by Gyula Krudy
The old willow’s knotted gnarls and stumps, like so many hands, palpated all over Miss Maszkerádi’s steel-spring body. The mossy beard stuck to the frost-nipped girl-cheek already quite cool to start with. Who knows, the old willow might even have reciprocated her embrace.
“I know you can keep a secret,” she mumbled. “Please don’t tell anyone I love you.”
She hugged that tree as she had never dared to hug a man. Her arms and legs wound around the trunk, her incandescent forehead pressed against the ancient idol, this offshoot of Roman Priapus that had escaped being daubed in cinnabar by womenfolk.
“As long as I’m around, I’ll visit you, old partner in crime,” she said.
Kati, the shaggy yellow mare, wearily lowered her head, suffered Miss Maszkerádi in the saddle, and carried her homeward, morose head hung low, as if they had been beaten up at a wedding.
In the afternoon a fog settled over the fields, like gray souls assembled to rehash the mournful circumstances of their demise. Madmen made of mist occupied the upper galleries... apparently unable to recall how they had died.
Back at the country house, Miss Maszkerádi smoked one cigarette after another as she paced the rooms under the century-old vaults. She marched tall like a soldier, and appeared to be content, even happy. Yet when she spoke, her voice sounded weary:
“Good God, to think that some people live their whole lives unvisited by illness, accident, misfortune. Sometimes I think I’ll be mauled to death by tigers.”
Eveline sat in the rocking chair, reading a novel: Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. From reveries of medieval knighthood she glanced up at her friend.
“You should read a good book, Malvina...We all die in the end...”
“But how?...You imagine yourself as mistress of a castle, because you have swallowed men’s lies. Your death, too, will be theatrical, complete with the whole works: candelabras, priests praying, funeral bells, servants sobbing outside the door, a towering catafalque. A whole production with you in the leading role, you hope. But I just can’t think that way, I’m a coward, a city bourgeoise, a Bürgerin of the Josephstadt...I am afraid of death.”
Miss Maszkerádi stood on feet wide apart in front of the window, like some actress in tights. (She would have felt tremendously embarrassed if someone had told her this.) On her forehead a brown curl stirred during her cogitations as if blown by a breeze. Her slender body was like a solitary fencing sabre stuck into the floor of the salle. She swayed and quivered, as if the pulsing of her blood moved steel springs coiled within her body. On foggy days she was always tense and she anxiously racked her brain as if her life depended on thinking of something new.
“I can’t resign myself to the fact that I live in order to die some day. I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s. What I dread most is a fate like my alter ego’s.”
Eveline finally gave up trying to follow the wanderings of the magnificent knight Ivanhoe in the Holy Land. The exotic mediaeval ladies flew up from her side like a covey of partridges, and Old England’s oak forests receded, to murmur from far off, on the edge of the horizon.
“You mean to tell me you have alter egos?” she asked, as if discovering some dark secret here, of all places, on a boring village afternoon.
Miss Maszkerádi’s steely-glinting eyes appeared as serene as an idol’s or a maniac’s.
“Yes, and I ran into one of them abroad, you know, the time I wintered in Egypt. This was a lady of distinction, a soulless vulgarian; she had both camel drivers and officers in red coats for lovers. She was sad only to the extent that a hotel orchestra’s tunes remind you of sadness, and she was cheerful to the extent that life in Cairo, the nightly balls, the various entertainments devised against ennui, formal dinners and excursions into the desert are calculated to cheer you, with a hypnotic power that every rich and idle traveler surrenders to. She lived a life as inhuman, as empty of inner content as any of the society ladies who stay at the gilded white hotels down there, and can be seen tapping the caged parrot’s beak with a finger that young men dream about. Perhaps her senses could only be aroused after she had gorged herself on rich, spicy dishes, danced at a ball, and listened to cold-blooded males calmly drawl incendiary words in her ear. She would settle into her seat at the theater with the indifference of an egret feather in a diamond hairpin. Sometimes she would leaf through a light French novel; among all those bald, grumpy, tired men she trod with silken footsteps. She had Creole or Gypsy blood, and she bore the name of a French prince who must have passed his days, advancing them like chessmen, in God knows what remote part of the globe.
“...Back then I was in love with an officer who spent an occasional evening with me.
