Then a voice could be heard breathing, “Go in, dear. In you go.” It was the woman. They were back.
Minutes went by. Not another sound, no movement. Then the girl stepped in.
After her—on her heels—her mother. She shut the door, sat down by the window. Opposite Esti.
The girl didn’t sit down. She just stood there, moodily, obstinately, tensely. But those are just words, tentative words, an attempt somehow to appreciate her resolute petulance. She looked a little flushed, too, as if she’d taken a hot bath or had rouged her face a little—it was still very pale. Esti looked questioningly at the mother, as if to ask where they could have been. The mother’s face was unchanging and negative.
The girl—like lightning, like the snapping of a spring—knelt on the seat in the opposite corner, by the corridor window, face to the wall, turning her back on the other two. She knelt and didn’t move. Knelt rigidly. Rigidly and wilfully. Her neck muscles were tensed. Her back was as flat as an ironing board. Her long arms, her long rachitic arms, dangled. She was showing her long, rachitic legs—left uncovered by the short white stockings—her skinny legs and the almost unworn soles of her patent leather shoes. There was something comical about it all. It was like when someone’s made to “be a statue” in a game of forfeits and the company can do what they like by way of teasing the person concerned. Only there was something very serious and frightening in her immobility and her pose.
So what was all this about? Esti again gave the mother a questioning look. This time a couple of words were on his lips, he meant to implore her, to say that the time had come for her at last to explain things to him, because it was becoming a little unbearable. She, however, avoided his eye. Esti choked back his words.
He was no longer surprised at the girl. What surprised him was that the woman wasn’t surprised at her. She just sat there, staring at nothing. Clearly, she was used to her. Had she seen such things before, and stranger too? Clearly, she could have acted no differently. She made nothing of it. And that was the most natural thing.
The train clattered on. Esti took out his pocket watch every five minutes. Half past one. Two o’clock. The girl still didn’t tire. They were approaching Zagreb.
Now the mother got up and, like one acting against her principles and better judgment, went to the girl. Once more she was warmhearted, as she had been at the start of the journey. She knelt down beside her, put her face to hers, and began to speak. She spoke quietly, nicely, sensibly, cheek to cheek, spoke into her face, her ears, her eyes, her forehead, her whole body, talked and talked without tiring, with a constant flow and impetus, and it was all incomprehensible, as incomprehensible as the girl’s whispering had been before, and incomprehensible too that one could find so much to say: what old words, pieces of advice, exhortations, what banalities she must have been repeating—previously painful but now no longer felt, known by heart, deadly dull—banalities which she had obviously used thousands and thousands of times before in vain, and which had long since been gathering dust in a lumber room, unused.
The part of the heroine in a five-act tragedy can’t be so long, nor can a single prayer, not even the whole rosary, that a believer mumbles to his unknown, unseen god. The girl took no notice whatever. She wasn’t disposed to budge from the spot.
Thereupon the mother grasped the girl’s neck, pulled her hard to her, with great force lifted her into the air, and sat her at her side.
She stroked her hair. She dabbed her forehead with a cologne-scented handkerchief. She smiled at her too, once, just once, with a smile, a wooden, impersonal smile which must have been the remains, the wreckage of that smile with which long ago she must have smiled down at that girl when she was still in swaddling clothes, gurgling in the cradle, shaking her rattle. It was a wan smile, almost an unseeing smile. But like a mirror that has lost its silvering, it still reflected what that girl must have meant to her back then.
She was holding a silver spoon in her hand. She filled it with an almost colorless liquid which Esti—who was the son of a pharmacist—recognized from its heavy, volatile scent as paraldehyde. She meant to administer this to her daughter, and that was why she had smiled. “Now, dear, you have a nice, quiet sleep,” she said, and put the spoon to the girl’s lips. The girl gulped the medication. “Go to sleep, dear, have a nice sleep.”
They arrived in Zagreb.
The sleepy life of the train came to. There was shunting, whistling. The heated wheels were tapped with hammers, and the sound wafted musically through the nighttime station. The engine took on water, and a second engine was attached so that two could pull the carriages to the great height of the Karszt mountains. The friendly Croat guard appeared again with his lamp. Just a few passengers got on. They were not disturbed.
