Sunflower

by Gyula Krudy

  Whereupon they toppled over, squatted or lay down, assuming the shapes of frogs or beggars kneeling by the roadside. They lay low in the shade of midnight’s sooty fireplace.

  “And what about the third one?” asked Maszkerádi.

  Mr. Pistoli took a tremendous swig from the jug, as if putting out an underground fire. It took him a moment to regain his breath. He looked around, dazed.

  “This Tokay wine is the best painkiller. It turns you into a veritable Hindu fakir. Even if a woman’s knitting needle penetrated my heart, the wound wouldn’t bleed.”

  “Drink up, Pistoli, if you’re drunk I won’t feel ashamed listening to your obscenities. You’re allowed to do certain things when you’re drunk. Yesterday you would have disgusted me, but today the weather’s different...Spring nights can be strange and unpredictable. They make you think we have something in common with the stars.” With that, Miss Maszkerádi pushed a newly-filled jug at her inebriated companion.

  “Ah, the third one: she loved me so much. She was called Mishlik, but she might have had some other name as well. Once I had a dog I called Mishlik...Anyway, her eyebrows grew together, thick and uninterrupted like somber memory itself. Her face was unapproachably severe, like a façade with shuttered windows, where no crimson-clad girls ever lean out over the windowsill. Her mouth was always pressed into a thin line. It was a well in a castle keep that had run dry forevermore. Her chin was as sharp as a nun’s knee. Her mania was trying to choke me in my sleep, night after night. She said she loved tranquility, and meanwhile the slow caresses of her pliant, cool, delicate fingers would insidiously, barely perceptibly turn into a choking death grip around my throat. It was like a serpent winding around my windpipe. I had to jump up and run. But she was powerful, lithe and limber. She would wrap her arms and legs around me, and press her lips against mine in a fatal kiss. Her mouth was like a vampire’s. Her kisses left crimson spots all over my body, like the sting of nettles. She kept her eyes closed, so I wouldn’t see the fires scorching her within. Maybe she was worried she’d frighten me away. Wordlessly, without a sound, she loved me to death. Poor thing, probably she had no inkling that she was out to kill me. Yes, I was definitely afraid of Mishlik. I started staying away from home at night, for I soon noticed that her courage renewed in the dark. If I beat her, it was like hitting a rubber ball. Her footfall was so soft that I never heard her stepping behind my back. She would sit, motionless, and calmly gaze off into the distance. Oh, how often and how bitterly I regretted marrying this madwoman from the Uplands!

  “My sleep came to resemble the groaning of a ghost in a lonely windmill. I tossed and turned like the damned. Each creak of the door woke me, as if I were a prisoner awaiting death. My health, my hearty appetite and carefree moods evaporated. Why, even my Gypsies gave me a scare when they insisted on sending me home toward dawn. Perhaps they, too, were in Mishlik’s service, like those great big maple trees whispering in the night, the sight of which always made me swallow hard. Trees to hang yourself from...I spent most of my time in the company of a blind piano player who was never sleepy, and was forever drunk, somber and black, and kept playing funeral marches for days on end. I dubbed myself ‘Don Sebastian’, and on the highway always scrutinized the stately black horses pulling the hearse toward the cemetery.

  “One night it occurred to me to go and check on Mishlik. At least I could do away with her, if I found her cheating on me.

  “I rapped on her windowpane at midnight, softly cajoling, as in the old days when the tapping of my ringed finger was well-known to the daughters of each and every house in this wetlands region.

  “‘Who is it?’ Mishlik called out.

  “‘Don Sebastian,’ I replied, in a changed voice. But there was no way of fooling Mishlik.

  “‘I’ll bring the key to the front door,’ she said from behind the shutters, without the least surprise, as if all I ever did was drop in at midnight.

  “We had funny weather that night. The wind lashed the chimneys, howling like a hound in a cemetery that comes across strange dogs digging up the graves.

  “I huddled near the front door, wrapped in my overcoat, as if to hide my bones, my white shanks. I felt a light-headed wish for death to ruffle my hair, like the giddy rush of passion you feel walking past a former lover’s garden on a spring night. If I were to die here, to be found by women like a soldier at his post...I stood and waited like an unlucky gambler scrutinizing his cards. Indeed, what would this night bring?

  “Mishlik opened the gate.

