Sunflower
Page 5
While making music, Álmos-Dreamer neither ate nor drank. He sat wearing a black tailcoat, white vest and lacquered pumps. His face as serene as an autumn landscape, his eyes brooding over dry fallen leaves, his lips proudly pressed together—all this was no mere histrionics. He was in truth a specimen of the dreamy, retiring and scornful Hungarian country gentleman who asks nothing more of the world than a nook from where all obnoxious climbers are banished. A place where life’s business may be conducted with the occasional small gesture or barely audible word. Such behavior would be called depressed by some people, yet it is in fact a splendid human trait, this regal disdain.
He liked to call these hours “withdrawing from life.”
He did not have to go far, in his solitude, to arrive at his goal. The house, built on this remote island wilderness by an eccentric ancestor to escape the “yellow peril” that would one day overrun Hungary and all of Europe, was a natural home to death and extinction. Around this household there could be no lust for life, for life was a succession of monotonous, idle days, its sole purpose, a preparation for extinction. The gutter hung from the roof, slowly dying like a superannuated watchdog. There were chairs that limped like grandfather himself. The cupboard had a vertiginous stance, prone to fainting spells like a fat old lady. The lamps gave a tired light, the walls were crumbling, windowpanes cracked without being touched, the carpets shed knots like hair falling from a head and the chimney emitted laborious puffs of smoke, as if tired of life. Everyone and everything was getting ready to leave the place like rovers at a tavern when the wine gets tiresome after the dreams of ecstasy wear thin. The portraits on the wall, once viewed with such youthful pride, had yellowed to the point of unrecognizability. The ideals carried in the heart, the colorful chords, solitary caterwaulings and songs hummed by one’s lonesome self had all turned into a meditation unrolled like some rare, treasured rug in the quiet hours around midnight. The wisdom of books, the dust of sunsets, the puppylike energy of the morning hours, had all faded away like the used-up toys of childhood.
Such reclusiveness, if intruded upon, comes charging out of its cave brandishing a club, like a hermit aroused from his dreams. One’s mood reaches the freezing point, and becomes bearish, like a black cloud over the woods. At night the wind howls like some terrible hellhound immune to ordinary bullets. The furniture, as a rule so obedient, now turns obtrusive so that the room’s inhabitant bumps knees and elbows against fiendishly protruding edges. The mirror’s reflection grows faint, or perhaps the face itself does, taking on an acrid, fastidious look like that of a cobwebbed old daguerreotype set by sentimental hands on a headstone. In the pupil of the eye tiny, swimming dots appear: they are rowboats steered by melancholy boatmen conveying luggage and traveler—departing life—from the shore to the vast old bark awaiting.
At times like these the quiet man opted to die.
By way of the violin’s melodies he took his leave of all that was pleasing and dear to him. Friendly faces cropped up in the hedgerows of miniscule black musical notes. Green mansions, porches wreathed in wild grape, stretching greyhounds, loud, friendly greetings, merry eyes and fancy bow ties. Men, companions who raised their glasses in a toast to homeland or womanhood. White table linen, cool arbors, fine, lingering autumns, frost-nipped leaves, orchard scents and places where he had been happy without being aware of his happiness. Years that yawned leisurely, poplar-bordered walking paths, rippling waterways, playfully curling chimney smoke, distant creaking of the well windlass, brown gateways and bedsteads that promised wonderful, untroubled dreams. The odor of fur on a winter’s journey, a tavern room redolent with marjoram, a lady’s name traced on a frosty windowpane, and a lingering pause over a small footprint in the freshly fallen snow. Women, glowing white under Christmas trees, indolent women whose soft flesh was made for embraces, romantic girls who tied their garters with fancy ribbons, reddish streaks in blonde hair and rings on slender fingers whose touch meant happiness once upon a time. Prayerbooks full of devotions, crucifixes at crossroads, high masses complete with kettledrum celebrated in childhood, playful strolls on the castle hill, girls with firm calves, and tiny earlobes that he could no longer place. Illnesses that were so good to recover from, convalescence like a breath of spring air, the buzz of the alarm clock signaling frozen dawns that smelled of the crypt, the coachmen’s ample capes exuding the scents of the road, and the mysterious bearing of the lady who happens to be your fellow passenger. Memorable hounds and majestic trees in the corner of a courtyard, strange old men, red autumnal twilights, birds’ cries and storytelling old women...All of life swept by during the violin’s play. Now Mr. Álmos-Dreamer was ready to die. He sat in the armchair, wrapped a rosary around his hand, closed his eyes and expired, for that was what he wanted.
