Gergely observed the effect and glanced at Esti. Zima clasped his hands together. Vitényi and Bolza shook their heads. Skultéty, however, who had seen some strange things in his time and was almost immune to the stimulus to laugh, released a gale of laughter into his handkerchief.
Pál noticed the laughter and as a defense against it, joined in. He too laughed, abstractedly.
“Give me a cigarette,” he said.
Five cigarettes flew toward him from the five reporters. Pál lit one. He inhaled the smoke and blew it out. The others lit up too, with the exception of Gergely, who only smoked cigars. Otherwise they all lit cigarettes. Esti too.
Pál didn’t really want to perform to order. He merely said to Zima, sitting beside him:
“I’m going to have my teeth seen to as well.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He shrugged. “Well, so that they’ll be in order. You know, so that I can chew. I’ve just got to have two at the back here out. I’ve got a first-class dentist.”
He opened his mouth wide in an unsightly gape, and showed Zima, whom he scarcely knew, the back of his mouth. The gold of bridges gleamed darkly among the various saliva-bright stumps. He cautiously poked a finger toward the two which the first-class dentist would painlessly extract.
This was still not amusing. Gergely tried to provoke him into doing one or other of his better numbers.
“Fortunately Pál’s got a hearty appetite.”
“Yes,” said Pál, “I eat thirty apricots a day.”
“How many?” asked Skultéty.
“Thirty.”
“Couldn’t you manage, say, forty?”
“Not that many. Thirty.”
He launched into a wide-ranging account, for the benefit of Zima, of the importance of food, clothing, and health. And he mentioned that he had ordered four new suits.
“Let me have a cigarette,” he said.
Again the five journalists tossed cigarettes, but they paid scarcely any attention to him. In the course of the evening they had heard on numerous occasions about the teeth, the thirty apricots, the four suits, and were beginning to find it all boring. Their quick nervous systems, attuned to immediately accepting and dismissing every horror, then registering “boredom,” could find nothing to sustain them, and furthermore they were embarrassed in front of Esti for having dragged him out to no purpose and drawn a blank over Pál. And so Skultéty fished out of an inside pocket a galley proof, Pál Mo-gyoróssy’s last article, sent from Hévíz a week before, and which the editor had naturally not used. Pál had signed it with his full noble style: Pál Mogyoróssy of Upper and Lower Mogyoród.
While Pál was giving an account of his love affairs and conquests, as if holding a rapid, cut-price clearance sale of his life, Esti took the opportunity to read the article at leisure under the table.
It was a report, a straightforward, beautifully written piece of reportage. It told of how that summer by the Balaton, an unpickable lock had been invented, all the villas fitted with it, and in consequence within twenty-four hours the burglars of the region had moved to the northeastern part of the country. At the last sentence Esti could not prevent a smile.
Gergely saw that smile and, together with Skultéty, went for Pál with inquisitorial ferocity.
“Now, Pál, what’s this about the widows and orphans of journalists?”
“Oh yes,” said Pál, turning his flushed but flaccid face. “Shall we tell him as well?” And he winked at his friends who had already heard it.
“Of course, that’s what he’s come for,” and they gestured at Esti.
“Esti, you won’t breathe a word to anybody, will you?” requested Pál in a confidential tone.
“No,” replied Esti, “not a word.”
“Well,” said Pál, and looked round. “We’re all millionaires. You are, and I am. How much do you want for one of your stories? Go on,” he said, encouraging Esti with the sort of forgiving kindliness that would overlook any greed. “Five hundred? A thousand? You’ll get it.”
“Where from?” mumbled Esti, so as to get a word in edgeways.
“Where from?” repeated Pál scornfully. “Give your word of honor not to tell anyone. Otherwise the jig’s up. Other people will be doing it.”
“Go on, then,” the journalists urged him.
“Give me a cigarette first. Look,” he said, as he struck a match, “the whole thing’s simple. Not to mention, noble in purpose. Journalists’ widows … journalists’ orphans …”
“We know, we know. Just get on with it.”
