Kornel Esti

III

In which, at night on a train, shortly after leaving school in 1903, a girl kisses him on the lips for the first time

WHEN, IN 1903, KORNÉL ESTI WAS DECLARED PRAECLARE maturus in his school leaving examination, his father laid before him a choice: either he would buy him that splendid bicycle for which he had long yearned, or he would give him the money — a hundred and twenty koronas — and with that he could travel wherever his fancy took him.

He decided on the latter. Though not without a little hesitation and soul-searching.

It was hard to be parted from his mother’s skirts. He had grown up in Sárszeg,^* among books and bottles of medicine. In the evening, before going to bed, he had always had to convince himself that his mother, father, brother and sister were in bed, in the usual place, and only then could he go to sleep to the tick-tock of the wall-clock. If, however, any of them had gone to visit in the country and happened not to be spending the night at home, he would rather stay awake and wait for their return, which would once more tip everything back into the old, happy balance. The family was for him the refuge from everything that he feared. It surrounded him like a dovecote, stuff y, dimly lit, tacky with rubbish.

On the other hand, he also longed to get away. He had never yet left that Alföld nest where there was neither river nor hills, the streets and the people were all alike, and days and years brought little change. Here were stifling, dusty afternoons and long, dark evenings. Exercise books and calendars filled the windows of the bookshops. His mind was waking, his tastes developing, but second-rate plays were put on in the theater and for want of better entertainment he watched these from a student seat in the rafters. He would have liked to see the world. Most of all, he would have loved to see the sea. He had imagined it while still in primary school, when he had for the first time looked at that smooth, endless blueness on the wall map. So, with an heroic decision, he proposed that come what may he would go to Italy,^* and alone.

One dull, hectic day in July he set off. The whole household was up and about at three in the morning. His worn and battered traveling basket had been brought down from the attic and a futile attempt made at mending its lock. He said good-bye with a smile, but his heart sank. He didn’t believe that he would ever return. Everyone went with him to catch the slow train for Budapest. They waved their handkerchiefs, while his mother turned away in tears.

After five hours’ rattling he reached Budapest without mishap. He immediately informed his parents of that fact by postcard. He took a room in a third-rate hotel near the station. There he spent only a single night.

That evening he used to get to know Budapest. Happy, electrified, he set out into the city, this modern Babylon, as he described it in another postcard to his parents. His self-esteem rose because he was going about all by himself. In the National Museum he looked at the antiquities, at the balcony from which Petőfi had spoken, at the stufffed animals. Later he got lost on Andrássy út. A policeman kindly put him on the right road. Map of Budapest in hand, he found the Danube and Gellérthegy. The Danube was big, Gellérthegy high. Both were splendid. Budapest was altogether splendid.

What interested him most of all were the people of Budapest. Everybody going along the street, sitting in a coffeehouse or on a tram, shopping in the shops, was a “Budapest person.” He could tell at a glance that they were very different from the people of Sárszeg, and as like one another in clothes, attitudes, and manners as members of a single family. In his eyes, therefore, a High Court judge, a horse-trader, the wife of a landowner, and a nursemaid were “Budapest people.” This statement — from a higher point of view — is undeniable.

The “Budapest person” was in a hurry and took no notice of him. He found that out immediately upon arrival. The porter who carried his luggage up to the third floor of the hotel likewise belonged to the people of Budapest. He didn’t say a single word to him, expect it though he might, but ill-humoredly deposited his basket on a trestle, muttered something, and simply left. Kornél found this behavior hard to bear, but it filled him with great admiration. He wrote to his parents — a third postcard — that the people here aren’t coarse, in deed, in a certain respect they’re more refined, more attentive than people in Sárszeg. Sometimes, however, they did seem cold, even heartless. No one asked him what at home everyone from the fôispán^* down would certainly have done: “Well, Kornél, isn’t Budapest splendid?” “Isn’t the Danube big?” “Isn’t Gellérthegy high?” And then, neither did they look him in the face, so open, so yearning for affection, which at first — for the first few hours — he raised to everyone with such boundless confidence that some involuntarily smiled and laughed together behind his back at the sight of such naïveté and youth until — hours later — he learned that one should keep one’s face straight if one didn’t want to seem ridiculous. At this point the broad, convivial world ceased to be — that sugary toy world, that doll’s dinner party — which he had been so accustomed to in the provinces. Things were quite different from then on: both more and less.

Confused by these novelties, brought low in all situations and repeatedly cut to the quick, he sauntered hither and thither and, like someone flayed, things stuck to his flesh; he painfully tore off the healing scabs and became unhealthily receptive to every impression, his every sense became sharpened and refined, and a word that struck his ear, the smell of mash from a brewery, or a glass of unfamiliar shape — a “Budapest glass”—became, in the dingy back room of his hotel, a symbol, an unforgettable memory, and when at length, dazed from the comings and goings of the day, he took refuge in bed — the “Budapest bed,” among the “Budapest pillows”—there welled up in his heart a nostalgia for the old things, the old people, and in despair he yearned for home. Nor did sleep come to his eyes. He propped himself up on the pillows in his dark room and pondered.

Next afternoon he boarded the express for Fiume.^* He quickly found a seat. There were not many traveling. In the second-class compartment where he first opened the door there were only two: a woman and her daughter. He greeted them. The woman received that with a wordless nod, good-natured but reserved, as if to inform him that she occupied a position of friendly neutrality. He crammed his basket onto the luggage rack and settled down by the window. The lady sat across from him, her daughter beside her, obliquely opposite him.

Esti fanned himself. An African temperature prevailed. The sweltering carriages, which had been baking all day in the blazing sun, were now oozing their poison, fuming and dusty, and the seats exuded the stench of some animal hide. The dark patches in the clouds of steam swirled drunkenly before his eyes in that yellow waxwork light.

He spared his traveling companions scarcely a glance. He didn’t even wish to know who they were. Schooled by bitter lessons, he feigned indifference. He could by then dissimulate better than those who had devoted their whole lives to it. He opened his book, Edmondo de Amicis’ Il Cuore.^* It amused him that even with his patchy knowledge of Italian he could understand it perfectly and read it almost fluently on the basis of his Latin.

The train ran out of the glass cage of the station. The woman made the sign of the cross. That surprised him. It wasn’t customary in his family. But it made an impression on him. What beautiful, womanly humility. “We are all in the hand of God.” Indeed, traveling impairs our life expectancy. It isn’t a deadly danger, only about as bad as a quinsy from which can develop — perhaps — blood poisoning or heart failure. That journey, furthermore, was no trifling matter. It lasted twelve hours without a break: part of the afternoon, then the whole of the night until eight the next morning. When they arrived the sun would be shining again — who knew what might happen during that time?

He delighted in that uncertainty. He was also pleased that no other passenger had come into their compartment, so that he would probably have a comfortable journey all the way with only that woman and her daughter, who, if not actually friendly, were not hostile.

They rattled through the marshaling yards. Now they were out of Budapest, among the fields. The sticky heat had cooled, been diluted. There was even a slight breeze. He felt that he had become free, had left behind him all sorts of things, that all sorts of things no longer restricted him as they had previously, and that the young man who was sitting there with the Italian book in his hand was really him and not him, could be anyone he wished, because with the constant change of place he was entering an infinite variation of possible situations, a kind of spiritual masked ball.

