Sunflower

by Gyula Krudy

  On the predawn street a tiny woman and a lanky gentleman were walking arm in arm, apparently taking their daily constitutional.

  Diamant, who knew everyone in town, purred with satisfaction.

  “This is what happens when you sell yourself to a woman. Mr. X gets married, but he can only take his dwarf wife out for fresh air in the dead of night...I remained a bachelor, although I had my chances...To marry like Zöld, that would have been easy.”

  The morning light reflected from windows of the Inner City’s antiquated houses like lantern rays shining from the Rákos cemeteries. Former burghers of the Inner City, now turned to water and dust, were sneaking back into their old apartments. The light gilded the faded shop signs. Diamant pointed at the lit-up windows on high:

  “That’s where they sleep, the good, the pure, the decent ones, the happy families, the untouched daughters. Ah, if I could have had the love of an honest woman just once! If only my fate had brought me an innocent, lily-white, heavenly creature, I’d now be going to the Jesuits’ red-brick church to give my thanks, instead of this...”

  Diamant grabbed Kálmán’s arm, and spoke as emotionally as a romantic hero. (Kálmán eyed him incredulously: maybe his friend had had too much champagne—although Diamant for decades had been quaffing champagne like water.) His eyes were as doleful as a ghost’s, his voice dolorous as a cello sounding behind a curtain.

  “My life’s been spent among women of ill repute. I was no lady-killer, no, I wasn’t even handsome, and what’s more, I never spent much on women. I just sat and smoked quietly and kept their company night and day. I’d give offhand answers, you’d never see me bend down to pick up their dropped jewelry or flowers; a glass of beer from me made them more delighted than a bottle of champagne bought by a count; some mornings I’d take them to the carnival peep show on a one-horse buggy, order hotdogs, have their fortunes told, things like that made them unforgettably grateful. At night I stood in the back at the nightclub, along with the applauding waiters, but the girls would still notice me. Every now and then I gave them a flower, and they’d dance all night wearing it in their hair and saved it in a glass of water in the morning. I offered them cheap Sport cigarettes, because I knew they didn’t really care what they smoked. I’d drop in at their rooms in the afternoon, like some relative paying a family visit. Then they’d tell me about family matters, unlucky love affairs, and show me the fiancé’s photo or love letters received from some simpleton. On rare occasions I’d let drop a word of advice, a mere suggestion. But mostly I smoked in silence, and solemnly listened to their Tarot readings. I pretended to believe all their superstitions, nodded sympathetically when they reviled a treacherous friend or expressed their disgust with the monotony of life. I’d put on my glasses—black horn-rims—when they consulted me about their contracts, and I coached them about making a statement when they were in trouble with the police. I never told them they were pretty, or that I loved them, I simply sat and sat, smoking, taking it all in, quietly, acting serene and wise. That’s how I possessed the diva and the flower girl. Neither my body nor my soul really craved them, for I’d always dreamed of something else, something unreachable.”

  Thus spoke Diamant, and he pointed his cherrywood walking stick at the windows in the gray dawn light:

  “There...up there...where the whole family sits at the fully laid table, cups of fresh coffee steaming on the red placemats, and where even before their ablutions the girls of the house smell of hyacinth, from the kiss exchanged with the potted plant on their windowsill, first thing in the morning. Their hands are white and translucent, just right for the little green can they use for watering their flowers. At times I felt a drop of water fall on my face...That was the entire extent of my acquaintance with pure, innocent maidenhood. Their polka-dot kerchiefs, the hair brushed straight back, those earlobes, those corals paling and blushing in turns, the down on the nape of the neck, cheeks cool as springwater, forehead full of godfearing faith, melancholy temples, dreamy curls, aloof noses and those resigned lips always shut tight, as if they would speak only once, and for the first time, on the wedding night—all this I never saw from up close, and could only imagine the flowery scent of their breath. Innocent, gentle, churchgoing, white-footed were the women whose acquaintance I’d always craved, and instead I got actresses and somersaulting jezebels. If only once a pure maiden’s palm had caressed my forehead, I would have been a different man. If only once, just once I’d have noticed that in the world outside it was Easter morning, and my heart full of love for a springtime woman—I would have walked a different path. Not once did a chaste woman smile at me, or take my hand, and inquire about the salvation of my soul...I merely stood on tiptoe behind dancing girls’ sagging petticoats. That’s why I never got anywhere in life. Soon I’ll be fifty and ready to die like a dog.”