“Anyway, tomorrow you and I and somebody—we’ll decide who—will go into town by car and call on all the shopkeepers in Budapest and tell them my idea, which I’ll let them have for nothing. For the widows of journalists …”
“Never mind the widows,” said the reporters.
“So we’ll tell the shopkeepers to put in their windows signs saying, Starting today, everything 25% off. That’s all. But you haven’t got the point yet.”
“No,” replied Esti decisively.
“Wait a bit. What will be the result? The public will storm the shops like madmen, the shopkeepers will sell out and take millions, and we, from the vast profit, will contract for only 5 percent, say; just five percent. That’s not a lot. It’s reasonable. They’re sure to agree. Do you still not get it?”
“No.”
“The point is,” and now he was whispering, “the shopkeepers will go on selling their goods at the prices they did before. That’s the clever bit. At the old prices. Now do you get it?”
“I see.”
Esti was upset. He was amazed that “it” was nothing more, so routine and mechanical. The reporters too were disappointed in Pál: he’d flopped. It had been a silly business. Hats in hand, they proposed moving on.
Pál was happy to go with them because he too didn’t think this coffeehouse was suitable, and he wanted another where there were fewer people and they could talk more confidentially. He took Esti’s arm, and—forgetting his earlier plan—suddenly promised that he’d send a Lancia for him in the morning.
Outside the summer night had cooled somewhat. It was sweet and wonderful, perhaps even more enchanting than the afternoon, which had faded so quickly. Quiet and undulating, it moved this way and that, slowly, rhythmically, in its deep peace, throbbed with its great waves which, governed by the laws of the tides, rose and fell, driving each other away by turns, adumbrating beneath them vast plains and chasms. Sparks gleamed on the bridges, wreaths of fire on the Danube and Svábhegy,* which with its points of light resembled an ocean liner setting sail. Lights flared up. Street lamps blazed as at other times, but more sharply. The roadside acacias filtered the rays of the gas lamps and cast on the asphalt a black tracery of shadows, which seemed to quiver, expanding and contracting flexibly like the mirror of the water. Budapest had become a city submerged. Wagons floated along, rocking heavily in the swell of the night, trucks turned into motorboats, sweeping noisily through the splashing foam of darkness, and the many watercraft gave wings to Pál, who swam enraptured with arms outstretched, swept along at magical speed toward his goal. He delighted in that order, that sense of purpose, that speed. And wherever the waves tossed him it was good, ecstatically exquisite, and blissful.
Esti spoke to Pál about going home, going to bed, and having a good rest. Pál seemed not even to hear him.
When they arrived outside police headquarters Esti took his leave. Pál seized his hand.
“Not going, are you?” he asked sorrowfully. “Are you leaving us?” and his eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Now? But you ought to have seen everything,” and he would not release his hand.
So Pál pulled him inside.
Esti was touched. He lived so solitary a life in Budapest that he might well have been in Madagascar or Fiji, and had never experienced such warmth of friendship. He went with him.
The company burst into the building with a great to-do. Detectives, clerks, and officials a
ll greeted Pál, whom they had known for twenty years. Many others came and joined the shifting group, in the middle of which stood Pál clinging to Esti’s arm. Inquisitive strangers smiled sympathetically as they addressed questions to him and followed him beneath the echoing vaults. Pál was not surprised at this. He found it natural that everyone “was together” on that night, which was not like the rest, and that others too were aware of the pleasing change thanks to which epoch-making new plans flashed with unimpeded lightness in his brain. While Gergely and Skultéty were discussing with the office on separate telephones at the same time what ought to be done with the poor fellow, Esti turned his attention to something else. He observed the idyll of the night, the policemen’s rooms bathed in green light, the hard plank beds on which policemen slept, swords at their sides, on rough mattresses, men stabbed in brawls awaiting medical reports, the healthy, smart, mustached constables who, untainted among so much corruption, watched at an iron rail over vagrants picked up by police patrols, the occasional headscarved nursemaid, street girls of almost aristocratic appearance, and youthful pimps, and he thought of how Pál’s finest years had slipped by in this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief.
