Kornel Esti

XIII

In which he appears as a benefactor.

He takes the part of an afflicted widow, but is finally obliged to strike her

because he is so sorry for her that he can do nothing else.

AT ELEVEN IN THE MORNING HE WAS ABOUT TO TAKE A BATH.

He ran toward the bathroom just as he’d jumped out of bed, wearing short underpants, his chest and arms bare, no nightshirt, just pushing his feet into his green leather slippers.

In that old-fashioned apartment he had to pass through three rooms on the way.

In the third, which was a sort of reception room, stood a woman dressed from head to foot in black, heavily veiled.

At the sight of the total stranger Esti recoiled. He did not know how she could have gotten there.

His first thought was of his undressed condition. He pressed both hands to his hairy chest out of politeness.

The lady gave a squeal of alarm. She stepped back, bowing. She was appalled at meeting in this way the person whom she had called on so often and was now seeing in the flesh for the first time. She thought that this had ruined everything.

“I beg your pardon,” she apologized, embarrassed.

“What do you want?” asked Esti.

“Please,” she stammered, “if you don’t mind … perhaps I’d better come back later … I don’t know … I beg your pardon.”

“Please go into the hall.”

“This way?”

“That way,” said Esti brusquely, “in there.”

The woman floated off, like a black cloud that had been filling the room, and Esti went into the bathroom, where his lukewarm morning bath awaited him.

He rang the bell in a rage.

Along came the maid. She stopped at the bathroom door.

“Jolán,” he shouted in that direction, “Jolán! Have you all gone quite mad? You’re letting everybody in.”

“I didn’t let her in. It was Viktor.”

“Where did he put her?”

“In the hall.”

“But she was here, in here, I walked straight into her. It’s outrageous. What does she want?”

“She’s asking for you, sir. She’s been here several times.”

“What’s she after?”

“I don’t know. Something to do with literature, perhaps,” the maid added, naively.

“Something to do with literature,” repeated Esti. “Wants to sell her collected works. Scrounging. Some kind of swindler. Or a sneak thief. She could have taken her pick. Cleaned the place out. I’ve told you a thousand times, give beggars something and let them go and God bless. I only see people on Sundays from twelve to one. Never any other time. Understand? And then people who come have to be announced. I’m not in now. To anyone. I’ve died.”

“Yes, sir,” said the maid.

“What’s that?” asked Esti, somewhat startled at her accepting this so quickly and naturally. “So get rid of her. Tell her to come back Sunday. Between twelve and one.”

When she heard the water splashing as her master took his bath the maid went away. Her quiet steps rustled in the next room. Esti called after her:

“Jolán!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Tell her to wait.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be ready directly.”

He did not even soap himself but got out of the bath, dressed, and called into the anteroom.

The black-clad woman came in. Once more the reception room became full of her. The white glass chandelier, with all its bulbs burning on that overcast winter morning, dimmed because of her; she was like a black cloud.

Outside snow was falling softly.

“What can I do for you?” asked Esti.

The lady did not answer. She merely burst out weeping. She choked down her tears with a thin, whining, old woman’s whimper.

All that could be made out was “Help … help … help …”

So: assistance.

Meanwhile she lifted her veil to wipe her wet face. She had dark green eyes. Dark green eyes surrounded by frosted curls, which had not yet had time to become gray. Disordered, almost frenzied, these tresses burst from beneath the black rim of her hat.

“The widow,” thought Esti, “the widow brought down into the dust. Ghastly.”

The woman blew her nose loudly, paying no attention to the fact that this disfigured her, made her seem ridiculous. In her confusion she had brought her umbrella in with her, as if she dared not leave it outside. It was dripping a whole little pond onto the mirrorlike varnish of the floor.

Her shoes and clothes were soaking wet.

But where had she come from, from what quarter of the inhabited zone, what lousy prison, what suburban slum or wooden shack? And why to him, him of all people, without any introduction or letter of recommendation?

