Hullámzó Balaton
,
^†
  he could kiss the viola player’s pock-marked face, give the double bass a kick, break glasses and mirrors, drink wine, beer, and marc brandy for three days on end out of tumblers, smack his lips at the sight of cabbage soup and cold pork stew, take ages inspecting his cards (with relish, one eye closed), dance a quick
csárdás
for a whole half-hour, urging and driving himself on to stamp and shout and toss his partner high in the air and catch her, light as a feather, with one arm: so, as I said, he could do everything that raises Man from his animal condition and makes him truly Man.

“He could also speak Zsuzsa’s language. He’d been brought up on Csantavér puszta. He remained a peasant at heart, a son of the puszta. If he opened his mouth the people itself spoke. He was a living collection of folk poetry bound in human skin.

“Quite how he made a conquest of Zsuzsa I don’t know. As I imagine it, however, within five or six minutes he was wooing her with ‘Zsuzsika, I kiss your hands, your dear little hands, for you I’d be a sheepdog for two years.’ He must have expressed himself even more astutely, more spontaneously than that, however. Our imaginations aren’t really up to such things. But whatever the case, by the time he’d walked her home, Zsuzsa was in love with him and almost fatally.

“Things were certainly not easy for them. They could only meet after Mass on Sunday, and for a short time. The old man watched his daughter like a savage
kuvasz
. Here I must mention that there were two real savage
kuvasz
in their yard. They were let of their chains in the evening, and the moment there was a sound at the fence they would rush to the gate with eyes rolling, suffused with blood, and rouse the neighborhood with their din. It was impossible even to make signals with them around. For a while Pista was gloomy, drank, had himself serenaded. Then he decided to ask for her hand in proper form and order.

“He put on his
ferencjóska
,
^*
stuck a panama hat on his head, borrowed Tóni Vermes’s gold watch and chain, and called on the wealthy peasant. His hopes were not high. He was at the time a mere assistant notary, twenty-three years of age, and his salary was only enough to hold his importunate creditors at bay. At most he could have cited his various fine and lengthy styles of nobility, but he was aware that he would achieve little with that sort of thing.

“On that sweltering summer morning the old man had been sitting in his weed-ridden yard since early dawn, bundled up from head to foot and wearing boots and hat. He looked at Pista. But only once. He sized him up with his eye and found him a frivolous, thin, overdressed dandy—a useless scrounger unfit to be a husband. He immediately turned his head away, as if to say ‘there’s more room in the street.’ He didn’t ask him in. They stayed in the yard. He didn’t even of er him a seat. Pista sat down uninvited and spoke his piece. The old man said neither yes nor no. He said nothing. And that was a considerable difficulty. If someone opposes you, it may still be possible to talk him round him somehow. Faced with silence, everyone is powerless. Pista slunk out crestfallen. As he left he extended a hand, but the old man ignored it. He just raised an index finger—slowly, stiffy, and deliberately—to the brim of his hat.

“At that time we too lived in that weed-ridden, dusty street, obliquely opposite. Because of that I know what happened next. In actual fact, nothing happened for months, until early October. It was, I remember, a cool, clear autumn night. The full moon was so bright that one could have taken photographs or even shaved by it. It must have been almost eleven o’clock. I heard a scream followed by repeated shouts for help. Women were wailing, men shouting. Sleepers jumped out of bed. Everybody ran toward the Szücs house. By the time I got there all was quiet. Ropes and ladders lay in the yard, as did a long walnut-gathering pole. Somebody had lit a lantern. Around the well stood silent, shocked people—some bowing their heads and even kneeling—and in the middle of this dark group, dressed only in her nightgown, lay Zsuzsa, dripping wet, having been just pulled out of the well. The water had been shaken out of her and now she was just spluttering and shivering, her lips blue in the moonlight. The soaked nightgown clung to her youthful breasts. The poor girl had tried to drown herself, like Ophelia.

“She had jumped into the well. See, nature will out. It had been no good Zsuzsa’s going to the convent school, no good her knowing La Fontaine’s fable about the ant and the cricket in the original French, no good her practising a few of the simpler finger exercises from Köhler’s piano tutor; at the decisive crux in her life she had yielded to the murky instinct and grim traditions of her ancestors and had done what so many peasant girls and women had done over the centuries, women who had conceived of suicide only as taking death into their arms one night in the icy water of a well among moss-green bricks and toads.

“Her father was standing a little apart from the group, wringing his hands. This even he had understood. If a girl jumps into the well, she loves somebody. That was a clear, meaningful, plain statement. There could be no argument about it. Nor did he raise further objections. He immediately gave his consent to the marriage, opened his heart and—in wondrous fashion—his purse too. He gave his daughter as a dowry forty crisp thousand-korona notes. Pista led her to the altar before Christmas.

“Now then. After this incident the old man began to waste away; he shrank to a shadow of his former self. He suddenly went to pieces. People thought that he would kick the bucket. What’s that? No, you’re wrong. Of course he hadn’t gone mad because she’d jumped into the well. He wasn’t even very upset that Zsuzsa’d left him alone in his old age. It was the money that upset him, that heap of money, those forty thousand-korona notes out of which—he himself couldn’t understand how—he’d been diddled. That he never forgave.

“So he vanished from public view, was no more to be seen even on the wooden bench in the street. He huddled in his earth-floored room in boots and hat, stick in hand, like any peasant waiting for a train in the third-class waiting room. He jabbed at the floor with the tip of his stick and spat. By evening he had spat a whole nice little puddle. A man who spits is thinking. I grant you that Immanuel Kant didn’t do his thinking quite like that when he was writing the
Critique of Pure Reason
. But we all have our ways. With old Szücs, spitting always meant intense contemplation. He was contemplating his son-in-law, that good-for-nothing gold digger, who had so craftily trapped and robbed him.

“Pista, however, was not a gold digger. He would have married that girl without the forty thousand just the same, without a thing to her name, in the nightgown in which she’d jumped down the well. He loved little Zsuzsa, and grew to love her even more. I’ve never seen a husband so worship his wife. He didn’t swear a vow to himself or to her, but from that day on he was dead as far as the world of debauchery was concerned; he stopped drinking and playing cards. He was just tied to her apron strings. He hid her away in his bachelor flat, which is where they moved to, and didn’t rent anywhere else. They put their money in the bank. All they bought was a gig, in which they drove about. In the evening they strolled hand in hand in the deserted streets. If ever there was a love match, this was it.