Kornel Esti

VIII

In which the journalist Pál Mogyoróssy suddenly goes mad in the coffeehouse and is then confined to the lunatic asylum.

“PÁL, PÁL,” THEY TRIED TO CALM HIM.

“Pál, be careful. Everybody’s looking at you.”

“Waiter!” Gergely, the long-established outstanding journalist, who knew of every secret scandal, clapped his hands, “Waiter! A large espresso! Pál, sit down and have an espresso.”

“Pál, sit by me,” urged Zima, who was on a German paper.

“Pál, take your hat off.”

“Pál, Pál.”

So said the journalists, all crime reporters, who, at about eleven on that delightful August evening, had dropped into the coffee-house which was their favorite nocturnal haunt.

In the middle of the group was someone who was not immediately visible. He was wearing a transparent raincoat and a brand new straw hat, and was likewise a crime reporter — Pál Mogyoróssy.

They’d settled down at the table that had been theirs for a decade. All five journalists were watching Pál with ill-concealed curiosity.

Pál took off his new straw hat. They looked at the silky blond hair, parted on one side, which covered his tiny, girlishly delicate head. When he’d hung up his splendid raincoat on the iron hook, a slim, very pleasant, gentlemanly fellow stood before them, who despite his forty years seemed almost a boy; he wouldn’t have looked out of place in short trousers. He was elegantly dressed: pea-green Burberry suit, zephyr shirt, and white silk bow tie on which gleamed a scarcely perceptible yellow stripe. It all looked brand new.

He tossed onto the marble tabletop a paper parcel, which contained another zephyr shirt and two pairs of buckskin gloves. That was all that he had with him.

He had arrived at the South station at half past one that afternoon on the express from the Balaton, and since then hadn’t even been home.

He had been taking his regular month’s summer holiday at Hévíz, where he rested, and combining the pleasant and the useful, attended to his health. He bathed in the warm, radioactive lake, on the dark mirror of which floated luxuriant, huge Indian lotuses, sprawled in the mud bath, slapping the greasy stuff on himself and especially on his left upper arm, in which he had recently had stabbing pains.

In a week his rheumatism had disappeared. With it went the headaches and the lassitude caused by keeping late hours. In his leisure he woke up. He wrote five “graphic” reports, which he sent by first-class registered mail to his editor. The weeks flew by with electric speed. But he could only hold out for three. At the start of the fourth he packed his bags, his patience exhausted, and abruptly went home.

As he got off the train and, at half past one, glimpsed the Vérmező and the Gellérthegy, an inexpressibly sweet joy filled his heart.^* A true son of the capital, he adored Budapest. The afternoon sun was shining, all was promise and happiness. Carrying his little light suitcase he went up into the Castle district, looked down from the promenade on the bastion, had his photograph taken — he had thirty prints made, so that he could hand them round to his friends and possibly get one into a picture paper — had a bite to eat in a coffeehouse, and then just strolled; the pleasant, refreshing hours slipped by until suddenly it was twilight, the beery sunlight turned rusty brown, and he wandered down from the hill beneath the cool branches, crossed into Pest, and looked up his friends at police headquarters.

“Six more espressos!” called Gergely to the waiter, who was approaching their table. “Make that seven,” he indicated with his fingers, “seven,” because at that moment Esti came into the coffee-house.

They had phoned Esti half an hour before, asking him to come at once. And had told him why.

The articles that he wrote were not about aggravated robbery, bank swindles, or arrests, but stories about himself and his fellow men, things which perhaps had not actually happened, only might — poems, novels — in short, he was a practitioner of the stricter profession of writing.

He’d never before even set foot in that coffeehouse where the crime reporters smoked little, nervous cigarettes, hanging on the phone at about two in the morning, shouting into the mouthpiece to the duty stenographers accounts of rapists, murderous servants, and monsters who had exterminated their families, spelling out their names and those of their victims, or where they dozed until first light on the worn plush sofa, yawning, cursing, and keeping watch on the endless series of the nation’s dying, so that when an aging politician or an old and distinguished writer finally had the goodness to die, they could call the night editor to have the lead columns, set weeks beforehand, framed in black and oozing with fresh consternation and tears, inserted in the paper.

He looked around with unfamiliar eye.

