Gyula Krudy - Sunflower

Andor Álmos-Dreamer, glimpsing his graying head in the Venetian pier glass — in which they had stared at each other so often like provincial couples engaged to be married — now wondered, amazed, how could he have ever left this woman? Here he had been kept as spoiled as a pet hedgehog, and still, he had wandered away from this household. He had gone away, to chew pumpkin seeds in his solitude, like an obstinate child.

At last a light spider cart wheeled into the courtyard, as in some period piece where the gentry are always carousing and no one has time to live an ordinary life.

Next to the coachman, who wore a beribboned hat sat Eveline, dressed in a dove-gray outfit. The short-tailed gray dapples that had gaily trotted along, while her hands held the reins, were now shaking their jingling accoutrements, as if this had been their sole raison d’être.

Watching from behind the white-framed window, Mr. Álmos-Dreamer was moved to see the two women greet and kiss each other under the red awning of the verandah. Risoulette, solemn and deliberate, gently embraced the maiden as if coveting her innocence. She kissed Eveline on both sides of her face. Now that they met, they were no longer rivals. Side by side, the woman in her forties and the girl in her twenties banished the thought of competing for the same man. Eveline’s bearing was noble, refined, and condescending, rather in the manner of a lady of the haut monde being amiable toward an acquaintance who must spend her life in a provincial village.

The Captain slapped his legs as one does an unruly horse, and advanced to receive the young miss at the front entrance.

When the white door opened, Eveline’s eyes took in Mr. Álmos-Dreamer with equal portions of surprise and distraction, as if the last grains of fairy dust from solitary reveries were still dropping on her eyelashes. She turned around to look behind her. Risoulette, teary-eyed, nodded at her with boundless benevolence and made herself scarce.

“You wanted to see me?” Eveline asked.

She took off her deerskin glove and offered her hand like a flower to Mr. Álmos-Dreamer.

“Yes, I, too, should have thought of the Captain and his wife. But believe me, Andor, I’ve been as inactive as a lazy cat. Days go by and I hardly even have a thought. Life for me has receded into the far distance like the mountains on the horizon that I shall never get to. It doesn’t even occur to me that there are cities, humans, and other lives in this world. I’ve made myself cozy on a pile of ashes. And as long as it stays warm, I’ll be all right.”

Andor replied the way he had once spoken to Risoulette:

“I’m the kind of man it is easy to forget. But I had never wanted to attach any importance or significance to my person. So I live on, a man who is far prouder than he has any right to be. Life is a mere flick of the hand…It is not important. And not very interesting, either. Time goes by, meandering like an impassive wanderer who never sees new landscapes, different cities, fresh or hostile faces. I’m merely a watchman in the cornfield who observes, from under a hat pulled over his eyes, the passage of unknown and uninteresting strangers on the highway. They’re all marching toward distant destinations, their eyes on the far horizon, their thoughts on foreign marvels. One will be shipwrecked at the Cape of Good Hope, another will be garroted in a Hong Kong opium den, the third will circle like a hapless bird of passage over alien lands…Everyone is on the go, dying to live, see, feel, and run amuck; wanting to inhale new scents, touch the hair of unknown women, taste strange cuisines, to make love and forget like sailors…this is what most men want. I alone seem satisfied by sitting on my hovel’s threshold — haughty, frozen, stubborn like a rock in my voluntary and conceited renunciation — while over my little rooftop life flies past, insanely clattering, deranged and carefree. Could it be I am a gopher without a mate, or a melancholy blind crow at the forest’s edge? For a human being I am most certainly not, no, no, I don’t enjoy, I don’t want, I despise what most men do. Possibly I am one of the dead who can see and look on, amazed by nothing and detesting everything that the living do. Or else once I was a pipe-smoking Turk on a shopsign in Munkács, and now I’m off on vacation. Truth is, I want nothing, my worshipful lady.”

“But you did want to see me, no?” said Eveline, who blushed a little, lowered her eyes a little, and adjusted her skirt a little, as women are wont to do, when they are unsure of themselves.

“Oh you, perhaps, are the only one for whose sake, at whose memory, I sometimes feel like bursting into a drunken or crazy sob so loud that it would be sheer pleasure…You are the one I think of, lying in my bed, you with your birdlike sadness, your eyes reflecting an otherworldy light…you are beautiful and alien, you are a whole different world…You contain archipelagos, Spice Islands full of unknown scents, joyous frenzies tumble from your eyelashes, many-colored shadows chase each other on your forehead, and hemp bursts into flower at your feet…For me, you are a mystery, although at night I scream out that you are simply a woman…You are a disheveled terror opening the door a crack in the middle of my reveries, like a murderer clutching a knife…you are a dead woman, a pale wraith hugging the door and summoning me to the netherworld…You are death and you are life.”

“Poor man,” said Eveline, and caressed his forehead, as any woman will, truly touched by hearing a man cry.

Now Álmos-Dreamer again addressed his words to the absent Risoulette. It was the final exam in all she had once taught him.

“I know it is cowardly to confess to a lady what we think in our weak, vulnerable moments…I’ll have to drink enormous amounts of alcohol in my solitude to forget the things I’m saying now. I’ll have to commit foul deeds to rid myself of these agonizing memories. I’ll have to travel far, and in foreign cities buy myself brides at midnight from their cabdriver fathers… Have myself robbed in clandestine houses kept by procuresses with eyes like beasts of prey…But I have to tell you that I despise and hate you and still I cannot live without you. You are despicable, for I know you love another. He is probably some young Budapest cabby or gambler, or a carousel operator in fancy pants whom you, instead of some older woman, provide with spending money. I detest you for finding yourself a gigolo in your youth, when you are so fine that one night with you would cost a hundred sovereigns in Shanghai…And I abhor you, for you remind me of my grandmother — like a song that bubbles up from the throat — you kill me, you daze me, in my dream you suck my blood, you are a woman who has driven a man wild, a man who until then had only known the manly, spirited, self-sacrificing kind of love…You are ever new and foreign, and I cannot find you behind the skirt flounces of desirable women in the cities of the night. And yet I’ve looked for you so long that my feet went lame…Looked among whores and nuns.”

“Poor thing,” said Eveline, lowering her arms like a wounded bird her wings.

“You resonate inside me like Negro jazz…When there’s a wedding at the sugar cane plantation and the slaves blow their mouth harps to produce a storm of dance music that makes everyone lose their minds…At other times you are a Hungarian folksong, heard on the Tisza’s bank in the moonlight at a fishermen’s tavern, when the heart is wounded, a suicidal hour…Grandfather’s waltz or a Sunday afternoon at my piano…the squeaking of mice and circus music. You are an unending howl rising from the insane asylum…You are love.”

“Please don’t hurt me…”

“Don’t be afraid. I happen to be the kind of forty-year-old man who is dying to make love, maddened by thoughts of orgies, but whose body is a centenarian’s, and has to import a street singer to satisfy his lady, while I sob in the next room…I am sick, old and mad. A used-up, tattered old hat that had once upon a time been worn at a crazy tilt by some girl at a boarding school and left behind in the corridor of the hotel where she rushed unthinking, riotous, crazed on the arm of the triumphant male…The night watchman stops to muse, as his old walking stick pokes at the hat with a numbered tag sewn in at the orphanage or boarding school…I can only crave you, crave you like sunshine that cannot be held.”