Kornel Esti

X

In which Zsuzsika, daughter of a wealthy Bácska^* peasant, jumps into the well and gets married.

KORNÉL ESTI ARRIVED HOME FROM PORTUGAL. HE HAD BEEN over to the Iberian peninsula just for a month, to have a rest. This rest had consisted of speaking exclusively to the natives during that time, and in Portuguese, the “language of flowers.”

It was late at night when he appeared at my door, dusty and travel-stained, on his way from the station. The Lisbon breeze was still on his raincoat, the gravel of the Tagus on his shoes.

He dragged me out to a bar in Buda. I thought that he was going to give me a lengthy account of his experiences on the journey, but he wasn’t disposed to talk about them. The conversation turned to affairs in Hungary, our native town, our student years, people and events of prewar days.

That night I came to know a new side of him. I admit that previously I had often thought of him as just a kind of dyspeptic international globetrotter, a half-baked literary freak. Now I saw that he was a man from head to foot, and from my part of the world. How typical of the Bácska was his every breath, his still irresponsible tomfoolery, and his breezy boastfulness. The Bácska is the Gascony of Hungary. There is a provincial quality in all eccentric behavior.

He guzzled wine. He began with Badacsony, moved on to Csopak, then turned to a heavy, perfumed golden nectar which had reached the age of thirty on the racks of the cellars of the priests of Arács.^* He stayed with that.

Toward dawn, when empty bottles of kéknyelű^† and sundry other varieties were ranged in serried ranks on our table and we still had things to talk about, because by that time we had killed of most of our living friends and resurrected those who had died, he asked me:

“Now, do you remember little Zsuzsa? You know, Zsuzsa Szücs. The daughter of that peasant, that rich peasant. He used to live by the fire station, in a tumbledown cottage like any other peasant. But he had pots of money.

“When I was a boy I heard that he kept gold in the drawers of his chest and that he stuffed his mattresses with thousand-korona notes. How much of that was true I don’t know, but it was a fact that he was made of money. He lived like a typical cottager. He wore a blue guba, a pörge hat, and boots.^‡ Smoked foul tobacco in a clay pipe, lit it with matches that made a terrible smell. In winter he would sit dozing on the bench of the banyakemence, wrapped in his suba, like a bear sleeping its winter sleep.^§ Then when spring came he would settle down outside the house, on the wooden bench, and sit there until autumn. He didn’t say a word to anybody. Just sat in silence. Sat there as if he were sitting on his money.

“The old man was dreadfully mean. For all he cared, the whole world could rot. True, he spent money on his daughter. But she was his only child. Apart from her he had nobody. He’d buried his wife a long time before.

“Young Zsuzsa went to the convent school, learned French, and played the piano. She wore a hat, like all our girls. She was pretty and unhappy. There was no way that she could find her place in our accursed society, which had so much artifice and so many unfathomable rules and regulations that no schooling or etiquette could list them or even adequately cover the subject. If anyone spoke to her she blushed to the ears, and if anyone of ered his hand she turned pale and withdrew hers in alarm. She would smile when she should have been solemn, and vice versa. But what did that matter? Despite it all, she was gorgeous.

“You say you only saw her once or twice? She didn’t really go anywhere. She lived with her silent father and became as silent as him. For the most part she hid indoors. If she went into town she avoided people. She was permanently embarrassed. For instance, not for all the tea in China could you have got her to go into a cukrászda and eat a szerecsenfánk.^*

“For a long time she didn’t marry. Yet she had so many suitors that she could scarcely manage to turn them down. The problem was that she didn’t know where she belonged. She looked down on peasant boys and they didn’t dare to approach her, while in the young men of the so-called gentry she saw gold diggers and in their company she was ill at ease — overcome by respectfulness and disdain together, like a sort of stage fright. Actually, do you know what it was? It was the historic stage fright of her emergent social class, which had not previously played a leading role on the stage of history, whose name wasn’t even in the program, because it had always approved or disapproved only in the background, and always anonymously.

“On Sundays she used to go to the szagosmise^† at half past eleven in the ancient Franciscan church. I saw her there several times. Oh, she was such a lovely creature! In summer she wore a white dress with a red leather belt and carried a red silk parasol through which the burning Alföld sun would filter, tinting her pale little face. She was like a lily under a Bengal light, like a posy of wild flowers, white and red, cowbane and poppies, white and red all together. Like a young noblewoman going incognito or a young duchess in disguise as a peasant. I wonder, was I in love with her too?

