Kornel Esti

by Kosztolányi, Deszö

  “Indeed,” he muttered, “the Bank of England,” and all but burst out laughing at the silly idea.

  He liked idiotic things like that.

  He was afraid that, faced by all that suffering, he was about to roar with laughter. He bit his lip so that physical pain should prevent anything so disgraceful, and began to speak rapidly and lightly, because he also knew that when we keep our lips and minds busy we find it easier to refrain from laughter.

  “So that’s what you’d like, is it now? I understand about this money, temporarily, just to tide you over. Look, my dear lady. I myself have obligations of my own.” That was a phrase that he had heard years before from a banker from whom he had begged money no less desperately (though in more prepossessing circumstances), and as he vividly saw and heard that scene he went on even more rapidly. “I have relations and friends. My staff . Etc., etc. I too work. Like a slave. Quite enough. Every letter means a bit of bread.” “You mean cake,” whispered something inside him. “Cake, cake, you liar.”

  The widow did not reply. She looked calmly into his eyes.

  Esti could still hear the whispering voice. He jumped up. Hurried out into the next room.

  From there he returned a little more slowly. He was holding his left fist clenched. He put down on the table a bank note. He did not look at it.

  The widow, however, although she did not mean to, glanced at it at once, and amazement lit her face; it was distinctly more than she had asked for, he had rounded the amount up.

  The frost which had held her almost rigid when she came in had melted, fallen away, like the melted snow on the floor. She did not know whether she could accept it. Of course, of course, just put it away.

  She clutched the money in her hand. She expressed her gratitude. Expressed it with the greatest word, than which there is none greater.

  “My God.”

  “Good,” Esti interrupted. “Write down your address. So you live in Kispest. By the way, how old’s the younger girl?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Is she feverish?”

  “Only in the evening. Never in the morning.”

  “Right. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps I’ll manage to get her into the sanatorium. Can’t say yet. Anyway, I’ll try. Give me a call next week. Any time. Here’s my phone number.”

  Next day he received a letter from them, which all five had signed. It was a long letter. It began Your Lordship!

  According to that salutation he had been granted a new title, promoted, elevated in their sphere of influence.

  They had written “Your Lordship’s heart …” Esti laid a hand on his heart. His noble heart.

  He himself had not taken seriously his promise perhaps to get the younger girl into some hospital or somewhere. He had done that rather by way of tact, for appearances, obeying his polished sense of style, to divert the widow’s attention from the money in the moment of parting as she slipped it into her battered handbag, and by steering her thoughts toward a future kindness to stem the unceasing flow of her constantly repeated gratitude, which he could really no longer endure.

  In the morning when he woke up Esti had the telephone brought to him in bed. He put it by his pillow, under his warm quilt, like other people put the cat. He liked that electric animal.

  While he stretched out in the wide bed, feeling refreshed after his rest, he picked up the receiver and asked for a number. The city came into his bed. Still half asleep, he could hear the attentive voices of officials at the other end of the line, the background morning din of a distant TB sanatorium. He asked for the doctor in charge, an old friend of his.

  “I wonder if you’ve got a free bed?” “Really, that’s something we’ve never got, but we can always manage somehow. Tell the little girl and her mother to come in and bring their papers, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  A couple of days later the doctor called him back. He informed him that his protégée had been admitted.

  Now all that remained was the newspaper kiosk.

  He felt that it was his duty to take this step too. And not a human duty, but one of kinship. Since he had spoken to the widow it was as if he had become related to her.

  First he visited the family.

  In the room where they lived, a bare wire dangled from the ceiling, and on it a single unshaded bulb shed a garish light.

  Margitka, the younger girl, was by then in the sanatorium. The older girl was called Angela, and was not pretty. She looked dull. She spoke in a singsong. She had a straight, white nose, which might have been carved out of chalk. Lacika, the schoolboy with the bad ear, was hunched over his Latin grammar. The electrician had come home after a fruitless search for work, scarcely spoke to them, and with proletarian cheerlessness withdrew to a corner, from where he eyed the visitor with such gloomy and searching attention that he might well have wanted to sketch him. Esti had no idea what to make of him.