The woman adjusted her ash-blonde hair, fiddled with the chignon at the back and her tortoiseshell hairpins. She had a calm face and an uncomplicated, clear forehead. Esti now discovered for the first time what intellectually fertile soil a railway compartment is. Here the lives of strangers appear before us in, as it were, cross section — suddenly and condensed — as in a novel opened haphazardly in the middle. Our curiosity, which otherwise we conceal by false modesty, can be satisfied under the constraint of our being enclosed together in a moving room, and we can peep into those lives and speculate on what the beginning of the novel must have been and how it will end. Esti had already, in his school literary circle, produced some decent work as both poet and novelist. Here too he could practice that craft. However gauche he was otherwise, he could cloak his intentions and give himself over completely to creative inquisitiveness, his eyes sliding more and more frequently from the guileless sentences of Il Cuore to the woman.

She must have been thirty-nine or forty, the same age as his mother. Straightaway, in the first moment, he felt an extraordinary warmth toward her. She had ivy-green eyes. She, however, looked at neither Esti nor her daughter, but stared into space — tired, sad, and perhaps even a little disinterested. She was looking into herself. She wouldn’t allow anyone else to look there.

She evinced a languid gentleness and trustfulness, like a dove. She wasn’t fat, not at all, but she was shapely, like a dove. The only jewelry on her hand was a gold wedding ring. That hand — the white hand of a mother — rested for the most part in her lap, in the pleasant, mystical softness of a mother’s lap.

She had with her two pigskin cases covered in coffee-brown canvas, decorated all over with the hummingbird brilliance of stickers from foreign hotels. Leather-framed name cards hung from the handles, swinging with the motion of the train. Beside her on the seat lay an elegant shagreen handbag.

Poise and taste were evident in her every movement. For that matter, she scarcely did move. That great calm was a trifle odd. She mused and did nothing. Sometimes Esti thought that at some point — when she sneezed or blew her nose — he would suddenly lose interest in her. But he was mistaken. As time went by, every such little tiny surprise merely reinforced his swift feeling of warmth toward her. Even inactivity didn’t make her boring. Everything that she did, or didn’t do, was good, beautiful, pleasing, and it was good, beautiful, or pleasing the way she did it, or didn’t do it.

As profound an affection for her awoke in him as if he were seeing his own mother. It did him good to look at that woman, to know that she was in the world and so close to him.

Meanwhile, time slipped by in such a way that he didn’t notice it.

Naturally, he gathered these observations slowly, bit by bit, something every minute, because he couldn’t be indiscreet, could only watch her for short periods, as if by chance, and then fly back with the precious, stolen pollen, to make it into honey in the buzzing beehive of his imagination.

Once, just as he was withdrawing again to hide behind the cover of Il Cuore, frowning and reading most intently, it struck him that the girl was whispering something to her mother.

In fact, he had been hearing this whispering — if such it may be called — this sotto voce murmuring ever since entering the compartment. He had, however, paid no attention to it. After a while he had become accustomed to it, as to the droning of a fly in a room on a summer afternoon.

The girl clung to her mother’s arm and whispered into her ear. Sometimes she made her hand into a funnel and whispered like that. What she whispered couldn’t be heard. Her mother sometimes paid attention to it, sometimes not. She would nod or shake her head in denial. When the whisper — or rather rustling sound — rose to a mutter or a buzz, she would quiet it, try mechanically, with half-words, to check it: “Hush, dear.” “Yes, dear.” “No, no, dear.” But that was all.

Esti didn’t understand the situation. This business made him a little anxious. The girl’s disquiet unsettled him. As did — perhaps even more so — her mother’s calm. Now, therefore, he stopped peeping from behind his book in search of further data on the dear unknown acquaintance, and didn’t watch, but listened.

It was a feverish, hasty rustling, a confused flow of words, inarticulate, incomprehensible, and as gabbled as if it were being read from a book, badly.

Until then he had, so to speak, paid no attention to the girl, as her mother had fully absorbed his interest. On entering the compartment, he had seen that she was a teenager, at the most fifteen. He had also seen that she wasn’t pretty. That was probably the reason why he had instinctively avoided looking at her.

Now he squinted at her round the edge of Edmondo de Amicis.

She was a slip of a girl, insignificant, quite insipid. Skinny legs, a thin, piping voice. She was wearing a white, spotted cambric dress, an expensive Swiss brooch, and new, showy, patent leather shoes. In her lusterless, pale blonde hair gleamed a huge bow of strawberry-colored satin ribbon, which made her pale face seem even paler. She wore a ribbon of the same material at her neck, very broad, to conceal her scrawniness.

She was dressed as if she were being taken not on this summer journey but to a ball, a glittering winter ball, a quite improbable children’s ball, quite unsuitable for her.

Her small head, flat chest, lean shoulders, the two “saltcellars” that showed above the scooped neckline of her dress, her hands, her ears, her everything at first aroused pity, but then straightaway displeasure. This creature wasn’t only graceless; she was repulsive, definitely loathsome.

Poor thing, thought Esti. He couldn’t even bear to look at her for long. He looked out the window.

It was slowly getting dark. The girl was vanishing in the gloom, blending into her mother. All that could be heard was her whisper, her unending, irritating whisper, which in the darkness became more agitated, more rapid. She buried herself in her mother’s ear and whispered. It was beyond understanding that she wasn’t tired out after all those hours and that her mother wasn’t tired of listening to her. Why did she lisp all the time? Why wasn’t she hoarse by now, why didn’t she have to stop? Esti shrugged. It was all quite beyond him.

The train had long ago left Gyékényes^* and was heading at full speed into the starless summer night. Overhead on the ceiling the gas lamps were lit. Esti escaped into his book.

He made every effort to concentrate on the text. He had scarcely read four or five pages, however, when he noticed something that thoroughly annoyed him.

He noticed that the girl kept pointing at him. She was clinging to her mother’s arm and whispering, as ever, and pointing at him. That was too much, really too much.

At this, now, he became indignant. But he was so overcome by anxiety that his indignation cooled. He tried to think calmly. So the pointing was directed at him. But in that case the one-sided dialogue had also been about him from the start, and he had become the focus of an interest of which he knew neither the origin nor the purpose.

What the devil did this girl want of him? He had to suppose that she was making fun of him for some reason. Perhaps because of his clothes? He had dressed in his best for the journey, his dark blue suit, new that spring. He was distinctively attired. He wore a high collar, reaching to his chin, and a narrow, white, piqué tie, which made him resemble both an international tenor and a provincial clerk, but he was perfectly satisfied with it and thought that nothing could express more appropriately his bohemian nature, his whimsical poetic soul that sighed for the infinite. So perhaps that chit of a girl now found him amusing, or did she think he was ugly? But he knew that wasn’t it. He was a slight, slender boy. His brown hair, parted on the side, fell abundantly over his forehead. His gray eyes burned with a pained longing, a hesitant curiosity, at that time even much more clearly and fierily than later, when disappointment and doubt about everything had clouded the gleam of those eyes to as leaden and drunken-murky a hue as if he were in a state of permanent intoxication.

