Kornel Esti

by Kosztolányi, Deszö

  Around him was his usual motley company, nine or ten writers of various sorts and a woman or two. In front of him was a glass of Bull’s Blood* and a silver dish on which lay the fabulously delicate skeleton of a trout and the remains of a light green sauce.

  In the unfriendly silence I threw down my fur coat and lit a cigarette. Someone informed me in a whisper of the preliminaries of the story which had begun.

  He had been telling them about his student years in Germany and about a distinguished, refined elderly gentleman, prominent in public life in Darmstadt—his full name was Baron Wilhelm Friedrich Eduard von Wüstenfeld—who had been president of Germania, the local cultural association, and also president and director of numerous other political, literary, and scientific associations, societies, clubs, unions, conferences, committees, and subcommittees.

  “So,” Kornél went on, “it always happened as I said. The president would open the session and go to sleep. The lecturer wouldn’t even have reached the table and he’d be asleep. He’d go off quickly, like lightning, the way little children do. He’d plunge from the brink of wakefulness straight into the bottomless abyss of sleep. He’d close his eyes and sleep deeply and sweetly.

  “The lecturer would step to the table, acknowledge the applause, bow, sit down, shuffle his ominously high pile of script, clear his throat, and set about his lecture on something like The Observation of the Essence of Dynamic Existence or Plant and Animal Names in the Erotic Poetry of Heinrich von Morungen, but that no longer concerned the president, who had slipped discreetly from the world of consciousness by an invisible secret door, leaving behind only his body as a token in the presidential chair.

  “When the lecturer had finished, the president would call the second and then the third to the rostrum from the printed program, and when they had performed their duties he too performed his.

  “Understand me: the lecturers and the president’s briefly interrupted sleep, which could yet be called uninterrupted and continuous, interacted, were in close contact, almost in a causal relationship. The president opened the session and closed his eyes. The president closed the session and opened his eyes. At first this was a mystery to me.

  “I was young and inexperienced when I went to Germany. At the time I’d been drifting around among the lighthearted, easygoing French, but in Paris I received a stern telegram from my father telling me to go at once to Germany and there continue my studies, and work only at my studies, not at creating literature as I had been doing. In his telegram he emphasized that if I didn’t do as I was told he’d cut off my monthly allowance. Whether for that reason, or because of my measureless love for him, I complied with his request right away. And to this day I’m grateful to him for making me go.

  Otherwise I’d hardly have gotten to know the Germans.

  “Naturally, I’d heard a thing or two about them. I knew that they were one of the world’s greatest peoples and had given humanity music and abstract thought. They were Cloudy and burdened with thought, as their divine Hölderlin has it. When I’m really down in the dumps I hum Bach fugues and say lines of Goethe to myself. ‘Among pine forests and hills lives an earnest, industrious people,’ I thought, ‘with the starry sky and the moral world order above their heads.’ So I had a great respect for the Germans. Perhaps I respected them more than any other people. But I didn’t know them. The French, however, I loved.

  “What a loss it would have been had I missed this close acquaintance. A new world opened before me. As soon as my train had rolled onto German soil, one surprise followed another. My mouth, so to speak, was constantly agape, from which my fellow-travelers deduced that I was a half-wit. Order and cleanliness were everywhere, in things and, indeed, in people alike.

  “I got off first at a small spa, to wash the dust off. I didn’t have to ask anyone where the sea was. There were elegant pillars at precise ten-yard intervals in the clean, swept streets, bearing white enamel signs showing a pointing hand with the words To the Sea beneath. The stranger could not have been given clearer directions. I reached the sea. There, however, I was rather taken aback. On the pebble beach, a yard from the water, another pillar drew my attention; it was identical to the rest, but the white enamel sign was rather larger and bore the words: The Sea.