  Finding a newspaper kiosk proved dif cult.

  At the office where that kind of licence was issued, the official informed him with a smile that in Hungary it was easier to get a ministerial post than one of those glass cages. There was absolutely no prospect of a vacancy in the foreseeable future.

  Esti took note of that. As, however, there was no likelihood of a ministerial post for the widow either—some people at least would have found that strange—he held out for the glass cage. He knew that there were laws, clauses, and resolutions which were hard and remorseless, but behind every law, clause, and resolution was a mortal man who was corrupt, and with the necessary expertise could be circumvented. Nothing is impossible when it is only from men that we want it. And so he smiled, lied, flattered, crawled, browbeat, and importuned as necessary. In one place he called the widow a close relative, a dependent, and a fervent Catholic; in a second a staunch Calvinist and a refugee under the peace treaty;* and in a third a victim of the White Terror, a refugee returning from Vienna.

  Esti had no scruples over such matters.

  What gave him strength? He himself wondered about that.

  When the family came to mind at night, or when he sometimes got up early in order to catch someone whom he needed at the office, he asked himself that question.

  Perhaps he was deluding himself with the possibility of saving someone?

  Was he enjoying the role of patron, living out a secret desire for power? Was his mawkish readiness to be a sacrifice influencing him? Was he atoning for something? Or was it just the excitement of the chase, of seeing the results of his amusing experiment or the extent to which people could be influenced?

  Esti weighed the reasons and was compelled to answer each question in the negative.

  He was after something else. Simply because he had tossed out that money in a moment of stress. It had been the direct consequence of that that he had obtained a free bed in the sanatorium for the girl, and from that it had followed that he had also had to guarantee the mother’s means of support. His one action ineluctably gave rise to the other. Now, however, he would have been sorry if his work was wasted. He wanted to see a little more perfectly, a little more roundly.

  As they say in business, in technical jargon, “he wanted to protect his investment.”

  At length the widow got her newspaper kiosk, in an excellent position at a busy corner on the Ring Road.

  September sunshine gleamed on the glass, gilding the foreign magazines, drawing Dekobra and Bettauer into a wreath of rays. She came and went among them with a convalescent smile as on the stage, isolated and yet part of the life of the street, in the full glare of the limelight.

  As the kiosk was on his way, Esti would sometimes stop there, no longer as a patron but just as a customer. He would buy a paper but did not even need it. He inquired how Margitka was.

  “Thank you,” the widow would gesture, as she straightened the papers with a half-gloved hand, “thank you very much. She’s not too bad. Only the food’s poor. They don’t give them enough,” she whispered confidentially. “We have t
o make it up. We take her a little butter every day or two. We walk, because I can’t afford the tram.”

  Then she spoke of the schoolboy.

  “Poor little chap’s had to repeat the year. He failed three subjects last year. You know, it’s because of his ears. He can’t hear. Can’t hear what the teacher’s saying. He’s gone deaf in his left ear.”

  Esti did not believe that anything on earth could be put right. He could see that as soon as he patched up misery in one place it immediately broke out somewhere else. Secretly, however, he hoped for at least a speck of improvement, some evident relief, some relative calm, a kind word, which would cheer him, reward him. Now he was the one looking for charity.

  In winter the rain poured down. The kiosk was like a lighthouse in the universal floods. Instead of the widow the seamstress was serving. She sang out with nervous gaiety:

  “Mum’s caught a chill. Her legs are bad. I’m standing in for her.”

  On his way home Esti thought of the kiosk, in which—it seemed—the elder girl too was cold, and of the widow, lying sick in bed. He sat down at his fireside. The embers cast a ruddy glow on the light brown curtains.

  He stood up in irritation.

  “I’m tired of this,” he sighed, “really tired.”

  After that he watched the kiosk halfeartedly, from a distance, while he waited for the omnibus. He was sick of them. If he possibly could, he avoided them.