He didn’t beat about the bush for long. He waited for the girl to point at him again, and when her finger was next waving in front of her nose he dropped his book into his lap and turned toward her, requiring an explanation.

The girl, like one caught in the act, was taken aback. Her slender finger seemed frozen into ice. It hung in the air like that. Slowly she lowered it.

Yet even then her mother spoke not a word. She took the girl’s hand — the erring little hand, the one that had been pointing — put it between her two hands, enclosed it, and began with gentle, infinite gentleness and patience to pat it, as if she were playing “bunnies” with it. “This man went rabbiting … this man caught it …”

Something like an armistice ensued. The whispering died away, or became so quiet as to be almost inaudible. Midnight approached. The woman opened her handbag. She took out a knife, a golden knife with a sharp, pointed, slender blade. Next she took out something wrapped in cotton wool. From the cotton-wool wrapping there emerged a lovely, butter-yellow Calville apple.^* Dexterously and carefully she peeled it, cut it into segments, picked them up on the point of the knife, and raised them one by one to the girl’s mouth.

She ate. Not nicely. She chomped.

As she caught the segments between her slightly swollen lips a white, sticky froth began to form as on the beaks of swallow chicks, like a scum or foam setting under internal warmth. She opened her beak clownishly for every morsel. In so doing she exposed her anemic gums and her few rotten little teeth, which shone black inside her mouth. “D’you want some more, dear?” her mother asked from time to time. The girl nodded.

In this way she ate almost the entire apple. Only the last segment remained.

Suddenly she leapt to her feet and rushed into the corridor. Her mother tore after her in alarm.

Now what was happening? What was wrong with the apple and the mother? What was the matter with this girl? Esti too jumped up. He looked around the empty compartment.

He was left alone. At last he was alone. He breathed deeply, like one released from a spell. It was only then that he dared really to admit that he had been afraid. He understood his traveling companions less and less. Who were they? What were they? Whoever was that ignorant girl who whispered and pointed all the time, then rushed out, with her mother after her like a gendarme? What scene was taking place out there, and what scene had ended in the compartment just now — when at last the apple was being peacefully eaten in the silence which had suddenly fallen — the dénouement of which couldn’t be so much as guessed? Whoever was this mother who endured simply anything from her daughter, indulged her in everything, never ever called her to order, was indeed so soft — or so foolish — as to respond to her naughtiness with doting? It was now rather her that he blamed, not the girl. He began to be annoyed with that extraordinary, warm-hearted woman, whom he had become so fond of. She should be firmer, stricter. Or couldn’t she handle her daughter? Of course, that was the trouble. She’d spoiled her, brought her up badly.

He could easily have found out their names. He would only have had to look up at the leather-held labels that dangled above his head. But that he regarded as improper. And in any case, what good would it have done him to read their names? His curiosity went deeper; he wanted to penetrate not names — for what does anyone’s name matter? — but people, their lives, these two lives which were clearly highly enigmatic.

But enigmatic or not, he could stay there no longer. He couldn’t spend a whole long night under the same roof. He had to decamp. Fate had opened an unexpected way of escape to him so that he could leave without making a fuss, take his things to another compartment, anywhere. They still hadn’t come back. Now he thought with a sinking feeling that they might come back at any moment. He hurried to look around.

There wasn’t a soul in the narrow, dimly lit corridor. The mother wasn’t there, nor the girl. Where could they have disappeared to? The question made him anxious. He searched everywhere. He even looked in both toilets. They were empty. They were nowhere. Not a sign of them.

Had they gone into another carriage? Unlikely. The communicating doors to the next carriage were closed. So had they jumped from the speeding train, and were they now lying, expiring, their skulls smashed and slowly oozing, on the stones of the track bed, or were they continuing their journey entangled in the wheels and accompanying him as mutilated corpses? That would be dreadful.

He opened every compartment in the carriage like a secret policeman, partly to shed light on the whereabouts of mother and daughter, and partly to find himself another seat for the night.

In most of the compartments it was dark. The passengers were snoring behind lowered curtains and tightly shut doors. The familiar idyll of the bedroom greeted him: sleeping children and half-oranges, wagons circled and walled for defense with suitcases, morose men in their shirtsleeves, milk gurgling in green water bottles and women, breathing heavily, heads bent over their chubby infants — cheese rinds, flowers, and shoehorns scattered in nightmare disorder on the floor as if after a savage attack, smelly feet in sweaty stockings on the seats, emitting storm clouds of fumes — and meanwhile simply dozing on the bombast of the patriotic leading articles in yesterday’s paper, spread out as a covering. Everywhere there had formed that hastily contrived, disgustingly family-like traveling companionship, that fortuitously forged train-fellowship, recruited of necessity from total strangers who greet another total stranger, arriving late and unexpectedly, not much more warmly than they would a masked robber equipped with chloroform.

Esti didn’t impose on anyone. Once he was convinced that mother and daughter really were not in a particular compartment and that there was no room for him, he apologized to everyone and discreetly withdrew.

He remained standing in the corridor. He enjoyed watching the sparks from the engine. At every moment it flung a shower into the sky. Myriads and myriads of sparks soared in great arcs, then were extinguished in a ditch like swiftly fading falling stars. One smut, however, went into his eye. He went back into his compartment.

This was still deserted, though with the memories of two lives in the air. He sat down in his old place. Now he himself took it for certain that he was trapped there. This bothered him, and yet it didn’t.

Even if he found a seat elsewhere — which he might, the train wasn’t full, he’d only have to speak to the guard — it was very doubtful that he’d move into another compartment and that his curiously prickly conscience would be able to stand the thought that by his furtive, panicky escape he might offend his traveling companions, those two people whom he had seen for the first and perhaps the last time in his life. It was probable, highly probable, that even then he would change his mind and turn back at the last moment and decide to stay there all the same, as he had now done.

The affair interested him, that was for sure. However much he dreaded the situation, he was curious about how it would develop. He wanted to see more clearly whom he’d been traveling with until then, he would have liked to clear up a thing or two.

His conduct couldn’t be explained by just that. Nor by the fact that he was a “well-brought-up boy.” Nor because timidity or a lively imagination made him indecisive — often when he avoided danger those were the qualities that urged him into it. Nor that he was, as it were, an excessively kindly soul, in the everyday sense of the word. There was a lot of cruelty in him, many bloodthirsty, evil instincts. He alone knew what he had done, as a small boy, to hapless flies and frogs in the secret torture chamber that he had set up in the laundry room. There he and his younger brother had dissected frogs and their grandmother’s cats with a kitchen knife, cracked their skulls, extracted their eyes, conducted real vivisection on a purely “scientific, experimental basis,” and their grandmother — that loud-voiced, addlepated, shortsighted woman — had been very cross that whatever she did, her cats kept disappearing, ten or twenty a year. If need be he could certainly have committed murder, like anyone else. But he was more afraid of hurting someone than of killing them.