His servant boy rode off posthaste to relay the news to Miss Eveline.
She put on her fur-trimmed skirt and boots, called for her sled and drove off across the frozen Tisza taking along only two large hounds.
The Álmos-Dreamers died for women. These dreamers, loiterers on bridges, strollers under shaggy-browed weeping willows, musers on solitary dark benches surrounded by the burgundy red tones of autumn: by now all of them painted in oil and vermilion, and hanging on the walls of this ramshackle old island domicile, the mansard roof so thickly layered by moss that storks landed there as in a meadow. All of the portraits showed Andor Álmos-Dreamer’s thin face as if every member of the family had been born into this world half- heartedly, tentatively, and always one-fourth obscured by shadow. Their true and majestic form had remained over there, in that netherworld, the solemn appendages of a headless, taciturn knight. Only their feminine aspect arrived in this world, like a white flower handed through an open window. Here they were, all of them, holding the wake over their dead impassively, without batting an eyelash. Over the past century every male in the family had ended his life with his own hand. Serene and resolved, having said their benisons and devised complicated last wills, they died premeditated, ritualistic deaths, for the same cause: the love of a woman.
They were called the crazy Álmos-Dreamers.
Once upon a time the family had possessed extensive holdings in the Uplands of Northern Hungary; these were probably not acquired in notably delicate ways. For centuries the Álmos-Dreamers had stalked wealthy widows, moneyed elderly women and females with prized dowries, pretty much the way they hunted the rarer kinds of egret in the marshy reeds of the Tisza.
That was back in the family’s heyday.
As a result, they acquired historical ruins; forts, forests and castles. Women’s curses, the shrieks of imprisoned spouses, the sad and vengeful shades of wives dispatched to the other shore haunted the Álmos-Dreamers. Back in those days women were given short shrift. Wild orgies, spilled ecstasies, virgins’ red blood, the mad rage of frenzied hunting parties drugged and lulled the pangs of conscience. Most of the ghosts in today’s castles had originated in those times. What else was left for these poor women? They would return from the other world, shrouded in white, to put the fear of God in their grandchildren. Ghosts are no mere figments of the popular imagination, cropping up like sempervivum on a stone wall. Curses turned into an owl’s hoot, echoing crypts and mysterious moonlit forests loom in the remote history of many a Hungarian family. It was not unusual for one of these brutally powerful men to wear out three or four women in one lifetime. Men in their old age married as lightheartedly as the young. They would abduct their women if necessary. Their rivals’ blood dripped from the steps of the wedding altar, and terrorized, violated brides covered their eyes in shame. The daggers were always close at hand, ready to be dipped into someone’s heart. Old family histories all resemble each other. When the men were off on a crusade, the women were happiest, rocking the cradle by themselves. They could choose their own lovers.
After all this violence there came a turn in the history of the Álmos-Dreamer family.
One day they abducted a blonde witch whose blue eyes flash
ed with all the colors of a mountain stream. She was as supple as a silvery birch in springtime. And like tumbleweed, she clung to men. She spoke the language of grasses, old trees and crossroads. She could make herself understood to beasts. The windmill’s blades stopped when she blew at them.
The name of this witch was Eveline.
Eveline managed to keep in line the men in a family where women had as a rule been locked away into caskets like old silver. Ákos Álmos-Dreamer, father of the newly-dead Andor, had unsuspectingly married her in the 1840s. He became the third husband of a woman widowed first by a colonel then by a high-ranking government official.
