* On the northwest edge of Budapest.
VII
In which Küçük appears, the Turkish girl, whom he compares to a honey cake.
“IT WAS THE HEIGHT OF SUMMER, AND I WAS RACING HOME ward,” said Kornél, “on the electrified line from the East.
“In the curtained first-class compartment where I was sitting, there were also three Turkish women, three thoroughly modern Turkish women without veils or prejudices: a grandmother, a mother, and a fifteen-year-old girl whom they called Küçük, that is, Little One, Tiny.
“I admired this delightful family for a long time. Grandmother, mother, and daughter formed a unity, were as close to one another as Winter, Summer, and Spring on certain mountains in the Alps.
“The grandmother, a gaunt matron in her eighties, dressed in black and with enormous black pearls round her neck, was sleeping on the seat. She spoke in Turkish in her sleep. From time to time she raised her hand, her wrinkled, blue-veined hand, to her face to cover it, because for the greater part of her life she had worn a veil, and even in her sleep she must have felt that her face was improperly exposed.
“The mother was more modern. She almost flaunted her progressiveness. She had dyed her hair straw yellow—it must have been raven black at one time. Her manner was free and easy. She smoked one cigarette after another. When the guard came in, she—democratically—shook his hand. Furthermore, she was reading Paul Valéry’s latest novel.
“Küçük was like a pink and white honey cake. She wore a pink silk dress, and her little face was as white as whipped cream. Her hair too was dyed straw yellow. In every respect she looked the disciple of her mother. She was almost ashamed of being Turkish. All that gave her away were the red leather slippers that she wore on the train and the huge bunch of roses that she had brought with her, all those fiery red, blood-red Constantinople roses, and then her Angora cat, for which she spread a Turkish mat to sit on, the blue-eyed, deaf Angora cat over whose slumber she tenderly watched.
“Mohammed came to my mind, their stirring, kindly prophet, who on one occasion when his cat had gone to sleep on his cloak, preferred to cut off its corner rather than wake his favorite kitty.
“They were making for Vienna, and from there for Berlin, Paris, and London. They were astoundingly cultured. The girl talked about vitamins B and C, and her mother about Jung and Adler and the latest heretical schools of psychoanalysis.
“They spoke all languages perfectly. They began in French, the purest literary language, then slipped into argot, followed shortly by German—alternating between the speech of Berlin and Lerchenfeld patois—passing meanwhile through English and Italian. This was not at all showing off. They were just content, like children making themselves understood in adult western European society, comfortable, finding themselves a niche everywhere. It seemed that their ambition was to be taken seriously and regarded as western Europeans.
“I felt inclined to tell them that they were possibly overesteeming western Europe a trifle, and that I was by no means as entranced by its culture. But I decided against doing so. Why spoil their fun?
“Instead I showed them my eight fountain pens, which I always keep in my pocket, my two gold fillings, which I likewise always have in my mouth, and I boasted that I had high blood pressure, a five-valve radio, and an incipient kidney stone, and that several of my relatives had had appendectomies. I tell everyone what they need to know.
“This had an extraordinary effect.
“Küçük smiled and stared at me with her dark, bewitching eyes with such honest, frank sincerity that she quite perturbed me. I didn’t know what she wanted of me. At first I thought that she was making fun of me. Then, however, she took both my hands and pressed them to her heart. A dove can thus attack a sparrowhawk.
“In all this there was no coquetry or immorality. She just thought that was how cultured, advanced, western European girls behaved toward men whom they met for the first time on trains. Therefore I too tried to behave as cultured, advanced, western European men do in such circumstances.
“Her mother saw this, but paid us little attention. She—as I’ve said—was immersed in Paul Valéry.
“We went out into the corridor. There we walked about, laughing, holding hands. Then we leaned out the window. And so I courted her.
