All that, however, I instantly forgot and forgave on that windy spring day when I decided to call on him.
That was a mad day. Not the first of April, but not far off. A mad, excited day. In the morning there was a frost, with mirrors of ice crackling on the iron gratings round the trees and the sky a bright blue. Then a thaw set in. Water dripped from the eaves. Mist spread over the hills. A lukewarm drizzle fell. The earth steamed like an overdriven, sweating horse. We had to throw off our winter coats. A rainbow hung its gaudy arc above the Danube. In the afternoon hail fell. It frosted the trees and squashed into slush beneath our feet. The wind whistled. Whistled keenly. Whistled up on high, round the chimneys, on the roofs of houses, in the telephone wires—everything was in motion. Houses groaned, attics creaked, beams sighed, wanting to put out buds, because they too had been trees. In that starting, that revolution, in came spring.
I listened to the whistling of the wind and remembered Kornél. I felt an irresistible desire to see him as soon as I could.
I telephoned here and there, to coffeehouses, nightclubs. By late evening all that I had been able to discover was that he was in Hungary. I tracked him on foot and in the car. At two in the morning I learned that he was staying at the Denevér Hotel. By the time I reached it a Russian blizzard was raging around me, and the collar of my raincoat was filled with its frothy flakes.
The porter at the Denevér directed me to room 7 on the fifth floor. I climbed a narrow spiral staircase, as there was no elevator. The door of room 7 was ajar. Inside the light was on. I went in.
I saw an empty bed, the blankets thrown back in a heap, and a feeble electric light on the nightstand. I thought that he’d popped out somewhere. I sat down on the sofa to wait for him.
But then I noticed that he was there, opposite me, sitting in front of the mirror. I jumped up. He did too.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” said he immediately, as if he wanted to pick up just where we had left off.
He wasn’t at all surprised at my bursting in so late. He wasn’t surprised at anything. He didn’t even ask what I wanted.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Very well, thank you. And you?”
“Likewise,” he replied.
He stared at me and laughed.
He was wearing a raincoat. There was snow on his collar too.
“Just got in?”
“Yes,” he nodded.
I looked round the room. It was a dingy hole. A narrow, dilapidated sofa, two chairs, a cupboard, a five-day-old newspaper on the table, a bunch of wilting violets. A mask, too, goodness knows what for. Cigarette butts on the floor, yellow spectacles and quince jelly in the violin case, open suitcases. A few books, mostly timetables. No pen or paper to be seen. Where he worked was a mystery.
My father had been right. He hadn’t amounted to anything. Here there was nothing but the poverty of a hermit, the liberty and independence of a beggar. I had wanted that sort of thing at one time. My eyes filled with tears.
“What’s new?” he inquired.
Outside the wind was howling. The cutting spring wind whistled shrilly. A siren too was wailing.
“Ambulance,” he said.
We went to the window. The blizzard had stopped. The sky shone crystal clear, as did the frosty roadway. The ambulance siren shrieked in competition with the spring wind.
Scarcely had it passed when a fire engine roared past to somewhere, its light flashing.
“Accidents,” I said. “All day long bricks have been falling, shop-signs crashing down on the heads of passersby. People have been slipping and falling on the icy sidewalks, hurting their hands, spraining their ankles, bleeding. Houses and factories have been catching fire. All sorts of things have been happening today. Frost, heat, mist, sunshine, rain, rainbow, snow, blood, and fire. It’s spring.”
We sat down and lit cigarettes.
“Kornél,” I broke the silence, “aren’t you angry?”
“Me?” and he shrugged. “Idiot! I can never be angry with you.”
“But you’d have good reason. Look, I was angry with you. I was embarrassed by you in front of people that mattered, I’ve had to get on, I’ve denied you. Haven’t even looked in your direction for ten years. But this afternoon, when the wind whistled, I thought of you and felt remorse. I’m not young any more. I turned forty last week. When you’re not young, you mellow and you can forgive everything. Even youth. Let’s make up.”
I stretched out a hand.
“Oh, you haven’t changed,” he scoffed. “Always so sentimental.”
“But you have, Kornél. When we were children you were the grownup, you were the leader, you opened my eyes. Now you’re the child.”
“Aren’t they both the same?”
“That’s what I like about you. That’s why I’ve come back, and now I’m going to put up with you forever.”
“What’s the matter with you today, that you’re saying such nice things about me?”
“Well, who else am I to say nice things about, Kornél? Who is there but you that I could love and not feel jealous of? Whom can I admire in this round world if not you, my brother and my opposite? Identical in everything and different in everything. I’ve gathered, you’ve thrown away, I’ve gotten married, you’ve stayed a bachelor, I worship my people, my language, I can only live and breathe here in Hungary, but you travel the world, fly above nations, in freedom, shrieking ever lasting revolt. I need you. I’m empty and bored without you. Help me, otherwise I’ll die.”
“I could do with somebody as well,” he said, “a pillar, a handrail, because look, I’m going to pieces,” and he gestured at the room.
“Let’s stick together,” I suggested. “Let’s make a deal.”
“To do what?”
“Let’s write something, together.”
