Sunflower

by Gyula Krudy

  By the time Libinyei made his way into the house he had grabbed an iron bar and was savoring glorious visions of murder as his sole road to salvation. However, both women (each in her own bedchamber) appeared to be as sound asleep as if there were no tomorrow. The itinerant musician had slipped away like a mendicant friar. Libinyei spent the night in his brother’s wife’s room, and attempted to convince Lotti that her dead husband lying under the window would arise and presently enter the house bleeding and gasping, to hold ordeal by fire over her. In a whisper Lotti confessed her mortal sins to her brother-in-law: she alone had laid Maszkerádi to waste, by means of the iron nail and the knitting needle, thereby earning the gratitude of every Josephstadt mother. Above all, Lotti had been outraged by the balding libertine’s latest schemes to seduce the youngest girls awaiting confirmation.

  “Oh, you witch,” the blue-dyer stammered, sobbing and in love, “I’m going to take care of you from now on. And I’ll skin you alive if you ever conjure up Maszkerádi from the beyond to come for dinner again.”

  Lotti solemnly swore, and at dawn they brought the corpse in from the sidewalk, where the itinerant musician had been guarding it as tenaciously as a ratter.

  Such were the circumstances surrounding Malvina’s birth.

  Lotti died in childbirth; the attending doctors delivered the child of a mother who was more dead than alive. For the first fifteen years of her life she never heard a word spoken about her parents. She was raised by a black-clad, thin-lipped, dagger-tongued woman (Helen) to whom Libinyei, the girl’s stepfather, never said a word. This woman spent her nights in a separate apartment of the house, with the taciturn itinerant musician on her doorstep, performing all sorts of hocus-pocus to keep the ghosts away. Libinyei, at times, addressed the girlchild as Miss Maszkerádi. (Later, after she had left her boarding school, Malvina used the pen name “Countess Maszkerádi” in her correspondence with classmates.) One day the monkish itinerant reported that Helen was in her last hour, whereupon his mysterious presence vanished forever from the household. By that time Libinyei had amassed such a fortune that he barely grieved over the death of his neglected wife. His possessions included mansions, land in the country, and real estate in Buda.

  Good fortune and wealth did their best to console him. After Helen’s death all kinds of relatives came to stay at the townhouse, but none of them won Libinyei’s approval. Springtime visits to spas, quack remedies, barbers and doctors all failed to rejuvenate him. Soon enough he followed Helen, Lotti, and Maszkerádi into the great beyond. Malvina became the wealthiest heiress in Budapest: somber, frosty, intrepid, and miserable.

  Malvina Maszkerádi was Eveline’s best and only friend, entrusted with all of the girl’s secrets, like a private diary.

  A few days after the Tarot reading Miss Maszkerádi arrived at Bujdos-Hideaway.

  “I sensed that you are in some kind of danger,” said the solemn girl, her eyes downcast. “I wanted to be by your side.”

  Miss Maszkerádi had stayed at Bujdos before. She knew by name each dog, each horse and rooster. The migrating swallow and the stork nesting on the chimney of the servants’ quarters both greeted the melancholy maiden. The servants dared not look her in the eye, but stared after her as they would at a creature from another world.

  Eveline both loved and worried about her strange friend. But her vernal insomnia immediately passed as soon as Miss Maszkerádi joined the Hideaway household. Like one preparing for the grave, Eveline related her recent experiences in the minutest detail, including Andor Álmos-Dreamer’s enigmatic demise and resurrection.

  “He’s crazy, but honest. This village Don Juan’s going to be your downfall yet,” observed Miss Maszkerádi. “And what about your gambler?” she inquired. “Show me the gambler’s letters.”

  Eveline shook her head.

  “He’s afraid to write me. Sometimes in the morning I stand by the window and watch the mailman trudging along on the road far away. That gray old man always comes the same way, sad as autumn and just as hopeless. If he were to deliver a letter from Pest one day...But I don’t even know if I’d like to receive a letter...”