He was always horrified that he might be harsh, merciless, and tactless toward anyone — a human being like himself, that is: frail, craving happiness, and finally in any case doomed to perish wretchedly — horrified of humiliating them in their own eyes, of upsetting them with even one innuendo, a single thought, and often — at least, so he imagined — he would rather have died than entertain the belief that he was someone superior in this world and that the person in question might blushingly repeat as he slunk away, “It seems I’ve been a burden to him … it seems he’s tired … it seems he looks down on me …”

This moral position, which Esti developed in greater detail in his later work, even then was germinating in his youthful heart. He knew that there is little that we can do for each other, that for the sake of being happy ourselves we are forced to injure others, sometimes even fatally, and that in great affairs pitilessness is almost inevitable, but for that very reason he held the conviction that our humanity, our apostleship can only be revealed — honestly and sincerely — in little things, that attentiveness, tact, and mutual consideration based on forgiveness are the greatest things on this earth.

Following this train of thought he had come to the conclusion, bleak, even pagan though it seemed, that since we can’t be really good we should at least be polite. This politeness of his, however, was no mere ceremoniousness, not a thing of compliments and idle chatter. It often consisted of nothing more than subtly slipping in at a crucial moment a word which might seem noncommittal, but which someone was desperately awaiting from him as an acknowledgment of their existence. He considered that tact his most particular virtue. Better than so-called goodness, in any case. Goodness preaches constantly, wants to change humanity, to work miracles from one day to the next, makes a show of its substance, wants to question essentials, but in fact is most often just hollow, lacking in substance and merely a matter of appearance. Whereas even if politeness does look entirely formal, in its inward nature it is substance, essence itself. A good word which has not yet been put into practice holds within itself every virgin possibility and is more than a good deed, the outcome of which is dubious, its effect arguable. In general, words are always more than deeds.

He waited anxiously for his traveling companions to return. They didn’t come, didn’t come. He looked at his pocket watch. It was a quarter to one. It had been exactly three-quarters of an hour since they’d disappeared.

At one o’clock footsteps were heard in the corridor. The guard was passing his compartment with a lamp in his hand, the new Croat guard, a friendly man with a mustache, and looked in on him and asked in faultless German and with Austrian cordiality where he was going and why he wasn’t asleep. He couldn’t, however, enlighten him on the whereabouts of the woman and the girl. Then, in his perfect German and with Austrian cordiality, he said “Ich wünsch’ Ihnen eine scheene, gute Nacht,” saluted, and as he left, closed the door of the compartment after him.

A couple of minutes later the door creaked open. Esti thought that the guard had come back to chatter on, to fraternize, Slav fashion, in the hope of a tip, because life was hard, the children many, and so on. There wasn’t a word spoken in the corridor. It was as if the door had opened itself with the motion of the train. From where he was sitting he could see no one. This must have lasted ten or fifteen — very long — seconds.

Then a voice could be heard breathing, “Go in, dear. In you go.” It was the woman. They were back.

Minutes went by. Not another sound, no movement. Then the girl stepped in.

After her — on her heels — her mother. She shut the door, sat down by the window. Opposite Esti.

The girl didn’t sit down. She just stood there, moodily, obstinately, tensely. But those are just words, tentative words, an attempt somehow to appreciate her resolute petulance. She looked a little flushed, too, as if she’d taken a hot bath or had rouged her face a little — it was still very pale. Esti looked questioningly at the mother, as if to ask where they could have been. The mother’s face was unchanging and negative.

The girl — like lightning, like the snapping of a spring — knelt on the seat in the opposite corner, by the corridor window, face to the wall, turning her back on the other two. She knelt and didn’t move. Knelt rigidly. Rigidly and wilfully. Her neck muscles were tensed. Her back was as flat as an ironing board. Her long arms, her long rachitic arms, dangled. She was showing her long, rachitic legs — left uncovered by the short white stockings — her skinny legs and the almost unworn soles of her patent leather shoes. There was something comical about it all. It was like when someone’s made to “be a statue” in a game of forfeits and the company can do what they like by way of teasing the person concerned. Only there was something very serious and frightening in her immobility and her pose.

So what was all this about? Esti again gave the mother a questioning look. This time a couple of words were on his lips, he meant to implore her, to say that the time had come for her at last to explain things to him, because it was becoming a little unbearable. She, however, avoided his eye. Esti choked back his words.

He was no longer surprised at the girl. What surprised him was that the woman wasn’t surprised at her. She just sat there, staring at nothing. Clearly, she was used to her. Had she seen such things before, and stranger too? Clearly, she could have acted no differently. She made nothing of it. And that was the most natural thing.

The train clattered on. Esti took out his pocket watch every five minutes. Half past one. Two o’clock. The girl still didn’t tire. They were approaching Zagreb.

Now the mother got up and, like one acting against her principles and better judgment, went to the girl. Once more she was warmhearted, as she had been at the start of the journey. She knelt down beside her, put her face to hers, and began to speak. She spoke quietly, nicely, sensibly, cheek to cheek, spoke into her face, her ears, her eyes, her forehead, her whole body, talked and talked without tiring, with a constant flow and impetus, and it was all incomprehensible, as incomprehensible as the girl’s whispering had been before, and incomprehensible too that one could find so much to say: what old words, pieces of advice, exhortations, what banalities she must have been repeating — previously painful but now no longer felt, known by heart, deadly dull — banalities which she had obviously used thousands and thousands of times before in vain, and which had long since been gathering dust in a lumber room, unused.

The part of the heroine in a five-act tragedy can’t be so long, nor can a single prayer, not even the whole rosary, that a believer mumbles to his unknown, unseen god. The girl took no notice whatever. She wasn’t disposed to budge from the spot.

Thereupon the mother grasped the girl’s neck, pulled her hard to her, with great force lifted her into the air, and sat her at her side.

She stroked her hair. She dabbed her forehead with a cologne-scented handkerchief. She smiled at her too, once, just once, with a smile, a wooden, impersonal smile which must have been the remains, the wreckage of that smile with which long ago she must have smiled down at that girl when she was still in swaddling clothes, gurgling in the cradle, shaking her rattle. It was a wan smile, almost an unseeing smile. But like a mirror that has lost its silvering, it still reflected what that girl must have meant to her back then.

She was holding a silver spoon in her hand. She filled it with an almost colorless liquid which Esti — who was the son of a pharmacist — recognized from its heavy, volatile scent as paraldehyde. She meant to administer this to her daughter, and that was why she had smiled. “Now, dear, you have a nice, quiet sleep,” she said, and put the spoon to the girl’s lips. The girl gulped the medication. “Go to sleep, dear, have a nice sleep.”

They arrived in Zagreb.

The sleepy life of the train came to. There was shunting, whistling. The heated wheels were tapped with hammers, and the sound wafted musically through the nighttime station. The engine took on water, and a second engine was attached so that two could pull the carriages to the great height of the Karszt mountains. The friendly Croat guard appeared again with his lamp. Just a few passengers got on. They were not disturbed.

The woman gave the girl a sweater, pulled her skirt down to her knees, and retied — more neatly — her strawberry-colored bow. She dressed her for the night rather than undressing her. She spread a soft, warm, yellow blanket over her legs. The girl closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, evenly.

The woman too now prepared to rest. She tied a light black veil over her ash-blonde hair.

When they left Zagreb she looked at the lamp. Esti took the hint. He got up and closed the shade round the glass globe.

Eyes open, hands in her lap, the woman waited for sleep. The scenes that she had gone through couldn’t have excited her excessively because she soon fell asleep. She gave one sigh and was asleep. Her eyelids closed heavily. She must have been tired, deathly tired. Her face was motionless. She slept without breathing. The girl’s deep, even breathing became quieter too. It could no longer be heard.