He opened his eyes wide. Spat his cigarette onto the floor.
“I can’t write anymore,” he said.
“But it’s all I can do,” I said.
“Oh really,” he replied, and gave me a hard look.
“Don’t misunderstand me, Kornél. I’m not showing of , only complaining, like you. Make me whole again, like you used to. In those days, when I was asleep you were awake, when I cried you laughed. Help me now too—remember the things I forget, and forget what I remember. I’m worth something as well. Everything I know will be at your disposal. I’ve got a home, everything there helps my work, and it will help yours too. I work hard, I’m devout and loyal. So loyal that I can’t upset anyone with whom I’ve exchanged a single word, not even in my mind. I’m so loyal, Kornél, that because of my old dog I won’t even pet other dogs, or play with them, or even look at them. Even to inanimate objects—sometimes I ignore my fifteen excellent fountain pens and bring out a worn-out, scratchy pen which it’s torture to write with, and scratch away so as to cheer it up, poor thing, and prevent it from feeling unwanted. I’m loyalty incarnate. You’ll be disloyalty, instability, at my side. Let’s start a business partnership. What can a poet achieve without anyone? What can anyone achieve without a poet? Let’s be joint authors. One man isn’t enough to write and live at the same time. Those who’ve tried it have all broken down sooner or later. Only Goethe could do it, that calm, cheerful immortal; when I think of him a shiver runs down my spine, because there’s never been a cleverer and more fearsome man, that splendid, Olympian monster, beside whom even Mephistopheles is a worthless snob. Yes, he forgave and saved Margaret, whom the earthly judges had imprisoned, and took the mother who had killed her child to heaven among the archangels and learned men of the faith, and made hidden choirs sing his eternal defense of womanhood and motherhood. A few years later, though, when he sat as a magistrate in Weimar and had to pass judgment on a similar infanticide mother, Margaret’s former champion condemned the girl to death without batting an eyelid.”
“So he sent her to heaven too,” muttered Kornél. “He acted consistently.”
“Quite,�
� I retorted. “Only neither of us would be capable of such vicious and divine wisdom. But if we joined forces, Kornél, we might perhaps get somewhere near it. Like Night and Day, Reality and Imag ination, Ahriman and Ormuzd. What do you say?”
“The trouble is,” he complained, “I get bored, bored beyond words with letters and sentences. You scribble away and in the end you see that the same words keep repeating themselves. It’s all no, but, that, rather, therefore. It’s infuriating.”
“I’ll see to that. All you need to do is talk.”
“I’ll only be able to talk about myself. About what’s happened to me. And what has happened? Just a minute. Nothing really. Hardly anything happens to most people. But I’ve imagined a lot. That’s part of our lives too. The truth isn’t just that we’ve kissed a woman, but also that we’ve secretly lusted after her, wanted to kiss her. Often the actual woman’s the lie and the lust is the truth. A dream is also reality. If I dream that I’ve been to Egypt, I can write an account of the journey.”
“So will it be a travelogue?” I joked, “or a biography?”
“Neither.”
“A novel?”
“God forbid! All novels begin: ‘A young man was going along a dark street, with his collar turned up.’ Then it turns out that the man with the turned-up collar’s the hero of the novel. Working up interest. Dreadful.”
“What, then?”
“All three in one. A travelogue—I’ll say where I would have liked to go—and a biography in the form of a novel: I’ll give details of how often the hero died in my dream. But one thing I insist on—don’t glue it all together with an idiotic story. Everything must be exactly what you’d expect from a poet: fragments.”
We agreed to meet more often in future, in the Torpedo or the Vitriol. If the worst came to the worst, on the telephone.
He walked me to the door.
“Oh,” in the corridor he slapped his forehead. “Something I forgot. What about the style?”
“We’ll be writing together.”
“But our styles are poles apart. You’ve recently been favoring calm, simplicity, classical images. Not much decoration, not many words. My style, on the other hand, is still restless, untidy, congested, ornate, racy. I’m an incurable romantic. Lots of epithets, lots of images. I won’t let you cut that out.”
“Tell you what,” I reassured him. “Let’s meet in the middle. I’ll take down what you say in shorthand, then erase some of it.”
“In what proportion?”
“Five out of ten of your images will stay.”
“And fifty out of a hundred of my epithets,” added Kornél. “That’ll do.”
He slapped my hand. It was a deal. He leaned on his elbows over the banister as I went down the spiral stairs.
No sooner had I reached the bottom than I thought of something.
“Kornél!” I called up, “Who’s going to put his name to our book?”
“Doesn’t matter!” he called down. “Perhaps you’d better. You put your name to it. And my name can be the title. The title’s in bigger letters.”
He kept his word marvelously. For a year we met once or twice a month, and he always brought some new experience or novel-chapter from his life. In between, he’d just go away for a few days. I put his tales on paper partly from my shorthand notes, partly from memory, and put them in the order he wanted. That’s how this book came to be written.
II
In which, on September 1, 1891, he goes to the Red Ox and there becomes acquainted with human society
IT WAS THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER, EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND ninety-one.
