Gyula Krudy - Sunflower

“Álmos-Dreamer, how could you leave me?” said Eveline. “How can I live in peace from now on, calling for you in vain?”

The deceased did not stir, even though Eveline crooned like a mourning dove.

“I know you’re truly dead, you’ve taken your leave solemnly and ceremoniously, closed your eyes forever without any theatrics or falsehood, and you wouldn’t protest if we laid you under ten tons of sod. Still I beg you, won’t you come back, for I simply cannot go on without you…”

This is how Eveline addressed the deceased, who quietly sat up.

He looked at Eveline in wonder yet without surprise, as if the girl were simply the continuation of a pleasant dream.

“I think I’ve been through a grave illness,” he murmured and slowly emerged from his coffin.

There lived in the Inner City of Pest a strange young man whose white spats, carefully ironed trousers and curled hair were visible mostly in the evening hours.

The outward appearance of this young man resembled one of those figures on antique amulets worn around the necks of pious elderly princesses or seduced daughters of the bourgeoisie. His auburn locks, combed in an old-fashioned style, his weary smile, his rather melancholy aspect and his way of dressing in imitation of fashion plates from the Romantic era of fifty years before, were all calculated to make women’s hearts open up, to accept and forever remember this young man. His appearance was as refined and fragile as that of a morganatic prince. His cream-colored gloves and freshly shaven face implied he was heading toward the National Casino, although his usual attitude toward that neighborhood was to eye the young aristocrats with a distant and disdainful smile, which dismissed them as idiots.

At the time of our story Kálmán happened to be homeless.

The aging dame who, in part out of charity, in part out of undying love à la Ninon de Lenclos, had adopted the youth, on this day discovered that someone had tampered with her cache of gold coins. These were not ordinary shekels. Ninon, in her youth, had received them as presents from reigning sovereigns and cardinals, English peers, and pretenders to diverse thrones, all of whom had paid court to this amusing and charming woman. Heads of kings and queens from all parts of the globe adorned the ducats brought by her chevaliers in their vest pockets. Ninon, when alone in her diminutive palace in Képíró Street, liked to claim that she could never be bored as long as she spent her days in such illustrious company. Amidst her guldens, she could turn from the Prince of Monaco to Queen Victoria. It was these notables that had of late been preyed upon by Kálmán who, by the third month of his sojourn at her house, had contrived to pick the lock on her strongbox.

Kálmán did not think the expulsion tragic. Ninon would forgive him any time he felt like it, once she had installed new locks on her safe. In all likelihood she was already on her way, scouring the city for him, possibly disguised as a market vendor à la Mrs. Baradlay in Jókai’s novel.

As was his wont, he turned his steps toward the Josephstadt, toward a dreamy townhouse complete with donjon, whose gray-curtained windows had witnessed his daily strolling past, to confirm that the bird had not yet returned to her cage.

Around the Museum lounged palazzos as changeless as the Papacy. Here life is never rushed, for it never ends. The families’ bloodlines run in endless streams: it seems the same individuals who die return rejuvenated to carry on the line. The selfsame figures inhabit the selfsame palaces, daughters get married the same as ever, countesses’ hair turns gray just as their ancestresses’ did. In the portals, the same old bearded, bald, gloved grooms loom, handling well-trained, highly bred steeds, while the same guests as ever take their places in the same carriages. The days pass without desires of an unattainable nature. Perhaps the medicinal-smelling doctor on a house call prescribes an occasional remedy. The books contain the same old romances. The christenings are unlikely to produce a name that has not yet occurred in the family.

Kálmán thought fondly of this genteel world. He would have given anything for a peek at a countess’s boudoir or bedroom! How did these heavenly angels spend their earthly days? Is it true they paid their feet the same painstaking attention as dancers? Did they ever harbor loving thoughts toward an etching or a sprightly verse? Their aloof, nonchalant and splendid faces, the distinctive style of their curls, their swan necks and little earlobes burnished vivid memories into Kálmán’s brain after a scrutinizing stare through a carriage window…He would have gratefully welcomed even one of their chambermaids, who in all likelihood wore stockings and shoes handed down by her mistress. But he had to make do with their serving men, whose conversations he overheard at Ivkov’s little tavern on the ground floor of the Üchtritz House.

As the bird had not yet returned to her cage, Kálmán sank into a reverie, forehead pressed against the bars of the cast-iron gate, then with hesitant steps waded through the dry leaves that littered the small round garden — it resembled a filigreed reliquary that contains the cheerful dreams of youth. This diminutive French garden with its white belvedere, green-skirted pines, and walls overrun by wild grape vines served to remind Eveline at spring and autumntime of the calendar’s turning leaves. Kálmán at times thought he was totally, maybe fatally, in love with Eveline, and could die for her, as a knight would. On this basis he considered the small French garden his natural kin and ally — a piece of the city’s most precious real estate that dedicated its flora solely to amuse a lovely girl.

Here he stood each night, facing the iron grillwork of the gate, like a penitent whose thoughts forever rehearse the same scenes of the past. Joy’s fleeting clouds, the trembling play of sunlight on a carpet, visions waving farewell. This was his moment of piety. Had religion been on Kálmán’s mind, the twilight hour would have found him entering the Franciscans’ Church in the wake of mallow-scented Inner City girls, along with the stately, distinguished gentlemen who came to pray there daily. If only once he could have won at dice in the gambling den where he spent his nights, at dawn he would have stopped in at St. Roch’s Chapel where the poor nuns, like white seagulls by the ocean’s dark shore, sat in the pews, row after row, saying prayers as adventitious as birdsong. But Kálmán was an unlucky son of a gun and — although not yet twenty-five — had lost all faith in both man and God. This deserted garden, strewn with dead leaves, had come to mean both redemption and purification for him. It reminded him that he had been young and innocent once, when spring mornings had impelled him to kiss the sumac blossoms, and when he had absorbed those distant, profound, serene autumn afternoons, as one does the teachings of a gentle sage who preaches only charity. Like fading sepia tints in photographs he had lost long ago, his mother’s and father’s faces floated above the path he trod in the sentimental worship of Eveline. The distant, innocent past loomed up before his eyes, sad and unaccusing. Oh, if only once he could hear a chiding voice from the past! But the past was silent, like a beloved mindlessly and irrevocably killed in a fit of passion.

Sunk in this emotional reverie, Kálmán sauntered from the Josephstadt district back to the Inner City, where in small taverns smelling of beer and braised pork pörkölt he ate his meals and was slowly going to seed, spending his time with devil-may-care, constantly harassed yet eternally hopeful cronies who knew nothing of his heart’s deep wound. Paprika-laced dishes flushed his face, foaming brews cooled his gullet, the grease-stained newsrag apprised him of the day’s events, while his associates retailed bawdy and hilarious yarns. Thus he passed tolerable, jolly, carefree evenings. At times some streetwalker would arouse his interest, but these trysts left him feeling as if he had embraced death. He was amazed that the other wanderers in the gutter, all those women swathed in veils and cheap perfume, had not been collared by the lanky escort with his death’s-head grinning above a smartly-knotted white silk scarf.