“My other wife, Mári, laid her head on the table, as if she’d just returned exhausted from a long journey. Lord, how fat she’d grown, her belly as big as if she were expecting a child… Her face was so sad and wasted that I could not harbor any anger against her.
“‘Won’t you sit down with your wives,’ said Mishlik, who also took a chair at the table, and crossed her arms across her chest like some magistrate.
“‘What’s going on here?’ I shouted. ‘How did these poor wretches get here?’
“‘They came to see you one last time,’ Mishlik replied.
“My first impulse was to jump for the door, and Mishlik smiled quietly at my useless exertions. She had already pocketed the key.”
Pistoli paused, grabbed the wine jug, and imbibed such a draft that his gullet nearly burst. Maszkerádi could only look on goggle-eyed at the stout man’s astounding prowess.
“So what did the madwomen do? Why didn’t they claw out your eyes?” she murmured.
“They demanded their conjugal rights,” Pistoli replied, and paused, his unblinking eyes fixed on the tabletop. “You are a lady of breeding and refinement, so I shall say no more.
“But, as you can see, I survived, although they could have killed me just as easily. The three of them could have torn me apart. But they turned out to be manageable.
“I caressed them, soothed them, calmed them down. In the morning I had all three of them carted to the Nagykálló asylum. And that’s where they’ve been ever since. But each night I check under the bed before I climb in. In dark alleys I always look behind my back. To this day any sudden, loud cackle still startles me. And I hate to look the moon in the eye. For I am Pistoli, the local maniac. Do you love me?”
“Drink up,” Maszkerádi replied. “Drink so you won’t remember a thing, so you’ll forget me, this night, springtime…”
As if drawn by a ghost, she rose and set out toward the garden that sprawled, moist and lurking, around the house. She kept stopping and looking back.
Pistoli, red-faced, rolled his eyes left and right in contentment. He let Miss Maszkerádi wend her way toward the garden alone. He raised the empty pitcher to his mouth and blared laughter into it as into a horn. His fists pummeled the tabletop, he danced seated in his chair. He ruffled his hair. And Maszkerádi waited in vain, watching him from the garden. This unaccountable man refused to stand up, and go after the confused young woman.
Pistoli downed another mouthful or two of wine; then, like a whirling ghost, he ran out and, together with his Gypsies, vanished into the night.
A melancholy day dawned on the manor at Bujdos.
Miss Maszkerádi never said a word about the events of the night.
5. Our Lady’s Fountain
The wild duck quacked in the reeds.
It was springtime; day by day more of them returned to the land, more of those invisible beings from their far-flung wanderings, the ones who come again to teach the long-stemmed grass by the ditch to hum and sing, who play with insects that crawl forth from the soil, the creatures that swing on bare birch twigs and screech at the highway traveler.
It is these invisible hands that flap the white blouses women set out to dry in the meadow; they also dig quick runnels for spring freshets, squat in a ditch to teach frogs diverse cochonneries, grab ahold of the cows’ tails and flick a light fillip across the snoozing shepherd’s face under his tilted hat. They rip moss from the manor house’s eaves, ascend like so many bubbles in the ancient drainpipe’s dark bowels to emerge near the chimney, on which they plop down and sit, swinging their legs. They slap young wives on the back, pinch the rooster’s spur, feed the hounds baneful weeds to make them run around all day. They are mischievous kobolds, smoke rings, balls of air in sunlight; in a drizzle they flatten themselves under leaves, squeeze behind the bedstead, crouch on the threshold, hide in the back of the cart, tangle, like invisible bats, in the peasant’s matted hair, latch onto his wife’s chemise and tug his daughter’s pigtails. You might call them breezes that arise in the raspberry patch, or warm drops of rain beating against the windowpane so loudly that they wake the dreamer. They pick on the graybeard, press his head into the straw, and ride his neck with legs flung apart. And they chivy young men as if they were starlings.
In pouring rain or curtain-tugging sunshine life went on in its customary monotonous rounds at the old manor house of Hideaway. Eveline found a trunkful of old novels in the attic, books read by her grandmother in the last century. The faded green volumes exuded an air of romanticism dear to her heart. Jósika, Dumas, Sue, a Rocambole…Oh, why wasn’t it winter again, with the snap and crackle of large logs in the fireplace to accompany her reading! As for Miss Maszkerádi, she stopped at times by the carved gatepost and pensively surveyed the landscape. Had she caught a glimpse of Mr. Pistoli, that worthy joker would not have gotten away unpunished.
Andor Álmos-Dreamer, being the romantic bachelor that he was, had naturally stayed away from the Bujdos manor ever since Miss Maszkerádi had been in residence.
Each human life possesses certain sensitivities, dove-pecked injuries, that are never noted by the casual observer, like invisible cracks in amber.
Words uttered unthinkingly, absentminded glances, careless gestures on the part of our fellow humans, somehow manage to avoid the wise or cynical man, bouncing off his outer wrappings, whereas they seem to follow in the tracks of other people, seeking them out from afar, like cats do certain women. You may be in the company of a certain lady, promenading or sitting in a garden, or even aboard a ship, in a reverie — not a cat in sight within miles — yet after a while you suddenly notice a feline lying at your lady’s feet, grooming itself. Where this cat came from, you’ll never know. Yet there it is, having sensed the presence of that certain woman who will appreciate it.
It’s the same way with words and other phenomena in life.
Miss Maszkerádi, about two years previously, in the course of a conversation had pronounced the word kronchi, meaning “crown” in the argot of Budapest. Andor Álmos-Dreamer, who happened to be present, immediately smelled a rat. Not much later Miss Maszkerádi in the same Bujdos manor house referred to certain “provincial hicks” in such a scornful manner that Andor Álmos-Dreamer nearly lost his temper. Yet Miss Maszkerádi was merely following the current fashion among the educated upper classes of using Budapest street slang. It was cool to flaunt your knowledge of thieves’ jargon. Another passing vogue, just like that summer when every Budapest lady carried her hat in her hand. Álmos-Dreamer, romantic bachelor that he was, naturally believed the epithet “provincial hick” to refer to himself. He said not a word about his being offended, he simply stayed away from the house. Miss Maszkerádi was too proud, and Eveline too naive, to inquire about the cause of Mr. Álmos-Dreamer’s withdrawal. The next year, when Miss Maszkerádi again sojourned with Eveline at Bujdos, it was accepted that the bachelor would stay away from the house for the duration. There are certain doors that open only from the inside. Such was the door that Andor Álmos-Dreamer’s sensitive nature made him lock himself behind. He was the kind of country gentleman who is as touchy as a gouty heel. (As opposed to the kind of provincial whom nothing can offend, and who loudly, eagerly devours life, ever ready to quarrel, make up, fight again and hold a grudge, then love, only to forget everything on the morrow and resume gobbling life again at the very same table to which his beard had been so cruelly stuck with candle wax the night before.)