Because she knew him. Not personally. She knew his writing.

Esti realized that.

He could tell people that knew his writing.

The widow spoke. It was impossible for so good a man as he not to understand her.

“I’m not a good man,” Esti protested inwardly. “I’m a bad man. Well, not a bad man. Just like anybody else. The fact that I retain my old, pure feelings — only and exclusively for purposes of expression — is a trick of the trade, a piece of technical wizardry, like that of the anatomist who can keep a heart or a section of brain tissue that hasn’t had a feeling or a thought for ages in formaldehyde for years and years. Life has left me numb, like it does everybody who reaches a certain age.”

The caller alluded to the fact that she had read several of his books of verse.

“That’s different,” Esti continued his silent argument. “Let’s not confuse the issue. That’s literature. It’d be dreadful if everything I’ve written were true. I once wrote that I was a gas lamp, but I’d object strongly to being changed into one. And I mentioned somewhere how much I’d like to go to sea. When I’m in ten feet of water in a swimming pool, however, I never stop thinking that I’m out of my depth, and I feel definitely relieved when I reach the shallow end.”

And such a refined spirituality shone from those pages, a quite extraordinarily refined spirituality.

“Refined as Hell,” Esti continued to weave his thoughts, probably disturbed by the word “spirituality.” “If people knew how hard, how cruel, how crudely healthy you have to be to deal with feelings. Anybody that’s gentle has to be rough as well. Gentleness is just roughness in disguise, and roughness, on the other hand, is gentleness in disguise. Really, goodness and badness, mercy and cruelty have that kind of strange mutual relationship. They go together inseparably, you can’t even imagine the one without the other, it’d be like someone with excellent eyes being unable to tell blue from red, or the butterfly from the larva. They are opposites, two opposing poles, but they’re in constant natural interaction and change places according to circumstances, they take one another’s names, fluctuate, change shape, like alternating electric current. Well, let’s leave it. What feels ‘refined’ on paper, however, is only so because it’s precise, finely tooled, and I am behind it, I — curse it! — who write for hours, work my stubborn fingers every day, come rain come shine, whether I’m in the mood or not, hissing and grinding my teeth. I’m supposed to be refined? In that case, so’s the blacksmith. I’m more like a blacksmith, madam. I pound the anvil with a hammer, make shoes for my horse, fine steel shoes, so that it can gallop faster on the highway. Because take note, the grif n can’t fly, it only looks as if it does, it gallops on the ground, and how! So I’m a craftsman. Look at these bones, this wrist, this chest, which you saw naked just now as it emerged from the creative workshop. Tell me the truth, do I look like a nasty, finicky poet, or more like a blacksmith?”

Esti actually stood up, showed himself as he really was, went over to the caller, so that his rough proximity might influence her to come to the point.

Slowly she came round to it.

She unbosomed her complaints, brought them out one by one as if from an open drawer.

And that had a good effect on her. She stopped weeping.

Pain, in its abstract entirety, seen at a distance, is always more terrible than close up: attention to detail sobers us up, disarms us, at least demands our concentration, self-discipline, makes us produce order from chaos. At such times we find a wheel, a screw, a hinge, which does the trick. All is now a question of detail, an easy matter. Small things reassure us.

Esti was ready for anything. He expected death and famine, prison and plague, scarlet fever, meningitis, madness.

The particular, objective data followed:

The woman’s late husband had been a headmaster in a provincial town and had died the previous summer after a long battle with cancer at the age of fifty-two.

“Quite,” said Esti, as if approving of cancer.

They had moved from the country, the five of them, and were now in an apartment consisting of one room and a kitchen. She had four children, that was to say. Large family, small pension, as was nowadays the fashion. The smallest boy was twelve, and had been operated on for inflammation of the middle ear, and the wound was still open and discharging.

“Quite.”