  “She looked at me without a word. She didn’t seem to be amazed or gladdened by my midnight homecoming. As a matter of fact, her face was usually as expressionless as a snake’s. You never knew what went on inside her head. The rare times when she spoke always made me glad, because she never lied.

  “The dining room was lit up. I did not like the idea of Mishlik awake at night. Who knows what she might be scheming, staying up till dawn? Women should always have something to keep them busy. Nursing the baby, doing the wash, or going to sleep. If they stay awake, with nothing to do, it can only mean trouble.

  “I asked her: ‘Why aren’t you asleep?’

  “She flipped her hand.

  “‘I knew you’d be coming home. I knew you’d get tired of your painted women, and return hungry for the touch of your wife’s clean hands. Here, let me massage you. I’ll knead you like bread dough.’

  “I might mention here that I always loved to have my wives rub my back, my legs, my gouty knee. Sooner or later every man worth his salt develops gout. Past a certain age taking care of one’s health becomes as important as making love. So I expected any woman who loved me to find the aching parts of my body, and rub and pinch them with her rose-hip fingers. Then I could fall asleep like a tomcat whose neck is caressed. But Mishlik had something else in mind. And I abhorred being choked.

  “I threw off my coat and stepped into the dining room.

  “Good God! I’ll never forget that sight!

  “There they sat at the table, my two former wives, the ones I’d thought were at the insane asylum. Sitting at the head of the table was my first wife, Sári, her hair shorn, her demented eyes enormous, and reeking of pálinka brandy. Now she was sipping a sweet liqueur and chose to ignore me.

  “My other wife, Mári, laid her head on the table, as if she’d just returned exhausted from a long journey. Lord, how fat she’d grown, her belly as big as if she were expecting a child... Her face was so sad and wasted that I could not harbor any anger against her.

  “‘Won’t you sit down with your wives,’ said Mishlik, who also took a chair at the table, and crossed her arms across her chest like some magistrate.

  “‘What’s going on here?’ I shouted. ‘How did these poor wretches get here?’

  “‘They came to see you one last time,’ Mishlik replied.

  “My first impulse was to jump for the door, and Mishlik smiled quietly at my useless exertions. She had already pocketed the key.”

  Pistoli paused, grabbed the wine jug, and imbibed such a draft that his gullet nearly burst. Maszkerádi could only look on goggle-eyed at the stout man’s astounding prowess.

  “So what did the madwomen do? Why didn’t they claw out your eyes?” she murmured.

  “They demanded their conjugal rights,” Pistoli replied, and paused, his unblinking eyes fixed on the tabletop. “You are a lady of breeding and refinement, so I shall say no more.

  “But, as you can see, I survived, although they could have killed me just as easily. The three of them could have torn me apart. But they turned out to be manageable.

  “I caressed them, soothed them, calmed them down. In the morning I had all three of them carted to the Nagykálló asylum. And that’s where they’ve been ever since. But each night I check under the bed before I climb in. In dark alleys I always look behind my back. To this day any sudden, loud cackle still startles me. And I hate to look the moon in the eye. For I am Pistoli, the local maniac. Do you love
me?”

  “Drink up,” Maszkerádi replied. “Drink so you won’t remember a thing, so you’ll forget me, this night, springtime...”

  As if drawn by a ghost, she rose and set out toward the garden that sprawled, moist and lurking, around the house. She kept stopping and looking back.

  Pistoli, red-faced, rolled his eyes left and right in contentment. He let Miss Maszkerádi wend her way toward the garden alone. He raised the empty pitcher to his mouth and blared laughter into it as into a horn. His fists pummeled the tabletop, he danced seated in his chair. He ruffled his hair. And Maszkerádi waited in vain, watching him from the garden. This unaccountable man refused to stand up, and go after the confused young woman.

  Pistoli downed another mouthful or two of wine; then, like a whirling ghost, he ran out and, together with his Gypsies, vanished into the night.

  A melancholy day dawned on the manor at Bujdos.

  Miss Maszkerádi never said a word about the events of the night.

  5. Our Lady’s Fountain

  The wild duck quacked in the reeds.

  It was springtime; day by day more of them returned to the land, more of those invisible beings from their far-flung wanderings, the ones who come again to teach the long-stemmed grass by the ditch to hum and sing, who play with insects that crawl forth from the soil, the creatures that swing on bare birch twigs and screech at the highway traveler.