Esti was a tall man of powerful physique, strong in appearance but inwardly soft and gentle. His watchful blue eyes constantly reflected alarm. His gestures were limp, hesitant. In his lack of confidence he was always inclined to let his opponent have his way. His skeptical spirit was ill at ease. His sensitivity used to be of such a degree that formerly he could have burst into tears at any moment over anything, at the sight of a battered matchbox or a tired face, but over the years he had schooled this inherent shakiness of nerve, hardening it to the point of harshness and consciously harnessing it to his art like a driving force. All he wanted was to see and feel. This was the one thing that kept him alive and to some extent bound him to the fellowship of men, together with the fact that he was afraid of the ultimate requirement of death. In his home, therefore, he barricaded himself behind medical books, washed his hands in disinfectant before meals, was appalled by and attracted to the sick and the sickly, the ruined and the special, and sought the opportunity of seeing deadly diseases, perhaps in the knowledge that if he could not overcome death, at least he could look into its entrance hall, and he was in general morbidly aroused by dreadful things, dramas small and great of annihilation, of destruction slow or swift, because he hoped that nonetheless he would be able to descry something of the moment when the unknown foot tramples us and being imperceptibly drifts into non-being.

Now too this was what had brought him there.

When he heard the news on the telephone at home he slammed the earpiece onto its hook, put out the light, left the manuscripts on which he’d been working in disorderly heaps on his desk, and rushed to the journalists’ coffeehouse.

His friends were installed beneath a chandelier: its half-burnt-out bulbs drizzled onto the company an inhospitable reddish light. In the thick, pungent smoke he could scarcely make them out. Gergely extended his right hand, in which a light Media glowed in a cigar holder.

Esti shook hands with his colleagues — Gergely, who had phoned for him, Skultéty of the long, sallow face, Vitényi, whom he was meeting for the first time, Zima, the German journalist, and dear, bald Bolza, who as a joke greeted everyone with “Lo.”

He left Pál Mogyoróssy for last.

Pál, it seemed, was pleased that Esti had come. He immediately stood up and waited while he shook hands with the others, and then would not release his hand for a long time, warming it in the velvety, glycerine-softened palm which was hotter than Esti’s own. He leaned toward him slightly too, as if intending to embrace him, to lay his head on his chest.

“Esti,” said he, in a quiet, hoarse voice, “it’s really good that you’re here as well. I need you tonight,” he said with a look of gratitude. “I was waiting for you.”

That took Esti by surprise.

The two of them had never been close friends, though they had known each other since childhood. Their work and spheres of interest had called them to different areas. In all their lives, therefore, they had scarcely exchanged more than thirty or forty sentences, and those too of disjointed words such as “Hello, what’re you up to?” “Nothing much.” “Good to see you, bye.” Esti, however — only now was he aware of it — had a secret sympathy for him. It suddenly came to him that in the course of the twenty years that had gone by while their youth was fading, he had, despite himself, been observing him and had paid more attention to him than he’d thought.

Above all he had been intrigued by Pál’s boyish ways, which had preserved his exterior from apparent aging. He also liked the fact that he was an inexorable listener, who sometimes went weeks without speaking to anybody and never talked about himself. His financial problems, which were almost considered a glory in that set, he never mentioned. His suit, his shirt, his brilliantly polished finger-nails were always immaculate. He said nothing about his ancient noble family. In addition, he cultivated his shrewd professionalism to a high degree but with a certain dif dence, and though he treated people with fastidious politeness, he knew how to remain aloof. Consequently, Esti had involuntarily felt himself honored if Pál, with a barely perceptible lordly gesture, invited him to his table in a wine bar; he would sit down beside him and look at him for a couple of minutes but would soon go away, because Pál would not, on his account, forsake his obdurate, apparently enduring, silence. He would drink like a fish — wine, pálinka, whatever came his way. He used to “put away” a huge amount, and was almost constantly drunk. This, however, did not show on him. He merely became somewhat paler: a waxen mask would spread over his face which served rather to intensify his grave appearance.

All this Esti recalled so quickly and suddenly that at that moment he could scarcely have analyzed it into its component parts. Then he saw two further images, two scenes clipped long ago from films, which had not faded in his excellent memory. Once — it must have been twenty years previously — Pál had been drinking champagne in the Orfeum, in the small hours, and in the light of the arc lamps had his hand on the cellulite-flabby thigh of a yellow-skirted danseuse on whose face was a beauty spot, larger than normal, which was obviously covering some infection or wound. The other image was less significant, but still germane. A couple of years before, at a quarter to five one November afternoon, Pál had been sitting idly in the plateglass window of the big coffeehouse in the Ring Road, alone, lost in thought, holding a bamboo-framed newspaper in his hand but not reading it, while Esti, passing on the sidewalk right before him, tapped on the window student-fashion. Pál did not hear this and kept staring into space, but all the way home Esti wondered what Pál could have been thinking of.