There was silence in the compartment, complete silence. The gas lamp gave out a green misty light, the sort of opal-milky twilight that one sees in an aquarium or in underwater pictures.

Esti began once more to experience that sense of relief that he’d had when the two were away. This too was real solitude. His traveling companions — heads pressed against the back of the seat — sat there torpid and unconscious. While the train hurtled in one direction their spirits wandered elsewhere, who could say on what journeys, who could say on what rails. His soul wandered around those two souls, glancing now at the mother, now at the girl. What sufferings, what passions must tear at them. Poor things, he thought.

Coughing, panting heavily, with ever-increasing effort, the two engines set about the ascent into the barren rocks. Now they were in the mountains. This was an alien world. Dark forests murmured up and up, on the heights, with their impenetrable mysteries. Waterfalls splashed here and there, mountain streams and torrents, sometimes startlingly close to his window. Lights burned on hilltops. The single Cyclops eye of a forge glowed blood-red. Then came the mirror gleam of a river. Dark gray, ice-cold water swirled this way and that, stumbling from rock to rock. It followed the train a long way. It trotted after the train, racing it, until it tired. The air was suddenly cooler.

Esti was cold. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stared into the romance of the night.

Now strange little stations appeared from the darkness, bathed in yellow lamplight, with the deserted seats and table of a closed waiting room, a kitchen garden with lettuces and cabbages, grassy banks, the stationmaster’s wife’s cherished petunias and geraniums. Glass globes bulged on sticks in the garden. A black cat sprang across the path in a sudden ray of light. Even at that late hour the stationmaster saluted, raising a gloved hand to his hat. At his feet his knowing dog pricked up its ears faithfully. A summerhouse sped toward them out of the gloom, the chatter of sunlit family tea parties long silenced, and, quite out of place, a convolvulus quivered among the branches of wild vine, frightened to death, blackened by night, dark blue with terror. These things, those people and animals, however, at which Esti was now looking — like a person who throws off the blankets and talks in his sleep — exposed themselves to him almost immodestly; they allowed a good-for-nothing young poet like him to steal their lives, until then so jealously guarded, so carefully concealed, and to take them with him forever.

Since setting out on that “first Italian journey” of his, he hadn’t slept a wink in more than two days. The many experiences had taken their toll. His ears were burning, his spine aching. He shut his eyes to rest a little.

As he dozed, drifting between sleep and waking, he heard a quiet rustle of clothes. Someone was standing beside him, so close that a hand was poised above his. It was the girl. Esti moved. At that she crept back to her place.

That girl wasn’t asleep. She hadn’t woken just now, but long before. After Zagreb, she hadn’t gone to sleep under the drug but had deceived both him and her mother. She was waiting for something, meaning to do something. At the moment she was lying there, head back and breathing deeply, evenly. Pretending to be asleep, as before. Esti watched her through half-closed eyes. Her eyes weren’t completely shut. She was likewise watching him through half-closed eyes. Esti opened his eyes. The girl did the same.

She giggled at him. She giggled in so strange a way that Esti all but shivered. She was sitting cross-legged. Her lace-edged underskirt dangled, showing her knees and thighs, a bare part of her spindly thighs. Again she giggled. Giggled with a foolish, unmistakable flirtatiousness.

Oh, this was frightful. This girl had fallen for him. This ghastly, hideous chit of a girl had fallen for him. Those legs, those eyes, that mouth too had fallen for him, that dreadful mouth. She wanted to dance with him, with him, at that obscene children’s ball, with her hair ribbon, the strawberry-colored bow, that little dress, that little specter at the ball. Oh, this was frightful.

What could be done about it? He didn’t want to make a scene. That was what he dreaded most of all. He could have woken the woman sleeping opposite. But he felt sorry for her.

Perspiration broke out on his forehead.

His tactics were partly intended to restrain the girl, partly to trick her into action and discover her intentions. Therefore he showed at regular intervals that he wasn’t asleep by coughing or scratching his ear, but he also simulated sleep for equally regular periods because he wanted to find out what the girl’s intentions actually were. These two ploys he alternated, always being very careful that the one went on no longer than the other.

The contest went on for a long time. Meanwhile the train raced on toward its destination. Sometimes it seemed that it was held up at a station but then rattled on, sometimes it seemed to rumble on and on but then would loiter in a station, and the strangely watchful voices of linesmen would be heard and machinery would crunch over the track bed toward the coal store. Were they going backwards or forwards? Had half an hour gone by? Or only half a minute? The strands of time and space were becoming tangled in his head.

This pretense was extremely tiring. Esti would have liked to escape from the trap, reach Fiume, be at home in Sárszeg, in the bedroom where his siblings were sleeping to the ticking of the wall-clock, in his old bed. But he dared not sleep, nor did he mean to. He clenched his teeth and struggled on. If he became a little more sleepy she would resort to all sorts of tricks. He frightened himself most of all with the idea that while he was asleep, that creature would crawl toward him and kiss him with her cold mouth — nothing could be more revolting and terrible.

And so at about three o’clock, Esti, constantly dwelling on these nightmarish thoughts and on his guard as to what to do — whether he should show that he was awake or pretend to be asleep — tried to open his eyes, tried to wake up, but couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe. There was something on his mouth. Some cold foulness, some heavy, soggy bath mat, lying on his mouth, sucking at him, expanding into him, growing fat on him, becoming rigid, like a leech, wouldn’t let go of him. Wouldn’t let him breathe.

He moaned in pain, writhed this way and that, waved his arms about for a long time. Then there burst from his throat a cry. “No,” he croaked, “oh.”

The woman leapt to her feet. Didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know what had happened. Couldn’t see a thing. It was completely dark in the compartment. Someone had put out the gas lamp. Thick smoke was billowing in through the window. Again, a cry for help. She thought that there’d been an accident.

When she had quickly lit the lamp, there stood her daughter facing Esti. She was holding her index finger mischievously to her lips, begging him to hush, he must keep quiet about it. Esti was standing facing the girl, in a fury, trembling from head to foot, deathly pale. He was wiping his mouth and spitting into his handkerchief.

“Oh,” said the woman dully, “I’m so sorry. But surely you can see …” That was all that she said. And she said it as if apologizing for her dog, which had licked a traveling companion’s hand. She was infinitely humiliated.

Then without looking at Esti she turned to her daughter.

“Edit!” she exclaimed, “Edit, Edit,” several times, one after another, perhaps just so as to hear her name. She pulled the girl this way and that. It seemed that her amazing poise had deserted her for a moment. That troubled her at once. She embraced her daughter, began to kiss her. Kissed her frantically, anywhere she could, even on her lips.

Esti, who had not yet recovered from the horror of the first kiss and was so disgusted by it that he could have vomited, watched this scene and tried to get his breath.

He could sense the enigma of the kiss. When people are helpless with despair and desire, and speech is no longer of use, the only means of making contact is by the mingling of their breath. They try in this way to enter into one another, into the depths where perhaps they will find the meaning and the explanation of everything.

The kiss is a great enigma. He had not been aware of it before. He had only known affection. Only adventure. He was still pure at heart, like most boys of eighteen. That had been his first kiss. He had received his first real kiss from that girl.

