Gyula Krudy - Sunflower

“Good night, sweet song of youth!” whispered Stony Dinka, and timidly caressed Mr. Pistoli’s gleaming, pale forehead.

Stony Dinka was indeed a peculiar woman: she loved Mr. Pistoli best when he, like a tusked beast, like some prehistoric creature, rooted about and wallowed in the field of dreams, snoring in three or four different tones. Had she lived in that distant era when primitive humans fought dragons in caves, Stony Dinka would surely have been the lover of the dragon that lurked about the settlement. She loved to stare at circus strongmen, lanky vagabonds, stalwart shepherds and bandit-faced tramps. But she did this unobtrusively, for she was a woman…Yes, she would have loved to be married to a giant, whereas fate had assigned as her lawful husband a man who was small of stature, with an apelike gait. Around the tavern the poplars, all stairways to heaven, roared in the wind, long-legged herons strutted in the wetlands, while Dinka took delight in Pistoli’s enormous muscles. In the sleeping man’s presence she no longer felt modesty’s girdle constraining her waist.

Pistoli woke with a start, as one returning from kingdom come.

“What did you do with the amulet I hung around your neck? The one that was consecrated twice at the Pócs chapel, and I even had an old Jew bless it for me?”

“I gave it away…” replied an embarrassed Pistoli. “That is, it was stolen, charmed, wheedled away from its rightful place over my heart. But I’m going to get it back, because ever since then I’ve had the worst luck.”

“Oh, those worthless hussies,” lamented Stony Dinka, with the profound scorn of one who alone understood the female sex. “How many decent men’s lives have they wrecked and made miserable? Why can’t every cracked-heeled hussy be driven out of Hungary, so that good men can have some peace again in this country.”

When Pistoli said his farewells, he realized Stony Dinka’s forehead was just as clear as Eveline’s. The two women did resemble each other, after all they were natives of the same region, had bathed in the flower-strewn waters of the Tisza River, shared the same long-dead ancestors, and seeds germinating in the same soil had nurtured both of them. Their eyes had followed the turning of the same windmills on the horizon, their ears had listened to the cry of the same wild birds, as girls they had danced the same dances at harvest time and at feather-plucking bees. They had the same slightly Slavic way of pronouncing certain vowels, and they had grown up hearing the same folk songs. The same April showers had washed away the springtime freckles from their faces, and lumps of earth in this corner of The Birches were equally well acquainted with the bare heels of both Stony Dinka and her ladyship Eveline Nyirjes. Ah, how alike women appear when you consider their heels! In the summer, when even young ladies went about barefoot in The Birches, the soil did not make any distinction between the soles of peasant lass and young miss. — Why shouldn’t Eveline and Stony Dinka resemble each other, when the geranium happened to be the favorite flower of both! Mr. Pistoli felt a tremendous sense of relief.

“Not even Eveline’s foot could be whiter,” he thought, as he took his place in Quitt’s cart.

He called Stony Dinka over to the cart’s side, and, as if confiding a secret, whispered the following in her ear:

“I’m going now, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever meet again, my heart. I won’t hold you to be faithful to me when I’m in the other world. Nor will I return to haunt you, for I’ve played the white-shrouded ghost enough times already in my life, whenever I had to frighten off superstitious women or cowardly husbands. I want you to go about your business as calmly as ever. Don’t forget to take your mares to the Nyíregyháza stud; and I know you won’t neglect to dilute last year’s wine…Alas, I have too little time left to help you with that. By the way, you should dismiss your serving girl Fruzsinka, for I caught her wearing one of your shirts. Don’t ever let your little daughter, who’s being brought up by your Szatmár aunts, visit this region. It would be best if she found a job at the post office when she grows up. Preferably far away, somewhere in Transylvania, where no one knows her mother. And take care of yourself. Your feet still have their snowy white looks, and I can’t detect any signs of those unappetizing varicose veins on your legs.

“Your hair still has its sheen, for you’ve always taken care to shampoo and comb it. Keep taking those baths, especially in the rainwater that you save in the pantry. You know, if you keep your eyes downcast, they sparkle more when you look up. Don’t laugh too loud with open mouth, because you have a yellow tooth that shows. Try to be quiet and composed, like a lone blackbird. At your age, what men like is a dreamily murmuring voice, like a bumblebee humming in an autumn vineyard. And remember, there’s only one decent man in the whole county, and his name is Andor Álmos-Dreamer. Make sure you never wear your stockings inside out! And now farewell, my love.”

He kissed Stony Dinka on her forehead, whereupon Quitt started to shake the reins, like a village storekeeper driving a cart.

After many a mile of lumpy-bumpy highway, when village steeples like so many whip handles appeared on the horizon, announcing that a tavern must be nearby, the one-eyed Quitt looked back at his passenger:

“So, how was it?” he asked, in the deep, slushy voice of Jews from the Nyírség region.

“Oh, I like’em zaftig like that,” replied Pistoli, who preferred to affect cultivated airs in lower-class company.

“Stop talking Yiddish, you know I don’t understand that. Tell me, Pistoli, did you beat up the little woman, or did she beat up on you?”

Pistoli replied with drooping spirits:

“I’m done with fighting.”

“Then you haven’t got much longer to live,” said Quitt, and went back to contemplating the horses’ ears. When they came to the Süvöltö oaks that guarded the local sands like great shaggy komondor sheepdogs, he looked behind him once again, timid and paling, afraid that his passenger already lay dead in the back of the cart…

“Where to, Fanny Late’s?” he asked, mumbling into his beard.

Pistoli linked his hands behind his neck, pushing his hat forward. He meditatively eyed the graying driver.

“So, you think we owe Fanny Late a visit?…Well, if you think so, Quitt…If that’s what you believe…I guess she does deserve a kind word or two…”

Quitt nodded twice.

“Yes, she’s been good to us…Even when you took a knife to her, and all the times you broke her heart…she was always good to us.”

Of course, Fanny Late, too, was a tavern-keeper’s wife, for where else could Pistoli camp out if not at some roadside inn, where of an afternoon the cat stretched out in the warm ashes, the wine jugs slumbered in the taproom, the flies hung motionless from the ceiling, and the keeper’s wife sat by the window to mend her little son’s pants…For awhile Pistoli would sit in silence like a blackbird in its cage. Noisily sipping his wine he would contemplate his hands as they lay on the tabletop. He would keep nodding pensively at his ring finger that was somehow never without a ring from one of his women. Then he would start in with his lies as the woman sat there in silence. At times he believed his own lies, and this made him supremely satisfied.

“What day is it today?” he now asked Fanny Late, entering the tavern known as the Zonett.

She kept on kneading her bread dough and answered without looking at Pistoli, as if she last saw him a day or two ago.

“It’s Saint Florian Martyr’s day. Fair day at Nyíregyháza. All the horse dealers will be here by nightfall.”