Gyula Krudy - Sunflower

“Watch out, Pistoli,” he growled, while he ambled down the celebrated moldy steps to the cellar, in order to take a great deep breath and in a glass siphon suck up some wine from the barrel. The wine trickling into the stone jug unexpectedly evoked Miss Maszkerádi, who was actually never far from his mind. The trickling wine sounded a feminine note, and Pistoli’s eyes bulged.

“You’re nothing but a poor little homegrown wine,” he addressed the wine jug in a scornful tone. “And Maszkerádi’s made of fire and the noblest aszú grape. How dare you, a humble local vin ordinaire , dare to imitate the regal Tokay vintage?”

Next he stood, mouth agape, in the middle of his courtyard as if he had never seen the migratory birds that now approached above the rooftops: it was as if rapidly shuttling aerial omnibuses had poured forth the swallows, like so many white-pinafored convent girls let out for summer vacation. Soaring storks inscribed huge circles and giant pretzel-shaped paths in the sky. The wild geese squatted down in the reeds, just like their relatives, the wandering Gypsy girls at the forest’s edge, when they cast their spells with twisted stems of grass, leaving behind signs for their lovers — or as it often happens, for the gendarmerie. Along with the birds of passage, it was time for the vagabonds to appear, for, with the thawing of the season, they saddled up shank’s mare to hit the highways in their seemingly aimless, tireless peregrinations from one end of the horizon to the other.

There stood Mr. Pistoli as stunned by all this as if he had been hit over the head and unable to find the culprit.

He was suddenly jealous, and as downcast as an ancient sumac tree whose sunlight is cut off by a new wall. He went and sniffed like a keen-nosed vizsla the horseshoe imprints on the loamy, earth-scented, cherry-blossom-strewn path, and thought he could pick up a whiff of Miss Maszkerádi’s unique perfume. This exotic and eccentric lady was to be his last great love, and he intended to take her with him to the other world as pure as a rosary wrapped around his wrist in the coffin.

The doves were tumbling in the air above the manor house like distant springtime memories of youth, and Pistoli, in a tragic gesture, interlaced the knobby fingers of his two hands, like branches of a lilac bush. How could Miss Maszkerádi possibly desire some other man in the neighborhood? And of all men, this clean-shaven, cheerless whippersnapper whom Mr. Pistoli secretly despised as thoroughly as he would some fledgling tenor…Pistoli was like a naive housewife past her silver anniversary, who one day discovers straw from a Gypsy girl’s pallet on her respectable’s husband’s shoulder. Yes, those men who never stop talking about women’s unfaithfulness are the ones most surprised by it.

The springtime air was as sweet as the waists of young girls bending over their flower beds, seeding, and Pistoli was ready to sob out loud in his desperation, like an old Gypsy, whose brats had got him drunk. The very saliva turned bitter in his mouth when he recalled the scene in Eveline’s garden with Miss Maszkerádi in the role of the temptress clad in white linen and the only thing he regretted now was that he had not given a piece of his mind to the confused girl who, with the characteristic unfathomability of womenfolk, had been ready to offer herself that night to any roadside hobo. At least he should have shouted in her face that he condemned her behaviour — and here his throat choked on a very ugly word — and that he despised, detested and disdained her…Instead, he had saved her, put her by like some Easter egg he could crack open whenever he felt like it. And so now he felt cheated.

As if sent by fate, on this day there appeared in the vicinity of the house one Kakuk, a drunken hobo who had crisscrossed Hungary many times, had spent nights in jails of all types, and chalked the customary signs left by beggars and vagabonds on the gates of households where the poor wanderer is welcomed, or where the dog bites. In his old age he had settled down in these parts and was wont to rest his wine-saturated, red-as-the-winter-sun, cobwebbed head for hours at a time on the stone wall surrounding the manor until Mr. Pistoli condescended to toss him a word or two.

Originally Kakuk had settled in Pistoli’s neighborhood with a different agenda in mind: he claimed to be an ex-hussar and notorious brawler, but the stout squire crushed all his ambitions. He made Kakuk mount a fiery stallion, and the famous hussar was thrown screaming right in front of the tavern called The Eagle; subsequently he had Kakuk beaten up so badly that the poor man was laid up in bed for weeks. At last the tramp confessed to being an itinerant cobbler all his life, patching and soling as he rambled the countryside. His real name was Ignatz, he had done time at the Veszprém jail as a suspected highway-man, and he ended up in Pistoli’s permanent service, as if he had sworn fealty to a gang leader.

After a while Pistoli deigned to notice the cabbage-shaped, shaggy gray head resting atop his crumbling stone wall. It was a head that had groveled oftentimes in front of Pistoli’s feet when the squire, lording it, made Kakuk kneel in the dust, or after returning from unfamiliar kitchens and servants’ quarters where he had been beaten up with stakes and poles. Just now Pistoli was deeply moved, for he thought he caught strains of funeral music approaching from the direction of the birch grove where the highway bends. The violins sobbed and wailed, the contrabass growled, hollow like fate itself; the coffin must have enclosed some bride, accompanied on her last voyage by black-clad men holding gendarme swords tipped with lemons. Pistoli imagined it was his own true love being interred in the distance.

“Don’t you want me to take a letter to some old lady or young miss?” Kakuk humbly inquired, and out of force of habit he chalked a hat on the stone fence, a vagabonds’ sign for an unfriendly house, to be avoided.

It was with uncharacteristic kindliness that Mr. Pistoli received his shirtless serf, who in his time had delivered so many billets-doux in Pistoli’s hand, enough to earn him a hundred deadly beatings. Lecherous widows, servant girls sent home from the big city, small-town waitresses, procuresses and noble ladies had received letters via this vagabond, letters that were sometimes totally uncalled for — Pistoli had simply picked the recipient as a potential paramour. This was cause enough for Kakuk to set out posthaste, clutching the message entrusted to him. He would lurk like the autumn wind around solitary houses. On bitter cold winter nights he would amble in godforsaken small-town alleys where women who had gone astray camped out in ramshackle hovels. A landlady named Stony Dinka would treat him to mulled wine, whereas the dove-souled Risoulette entreated him with clasped hands to persuade the saucer-eyed Pistoli not to harrass her any more. Both the messenger and the ladies had aged somewhat in the meantime. The owl hooted on storm-tossed nights, complexions had lost their apple-blossom pink, and fingers that used to rake through masculine hair now clasped only the prayer book.

“No, I’ll never write another letter,” replied Pistoli about a quarter of an hour later, having behind carefully closed doors instructed Kakuk in a soft voice at length about what was to be done.

The very next day the tramp was back, and tugged Mr. Pistoli’s leg which was dangling from the bed (for the squire could only fall asleep by swinging a leg).

“Back o’the garden,” Kakuk said, cryptic as some spy, before vanishing like a bad dream.

It was sunset: the trees in flower were listening for the footfalls of someone coming to pick their blossoms, while shadows, like exhausted hounds, stretched across the path. The hedge sent up a little bird, God only knows what business she had there, brooding the spring afternoon away…