Gyula Krudy - Sunflower

“Why indeed…” mused Mr. Álmos-Dreamer. “Because I want to say good-bye to you, my dear wife, my darling.”

“Is that why you woke me?”

Mr. Álmos-Dreamer sadly nodded like a wanderer stranded in the night:

“That’s right, my child. I shall be leaving life in an hour. Like a runaway cat, the movements of my hands and feet are abandoning me as I descend on slippery steps down to the icehouse and the door slams behind. I want this last hour of my life to be happy. Not to think, not to dread, not to quake, not to recoil from invisible blows…For one hour, eyes open or closed: to sense and see only you, oh ecstasy, whose chalice I never drank from.”

Eveline angrily knit her brows — then cast a sly glance from under those eyebrows as if weighing whether to believe the promise. Would he deceive her like a wandering organ-grinder, who plays sad songs under the window, making your heart ache and cry, waking the sad ghosts of the house, while laughing to himself as he licks the last drop of wine from his mustache?

Eveline was a bold and businesslike lady. She had never done anything that she later regretted. She was concerned that all this might be a trick.

“Word of honor?” she asked, mostly to stall for time, to better appraise the situation.

Mr. Álmos-Dreamer nodded without emotion, a most peculiar nod, like a one-legged man confronting his lost limb preserved in spirits.

“Swear on the cross,” murmured Eveline, having noted nothing suspicious in Mr. Álmos-Dreamer’s behavior.

Ákos Álmos-Dreamer dropped to one knee. Eveline’s hand reached for the heavy silver crucifix that had for centuries served to pacify and silence the dying curses of forebears. The crucifix could have passed for a weapon, at a pinch. Rightly swung, the hefty silver object indeed could have promoted one’s passage to the other world.

Álmos-Dreamer took the crucifix in hand and softly swore a clearly audible oath in the vaulted room:

“I, Ákos Álmos-Dreamer, swear by the Almighty and by the seven wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ that after an hour’s passage I shall no longer be among the living but will lie stretched out dead, never to return from the nether world.”

Eveline nodded her assent.

She took one glance at the glass-encased clockworks where at the stroke of midnight the twelve apostles would pass in single file.

It was a clock face worn out by all the expectant, desperate, fatal glances cast by eyes that had long ago turned into varicolored pebbles along the Upper Tisza. The Roman numerals had faded, the hands were bent like a drooping mustache, the circumambulant pilgrims’ robes tattered. But the tireless mechanism labored on, it still had so much left to accomplish here on earth: such as marking the hour of someone’s death.

“When the apostles appear, your time’s up,” she murmured and blew out the candle.

And what happened to Eveline after she had taught the first Álmos-Dreamer how to die of joy and grief, for love of a woman? For, ever since then, curious little females have been asking Álmos-Dreamers, and with good cause: “Could you do something grand for me? Would you die for me?”

Nine months later Eveline gave birth to a wistful, moody little boychild, whom she would take many a time to his father’s green sepulchral mound, located, in deference to the deceased’s wishes, like Lensky’s grave, in a small copse of white birches. On the bookshelf, to this day you may find Onegin (in French), with the page folded at the appropriate place.

At his christening the child was given the names Andor Zoltán, the latter fashionable at the time in Hungary, favored by widowed mothers who followed the example of the poet Peto´´fi’s young widow, née Countess Szendrey. Widows who do not stay faithful to their husband’s memory sense their kinship from afar, like nomadic Gypsies who leave behind intertwined straws or some other sign of their passage across the countryside; women, by donning a certain ball gown or particular chapot, let each other know that they don’t mind bestowing their favors upon newcomers. This is a strange fact, but true. In bygone days village dames read through lists of guests at soirées, participants at masked balls, and were able to tell at a long distance whom their lady acquaintance meant to please with her carnival outfit. Via the pages of Conversation Pieces and Ladies’ Courier , Eveline kept in close touch with events at the capital. Even from her rustic hermitage she could participate in the eventful life of Pest. The mail coach delivered lengthy epistles. From fashion magazines she could determine which ladies were the latest trendsetters, what hat and hair styles were the current vogue. For the same reason she wore her hair short like Peto´´fi’s widow, mused about love by her escritoire, kept a romantic diary in which she lamented her unhappiness and never bothered to recall any of her former suitors, while she more than once invited to her country estate Kálmán Lisznyai, the fashionable poet of the day, and often looked out of the window to check whether the poet who affected the szu´´r (an ornamentally embroidered shepherd’s cloak) had at last arrived. When she died at fifty of consumption, the Capital Herald carried an obituary citing her patriotism and her artistic, noble soul, ever true to the black veil and to her tragically deceased husband.

This was the parentage of the most recently expired Álmos-Dreamer, whom the living, touchable Eveline now visited on his island in the Tisza.

The bygone Eveline’s life-size portrait hung on the wall, and next to it the living Eveline now appeared, the very image of the painting come to life and stepped out of its frame. The resemblance was striking. As if that extraordinary woman — who had wreaked such havoc in the lives of gullible men, setting frozen hearts ablaze like a bonfire built by woodcutters shivering at the edge of a forest — it was as if this woman had come back to life. Being exceptional, she had been given a second life to live, for one life was not enough to accomplish all that was waiting for her to do here on earth. As if she had turned back at the gates of eternal repose, having noticed that her limbs were still youthful, her eyes still fiery, and the candle flame still unextinguished in her cold heart. She had returned for another round, to meet new men, to drain love’s goblet anew…Only her rich, honey-blonde mane had been left behind, underground. At the time of her emergence from the soil, along with the cowslips and dragonflies, the fields bore a thick crop of rye. For a crown of hair she plaited herself a wreath of ripe rye, spiky russet and yellow grasses. Now her hair had red-brown streaks, like tiger spots. The first moonlit night taught her the arts of witchcraft and sorcery, when among the trees’ sleeping boughs the souls of the dead glide like so many bats. Young birch trees ooze a sap that the pale-skinned women of the region lick up so that their legs stay forever limber, and even in old age they can ride the broomstick with bright gleaming knees. In The Birches there is no need to take lessons in giving men the evil eye. The women’s voices are woven of the strange melodies of springtime birds; their hips radiate the comforting warmth of a brooding duck; their glances emulate the sun-worship in the eye of the lanky sunflower straining after the sun. Their hair, like the tender young crop in the fields, is raked by the capricious fingers of the wayward winds.

The touchable Eveline stood lingering under the portrait of the bygone Eveline and exchanged a look of sympathy with her predecessor. Her heartache was gone like a child’s hurt blown away by a mother’s kiss; she immediately felt her strange power in this house where all things owed her allegiance. She felt she had come home to claim the heritage of the former mistress of the house whose swaying skirts were almost still visible just around the doorposts. All she had to do was follow her trail. On the painter’s primitive oil the elongate, white hand was pointing ahead, a magical sign, as it were, for women who enter this abode. Eveline followed the pointing finger. Andor Álmos-Dreamer, as his ancestors had done, had in life provided for his fragrant walnut coffin, and now lay in it with hands clasped in prayer, wearing a full evening outfit, with courtly black dancing shoes, a token of his esteem for the post-mortem visitor.