His elder brother had gone to a factory and was learning to be an electrician, but was not being paid yet.

“Quite.”

The elder girl was a seamstress, but could not go out of doors because now, in the winter, she had no shoes.

“Quite.”

Esti was expecting consumption, and — speak of the Devil — the widow said the word: consumption. The smaller girl had consumption.

As for herself, the woman would like to find work, anything, because she could still work, she was thinking in particular of a tobacconist’s or at least a newspaper kiosk in which she could sit, summer and winter, from morning to night.

“Quite, quite.”

Esti was hearing a lot less than he had braced himself for.

After all, these were those modest — and uninteresting — complaints that life produces, for the most part with industrial, frightening uniformity. Mass production doesn’t permit anything original.

But perhaps it was just that lack of imagination that surprised him, this grayness and banality: the fact that such shoddy goods were set before him, and yet certain people to whom they were shared out tolerated them as destiny.

And he thought:

“Is that all?”

And he waited.

But there was no more. It was all gone.

Esti sat down. He turned to the woman:

“How can I help you?”

With a sum of money, which was not large — to him, really, nothing at all — but with which the whole unfortunate family, which deserved a better fate, could be put on its feet for the time being. He should not misunderstand all this. She and her hapless, sick children were not asking for this as alms or a gift, only as a loan which they would redeem by their hard work, or if necessary repay in kind, here or elsewhere, but in any case they would repay to the last fillér, the very last fillér, in precise monthly installments which could be fixed in advance.

This infuriated Esti. All these people offered deals, hinted at alluring profit on capital. They were all strictly based on capital. So reliable were they that the Bank of England seemed untrustworthy by comparison.

“Indeed,” he muttered, “the Bank of England,” and all but burst out laughing at the silly idea.

He liked idiotic things like that.

He was afraid that, faced by all that suffering, he was about to roar with laughter. He bit his lip so that physical pain should prevent anything so disgraceful, and began to speak rapidly and lightly, because he also knew that when we keep our lips and minds busy we find it easier to refrain from laughter.

“So that’s what you’d like, is it now? I understand about this money, temporarily, just to tide you over. Look, my dear lady. I myself have obligations of my own.” That was a phrase that he had heard years before from a banker from whom he had begged money no less desperately (though in more prepossessing circumstances), and as he vividly saw and heard that scene he went on even more rapidly. “I have relations and friends. My staff. Etc., etc. I too work. Like a slave. Quite enough. Every letter means a bit of bread.” “You mean cake,” whispered something inside him. “Cake, cake, you liar.”

The widow did not reply. She looked calmly into his eyes.

Esti could still hear the whispering voice. He jumped up. Hurried out into the next room.

From there he returned a little more slowly. He was holding his left fist clenched. He put down on the table a bank note. He did not look at it.

The widow, however, although she did not mean to, glanced at it at once, and amazement lit her face; it was distinctly more than she had asked for, he had rounded the amount up.

The frost which had held her almost rigid when she came in had melted, fallen away, like the melted snow on the floor. She did not know whether she could accept it. Of course, of course, just put it away.

She clutched the money in her hand. She expressed her gratitude. Expressed it with the greatest word, than which there is none greater.

“My God.”

“Good,” Esti interrupted. “Write down your address. So you live in Kispest. By the way, how old’s the younger girl?”

“Sixteen.”

“Is she feverish?”

“Only in the evening. Never in the morning.”

“Right. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps I’ll manage to get her into the sanatorium. Can’t say yet. Anyway, I’ll try. Give me a call next week. Any time. Here’s my phone number.”

Next day he received a letter from them, which all five had signed. It was a long letter. It began Your Lordship!

According to that salutation he had been granted a new title, promoted, elevated in their sphere of influence.

They had written “Your Lordship’s heart …” Esti laid a hand on his heart. His noble heart.