  “Having come from among the Latin races, I felt at first that this was exceedingly superfluous. Before me foamed restless infinity, and it was obvious that no one could mistake the Baltic for a spittoon or a steam laundry. Later I realized that I had been wrong in my youthful superiority. This was where the true greatness of the Germans lay. This was perfection itself. Their philosophical tendency demanded that the argument be concluded and the outcome demonstrated, as the mathematician often writes in the course of a deduction that 1 = 1, or as is often stated in logical proofs, Peter = Peter (and not Paul).

  “In Darmstadt I rented a modest little student’s room in the house of a master cooper. There too a series of surprises awaited me. The family was pleasant, considerate, and very clean. The cooper’s father, an old man who seemed to be simple, treated me, a nobody who had been tossed ashore there from abroad, with kindly, human affection. In the evening, when I came in, he always questioned me: Well, young man, tell me, what have you experienced today, 1. humanly, 2. literarily, 3. philosophically? I couldn’t answer this question at first. Not only because I could as yet hardly speak German. This profundity, this classification so normal to the German mind but to which I was not accustomed, confused me. My unrefined brain all but exploded. It came to my mind that that morning I had read Hegel in the library, then had some dill sauce in the refectory, and in the afternoon strolled with Minna in the town park. Was the library a human experience, the dill sauce a literary experience, and Minna a philosophical experience, or vice versa? To me these three had been one until then. I mixed up the library with the dill sauce and Minna, experiences human, literary, and philosophical. It was quite some time—and required constant mental gymnastics—before I was able to separate them.

  “They’re an enigmatic people, I can tell you. There’s no people so enigmatic. They think all the time. One after another I met eccentrics who ‘on principle’ ate only things that were raw, who every morning ‘on principle’ did breathing exercises, who in the evening, ‘on principle,’ slept on hard beds with no quilts, even in the dead of winter. Their level of culture is astounding. They go from school to university but don’t finish their studies even then, and I suspect that after that all of them enroll in the universe. The universe with its myriad stars is there in their calculations, indeed in their appointment diaries too. Even girls and women refer to it like a popular place of entertainment. German women are, on the whole, sensitive and romantic. They’re like French women. The only difference between them is perhaps that French women tend to have large eyes, whereas German women have large feet and souls which absorb at once everything that is noble and beautiful. The moment one makes their acquaintance, they describe themselves exhaustingly, cleverly, and abstractly. They reveal the length and breadth of their spiritual lives, two or three of its fundamental attributes, and their basic symptoms, like a patient revealing the history of his disease to a doctor. They are terribly sincere. And they don’t conceal their faults. They are not embarrassed by anything human. I had scarcely begun courting one delightful, divorced little woman, beneath the limes one sunny autumn morning, than she confessed that she had had hemorrhoids since giving birth and was suffering badly from them that very day. All that not for my interest, just because it was sincere and human. It’s a bewildering world.

  “One after another the doors of the best houses opened to me. They accepted me into their circle as if I were not a foreigner. What little merit there was in me they appreciated. They respect all other nations just as much as they love their own. They do not proclaim international principles—they practice them. The Germans are instinctively welcoming. There was a place for me too at their table. I’ll not conceal, however, that here too I was surprise
d at this and that. At the end of dinner, for instance, they serve a longish, stick-shaped, dead-white, very smelly cheese, which they call ‘Dead Man’s Finger’ (Leichenfinger). They filled my glass with a dark red liqueur the name of which was, according to the manufacturer’s label, ‘Blood Blister’ (Blutgeschwür). As a well-brought-up person I sank my teeth into the dead man’s finger and washed it down with the sticky secretion of the blood blister.

