Gyula Krudy - Sunflower

They were called the crazy Álmos-Dreamers.

Once upon a time the family had possessed extensive holdings in the Uplands of Northern Hungary; these were probably not acquired in notably delicate ways. For centuries the Álmos-Dreamers had stalked wealthy widows, moneyed elderly women and females with prized dowries, pretty much the way they hunted the rarer kinds of egret in the marshy reeds of the Tisza.

That was back in the family’s heyday.

As a result, they acquired historical ruins; forts, forests and castles. Women’s curses, the shrieks of imprisoned spouses, the sad and vengeful shades of wives dispatched to the other shore haunted the Álmos-Dreamers. Back in those days women were given short shrift. Wild orgies, spilled ecstasies, virgins’ red blood, the mad rage of frenzied hunting parties drugged and lulled the pangs of conscience. Most of the ghosts in today’s castles had originated in those times. What else was left for these poor women? They would return from the other world, shrouded in white, to put the fear of God in their grandchildren. Ghosts are no mere figments of the popular imagination, cropping up like sempervivum on a stone wall. Curses turned into an owl’s hoot, echoing crypts and mysterious moonlit forests loom in the remote history of many a Hungarian family. It was not unusual for one of these brutally powerful men to wear out three or four women in one lifetime. Men in their old age married as lightheartedly as the young. They would abduct their women if necessary. Their rivals’ blood dripped from the steps of the wedding altar, and terrorized, violated brides covered their eyes in shame. The daggers were always close at hand, ready to be dipped into someone’s heart. Old family histories all resemble each other. When the men were off on a crusade, the women were happiest, rocking the cradle by themselves. They could choose their own lovers.

After all this violence there came a turn in the history of the Álmos-Dreamer family.

One day they abducted a blonde witch whose blue eyes flashed with all the colors of a mountain stream. She was as supple as a silvery birch in springtime. And like tumbleweed, she clung to men. She spoke the language of grasses, old trees and crossroads. She could make herself understood to beasts. The windmill’s blades stopped when she blew at them.

The name of this witch was Eveline.

Eveline managed to keep in line the men in a family where women had as a rule been locked away into caskets like old silver. Ákos Álmos-Dreamer, father of the newly-dead Andor, had unsuspectingly married her in the 1840s. He became the third husband of a woman widowed first by a colonel then by a high-ranking government official.

Eveline’s former husbands met identical fates on the dueling ground; in those days this was a legitimate exit for men. The Colonel’s heart was pierced by an épée, after an excruciating fit of jealousy inspired him to challenge an itinerant Frenchman whose only known occupation was kibitzing at the faro table and fleecing tipsy swine dealers playing billiards at the Turkish Sultan. This dubious foreigner had eyes for a Parisian dancer who happened to be a guest artist at the National Theatre. In the evenings he would leave the gambling casino to stand like a statue with arms crossed during performances, as it happens, just below the box reserved, on alternate days, by Colonel Sükray. The dancer appeared as an entr’acte between the second and third acts when she hovered, fairylike, over the stage, performing a dance of her own choreography, with superhuman grace.

“Madame, I adore you,” sighed the statue beneath the railing of Colonel Sükray’s box, and, doing so, he happened to fix on the Colonel’s wife the blazing torch of his eyes — eyes that were actually bestowed upon him by the Creator for the express purpose of keeping tabs on the legerdemain of one Buzinkai (a notorious local cardsharp) so that in the case of a successful deception he should imperceptibly yet significantly tap the gambler’s shoulder.

The Colonel had heard the Frenchman’s words only too clearly. One look at his wife’s beaming face was enough to turn his suspicions into the darkest despair, even though at home, in the privacy of their canopied bed, they had frequently made fun of the eccentric Frenchman so hopelessly in love with the untouchable star of the stage.

Sükray was a nobleman and an officer. Speaking in an undertone he requested his wife to leave quietly with him before the hall lit up again in all its splendor at the end of the show. During the fairy’s dance the entire house was plunged into total darkness, to the great delight of the local heartbreakers who made use of this interval to pass love notes or whisper sweet nothings in their chosen ones’ ears without being observed.

Eveline, shaken, grasped her husband’s arm as he led her to the back of the loge. As soon as she was outside the door, the Colonel turned around and with a light gesture tossed his white glove, crumpled into a ball, into the face of the French chevalier who stood with his customary stillness below the box. At the touch of the glove the chevalier staggered as if hit by a poleax. The blood left his face; he lowered his eyelashes in pain. Being the most ill-fated lover in town, he was desperate. His face resumed its everyday devil-may-care expression only when the door closed behind Eveline and the Colonel, making any further histrionics unnecessary.

A decade earlier or later the Colonel would have handed over the fly-by-night Frenchman to the military or the municipal authorities for incarceration until the next transport of vagrants. But this happened at the height of a Romantic era when the salons were seething with daily tales about the generosity and self-sacrifice of men in love. Women fell for heroic characters of the stage and many a lady in the capital felt an urge to elope with the first dance instructor or musician she encountered.

Therefore the next afternoon the Colonel acknowledged without comment when the Frenchman’s two cronies, birds of a feather, asserted that the impudent dandy he had insulted the previous night at the theater happened to be a French nobleman, a descendant of Saint Louis, dispossessed of his rank and estates by the French Revolution…A routine claim of the French gamblers and impostors who roamed the continent of Europe and usually ended their lives in some German prison, for the Teutons had no sense of humor in such matters.

The Colonel requested Captain Asszonyfái and Count Leiningen to assist in the speedy settlement of this affair. The officers were forced to respect the Frenchman’s claim to competence only in the épée, whereas the Colonel would have preferred to fight with the curved Hungarian sabre.

However, the dueling regulations of the day were clearly in favor of the offended party. The officers did not keep a detailed record, noting the events only in their private diaries. Pages cut out from the diaries later exonerated these officers in front of the military command.

The duelists met on an early spring morning in a remote corner of the city park. They chose the secluded woods on purpose. At this time it happened more than once that women, for whose sake the men faced each other with drawn swords or at pistol point, had penetrated the ball room of the Seven Electors or the riding school at the barracks. Dressed in mourning, they threw themselves screaming between the duelers, and produced theatrics that left a bitter taste. Colonel Sükray had conducted his affairs in utter secrecy but he could not vouch for his opponent’s discretion. Especially since he noticed that the last two nights Eveline had only pretended to be asleep in the canopied bed. Her heart was palpitating and every once in a while she let out a loud and uncontrollable sigh. The Colonel, wrapped in melancholy thought, lay motionless next to his wife, nor did a single twitch of his face betray his awareness of her sleeplessness.