Now Pál gestured him to his table with that grand, scarcely perceptible movement. Esti sat down. He asked what was new. But no one replied.

From then on the five reporters paid attention only to Esti. Pál was no longer the focus of their interest, as he had been the moment before, because they knew what they knew. Now they would have liked to see the surprise, which they themselves had painfully and with creepy pleasure drunk to the dregs, the horror, and the laughter spring up again on Esti’s face, as well-worn anecdotes acquire new charm if they are told to others.

Esti’s face gave nothing away. He lowered his head toward the floor, whether in embarrassment or arrogance. He picked up a newspaper from the marble table to hide behind.

From behind this he took just one glance at Pál. He was more restless than usual, and his face was a bright pink. It looked as if he had had more to drink, and stronger stuff too, than was good for him.

The espressos were brought, all seven together.

They were hot, undrinkably so. At least a hundred and forty degrees. The vapor condensed on the inner rims of the glasses in fat drops.

The reporters pushed them aside. Zima complained to the waiter for serving such things to “the press.”

Pál picked up his steaming glass, which must have burned the skin of his hand, and tossed it back to the dregs.

Esti dropped the paper. He leaned back in his seat, horrified, and stared at him. He was thinking — and the very thought was terrible — of that red-hot liquid scalding his esophagus and stomach wall.

Gergely observed the effect and glanced at Esti. Zima clasped his hands together. Vitényi and Bolza shook their heads. Skultéty, however, who had seen some strange things in his time and was almost immune to the stimulus to laugh, released a gale of laughter into his handkerchief.

Pál noticed the laughter and as a defense against it, joined in. He too laughed, abstractedly.

“Give me a cigarette,” he said.

Five cigarettes flew toward him from the five reporters. Pál lit one. He inhaled the smoke and blew it out. The others lit up too, with the exception of Gergely, who only smoked cigars. Otherwise they all lit cigarettes. Esti too.

Pál didn’t really want to perform to order. He merely said to Zima, sitting beside him:

“I’m going to have my teeth seen to as well.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He shrugged. “Well, so that they’ll be in order. You know, so that I can chew. I’ve just got to have two at the back here out. I’ve got a first-class dentist.”

He opened his mouth wide in an unsightly gape, and showed Zima, whom he scarcely knew, the back of his mouth. The gold of bridges gleamed darkly among the various saliva-bright stumps. He cautiously poked a finger toward the two which the first-class dentist would painlessly extract.

This was still not amusing. Gergely tried to provoke him into doing one or other of his better numbers.

“Fortunately Pál’s got a hearty appetite.”

“Yes,” said Pál, “I eat thirty apricots a day.”

“How many?” asked Skultéty.

“Thirty.”

“Couldn’t you manage, say, forty?”

“Not that many. Thirty.”

He launched into a wide-ranging account, for the benefit of Zima, of the importance of food, clothing, and health. And he mentioned that he had ordered four new suits.

“Let me have a cigarette,” he said.

Again the five journalists tossed cigarettes, but they paid scarcely any attention to him. In the course of the evening they had heard on numerous occasions about the teeth, the thirty apricots, the four suits, and were beginning to find it all boring. Their quick nervous systems, attuned to immediately accepting and dismissing every horror, then registering “boredom,” could find nothing to sustain them, and furthermore they were embarrassed in front of Esti for having dragged him out to no purpose and drawn a blank over Pál. And so Skultéty fished out of an inside pocket a galley proof, Pál Mo-gyoróssy’s last article, sent from Hévíz a week before, and which the editor had naturally not used. Pál had signed it with his full noble style: Pál Mogyoróssy of Upper and Lower Mogyoród.

While Pál was giving an account of his love affairs and conquests, as if holding a rapid, cut-price clearance sale of his life, Esti took the opportunity to read the article at leisure under the table.

It was a report, a straightforward, beautifully written piece of reportage. It told of how that summer by the Balaton, an unpickable lock had been invented, all the villas fitted with it, and in consequence within twenty-four hours the burglars of the region had moved to the northeastern part of the country. At the last sentence Esti could not prevent a smile.