“Did I say I was in love? No, Eveline, I must confess I’ve never been in love, just like that French princess. I simply happened to spend the winter and early spring in Egypt; went to lunch when the bell rang in the hotel, and had an affair with an officer of the local garrison. Simply because that was how things were done in the haut monde I frequented for entertainment, just like a servant girl who goes out to a masked ball.
“One night the officer—and I can’t for the life of me recall his face, or the camel driver’s, who took me out into the desert—well, the officer had had a little too much to drink, and he confessed that on days when I did not require his services he spent the night with the Frenchwoman, and he swore upon his honor that he could barely tell the two of us apart. To him, our voices, bodies, hair, and gestures appeared mirror images of each other. What’s more, while making love, the princess called him ‘sweet young master,’ the same term of endearment that I had picked up from a peasant woman here in Hungary. The princess, like me, begged to die at the moment of consummation. She loved the same feature of his face as I did, kissed his hand the same way as I, and watered him like a lady gardener her violets. And she, too, was supremely happy when this thirsty violet, parched by the Egyptian night, lapped up her blonde French vintage with loud slurps.
“The man was totally drunk, and insensitive to the fact that he was skinning me alive by ascribing my most intimate amorous behavior to another woman.
“I’m not going to go into what I felt and thought at the time. All I’m going to say is that on that night he lovingly implored me to let down my long auburn hair so that he could tie it in a knot around his neck. In vain. Like a naive little girl from the Josephstadt, I never really fathomed the purpose of this production at the time. Back then I had not yet visited prisons and madhouses. I only knew the life around me, worlds apart from the tragic depths, or the solemn mysteries—as far apart as our luxury liner and that Black Sea steamer full of howling slaves, that we passed near the African shore. Back then I still believed that no matter how I lived, acted, behaved and felt, I would still eventually await, clutching an old prayerbook, my heart at peace, the arrival of the Jesuit father to administer the last rites in my white-curtained Josephstadt house, with the consecrated pussy willow on the wall. Back then I still believed that from that tranquil island of happiness one could roam without hurt on wild sargasso seas, and that adventures and experience would not blind my eyes like droppings from a swallows’ nest.
“I’ll make this short. The next morning, after an anxious night, I thoroughly scrutinized my French princess, who until then I had found quietly repulsive, like most of the ‘culture vultures’ who spend every day of their lives in white ocean liners and hotels with gold trim.
“The princess undeniably resembled me. The saucy thing even imitated my style in clothes—or else I did hers. The only other thing I wanted to know was whether she had poor vision in her left eye, as I do. So I decided to test her. At lunch I sat immediately on her left and on my white lace fan I wrote in large, clear letters, ‘I hate you,’ in French. I’d already made sure tha
t my left eye could not decipher the letters. During lunch we exchanged a few neutral words. Then I opened my fan and conspicuously waved it near her face several times. Had her left eye not been as poor as mine, she would have certainly noticed the inked inscription. But she merely smiled neutrally, bored and indifferent as a puma at the zoo. Her hair emanated the scent of Japanese gardens. She was as weird as an exotic bird. A ghastly chill ran through my soul when I considered that, under certain circumstances, I resembled her.
“After lunch I spoke briefly with the officer. I told him I wanted to rest that evening, so why didn’t he spend the night with my rival. ‘Besides, I’m curious to know what the princess thinks about this extraordinary similarity between us,’ I told him. His eyes flashed like a knife in a scuffle. ‘I’ll ask her!’ he said, licking his chops, the poor fool. Service in the colonies had degraded him, as it does most Europeans. Looking at him, I thought that once upon a time this blue-eyed young man had been a blond-haired little boy who went to school wearing a white collar, the taste of cake in his mouth and the trace of his mother’s kiss on his forehead.
“Next morning the officer was found strangled in the corridor outside the French princess’s room. My alter ego had committed the deed that would have been my lot. She had tied her hair in a knot around the show-off’s neck, and suffocated him.
