“Ghee-gaw!” comes from the other world Lord Álmos-Dreamer’s cry, and Eveline, humbling herself, would obediently follow in his wake to the land of dreams.
Spring was on the way, the Tisza region full of witching vapors and miasmic exhalations. Sir Álmos-Dreamer spent a moonlit night in the boggy fen, with a clear view of the ladder stretching up on which souls like tiny dust motes climbed toward milky heaven. The spring night sparkled miraculously above the toady clods of earth. Fogs, mists, and plumes of fume floated up toward the heights like bygone beauties’ curves on dallying display for the moonbeam’s benefit. Now the water snake sheds its old skin, fish and lizards borrow their brightness from the moon and ancient, mute waterfowl vow eternal silence. The earth below splits open like a bivalve, and mysterious night betroths the seedling never yet seen by human eyes.
The time was here for Sir Ákos Álmos-Dreamer’s tragic demise.
Swamp fever, on the Tisza island, stole snakelike into his indestructible system, slithered down his throat and through his eyes like poison fumes, terminally deranging an already unbalanced psyche. His case baffled doctors: the so-called malaria, like most other Indian diseases, usually treated with quinine, took the form of delirium in Mr. Ákos Álmos-Dreamer. His actions, at least, indicate that the tragic gentleman went mad in his insular solitude.
One May night, after prolonged staring at a rufous moon that appeared to squat on the marsh’s edge, coming down on the furze thickets like visiting royalty among rustic wenches, the thought ripened: he must end his tortured existence. But first…
With the stealth of the insane he approached Eveline’s bedroom. That merciless lady always bolted the oaken door for the night, although her husband had quoted the Bible to her to prove she had no right to do so. Eveline looked away and shrugged. Who cares about the Bible?
But on this night, as if she had had a premonition (the way her little finger could sense changes in the weather), this extraordinary woman left the door ajar, and woke from a deep slumber to a heavy hand on the nape of her neck, a trembling, joyously quivering palm cleaving to the mound, not unlike the mons veneris, found in buxom women below their neck vertebrae and from where miraculous cables and telegraph wires signal the nuptial moment. An ancient minstrel song already calls the nape the most desirable and most vulnerable bastion of that splendid castle known as the female physique. Eveline had a neck equally suited to the necklace and the noose. Beauteous feminine necks, as self-possessed as if they led their own swanlike existence, and seemingly without the brain’s overlordship, execute their fairylike motions; they see and hear, speak, rise and humbly, submissively bend — such necks have been known to send the brains of many a man into his bootlegs.
Eveline suffered the caresses only until her dream had flown out the window. When the bird was gone, she hissed a question:
“Why did you wake me?”
“Why indeed…” mused Mr. Álmos-Dreamer. “Because I want to say good-bye to you, my dear wife, my darling.”
“Is that why you woke me?”
Mr. Álmos-Dreamer sadly nodded like a wanderer stranded in the night:
“That’s right, my child. I shall be leaving life in an hour. Like a runaway cat, the movements of my hands and feet are abandoning me as I descend on slippery steps down to the icehouse and the door slams behind. I want this last hour of my life to be happy. Not to think, not to dread, not to quake, not to recoil from invisible blows…For one hour, eyes open or closed: to sense and see only you, oh ecstasy, whose chalice I never drank from.”
Eveline angrily knit her brows — then cast a sly glance from under those eyebrows as if weighing whether to believe the promise. Would he deceive her like a wandering organ-grinder, who plays sad songs under the window, making your heart ache and cry, waking the sad ghosts of the house, while laughing to himself as he licks the last drop of wine from his mustache?
Eveline was a bold and businesslike lady. She had never done anything that she later regretted. She was concerned that all this might be a trick.
“Word of honor?” she asked, mostly to stall for time, to better appraise the situation.
Mr. Álmos-Dreamer nodded without emotion, a most peculiar nod, like a one-legged man confronting his lost limb preserved in spirits.
“Swear on the cross,” murmured Eveline, having noted nothing suspicious in Mr. Álmos-Dreamer’s behavior.
Ákos Álmos-Dreamer dropped to one knee. Eveline’s hand reached for the heavy silver crucifix that had for centuries served to pacify and silence the dying curses of forebears. The crucifix could have passed for a weapon, at a pinch. Rightly swung, the hefty silver object indeed could have promoted one’s passage to the other world.
Álmos-Dreamer took the crucifix in hand and softly swore a clearly audible oath in the vaulted room:
“I, Ákos Álmos-Dreamer, swear by the Almighty and by the seven wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ that after an hour’s passage I shall no longer be among the living but will lie stretched out dead, never to return from the nether world.”
Eveline nodded her assent.
She took one glance at the glass-encased clockworks where at the stroke of midnight the twelve apostles would pass in single file.
It was a clock face worn out by all the expectant, desperate, fatal glances cast by eyes that had long ago turned into varicolored pebbles along the Upper Tisza. The Roman numerals had faded, the hands were bent like a drooping mustache, the circumambulant pilgrims’ robes tattered. But the tireless mechanism labored on, it still had so much left to accomplish here on earth: such as marking the hour of someone’s death.
“When the apostles appear, your time’s up,” she murmured and blew out the candle.
And what happened to Eveline after she had taught the first Álmos-Dreamer how to die of joy and grief, for love of a woman? For, ever since then, curious little females have been asking Álmos-Dreamers, and with good cause: “Could you do something grand for me? Would you die for me?”
Nine months later Eveline gave birth to a wistful, moody little boychild, whom she would take many a time to his father’s green sepulchral mound, located, in deference to the deceased’s wishes, like Lensky’s grave, in a small copse of white birches. On the bookshelf, to this day you may find Onegin (in French), with the page folded at the appropriate place.
At his christening the child was given the names Andor Zoltán, the latter fashionable at the time in Hungary, favored by widowed mothers who followed the example of the poet Peto´´fi’s young widow, née Countess Szendrey. Widows who do not stay faithful to their husband’s memory sense their kinship from afar, like nomadic Gypsies who leave behind intertwined straws or some other sign of their passage across the countryside; women, by donning a certain ball gown or particular chapot, let each other know that they don’t mind bestowing their favors upon newcomers. This is a strange fact, but true. In bygone days village dames read through lists of guests at soirées, participants at masked balls, and were able to tell at a long distance whom their lady acquaintance meant to please with her carnival outfit. Via the pages of Conversation Pieces and Ladies’ Courier, Eveline kept in close touch with events at the capital. Even from her rustic hermitage she could participate in the eventful life of Pest. The mail coach delivered lengthy epistles. From fashion magazines she could determine which ladies were the latest trendsetters, what hat and hair styles were the current vogue. For the same reason she wore her hair short like Peto´´fi’s widow, mused about love by her escritoire, kept a romantic diary in which she lamented her unhappiness and never bothered to recall any of her former suitors, while she more than once invited to her country estate Kálmán Lisznyai, the fashionable poet of the day, and often looked out of the window to check whether the poet who affected the szu´´r (an ornamentally embroidered shepherd’s cloak) had at last arrived. When she died at fifty of consumption, the Capital Herald carried an obituary citing her patriotism and her artistic, noble soul, ever true to the black veil and to her tragically deceased husband.