  Kálmán felt a voice humming in his throat, a psalm that would have to be sung as soon as the organist gave the signal:

  “Eveline, Eveline...Pure virgin, sweet Eveline.”

  But he held his peace, for she was the sole treasure of his life.

  Lovers, every last one of them, these strange participants in the card game of life, tend to see all other men as inferior knaves.

  While Mr. Diamant mused over his wasted life like a melancholy jack of diamonds, Kálmán, in his jaunty heart and cocky complacence, reflected that he happened to possess the very woman whose praises the wise fat man just sang.

  An upsurge of woes and sorrows, to a lover’s ears, sounds like mere lyrical plashing of white-capped waves.

  What a fool, the Hungary of his day deemed the poet Kisfaludy, when he sounded his plaintive lover’s lyre! The blue hill of Badacsony, the dreamy, fleecy cumulus clouds evoked sadness only in a few similarly afflicted hearts. Few folks had cared to remember that, wandering through the greengage woods on the vineyard-studded mountain, was an unhappy swain for whom all of life, the entire universe depended on the whim of a young girl’s eyes.

  Even the man in love is always ready to laugh at another one—apart from his own emotions, are there still other varieties of that fancy ivy that entangles the heart? Love can be a most ridiculous and childish thing, as long as it amuses or torments others.

  It is the clown’s pancake makeup daubed on our fellow men’s faces.

  Or a flamboyantly long pheasant feather stuck in a dunce’s cap.

  Or worthless filberts used by children and old men in games of chance.

  Everyone appears ridiculous when in love.

  Only the daring ones admit the extent of their torments over a woman. Therefore the lyric poet is actually surrounded by a hostile audience when he sings of his folly. And as for an overweight, barrel-toned, beer-bellied and prickly-chinned man, already suffering from all kinds of bodily ills, to talk about love, why, the weary corners of his mouth are more suited for obscene or scornful phrases than plaintive verses...

  That dawn Kálmán made a silent vow that he would never again hold forth about love. Henceforth he would only hum to himself, “Eveline, I love you so,” like some solitary autumnal fly droning among reeds and rushes.—Kálmán was a redblooded young man, who would have died rather than be heard singing those songs crooned daily by tenors the world over (songs that women never tire of hearing).

  “Damn!” exclaimed Mr. Diamant who in his thoughts had been making wedding arrangements with Inner City misses at the Franciscans’ Church and would have gladly approved the young maiden’s wearing long, laced knickers, such as her grandmother had worn to the fair on St. Gellért’s Hill. Possibly deep down in his heart he had desired a wife who would knit her stockings herself—just as the same men who profess to set things right in the world end up guzzling booze from dancing girls’ shoes.

  “Damn, something spilled on me...”

  His feathered green hunting hat indeed showed traces of a suspect fluid, flung from above into the early morning Inner City street; at the same time a white-curtained window was quietly closed on the s
econd floor.

  (It would have been easy to go into flights of fancy about the white hand and the lace-frilled nightgown, the sleepy little face, the snowy shoulders, and the long eyelashes stuck in a thousand-and-one-nights’ narcosis by sleep, heavy sighs exhaled into the pillows, thoughts aflutter like moths in the night while the stockings were being pulled off, the fairy dust of sweet reveries sprinkled on the brow, the orphaned little hand of the sleeping woman, her heel peeping out from the silk quilt in telltale exposure of the dreaming virgin in the dawn light—but Mr. Diamant was past his serenading mood. Interjecting brief curses, he explained to Kálmán that certain irate old bachelors in the Inner City poured water from upper stories on the heads of the early dawn passersby whose footfalls, resounding in the deathly silence of the neighborhood, disturbed the citizens’ sleep.)

  These were the circumstances preceding their arrival at The Veteran, a rare all-night tavern in the Inner City of old Pest, permitted by the police to stay open all night. And so the nightlife was lively here, even though the tavern sign showed a Hat Street janitor decked out in the uniform, complete with feather, sword and other insignia, of a Mexican campaign volunteer from Emperor Maximilian’s time.

