Gyula Krudy - Sunflower

“Let’s have Miss Sonnet’s songs,” Pistoli commanded the Gypsies, after they took their positions under the manor house window that shed blue light into the night. The oil lamp was lit under the holy icon, for the house had always belonged to those of Russian Orthodox faith, folks who were ever ready to sacrifice lamp oil and wick to implore the Holy Virgin’s mercy for the miserable.

When the music struck up Eveline was reading a novel as usual, and, as usual, she was comparing the men she knew with some figure conjured up by the letters on the printed page. She loved these nocturnal hours, this removal from daily life, the stories of people whose lives and fates had been set down on paper…Perhaps someone had already written her story, too, some time ago. “Young Miss,” the fortune-teller had once told her, “all your childhood dreams will be fulfilled. But you won’t like it when these dreams come true.” She dreamed of men who would gladly suffer for her, of a magnificent life as a woman of the world: theater, balls, entertainments, good horses, the independent life, country quietude alternating with the metropolitan buzz…passions, fine words, unforgettable days. Life had always fulfilled her desires as easily as a magician producing roses from a hat. And now here came a midnight serenade under her window, just as in the Spanish novels she was so fond of. The señora on the balcony, her caballero below.

Miss Maszkerádi grabbed a full-length fur coat and burst into Eveline’s room, swearing.

“Did you call in these Gypsies?” she asked peremptorily. “I hate these fifth-rate village bands. You have no idea of the kind of music I love. I am a modern woman. I don’t even remember the old-time favorites any more. Listen, I’m going to empty my revolver at them if they don’t shut up.”

“Be a good girl now,” was Eveline’s quiet response. “Your beau is here again.”

“That provincial stumblebum! Phew! If he ever took off one of his boots I’d run away and never come back to this place!”

“It’s Pistoli,” Eveline explained, with some heat. “Don’t you recognize he’s playing your songs?”

“Oh, you precious thing!” Miss Maszkerádi’s tone dripped venomous disdain. “If we were in the city, I’d set my servants on them for disturbing the peace. I was just starting to doze off, thanks to a triple dose of Adalin. And now this scoundrel shows up, with his Tartar manners, his insane nomads and their Asiatic instruments, and slaps me back into reality. We are in Hungary after all, in a godforsaken little village. We’ll be lucky if the bastard leaves our windows intact. Why, last year he tossed stones into my bedroom. Why can’t the gendarmerie lock up this wild beast?”

“Now try to be nice to him,” said Eveline, with a certain amount of hostesslike solemnity, getting out of bed and pulling on some petticoats and silk-lined, lacquered slippers. She pinned up her long tresses and smoothed out her forehead. Forgetting the hairpin between her teeth, she pensively listened to the outdoor serenade.

“You better make sure right away it’s Pistoli and not some highwaymen here to rob us under the guise of a midnight serenade,” Miss Maszkerádi continued, red as a turkey and as furious.

“Nothing easier. Just open the window, shove the shutters aside, strike a match and ask the darkness outside whether it is Sir Pistoli, the excellent chevalier and most noble seigneur, whom we should thank for this exquisite midnight surprise.”

Maszkerádi cursed on, like one of the Gypsies…

“I’d rather die. I’d rather go blind than face this ragged old rattletrap.”

Eveline snapped the red garter around her knees, and dug up a bulky and warm crimson house coat. She bustled about like a colorful pollen-laden moth above the midnight flowerbeds. Her face was fresh, determined and enterprising, like a traveler’s who rose at dawn to set out for cities full of promise.

“I happen to be a local landowner. I can’t afford to offend any of my neighbors, Malvina. So I ask you to please respect the customs of my house.”

“I swear, I’ll pour boiling water over that cur!” threatened Miss Maszkerádi. “I’d never known a more insolent character. Gets soused and that’s his excuse for going around, molesting decent womenfolk…Don’t you have gendarmes in these parts? Haven’t you got watchdogs in your yard?”

“My dogs are as well acquainted with Mr. Pistoli, as doormen at the Orpheum with a spendthrift count. We can’t help what’s about to happen. Squire Pistoli is lord of the neighboring estates and must be entertained as a guest in the dining room until he feels like rolling on toward some other archipelago. You know, Malvina, we are dependent on each other in these isolated parts. No one comes this way, only the tax collector, and we do our united best to keep him permanently drunk.”

Miss Maszkerádi shrugged, then tore open the window, although for a moment she entertained the notion that the wild squire might send a bullet her way from down below.

“Come on in, you wretched dipsomaniac!” she yelled into the darkness. “But you better shave off your beard first, because we’ll glue it to the table with candlewax.”

But Pistoli was not quite done with his preparations. He approached midnight serenades as solemnly and ceremoniously as a small-town quadrille organizer his duties. Have you ever seen a master of ceremonies at a quadrille willing to forego even one of the figures in the customary repertoire? The young misses and their partners are raring to go, their eager feet ready to dance the csárdás till dawn — while the pompous quadrille director leads, like Moses did the Jews, the entire company through a labyrinth of one elaborate old figure after another. Why, figure number six alone has thousands of tricky variants. (As for me, I was always happy just to be able to find my partner after all those artful dodges, and continue the kind of tantalizing conversation that used to be initiated during the quadrille by most young gentlemen of the better sort in the Hungary of old.)

Pistoli was a past master of the midnight serenade.

He knew every single dreamy melody that had ever been played beneath a shuttered window by a Gypsy band in Hungary. He was familiar with the Lake Balaton songs, the fantasias of Boka, Lavotta and Csermák; nor did he neglect the waltzes of József Konti. The ladies he had conquered through his serenades had instructed him thoroughly in what a woman likes to hear in a half-dreaming state. Last but not least came Mr. Pistoli’s favorite song, the one that had so often served as overture as well, a nocturnal signature as it were, sent up toward those silent windows: “ Cloudy sky above the forest …” This was the song Mr. Pistoli crooned, posted under the linden trees. He had a rather pleasant, resonant baritone; after all, in those days in the provinces one had to have some musical accomplishment to win over a woman’s heart. When the song ended and the undertones of the contrabass had vanished into the night like the final note at a wedding, Pistoli, hat in hand, approached the window where the shutters had been thrown open. First of all, Eveline lit the customary match (much to Miss Maszkerádi’s annoyance), then spoke a few words thanking the excellent gentleman for his thoughtfulness.

“I just wanted to pay my respects,” Pistoli solemnly replied.

The manor house had a verandah that was still unused this early in spring. Upended garden chairs, wickerwork tables, flower stands, white stakes topped by iridescent glass globes, hammocks and swinging chairs lay heaped on this verandah, as if summer were in permanent exile. Eveline invited Mr. Pistoli and his musicians to step in here. A table was set right side up, and Eveline returned from the interior of her house with bottles of wine and glasses, while Miss Maszkerádi dragged forth a ham from the larder. The Gypsies received plum brandy, which they knocked down from a black jug in their corner, keeping track, on the sly, of how much slivovitz passed down each gullet. The garden candelabras lit up part of the courtyard. Sleepy servants peered out through windows and the huge hounds paced growling in the yard, forbidden to nip at the Gypsies’ legs. Mr. Pistoli, swaggering and strutting between the two girls, asked them repeatedly how they were able to live without a man. Maszkerádi looked away; her writhing lips seemed to be uttering silent curses, while Eveline affably replied to her guest that until this day she had not thought of marrying, but from now on she would consider Mr. Pistoli’s wise advice.