Eveline’s former husbands met identical fates on the dueling ground; in those days this was a legitimate exit for men. The Colonel’s heart was pierced by an épée, after an excruciating fit of jealousy inspired him to challenge an itinerant Frenchman whose only known occupation was kibitzing at the faro table and fleecing tipsy swine dealers playing billiards at the Turkish Sultan. This dubious foreigner had eyes for a Parisian dancer who happened to be a guest artist at the National Theatre. In the evenings he would leave the gambling casino to stand like a statue with arms crossed during performances, as it happens, just below the box reserved, on alternate days, by Colonel Sükray. The dancer appeared as an entr’acte between the second and third acts when she hovered, fairylike, over the stage, performing a dance of her own choreography, with superhuman grace.
“Madame, I adore you,” sighed the statue beneath the railing of Colonel Sükray’s box, and, doing so, he happened to fix on the Colonel’s wife the blazing torch of his eyes—eyes that were actually bestowed upon him by the Creator for the express purpose of keeping tabs on the legerdemain of one Buzinkai (a notorious local cardsharp) so that in the case of a successful deception he should imperceptibly yet significantly tap the gambler’s shoulder.
The Colonel had heard the Frenchman’s words only too clearly. One look at his wife’s beaming face was enough to turn his suspicions into the darkest despair, even though at home, in the privacy of their canopied bed, they had frequently made fun of the eccentric Frenchman so hopelessly in love with the untouchable star of the stage.
Sükray was a nobleman and an officer. Speaking in an undertone he requested his wife to leave quietly with him before the hall lit up again in all its splendor at the end of the show. During the fairy’s dance the entire house was plunged into total darkness, to the great delight of the local heartbreakers who made use of this interval to pass love notes or whisper sweet nothings in their chosen ones’ ears without being observed.
Eveline, shaken, grasped her husband’s arm as he led her to the back of the loge. As soon as she was outside the door, the Colonel turned around and with a light gesture tossed his white glove, crumpled into a ball, into the face of the French chevalier who stood with his customary stillness below the box. At the touch of the glove the chevalier staggered as if hit by a poleax. The blood left his face; he lowered his eyelashes in pain. Being the most ill-fated lover in town, he was desperate. His face resumed its everyday devil-may-care expression only when the door closed behind Eveline and the Colonel, making any further histrionics unnecessary.
A decade earlier or later the Colonel would have handed over the fly-by-night Frenchman to the military or the municipal authorities for incarceration until the next transport of vagrants. But this happened at the height of a Romantic era when the salons were seething with daily tales about the generosity and self-sacrifice of men in love. Women fell for heroic characters of the stage and many a lady in the capital felt an urge to elope with the first dance instructor or musician she encountered.
Therefore the next afternoon the Colonel acknowledged without comment when the Frenchman’s two cronies, birds of a feather, asserted that the impudent dandy he had insulted the previous night at the theater happened to be a French nobleman, a descendant of Saint Louis, dispossessed of his rank and estates by the French Revolution...A routine claim of the French gamblers and impostors who roamed the continent of Europe and usually ended their lives in some German prison, for the Teutons had no sense of humor in such matters.
The Colonel requested Captain Asszonyfái and Count Leiningen to assist in the speedy settlement of this affair. The officers were forced to respect the Frenchman’s claim to competence only in the épée, whereas the Colonel would have preferred to fight with the curved Hungarian sabre.
However, the dueling regulations of the day were clearly in favor of the offended party. The officers did not keep a detailed record, noting the events only in their private diaries. Pages cut out from the diaries later exonerated these officers in front of the military command.
The duelists met on an early spring morning in a remote corner of the city park. They chose the secluded woods on purpose. At this time it happened more than once that women, for whose sake the men faced each other with drawn swords or at pistol point, had penetrated the ball room of the Seven Electors or the riding school at the barracks. Dressed in mourning, they threw themselves screaming between the duelers, and produced theatrics that left a bitter taste. Colonel Sükray had conducted his affairs in utter secrecy but he could not vouch for his opponent’s discretion. Especially since he noticed that the last two nights Eveline had only pretended to be asleep in the canopied bed. Her heart was palpitating and every once in a while she let out a loud and uncontrollable sigh. The Colonel, wrapped in melancholy thought, lay motionless next to his wife, nor did a single twitch of his face betray his awareness of her sleeplessness.