  The vaulted rooms belonged to a building on Franciscans’ Place; printers, newspapermen, women of easy virtue and other such nocturnal refugees camped out here, so many tumbleweeds, transients blown by the whistling autumn winds and left stuck on the cemetery steps. Misplaced lives found a nook here, much as wanderers’ wet cloaks are spread out to dry on a roadside kiln. The pilgrims left the crosses they had toted this far, resting them against the wall outside, before stepping from the night into the alcoholic fumes of this musty tavern. They dropped in here for one last hour of merrymaking, shouting, table-thumping, arguing, maybe a song or two—before laying themselves down to a sleep from which there might be no awakening. All around in the big city, the Budapest of myriad lives, people were asleep. Groaning in their dreams of lottery numbers, white-legged girls, nightmarish hags, tomorrow’s cares, money turned to ash—as if they had all fled the city for night’s distant province. Sleepers don’t pay taxes, don’t litigate, they lie tranquil, stretched out, wonderfully silent. Of the city’s legions of voices, feelings, longings, only The Veteran’s patrons remained awake. If the sleepers were never to wake again, The Veteran’s patrons would remain as Budapest’s sole survivors, having stayed up carefree, gay, open-eyed, keeping the watch during the night when archangels came to lay waste apartment houses whose gateposts were marked with the blood of the lamb.

  Here they sat, tippled their wine, downed their beer, and consumed freshly boiled meats and palate-tingling seafood, the folks who would have nothing to do with the city’s daytime, who had exiled themselves into the night, having found no daytime faces worth facing. Those who, without this tavern, would have been forced to become magic hunters, galloping ghosts astride dry twigs, wanderers gliding over the highway, blurry patches of moonlight on the roof ridge, stuck-in-the-doghouse, doorway-lurking shadows, stray smoke rings wreathed around the moon, starbeams’ loosely flung motes, persuaders lurking at the foot of the suicide’s bed, pied pipers wearing the trickster’s tall hat, disembodied bawdy thoughts sneaking in to tempt sleepless virgins. They sat dipping their beards into tankards, as befits liberated, formerly bewitched spirits who have nothing else left to do at night in the city. Executioners and victims, trembling sinners and meek fishermen flocked together under night’s shelter. Those whom a faithful wife’s chaste kiss and undefiled limbs awaited in a warm bed had already left the premises, the way a dragonfly soars away, apparently aimless, toward the sun’s rays.

  These desperate, sad pub crawlers respected Mr. Diamant, whose form emanated at least as much bitter experience as the pyramids of Egypt. A separate table was secured for the melancholy man who proceeded to salute by first name a few individuals who looked like coachmen, after being greeted by them.

  “Boiled beef...and, if you happen to have one, a marrow bone,” said Diamant to the spindle-shanked tavernkeeper, all the while emanating an air of official ceremoniousness, as if the job of food inspection had been what made him stay up nights.

  The teeth had hardly begun masticating the meat, Diamant had barely downed a single stein of barley-brew (his eyes fixed vacantly on a far-off point), when the front door’s glass, veiled by steam like the women’s compartment in Purgatory, flew open.

  She was smartly dressed, fresh and perfumed, as if all night she had preened in front of her mirror, instantly replenishing evaporated essences. She shimmered and hovered like a beauteous woman in a ruined gambler’s imagination, the one he could have bought had his luck taken a different turn. Her vanished youth, expired like a swallow on African shores, now returned for this one night. She was woman, a jealous tigress maddened by pains surpassing those of childbirth. She was the ruddy disk of the sun dying behind the hills, mirroring the wrestling twins: the moon’s leggy, breezy, flute-playing daughter and the sun’s hammersmith son.

  One of her eyes had a cast, as if there, behind iron-barred windows, cried out the prisoners condemned to death row: love, youth, song and recklessness.

  Her other eye stared fixed at Kálmán Ossuary like a gold-tipped arrow seeking the bulls-eye.

  Kálmán, paralyzed, could merely look on at this fiery sallying forth of bustle, ostrich-feathered hat, sweet perfume: la dolce vita itself, on parade like some superannuated circus steed that, come tomorrow, might be harnessed to a hearse.