“Anyway, one Sunday, when the gilded youth of the town were standing in a semicircle outside the church, dangling their slender canes and brand new kid gloves, polishing their monocles in lordly fashion, and observing the ladies as they emerged, Pista Boros caught sight of her and fell fatally in love. He rushed after her and spoke to her. Zsuzsa screwed up her face in horror. But Pista went on talking. At that, Zsuzsa took her hands from her ears, began to pay attention, looked at him, and smiled — when she actually should have, for once.

“So how did Pista score that success which none of the rest of us had been able to claim? Well, you see, he was a wonderful fellow, an absolute marvel. First of all he was a handsome man, with curly hair and an aquiline nose. He dressed like Imre Lubloy, the famous actor, when he was playing a filthy rich count. Even in summer he wore spats. And then he had such an impressive natural air of culture, the kind that can’t be acquired, you have to be born with it.

“He knew everything. He knew at least a thousand Hungarian folk songs, all the words and tunes, he could handle Gypsies, give them instructions and keep them in order, check their familiarity with the flicker of an eyelid, then win their affection with a lordly, condescending, and yet fraternal-playful sidelong glance, he could call ’‘ácsi’ ^* perfectly, shout at the first violin when he didn’t strike up Csendesen, csak csendesen quietly enough and at the cimbalomist when the padded sticks didn’t make the steel strings thunder and rumble sufficiently in Hullámzó Balaton,^† he could kiss the viola player’s pock-marked face, give the double bass a kick, break glasses and mirrors, drink wine, beer, and marc brandy for three days on end out of tumblers, smack his lips at the sight of cabbage soup and cold pork stew, take ages inspecting his cards (with relish, one eye closed), dance a quick csárdás for a whole half-hour, urging and driving himself on to stamp and shout and toss his partner high in the air and catch her, light as a feather, with one arm: so, as I said, he could do everything that raises Man from his animal condition and makes him truly Man.

“He could also speak Zsuzsa’s language. He’d been brought up on Csantavér puszta. He remained a peasant at heart, a son of the puszta. If he opened his mouth the people itself spoke. He was a living collection of folk poetry bound in human skin.

“Quite how he made a conquest of Zsuzsa I don’t know. As I imagine it, however, within five or six minutes he was wooing her with ‘Zsuzsika, I kiss your hands, your dear little hands, for you I’d be a sheepdog for two years.’ He must have expressed himself even more astutely, more spontaneously than that, however. Our imaginations aren’t really up to such things. But whatever the case, by the time he’d walked her home, Zsuzsa was in love with him and almost fatally.

“Things were certainly not easy for them. They could only meet after Mass on Sunday, and for a short time. The old man watched his daughter like a savage kuvasz. Here I must mention that there were two real savage kuvasz in their yard. They were let of their chains in the evening, and the moment there was a sound at the fence they would rush to the gate with eyes rolling, suffused with blood, and rouse the neighborhood with their din. It was impossible even to make signals with them around. For a while Pista was gloomy, drank, had himself serenaded. Then he decided to ask for her hand in proper form and order.

“He put on his ferencjóska,^* stuck a panama hat on his head, borrowed Tóni Vermes’s gold watch and chain, and called on the wealthy peasant. His hopes were not high. He was at the time a mere assistant notary, twenty-three years of age, and his salary was only enough to hold his importunate creditors at bay. At most he could have cited his various fine and lengthy styles of nobility, but he was aware that he would achieve little with that sort of thing.

“On that sweltering summer morning the old man had been sitting in his weed-ridden yard since early dawn, bundled up from head to foot and wearing boots and hat. He looked at Pista. But only once. He sized him up with his eye and found him a frivolous, thin, overdressed dandy — a useless scrounger unfit to be a husband. He immediately turned his head away, as if to say ‘there’s more room in the street.’ He didn’t ask him in. They stayed in the yard. He didn’t even of er him a seat. Pista sat down uninvited and spoke his piece. The old man said neither yes nor no. He said nothing. And that was a considerable difficulty. If someone opposes you, it may still be possible to talk him round him somehow. Faced with silence, everyone is powerless. Pista slunk out crestfallen. As he left he extended a hand, but the old man ignored it. He just raised an index finger — slowly, stiffy, and deliberately — to the brim of his hat.