Gergely saw that smile and, together with Skultéty, went for Pál with inquisitorial ferocity.

“Now, Pál, what’s this about the widows and orphans of journalists?”

“Oh yes,” said Pál, turning his flushed but flaccid face. “Shall we tell him as well?” And he winked at his friends who had already heard it.

“Of course, that’s what he’s come for,” and they gestured at Esti.

“Esti, you won’t breathe a word to anybody, will you?” requested Pál in a confidential tone.

“No,” replied Esti, “not a word.”

“Well,” said Pál, and looked round. “We’re all millionaires. You are, and I am. How much do you want for one of your stories? Go on,” he said, encouraging Esti with the sort of forgiving kindliness that would overlook any greed. “Five hundred? A thousand? You’ll get it.”

“Where from?” mumbled Esti, so as to get a word in edgeways.

“Where from?” repeated Pál scornfully. “Give your word of honor not to tell anyone. Otherwise the jig’s up. Other people will be doing it.”

“Go on, then,” the journalists urged him.

“Give me a cigarette first. Look,” he said, as he struck a match, “the whole thing’s simple. Not to mention, noble in purpose. Journalists’ widows … journalists’ orphans …”

“We know, we know. Just get on with it.”

“Anyway, tomorrow you and I and somebody — we’ll decide who — will go into town by car and call on all the shopkeepers in Budapest and tell them my idea, which I’ll let them have for nothing. For the widows of journalists …”

“Never mind the widows,” said the reporters.

“So we’ll tell the shopkeepers to put in their windows signs saying, Starting today, everything 25 % off. That’s all. But you haven’t got the point yet.”

“No,” replied Esti decisively.

“Wait a bit. What will be the result? The public will storm the shops like madmen, the shopkeepers will sell out and take millions, and we, from the vast profit, will contract for only 5 percent, say; just five percent. That’s not a lot. It’s reasonable. They’re sure to agree. Do you still not get it?”

“No.”

“The point is,” and now he was whispering, “the shopkeepers will go on selling their goods at the prices they did before. That’s the clever bit. At the old prices. Now do you get it?”

“I see.”

Esti was upset. He was amazed that “it” was nothing more, so routine and mechanical. The reporters too were disappointed in Pál: he’d flopped. It had been a silly business. Hats in hand, they proposed moving on.

Pál was happy to go with them because he too didn’t think this coffeehouse was suitable, and he wanted another where there were fewer people and they could talk more confidentially. He took Esti’s arm, and — forgetting his earlier plan — suddenly promised that he’d send a Lancia for him in the morning.

Outside the summer night had cooled somewhat. It was sweet and wonderful, perhaps even more enchanting than the afternoon, which had faded so quickly. Quiet and undulating, it moved this way and that, slowly, rhythmically, in its deep peace, throbbed with its great waves which, governed by the laws of the tides, rose and fell, driving each other away by turns, adumbrating beneath them vast plains and chasms. Sparks gleamed on the bridges, wreaths of fire on the Danube and Svábhegy,^* which with its points of light resembled an ocean liner setting sail. Lights flared up. Street lamps blazed as at other times, but more sharply. The roadside acacias filtered the rays of the gas lamps and cast on the asphalt a black tracery of shadows, which seemed to quiver, expanding and contracting flexibly like the mirror of the water. Budapest had become a city submerged. Wagons floated along, rocking heavily in the swell of the night, trucks turned into motorboats, sweeping noisily through the splashing foam of darkness, and the many watercraft gave wings to Pál, who swam enraptured with arms outstretched, swept along at magical speed toward his goal. He delighted in that order, that sense of purpose, that speed. And wherever the waves tossed him it was good, ecstatically exquisite, and blissful.

Esti spoke to Pál about going home, going to bed, and having a good rest. Pál seemed not even to hear him.

When they arrived outside police headquarters Esti took his leave. Pál seized his hand.

“Not going, are you?” he asked sorrowfully. “Are you leaving us?” and his eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Now? But you ought to have seen everything,” and he would not release his hand.

So Pál pulled him inside.

Esti was touched. He lived so solitary a life in Budapest that he might well have been in Madagascar or Fiji, and had never experienced such warmth of friendship. He went with him.