  “Your gambler’s crazy, too...He thinks you’re some other-wordly creature,” Miss Maszkerádi replied scornfully. “I assume every man to be insane, and usually the events prove me right. Oh, there’s the ass who believes you are a demon, an angel of death, and who wants to escape into death when he feels he’s lost his freedom. Meanwhile another inane male will worship you like a saint or a holy icon, and expect you to perform miracles. Only I know you exactly as you really are: a scatterbrained, bored, orphaned young miss. Why, by now you should have married a first lieutenant or some young gent with a duck’s ass haircut. But you believe life is more interesting this way. Well, one fine day some maniac will snag you by the throat like a fox taking a goose.”

  “Please calm down,” implored Eveline. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  “Oh yes, with a dog...or a horse...or a wooden cross at the old Buda military cemetery over the grave of a young officer whose fiancée’d run off to work the cash register at a nightclub. Men stink. If I were to find one guy whose mouth had a pleasing aroma, maybe I’d let him kiss me. Or rather I wouldn’t wait but kiss him myself. If, God forbid, I should find a man I like, I’d pick him like a roadside poppy. If I could only live...If it were really worthwhile to be alive, I’d show you how to live life. But I’m not in good health, and I’m not old enough to enjoy being in poor health.”

  “Just simmer down,” Eveline repeated. “Can’t you hear someone lurking around the house? Every night I hear him and my heart almost bursts...”

  It was a spring night.

  “Nah, it’s just the unusual weather we’re having,” Miss Maszkerádi replied, unmoved. “It’s all that meteoric crap—ashes and dust from burnt-out stars—the winds sweep into the atmosphere...It’s only the night, plucking an old mandolin string in the attic that’s been lying silent for years. No need to go mushroom-crazy, like some fungus that suddenly pops up, so glad to be among us.”

  “But I tell you, someone goes past my window every night. I tell myself, perhaps it’s Kálmán, and my heart nearly screams out like a bird that’s caught. Perhaps it’s Álmos-Dreamer, and my tears soak the pillow...Or it’s the night watchman, so I just sigh—but the candle still burns till dawn, I simply can’t get resigned to living this way. But how else should I live?”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to her friend, Miss Maszkerádi folded her arms.

  “In old Russian novels people asked such questions, behaving like cardboard characters...But today it’s totally different. Novels only show you how to die. I don’t even know who my father was. One thing for sure, he never thought of me. My mother had no way of knowing, either, that I would be here some day. I came into being and grew like an icicle under the eaves. This is why I’ll never have a child. I just can’t recommend this lifestyle for you, Eveline, although I know you want me to. Well, each to her own...suit on suit, heart to heart,” mocked Miss Maszkerádi.

  “Malvina, you’ll never be happy,” prophesied Eveline, speaking as if from the pages of some novel.

  “I must always look within myself, for everything. I believe only in myself, and myself alone, and don’t give a damn about others’ opinions. I view each of my acts as if I were reading about it fifty years from now, in a newly found diary. Did I do something ridiculous and dumb? I ask myself each night when I close my eyes. I think over each word, each act: will I regret it, come tomorrow? I am my own judge and I judge myself as harshly as if I’d been lying in my grave these hundred years, my life a yellowed parchment diary, its end known in advance. I will not tolerate being laughed at or cheated. I want to know this very minute what I will think ten years from now about today, about today’s weather and about this night...Will I have to be ashamed of some weakness or tenderness? Is there one circumstance worth disrupting my life for, rising an hour earlier, or using more words than u
sual? I try to modulate my decisions and my emotions by looking ahead and seeing whether I’d regret it tomorrow. And I’m never nervous, it’s simply not worth it.

  “Had I been born a man, I would have been a Talmudist, an Oriental sage, a scholar who delves into decaying millennial mysteries. Too bad, I was not admitted at the university. But if possible, I would still marry a great, gray-bearded, immensely wise rabbi or Oriental scholar. Possibly Schopenhauer...or my first teacher, Gyula Sámuel Spiegler, if that little old Jew were still alive...Oh, you won’t catch me crying on account of rival women, actresses, danseuses! The hell with the strumpets! What do I care if my husband sometimes sees them? As long as they stay away from me with their dirt.”