“At that time we too lived in that weed-ridden, dusty street, obliquely opposite. Because of that I know what happened next. In actual fact, nothing happened for months, until early October. It was, I remember, a cool, clear autumn night. The full moon was so bright that one could have taken photographs or even shaved by it. It must have been almost eleven o’clock. I heard a scream followed by repeated shouts for help. Women were wailing, men shouting. Sleepers jumped out of bed. Everybody ran toward the Szücs house. By the time I got there all was quiet. Ropes and ladders lay in the yard, as did a long walnut-gathering pole. Somebody had lit a lantern. Around the well stood silent, shocked people — some bowing their heads and even kneeling — and in the middle of this dark group, dressed only in her nightgown, lay Zsuzsa, dripping wet, having been just pulled out of the well. The water had been shaken out of her and now she was just spluttering and shivering, her lips blue in the moonlight. The soaked nightgown clung to her youthful breasts. The poor girl had tried to drown herself, like Ophelia.

“She had jumped into the well. See, nature will out. It had been no good Zsuzsa’s going to the convent school, no good her knowing La Fontaine’s fable about the ant and the cricket in the original French, no good her practising a few of the simpler finger exercises from Köhler’s piano tutor; at the decisive crux in her life she had yielded to the murky instinct and grim traditions of her ancestors and had done what so many peasant girls and women had done over the centuries, women who had conceived of suicide only as taking death into their arms one night in the icy water of a well among moss-green bricks and toads.

“Her father was standing a little apart from the group, wringing his hands. This even he had understood. If a girl jumps into the well, she loves somebody. That was a clear, meaningful, plain statement. There could be no argument about it. Nor did he raise further objections. He immediately gave his consent to the marriage, opened his heart and — in wondrous fashion — his purse too. He gave his daughter as a dowry forty crisp thousand-korona notes. Pista led her to the altar before Christmas.

“Now then. After this incident the old man began to waste away; he shrank to a shadow of his former self. He suddenly went to pieces. People thought that he would kick the bucket. What’s that? No, you’re wrong. Of course he hadn’t gone mad because she’d jumped into the well. He wasn’t even very upset that Zsuzsa’d left him alone in his old age. It was the money that upset him, that heap of money, those forty thousand-korona notes out of which — he himself couldn’t understand how — he’d been diddled. That he never forgave.

“So he vanished from public view, was no more to be seen even on the wooden bench in the street. He huddled in his earth-floored room in boots and hat, stick in hand, like any peasant waiting for a train in the third-class waiting room. He jabbed at the floor with the tip of his stick and spat. By evening he had spat a whole nice little puddle. A man who spits is thinking. I grant you that Immanuel Kant didn’t do his thinking quite like that when he was writing the Critique of Pure Reason. But we all have our ways. With old Szücs, spitting always meant intense contemplation. He was contemplating his son-in-law, that good-for-nothing gold digger, who had so craftily trapped and robbed him.

“Pista, however, was not a gold digger. He would have married that girl without the forty thousand just the same, without a thing to her name, in the nightgown in which she’d jumped down the well. He loved little Zsuzsa, and grew to love her even more. I’ve never seen a husband so worship his wife. He didn’t swear a vow to himself or to her, but from that day on he was dead as far as the world of debauchery was concerned; he stopped drinking and playing cards. He was just tied to her apron strings. He hid her away in his bachelor flat, which is where they moved to, and didn’t rent anywhere else. They put their money in the bank. All they bought was a gig, in which they drove about. In the evening they strolled hand in hand in the deserted streets. If ever there was a love match, this was it.

“Even a love match, however, can have its other side. He that that brings love to a marriage is not much wiser than he that establishes a lovely, graceful leopard in his home to see to its tranquility. It’s quite unsuitable.

“They were always arguing. Pista was possessive toward his wife, and she toward him. She was even possessive toward his thoughts. They were both very young, little more than children. After the storms came the rainbows, and they would make up in tears. So they argued and kissed, like doves.