On that fatal, foggy morning he had intended to tiptoe out of his room, since there was not a sound from where his wife lay asleep. As he was about to silently open the door, Eveline popped up pantherlike from among her frilly, lacy pillows.
“O, you miserable wretch...You’d leave me without one last kiss?” she shouted, beside herself, and showed him her leaden, haggard, sleepless face.
For the last time the Colonel commanded his aching heart be still. With cool courtesy he brushed his lips first against Eveline’s hand, then her forehead.
Wildly, uncontrollably sobbing, she threw herself back among the pillows. The noble Kamilló Sükray, Colonel of the Hunyady regiment, quietly closed the bedroom door for the last time. With an aching heart he directed his steps toward the woods at the edge of the city.
No matter what the Romantic novels claim about desperate, angry husbands who kill their unfaithful wives without a second thought, let it be known that a woman’s treachery first of all causes pain; sentimental, cowardly and sad pain...Shame comes later, then vanity arises like a raging bear, followed inevitably by angry remorse.
On the way to the duel, Sükray decided to kill the Frenchman, who, to all appearances, had been carrying on a secret affair with his wife.
Who can fathom women’s mysterious feelings, their secret errands, their never-acknowledged adventures? Why, the dear lady who could pass for Saint Cecilia, misted in dewy scents at the soirée, might have spent that very afternoon in the woods with a mysterious stranger, and her knees might still bear the traces of ant bites...Her sweetly fragrant mouth pronounces carefully chosen phrases, picked from the works of unhappy poetasters or frazzled novelists, to dazzle everyone with her witty repartee—whereas an hour before, in her uncontrollable passion for her secret lover she might have moaned words used by a kitchen wench at a sailors’ bar...An English governess or a boarding school may teach a girl impeccable manners, sweet-scented modesty and the chastest dances, all of which will be most useful in society, but to love madly, in joy and misery, to love with gnashing teeth, this a lady can learn only from depraved men, the trashy men kept by streetwalkers. Is there a bored society lady who, deep down in her heart of hearts, does not crave to be acquainted with the mysteries of love?
On the way to the duel these were the thoughts of Colonel Sükray who, as a young lieutenant had nowhere near the sacred regard for the tenth commandment he professed now, when unclean hands threatened the fragrant rose
bud in his possession.
Each dueler wore a black silk shirt over his bare chest and on the second passage of arms the Colonel’s fiery lunge left him impaled on the Frenchman’s épée, like a magpie on a hedgethorn. The wound penetrated the heart and proved fatal within seconds.
The two captains solemnly adjured the roving chevalier to leave town before they took steps to expel him. The Frenchman announced that he could only do so after he apologized to the Colonel’s widow...He asked the gentlemen to remain with the corpse until his return, whereupon he would immediately depart from town.
The stunned officers looked askance at each other. The astonishing brazenness of the Frenchman rendered them speechless. A resurgent spout of blood from the corpse’s chest signaled the dead man’s awareness of his impending dishonor.
“How much time do you need?” asked Captain Asszonyfái.
“Half an hour.”
“Hurry up.”
The Frenchman grabbed his overcoat, put on his stovepipe hat, and left the scene of the duel with rapid strides. We have no way of knowing whether he in fact looked up the blonde lady to notify her of the sad news, in lieu of the reluctant officers. Eveline, the only one who knew the circumstances, preferred to keep silent. Many are the meetings about which women maintain a wise silence.
Asszonyfái and Leiningen stood guard by their Colonel’s corpse until nightfall, as if it were the Saviour’s body on Good Friday. Then they placed the cadaver on a cart and had it taken to the cemetery. Eveline wore mourning for the first time. Her blonde hair, white neck, and rustling skirts soon landed a second husband. He was Mr. Paul Burman, a high government official at Buda.