Gyula Krúdy - Life Is A Dream

Wineless (and wordless) men trudged past Foamwhite’s tavern where the owner himself was so crazed with wine that he had to be locked up in a room (from where he occasionally escaped, and returned days later bloodied and lame, as if he had been forced to dance in a quarry), leaving old women to ‘manage’ the tavern — two, three or four or five of them — friends of the tavern-keeper’s wife who served up the wine for the guest, and mistook the grape seeds left in the wine for fleas.

Wineless (and wordless) men passed scornfully by the wine cellars where the hair of tipplers grew long and turned a dull mould-colour, for your true lush never has time for a haircut, at most he’ll give an emphatic twirl to the moustache, to keep it from soaking up wine intended for the gullet. Meanwhile the nose turns red, no amount of frostbite ointment will help, the nose will not relinquish its bibulous crimson, and through borrowed eyeglasses the nose appears ever more misshapen in the mirror where a moment before the tavern-keeper’s girl had been eyeing herself. A true lush will not sacrifice good money for eyeglasses but would rather borrow a pair from some superannuated old man, through whose glasses the world may appear more permanent and contented, and happier …

As I was saying, suddenly you began to see men sobered and spruced up, reeking of incense, walking the streets of Tabán, men whose ears remained deaf to even the most table-thumping songs that winos locked in cellars like to wail out to attract someone, anyone to bring news of what was happening outside in the world at large. (Only Sasadi was afraid of news from the outside — it usually meant another child of his was dead, after stretching her arms in vain towards the absent father. ‘Veronica!’ screamed Sasadi from the cellar whenever he thought of his dead children and pangs of conscience made him feel like crawling inside a wine barrel.)

Surely something must have happened, if certain folks in the Tabán district now started to notice on some days the cloud-white sheen of the nanny goats grazing on the hillside, mildly maa’ing in the absence of the bearded billy goat. Yes, even without wine folks noted how bright certain spring days can be, days when the junky old cupboards and dressers creep out, as it were, on their own to keep company with the wheezing old men in the courtyard, and a little bird alights on the picket fence to sing a few songs for those who lately heard only the caterwauling of some heavily made-up tavern chanteuse, although the old men emphatically deny this. The song sparrow and goldfinch warble a different song from that of the wine-cellar songstress. And Countess Brunszvik, leader of the teetotal movement, surely must have understood what the birds were singing, for how else would she have been able to speak their language?

Miss Brunszvik lived in a two-storey house on White Eagle Place, the same house where, a century earlier at the time of the Martinovics conspiracy, the brides, fiancées and female acquaintances of the captured conspirators had gathered to confer, to pray and to endure — as described by His Worship the titular Bishop Fraknoi in his book (and a bishop is naturally more accurate writing about the adventures of young women than poets of the same period, who tend to mix up the hair colours, and never see clearly in matters of the feminine heart). For this reason, ever since then this two-storey building had a ‘feminine’ aura from which, according to some imaginations, emanated the nightingale-like strains of woeful women’s songs and plaintive chants.

The Countess Brunszvik had a major role in liberating the men of Tabán from the influence of wine, and consequently from the magic spell cast by the flashing eyes of Gypsy women, the cockeyed smiles of tavern floozies, and proprietresses of taverns who are always ready for a fling. This Countess Brunszvik was a clean-living human being of the feminine gender, a candidate for sainthood whose miracles not even the wine-sellers’ complaints could diminish.

Since the Countess was a newcomer to Budapest (with only a single relative here, a maternal uncle, a colonel, who now reposed in the military cemetery of the Watertown section of Buda), it was all the more remarkable that her endeavours succeeded without any effective intervention by her family.

She was a petite lady quite amply endowed in the region of the heart, and seemed to be one of those women born for love. Yet Countess Helen confuted the opinions of poets who, mostly counselled by wine, considered such petite femmes as the most desirable for their embraces. In fact Countess Helen was a living example of the saying that the smallest peppercorn packs the mightiest wallop. And fortitudinous she was indeed, at least in her heart and soul, for even if she did hear out the confessions of men who confused the ecstasies of wine with true love, and on moonlit nights loitered around her silent house on White Eagle Place, straining their bloodshot eyes at the cast-iron grille of the ground-floor windows, or at the balcony above while straining their feebly crooning vocal chords and capering ankles in expectation of a glimpse of the Countess — who, even if she did give ear to the spiels of these men who kept coming, under tattered clouds like warriors stuck in cellars back in the age of the Turkish wars, kept coming like rebel songsters about to put the reed of the shawm to their gap-toothed mouths, coming, like so many idle twangers on guitars, good-for-nothing strummers on the lute, moonstruck serenaders — even if she did give ear at times from her ground-floor window, left open by chance, or from her lookout on the upstairs balcony, to these sickening confessions of love (which Countess Helen thought should have been addressed to some parlour maid cornered in a dark corridor, or to a wandering witch with loose morals), she, Helen, paid no mind to these nocturnal vagabonds. And it wouldn’t have occurred to her to call on the night watchman in his musty cape for protection, for protection against the caterwaulings of these gallants on the night watchman in his musty cape. Let Sasadi howl until he gets tired. And she had the same opinion about the other candidates who, in the old Tabán tradition, emerged around midnight from taverns, heartened by wine, song and companions’ chivvying to venture forth and ‘ensnare’ the hearts of sleepless womenfolk.

It is possible, even probable, that before Countess Brunszvik’s arrival here, there were one or two little misses who kicked off the eiderdown quilt and tiptoed on a moonbeam to their window when they heard the heroes of the tavern bawling out in the piazza. There might have been some misguided little girl whose fingers reached out between the slats of the shutters if her hand was small enough. Some of these hands might have received a ring or a bracelet; others, a love note scrawled in tears, wine, or blood — or else her knight might have offered a live calling card, to be grasped by the female hand like some whip handle in a dream where she is in the driver’s seat, urging the magic steeds of passion. There were gallants who covered with hot kisses these hands reaching out from the windows of Tabán at night, without giving thought to the unhygienic acts these hands had been performing in the dead of night.

But Countess Brunszvik had never given her hand. It is equally true that she had never done what old crones in the Tabán like to do with the full chamberpot they keep on hand: toss the contents out the window at the mouths of minstrels singing down in the street.

So what did Countess Brunszvik in fact do, this early riser with her pink nose, her cheeks freshly washed with soap, her droll little mouth always hiding a secret smile, her melancholy brown eyes, her heart-shaped face, her blonde hair spun from songs and imaginings, and her soft voice — how did she manage to improve the world around her, without actually bestowing her heart and soul to reward reformed men?