  “Let them die,” he muttered. “I shall die as well, just as miserably. Everybody does.”

  The widow and her family were not importunate. After repeatedly saying that they owed everything—all these things—to him and him alone, they went their way. They did not want to burden him further.

  He did not see them, did not hear of them.

  One restless May evening the wind was blowing up dust in the road. Esti had been drinking chocolate in a café. As he left he bumped into the widow.

  She had not noticed him.

  Esti spoke to her. “What’s new?” said he, “I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  For a while she did not speak.

  “My little Laci,” she stammered, “my little Laci,” and her voice choked.

  The little schoolboy had died two months previously.

  Esti lowered his eyes to the ground, in which the boy was crumbling.

  The widow told him everything bit by bit. Margitka was having fevers in the morning too, and they wanted to send her home from the sanatorium as they could keep her no longer. Angela had lost her job at the dressmaker’s because she had had to stand in for her mother so often. The kiosk had been given up. She herself had not been able to stand about there with her bad legs. Perhaps it was just as well.

  Esti nodded.

  “Quite, quite.”

  He was standing under a gas lamp. He looked at the widow’s face. She was no longer as ravaged and disheveled as when he had first met her. She was numb and calm.

  If she had not been so much like his mother and those female relations of his who had likewise become dull, gone into a decline, all would have been well. But there was a look of accusation about her. An aching, almost insolent reproach.

  That incensed him.

  “So what can I do about it?” he raged inwardly. “Perhaps you think that I personally am doing all these dreadful things to you? What the Hell do you want from me, always from me?”

  He made a gesture of refusal. He grabbed at the widow. Held her arm. Shook the thin old woman in her black clothes, struggled with her.

  “Stop it,” he shouted, “stop it.”

  Then he rushed down a side street.

  “What have I done?” he gasped. “Oh, what a mess I am! A woman. A weak, miserable woman. I’m out of my mind.”

  He leaned against the wall. He was still gasping from the outburst. And yet he was happy. Inexpressibly happy that at last he had well and truly gotten over her.

  * That of Trianon (1920), under which much of the territory of Greater Hungary was lost to its neighbors. Many ethnic minority Hungarians fled into into what is now Hungary.

  XIV

  In which are disclosed the mysterious doings of Gallus, the cultured translator who came to no good.

  WE WERE TALKING ABOUT POETS AND WRITERS, OLD FRIENDS of ours, who had once set out with us but then had fallen away and vanished without a trace. From time to time we would toss a name into the air. Who could still remember him? We would nod, and faint smiles would flicker on our lips. The image of a face that we thought forgotten was mirrored in our eyes, a missing career and life. Who knew anything about him? Silence answered the question, a silence in which the desiccated wreath of his fame rustled like leaves in a cemetery. We said nothing.

  We had been sitting in silence like that for some minutes when somebody mentioned Gallus.

  “Poor chap,” said Kornél. “I still used to see him a few years ago—it must be eight or nine years now—in very sorry circumstances. Something happened to him then—something to do with a thriller, and something of a thriller itself, the most exciting and most painful thing I’ve ever been through.

  “Well, you all knew him, after a fashion anyway. He was a capable man, lively, spontaneous, and conscientious and cultured as well. Spoke several languages. Spoke English so well that it was said that even the Prince of Wales took lessons from him. Lived over there for four years, in Cambridge.

  “He had, however, one fatal shortcoming. No, he didn’t drink. But everything that came within reach he picked up. He thieved like a magpie. It didn’t matter to him whether it was a pocket watch, a pair of slippers, or a great big stovepipe. He never bothered about the value of the things he stole or how big they were. He often hadn’t any use for them. His enjoyment consisted simply in doing as he pleased—stealing. We, his closest friends, tried to make him see sense. We appealed to his better nature, pleasantly. We gave him a hard time and threatened him. He used to agree that we were right, he’d promise to struggle against his nature. But his mind struggled to no purpose, his nature was the stronger. He lapsed time and time again.