The company burst into the building with a great to-do. Detectives, clerks, and officials all greeted Pál, whom they had known for twenty years. Many others came and joined the shifting group, in the middle of which stood Pál clinging to Esti’s arm. Inquisitive strangers smiled sympathetically as they addressed questions to him and followed him beneath the echoing vaults. Pál was not surprised at this. He found it natural that everyone “was together” on that night, which was not like the rest, and that others too were aware of the pleasing change thanks to which epoch-making new plans flashed with unimpeded lightness in his brain. While Gergely and Skultéty were discussing with the office on separate telephones at the same time what ought to be done with the poor fellow, Esti turned his attention to something else. He observed the idyll of the night, the policemen’s rooms bathed in green light, the hard plank beds on which policemen slept, swords at their sides, on rough mattresses, men stabbed in brawls awaiting medical reports, the healthy, smart, mustached constables who, untainted among so much corruption, watched at an iron rail over vagrants picked up by police patrols, the occasional headscarved nursemaid, street girls of almost aristocratic appearance, and youthful pimps, and he thought of how Pál’s finest years had slipped by in this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief.

They were walking on the Ring Road again. Pál and Esti were in front. Pál no longer needed to take Esti’s hand or arm. He felt safe in releasing it. Esti went without it being held. He was drawn by pity. Behind their backs the five journalists were arguing loudly. Bolza, kindly and bald, was of the opinion that Pál should be put into a cab straightaway and taken home to his family. Gergely objected, saying that he could injure someone — he was a public menace. Skultéty agreed. Pál, on the other hand, obstinately insisted that he had to meet a woman at the West station at half past one, and that at half past two he had to address at least five hundred colleagues in the Erdélyi wine bar concerning his plan for the widows and orphans of journalists and the 25 percent and 5 percent with the Budapest shopkeepers. In any case, the opinion that he should be “put away” that very night brooked no contradiction.

Meanwhile they went into another coffeehouse. There they drank sweet white wine. Ten minutes later they were in another, drinking császárkörte ^* liqueurs. Another ten minutes and they were in a third, drinking red wine. Everywhere they smoked cigarettes. Everywhere they were known to the waiters, those faithful proletarian friends of the press, who migrate from one coffeehouse to another as journalists do from paper to paper. Everywhere they were objects of uncommon attention. Pál was still not content anywhere, none of these places was any good, he had to keep going on and on, driven by some religious passion from the fourth coffeehouse to the fifth. The coffeehouse is the journalist’s place of worship.

At this point Gergely and Skultéty, after a lengthy professional consultation, decided to telephone the psychiatric department of St Miklós hospital. A Dr. Wirth replied that they should bring the patient in, he was on duty and at their disposal. At the cashier stand in the coffeehouse they discussed for some time the means of doing this, because as crime reporters they wanted everything to go smoothly and tastefully.

They were in that big coffeehouse where Esti had once caught sight of Pál, deeply immersed in himself, at a quarter to five on a No vember afternoon. He and Pál now went and sat at that same table. On this occasion, however, the plateglass window had been lowered, and the night was flooding into the quiet, deserted coffeehouse as if melting into one with it. The two of them leaned their elbows on the brass rail. For a while the proprietor stood by their table, listening with furrowed brow to the poor szerkesztô úr,^* and when he was called away bowed to them more deeply than usual, in a clear expression of sympathy. Kindly, bald Bolza prepared to leave. He had three daughters and so worked day and night and was always up early. He raised his bowler hat to Pál without a word. On this occasion he did not say “see you soon.”

Vitényi and Zima went with him.

Pál dismissed them scornfully. As Gergely and Skultéty were still plotting at the cashier stand, he and Esti were left alone.

“I’m going to write,” said Pál.

“Good.”

“Novels, short stories,” he went on, and with a sort of desperate movement leaned toward Esti’s face. “I’m leaving the paper. I’m through with being a reporter. It’s beneath me.”

He looked out into the night. A cab was rumbling along the wooden roadway.

“The wheels of the cab are ‘roaring,’” said Pál. “Roaring.” He emphasized the word. “What a fine language our Hungarian is. That’s the way to write. They’re not ‘going,’ they’re ‘roaring.’”

“Roaring,” repeated Esti, and he, who weighed every word so many times, became bored with it, and brought it up again, could not deny that he too liked the word.

“But what am I to write?” Pál burst out in a faltering, plaintive voice.

“Simply anything. Whatever interests you. Whatever comes into your head.”