They were walking on the Ring Road again. Pál and Esti were in front. Pál no longer needed to take Esti’s hand or arm. He felt safe in releasing it. Esti went without it being held. He was drawn by pity. Behind their backs the five journalists were arguing loudly. Bolza, kindly and bald, was of the opinion that Pál should be put into a cab straightaway and taken home to his family. Gergely objected, saying that he could injure someone—he was a public menace. Skultéty agreed. Pál, on the other hand, obstinately insisted that he had to meet a woman at the West station at half past one, and that at half past two he had to address at least five hundred colleagues in the Erdélyi wine bar concerning his plan for the widows and orphans of journalists and the 25 percent and 5 percent with the Budapest shopkeepers. In any case, the opinion that he should be “put away” that very night brooked no contradiction.
Meanwhile they went into another coffeehouse. There they drank sweet white wine. Ten minutes later they were in another, drinking császárkörte * liqueurs. Another ten minutes and they were in a third, drinking red wine. Everywhere they smoked cigarettes. Everywhere they were known to the waiters, those faithful proletarian friends of the press, who migrate from one coffeehouse to another as journalists do from paper to paper. Everywhere they were objects of uncommon attention. Pál was still not content anywhere, none of these places was any good, he had to keep going on and on, driven by some religious passion from the fourth coffeehouse to the fifth. The coffeehouse is the journalist’s place of worship.
At this point Gergely and Skultéty, after a lengthy professional consultation, decided to telephone the psychiatric department of St Miklós hospital. A Dr. Wirth replied that they should bring the patient in, he was on duty and at their disposal. At the cashier stand in the coffeehouse they discussed for some time the means of doing this, because as crime reporters they wanted everything to go smoothly and tastefully.
They were in that big coffeehouse where Esti had once caught sight of Pál, deeply immersed in himself, at a quarter to five on a No vember afternoon. He and Pál now went and sat at that same table. On this occasion, however, the plateglass window had been lowered, and the night was flooding into the quiet, deserted coffeehouse as if melting into one with it. The two of them leaned their elbows on the brass rail. For a while the proprietor stood by their table, listening with furrowed brow to the poor szerkesztô úr,* and when he was called away bowed to them more deeply than usual, in a clear expression of sympathy. Kindly, bald Bolza prepared to leave. He had three daughters and so worked day and night and was always up early. He raised his bowler hat to Pál without a word. On this occasion he did not say “see you soon.”
Vitényi and Zima went with him.
Pál dismissed them scornfully. As Gergely and Skultéty were still plotting at the cashier stand, he and Esti were left alone.
“I’m going to write,” said Pál.
“Good.”
“Novels, short stories,” he went on, and with a sort of desperate movement leaned toward Esti’s face. “I’m leaving the paper. I’m through with being a reporter. It’s beneath me.”
He looked out into the night. A cab was rumbling along the wooden roadway.
“The wheels of the cab are ‘roaring,’” said Pál. “Roaring.” He emphasized the word. “What a fine language our Hungarian is. That’s the way to write. They’re not ‘going,’ they’re ‘roaring.’”
“Roaring,” repeated Esti, and he, who weighed every word so many times, became bored with it, and brought it up again, could not deny that he too liked the word.
“But what am I to write?” Pál burst out in a faltering, plaintive voice.
“Simply anything. Whatever interests you. Whatever comes into your head.”
“Tell me, for example, is this all right? The woman comes up to my apartment. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” said Esti, who had by that time a splitting headache.
“You know, she’s got brown hair, but not black, or chestnut,” Pál pondered, “her hair’s a sort of chocolate color. Her eyes are like those little blue flowers, what are they called?”
“Violets?”
“No, no,” Pál shook his head.
“Forget-me-nots?”
“That’s right. Forget-me-nots. And she’s like fire,” he went on so wildly that he was alarming. “Her body’s warm, but I don’t like it. I sprinkle her thighs, her back, with ice-cold eau de cologne until she’s quite cool. And I put a garland of those little blue flowers on her head. She’s like a dead bride in her coffin. Then she goes away.” He thought for a moment. “How am I to put it? What shall I say when she goes?”