  But Diamant had his wits about him.

  He flew toward the onrushing lady and addressed her in the unctuous, churchwarden-like tones of a village uncle:

  “Madam, this place is most unsuitable...”

  “I want to be near my betrothed,” replied Ninon, who had had plenty of time on this sleepless night to rehearse her say.

  “But this is a cabdrivers’ club,” Diamant insisted, expending considerable energy to achieve a kind of asthmatic emphasis. “Men may go anywhere, even to a morgue if they feel like being diverted by the sight of a woman beaten to death. But you are a refined lady, men kiss your hand wherever you go.”

  “That used to be the case, but this man proved to be my undoing,” she faltered.

  “Let’s go, my lady,” Diamant replied relentlessly, and at once took the hysterical woman by the arm.

  In two strides he led her out of The Veteran, and seated her in a cab waiting by the curb.

  “Please go home now...” he said.

  (“And feel free to read your old love letters, my unhappy child,” he added, in his mind.)

  When he returned, he addressed Kálmán in a more familiar manner.

  “Son, you must get away from here. Only misery and the sufferings of hell lie in store for you here. And lest you forget, the prisons are empty nowadays, just waiting to be filled...Get away from here, go someplace where there’s fresh air and a breeze. Where you can hear whoops from a long way off, and the heartbeat’s steady like a bull’s low-key, casual bellowing. You’re still young, you’re master of your own fate. Find some innocent, saintly woman who will pray away your sins and will gladly suffer anything for your sake, be it a toothache or martyrdom. Times are getting tough around here.”

  Ossuary hung his head.

  A slew of melancholy images came to his mind with cruel alacrity. A narrow Inner City street, the flickering street lamp, in the light of which he examines the rope before looping it around his neck...A miserable, endless day, the sun showing no sign of ever intending to sink behind St. Gellért’s Hill, and all afternoon spent looking the pistol’s barrel in the eye...The penitentiary, full of rats and close-cropped old inmates... Buried alive in the stench...

  He felt utterly miserable.

  “I’ll make arrangements for your departure by daybreak,” continued Diamant, and gritting his teeth, he swallowed a mouthful of beer after chewing on it as if it were some adversary.

  Soon afterward Kálmán Ossuary left The Veteran’s heart-lulling
and soul-soothing vaulted chambers. He had experienced a miraculous transformation deep down in his heart. No more loitering around gambling casinos; on the street he would steer clear of his worthless, easygoing chums who casually fraternized with death; he would reconcile with his uncle, a prickly village gentleman out of whom he could no longer squeeze a single farthing; he would take his law exams and establish himself as a lawyer in the Inner City of Pest. Any life deficient in the family pleasures must, of necessity, be aimless and troubled. He would find himself a wife in the Josephstadt, where he had met Eveline. He would have the doors fitted with secure locks, be always on the qui vive, take his wife out only to the National Theater and for daily constitutionals on the Buda esplanade, soon with heads bent they would be leaning over a small cradle, enjoying the quiet life, no thought hidden from each other; they would have their photograph taken together, and on Sunday afternoons visit the Farkasrét Cemetery where the relatives rest in peace. Time to enjoy the pleasures of a fine kitchen, the rich roast, clean table linen, a soft bed and the alarm clock —quiet, happy days, with plenty of time to observe all the beauty of autumn and spring. No loud word would ever scare the silent bird of tranquility from their house. Only the sewing machine will whirr, the mailman will ring the doorbell to deliver a money order, and a retired old neighbor might amble over after dinner to regale them with tales of the Prussian campaign. The family doctor would make house calls, but mostly to discuss politics, and afternoon coffee would be sipped by his wife’s dearest friends: old Josephstadt ladies who are never seen without shopping bags. The clock’s hands would show the midnight hours in vain in a house where everyone sleeps through the night. The garbage collector’s bell, or the dawn revelers’ footfalls, would be heard from a great distance, as if from far-off lands. The oil lamp always lit under the holy icon, until the woman of the house begins to resemble the Virgin Mary herself, her face not yet broken by pain; if overheard talking in her dream, she would always speak of household and domestic matters, serving maid stuff: “Marie, mind the gentleman’s caraway-seed soup...”