Sunflower

by Gyula Krudy

  “Each swallow of wine brought out their innermost feelings, clandestine thoughts and never-before-confessed misbehavings. They told me what they do at home when they believe no one is watching. They had opened up the blind windows of their souls’ dank cellars, and let out the cold blast of egotism that filled their miserable lives. After these gatherings not one of my acquaintances remained unfathomed. I had reconsidered all their voluntary actions and reviewed the deeds they had committed without themselves knowing the whys and wherefores. I inspected them from all sides as one would a bullock at the marketplace. Did they possess any redeemable human value, and what was it? What was the key to their makeup? Did they really merely dangle from the hair of women’s private parts, like rancid little crumbs, while claiming they were connected umbilically to the eternal feminine, the Mother of us all? And so I examined them like an apothecary does his poisons. I often laughed out loud when I discovered new sights. In my solitary investigations I had to slap my forehead when I came upon the key to the behavior of one of my friends. I calmed down and made peace with myself. The life I had lived thus far, like a surly badger, was surely the best, for I had lost nothing by avoiding men. I became as cheerful as a fallen girl after her confession. My heart filled up with the joys of life. And the wine jug welled up with women who were never unfaithful, never evil. They were women who gave me joy. So I played cards with them till daybreak, the stakes were nose-tweaking and making love. The winner would receive my dream for the day, for dreams were all I ever paid to women.”

  “The scoundrel,” thought Kálmán Ossuary, from whom a woman was lucky to receive, at the most, his condescending agreement to accept her presents.

  “You think I didn’t see Eveline leaving the garden earlier this evening?” Mr. Pistoli asked with a sudden flash of his eyes, and gave Kálmán Ossuary a penetrating glance.

  The latter, a bit discomposed, bit his lip, and racked his brain for the ugliest epithets regarding Mr. Pistoli.

  “But let’s return to the women in the chalice. (Alas, Miss Eveline has never complied with my summons, even though in my boredom I had more than once appealed for the young lady with the doelike tread who happens to be the chatelaine of this neighborhood. Naturally she bathes far more often than the chateleines of old, about whom I had once read that on Good Friday they washed the feet of beggars, but never their own. They used to wear egret feathers in their hats, although their necks were not exactly immaculately clean. Those heavy, brocaded skirts and leather undergarments concealed unwashed limbs, that’s why itinerant peddlers hawking perfumes did such roaring trade. Still, the scent of ambergris and frankincense was often overcome by the natural body odors of those ladies of yore. That’s why I could never go in a big way for women of earlier times. I never welcomed guests from the other world, for I happen to be blessed with a most sensitive olfactory organ.) My women were always live ones, hot, full-blooded, full of zest for life—although they would usually turn up in the dead of night. They stuck their bare toes in my mouth, grabbed ahold of my hair, straddled my shoulder and rode me, and stuffed their hands in my pockets. They would shift me around and knead my muscles, banish me under the bed, chase me with flashing teeth, and nibble me like puppies. The hefty ones danced around on the tabletop; the skinny ones stood on their head.

  “The petite ones tumbled about like sleepydust on eyelashes. The big solemn bony ones cracked my waist as if they were in love with my bones. I can’t understand why I never became conceited, since my women stuck by me even when I returned from one of my binges infested with vermin. Why, they even helped me get rid of the bugs. No, no, I never would have believed they’d keep me company all my life, and not get tired of my speechifyings, my ailments, my whims, my ravings. On the contrary, I was always expecting to be stabbed to death in the constant sparring...But at night, when I settled down by the wine jug, all my women proved to be most accomodating. They never threatened to murder me.”

  “And tell me, your excellence, how far did you get with these fantasy women?” asked Ossuary, quietly sarcastic.

  “They made me love and desire the live ones. I began to search for their imaginary scents and ungraspable limbs. But in real life I never found the salvation promised by the imagined figure.—But let’s go to bed. Tonight I made an appointment to meet Miss Eveline.”

  7. Pistoli Goes on a Long Journey

  One day Pistoli made a peculiar discovery around the garden cottage. He saw the imprints of horseshoes on the wet black path that meandered in the far end of the garden like a clandestine love affair.

