Gyula Krúdy - Life Is A Dream

The door opened and a young miss wearing a red hat advanced into the room.

The lively noise of the outdoors intruded into the room through the doorway along with this otherwise rather unremarkable young woman. Instead of a priestly cassock, she wore the inexpensive outfit of a laundress, over which she had thrown a little cape resembling bat wings. The fingers of her grey glove had been darned more than once. The young lady sported a kiss-curl over one ear …

‘I was told you needed a nursery maid,’ the girl in the red hat announced with a merry laugh, and stopped in the doorway.

All the old co-workers in the office raised their heads and were cheered by what they saw. But when they noted Mr Sortiment’s gloomy visage, they, too, turned serious and assumed an air of indifference, although they kept their ears open.

The little miss stepped forward: ‘I am Betty. I was told I could be nursemaid at this office …’

Sortiment looked the girl over, and spoke in a somewhat forced tone with a touch of humour that conveyed authority and was the equivalent of a pay raise: ‘Mr Vacsok, do you by any chance need a nursemaid?’

The editor of Miscellanies gesticulated with stubby fingers in a defensive way, but before he had a chance to utter a word, the girl, without removing her red hat or her bat-wing cape, spun around and landed in Mr Vacsok’s lap, seated as he was in his armchair stuffed with newsprint, and put her arms around his hamster-like neck. She spoke in a wheedling, breathless, irresistible voice: ‘Oh yes you do, please say you need a nursemaid, my life depends on becoming a contributor to Sunday News . My guardian is a head waiter who spends his earnings in a gambling casino each night; my stepmother is a laundress who sends me out to pick up dirty laundry from the customers … What else could I be, but your nursemaid, when I feel such a strong poetic vocation?’

Before Mr Vacsok, the editor of Miscellanies, had a chance to reply, the editor-in-chief with the diminutive desk spoke up again, but this time as if with a touch of bitterness: ‘Well then, let us proceed in order. Mr Murocski, grand master of puzzles, for whom there is no insoluble puzzle in the world, what would you say to a nursemaid? Captain Bosnyak, our military editor, do you feel the need to have your nappy changed by a nursemaid? And you, Mr Palotai? Speak up, tell us if you need any help to handle the picture captions.’

While editor Sortiment was saying the above, the surprising young lady immediately leaped on the lap of each gentleman addressed and began to caress his hairy neck …

‘Yes, yes, say you need a nursemaid!’ she entreated, whispering then shouting into the ear of the gentleman called upon, so that her bat-wing cape seemed to flutter. At this moment the door opened as if some everyday visitor was about to enter, and in came Ligetsarki, the swindling short-story writer, just like a character on stage, on cue.

The editor’s voice sounded hollow by the side of his little desk: ‘At last here is someone who is qualified to decide whether we should hire Miss Betty as nursemaid of the editorial office — or should we look for an older woman?’

The short-story writer looked around in confusion, until he glimpsed the enthusiastic young lady, who cried out in ecstasy: ‘Ligetsarki, you cannot tell me to be a laundress like my stepmother. You are the noblest soul in the land, I have been a reader of your unsurpassable works for a long time. Oh, all those anonymous letters I wrote you after reading a story of yours!’

The writer looked at the editor, awaiting Sortiment’s response.

And Sortiment replied with a laugh, in a firm voice: ‘Ligetsarki, I still owe you for your last piece. Here is the money. Do me the favour of interviewing the young lady about her past, her goals and plans, before I hire her as nursemaid for our office. I recommend the patisserie on Franciscans Place for the purpose.’

The short-story writer, who had expected to be thrown out by the quick-tempered Sortiment, accepted the five-forint banknote and offered his arm to the young lady.

‘Please wait one moment, my dear author,’ said the prospective editorial nursemaid. ‘I still have to sit in the lap of the editor-in-chief …’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ replied Mr Sortiment, and once more began to rub his foot, this time the left one, with the right. He cast a benevolent, smiling, congratulatory glance at his old co-workers, who were all seized by a sudden urge to dip their noses into the inkbottle to placate the boss.