  Eveline heard out these words of wisdom with eyes closed. All her life repelled by women of easy virtue, she still envisioned them to be like the first one she had ever seen, in her childhood in the Inner City, near her convent school. A fat, ungainly, wide-mouthed, coarsely painted towering idol of flesh that passed by with petticoats lifted, like a killer of men, cruelly smiling. The little schoolgirls had nightmares about this other-worldly monster who probably roamed the town to entice inexperienced men to her cave in the mountains where she would devour them like a dragon. Ever after, the educated, curious and clairvoyant young woman still imagined fallen women to be like that. (She was most amazed at the Pest racing turf one summer Sunday when she attended the St. Stephen’s Cup races with her lady companion, and Kálmán pointed out from afar a gentle, unimpeachably clean-cut angel, all blonde English-style curls, as one of the city’s most depraved creatures who spent her days in the company of elderly counts.)

  Miss Maszkerádi, all her Talmudic wisdom notwithstanding, loved to refer to women of easy virtue as wondrous creatures who lived off their bodies. She preferred French novels that described life in brothels, and would have given much to clandestinely observe the goings-on at some sordid club one night. She was convinced that the best way to get to know a man was by witnessing his coarsest words and acts.

  “Had I a father or brother, I would send them to accompany my would-be fiancé on a visit to the filles de joie. I’d want to know how my future life-companion acted, how he behaved there...” Miss Maszkerádi insisted. “But I don’t want to get married. Because then I’d have long ago become an expert in midwifery, and in all the seductive practices of loose women.”

  And on this childish note the wise Miss Maszkerádi closed the evening’s proceedings. She went to bed in her room, smiling in quiet scorn at Eveline, who would listen all night long for the sound of footsteps coming and going around the house. She knew it was nothing but the spring wind fidgeting out there.

  ***

  In the morning Miss Maszkerádi went horseback riding. (Actually, the real reason she liked to sojourn at Eveline’s Bujdos estate was because it offered wide meadows and endless country roads for indulging in her passionate pastime. Back in Pest she rarely showed herself on the Stefánia Road promenade among the nannies, small children and the multitudes of happy or unhappy lovers. “Someone might think I’m trying to show off,” she thought and was always annoyed whenever some man stared too long at her willowy equestrienne waist and her silver-spurred little riding boots. As if she were trying to impress anyone!)

  At Bujdos-Hideaway a fat mare named Kati was Miss Maszkerádi’s mount. This saddle horse had ears as long as a donkey’s. She had a shifty way of eavesdropping on conversations around her, pricked up her ears at approaching footsteps, and assiduously whisked her short tail like a housemaid shaking a dust rag. At times she was as obedient as a trained circus horse. Then in one of her capricious moods she threw Miss Maszkerádi, and, maliciously satisfied, ran off. She was as old as the chief steward’s wife, and as gluttonous, doleful and impetuous as a frustrated spinster.

  Miss Maszkerádi rode over hill and dale, resting her eyes on the colors of the early spring landscape that alternated with the humdrum monotony of an aging chorus singer’s costume changes. It is only human to be constantly astounded by springtime; sixty or seventy years are not enough to make you tire of it. Each spring a new card game begins with life itself; you may win or you may lose. Secretly everyone starts life anew each spring. Only thing is, no one has the courage to admit wanting to be born again, to start everything all over: love, marriage, lifelong projects. To throw off the shabby old clothes and those dented decorations. Oh to run, run naked and devour buds, trees, girls, pale boys in the woods, and quickly lay to rest the old folks wrapped in their lynx furs, still mumbling about winter.—Miss Maszkerádi had never in her life read a springtime lyric, and despised people who delighted in the weather. Wasn’t it all the same, a screeching snowstorm or a mild lingering breeze, once you lay in your grave? Why bother to set out in life when it was over so soon?

  So she whacked the melancholy mare Kati, and, flushed in the heat of excitement, cantered through birch woods, where the aftereffects of melted snow, blackened nests and globular growths hung from bare branches like so many hanged men slain by spring for being no longer fit to live.