“What happened to the murderous princess? That I can’t tell you, Eveline, because I left Cairo before the results of the inquest into the officer’s death were revealed. I arrived home in a state of nervous fever and hallucination. I don’t think I’ll leave this country for some time to come. After all, in this land we more or less know each other, men and women, and surprises are unlikely; our sins are of the usual sort, the modes of thought familiar. Sometimes I visit menageries, and the eyes of caged exotic predators remind me of looks I have encountered in my travels abroad. So I am a native of the Josephstadt, after all. Even though in make-believe I have rehearsed a happy and serene death scene—oh, I don’t think I’ll rest in peace when I kiss the crucifix for the last time. Although at times I still think that my alter ego, the unhappy French princess, has suffered and atoned on my behalf. She has done my penance, by living out the life that I should have lived, by rights. I am the shadow that remains after she has disappeared. For where do they go, the shadows of folks who have gone underground? They must live on, somehow. So maybe fate will deal me a merciful death.”
“Poor dear,” replied Eveline, and embraced her friend with a heart as pure as only a village girl’s can be. She smelled of old lavender and wore shirts of fine Upland linen. In cold weather she put on soft cotton flannel petticoats although she knew full well that this was no longer the fashion. She loved to linger in vaulted chambers, to dawdle in a May garden, and, come autumn, to sink into reveries wrapped in a Kashmir shawl. And she loved beautiful old novels.
“So who was your second alter ego?” Eveline asked.
“I’ll tell you when we’ve forgotten about Egypt,” replied Miss Maszkerádi, assuming the grave air of a schoolteacher. “Anyway, it’s getting dark, time to light the lamp.”
On this spring night the ladies of Bujdos found themselves serenaded.
It was in honor of the visitor, as always, whenever Malvina Maszkerádi sojourned at Hideaway.
When the moonlight rose above the canebrakes, where it had been brooding like an outlaw, it revealed, leaning against a linden tree, the figure of Mr. Pistoli, who had already gone through three wives, for he still hoped that he would conquer the Donna Maszkerádi, whom this incorrigible amoroso with the tinted mustache liked to dub the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, among other monickers.
Ah, Pistoli was a solemn and cruel-hearted man of the world except at Bujdos, where, the moment he set foot, he became a clown. He brought along a Gypsy band, and made sure to collect one half of the generous honorarium he bestowed on them from Andor Álmos-Dreamer the day after the night music—for Eveline, too, was a recipient of these moonlit melodies.
As soon as the two misses had turned in for the night, the huge watchdogs were let off their chains, the field guard discharged his shotgun and the spring night settled over the land like a maiden in her bed: here came the town fiacre on which Gypsies love to clamber as if it were Jacob’s ladder. Ah yes, Gypsies love to ride a fiacre! The contrabassist, like a grandfather at a wedding, conducted the procession from the coachbox, where he had shivered, hugging his partner in crime throughout the potholed ride. The cimbalom was tied to the forage rack, and its player, a youth with a bowler hat and a frilly bow tie, stood on the running board of the carriage, jealously watching his beloved. Inside the coach violins in sacks lurched along with the nonchalant, brandy-tippling cheer of a red-faced road inspector making the rounds of his home district.
That ceaseless Gypsy prankishness, the horselaugh unique to this tribe, the chortling delight in each and every hour, the devil-may-care, self-indulgent, proud music of the moment, that buck-naked humor and animal delight in each breath of life: all of this appeared on that provincial hackney cab, as if Noah’s ark had spilled forth these human beings from another world. The dark-skinned, gamey village Gypsy, raised on the meat of fallen animals, is worlds apart from his city kin. Although, like poor relations, they are well aware of their city cousins’ living like lords in Budapest or Paris, and know the greats of the profession by name, they remain free nomads who possess nothing but disdain for an orderly world and laws of any kind. They live by their own lights, cling to their superstitions more than to life itself, see illness, the devil and death in their blue moods—yet among them suicide is rare as a white crow. They live in bands, the better to bear their poverty. Their boys are educated by older women, girls by older men. They use wild herbs to heal themselves, like stray dogs.
Mr. Pistoli was a patron of village Gypsies. He spent his entire life among Gypsies, returning home only to calm the wife of the moment, tint his mustache, clip the bristles sprouting from his warts, rub pomade in his hair, toss creditors’ letters into the trash, and off he was again, in search of the band. If a wife became a burden to him, he eased her out as best as he could and took on a new woman. This half-mad country squire was a leftover from the Hungary of old, where menfolk even in extreme old age refused to be incapacitated. He waltzed merrily with willing women, like a dance instructor giving an apprentice girl a whirl. His big buck teeth, protuberant bullish eyes, lowering, growling voice, oversized, meaty ears, calloused knuckles and pipe-stem legs altogether produced a peculiar effect on the females of the region. For there are still many women around who will kiss the spot where her man has hit her; who will put up with years of suffering to receive a kind word at the last hour; who will cut off her hair, pull out her teeth, put out her bright eyes, clench down her empty stomach, ignore her tormenting passion, say goodbye to springtime, beauty, life itself—if her man so commands. Pistoli went about growling like a wild boar, and women wiggled their toes at him, to tease the monster. Thus he lived to bury three wives.