Edit was crouching at her mother’s side. Now she shrugged her shoulders. Every ten seconds — every ten seconds precisely — she raised her left shoulder almost imperceptibly. She wasn’t being defiant. She didn’t speak either to her mother or to Esti. She was making signs. To whom or to what she was making those signs no one knew, not even she herself. Only perhaps He knew, who created the world to His glory and set man therein.

The woman, who must have been overcome with remorse at forgetting herself, was clinging to both her daughter’s hands. By that she was showing that she was with her, now and always.

They were silent. All three were silent. Silent for a long time.

Suddenly the woman spoke. “Dawn’s coming,” she said to no one in particular. “It’ll soon be light.” Why was that so dizzily solemn? Because it meant, “Dawn isn’t coming, it never will.”

Esti ran out into the corridor. He had to go quickly. Scarcely was he out than he burst into tears. Tears streamed down his face.

But dawn was coming, it really was. A pale strip of light had appeared in the east.

He thought over what had happened. What had happened was tragic and interesting. It even flattered his pride a tiny bit that he had gone from the school bench — by some unforeseen process — straight into the darkest center of life. He’d learned more from this than he had from any book.

The year before he’d had other struggles. He’d maintained in the literary circle that one of his poems was a ballad. The teacher in charge had opened the matter to debate, and after the opinions of the members had been heard had decided that the poem in question wasn’t a ballad but a romance. As a result Esti “immediately drew a conclusion.” He’d resigned as secretary, with which responsibility his fellow members had clothed him.

How that had hurt him at the time! Now he could see that it wasn’t so important. What mattered wasn’t ballads and romances. Life was what mattered, only that. That kiss too had come from the richness of life and had enriched him. He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it, not even his brother, because everyone would laugh at him. But in his own eyes he wasn’t ashamed.

“Homo sum,”—he quoted Terence—“humani nihil a me alienum puto,” and thought back with a shudder to that shivering kiss. Perhaps his pleasure in it could have been full if he were a little more daring and could surrender himself completely, because sensual pleasure — he guessed — cannot be far from disgust. Nor should that be a cause for shame. Epicurus non erubescens omnes voluptates nominatim persequitur. Now who had said that? It had been somewhere in the middle of the grammar, on a certain page, at the top, a little to the left, an example of the use of the participium praesens with a negative particle. One must not be ashamed of anything. Our fate is stars and rubbish.

Now other people were standing around him, early risers, with mustache trimmers and traveling soap. Watching the sunrise. They pulled down the windows and drew into themselves the dawn air. Esti followed their example.

The lamps were extinguished. The train rumbled on, fleeing night and nightmares, toward the daylight. The first ray gilded a hilltop with magical speed. On it stood a little church with a wooden tower, awaiting the faithful. It stood so high that his imagination, by the time he reached it, was exhausted, collapsing and giving up the ghost right at the door of the church, but down below was a green valley at the bottom of a fearsome ravine so deep that his imagination fell headlong into it and was killed outright on a rock. It was a barren, picturesque landscape. Stone walls stretched along the hillsides, ramparts with which the local people defended their produce, their potatoes and oats, against the wrath of the elements. Here one had to fight a bitter battle against nature. Howling gales tore up trees, roots and all, flattened out furrows and flung seed into the air. In those parts even eagles were afraid. In those parts even cows looked interesting, they were so thin and melancholy. In winter, snow fell and covered everything. Packs of wolves plodded slowly through the whiteness, their tails shaggy. Guzlica and wailing songs were heard in huts. This was where he would have liked to live. He imagined getting of the train at once, settling down in this stony hell, becoming a forester, or rather a quarryman, marrying an apple-faced Croat girl with a black headscarf, white skirt, and black apron, then growing old without ever sending word of himself and being buried anonymously in the valley. But he also imagined himself owner of those hills and forests, rich, powerful, known and admired by all, greater perhaps than a king. He imagined all sorts of things. He played with life, for it was still before him.

At six o’clock an army doctor came on board — or as Esti later boasted to his brother, “a high-ranking regimental doctor.” He came without luggage, fresh, having slept. The gold stars sparkled cheerfully on his velvet collar. He lived in the region and was making for Fiume to bathe.

He was a very cultured man and widely traveled. He took honey-sweet snuf from a slender, colored snuffbox. He grew his manicured nails long and shaped to the pads of his fingers. He had often seen the sea, too.

Esti beset him with the most foolish questions, mostly to do with the sea. The doctor dealt with these as best he could. Sometimes at length, sometimes only briefly, with a yes or a no.

At half past six, at Plase, he pointed out that the gulf of Buccari would soon be in sight. The quivering of branches indicated that the sea wasn’t far away. There was a tang of salt in the air.

The sea could be there at any moment. But it still wasn’t. Esti believed by that time that the doctor was either mistaken or joking, it would never come, didn’t want to show itself to him. He walked up and down as if to speed up the racing train. In his agitation he composed a dithyramb, celebratory lines with which to greet the sea. His words slowly froze on his tongue. The sea was late in arriving.

Finally they were standing in line in the carriage. Old civil servants, a honeymoon couple, women and children, even nursemaids with infants in their arms, even sick people, consumptives, incurables, traveling in search of treatment, all were standing side by side and behind one another, craning their necks so as to welcome the sea when the time came with uplifted hearts and a outburst of happy sighs. The sea had a full house. But nevertheless it didn’t appear. Like a prima donna it made itself wanted, aroused curiosity. It needed a crescendo, intensification, scenery even more impressive.

The two engines, coupled one before the other, climbed higher and higher up the steep mountain track. Now they too were becoming impatient, thirsty for the liberating, redeeming water. They increased their speed and hurled themselves toward it. So ardent was their desire that perhaps they didn’t care that they might slip and crash headlong down onto the limestone and be smashed to bits. Their wheels turned with such eye-baffling rapidity that they almost looked stationary. They rushed into tunnel after tunnel. First they gave terrifying whistles, then plunged between the streaming, black cliffs, rattled and snorted, and when they emerged gave shrieks of inquiry. They were looking for the sea, but still hadn’t found it. Their pistons gleamed, pumping on the oily bearings. Inexhaustibly they raced on. Again they thundered into a tunnel. Esti had by now abandoned all hope. As the train curved out of the tunnel, however, the army doctor stretched his index finger with its carnelian ring to the sunlight and said:

“There it is.”

Where was it? There below him, there it really was, the sea, the sea itself, smooth and blue as he had seen it on that wall map in primary school. Just one more point, the bay of Buccari, the Quarnero strip. He gaped at it, mouth wide open. But before he could admire it properly it had vanished. The sea was playing hide and seek with him.

Then it spread out before him, for a long time, in its calm majesty.

He had not imagined it any lovelier or bigger. It was lovelier and bigger than he had ever imagined. A smooth, blue infinity, and sailing ships on it leaning sideways, like the wings of butterflies, parched butterflies that had alighted on the mirror of the water and were drinking from it. From a distance it was a pure panorama, a picture in a book, silent, almost motionless. Not even the hiss of the waves reached him. Nor could their ripples be seen. The ships themselves moved no more quickly than that toy boat of years gone by which he had pushed around in the bath as a child. And yet it was festive, it was a giant, alone in the ancestral glory of vasty ages.