“ ‘You’re the first Turkish girl,’ I told her—we were on te terms by then—‘the first Turkish girl I’ve met, Küçük, Little One, and I love you. Years ago, in school, I learned about the battle of Mohács. I know that your ancestors spilled the blood of mine and kept us in shameful slavery for a century and a half. But I’d be your slave for another hundred and fifty years, serve you, pay you tribute, my dear little enemy, my dear oriental relative. Do you know what? Let’s make peace. I’ve never been angry with your people—they have given us our most lovely words, words without which I’d be unhappy. I’m a poet, a lover of words, crazy about them. You gave us words like gyöngy, tükör, and koporsó. You’re a pearl, you’ll shine in the mirror of my soul until they close my coffin. Do you understand when I say gűrű, gyűszű, búza, bor? Of course you do, they’re your words as well, and betû, the letters by which I make my living. You’re my ring, my thimble, the wheat that feeds me, the wine that intoxicates me. I have your people to thank for our three hundred and thirty finest words.* I’ve been looking for ages for someone, a Turk, to whom I could express my unfailing gratitude for them and pay back at least in part that loan of words, discharge that linguistic debt which has accumulated so very, very much interest for me.’
“I was burning thus in rapture when suddenly the train ran into a dark tunnel. Küçük sank warmly into my arms. And I, quickly and passionately, began to kiss her lips.
“If I remember correctly, I gave her exactly three hundred and thirty kisses.”
* There are indeed quite a lot of Turkic loanwords in Hungarian, but most of them, including all eight that Kornél lists here, are of ancient origin, and far fewer date from the years of the Ottoman occupation (1526-1699).
VIII
In which the journalist Pál Mogyoróssy suddenly goes mad in the coffeehouse and is then confined to the lunatic asylum.
“PÁL, PÁL,” THEY TRIED TO CALM HIM.
“Pál, be careful. Everybody’s looking at you.”
“Waiter!” Gergely, the long-established outstanding journalist, who knew of every secret scandal, clapped his hands, “Waiter! A large espresso! Pál, sit down and have an espresso.”
“Pál, sit by me,” urged Zima, who was on a German paper.
“Pál, take your hat off.”
“Pál, Pál.”
So said the journalists, all crime reporters, who, at about eleven on that delightful August evening, had dropped into the coffee-house which was their favorite nocturnal haunt.
In the middle of the group was someone who was not immediately visible. He was wearing a transparent raincoat and a brand new straw hat, and was likewise a crime reporter—Pál Mogyoróssy.
They’d settled down at the table that had been theirs for a decade. All five journalists were watching Pál with ill-concealed curiosity.
Pál took off his new straw hat. They looked at the silky blond hair, parted on one side, which covered his tiny, girlishly delicate head. When he’d hung up his splendid raincoat on the iron hook, a slim, very pleasant, gentlemanly fellow stood before them, who despite his forty years seemed almost a boy; he wouldn’t have looked out of place in short trousers. He was elegantly dressed: pea-green Burberry suit, zephyr shirt, and white silk bow tie on which gleamed a scarcely perceptible yellow stripe. It all looked brand new.
He tossed onto the marble tabletop a paper parcel, which contained another zephyr shirt and two pairs of buckskin gloves. That was all that he had with him.
He had arrived at the South station at half past one that afternoon on the express from the Balaton, and since then hadn’t even been home.
He had been taking his regular month’s summer holiday at Hév�
�z, where he rested, and combining the pleasant and the useful, attended to his health. He bathed in the warm, radioactive lake, on the dark mirror of which floated luxuriant, huge Indian lotuses, sprawled in the mud bath, slapping the greasy stuff on himself and especially on his left upper arm, in which he had recently had stabbing pains.
In a week his rheumatism had disappeared. With it went the headaches and the lassitude caused by keeping late hours. In his leisure he woke up. He wrote five “graphic” reports, which he sent by first-class registered mail to his editor. The weeks flew by with electric speed. But he could only hold out for three. At the start of the fourth he packed his bags, his patience exhausted, and abruptly went home.