He himself had not taken seriously his promise perhaps to get the younger girl into some hospital or somewhere. He had done that rather by way of tact, for appearances, obeying his polished sense of style, to divert the widow’s attention from the money in the moment of parting as she slipped it into her battered handbag, and by steering her thoughts toward a future kindness to stem the unceasing flow of her constantly repeated gratitude, which he could really no longer endure.

In the morning when he woke up Esti had the telephone brought to him in bed. He put it by his pillow, under his warm quilt, like other people put the cat. He liked that electric animal.

While he stretched out in the wide bed, feeling refreshed after his rest, he picked up the receiver and asked for a number. The city came into his bed. Still half asleep, he could hear the attentive voices of officials at the other end of the line, the background morning din of a distant TB sanatorium. He asked for the doctor in charge, an old friend of his.

“I wonder if you’ve got a free bed?” “Really, that’s something we’ve never got, but we can always manage somehow. Tell the little girl and her mother to come in and bring their papers, and we’ll see what we can do.”

A couple of days later the doctor called him back. He informed him that his protégée had been admitted.

Now all that remained was the newspaper kiosk.

He felt that it was his duty to take this step too. And not a human duty, but one of kinship. Since he had spoken to the widow it was as if he had become related to her.

First he visited the family.

In the room where they lived, a bare wire dangled from the ceiling, and on it a single unshaded bulb shed a garish light.

Margitka, the younger girl, was by then in the sanatorium. The older girl was called Angela, and was not pretty. She looked dull. She spoke in a singsong. She had a straight, white nose, which might have been carved out of chalk. Lacika, the schoolboy with the bad ear, was hunched over his Latin grammar. The electrician had come home after a fruitless search for work, scarcely spoke to them, and with proletarian cheerlessness withdrew to a corner, from where he eyed the visitor with such gloomy and searching attention that he might well have wanted to sketch him. Esti had no idea what to make of him.

Finding a newspaper kiosk proved dif cult.

At the office where that kind of licence was issued, the official informed him with a smile that in Hungary it was easier to get a ministerial post than one of those glass cages. There was absolutely no prospect of a vacancy in the foreseeable future.

Esti took note of that. As, however, there was no likelihood of a ministerial post for the widow either — some people at least would have found that strange — he held out for the glass cage. He knew that there were laws, clauses, and resolutions which were hard and remorseless, but behind every law, clause, and resolution was a mortal man who was corrupt, and with the necessary expertise could be circumvented. Nothing is impossible when it is only from men that we want it. And so he smiled, lied, flattered, crawled, browbeat, and importuned as necessary. In one place he called the widow a close relative, a dependent, and a fervent Catholic; in a second a staunch Calvinist and a refugee under the peace treaty;^* and in a third a victim of the White Terror, a refugee returning from Vienna.

Esti had no scruples over such matters.

What gave him strength? He himself wondered about that.

When the family came to mind at night, or when he sometimes got up early in order to catch someone whom he needed at the office, he asked himself that question.

Perhaps he was deluding himself with the possibility of saving someone?

Was he enjoying the role of patron, living out a secret desire for power? Was his mawkish readiness to be a sacrifice influencing him? Was he atoning for something? Or was it just the excitement of the chase, of seeing the results of his amusing experiment or the extent to which people could be influenced?

Esti weighed the reasons and was compelled to answer each question in the negative.

He was after something else. Simply because he had tossed out that money in a moment of stress. It had been the direct consequence of that that he had obtained a free bed in the sanatorium for the girl, and from that it had followed that he had also had to guarantee the mother’s means of support. His one action ineluctably gave rise to the other. Now, however, he would have been sorry if his work was wasted. He wanted to see a little more perfectly, a little more roundly.

As they say in business, in technical jargon, “he wanted to protect his investment.”

At length the widow got her newspaper kiosk, in an excellent position at a busy corner on the Ring Road.