  “Heads up, Pistoli,” he cautioned himself, and swung his head back and forth like some Asian monk. With eyes apparently closed, he stood on his right foot and rubbed the sole of the other foot against his right knee. In his preoccupation he opened the door to the cupboard, then gazed for a long time at his boots lying on the floor—he preferred to take them off during the day. After this he began to finger a swelling that sat like a second, smaller head on top of his cranium; old Hungarian tradition held such small melonlike growths on the head to be a sign of wisdom.

  “Watch out, Pistoli,” he growled, while he ambled down the celebrated moldy steps to the cellar, in order to take a great deep breath and in a glass siphon suck up some wine from the barrel. The wine trickling into the stone jug unexpectedly evoked Miss Maszkerádi, who was actually never far from his mind. The trickling wine sounded a feminine note, and Pistoli’s eyes bulged.

  “You’re nothing but a poor little homegrown wine,” he addressed the wine jug in a scornful tone. “And Maszkerádi’s made of fire and the noblest aszú grape. How dare you, a humble local vin ordinaire, dare to imitate the regal Tokay vintage?”

  Next he stood, mouth agape, in the middle of his courtyard as if he had never seen the migratory birds that now approached above the rooftops: it was as if rapidly shuttling aerial omnibuses had poured forth the swallows, like so many white-pinafored convent girls let out for summer vacation. Soaring storks inscribed huge circles and giant pretzel-shaped paths in the sky. The wild geese squatted down in the reeds, just like their relatives, the wandering Gypsy girls at the forest’s edge, when they cast their spells with twisted stems of grass, leaving behind signs for their lovers—or as it often happens, for the gendarmerie. Along with the birds of passage, it was time for the vagabonds to appear, for, with the thawing of the season, they saddled up shank’s mare to hit the highways in their seemingly aimless, tireless peregrinations from one end of the horizon to the other.

  There stood Mr. Pistoli as stunned by all this as if he had been hit over the head and unable to find the culprit.

  He was suddenly jealous, and as downcast as an ancient sumac tree whose sunlight is cut off by a new wall. He went and sniffed like a keen-nosed vizsla the horseshoe imprints on the loamy, earth-scented, cherry-blossom-strewn path, and thought he could pick up a whiff of Miss Maszkerádi’s unique perfume. This exotic and eccentric lady was to be his last great love, and he intended to take her with him to the other world as pure as a rosary wrapped around his wrist in the coffin.

  The doves were tumbling in the air above the manor house like distant springtime memories of youth, and Pistoli, in a tragic gesture, interlaced the knobby fingers of his two hands, like branches of a lilac bush. How could Miss Maszkerádi possibly desire some other man in the neighborhood? And of all men, this clean-shaven, cheerless whippersnapper whom Mr. Pistoli secretly despised as thoroughly as he would some fledgling tenor...Pistoli was like a naive housewife past her silver anniversary, who one day discovers straw from a Gypsy girl’s pallet on her respectable’s husband’s shoulder. Yes, those men who never stop talking about women’s unfaithfulness are the ones most surprised by it.

  The springtime air was as sweet as the waists of young girls bending over their flower beds, seeding, and Pistoli was ready to sob out loud in his desperation, like an old Gypsy, whose brats had got him drunk. The very saliva turned bitter in his mouth when he recalled the scene in Evel
ine’s garden with Miss Maszkerádi in the role of the temptress clad in white linen and the only thing he regretted now was that he had not given a piece of his mind to the confused girl who, with the characteristic unfathomability of womenfolk, had been ready to offer herself that night to any roadside hobo. At least he should have shouted in her face that he condemned her behaviour—and here his throat choked on a very ugly word—and that he despised, detested and disdained her...Instead, he had saved her, put her by like some Easter egg he could crack open whenever he felt like it. And so now he felt cheated.

  As if sent by fate, on this day there appeared in the vicinity of the house one Kakuk, a drunken hobo who had crisscrossed Hungary many times, had spent nights in jails of all types, and chalked the customary signs left by beggars and vagabonds on the gates of households where the poor wanderer is welcomed, or where the dog bites. In his old age he had settled down in these parts and was wont to rest his wine-saturated, red-as-the-winter-sun, cobwebbed head for hours at a time on the stone wall surrounding the manor until Mr. Pistoli condescended to toss him a word or two.