  It is these invisible hands that flap the white blouses women set out to dry in the meadow; they also dig quick runnels for spring freshets, squat in a ditch to teach frogs diverse cochonneries, grab ahold of the cows’ tails and flick a light fillip across the snoozing shepherd’s face under his tilted hat. They rip moss from the manor house’s eaves, ascend like so many bubbles in the ancient drainpipe’s dark bowels to emerge near the chimney, on which they plop down and sit, swinging their legs. They slap young wives on the back, pinch the rooster’s spur, feed the hounds baneful weeds to make them run around all day. They are mischievous kobolds, smoke rings, balls of air in sunlight; in a drizzle they flatten themselves under leaves, squeeze behind the bedstead, crouch on the threshold, hide in the back of the cart, tangle, like invisible bats, in the peasant’s matted hair, latch onto his wife’s chemise and tug his daughter’s pigtails. You might call them breezes that arise in the raspberry patch, or warm drops of rain beating against the windowpane so loudly that they wake the dreamer. They pick on the graybeard, press his head into the straw, and ride his neck with legs flung apart. And they chivy young men as if they were starlings.

  In pouring rain or curtain-tugging sunshine life went on in its customary monotonous rounds at the old manor house of Hideaway. Eveline found a trunkful of old novels in the attic, books read by her grandmother in the last century. The faded green volumes exuded an air of romanticism dear to her heart. Jósika, Dumas, Sue, a Rocambole...Oh, why wasn’t it winter again, with the snap and crackle of large logs in the fireplace to accompany her reading! As for Miss Maszkerádi, she stopped at times by the carved gatepost and pensively surveyed the landscape. Had she caught a glimpse of Mr. Pistoli, that worthy joker would not have gotten away unpunished.

  Andor Álmos-Dreamer, being the romantic bachelor that he was, had naturally stayed away from the Bujdos manor ever since Miss Maszkerádi had been in residence.

  Each human life possesses certain sensitivities, dove-pecked injuries, that are never noted by the casual observer, like invisible cracks in amber.

  Words uttered unthinkingly, absentminded glances, careless gestures on the part of our fellow humans, somehow manage to avoid the wise or cynical man, bouncing off his outer wrappings, whereas they seem to follow in the tracks of other people, seeking them out from afar, like cats do certain women. You may be in the company of a certain lady, promenading or sitting in a garden, or even aboard a ship, in a reverie—not a cat in sight within miles—yet after a while you suddenly notice a feline lying at your lady’s feet, grooming itself. Where this cat came from, you’ll never know. Yet there it is, having sensed the presence of that certain woman who will appreciate it.

  It’s the same way with words and other phenomena in life.

  Miss Maszkerádi, about two years previously, in the course of a conversation had pronounced the word kronchi, meaning “crown” in the argot of Budapest. Andor Álmos-Dreamer, who happened to be present, immediately smelled a rat. Not much later Miss Maszkerádi in the same Bujdos manor house referred to certain “provincial hicks” in such a scornful manner that Andor Álmos-Dreamer nearly lost his temper. Yet Miss Maszkerádi was merely following the current fashion among the educated upper classes of using Budapest street slang. It was cool to flaunt your knowledge of thieves’ jargon. Another passing vogue, just like that summer when every Budapest lady carried her hat in her hand. Álmos-Dreamer, romantic bachelor that he was, naturally believed the epithet “provincial hick” to refer to himself. He said not a word about his being offended, he simply stayed away from the house. Miss Maszkerádi was too proud, and Eveline too naive, to inquire about the cause of Mr. Álmos-Dreamer’s withdrawal. The next year, when Miss Maszkerádi again sojourned with Eveline at Bujdos, it was accepted that the bachelor would stay away from the house for the duration. There are certain doors that open only from the inside. Such was the door that Andor Álmos-Dreamer’s sensitive nature made him lock himself behind. He was the kind of country gentleman who is as touchy as a gouty heel. (As opposed to the kind of provincial whom nothing can offend, and who loudly, eagerly devours life, ever ready to quarrel, make up, fight again and hold a grudge, then love, only to forget everything on the morrow and resume gobbling life again at the very same table to which his beard had been so cruelly stuck with candle wax the night before.)

  So what sort of ideas does such a romantic soul entertain when the wild duck begins to quack in the reeds and every night he dreams of Eveline?

