Gyula Krúdy - Life Is A Dream

From behind the cash till the woman’s tantalizing smile aimed straight at the merchant’s belly. ‘Why, we have Mr Paszmati’s favourite: peppered pork stew prepared from a young pig, and not diced into small pieces, but sliced into pieces the size of a child’s palm, which is the tastiest way to make this dish.’

‘Hmm, pork stew, you say? With potatoes or noodles?’ Paszmati soliloquized. ‘And plenty of gravy, I hope? Whew, we certainly have had some rotten weather. A blizzard hit us past Nyíregyháza and the train slowed to a crawl so that all the hip flasks were depleted. When we got to Püspökladány the cafeteria had only stale food, without any taste or aroma. They served a watered-down goulash. Instead I opted for just a mouthful of fog, knowing I’d find something freshly cooked here.’

The hog merchant fawned on the proprietress.

‘It’s fresh all right, you won’t be disappointed in that, Mr Paszmati. My staff rises at the crack of dawn, and I myself watch over them as they prepare breakfast.’ Saying this, she motioned towards the kitchen, where the response was immediate. The blue-aproned bartender left the tap to fetch a sizeable platter of pork paprikash from the kitchen, and placed it, unaccompanied by a bowl or a plate, on the table by the cash till.

‘Bring some bread, and make sure it’s an end piece’ ordered Aranka from her perch by the till.

Paszmati examined the promising hunks of meat that had their share of fat and bone, turning them in the gravy so that the bonier pieces would reveal themselves. It was not a suckling, but a young porker none the less that had gone into the making of the stew: the landlady had spoken the truth. Paszmati took out his long pocketknife to probe the bonier pieces. ‘I wish you had some green pepper for me!’ sighed the hog merchant.

Aranka smiled again, as if she had foreseen her guest’s thoughts.

‘We have no green pepper this time of the year, but we do have sweet red peppers from the Serbian gardeners in Zugló. Hey, Anna!’

The serving girl placed a portion of red peppers in front of the guest.

Paszmati took one of them and turned it in his hands a few times. ‘Looks like this one’s going to have a bite — but I can bite back.’ He used his pocketknife to slice slivers of pepper into his stew. ‘Whew!’ He exclaimed after the first bite. ‘That train should have come faster, with a dish like this waiting for me.’

The woman gave him a conspiratorial smile. ‘Why, my husband and me, we’ll do anything for you, Mr Paszmati. We purchase pork directly from the villagers, who deliver it here in their carts. We buy all our supplies from the villagers, even our peas, and not from storekeepers or market vendors who have a way of adulterating everything they touch. The villagers know us by now, and when they have a fine goose or a shapely pig, they know they have a buyer in us. Why just yesterday I bought a cartload of cabbages from a man from Szentendre, and this afternoon we’re going to pack them into barrels.’

This news made Mr Paszmati perk up. ‘Hmm, so this is the day of cabbage-trampling! Well, that is always an entertaining activity.’ With that, he went back to his pork stew, for eating can be fairly amusing too.

The fatty, delicately boned pieces of meat, the well-cooked bits of skin, flesh, tendon, in addition to the thin flank — all of which goes into the making of a righteous pork stew — with the help of the pocketknife and a piece of bread, all found their way into Mr Paszmati’s maw, much to the rejoicing of his molars that had had nothing to sink into all night long but smoky fog and a cigar-holder carved of cherry wood.

One’s tongue acquires a strange taste after travelling all night, gulping coal smoke. The gullet forgets it ever had a palatable mouthful. The occasional shots of brandy the traveler consumes here and there — provided he is knowledgeable about where to obtain the right kind of brandy — merely lull the stomach for a brief while, like a fly-by-night impromptu affair. Accordingly, Paszmati took his sweet time with the chunks of meat in his stew. Coming across a tougher piece of skin, he gave it a try, but abandoned the effort with a shake of the head, for his teeth were past fifty years old — although he had had only one of them pulled, by a rural dentist on a day when he could not allow a toothache to affect his bargaining ability at a regional fair.

He was at the stage of cleaning up the platter using small pieces of bread on the point of the knife — speared lightly, so that they can be turned over easily — when he returned to the earlier topic: ‘So this is the day of cabbage-trampling … And pray tell, who will perform this by no means everyday task requiring considerable expertise? First of all, the layers of cabbage must be evenly formed and adequately sprinkled with black peppercorns. Often, folk wonder what went wrong with the barrel of winter cabbage, why does it give nothing but a bellyache and a pain in the middle? It’s because the cabbage-trampler was not a man of sufficient weight.’ Saying this, Paszmati involuntarily squared his broad shoulders and gave the landlady a devilish smile.

She replied with averted eyes: ‘Cabbage-trampling, as we all know, should be performed by the master of the house. Cabbage is a masculine type of food — womenfolk can get by very well without it. But my poor husband is so busy that it’s unlikely he’ll have time this afternoon to trample cabbage.’

The hog dealer’s reply was nothing less than splendid. ‘And take care not to let just anyone cut the cabbage cores. You can’t use some young chit of a girl whose mind’s always on other things. You need a mature woman for cutting cabbage cores, just as you do for shearing sheep or washing intestines for sausage-making, because an older woman knows how to find enjoyment in that kind of painstaking work.’

Now the landlady leaned closer from her high perch and inquired, not without flirtatiousness: ‘Mr Paszmati, would you by any chance be interested in trampling my cabbage?’

‘Why not?’ the hog dealer replied. ‘Today my clients are still away at country fairs all over the place, so I won’t be meeting any of them at taverns and cafés before tomorrow. I was planning to visit the baths this morning, anyway. So I’ll take a turn in your cabbage tub this afternoon.’

With a conspiratorial air, the landlady and her guest parted company. Who knows what kind of hearty acquaintanceship this afternoon’s cabbage-trampling may lead to?

Paszmati took off for the baths in Buda to get his feet soaked most thoroughly. Meanwhile Aranka stuck to her post until the time when, above the clatter of plates from the restaurant fronting the courtyard, her ears registered the sweet sound of a guest tapping the tip of a knife against glass, which was most likely the drinking glass in front of him.

‘Here come my customers at last,’ Aranka said to herself, glancing at the clock that showed 11.30 — the same time, to the minute, as the train station’s clock.

Aranka liked guests who came early because they brought appetites that were not picky at all. These were the men with so much business in the capital that for breakfast they had to make do with a small glass of booze — grappa or slivovitz — before they sped off in a frenzy, as if they meant to get a lifetime’s worth of work done that very morning. So it was natural that, well before the stroke of the noontime bell, their minds’ eye started conjuring up steaming bowls of soup and red-brown roasts swimming in dark gravy, to quicken their faltering steps.

Among the early lunch crowd, Aranka’s most notable customer was a Mr Bombai. His hamster-like countenance featured a moustache like cat’s whiskers over big buck teeth that looked capable of devouring a roasted ox in its entirety. This Mr Bombai had a greying set of side-whiskers that he liked to arrange and groomed with back-and-forth strokes of a small brush when bored, until it suddenly occurred to him why he was here and he vehemently rapped the wine glass with his knife.