As he got off the train and, at half past one, glimpsed the Vérmező and the Gellérthegy, an inexpressibly sweet joy filled his heart.* A true son of the capital, he adored Budapest. The afternoon sun was shining, all was promise and happiness. Carrying his little light suitcase he went up into the Castle district, looked down from the promenade on the bastion, had his photograph taken—he had thirty prints made, so that he could hand them round to his friends and possibly get one into a picture paper—had a bite to eat in a coffeehouse, and then just strolled; the pleasant, refreshing hours slipped by until suddenly it was twilight, the beery sunlight turned rusty brown, and he wandered down from the hill beneath the cool branches, crossed into Pest, and looked up his friends at police headquarters.
“Six more espressos!” called Gergely to the waiter, who was approaching their table. “Make that seven,” he indicated with his fingers, “seven,” because at that moment Esti came into the coffee-house.
They had phoned Esti half an hour before, asking him to come at once. And had told him why.
The articles that he wrote were not about aggravated robbery, bank swindles, or arrests, but stories about himself and his fellow men, things which perhaps had not actually happened, only might—poems, novels—in short, he was a practitioner of the stricter profession of writing.
He’d never before even set foot in that coffeehouse where the crime reporters smoked little, nervous cigarettes, hanging on the phone at about two in the morning, shouting into the mouthpiece to the duty stenographers accounts of rapists, murderous servants, and monsters who had exterminated their families, spelling out their names and those of their victims, or where they dozed until first light on the worn plush sofa, yawning, cursing, and keeping watch on the endless series of the nation’s dying, so that when an aging politician or an old and distinguished writer finally had the goodness to die, they could call the night editor to have the lead columns, set weeks beforehand, framed in black and oozing with fresh consternation and tears, inserted in the paper.
He looked around with unfamiliar eye.
Esti was a tall man of powerful physique, strong in appearance but inwardly soft and gentle. His watchful blue eyes constantly reflected alarm. His gestures were limp, hesitant. In his lack of confidence he was always inclined to let his opponent have his way. His skeptical spirit was ill at ease. His sensitivity used to be of such a degree that formerly he could have burst into tears at any moment over anything, at the sight of a battered matchbox or a tired face, but over the years he had schooled this inherent shakiness of nerve, hardening it to the point of harshness and consciously harnessing it to his art like a driving force. All he wanted was to see and feel. This was the one thing that kept him alive and to some extent bound him to the fellowship of men, together with the fact that he was afraid of the ultimate requirement of death. In his home, therefore, he barricaded himself behind medical books, washed his hands in disinfectant before meals, was appalled by and attracted to the sick and the sickly, the ruined and the special, and sought the opportunity of seeing deadly diseases, perhaps in the knowledge that if he could not overcome death, at least he could look into its entrance hall, and he was in general morbidly aroused by dreadful things, dramas small and great of annihilation, of destruction slow or swift, because he hoped that nonetheless he would be able to descry something of the moment when the unknown foot tramples us and being imperceptibly drifts into non-being.
Now too this was what had brought him there.
When he heard the news on the telephone at home he slammed the earpiece onto its hook, put out the light, left the manuscripts on which he’d been working in disorderly heaps on his desk, and rushed to the journalists’ coffeehouse.
His friends were installed beneath a chandelier: its half-burnt-out bulbs drizzled onto the company an inhospitable reddish light. In the thick, pungent smoke he could scarcely make them out. Gergely extended his right hand, in which a light Media glowed in a cigar holder.
Esti shook hands with his colleagues—Gergely, who had phoned for him, Skultéty of the long, sallow face, Vitényi, whom he was meeting for the first time, Zima, the German journalist, and dear, bald Bolza, who as a joke greeted everyone with “Lo.”
He left Pál Mogyoróssy for last.
Pál, it seemed, was pleased that Esti had come. He immediately stood up and waited while he shook hands with the others, and then would not release his hand for a long time, warming it in the velvety, glycerine-softened palm which was hotter than Esti’s own. He leaned toward him slightly too, as if intending to embrace him, to lay his head on his chest.