  The wily mare cantered on the wet road, past deep ditches as dark as grave pits whose dead had escaped to become ghosts; the meadows, convalescent after their long confinement, looked as feeble as a nonambulatory patient sitting on the edge of the bed. Birds: crows and magpies wheeled in the air as if newly acquainting themselves with the land below; spring was sprung with a vengeance, as if hardy hands were prying some vast door open a crack, allowing to slip back into this world those meteorological exiles, those playful roués and screeching, shameless hussies, clowns and paunchy rakes: the lock is creaking, there is a great rush as the stag-headed, mossy-bearded stable master sweeps over the land, horsewhips and expels winter’s lingering leftovers, kicks the dead into the ditch, cracks the whip at wandering minstrels and unrolls the meadows’ endless carpets for the upcoming catastrophic onrush.

  On buds, naked little fairies seat themselves astraddle (till now they were mute shadows in hidden groves); in the air, snaps and creaks, voices of unknown origin, as if underground germs and seeds sang a grand chorale; gusts of air scamper like crazed wheels, whistling clouds whoosh by streaming overland, solemnly still waters for no particular reason stir now as if they, too, wanted a part in the Spring Ball; it is a miracle that strident, bleating billy goats don’t flood the field where everyone and everything aches to play. And still, in abandoned little autumnal niches hidden among trees in the depths of sad copses that seem to be created for solitary ghostly reveries with bent head—someone must certainly be sitting there, in a clearing that no one ever sees. But even such solitudes are approached by young snoopers on tiptoes, eager to spy on saddish old folks’ thoughts.

  “Spring!” thought Miss Maszkerádi. “You are an idiot. I just don’t believe in you!”

  And yet she must have believed in it a tiny little bit, for she searched out the tree she had been in love with for years.

  It was a dwarf willow up on the bank of a stream gone dry, highly solemn, determined to hold its ground like some watchman. Its twigs had long ago gone with the wind, like unfaithful, flighty women from an old man’s side. But the ancient tree maintained a virile, calm, patriarchal equanimity. This was one somber, manly male who never showed any hurt, rejoiced not at Eastertime, nor did it celebrate the coming and going of evanescent life all around.

  Miss Maszkerádi had sought precisely such a gruff, ancient tree-like male all her life, to whom she could have been as faithful as to this rooted, bark-bound, impassive trunk that had a face, as in fabled forests of old, hands in pockets, and a waist aslant, in a bored pose. At times she fancied the tree as an aging vagabond who had weathered many a hardship in his wifeless life, tramped about aimless as a muddy dog, the kept lover of man-hungry females; he despised love’s joys and woes, had plucked his share of triumph and hopelessness, taken quiet delight in success, had women on their knees to kiss his hand; passionless, not even pretending a semblance of emotion, he seduced the women in hi
s path, then sent them packing, so many used-up playmates; they had loved and hated him, caressed him with trembling hands, then flung curses at his head, the way chambermaids in Pest toss trash out of a window...This manly one stayed calm and collected by living the inward life, thinking his own thoughts and always doing whatever felt good. He never kept a flower, a lock of hair, or remembrance of a kiss. He dealt with women as they deserved. Never did he wander with aching heart on moonlit nights, under anyone’s window, no matter how much awaited...He might prowl about for a week or two like a dog in springtime, then, all skin and bones and weary of the world, he would return from his wanderings and never recall what happened to him, what women had said, what they smelled and tasted like...Miss Maszkerádi positively abhorred novelists who always write about old men remembering youthful adventures. Thus she could not stand Turgenev, whom Eveline would have read night and day.

  The old rogue pretended not to notice last year’s lover, Miss Maszkerádi. Indifferent and cool, he stood his ground by the vanished creek whose bed had perhaps drained off his very life, never to return, flighty foam, playful wavelet, rainbow spray.

  “Here I am, grandpa,” Maszkerádi whispered, sliding from her saddle.

  She beheld the ancient tree’s inward-glancing eye, compressed, cold mouth, thick-skinned, impassive waist, and pocketed hands.

  “I am here and I am yours,” she went on, after embracing the tree as an idol is embraced by some wild tribeswoman who can no longer find a mate that’s man enough in her own nation.