“What people usually say: ‘Good-bye.’”
“No,” Pál did not like that, and an idea crossed his mind, “I’ll say to her: ‘Sincere tenderness of heart.’ You can seduce any woman with that. She’ll have a feeling that she can’t resist. Do you hear? Like this: ‘Sincere tenderness of heart,’” he enunciated with a peculiar, crafty smile, staring at Esti, and his eyes were like fire. “Nod if you feel it as well. Do you feel it now?”
Esti could not feel what that woman was supposed to, but he could imagine what Pál must be feeling, and he nodded.
It was a relief for him when Gergely and Skultéty linked arms with Pál and took him into the street. Pál would not hear of a cab. He protested to his journalist friends and let go of their arms time and again. He looked for Esti, speaking across to him as Gergely and Skultéty led him along.
“Esti, I’m going to learn Italian. This very night I’m going to learn Italian, Esti.”
At the West station he had fortunately forgotten about the chocolate-haired woman. Not, however, about the Erdélyi wine bar.
There disappointment awaited him. He was expecting a seething crowd, such as he had seen at extraordinary general meetings of journalists, when a chairman was dismissed in an explosive atmosphere, but during that lull in the evening’s entertainment, between two and three in the morning, when the diners had gone and the dawn revelers had not yet appeared, the place was deserted, and just a couple of waiters were sauntering about putting knives and forks on the freshly laid tables. The colleagues had not come. No one had come. Pál looked around in dismay. He blinked. Such wretched people didn’t deserve to have anything done for them.
“Hungary,” he sighed. “Journalists’ widows, their poor little orphans,” and he ushered his friends to a table.
He ordered korhelyleves. The others wanted nothing more to eat or drink.
Pál looked at his soup, did not taste it, but stirred it for a long time before tipping into it the entire contents of the salt cellar, the paprika pot, and the jar of toothpicks. He began to eat. The toothpicks crunched between his teeth.
All three of his companions jumped up.
“T
his is terrible,” Skultéty was appalled, “terrible.” He looked at himself in a mirror; he had gone green, and a twitching, bitter grin trickled from his face like vinegar.
“Terrible.”
“Let’s do something,” said Esti. “This is awful.”
Pál spat the toothpicks back out into his bowl. He could not chew them.
Gergely, who was fitting a fresh light Media into his cigar holder, and Skultéty made for the telephone booth which was by the table. They did not telephone, merely lamented: Poor fellow, poor fellow.
A couple of moments later Gergely burst out of the telephone booth, his hair in disorder. He rushed straight over to Pál.
“The swine!” he shouted, beside himself with rage. “The swine!”
Pál went on sitting there, oafishly unmoved.
“Hey, Pál,” said Gergely, shaking his arm as if to wake him, “mental patients are being beaten up.”
“Where?” said Pál from the depths of his torpor, and the muscles of his face twitched.
“At St. Miklós, of course. They’ve just been on the phone. Two mental patients have been beaten up in the night.”
“It’s a scandal!” exclaimed Skultéty. “A national scandal!”
“It’s a scoop,” said Pál. “Pay the bill,” and as a soldier who hears a word of command in his sleep springs to his feet, he remembered his journalistic duty, his role as a guardian of enlightenment, at the command of humanity. “Don’t put the paper to bed yet,” he ordered. “I’ll want ten columns. And give me another cigarette.”
Esti felt that the time was ripe for him to be off. He couldn’t stand any more. He hated tricks. He was even disgusted at himself. He made his way carefully to the far side of the sidewalk and from there watched to see what would happen.
First Gergely emerged from the Erdélyi wine bar, and like the experienced, born organizer of every dreadful deed, whistled for a cab. He promised the cabby a good tip and whispered something in his ear. Next came Skultéty and behind him Pál, bareheaded. He was putting his brand-new straw hat on his silky blond hair; the vegetable fibers in it, once alive, were now just as faded, just as dead, as the skull that it covered. He got into the cab first, followed by Gergely and Skultéty. Off they went.
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