The woman gave the girl a sweater, pulled her skirt down to her knees, and retied—more neatly—her strawberry-colored bow. She dressed her for the night rather than undressing her. She spread a soft, warm, yellow blanket over her legs. The girl closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, evenly.
The woman too now prepared to rest. She tied a light black veil over her ash-blonde hair.
When they left Zagreb she looked at the lamp. Esti took the hint. He got up and closed the shade round the glass globe.
Eyes open, hands in her lap, the woman waited for sleep. The scenes that she had gone through couldn’t have excited her excessively because she soon fell asleep. She gave one sigh and was asleep. Her eyelids closed heavily. She must have been tired, deathly tired. Her face was motionless. She slept without breathing. The girl’s deep, even breathing became quieter too. It could no longer be heard.
There was silence in the compartment, complete silence. The gas lamp gave out a green misty light, the sort of opal-milky twilight that one sees in an aquarium or in underwater pictures.
Esti began once more to experience that sense of relief that he’d had when the two were away. This too was real solitude. His traveling companions—heads pressed against the back of the seat—sat there torpid and unconscious. While the train hurtled in one direction their spirits wandered elsewhere, who could say on what journeys, who could say on what rails. His soul wandered around those two souls, glancing now at the mother, now at the girl. What sufferings, what passions must tear at them. Poor things, he thought.
Coughing, panting heavily, with ever-increasing effort, the two engines set about the ascent into the barren rocks. Now they were in the mountains. This was an alien world. Dark forests murmured up and up, on the heights, with their impenetrable mysteries. Waterfalls splashed here and there, mountain streams and torrents, sometimes startlingly close to his window. Lights burned on hilltops. The single Cyclops eye of a forge glowed blood-red. Then came the mirror gleam of a river. Dark gray, ice-cold water swirled this way and that, stumbling from rock to rock. It followed the train a long way. It trotted after the train, racing it, until it tired. The air was suddenly cooler.
Esti was cold. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stared into the romance of the night.
Now strange little stations appeared from the darkness, bathed in yellow lamplight, with the deserted seats and table of a closed waiting room, a kitchen garden with lettuces and cabbages, grassy banks, the stationmaster’s wife’s cherished petunias and geraniums. Glass globes bulged on sticks in the garden. A black cat sprang across the path in a sudden ray of light. Even at that late hour the stationmaster saluted, raising a gloved hand to his hat. At his feet his knowing dog pricked up its ears faithfully. A summerhouse sped toward them out of the gloom, the chatter of sunlit family tea parties long silenced, and, quite out of place, a convolvulus quivered among the branches of wild vine, frightened to death, blackened by night, dark blue with terror. These things, those people and animals, however, at which Esti was now looking—like a person who throws off the blankets and talks in his sleep—exposed themselves to him almost immodestly; they allowed a good-for-nothing young poet like him to steal their lives, until then so jealously
guarded, so carefully concealed, and to take them with him forever.
Since setting out on that “first Italian journey” of his, he hadn’t slept a wink in more than two days. The many experiences had taken their toll. His ears were burning, his spine aching. He shut his eyes to rest a little.
As he dozed, drifting between sleep and waking, he heard a quiet rustle of clothes. Someone was standing beside him, so close that a hand was poised above his. It was the girl. Esti moved. At that she crept back to her place.
That girl wasn’t asleep. She hadn’t woken just now, but long before. After Zagreb, she hadn’t gone to sleep under the drug but had deceived both him and her mother. She was waiting for something, meaning to do something. At the moment she was lying there, head back and breathing deeply, evenly. Pretending to be asleep, as before. Esti watched her through half-closed eyes. Her eyes weren’t completely shut. She was likewise watching him through half-closed eyes. Esti opened his eyes. The girl did the same.
She giggled at him. She giggled in so strange a way that Esti all but shivered. She was sitting cross-legged. Her lace-edged underskirt dangled, showing her knees and thighs, a bare part of her spindly thighs. Again she giggled. Giggled with a foolish, unmistakable flirtatiousness.