After all of this, who can explain why Sortiment, editor-in-chief of the Sunday News , put on his tail coat around midnight in his small room on the ground floor, and shot himself through the heart that very night, when on the previous day seemingly everything had gone to his liking?

(1926)

Mangy fox collars, ghastly tattered overcoats, trousers ready for the spindly legs of scarecrows, faded moustaches resembling dripping drainpipes dangling from old thatched roofs, conscience-bitten, thinning beards, blinking, cobwebby eyes, heads of hair knotted by autumn wind and fog, buttonless vests, neckties shrivelled up like withered leaves, and hollowly resounding cellars of the moth-eaten old Tabán district in Buda: this was the setting of the miraculous pledge made by Kuvik, the vendor of street song broadsides: he would never again, of his own free will, allow another mouthful of wine down his gullet.

Old Tabán, with your chimney smoke like so many sighs stuck in the throat, subterranean groans like those of a narcoleptic, sobs drowned by the whirr of a sewing machine, treacherous dreams born of moonlight that rapidly age and turn helpless in daylight, nameless, forgotten sorrows, aimless loiterings and even more aimless sessions of sitting around! — this is where it came to pass that Lenke Mariancsics, who was as blonde as the new moon and whose sky-blue eyes had for years been casting glances into the leafy arbours of taverns as well as through the windowpanes that tremble with the hum of monotonous song, in order to rouse sleeping acquaintances from their spellbound damnation in the corner nooks of wine shops and introduce them to that long-forgotten merry cup of wine that would make them burst into song … One fine day this same Lenke Mariancsics renounced taverns forever, and announced that wine was both stupid and without taste.

Oh Tabán! With your streets winding uphill towards unknowable dead ends, doorsills that only make one stumble, ailing doors that are ready to fall off their hinges at the touch of an unpractised hand, furniture that had been new in the days of your grandmother and before, sofas wasted away to a painful thinness, arthritic armchairs, mirrors that had lost their quicksilver and reflect only former faces, teapots with spouts like dog tails, glasses yellowed by medicines, antique icons depicting children, squatting crones harbouring fleas unused to hopping; desperate, limping ancient roosters, courtyards that moulder into dust at night like decaying graveyards, deathly tired oil lamps, female topknots that had long ago forgotten their famed beauty and the compliments they drew, blouses yellowed with apathy, swinging on fraying clothes lines, mynah-birds that had long ago lost their ability to talk, women shrunken into ornamental initials in prayer books without ever having known the magic of a night of love, men cursed in childhood and aged into crotchety old freaks, goldfinches and blue-throats that never sang a note, not even in springtime, virgins that did not take care of their garters even when they were in convent school, marriageable, barren girls whose dreams of running water never delivered their promise, and aged janitors who wrapped their blue uniforms in ghostly winding sheets — all in old Tabán! — where it once happened that a portion of the populace, among them the gingerbread vendor and candle-maker Guguli, the town scribe Arkus, Poturicsics, the captain of ships, and Weinsong, the ‘landlord’, one and all made a pledge to stay away from wine and other alcoholic beverages, as if the devil himself had cast a spell to make them all want to end their days in open-eyed sobriety, without trembling knees and twisting ankles, without vests torn away in frenzy and with their belts in place, and not like those miserable drunkards found dead in Tabán, hanging from a withered tree in the orchard or from a hook in the cellar or else collapsed in the back of the house, on the dung heap, or in ditches, with gaping mouths not even stray dogs deign to lick. The bright sun of Indian summer sermonized against alcohol over the Serbian orthodox church on Greek Street that marks the boundary of the Tabán, and one abstemious man was seen climbing uphill on Golden Rooster Street where since time immemorial no one had walked in a sober state, and without first tearing away a piece of wood from a fence, railing or palisade in drunken defence against the myriad arms reaching up from underground.