After a while Pistoli deigned to notice the cabbage-shaped, shaggy gray head resting atop his crumbling stone wall. It was a head that had groveled oftentimes in front of Pistoli’s feet when the squire, lording it, made Kakuk kneel in the dust, or after returning from unfamiliar kitchens and servants’ quarters where he had been beaten up with stakes and poles. Just now Pistoli was deeply moved, for he thought he caught strains of funeral music approaching from the direction of the birch grove where the highway bends. The violins sobbed and wailed, the contrabass growled, hollow like fate itself; the coffin must have enclosed some bride, accompanied on her last voyage by black-clad men holding gendarme swords tipped with lemons. Pistoli imagined it was his own true love being interred in the distance.
“Don’t you want me to take a letter to some old lady or young miss?” Kakuk humbly inquired, and out of force of habit he chalked a hat on the stone fence, a vagabonds’ sign for an unfriendly house, to be avoided.
It was with uncharacteristic kindliness that Mr. Pistoli received his shirtless serf, who in his time had delivered so many billets-doux in Pistoli’s hand, enough to earn him a hundred deadly beatings. Lecherous widows, servant girls sent home from the big city, small-town waitresses, procuresses and noble ladies had received letters via this vagabond, letters that were sometimes totally uncalled for — Pistoli had simply picked the recipient as a potential paramour. This was cause enough for Kakuk to set out posthaste, clutching the message entrusted to him. He would lurk like the autumn wind around solitary houses. On bitter cold winter nights he would amble in godforsaken small-town alleys where women who had gone astray camped out in ramshackle hovels. A landlady named Stony Dinka would treat him to mulled wine, whereas the dove-souled Risoulette entreated him with clasped hands to persuade the saucer-eyed Pistoli not to harrass her any more. Both the messenger and the ladies had aged somewhat in the meantime. The owl hooted on storm-tossed nights, complexions had lost their apple-blossom pink, and fingers that used to rake through masculine hair now clasped only the prayer book.
“No, I’ll never write another letter,” replied Pistoli about a quarter of an hour later, having behind carefully closed doors instructed Kakuk in a soft voice at length about what was to be done.
The very next day the tramp was back, and tugged Mr. Pistoli’s leg which was dangling from the bed (for the squire could only fall asleep by swinging a leg).
“Back o’the garden,” Kakuk said, cryptic as some spy, before vanishing like a bad dream.
It was sunset: the trees in flower were listening for the footfalls of someone coming to pick their blossoms, while shadows, like exhausted hounds, stretched across the path. The hedge sent up a little bird, God only knows what business she had there, brooding the spring afternoon away…
There, where the lime trees huddle together like revolutionary generals before their execution, awaiting the crash of lightning with arms uplinked, there stood a memorable little garden bench, a secret spot on the grounds surrounding this red house, as private as the purity of a youth and the nobility of a heart. Formerly, when women had still travelled on clouds over this land, and a female foot was worth a kingdom, Pistoli spent hours seated there next to his soul mate, uttering never-to-be-recalled fine words; or else brooding alone like some knight whose unbalanced bride jumped from the castle ramparts the night before;—but he was never bored.
In later years, whenever Pistoli approached this small bench, he envisioned women who would quietly rise as he neared and vanish into the birches like a delicate mist withdrawing under fallen leaves beneath a frigid moon. Women he had yearned to meet sat there, and women he had tired of, but later wanted back with all the pain of a middle-aged man missing the joys of his youth. And since a real man holds no grudge against the women who robbed him of his youth, merely to pin his wings on their hats, Pistoli thought he saw seated on that bench mostly those ladies who had drawn blood.
And now, once more, a dearly beloved took her place on the little bench. The hat decorated with a pheasant feather shaded the face averted in surrender, like a bird being taught to sing. It was Eveline, sitting where Pistoli’s former loves had sat, and she was listening to what Kálmán Ossuary had to say.
“Just look at him jabber!” reflected Mr. Pistoli bitterly, as he hid to eavesdrop behind the hedge, pricking up his ears like a horse.
Alas, Mr. Pistoli was too far away, though he would have gladly given a fine fur coat to overhear the lovers’ conversation. But it was enough just to look at them: the eyes said it all, it was so obvious. A glove pulled off the hand might feel the way Mr. Pistoli felt. The russet brown cloak’s undone buttons might have sensed his keen disappointment. Those soft curls lurking about her ear quivered like young maids when they find out the whys and wherefores of their coming into this world. The swan neck, the adorable mouth, the long lashes: they were all unaware of the hourglass and time’s flight. The finely-shod foot, the liquescently smooth stockings, and the amulet heaving above the panting heart all imagined this was the first instance of love on earth, wherefore their sudden all-importance. The tender curves of the shoulder, the phenomenal lines of the arm, the miraculous shape of the hips: no way did they foresee lying someday in the grave pit’s damp depth and infinite solitude, with no one to praise them. And the splendid cheek might be leprous after a few years — while this moment, this heartthrobbing hour, imagined by bird-bodied, bird-brained love to be eternal, would have become a matter of indifference.
All Pistoli could do was wriggle his big toe, as if it were a gopher, inside his boot. He regretted that not once did Ossuary kneel, during his endless warblings. Then the moment of farewell arrived. The exchange of abiding looks. The arm gliding off like foam down Niagara Falls. The departing lady’s subdued, lingering, pensive footfall, as if she were leaving for good, for the infinite beyond.
Soon afterward came the clatter of a carriage, stealing off past the garden’s far end, like a Gypsy kidnapper’s cart.
“Tomorrow I’ll sacrifice a pig to celebrate that it wasn’t Maszkerádi with that joker,” resolved Mr. Pistoli, and made an effort to sneak back to his house without being seen by Ossuary.
By nightfall he had remembered all kinds of old songs he believed he had long forgotten. The ditties descended like a spider from the roof beam, and he snapped at them like a dog at a fly. Of some songs he recalled only a single line, but he still hummed through the entire melody. He laid his head on the tabletop, absorbed in woolgathering. From time to time he flung a ditty, as one would a bone, at Kakuk crouching in a corner. But he had little patience for another’s singing. It didn’t take long before he shouted: “Ah, nonsense!”
And whinnying, he struck up a new song, only to get stuck halfway through, like a rickety cart full of drunken wedding guests.
Ossuary was loitering in the moonlight like some terminally bored ghost.
Suddenly Mr. Pistoli stood in front of him with raised forefinger and declared triumphantly:
“I was a tougher kid than you…And I’m still the better man. The girls were weeping and wailing when they left me. For I am Pistoli, that’s who I am.”
The moonlight over The Birches advanced hugger-mugger in the sky like a shepherd hiding a lamb under his coat.
And, wrapped in black veils, night crept away, like a woman’s once undying love.
Kakuk spent all day lolling in a ditch, for the grass was growing in; he chewed grasses like a hound healing some ailment. And, anyway, he had been dropped into this world to lie about in ditches, while the flouncy-skirted, flowery-embroidered, rowdy marketing women pressed ahead to pass each other on the highway. Life does have its do-nothings who welcome as a matter of course each successive morn. They trudge, slothful and passive, into eternal darkness, for they never imagined that dawn would ever displace the night. All those daytimes must have been a misunderstanding, as was the aimless wind, rustling rainfall, wall-clawing torment, and bitter dementia. The truth lies in the great night that stretches from one end of the sky to the other in motionless eternity, where rockets devised by humans will never penetrate.