“Let’s go see the beast,” quoth Pistoli to his Gypsies, solemnly convinced that Miss Maszkerádi had arrived at Bujdos solely for his sake. He had prepared and pocketed his infallible tools: the meerschaum cigar holder embellished with naked lovers embracing, the silver cigarette case chased with bathing beauties. He made sure to bring his trick penholder (its glass compartment a peep show of nude dancers), nor did he leave behind those lithographs guaranteed to make females flush and blush and fantasize. He brought a tiny cap to pull on his index finger for all kinds of silly puppet acts. So, having earlier soaked his feet and cleared his throat, Pistoli set out “to conquer the beast.”
In rollicking good humor, a song tickling his palate, whistling, he roamed with the Gypsies like a bridegroom who had a bride waiting in each village. His unruly animal spirits resembled the moods of convicts on certain days, or that of inmates at the Nagykálló madhouse where he had once spent half a year. He had abducted his first wife from there, a silent queen as beautiful
as memory itself. From under her boyish haircut she had sent him many tantalizing looks, a temptress clad in white linen. Her name was Izabella, unforgettable as the mediaeval princess whose image comes to the dying mercenary on the battlefield. Back then Pistoli would still grovel on his knees, his hair grew thick and fast, his mood was like a young bull’s. He would gladly creep under the bed at Izabella’s behest. This romantic heroine remained his lifelong true love. When one day she hung herself, Pistoli swore beside her corpse he would soon follow her to the grave. That had been twenty years ago. Since then, Pistoli had gotten drunk, married, buried wives, slept in muddy ditches and flower beds, his memory had stored the scents of as many women as the nose of a dog in a metropolis; he had loved ladies’ shoes, flouncy skirts, shirts and exposed napes; had danced attendance like a madman around barefoot servant girls and saintly matrons; had howled his love’s name out on the street in front of houses lit by the red light; had night after night climbed through the window into rooms where he surmised a female might be sleeping; there came screams, alarums, gunshots and wild escapes from stake-toting retainers, followed by triumph on the morrow in the bed of a kitchen wench, after his face had been bloodied by jealous rivals: such had been his life...And when he at last found himself alone, like a condemned man in his cell, by the moonglow of a candle or the sooty flame of an oil lamp, he felt the funerary wrinkles of the pillow, the deafening silence after the revelry overwhelm him with a drowning sensation...Startled, frightened of imminent death, he felt Izabella’s hand pulling him into the beyond. So he no longer slept at night, but only in daytime, near lit candles, surrounded by wardrobes, chests and drawers he had emptied. Snakes slithered past on the carpet and he felt like howling, but he was stopped by the memory of his former roommate, the colonel who would howl all day, confined in a straightjacket.
So this was the satyr Pistoli who rolled about in the Gypsies’ laps, cackling so loudly that the crossroads, momentarily empty, resounded with the ghostly echo of his laughter. The mute trees stood somber, like gibbets awaiting some escaped criminal. Shadowy hedges, that must surely shelter Death stopping to write down the lottery numbers he dreams of, ominously pricked up their ears, as if waiting for Pistoli to leap, tired of laughter, over them at a single bound into the wild blue yonder. Roadside wells, so many taciturn accomplices, were passed one after another by the Gypsy-laden coach. Women had thrown themselves into these wells, women to whom Pistoli in his manic moods had irresponsibly promised the world, as nonchalantly as he pledged payments to creditors. The ladies had adored his extravagant promises, and became unhinged when none were kept. The wells in the fields, like passive abettors of the crime, persisted like so many monuments to monotonous existence. No inquest would ever hold them responsible. Meanwhile Pistoli needed constant giggles, nothing short of sheer raving manic glee, just to make it through the night, just to see another day. Once he rejoiced exceedingly when he broke a leg jumping from a window. He considered it a small payment on Izabella’s account.