“Tell me, for example, is this all right? The woman comes up to my apartment. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” said Esti, who had by that time a splitting headache.

“You know, she’s got brown hair, but not black, or chestnut,” Pál pondered, “her hair’s a sort of chocolate color. Her eyes are like those little blue flowers, what are they called?”

“Violets?”

“No, no,” Pál shook his head.

“Forget-me-nots?”

“That’s right. Forget-me-nots. And she’s like fire,” he went on so wildly that he was alarming. “Her body’s warm, but I don’t like it. I sprinkle her thighs, her back, with ice-cold eau de cologne until she’s quite cool. And I put a garland of those little blue flowers on her head. She’s like a dead bride in her coffin. Then she goes away.” He thought for a moment. “How am I to put it? What shall I say when she goes?”

“What people usually say: ‘Good-bye.’”

“No,” Pál did not like that, and an idea crossed his mind, “I’ll say to her: ‘Sincere tenderness of heart.’ You can seduce any woman with that. She’ll have a feeling that she can’t resist. Do you hear? Like this: ‘Sincere tenderness of heart,’” he enunciated with a peculiar, crafty smile, staring at Esti, and his eyes were like fire. “Nod if you feel it as well. Do you feel it now?”

Esti could not feel what that woman was supposed to, but he could imagine what Pál must be feeling, and he nodded.

It was a relief for him when Gergely and Skultéty linked arms with Pál and took him into the street. Pál would not hear of a cab. He protested to his journalist friends and let go of their arms time and again. He looked for Esti, speaking across to him as Gergely and Skultéty led him along.

“Esti, I’m going to learn Italian. This very night I’m going to learn Italian, Esti.”

At the West station he had fortunately forgotten about the chocolate-haired woman. Not, however, about the Erdélyi wine bar.

There disappointment awaited him. He was expecting a seething crowd, such as he had seen at extraordinary general meetings of journalists, when a chairman was dismissed in an explosive atmosphere, but during that lull in the evening’s entertainment, between two and three in the morning, when the diners had gone and the dawn revelers had not yet appeared, the place was deserted, and just a couple of waiters were sauntering about putting knives and forks on the freshly laid tables. The colleagues had not come. No one had come. Pál looked around in dismay. He blinked. Such wretched people didn’t deserve to have anything done for them.

“Hungary,” he sighed. “Journalists’ widows, their poor little orphans,” and he ushered his friends to a table.

He ordered korhelyleves. The others wanted nothing more to eat or drink.

Pál looked at his soup, did not taste it, but stirred it for a long time before tipping into it the entire contents of the salt cellar, the paprika pot, and the jar of toothpicks. He began to eat. The toothpicks crunched between his teeth.

All three of his companions jumped up.

“This is terrible,” Skultéty was appalled, “terrible.” He looked at himself in a mirror; he had gone green, and a twitching, bitter grin trickled from his face like vinegar.

“Terrible.”

“Let’s do something,” said Esti. “This is awful.”

Pál spat the toothpicks back out into his bowl. He could not chew them.

Gergely, who was fitting a fresh light Media into his cigar holder, and Skultéty made for the telephone booth which was by the table. They did not telephone, merely lamented: Poor fellow, poor fellow.

A couple of moments later Gergely burst out of the telephone booth, his hair in disorder. He rushed straight over to Pál.

“The swine!” he shouted, beside himself with rage. “The swine!”

Pál went on sitting there, oafishly unmoved.

“Hey, Pál,” said Gergely, shaking his arm as if to wake him, “mental patients are being beaten up.”

“Where?” said Pál from the depths of his torpor, and the muscles of his face twitched.

“At St. Miklós, of course. They’ve just been on the phone. Two mental patients have been beaten up in the night.”

“It’s a scandal!” exclaimed Skultéty. “A national scandal!”

“It’s a scoop,” said Pál. “Pay the bill,” and as a soldier who hears a word of command in his sleep springs to his feet, he remembered his journalistic duty, his role as a guardian of enlightenment, at the command of humanity. “Don’t put the paper to bed yet,” he ordered. “I’ll want ten columns. And give me another cigarette.”

Esti felt that the time was ripe for him to be off. He couldn’t stand any more. He hated tricks. He was even disgusted at himself. He made his way carefully to the far side of the sidewalk and from there watched to see what would happen.