“After one reconciliation a couple of months went by, and they fell out again over some trifle. It was a morning in spring. Pista slammed the door behind him and rushed to the office. When he came home at midday the place was empty. The kitchen fire wasn’t burning. Nor had young Zsuzsa made lunch. He looked everywhere for her, even under the bed. He waited for her until three in the afternoon. Then he went to see his father-in-law.

“The old man, whom he’d met only once since the wedding — and even then they’d visited him — received him coldly. On this occasion too he didn’t shake hands, and he addressed him as maga.^* What he heard didn’t surprise him. He merely shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, hemmed and hawed; his daughter hadn’t been there, goodness knows where she might be, he really didn’t know. Anyway, he wasn’t particularly interested.

“In the yard Pista looked into the well and then rushed home. He was hoping that by the time he arrived he’d find Zsuzsa there. But she wasn’t. Now he began to worry. Where could she be, where could she have got to? Zsuzsa had no close friends. She was still too shy to go into a restaurant alone. Pista searched the town, looking down every street and alley. As evening approached he — in despair — reported her disappearance to the police. The officer advised him to take another look at her father’s house.

“There was nothing else that he could do. First, however, he approached the house from behind, up the other street. There he saw a light in the window. Never in all his life had the old man lit the lamp — he begrudged the expense. So Zsuzsa must be hiding there. Pista tapped on the window. At that the lamp inside was blown out. It was she, it was she.

“He did not dare resort to force. He knew her. She was as obstinate as her father. She met force with greater force. He rang at the gate.^* After a lengthy interval the old man opened it. Pista informed him that his wife was hiding there. The old man didn’t deny it, but neither did he confirm it. Pista resorted to pleas, begged him to soften his daughter’s heart, reconcile her to him, he would be grateful, promised him all sorts of things. The old man pondered. Then he spat out that it would cost him a cool five hundred koronas.

“Pista thought that it was all a joke — even laughed — but it was no joke. Next day too his father-in-law would not let him in, merely spoke briefly through the window, and when he saw that Pista had come empty-handed he shut it. Pista couldn’t get near Zsuzsa, nor did she accept his letters. So Pista didn’t get his wife back until he withdrew from the bank the five hundred korona and counted every one of them out into the old man’s hand.

“Thus he blackmailed Pista the first time. Then it happened twice more. The second time it was more expensive — fifteen thousand korona were extorted from him. The most serious, however, was the third occasion, which happened one Whitsun, in the second year of their marriage.

“This time there was a lot at stake. They had come home from a masked ball — the first to which her husband had taken Zsuzsa — and had argued so badly in the street that when they reached home Pista gave his wife two quick slaps in the face in the hall. Zsuzsa turned on her heel, and in her thin patent leather shoes and her Tündér Ilona costume, ran out into the street and went weeping through the freezing winter night to her father’s. Pista, who was by that time tired of all the arguments and reconciliations, and also of the ransoms which were more exorbitant every time, decided on a new tactic: he would ignore the whole thing, his wife would simply relent, get tired of sulking, and come back of her own accord. Days went by, weeks too. Three long weeks passed without any sign of life from his wife. He didn’t even know whether she had in fact gone home on that bitter night, or even whether she was alive or dead. One evening he took a walk past his father-in-law’s. The house was shut up, dark and gloomy as a castle.

“Pista drank until dawn. At dawn he returned with the gypsy band, to assault the fortress with violins. Until morning came he made them play his wife’s song—Hány csillagból áll a szemed, Zsuzsikám?^*—under her window. Until morning came he sang it at the top of his voice toward the window, toward the snow clouds in the sky, toward the stars, as if expecting from somewhere an objective reply to that rhetorical question, that excusable poetic exaggeration. Nobody replied. Only the two kuvasz howled in opposition.

“The fourth week passed too. Now a whole month had gone by. Pista’s patience was exhausted. He engaged a lawyer to go and hold talks on his behalf. Zsuzsa told him that she absolutely wanted a divorce and asked her husband to agree to it peacefully. The lawyer continued talks for a further week. Then he brought the old man’s reply, that peace would cost a round twenty thousand koronas.

“Why drag the story out? Pista hurried to the bank, withdrew what remained of his dowry, nineteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty koronas — the rest he had to scrape together from his friends — and paid up. Then, after almost six weeks of absence, he brought his wife out in his arms, placed her triumphantly in the gig and drove home with her.