Then there burst forth within him that poem on which he had been working earlier, that dithyramb which he had conceived in the anguished hours of the night, and the shouts of Xenophon’s men, the scattered army of the Anabasis, that starving, homesick ten thousand, could have been no louder for all their ten thousand throats, than he himself: Thalatta, thalatta, immutable, eternal one, thou art whole in the cathedral of mountain ranges, among the church pillars of peaks, thou the holy water of earth in the stoop carved out of the rocks, baptismal font of all greatness that has ever lived in this world, thou milk of mother earth. Suckle me, redeem me, keep evil spirits far from me. Make me what I was born to be. He immersed himself in the smell of the sea, washed himself first in its breath. He held out his arms to be nearer to it.

Later the Scoglio di San Marco loomed into view, the ancient, ruined pirate stronghold. After the crescendo, a decrescendo followed. The train was descending the stepped slope among the crags. The first Italian house came into view. It wasn’t as neat as a house in Hungary, nor as comfortable and clean. It was slim and airily graceful. Pieces of colored cloth and shirts hung from windows with the honest grime of life which here wasn’t concealed. Red, white, and green flags flapped in the wind on tall poles, triumphantly announcing the Hungarian seaport. He had to fetch his luggage.

Mother and daughter were still there together. He was almost horrified — he’d forgotten about them in the meantime. Hadn’t given them a thought for hours. This forgetfulness brought home to him how much together those two had been, and would forever be. Now he realized the meaning of fate.

They too were getting ready. The mother had put a broad-brimmed hat on the girl’s head, and slipped the elastic band under her bony chin. She herself was now wearing a hat. A nest-shaped straw hat. There were two white roses on it. Esti helped her get her cases down.

It was almost time to say good-bye. He’d decided, word for word, what he meant to say to her: “Madam, I have an inexpressible respect and deep sympathy for you. Right at the very first moment I felt a remarkable warmth toward you. I noticed on your forehead a sign, such pain as I had never before seen. Near Zagreb you tied up your hair, your ash-blonde hair, in a light black veil. At dawn, when I ran hastily — and ill-manneredly — out of the compartment, I suddenly saw the whole world blackened by that veil. You are a martyr-mother, a sainted martyr-mother, with seven daggers in your heart. I’m very sorry for you. I’m very sorry for your daughter too. She’s a strange girl. Perhaps you should dose her with potassium bromide solution, a teaspoon every evening, and bathe her in cold water. That helped me. As for the — what shall I say — the affair, I’m not offended. I was a little afraid. But now I’m not. I’ve forgotten it. The only thing that worries me is where you vanished to after midnight. I looked for you everywhere and couldn’t find you. Even now I can’t think where you could have been all that time. The idea crossed my mind, madam, that for the sake of your daughter, whom you love so, for the sake of your daughter, who doesn’t live in this world, you’d gone away with her into the realm of fantasy and with her become invisible. That’s not a satisfactory explanation, I know. But it’s a profound poetic thought. And so I’ll take the liberty of telling you. I’m going to be a writer. If once I master that difficult craft — because please believe me, one has to learn to be constantly watchful, to suffer, to understand others and oneself, to be merciless to oneself and others — well, then perhaps I’ll write about this. It’s a very difficult subject. But things like this interest me. I want to become the sort of writer who knocks at the gates of existence and attempts the impossible. Anything less than that I despise — please forgive my immodesty, because I’m nothing and nobody yet — but I do despise it, and profoundly. I’m never going to forget what happened to me here. I’ll keep it among my memories and by it express my ceaseless grief. I no longer believe in anything. But in that I do believe. Permit me now, madam, before I finally take my leave, to kiss your hand as a mark of sympathy and filial homage.” That was what he meant to say, but he didn’t. Eighteen-year-old boys can, as yet, only feel. They can’t compose speeches like that and deliver them. So he only bowed. More deeply than he’d intended. Almost to the ground. The woman was surprised. She looked at the ground, still all the time hiding her eyes, in which there must once have been life but now were only fear and everlasting anxiety. She thought, “Poor boy, poor boy. What a dreadful night you must have had. When you came into our compartment, my first thought was to send you away somehow. I could see that you were trembling. Sometimes you were a little ridiculous too. I wanted to enlighten you. Only I can’t do such a thing. Then I’d have to talk on and on, tell everyone, here on the train, the neighbors at home, people abroad and everywhere what’s happened to us. It can’t be done. So I prefer to say nothing. And then, I’ve truly become a little unfeeling toward people. At midnight, when my daughter and I left this compartment and — somewhere else — a scene was played out such as you’ve never witnessed — you can be eternally thankful — I hoped that you’d change your mind and move somewhere else in the meantime. You didn’t do that. Out of politeness you didn’t. You didn’t want to let me know that you knew more or less what you did. You behaved beautifully. You behaved as a well-brought-up young gentleman should. Thank you. You’re still a child. In fact, you could be my son. You could be my son-in-law. Yes you could, you could be my son-in-law. You see the sort of things that a mother thinks of. But you can’t be my son-in-law. Nobody can. You don’t know life yet. You don’t know what the doctors have diagnosed. The experts in Switzerland and Germany aren’t very encouraging. We’ve come away against their advice. There’s a little island near here. It’s called Sansego. Fishermen live there, simple people. They grow olives and catch sardines. They won’t notice anything. I’m taking her there to hide her away. I want to keep her with me this summer. It may be our last. Then, it seems, I’m going to have to ‘put her away’ after all. The specialists have been recommending that for years, in Hungary and abroad. There are some reliable ‘establishments.’ She’ll get a private room there, her bodily needs will be taken care of. I’ll be able to visit her as often as I like. You don’t know about this sort of thing yet. Don’t ever find out. God bless you. I believe in God. I have to believe in Him, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do my duty. Of you go, my boy. Forget the whole thing. Be happy, my boy.” So she thought. But she didn’t speak either. People who suffer don’t talk much. She merely tossed back her head, raised her ravaged face and now, for the first time, looked at Kornél Esti, and as a reward granted him a long look into her ivy-green eyes.

By this time the train had crossed a Fiume street between lowered barriers. Porters stormed the carriages. Esti picked up his own basket and deposited it in the left luggage office, as he didn’t intend, for the sake of economy, to take a room in Fiume; he would only be there until eight that evening when his ship, the Ernő Dániel, left for Venice. O navis referent in mare te novis fluctus …

Among the cabs in the square outside the station building a private carriage was waiting. Mother and daughter got into it. Esti stared after them. He watched them until they disappeared in the dreaming lines of plane trees on Viale Francesco Deák.

He too set of along that shady, sun-dappled avenue, light of heart, with his raincoat over his shoulder. Shopkeepers called out “latte, vino, frutti,” as he passed, passersby said “buon giorno” to one another. “Annibale,” shouted a mother after her son, and a market woman selling figs at a street corner scolded her little daughter, “Francesca, vergognati.” Everyone was chattering in that language, that language which is too beautiful for everyday use, that language of which he wasn’t ignorant, which he had taken to his heart in the cramming torments of schoolboy nerves. There was in the air a ceaseless din, a happy racket, a great and unrestrained street merriment. While people were alive they made a noise, for they wouldn’t be able to later.