  “There was one thing that I couldn’t accept for a long time: their mustard pots. On the best families’ tables there is a very strange mustard pot from which—as I later found out—the manufacturer had become wealthy; his product was in demand everywhere and he could not make enough. This mustard pot was in the shape of a tiny, white porcelain lavatory pedestal, with a brown wooden lid that closed, a deceptively faithful replica with only the inscription ‘Mustard’ (Senft) to betray what it was. In this they keep the yellowish-brown mustard which they put on their blood sausage during a meal. At first they didn’t understand that I could only eat with limited appetite when that witty, risible little object was set playfully before me. They found it amusing. Even engaged couples looked at it with a smile and knew in advance that their future home would contain one like it. Respectable mothers of families, in whose presence it would be unthinkable to make the slightest risqué remark, passed it nonchalantly to guests. Small boys screwed up their faces as they sniffed at it and licked off the brown fragments that stuck to the porcelain bowl, and little girls, whom their doting parents had photographed with hands clasped in prayer, took a delight in scraping at the paste that had congealed in it and, like enthusiastic mudlarks, softening it with vinegar.

  “I confess that for a while I found that healthily studentish good humor repulsive. Previously, however, I’d been through the school of Paris, enjoyed all the coarse slapstick and thinly veiled double entendres of the bawdy theater of Montmartre; I’d studied decadent poetry too, which often enthrones indecency and filth. This, however, was repugnant to me. It was the openness that shocked me, the cosy sniggering at this devilment. But who can understand a people?

  “I repeat, this people is unfathomably enigmatic. They are loyal, clever, and attentive. If I was unwell, my landlady herself made my bed, plumped up my pillow and smoothed it down, made up embrocations, took my temperature, made me drink linden leaf tea, and nursed me with motherly love and with such knowing skill. Only German women know how to nurse the sick. A doctor would be called too. German doctors have no equal. The least of them is worth more than a university professor in another country. Their forget-me-not-blue eyes would look at my fevered brow with inexpressible objectivity and concern. Their medicines, prepared in a million forms by the best factories on earth, cure us the moment we look at them. I’ve often said that I’d like to be sick and die only among the Germans. But I’d rather live somewhere else—here in Hungary, and when I’m on holiday, in France.

  “However, I hadn’t gone there to live, but to study. First and foremost, to study their rather difficult, harsh, tortuous, complex, but splendid and ancient language, in which as yet I could only stammer incompetently and inadequately. I frequently didn’t understand what they said. They frequently didn’t understand what I said. These two defects didn’t cancel one another out, they increased each other. It was my sole ambition to learn German. I listened like a secret policeman. I talked to everybody. Living grammars and dictionaries were all around me. I tried hard to turn the pages. I even spoke to three-year-old children, as they spoke better German than I did although I had read and understood Kant’s Prolegomena in the original. If I failed to understand a snatch of conversation in the street, my pride was injured. Once I almost felt disposed to commit suicide when a shopkeeper noticed the foreign accent of my otherwise tolerable speech and didn’t answer my questions but—no doubt out of consideration—made signs like a deaf-mute or a savage would. I worked with indefatigable industry and lost no opportunity to ensure progress. Unfortunately, numerous disasters befell me. I went home by cab late one night after a student feast. I asked the driver what I owed him. I presumably misunderstood him and didn’t give him enough. He began to shout, called me a lousy villain, even threatened me with his whip, but all that I could do was admire his wonderful command of strong verbs, the masterly way that he maneuvered subject and predicate, his rich and varied vocabulary, and took out a pencil with which to make notes of it all. At that the cabby too was amazed, but at the patient way I had borne his filthy tirade. He thought that I was either the founder of a religion or mad. But I was only being a linguist.

  “And so I went everywhere that German was spoken, publicly or privately. There were few visitors at the Germania and other cultural institutions as keen as I. At all costs I meant to hear spoken German, the more the merrier, and I didn’t care what.

  “Allow me, after this long but necessary digression, to return to Baron Wüstenfeld, the president, who was asleep when we left him, and I assure you is still asleep. What did the people of Darmstadt have to say about this? Well, they were used to it. So was I eventually. At first, however, I recall, at one lecture I turned to a citizen of Darmstadt who was sitting beside me and asked him why the president was always sleeping. He was surprised at my question. He looked at me, then at the president, and replied—dispassionately—that he was in fact asleep, but he was, after all, the president, and he shrugged as if I’d asked why the sun was shining. The president was president in order to sleep. It was accepted at that time, and they went on with the agenda regardless.