  Originally Kakuk had settled in Pistoli’s neighborhood with a different agenda in mind: he claimed to be an ex-hussar and notorious brawler, but the stout squire crushed all his ambitions. He made Kakuk mount a fiery stallion, and the famous hussar was thrown screaming right in front of the tavern called The Eagle; subsequently he had Kakuk beaten up so badly that the poor man was laid up in bed for weeks. At last the tramp confessed to being an itinerant cobbler all his life, patching and soling as he rambled the countryside. His real name was Ignatz, he had done time at the Veszprém jail as a suspected highway-man, and he ended up in Pistoli’s permanent service, as if he had sworn fealty to a gang leader.

  After a while Pistoli deigned to notice the cabbage-shaped, shaggy gray head resting atop his crumbling stone wall. It was a head that had groveled oftentimes in front of Pistoli’s feet when the squire, lording it, made Kakuk kneel in the dust, or after returning from unfamiliar kitchens and servants’ quarters where he had been beaten up with stakes and poles. Just now Pistoli was deeply moved, for he thought he caught strains of funeral music approaching from the direction of the birch grove where the highway bends. The violins sobbed and wailed, the contrabass growled, hollow like fate itself; the coffin must have enclosed some bride, accompanied on her last voyage by black-clad men holding gendarme swords tipped with lemons. Pistoli imagined it was his own true love being interred in the distance.

  “Don’t you want me to take a letter to some old lady or young miss?” Kakuk humbly inquired, and out of force of habit he chalked a hat on the stone fence, a vagabonds’ sign for an unfriendly house, to be avoided.

  It was with uncharacteristic kindliness that Mr. Pistoli received his shirtless serf, who in his time had delivered so many billets-doux in Pistoli’s hand, enough to earn him a hundred deadly beatings. Lecherous widows, servant girls sent home from the big city, small-town waitresses, procuresses and noble ladies had received letters via this vagabond, letters that were sometimes totally uncalled for—Pistoli had simply picked the recipient as a potential paramour. This was cause enough for Kakuk to set out posthaste, clutching the message entrusted to him. He would lurk like the autumn wind around solitary houses. On bitter cold winter nights he would amble in godforsaken small-town alleys where women who had gone astray camped out in ramshackle hovels. A landlady named Stony Dinka would treat him to mulled wine, whereas the dove-souled Risoulette entreated him with clasped hands to persuade the saucer-eyed Pistoli not to harrass her any more. Both the messenger and the ladies had aged somewhat in the meantime. The owl hooted on storm-tossed nights, complexions had lost their apple-blossom pink, and fingers that used to rake through masculine hair now clasped only the prayer book.

  “No, I’ll never write another letter,” replied Pistoli about a quarter of an hour later, having behind carefully closed doors instructed Kakuk in a soft voice at length about what was to be done.

  The very next day the tramp was back, and tugged Mr. Pistoli’s leg which was dangling from the bed (for the squire could only fall asleep by swinging a leg).

  “Back o’the garden,” Kakuk said, cryptic as some spy, before vanishing like a bad dream.

  It was sunset: the trees in flower were listening for the footfalls of someone coming to pick their blossoms, while shadows, like exhausted hounds, stretched across the path. The hedge sent up a little bird, God only knows what business she had there, brooding the spring afternoon away...

  There, where the lime trees huddle together like revolutionary generals before their execution, awaiting the crash of lightning with arms uplinked, there stood a memorable little garden bench, a secret spot on the grounds surrounding this red house, as private as the purity of a youth and the nobility of a heart. Formerly, when women had still travelled on clouds over this land, and a female foot was worth a kingdom, Pistoli spent hours seated there next to his soul mate, uttering never-to-be-recalled fine words; or else brooding alone like some knight whose unbalanced bride jumped from the castle ramparts the night before;—but he was never bored.

  In later years, whenever Pistoli approached this small bench, he envisioned women who would quietly rise as he neared and vanish into the birches like a delicate mist withdrawing under fallen leaves beneath a frigid moon. Women he had yearned to meet sat there, and women he had tired of, but later wanted back with all the pain of a middle-aged man missing the joys of his youth. And since a real man holds no grudge against the women who robbed him of his youth, merely to pin his wings on their hats, Pistoli thought he saw seated on that bench mostly those ladies who had drawn blood.

