Gyula Krudy - Sunflower

When he reached ground level he broke into the verbunkos , a traditional soldiers’ recruiting dance, and embraced Kakuk.

“I’m getting drunk as a lord and I never want to be sober again,” he shouted. “Go get my cart. Move it, Kakuk, if you hold your life dear. Wine, I want wine.”

Growling and staggering, he leaned against the gatepost and waited until Quitt arrived, the one-eyed Jewish carter who hauled Mr. Pistoli about whenever the urge to roam seized him. Bells jingled, hanging from the necks of his horses. Sad little jingle bells, that rang out over the highway like the entreaties of a mendicant friar.

Pistoli hoisted and squeezed his hulk onto the cart’s forage rack. He was determined, tough and energetic, like one setting out to commit murder. He whistled for Kakuk, who hotfooted it after the cart like some canine.

The cart flew, as if blown by the breeze. It swayed and reeled, heaving Mr. Pistoli’s bulk from one side to the other. He cackled or cried, as the mood seized him. At last he started to snore like a wounded wild boar. Even the man on death row has to sleep.

For the third day now, Pistoli had been riding across the landscape of The Birches.

During his time he had visited all of his old hangouts, the taverns where he had once brawled, administered and received beatings. At the same time he said his farewells to former lovers, as if preparing for a very distant destination.

This journey revealed that Pistoli had not had more lovers than any other man who had spent his life in this sunflowery, tranquil, impassive land crisscrossed by highways. Just as in autumntime when women winnow, the wandering winds sometimes carry off both chaff and seed alike…Pistoli’s lovers were the same as any other man’s. Except other men forget these women as one forgets a song after the carousal is over; at the most, a bitter taste remains in the mouth on the morning after, as one contemplates with distaste the muddy boots. Whereas Pistoli never forgot the women who were kind to him. He would recall their words and gestures even three days later, when he would be already well on his way to recovery, taking the cure via the back alleys leading to out-of-the-way pubs where the beer tastes best, or else he would sit around in front of roadside taverns musing and admiring the red glow of wine in the sun, taking his delight in the birdlike song of the wench dipping water at the well. And he would go about wielding a crooked cherrywood staff on which he skewered fallen leaves like so many uncomprehending hearts. He would stop from time to time and laugh his horselaugh when he recalled some quaint oddity in his late drunken nights, on the back roads meandering toward taverns with names like The Linden Tree or Green Tree, or toward some girl’s room reeking of cheap patchouli.

For he even got to know the kinsfolk of these loose girls, some of whom had asked him to be godfather to their child. He acted as sagely as the roadside crucifix that absolves the highway wanderers’ every trespass. The music played at fairground barbecue stalls, the flutes at midnight serenades, a familiarity with feminine foibles, contempt for the world, which he shook off like rain fallen on his hat’s brim — all this had made him acquiescent and resigned to the way things were. Rarely did life whoop it up inside him; he mostly went about purring like a cat rubbing against your feet. When something pained him unbearably, he would run off, until like a lost dog, he picked up the right scent, the trail of wisdom.

He found Stony Dinka in the same place where he had left her ten years before. Nothing changes in these parts: women either look like Mrs. Blaha (“the nation’s nightingale”) or else like Queen Elisabeth. And hearts are as alike as inscriptions on headstones in the graveyard. (“One lived 72 years, another 83. Isn’t it all the same, where one spends that extra decade: in hopeless love or on death row?” mused Mr. Pistoli, skulking around recently widowed women in village graveyards.)

Stony Dinka owned an inn overrun with wild grapes out near the limits of a small town, the csárdá known as The Rubadub. In the past Pistoli had crossed the threshold both at cock’s crow and to the howling of dogs in the dead of night; he had arrived here to the thrumming of clangorous cimbalom music, ready to take Stony Dinka to a wedding — or else as cautiously as a construction worker climbing high up on a tower. At The Rubadub, Pistoli could always count on a hearty reception. “His heroics live on in memory,” as Pushkin sings of Zaretzky. He had especially distinguished himself in bowling — he was the best in the entire county — winning vast quantities of kegs from folks on outings from Nyíregyháza, tradesmen sporting Kossuth-style hats and bureaucrats of the county water regulation bureau, who affected checked pants. But he won Stony Dinka’s favors only after “beating out” Pista Puczér, editor of the weekly Awakening . Editor Puczér, a man of short stature with a big bushy beard, the peppery, fiery village prank master, had from times long past staked some claim to Stony Dinka’s heart. His rowdy behavior, his constant brandishing of the fokos (ax-headed staff), and his peacocklike screech had more than once turned what started out as a most promising May picnic into general mayhem. To Dinka’s reproaches all he said was:

“But I’m faithful to you. And keeping the faith is golden.”

Whereas Stony Dinka knew for certain that Pista Puczér had approached and propositioned not only her serving maids (who wore red slippers on their bare feet with a purpose after all), but all of her girlfriends as well. But she could never catch the wily editor in the act, and send him packing. All those henhouses, kennel bunks and haystacks knew how to keep their secrets. And so Pista Puczér persisted, rolling his hypocritically faithful eyes in the grape arbors surrounding The Rubadub, much as Pistoli rolled his iron bowling balls, whenever the outcome of a match was in doubt. For the very same reason, Pistoli was the only man Editor Puczér had never thrown out of The Rubadub, although in the kitchen he had repeatedly grumbled in front of a flushed Stony Dinka:

“Are you cooking again for that windbag? Sooner or later he’ll run off to America.”

When the journalist Puczér began to swagger around The Rubadub, wearing a skullcap and smoking a long-stemmed chibouk pipe, Pistoli at last decided to get rid of him. His decision was followed by action. He sent one of his village familiars, a red-skirted Gypsy gal, to seduce Pista Puczér in the pantry, leaving the door ajar so that Stony Dinka stumbled upon the pair at the critical moment. Her screams brought the whole bowling party running, and P.P. had to flee in partial undress toward Nyíregyháza, pursued by broom-wielding serving women.

After that Pistoli was lord of The Rubadub. But he no longer participated in bowling tourneys, in fact he hardly showed his face among the guests. Instead he sat by himself in the innermost room playing the flute, talking to wine bottles, toasting Stony Dinka (née Jolán Weiss)’s aged parents who, in the medium of sepia-tint photographs, graced the walls of this quince-scented room. These onetime furriers in the town of Szerencs had labored with unceasing diligence stitching untold numbers of lambskin vests, jackets, coats, for they had fourteen children to raise. This made him meditate about life and death, and he came alive only when the clatter of smashed plates signaled a fight among the clientele in the taproom. Then Pistoli took his iron-studded, lead-weighted bludgeon and began a god-awful thumping on his inner room’s door, bellowing oaths he had learned from convicts on the chain gang. Other than that, he kept as quiet as a hospitalized invalid. Normally he would turn up at Stony Dinka’s only after having been ejected from twenty other pubs, after at least a dozen women had derided him, kicked him in the forehead, deceived him, rolled him in the tar and feathers of various torments, flashed him what the village madwoman flashes at the jeering children, poured water on him from upstairs windows, and finally put him out of the house. At times like that he went to bed early, before Stony Dinka called for the last round at The Rubadub. Half asleep, he would still hear the guests bawling, only to feel infinite scorn for those good-for-nothing carousers.