At seven in the morning, in the modest apartment overlooking the courtyard, his mother opened the door to the longish room where her three children slept—he, his younger brother, and his sister.
She tiptoed to the mosquito-netted bed, unfastened the rod that held the bracken-festooned net, and gently touched the forehead of her eldest, six-year-old son to wake him. Today was to be his first day at school.
He opened his eyes immediately. His mother’s blue eyes were sparkling right above him. She smiled.
He was a skinny, anemic little boy, with transparent ears. He was still feeling the effects of his last serious illness, pleurisy, which had kept him in bed for several months that year. His heart now beat on the right, and they had been talking about surgically draining the fluid from his lungs when suddenly he had improved. He’d recovered, but then he’d begun to “have nerves.” All sorts of weird ideas plagued him. He was afraid of old women in headscarves, of policemen with their plumes. He was afraid—no telling why—that his father was going to shoot himself, and he’d suddenly cover his ears with both hands so as not to hear the report of the pistol. He was afraid of not getting enough air and walked from room to room, hugging various pieces of furniture so that his chest would expand with the effort and he wouldn’t suffocate. He was afraid of coffin makers and death. More than once, when the lamp was lit, he’d gathered his belongings around him and made arrangements for how he was to be buried and to whom each toy was to be given, should he happen to die in the night. The doctor didn’t consider his condition serious. Nevertheless his parents had planned to have him taught privately for the first year instead of sending him to school, but at the last moment they’d changed their minds.
Now he sat there on the edge of his bed, eyes full of sleep, yawning and scratching himself.
He’d known that this day would come sooner or later. But he hadn’t believed that it would come so quickly.
He would have liked to defer it somehow.
Reluctantly he pulled up his long black socks, which hung loosely on his legs. He stood for a long time at the washstand, dipping his hands and taking them out again and again, watching the rings of light that shimmered on the surface of the water.
His mother washed him herself and put him in a clean shirt. She’d got his best clothes ready, a dark blue linen shirt trimmed with white which she’d made from an old blouse of hers, set off with feminine heart-shaped mother-of-pearl buttons. She pulled a wet brush through his hair.
She put some coffee in front of him, and an S-shaped kifli. He didn’t want any coffee that day. Said he wasn’t hungry.
At that his mother pressed into his hand his ABC book, his slate and slate-pencil, and took him to the school.
The autumn sun was by then shining in its full splendor over the Alföld town. Peasant carts were jolting along in clouds of yellow dust. A train whistled on the bridge. In the market square sacks of red paprika and white dried beans were on sale.
He trotted irritably along at his mother’s side. He felt awkward, silly, and above all girlish in his “best” clothes—which he knew were the worst, both cheap and old. He’d have liked to tear them up and trample them into the ground. But he knew that his father was a poor teacher at the secondary school and couldn’t really afford anything else. He took revenge by not saying a single word the whole way.
Very soon they reached the Red Ox.
The Red Ox was the elementary school. This two-story palace of public education took its quite lamentable name from the fact that at one time a rickety, tumbledown inn had stood on the site, with a red ox daubed on its sign. The building had burned down a generation ago, but the drunkards of that wine-swilling town still liked to recall the nights of dissipation spent there, and so the name of the inn had been unkindly transferred to the school and in that way was passed down from father to son.
When they reached the dim entrance hall of the school he turned pale and had an attack of “breathing difficulty.” As was his custom, he leaned on a pillar and hugged it to him with all his strength. His mother bent over him and asked what was the matter. He didn’t answer. Just held her hand tighter and tighter.
First grade was upstairs. His mother gave him a kiss outside a brown double door and made to leave. But he wouldn’t let go of her hand.
“I’m frightened,” he whispered.
“What’re you
frightened of?”
“I’m frightened,” he repeated.
“Don’t be frightened, darling. Look, the others are here as well. Everybody’s here. Can’t you hear how happy they are? Go and see your little friends.”
“Stay,” he pleaded, and clung to his mother’s skirt.
Waving good-bye to her son with the hand that he had released, she slipped away from him and walked slowly down the corridor. At the corner she took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. She even looked back once to encourage him with her smile. But then she suddenly vanished.
The little boy stood for a while rooted to the spot and waited, waited, staring after his mother. He hoped that perhaps she’d come back and that the whole thing was a joke. But it was not a joke.
When he realized that, and also realized that he was alone, more alone than he’d ever been on this earth before, a spasm seized his entire body, something akin to colic. He tried to run away. He slunk along the wall as far as the stairs, where that skirt had just then mysteriously vanished into nothing. There a staircase yawned, completely unfamiliar and cheerless, with a cavernous, gray, echoing vault. To go down there would have called for death-defying courage. With the instinct of the damned, he thought it wiser to creep back instead to where he had lost her, back to the door of the classroom. At least he was a little bit used to that.
He peered in through the gap in the half-open door.
He could see children, more children than he’d ever before seen in one place. It was a crowd, a crowd of completely unknown little people like himself.
So he wasn’t alone. But if it had previously plunged him into despair that he was so alone in the world, now an even more alarming despair seized him, that he was so very much not alone in the world, that all those other people were alive as well. That was perhaps even more terrifying.
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