Good fortune and wealth did their best to console him. After Helen’s death all kinds of relatives came to stay at the townhouse, but none of them won Libinyei’s approval. Springtime visits to spas, quack remedies, barbers and doctors all failed to rejuvenate him. Soon enough he followed Helen, Lotti, and Maszkerádi into the great beyond. Malvina became the wealthiest heiress in Budapest: somber, frosty, intrepid, and miserable.
Malvina Maszkerádi was Eveline’s best and only friend, entrusted with all of the girl’s secrets, like a private diary.
A few days after the Tarot reading Miss Maszkerádi arrived at Bujdos-Hideaway.
“I sensed that you are in some kind of danger,” said the solemn girl, her eyes downcast. “I wanted to be by your side.”
Miss Maszkerádi had stayed at Bujdos before. She knew by name each dog, each horse and rooster. The migrating swallow and the stork nesting on the chimney of the servants’ quarters both greeted the melancholy maiden. The servants dared not look her in the eye, but stared after her as they would at a creature from another world.
Eveline both loved and worried about her strange friend. But her vernal insomnia immediately passed as soon as Miss Maszkerádi joined the Hideaway household. Like one preparing for the grave, Eveline related her recent experiences in the minutest detail, including Andor Álmos-Dreamer’s enigmatic demise and resurrection.
“He’s crazy, but honest. This village Don Juan’s going to be your downfall yet,” observed Miss Maszkerádi. “And what about your gambler?” she inquired. “Show me the gambler’s letters.”
Eveline shook her head.
“He’s afraid to write me. Sometimes in the morning I stand by the window and watch the mailman trudging along on the road far away. That gray old man always comes the same way, sad as autumn and just as hopeless. If he were to deliver a letter from Pest one day…But I don’t even know if I’d like to receive a letter…”
“Your gambler’s crazy, too…He thinks you’re some other-wordly creature,” Miss Maszkerádi replied scornfully. “I assume every man to be insane, and usually the events prove me right. Oh, there’s the ass who believes you are a demon, an angel of death, and who wants to escape into death when he feels he’s lost his freedom. Meanwhile another inane male will worship you like a saint or a holy icon, and expect you to perform miracles. Only I know you exactly as you really are: a scatterbrained, bored, orphaned young miss. Why, by now you should have married a first lieutenant or some young gent with a duck’s ass haircut. But you believe life is more interesting this way. Well, one fine day some maniac will snag you by the throat like a fox taking a goose.”
“Please calm down,” implored Eveline. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”
“Oh yes, with a dog…or a horse…or a wooden cross at the old Buda military cemetery over the grave of a young officer whose fiancée’d run off to work the cash register at a nightclub. Men stink. If I were to find one guy whose mouth had a pleasing aroma, maybe I’d let him kiss me. Or rather I wouldn’t wait but kiss him myself. If, God forbid, I should find a man I like, I’d pick him like a roadside poppy. If I could only live…If it were really worthwhile to be alive, I’d show you how to live life. But I’m not in good health, and I’m not old enough to enjoy being in poor health.”
“Just simmer down,” Eveline repeated. “Can’t you hear someone lurking around the house? Every night I hear him and my heart almost bursts…”
It was a spring night.
“Nah, it’s just the unusual weather we’re having,” Miss Maszkerádi replied, unmoved. “It’s all that meteoric crap — ashes and dust from burnt-out stars — the winds sweep into the atmosphere…It’s only the night, plucking an old mandolin string in the attic that’s been lying silent for years. No need to go mushroom-crazy, like some fungus that suddenly pops up, so glad to be among us.”
“But I tell you, someone goes past my window every night. I tell myself, perhaps it’s Kálmán, and my heart nearly screams out like a bird that’s caught. Perhaps it’s Álmos-Dreamer, and my tears soak the pillow…Or it’s the night watchman, so I just sigh — but the candle still burns till dawn, I simply can’t get resigned to living this way. But how else should I live?”
Sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to her friend, Miss Maszkerádi folded her arms.
“In old Russian novels people asked such questions, behaving like cardboard characters…But today it’s totally different. Novels only show you how to die. I don’t even know who my father was. One thing for sure, he never thought of me. My mother had no way of knowing, either, that I would be here some day. I came into being and grew like an icicle under the eaves. This is why I’ll never have a child. I just can’t recommend this lifestyle for you, Eveline, although I know you want me to. Well, each to her own…suit on suit, heart to heart,” mocked Miss Maszkerádi.
“Malvina, you’ll never be happy,” prophesied Eveline, speaking as if from the pages of some novel.
“I must always look within myself, for everything. I believe only in myself, and myself alone, and don’t give a damn about others’ opinions. I view each of my acts as if I were reading about it fifty years from now, in a newly found diary. Did I do something ridiculous and dumb? I ask myself each night when I close my eyes. I think over each word, each act: will I regret it, come tomorrow? I am my own judge and I judge myself as harshly as if I’d been lying in my grave these hundred years, my life a yellowed parchment diary, its end known in advance. I will not tolerate being laughed at or cheated. I want to know this very minute what I will think ten years from now about today, about today’s weather and about this night…Will I have to be ashamed of some weakness or tenderness? Is there one circumstance worth disrupting my life for, rising an hour earlier, or using more words than usual? I try to modulate my decisions and my emotions by looking ahead and seeing whether I’d regret it tomorrow. And I’m never nervous, it’s simply not worth it.
“Had I been born a man, I would have been a Talmudist, an Oriental sage, a scholar who delves into decaying millennial mysteries. Too bad, I was not admitted at the university. But if possible, I would still marry a great, gray-bearded, immensely wise rabbi or Oriental scholar. Possibly Schopenhauer…or my first teacher, Gyula Sámuel Spiegler, if that little old Jew were still alive…Oh, you won’t catch me crying on account of rival women, actresses, danseuses! The hell with the strumpets! What do I care if my husband sometimes sees them? As long as they stay away from me with their dirt.”
Eveline heard out these words of wisdom with eyes closed. All her life repelled by women of easy virtue, she still envisioned them to be like the first one she had ever seen, in her childhood in the Inner City, near her convent school. A fat, ungainly, wide-mouthed, coarsely painted towering idol of flesh that passed by with petticoats lifted, like a killer of men, cruelly smiling. The little schoolgirls had nightmares about this other-worldly monster who probably roamed the town to entice inexperienced men to her cave in the mountains where she would devour them like a dragon. Ever after, the educated, curious and clairvoyant young woman still imagined fallen women to be like that. (She was most amazed at the Pest racing turf one summer Sunday when she attended the St. Stephen’s Cup races with her lady companion, and Kálmán pointed out from afar a gentle, unimpeachably clean-cut angel, all blonde English-style curls, as one of the city’s most depraved creatures who spent her days in the company of elderly counts.)