Deszö Kosztolány - Kornel Esti

But enigmatic or not, he could stay there no longer. He couldn’t spend a whole long night under the same roof. He had to decamp. Fate had opened an unexpected way of escape to him so that he could leave without making a fuss, take his things to another compartment, anywhere. They still hadn’t come back. Now he thought with a sinking feeling that they might come back at any moment. He hurried to look around.

There wasn’t a soul in the narrow, dimly lit corridor. The mother wasn’t there, nor the girl. Where could they have disappeared to? The question made him anxious. He searched everywhere. He even looked in both toilets. They were empty. They were nowhere. Not a sign of them.

Had they gone into another carriage? Unlikely. The communicating doors to the next carriage were closed. So had they jumped from the speeding train, and were they now lying, expiring, their skulls smashed and slowly oozing, on the stones of the track bed, or were they continuing their journey entangled in the wheels and accompanying him as mutilated corpses? That would be dreadful.

He opened every compartment in the carriage like a secret policeman, partly to shed light on the whereabouts of mother and daughter, and partly to find himself another seat for the night.

In most of the compartments it was dark. The passengers were snoring behind lowered curtains and tightly shut doors. The familiar idyll of the bedroom greeted him: sleeping children and half-oranges, wagons circled and walled for defense with suitcases, morose men in their shirtsleeves, milk gurgling in green water bottles and women, breathing heavily, heads bent over their chubby infants — cheese rinds, flowers, and shoehorns scattered in nightmare disorder on the floor as if after a savage attack, smelly feet in sweaty stockings on the seats, emitting storm clouds of fumes — and meanwhile simply dozing on the bombast of the patriotic leading articles in yesterday’s paper, spread out as a covering. Everywhere there had formed that hastily contrived, disgustingly family-like traveling companionship, that fortuitously forged train-fellowship, recruited of necessity from total strangers who greet another total stranger, arriving late and unexpectedly, not much more warmly than they would a masked robber equipped with chloroform.

Esti didn’t impose on anyone. Once he was convinced that mother and daughter really were not in a particular compartment and that there was no room for him, he apologized to everyone and discreetly withdrew.

He remained standing in the corridor. He enjoyed watching the sparks from the engine. At every moment it flung a shower into the sky. Myriads and myriads of sparks soared in great arcs, then were extinguished in a ditch like swiftly fading falling stars. One smut, however, went into his eye. He went back into his compartment.

This was still deserted, though with the memories of two lives in the air. He sat down in his old place. Now he himself took it for certain that he was trapped there. This bothered him, and yet it didn’t.

Even if he found a seat elsewhere — which he might, the train wasn’t full, he’d only have to speak to the guard — it was very doubtful that he’d move into another compartment and that his curiously prickly conscience would be able to stand the thought that by his furtive, panicky escape he might offend his traveling companions, those two people whom he had seen for the first and perhaps the last time in his life. It was probable, highly probable, that even then he would change his mind and turn back at the last moment and decide to stay there all the same, as he had now done.

The affair interested him, that was for sure. However much he dreaded the situation, he was curious about how it would develop. He wanted to see more clearly whom he’d been traveling with until then, he would have liked to clear up a thing or two.

His conduct couldn’t be explained by just that. Nor by the fact that he was a “well-brought-up boy.” Nor because timidity or a lively imagination made him indecisive — often when he avoided danger those were the qualities that urged him into it. Nor that he was, as it were, an excessively kindly soul, in the everyday sense of the word. There was a lot of cruelty in him, many bloodthirsty, evil instincts. He alone knew what he had done, as a small boy, to hapless flies and frogs in the secret torture chamber that he had set up in the laundry room. There he and his younger brother had dissected frogs and their grandmother’s cats with a kitchen knife, cracked their skulls, extracted their eyes, conducted real vivisection on a purely “scientific, experimental basis,” and their grandmother — that loud-voiced, addlepated, shortsighted woman — had been very cross that whatever she did, her cats kept disappearing, ten or twenty a year. If need be he could certainly have committed murder, like anyone else. But he was more afraid of hurting someone than of killing them.

He was always horrified that he might be harsh, merciless, and tactless toward anyone — a human being like himself, that is: frail, craving happiness, and finally in any case doomed to perish wretchedly — horrified of humiliating them in their own eyes, of upsetting them with even one innuendo, a single thought, and often — at least, so he imagined — he would rather have died than entertain the belief that he was someone superior in this world and that the person in question might blushingly repeat as he slunk away, “It seems I’ve been a burden to him … it seems he’s tired … it seems he looks down on me …”

This moral position, which Esti developed in greater detail in his later work, even then was germinating in his youthful heart. He knew that there is little that we can do for each other, that for the sake of being happy ourselves we are forced to injure others, sometimes even fatally, and that in great affairs pitilessness is almost inevitable, but for that very reason he held the conviction that our humanity, our apostleship can only be revealed — honestly and sincerely — in little things, that attentiveness, tact, and mutual consideration based on forgiveness are the greatest things on this earth.

Following this train of thought he had come to the conclusion, bleak, even pagan though it seemed, that since we can’t be really good we should at least be polite. This politeness of his, however, was no mere ceremoniousness, not a thing of compliments and idle chatter. It often consisted of nothing more than subtly slipping in at a crucial moment a word which might seem noncommittal, but which someone was desperately awaiting from him as an acknowledgment of their existence. He considered that tact his most particular virtue. Better than so-called goodness, in any case. Goodness preaches constantly, wants to change humanity, to work miracles from one day to the next, makes a show of its substance, wants to question essentials, but in fact is most often just hollow, lacking in substance and merely a matter of appearance. Whereas even if politeness does look entirely formal, in its inward nature it is substance, essence itself. A good word which has not yet been put into practice holds within itself every virgin possibility and is more than a good deed, the outcome of which is dubious, its effect arguable. In general, words are always more than deeds.

He waited anxiously for his traveling companions to return. They didn’t come, didn’t come. He looked at his pocket watch. It was a quarter to one. It had been exactly three-quarters of an hour since they’d disappeared.

At one o’clock footsteps were heard in the corridor. The guard was passing his compartment with a lamp in his hand, the new Croat guard, a friendly man with a mustache, and looked in on him and asked in faultless German and with Austrian cordiality where he was going and why he wasn’t asleep. He couldn’t, however, enlighten him on the whereabouts of the woman and the girl. Then, in his perfect German and with Austrian cordiality, he said “ Ich wünsch’ Ihnen eine scheene, gute Nacht, ” saluted, and as he left, closed the door of the compartment after him.