First Gergely emerged from the Erdélyi wine bar, and like the experienced, born organizer of every dreadful deed, whistled for a cab. He promised the cabby a good tip and whispered something in his ear. Next came Skultéty and behind him Pál, bareheaded. He was putting his brand-new straw hat on his silky blond hair; the vegetable fibers in it, once alive, were now just as faded, just as dead, as the skull that it covered. He got into the cab first, followed by Gergely and Skultéty. Off they went.

Esti strolled homewards along Andrássy út. He had smoked thirty cigarettes that night and drunk nine espressos, and he was suffering from nicotine and caffeine poisoning. He was panting. He stopped again and again to lean on the walls of houses, felt his pulse at the radial bone in his right arm and at his neck. His weak heart was throbbing. He felt sick. He didn’t even care how he had come to this. Together with the nasty experience he had brought away a kind of warmth, an animal warmth and affection, of which it was pleasant to think — a man’s last love. He felt richer for having been selflessly loved by mistake for a couple of hours.

He was no gloomier than at other times. There were still stars in the sky. A light breeze blew on the bridge, and in its deep bed the Danube rolled on irrevocably to the beat of continuity and passing. When he opened the door of his study, where through years of practice he could always be in readiness, he sat down mechanically at his desk, fished out a couple of sheets from the untidy heap of paper, and read them, so as to find the voice necessary to go on and put on paper the chapter of the novel which he had already drafted in his head. What he had seen and heard that night he put aside to mature, to be forgotten somewhat and then retrieved from his soul one day, when the time was right.

The cab screeched through the night.

The driver drove well in excess of the permitted speed, flat out, in hopes of a tip. At the rear of the car the little mauve lamp burned with an unnatural chemical light. In front the headlights cast a carpet of glittering rays on the dark surface of the road — the rubber tires were never to catch up with it. This carpet of rays appeared to change, sometimes seeming new at every moment, but sometimes it stood still, and it seemed that it was the old one and the same that the cab was carrying along and, as it never wore out, spreading it again and again before itself with lightning speed in its immaculate brightness.

Pál sat on the back seat, watching this play of light and entertained by it. The sensation that he was gently rising and falling at sea came again, but this time much more strongly. He kept leaning out to look at his face in the mirror of the water, but the waves were now too high and he could see nothing.

Gergely sat beside him. Skultéty was facing them on the little folding seat. They were thinking of how the two of them would deal with him. Pál, however, was quiet. He gave no more thought to the assurances by which he had been turned against the cruel psychiatrists. He licked his thin lips, fragrant with alcohol, and did not speak.

Thus he quite faded into the background on that journey. In the gloom from time to time three heads moved: his own, Gergely’s, and Skultéty’s.

They did not speak either. Gergely yawned.

The car lurched on the uneven ground, gave a mighty blast on the horn, and stopped outside the gate of St. Miklós Hospital.

There was no need to ring, the porter opened the gate at the sound of the horn.

Gergely got out, Skultéty next. Finally Pál.

He went over to the porter.

“Who’s on duty?” he asked of ciously.

“Dr. Wirth.”

Pál stood erect. The wind blew at the unfastened wings of his splendid raincoat.

When the others had joined him he said:

“Give me a cigarette.”

The flame of the lighter lit up his face. Now it was as calm and serious as ever in the past.

“What’s the time?” he asked.

“Quarter to three.”

“Right, let’s go,” said he, and set off with resolute steps, with that air of being at home that journalists have in unfamiliar places.

Gergely and Skultéty followed a yard behind him.

On the first floor a lock creaked. A gray door opened on a long, narrow corridor lit by two dim electric lamps. At the door Pál stubbed out his cigarette and glanced back at his friends, but they were hanging back. Gergely was bending down as if tying a shoelace that had come undone. So he went inside by himself.

The iron door clanged to behind him and the attendant turned the key.

Gergely and Skultéty paused reflectively outside the door for a few seconds. Then they went back down the stairs and got into the cab, which had waited for them.

They both had a sense of death, the common fate of us all, which, in whatever form it comes, is equally final and sooner or later gets the better of us. Gergely, who had witnessed many a shooting and hanging, coughed and muttered something that sounded like a curse. Skultéty had been laughing out loud and braying so much all evening that his ribs ached. They did not speak. Gergely sat on the padded seat, Skultéty on the folding seat. The place where Pál had sat remained vacant. There was an air of mourning in the car.