  And now, once more, a dearly beloved took her place on the little bench. The hat decorated with a pheasant feather shaded the face averted in surrender, like a bird being taught to sing. It was Eveline, sitting where Pistoli’s former loves had sat, and she was listening to what Kálmán Ossuary had to say.

  “Just look at him jabber!” reflected Mr. Pistoli bitterly, as he hid to eavesdrop behind the hedge, pricking up his ears like a horse.

  Alas, Mr. Pistoli was too far away, though he would have gladly given a fine fur coat to overhear the lovers’ conversation. But it was enough just to look at them: the eyes said it all, it was so obvious. A glove pulled off the hand might feel the way Mr. Pistoli felt. The russet brown cloak’s undone buttons might have sensed his keen disappointment. Those soft curls lurking about her ear quivered like young maids when they find out the whys and wherefores of their coming into this world. The swan neck, the adorable mouth, the long lashes: they were all unaware of the hourglass and time’s flight. The finely-shod foot, the liquescently smooth stockings, and the amulet heaving above the panting heart all imagined this was the first instance of love on earth, wherefore their sudden all-importance. The tender curves of the shoulder, the phenomenal lines of the arm, the miraculous shape of the hips: no way did they foresee lying someday in the grave pit’s damp depth and infinite solitude, with no one to praise them. And the splendid cheek might be leprous after a few years—while this moment, this heartthrobbing hour, imagined by bird-bodied, bird-brained love to be eternal, would have become a matter of indifference.

  All Pistoli could do was wriggle his big toe, as if it were a gopher, inside his boot. He regretted that not once did Ossuary kneel, during his endless warblings. Then the moment of farewell arrived. The exchange of abiding looks. The arm gliding off like foam down Niagara Falls. The departing lady’s subdued, lingering, pensive footfall, as if she were leaving for good, for the infinite beyond.

  Soon afterward came the clatter of a carriage, stealing off past the garden’s far end, like a Gypsy kidnapper’s cart.

  “Tomorrow I’ll sacrifice a pig to celebrate that it wasn’t Maszkerádi with that joker,” resolved Mr. Pistoli, and made an effort to sneak back to his house without being seen by Ossuary.

  By nightfall he had remembered all kinds of old songs he believed he had long forgotten.
The ditties descended like a spider from the roof beam, and he snapped at them like a dog at a fly. Of some songs he recalled only a single line, but he still hummed through the entire melody. He laid his head on the tabletop, absorbed in woolgathering. From time to time he flung a ditty, as one would a bone, at Kakuk crouching in a corner. But he had little patience for another’s singing. It didn’t take long before he shouted: “Ah, nonsense!”

  And whinnying, he struck up a new song, only to get stuck halfway through, like a rickety cart full of drunken wedding guests.

  Ossuary was loitering in the moonlight like some terminally bored ghost.

  Suddenly Mr. Pistoli stood in front of him with raised forefinger and declared triumphantly:

  “I was a tougher kid than you...And I’m still the better man. The girls were weeping and wailing when they left me. For I am Pistoli, that’s who I am.”

  The moonlight over The Birches advanced hugger-mugger in the sky like a shepherd hiding a lamb under his coat.

  And, wrapped in black veils, night crept away, like a woman’s once undying love.

  Kakuk spent all day lolling in a ditch, for the grass was growing in; he chewed grasses like a hound healing some ailment. And, anyway, he had been dropped into this world to lie about in ditches, while the flouncy-skirted, flowery-embroidered, rowdy marketing women pressed ahead to pass each other on the highway. Life does have its do-nothings who welcome as a matter of course each successive morn. They trudge, slothful and passive, into eternal darkness, for they never imagined that dawn would ever displace the night. All those daytimes must have been a misunderstanding, as was the aimless wind, rustling rainfall, wall-clawing torment, and bitter dementia. The truth lies in the great night that stretches from one end of the sky to the other in motionless eternity, where rockets devised by humans will never penetrate.