“Esti,” said he, in a quiet, hoarse voice, “it’s really good that you’re here as well. I need you tonight,” he said with a look of gratitude. “I was waiting for you.”
That took Esti by surprise.
The two of them had never been close friends, though they had known each other since childhood. Their work and spheres of interest had called them to different areas. In all their lives, therefore, they had scarcely exchanged more than thirty or forty sentences, and those too of disjointed words such as “Hello, what’re you up to?” “Nothing much.” “Good to see you, bye.” Esti, however—only now was he aware of it—had a secret sympathy for him. It suddenly came to him that in the course of the twenty years that had gone by while their youth was fading, he had, despite himself, been observing him and had paid more attention to him than he’d thought.
Above all he had been intrigued by Pál’s boyish ways, which had preserved his exterior from apparent aging. He also liked the fact that he was an inexorable listener, who sometimes went weeks without speaking to anybody and never talked about himself. His financial problems, which were almost considered a glory in that set, he never mentioned. His suit, his shirt, his brilliantly polished finger-nails were always immaculate. He said nothing about his ancient noble family. In addition, he cultivated his shrewd professionalism to a high degree but with a certain dif dence, and though he treated people with fastidious politeness, he knew how to remain aloof. Consequently, Esti had involuntarily felt himself honored if Pál, with a barely perceptible lordly gesture, invited him to his table in a wine bar; he would sit down beside him and look at him for a couple of minutes but would soon go away, because Pál would not, on his account, forsake his obdurate, apparently enduring, silence. He would drink like a fish—wine, pálinka, whatever came his way. He used to “put away” a huge amount, and was almost constantly drunk. This, however, did not show on him. He merely became somewhat paler: a waxen mask would spread over his face which served rather to intensify his grave appearance.
All this Esti recalled so quickly and suddenly that at that moment he could scarcely have analyzed it into its component parts. Then he saw two further images, two scenes clipped long ago from films, which had not faded in his excellent memory. Once—it must have been twenty years previously—Pál had been drinking champagne in the Orfeum, in the small hours, and in the light of the arc lamps had his hand on the cellulite-flabby thigh of a yellow-skirted danseuse on whose face was a beauty spot, larger than normal, which was obviously covering some infection or wound. The other image was less significant, but still germane. A couple of years before, at a quarter to five one November afternoon, Pál had been sitting idly in the plateglass window
of the big coffeehouse in the Ring Road, alone, lost in thought, holding a bamboo-framed newspaper in his hand but not reading it, while Esti, passing on the sidewalk right before him, tapped on the window student-fashion. Pál did not hear this and kept staring into space, but all the way home Esti wondered what Pál could have been thinking of.
Now Pál gestured him to his table with that grand, scarcely perceptible movement. Esti sat down. He asked what was new. But no one replied.
From then on the five reporters paid attention only to Esti. Pál was no longer the focus of their interest, as he had been the moment before, because they knew what they knew. Now they would have liked to see the surprise, which they themselves had painfully and with creepy pleasure drunk to the dregs, the horror, and the laughter spring up again on Esti’s face, as well-worn anecdotes acquire new charm if they are told to others.
Esti’s face gave nothing away. He lowered his head toward the floor, whether in embarrassment or arrogance. He picked up a newspaper from the marble table to hide behind.
From behind this he took just one glance at Pál. He was more restless than usual, and his face was a bright pink. It looked as if he had had more to drink, and stronger stuff too, than was good for him.
The espressos were brought, all seven together.
They were hot, undrinkably so. At least a hundred and forty degrees. The vapor condensed on the inner rims of the glasses in fat drops.
The reporters pushed them aside. Zima complained to the waiter for serving such things to “the press.”
Pál picked up his steaming glass, which must have burned the skin of his hand, and tossed it back to the dregs.
Esti dropped the paper. He leaned back in his seat, horrified, and stared at him. He was thinking—and the very thought was terrible—of that red-hot liquid scalding his esophagus and stomach wall.
Kornel Esti Page 11