September sunshine gleamed on the glass, gilding the foreign magazines, drawing Dekobra and Bettauer into a wreath of rays. She came and went among them with a convalescent smile as on the stage, isolated and yet part of the life of the street, in the full glare of the limelight.

As the kiosk was on his way, Esti would sometimes stop there, no longer as a patron but just as a customer. He would buy a paper but did not even need it. He inquired how Margitka was.

“Thank you,” the widow would gesture, as she straightened the papers with a half-gloved hand, “thank you very much. She’s not too bad. Only the food’s poor. They don’t give them enough,” she whispered confidentially. “We have to make it up. We take her a little butter every day or two. We walk, because I can’t afford the tram.”

Then she spoke of the schoolboy.

“Poor little chap’s had to repeat the year. He failed three subjects last year. You know, it’s because of his ears. He can’t hear. Can’t hear what the teacher’s saying. He’s gone deaf in his left ear.”

Esti did not believe that anything on earth could be put right. He could see that as soon as he patched up misery in one place it immediately broke out somewhere else. Secretly, however, he hoped for at least a speck of improvement, some evident relief, some relative calm, a kind word, which would cheer him, reward him. Now he was the one looking for charity.

In winter the rain poured down. The kiosk was like a lighthouse in the universal floods. Instead of the widow the seamstress was serving. She sang out with nervous gaiety:

“Mum’s caught a chill. Her legs are bad. I’m standing in for her.”

On his way home Esti thought of the kiosk, in which — it seemed — the elder girl too was cold, and of the widow, lying sick in bed. He sat down at his fireside. The embers cast a ruddy glow on the light brown curtains.

He stood up in irritation.

“I’m tired of this,” he sighed, “really tired.”

After that he watched the kiosk halfeartedly, from a distance, while he waited for the omnibus. He was sick of them. If he possibly could, he avoided them.

“Let them die,” he muttered. “I shall die as well, just as miserably. Everybody does.”

The widow and her family were not importunate. After repeatedly saying that they owed everything — all these things — to him and him alone, they went their way. They did not want to burden him further.

He did not see them, did not hear of them.

One restless May evening the wind was blowing up dust in the road. Esti had been drinking chocolate in a café. As he left he bumped into the widow.

She had not noticed him.

Esti spoke to her. “What’s new?” said he, “I haven’t seen you in ages.”

For a while she did not speak.

“My little Laci,” she stammered, “my little Laci,” and her voice choked.

The little schoolboy had died two months previously.

Esti lowered his eyes to the ground, in which the boy was crumbling.

The widow told him everything bit by bit. Margitka was having fevers in the morning too, and they wanted to send her home from the sanatorium as they could keep her no longer. Angela had lost her job at the dressmaker’s because she had had to stand in for her mother so often. The kiosk had been given up. She herself had not been able to stand about there with her bad legs. Perhaps it was just as well.

Esti nodded.

“Quite, quite.”

He was standing under a gas lamp. He looked at the widow’s face. She was no longer as ravaged and disheveled as when he had first met her. She was numb and calm.

If she had not been so much like his mother and those female relations of his who had likewise become dull, gone into a decline, all would have been well. But there was a look of accusation about her. An aching, almost insolent reproach.

That incensed him.

“So what can I do about it?” he raged inwardly. “Perhaps you think that I personally am doing all these dreadful things to you? What the Hell do you want from me, always from me?”

He made a gesture of refusal. He grabbed at the widow. Held her arm. Shook the thin old woman in her black clothes, struggled with her.

“Stop it,” he shouted, “stop it.”

Then he rushed down a side street.

“What have I done?” he gasped. “Oh, what a mess I am! A woman. A weak, miserable woman. I’m out of my mind.”

He leaned against the wall. He was still gasping from the outburst. And yet he was happy. Inexpressibly happy that at last he had well and truly gotten over her.

* That of Trianon (1920), under which much of the territory of Greater Hungary was lost to its neighbors. Many ethnic minority Hungarians fled into into what is now Hungary.