  One overcast afternoon, when the house became as stuffy with pipe smoke as if every one of his forefathers had clambered down from the framed portraits to light up, and antique medals, Maria Theresa thalers and Roman coins failed to keep him entertained; when pacing back and forth with arms behind his back became as dreary as the endless rainfall, and he found himself sending up a surprisingly prolonged sigh, as if some great sorrow had scurried just then through the door, to hide quickly under the old raincoats only to shamble forth in the night and crouch by the sleeper’s bedside like a silent old man...On such an afternoon Andor Álmos-Dreamer visited his former lover, Madame Risoulette, to confide in her all his troubles and heartaches.

  Risoulette, too, lived in the wet lowlands, in a château that had been a Franciscan monastery once upon a time. Tiny white windows gave on the arcaded corridors, and in the circular courtyard the poplars soared high above the roof. It was a clean and cloistered environment, redolent with the scent of innocence and resonant with the chimes of a musical clockwork. Risoulette’s husband, a retired captain, suffered from gout, and surrounded his aching limbs with barometers and weather glasses. For him the two questions in life were: what’s the weather like, and what’s for dinner. He cared not a whit about anything else. Over the years Risoulette had been the sweetheart of every worthy man in the neighborhood. And each believed she would never forget him, for she was able to recall each amorous date, each momentous hour, the very dress she had worn on the day in question, and what’s more, even the words that passed, only to eventually crumble into dust. The lady had a remarkable memory, she never mistook one man for another. And she never embarrassed them by letting on that afterwards she had given herself to another. Each and every man parted from her sure of possessing her heart forever after, certain that from then on Risoulette would be lost in tearful reveries...And each man knew her by a different name. Whether out of superstition or because of the novelty of each fresh love affair, this woman had given herself a different name for each lover. For Andor Álmos-Dreamer she became Risoulette, because she noticed that he was attracted to her combination of a du
sky Oriental complexion and lighthearted Gallic elegance. “Risoulette” suggested both the Orient and the Occident. Risoulette was goodness personified, ever the ready plaything of her lovers’ debauched whims, and she never complained. After a breakup, she might pale slightly, and frequent the church for a while; usually she weathered one or two minor illnesses, but she never clung to a cart after the ride was over. She sat down by her Captain’s side to eye the barometer with a lifelong devotion. She smoothed down her unruly curls and cinched a black leather belt around her waist. She took stock of the estate, and burned any compromising letters—after having kissed them. She was not overly fazed by the telltale mementos lurking here and there in the neighborhood: a hair wreath (made of her tresses), or a souvenir slipper, or a memorable shirt. “My husband believes what I tell him!” She never worried that any man would be base enough to betray the precious moments she had bestowed on him.

  It was almost ten years ago that Andor Álmos-Dreamer sailed through those happy days when he could call Risoulette his own. At the time, the affair carried every sign of a great and deathless love. The emotional young man had nearly gone out of his mind: without the least thought or hesitation he had placed his fate in Risoulette’s dazzlingly white little hands. Miseries, joys, overindulgences and ever novel, life-giving sensations composed this love affair, and while it lasted, Andor Álmos-Dreamer walked about half-dazed, happy and oblivious. The way he saw it, the world existed only because his love willed it so. Later, he would look back on these years as individual burial mounds in the dark graveyard of his life, tumuli where the oil lamp’s flame still flickered. Back then each day had been as momentous as the Battle of Austerlitz. Even the watch stopped ticking in his vest pocket. Life lay ahead, a long and leisurely meander like the River Tisza in summertime. Each morning began with the invocation of Risoulette’s name. And every dream’s curtain was lowered by Risoulette’s hands in the night. Yet eventually all of this passed, like the clatter of a cart receding beyond the hills. Risoulette had developed considerable expertise in letting the bird of passage fly on without his even noticing the feather or two left behind in the strange nest at the forest’s edge where he had passed the night. By the time Andor Álmos-Dreamer had come to his senses, the woman he had held in his arms only the day before, and the love that had both of them breathing in unison, thinking and feeling as one, now loomed like memories of an ancient church, where he had once chanced to linger awhile admiring a rare icon. Risoulette benevolently guided her men across yawning chasms and dizzying rope bridges. It made her proud that not one man had ever tried suicide on her account, although over the years there were many who would reminisce about her in the evening hours when a crackling fire and mulled wine offer some solace in one’s solitude.