Oh, this was frightful. This girl had fallen for him. This ghastly, hideous chit of a girl had fallen for him. Those legs, those eyes, that mouth too had fallen for him, that dreadful mouth. She wanted to dance with him, with him, at that obscene children’s ball, with her hair ribbon, the strawberry-colored bow, that little dress, that little specter at the ball. Oh, this was frightful.
What could be done about it? He didn’t want to make a scene. That was what he dreaded most of all. He could have woken the woman sleeping opposite. But he felt sorry for her.
Perspiration broke out on his forehead.
His tactics were partly intended to restrain the girl, partly to trick her into action and discover her intentions. Therefore he showed at regular intervals that he wasn’t asleep by coughing or scratching his ear, but he also simulated sleep for equally regular periods because he wanted to find out what the girl’s intentions actually were. These two ploys he alternated, always being very careful that the one went on no longer than the other.
The contest went on for a long time. Meanwhile the train raced on toward its destination. Sometimes it seemed that it was held up at a station but then rattled on, sometimes it seemed to rumble on and on but then would loiter in a station, and the strangely watchful voices of linesmen would be heard and machinery would crunch over the track bed toward the coal store. Were they going backwards or forwards? Had half an hour gone by? Or only half a minute? The strands of time and space were becoming tangled in his head.
This pretense was extremely tiring. Esti would have liked to escape from the trap, reach Fiume, be at home in Sárszeg, in the bedroom where his siblings were sleeping to the ticking of the wall-clock, in his old bed. But he dared not sleep, nor did he mean to. He clenched his teeth and struggled on. If he became a little more sleepy she would resort to all sorts of tricks. He frightened himself most of all with the idea that while he was asleep, that creature would crawl toward him and kiss him with her cold mouth—nothing could be more revolting and terrible.
And so at about three o’clock, Esti, constantly dwelling on these nightmarish thoughts and on his guard as to what to do—whether he should show that he was awake or pretend to be asleep—tried to open his eyes, tried to wake up, but couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe. There was something on his mouth. Some cold foulness, some heavy, soggy bath mat, lying on his mouth, sucking at him, expanding into him, growing fat on him, becoming rigid, like a leech, wouldn’t let go of him. Wouldn’t let him breathe.
He moaned in pain, writhed this way and that, waved his arms about for a long time. Then there burst from his throat a cry. “No,” he croaked, “oh.”
The woman leapt to her feet. Didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know what had happened. Couldn’t see a thing. It was completely dark in the compartment. Someone had put out the gas lamp. Thick smoke was billowing in through the window. Again, a cry for help. She thought that there’d been an accident.
When she had quickly lit the lamp, there stood her daughter facing Esti. She was holding her index finger mischievously to her lips, begging him to hush, he must keep quiet about it. Esti was standing facing the girl, in a fury, trembling from head to foot, deathly pale. He was wiping his mouth and spitting into his handkerchief.
“Oh,” said the woman dully, “I’m so sorry. But surely you can see …” That was all that she said. And she said it as if apologizing for her dog, which had licked a traveling companion’s hand. She was infinitely humiliated.
Then without looking at Esti she turned to her daughter.
“Edit!” she exclaimed, “Edit, Edit,” several times, one after another, perhaps just so as to hear her name. She pulled the girl this way and that. It seemed that her amazing poise had deserted her for a moment. That troubled her at once. She embraced her daughter, began to kiss her. Kissed her frantically, anywhere she could, even on her lips.
Esti, who had not yet recovered from the horror of the first kiss and was so disgusted by it that he could have vomited, watched this scene and tried to get his breath.
He could sense the enigma of the kiss. When people are helpless with despair and desire, and speech is no longer of use, the only means of making contact is by the mingling of their breath. They try in this way to enter into one another, into the depths where perhaps they will find the meaning and the explanation of everything.
The kiss is a great enigma. He had not been aware of it before. He had only known affection. Only adventure. He was still pure at heart, like most boys of eighteen. That had been his first kiss. He had received his first real kiss from that girl.