“I heard this from people who swear that, word for word, that’s exactly what happened. And I believe them. There’s just one thing that I don’t understand. Was she in league with the old miser, who had recouped his daughter’s dowry to the last krajcár? Possibly so. But it’s also possible that she was a mere tool in his hands, and that she only wanted her husband back but wanted to sell her love dear. That too is possible.

“Something else that’s odd — after that they never quarreled again. That’s strange. That I could not begin to explain. Perhaps you can.

“Yes, yes. As soon as they had nothing they were happy and content. But they were often hard up. True, they knew that they had mighty expectations when the old man closed his eyes. That could have happened any day. But he wouldn’t die. His financial success really galvanized him, he took a new lease on life. Once more he sat on the bench saying nothing.

“He lived for years, hale and hearty. Why is it that misers are all long-lived? Some say that meanness itself is an indication of an indomitable joie de vivre, and like every true passion, doesn’t kill but keeps one alive. Some say that this long-term, constant greed is what’s missing in puny individuals who die young. Some say that misers are steeled, filled with obstinacy, by the antipathy that surrounds them, it’s the burning hatred of their dependents that keeps them alive, just as the enthusiastic adoration of their children sustains the good. Finally, there are those who say that the earth keeps them here, won’t let them go, clasps them to its dirty, muddy bosom, because misers are dirty and muddy like their relative, the earth. These are theories, and nothing can be settled by theories. Everything, however, is settled by a severe brain hemorrhage in the night. That killed even the old man. Pista and his wife then inherited more than they had hoped for, almost half a million prewar gold koronas.

“Believe me, I would love to end this newfangled folk tale happily, to show in glowing colors how Zsuzsa and Pista finally obtained their reward and lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, I can’t. The old man died on the second of June 1914, and on the twenty-eighth — as I’m sure you’ve heard — war broke out. As a lieutenant in the reserve, Pista was called up into the First Honvéd Hussars. Before joining them he decided to invest all his money in war bonds. Zsuzsa, a peasant girl of limited outlook who clung to the soil, at first would not approve of this. She proposed that with part of it at least they should buy gold and land. She changed her mind only when her husband, who being a man had a better understanding of politics, explained that when the war was over they would get their money back with interest from the great syndicate which would have become a grateful posterity. Pista was never able to learn that this didn’t quite work out. The fault, it must be said, wasn’t his own. That is to say, in the first cavalry charge a shell so hit him that not so much as a kneecap or a brass button was left — even his horse vanished without a trace. It was as if the earth had swallowed the two of them up, or as if they had galloped up fully armed to the Milky Way, that golden roadway in the sky, and from there rushed into some wonderful and splendid military heaven. Young Zsuzsa waited for him for a while. She slowly used up what money she had. Then she languished on her war widow’s pension and eventually left town. The last time I went down there I heard that she’d found employment as a maid on a farm and had become a complete peasant, setting hens and fattening geese.

“So life has its ups and downs, doesn’t it? No, we really can’t complain. But let’s add that not only has it ups and downs, it also has deep meaning. Quite. Now, aren’t we ever going to have another drink?”

* Kosztolányi’s native area, a region of the Alföld southwest of Szeged, mostly now in Serbia.

* Badacsony and Csopak are celebrated white-wine regions on the north shore of Lake Balaton, as is (Balaton) Arács too. This latter is now joined to Balatonfüred and the monastery is no more.

† Kéknyelű, “blue-stemmed,” is a traditional Hungarian grape variety grown mostly in Badacsony.

‡ The guba is a cloaklike garment, often of rough woollen cloth; the pörge, “upturned,” hat is that traditionally worn by Hungarian shepherds, low-crowned with an upturned brim, somewhat similar to a bowler.

§ Banyakemence is a big, rick-shaped earthenware stove found in peasant houses. Suba is a sheepskin coat, worn with the fleece inside.

* “Saracen doughnut,” a doughnut coated with chocolate.

† “Perfumed Mass,” that attended by society ladies.

* “Silence!” A Romany word.

† “Quietly, just quietly” and “Waves of Balaton” are well-known folk songs.

* A style of frock coat popularized by Emperor Franz Josef.

* The honorific form of address, implying a certain distance.

* The gate, not the house door, because of the kuvasz. This is standard Hungarian practice.

* How many stars are your eyes made of, my Zsuzsika?