  “I apologized for my inquisitiveness. As time went by I realized that they were right. The president was an old man. A very old man. Very old and very tired. Clearly, that was why he was always known as the ‘tireless fighter for public education.’ He was also called ‘the watchman of public education,’ and not out of weary contempt or without good reason. He was a man of great culture and great breadth of vision, with a long career behind him, who functioned actively from morning to night in public life. He would open an extraordinary meeting early in the forenoon, convene a preparatory subcommittee at noon, chair a political council in the afternoon, and in the evening propose the toast to the guest of honor at a banquet. In general he presided everywhere, rang the bell everywhere, spoke the introductory or closing words everywhere. In the meanwhile he appeared everywhere that he had to, and his name was never missing from the list of those present. Was it any wonder that the burden of the years weighed on him and he was worn out with so much feverish and useful activity?

  “No, indeed. Gradually I too came to regard as natural what all of Darmstadt, all Hesse, all Germany did. When as a scatterbrained student I rushed headlong into the distinguished, paneled hall of the Germania and wanted to be certain that I had arrived in time, I didn’t look at the table or at the audience, only at the presidential dais. If the president was asleep, I knew that the session had begun. If he was not, I knew that the session had not yet begun, and stepped outside for a cigarette or two. I became firmly assured that the sleeping of the president was at the same time the beginning of intellectual work and an infallible indicator and scientific measure of it.

  “The lecturers themselves thought so too. Didn’t this habit of the president disturb or offend them? On the contrary. As the first word of their paper rocked the president to sleep with irresistible force, they too derived courage and inspiration from his slumbers. If they noticed that he was awake, they would pause briefly, sip their water, adjust the light, but they didn’t have to wait long before he was sleeping the age-old sleep of the just. Some scarcely dared speak for the first few minutes. They trembled quietly through the introductory remarks almost in a whisper, like mothers beside the cradles of their children, their thoughts and feelings coming almost on tiptoe, and only when they were convinced that the chairman’s sleep had reached the required depth and that nothing could now wake him did they raise and develop their voices, abandon themselves to flights of oratory. Need I remark that this touching, c
hildlike attention on the part of the lecturers, this caution which sprang from profound respect, was in all cases superfluous?

  “Yes, my friends, that man could certainly sleep. Never have I seen a president sleep like that, and I’ve seen many a president sleep in Germany and in other European countries, big and small. By that time I could get along quite well in German, and I only went to the Germania and elsewhere in order to admire him. And I wasn’t the only one that had a similar aim in view. Zwetschke was actually studying him—he was a slender, quick-witted young psychiatrist with whom I became friendly over this common interest. Foreigners came too—Norwegians, English, and Danes—presidents, for the most part, who despite their advanced ages made the pilgrimage to Darmstadt in order to spy out the modus operandi of their remarkable colleague, his secret, his stratagem, and to turn their experience to fruitful advantage in their demanding and responsible careers.

  “But how did he sleep? In masterful fashion, remarkably, perfectly, with inimitable artistry. This was quite understandable. Even as a young man—at the age of twenty-eight—he had attained high office, and since then—for generations—had borne it constantly in the Germania and in other cultural organizations. He had vast experience. On each side of him on the dais sat a vice president, like the thieves on the right and the left. They were Professor Dr. Hubertus von Zeilenzig and Professor Dr. Eugen Ludwig von Wuttke. I’m not saying that they too nodded, dozed, snoozed, indeed actually slept, but they did it with only one eye, like hares, uneasily, like dogs do. A single glance at them was enough for the keen observer to appreciate at once the difference between master and apprentice, to realize that these were mere disciples, only vice presidents, and would never become presidents. He, however, who slept between them with profound conviction and expertise was a president, the real thing. God had created him such. I heard from Darmstadt people that this rare ability of his had shown itself even in boyhood, and while his frolicsome companions noisily played soccer in the field he would sit apart on a dais-like mound and preside.