Pál Mogyoróssy, staff reporter on the Közlöny, strode forth down the corridor, which was so long, so very long, that it seemed scarcely to end. A long way off, some hundred yards away, beneath the second electric light, a quite wretched little figure was waiting for him, puny, anemic, much smaller and weaker than Pál. Its ears were slightly projecting. A stethoscope peeped from its white coat. This was Dr. Wirth.

When Pál reached the doctor he introduced himself, as usual on such occasions, both personally and on behalf of his paper, modestly, with dignity, as the representative of the public at large.

“I’ve come for information,” said Pál. “We’ve been told, my dear doctor …” and he dried up.

Wirth came to his aid:

“What?”

“That,” said Pál, “two mental patients have been beaten up here tonight.”

“Here?” said Wirth, glancing at the floor. “No, indeed. Patients aren’t beaten up here. And in any case, we have no mental patients, only sufferers from nervous disorders, who are rather tired and are resting.”

“But we have definite information, doctor.”

“No, szerkestô úr,^* it’ll be a mistake,” and he patted Pál on the shoulder with an almost impudent smile.

The doctor took Pál by the arm, and they walked for a long time up and down the long, long corridor. On both sides were the wards, large open rooms lit by blue electric lamps like the taillight of the car. The patients, those who could, were sleeping, toying in their dreams with the trivia of their lives, putting them together and taking them apart, like other people. Many, however, could not sleep. One fat, unshaven man, who was in the third phase of encephalo-malacia, was sitting up in bed, his head hanging before him, pressing his blue striped hospital gown to his face.

Pál inquired about their diagnoses and prospects of treatment, and Wirth chatted about politics and the police, about certain journalists of their mutual acquaintance too, and spoke with almost paternal good humor of syphilis. It was a friendly exchange of views, uninhibited and relaxed. Then without any transition the doctor asked for his pocket knife, which Pál actually handed over, and the doctor, without so much as thanking him for it, slipped it into the pocket of his white coat beside his stethoscope. He had by that time made a preliminary diagnosis. Detailed examination he postponed to the morning; it was getting late.

Pál was still talking, chattering of this and that. Suddenly he stopped. It seemed to him that something was not quite right. A vague and superficial sense of uncertainty had come over him. It was just the sort of misgiving that comes to us all when we have been in the street for hours and feel uncomfortable because one strap of our suspenders, which normally press evenly on our collarbones, has slipped down. He had remembered Gergely and Skultéty.

By then, however, Wirth had led Pál into a separate little room, the quietness and elegance of which he could not praise, as it was disagreeable, repugnant, and shabby, furnished with only a table covered by waxed cloth, a chair, a bed, a nightstand, and a radiator.

The doctor sat down on the bed. He appealed to Pál to undress and get some sleep, and next day he would be able to go for a walk in the lovely garden.

Pál wanted to protest in the name of the press against this infringement of his personal liberty, but couldn’t hear his own voice. He could only hear his fury. His press cards. He, who had always been inside the cordon, at every suicide, every demonstration, every burial, inside the cordon. It was he, he.

Wirth disappeared. Pál ran after him into the corridor, but he was not there either. He could only see an attendant, not the one who had opened the door but another, whom he did not recognize.

He went back into the room. He looked through the barred window into the garden; on the weed-ridden lawn, surrounded by sumac trees, flowers of hemlock swayed, white, like scraps of writing paper. The electric light was still on, but even without it he could see. The sun, precise timepiece of the universe, in its relentless course was making its presence known below the horizon and whitening the sky. Dawn was breaking.

Pál leaned on his elbows on the shoddy waxed cloth of the table. And he thought of Esti, Esti, who after correcting his dawn work, had pressed the switch on his electric lamp and was now standing in his bedroom in just his shirt, undressing, but could not sleep because he too was thinking of Pál.

Pál pondered what he was to do. For the present, however, nothing came to mind.

He just sat and wept.

* Vérmezô, “Field of Blood,” is an open space of grass and trees adjoining the South station, to the west of Buda castle; it takes its name from its former use as a place of public executions. Gellérthegy is a hill on the Buda side of the Danube, commemorating the archbishop who led the conversion of the ancient Magyars to Chrisitanity.

* A hill in Buda, to the north of Gellérthegy.

* A type of pear, “emperor pear.”

* “Mr. Editor,” an honorific for a “gentleman of the press.”

* As before. Pál addresses the doctor as fôorvos, “principal doctor,” in similar style.