A barrow loaded with fish was pushed along, big sea fish and crabs. Cake shops exhaled a scent of vanilla. He saw bay-trees and oysters. In front of the dangling glass bead curtain of a hairdresser’s shop stood the coif eur, splendidly accoutred like a divine actor, setting an example to his customers with a white comb stuck in his high-piled, pomaded black hair. Toilet soap: italianissimo. All was exaggeration, superlative, ecstasy.

Esti sat down on the terrace of a café. He hadn’t eaten or drunk since the previous afternoon. But more than food or drink, he was yearning at last to speak Italian to a real Italian for the first time in his life. He prepared for this with a certain amount of stage fright. Very slowly the waiter approached him, an elderly Italian with a pointed white beard.

He knew that the Budapest express had arrived, and so he addressed his guest in Hungarian, with an almost spicy accent: “Breakfast, sir?” Esti didn’t reply, waited a moment, then said, “Si, una tazza di caffé.” The waiter happily reverted to his native language: “Benis-simo, signore,” and was about to go. In his delight at having passed that test with flying colors, Esti called after him: “Camariere, portatemi anche pane, acqua fresca e giornali. Giornali italiani,” he added nonchalantly and unnecessarily. “Sissignore, subito,” replied the waiter, and hurried away with his indescribably pleasant s-es.

Esti was happy. Happy that he had been taken for something other than what he was, perhaps even for an Italian, but in any case a foreigner, a person, and that he was able to continue to play his role, escaping from the prison in which he had been confined since birth. He sipped his espresso, which the waiter poured into his glass from a large aluminum jug, devoured six croissants and four rolls, then, as if he’d been doing it all his life, buried himself in the Corriere della Sera.

While he was thus reading a voice rang out: “Pane.” A ragged, filthy street urchin was standing by his table, a four-year-old child, barefoot, and pointing most determinedly at the basket of bread. Esti gave him a roll. But the little boy didn’t go away. “Un altro,” he exclaimed again. “Che cosa?” inquired Esti. “Un altro pane,” said the child, “due,” and held up two fingers as is customary in those parts to show that he was asking for not one but two, “per la mamma,” and her too he indicated, standing a few yards away on the road as if on stage, to be seen and exert influence as in a tear-jerking farce, but even so, dignified. She was a youthful, weather-beaten mother, also barefoot, wearing a chemise but no blouse. A wretched skirt hung from her, and her hair was unkempt, but the skin of her face was that olive shade that one sees in Abruzzo. Her eyes gleamed darkly. She and her child watched, standing erect, not bending, watched what the straniero would do. Esti held out another roll to the little boy. He and his mother, his mamma, whom he must have loved so much, strolled slowly on. Neither of them thanked him for his kindness.

This, however, pleased Esti beyond words and made him feel good. “See,” he thought, “these people don’t beg, they demand. They’re an ancient free people, glorious even in penury.” He sat on at the table of life. He knew that life was his, as the bread was. “I ought to live here. This sensitivity, this sincerity, this sunlight that permeates everything, this easy-going exterior which must conceal all sorts of things, all excite me. No blood relationship can be as strong as the attraction that I feel to them. They alone will be able to cure me of my muddled sentimentality.”

When the time came to pay, a few problems cropped up, as Esti failed to understand a couple of Italian words, and the waiter, who had immediately realized from Esti’s accent that he wasn’t an Italian, began to ask, with the frankness that is permissible with the young, what his nationality was. He listed numerous possibilities—Austri-aco? Tedesco? Croato? Inglese? — and Esti just shook his head. Then the waiter inquired where he lived, from what town he came, where he was from. With a stern gesture Esti dismissed the old man, who withdrew behind a pillar not far from the table and from there continued to assess this inscrutable boy.

“Where am I from?” recited Esti to himself, intoxicated by the espresso and lack of sleep. “Where everybody’s from. The purple cavern of a mother’s womb. I too started out from there on an uncertain journey, and neither destiny nor destination are stated in the passport. A pleasure trip? I hope it will be, because I very much want to enjoy everything. Or a study trip? If only I could know all that has been known until now. Or just an affaire familale? I wouldn’t mind that either, because I adore children. So, I’m an earthworm, a man like you, my dear old Italian, good and bad alike. Above all, however, sensitive and inquisitive. Everything and everybody interests me. I love everything and everybody, every nation and every region. I’m everybody and nobody. A migrating bird, a quick-change artist, a magician, an eel that always slips through your fingers. Unfathomable and unattainable.”

He saw the sea close to from the Adamich jetty. Fruit peels, old shoes, and fishbones floated on its oil-stained surface. He was incensed at the idea of the majestic ocean being used this way, not just constantly adored. A steamship was leaving for Brazil, for Rio de Janeiro. Gulls screamed in the air, seagulls, kings of the storm.

He ought to send another card home to his anxious mother. But he put off doing that. There wouldn’t have been room on a card for all the adventures that he’d had. All the people that he’d met, all the new people and two more mothers as well. His family had grown.

He went for a swim to wash away the aching head and throbbing heart of the night, the dust of school and everything.

He undressed and sat for a long time on a rock in his bathing costume. He listened to the sound of the water: a different hiss and crackle at every moment. Then he went down to it, befriended it, caressed it. When he saw that he didn’t hurt it he slapped it in the face with both hands, with the treasonable insolence of youth, as recklessly as an infant would a Bengal tiger. He sank into it. He sprang back up spluttering and laughing aloud. He rocked to and fro on its fragile, glassy surface. He rinsed his throat with that salty mouth-wash, spat it out, for the sea is a spittoon too, the spittoon of gods and recalcitrant youth.

Then he flung his body, arms outstretched, into the pearly blue-ness, at last to be united with it. He no longer feared anything. He knew that after this no great harm could come to him. That kiss and that journey had consecrated him for something.

He swam a long way out, beyond the rope that marked the limit, where he thought that there were dangers — sharks, corpses, rusty anchors and wrecked ships — so that everything that was lovely and ugly, everything that was visible and invisible, should be his.

On he swam with the waves and the morning wind, toward where he guessed golden Venice lay in a golden mist, the land which he didn’t yet know but loved even unknown, and as his shoulders rose and rose again from the water he lifted his face passionately toward the distant Latin shore: toward Italy, the holy, the adored.

* Sárszeg was, at the time of the story, a village to the northeast of Nagyvárad, in Bihar county, eastern Hungary. The region was lost in 1920 under the treaty of Trianon, and Sárszeg is now in Romania. Here it is the pseudonym of Kosztolányi’s native Szabadka (post-Trianon, Subotica in Serbia); it is also the setting of his novel Pac-sirta (Skylark, 1924).

* Kosztolányi himself left school and traveled to Italy in 1903.

* The appointed representative of the crown in a Hungarian county, something like the English lord lieutenant.

* Now Rijeka in Croatia.

* De Amicis (1846–1908), Italian novelist allied to Manzoni in the “purification” of Italian. Il Cuore (1886) is his most popular work, much translated and titled in English An Italian Schoolboy’s Journal.

* Gyékényes is in Somogy county, southwest Hungary, near the present Croatian frontier.

* A highly esteemed French variety, introduced to Hungary in the early 20th century.