  “Other people embarrassed and shamed him countless times, in public, caught him in the act, and at such times we had to make incredible efforts somehow to smooth over the consequences of what he’d done. On one occasion, however, on the Vienna express, he stole the wallet of a Moravian businessman who collared him then and there and handed him over to the police at the next station. He was brought back to Budapest in handcuffs.

  “Once more we tried to save him. You, who are writers, know that everything turns on words, whether it’s a poem or a man’s fate. We gave evidence that he was a kleptomaniac, not a thief. The man we know is a kleptomaniac; the man we don’t know is a thief. The court didn’t know him, and so classified him as a thief and sentenced him to two years in jail.

  “When he came out, one dark morning in December just before Christmas, he came straight round to me, hungry and in rags. He went down on his knees to me. Pleaded with me not to desert him, to help him, find him work. For the time being there could be no question of his writing under his own name. On the other hand, all he could do was write. So I called on a decent, kindly publisher and recommended him, and next day the publisher gave him an English thriller to translate—the sort of rubbish we wouldn’t soil our hands with. We wouldn’t read it. The most we’d do is translate it, and even then we’d wear gloves. The title was—to this day I can remember —

  The Mysterious Mansion of Count Vicislav. But what did that matter? I was pleased to be able to do something, he was pleased to earn some money, and he cheerfully set to work. He worked so hard that he beat the deadline and delivered the translation in three weeks.

  “I was infinitely amazed when a couple of days later the publisher phoned and told me that my protégé’s translation was completely unusable, and so he wasn’t prepared to pay him a thing for it. I couldn’t make it out. I got into a taxi and went round to the publishing house.

  “The publisher said not a word
but put the typescript in my hand. Our friend had typed it out beautifully, numbered the pages, and tied them together with ribbon in the national colors. That was typical of him, because—as I think I’ve said—in literary terms he was reliable, scrupulously precise. I began to read it. I cried out in delight. Well-formed sentences, apt turns of phrase, clever linguistic devices came one after another—more, perhaps, than that drivel deserved. I was amazed and asked the publisher what he found unacceptable. He now gave me the English original, still without comment, and asked me to compare the two. I spent half an hour dipping into the book and the translation in turn. Finally I stood up in astonishment. I declared that the publisher was perfectly right.

  “Why? Don’t try to guess. You’ll be wrong. He hadn’t plagiarized something else. It really was a translation of The Mysterious Mansion of Count Vicislav—fluent, artistic, in places poetic in spirit. Once again, you’d be wrong. There wasn’t a single mistranslation to be found in it. After all, his knowledge of English was perfect, as was his Hungarian. Stop guessing. It’s something the like of which you’ve never heard. The problem was something different. Completely different.

  “I myself came to it only slowly, bit by bit. Look here. The first sentence of the English original went like this: All thirty-six windows in the ancient, weather-beaten mansion were gleaming. Up in the ballroom on the second floor, four crystal chandeliers shed a brilliant light. In the Hungarian it said: All twelve windows in the ancient, weather-beaten mansion were gleaming. Up in the ballroom on the second floor, t wo crystal chandeliers shed a brilliant light. Eyes wide, I read on. On the third page the English author had written: With a scornful smile Count Vicislav took out his bulging wallet and flung down the sum required, five thousand pounds. This the Hungarian translator had made into: With a scornful smile Count Vicislav took out his bulging wallet and flung down the sum required, a hundred and fifty pounds. I was now filled with an ominous suspicion which in the following minutes—alas—was confirmed into lamentable cer tainty. Farther down, at the bottom of the third page of the English edition, I read: Countess Eleonora was sitting in a corner of the ballroom in evening dress and wearing the old family jewels: on her head was the diamond tiara which she had inherited from her great-grandmother, wife of the German Elector, on her white bosom was the opalescent gleam of a necklace of real pearls, and her fingers were almost stiff with rings set with diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds. The Hungarian, to my no small surprise, rendered this glowing description: Countess Eleonora was sitting in a corner of the ballroom in evening dress. That was all. Gone were the diamond tiara, the pearl necklace, the diamond, sapphire, and emerald rings.