Edit was crouching at her mother’s side. Now she shrugged her shoulders. Every ten seconds—every ten seconds precisely—she raised her left shoulder almost imperceptibly. She wasn’t being defiant. She didn’t speak either to her mother or to Esti. She was making signs. To whom or to what she was making those signs no one knew, not even she herself. Only perhaps He knew, who created the world to His glory and set man therein.
The woman, who must have been overcome with remorse at forgetting herself, was clinging to both her daughter’s hands. By that she was showing that she was with her, now and always.
They were silent. All three were silent. Silent for a long time.
Suddenly the woman spoke. “Dawn’s coming,” she said to no one in particular. “It’ll soon be light.” Why was that so dizzily solemn? Because it meant, “Dawn isn’t coming, it never will.”
Esti ran out into the corridor. He had to go quickly. Scarcely was he out than he burst into tears. Tears streamed down his face.
But dawn was coming, it really was. A pale strip of light had appeared in the east.
He thought over what had happened. What had happened was tragic and interesting. It even flattered his pride a tiny bit that he had gone from the school bench—by some unforeseen process—straight into the darkest center of life. He’d learned more from this than he had from any book.
The year before he’d had other struggles. He’d maintained in the literary circle that one of his poems was a ballad. The teacher in charge had opened the matter to debate, and after the opinions of the members had been heard had decided that the poem in question wasn’t a ballad but a romance. As a result Esti “immediately drew a conclusion.” He’d resigned as secretary, with which responsibility his fellow members had clothed him.
How that had hurt him at the time! Now he could see that it wasn’t so important. What mattered wasn’t ballads and romances. Life was what mattered, only that. That kiss too had come from the richness of life and had enriched him. He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it, not even his brother, because everyone would laugh at him. But in his own eyes he wasn’t ashamed.
“Homo sum ,”—he quoted T
erence—“humani nihil a me alienum puto,” and thought back with a shudder to that shivering kiss. Perhaps his pleasure in it could have been full if he were a little more daring and could surrender himself completely, because sensual pleasure—he guessed—cannot be far from disgust. Nor should that be a cause for shame. Epicurus non erubescens omnes voluptates nominatim persequitur. Now who had said that? It had been somewhere in the middle of the grammar, on a certain page, at the top, a little to the left, an example of the use of the participium praesens with a negative particle. One must not be ashamed of anything. Our fate is stars and rubbish.
Now other people were standing around him, early risers, with mustache trimmers and traveling soap. Watching the sunrise. They pulled down the windows and drew into themselves the dawn air. Esti followed their example.
The lamps were extinguished. The train rumbled on, fleeing night and nightmares, toward the daylight. The first ray gilded a hilltop with magical speed. On it stood a little church with a wooden tower, awaiting the faithful. It stood so high that his imagination, by the time he reached it, was exhausted, collapsing and giving up the ghost right at the door of the church, but down below was a green valley at the bottom of a fearsome ravine so deep that his imagination fell headlong into it and was killed outright on a rock. It was a barren, picturesque landscape. Stone walls stretched along the hillsides, ramparts with which the local people defended their produce, their potatoes and oats, against the wrath of the elements. Here one had to fight a bitter battle against nature. Howling gales tore up trees, roots and all, flattened out furrows and flung seed into the air. In those parts even eagles were afraid. In those parts even cows looked interesting, they were so thin and melancholy. In winter, snow fell and covered everything. Packs of wolves plodded slowly through the whiteness, their tails shaggy. Guzlica and wailing songs were heard in huts. This was where he would have liked to live. He imagined getting of the train at once, settling down in this stony hell, becoming a forester, or rather a quarryman, marrying an apple-faced Croat girl with a black headscarf, white skirt, and black apron, then growing old without ever sending word of himself and being buried anonymously in the valley. But he also imagined himself owner of those hills and forests, rich, powerful, known and admired by all, greater perhaps than a king. He imagined all sorts of things. He played with life, for it was still before him.
Kornel Esti Page 5