Gyula Krúdy - Life Is A Dream

Miss Brunszvik targeted Mr Rimaszombati.

This gentleman, quite likely past seventy years old, was the undisputed ringleader of the drunkards of Tabán.

Rimaszombati, who retained his light-rye hair colour, was a gentleman who throughout his life preferred to look out at winter storms from underneath the tavern eaves, for which reason the snowy whiteness never quite conquered his head, although his coevals, the men seen mostly around churches, if at all, were model greybeards who had become sainted in their lifetime as they neared the nether world.

Rimaszombati’s customary tone of voice recalled that of a merry traveller on a morning in early winter at a roadside inn where he has stopped for a few shots of brandy.

He was a man of compact build, with a beard in the imperial style, whose nasal septum sprouted three hairs, until this was called to his attention. His mouth had never pronounced the name of a respectable woman; his fairly numerous remaining teeth were always grinding out the names of those dubious ladies whose role in life is bestowing happiness on men. Otherwise, he devoted most of his pronouncements to the subjects of love, wine and song, as if a man’s life was to be spent mostly in taverns, passing judgement on bar maids, as one judges various wines and comestibles. It happened that fate had allotted seventy years and more to this gentleman who rolled his words, twirled his moustache, jauntily wore a monocle on a string (at first he had started sporting a pince-nez mostly to facilitate his amorous conquests), and knew by heart nearly every poem penned about the ecstasies and excesses of love.

Even past seventy fortune had allowed him to retain an office job — true, only as part-time clerk, but it was at the Royal Hungarian High Court of Justice, where he was not well known, but this position brought him respect and sympathy. When he set out in the morning, clad in his lynx coat, a remnant of times past, he coughed and hawked to let the world know, both pedestrians and drivers of carriages, that he was on his way to the office. But in the afternoon, with the taste of lunch still lingering on his palate, he proceeded to a tavern in the Tabán, where the first words he uttered were: ‘Boriska, Mariska, Juliska!’ as if each woman whose name left his lips was his lover, to say the least. He quizzed them about the events of their recent nights, their experiences and adventures, because, he claimed, he never read the papers and relied on the hearsay of tavern girls to find out what was happening in the world. This ancient ragman had tied up into a bundle all the tales told by cashier ladies, for they confessed everything to him, knowing full well that they would find absolution. Having heard out all about these women’s romantic afflictions, ailments and love affairs, he next examined their skirts, aprons and garters and handed out free advice even about details such as how much rouge to use on their cheeks.

‘You’re saying that Galgóczi hasn’t been seen in three weeks?’ Mr Rimaszombati inquired on that certain autumn day as the girl at the Green Ace set down his afternoon carafe of wine in front of him. (Rimaszombati drank it up as if it were medicine.)

‘And we’ll never see Galgóczi here again unless the Green Ace starts serving goat’s milk,’ replied the girl who was called Jolan Foamwhite, like so many other girls in this world, except that she was perhaps somewhat more emotional, sentimental, tender-hearted than other Jolans in general. Even though she wore a short skirt so that anyone who likes to scrutinize tavern-keepers’ daughters could have a good view of her ankles, and she had permitted the sacristan at the nearby Serbian church to place his hand on her hip, Jolan’s narrow forehead showed a certain mark displayed by women who live to suffer the torments of unhappy love. In her heart of hearts she was surely awaiting some stirring voice that would have caressed and warmed her, and her face would invariably flush whenever men in their cups began to explain the nature of the feelings they nurtured for her within their hairy chests.

‘So Galgóczi hasn’t been here in three weeks …’ Mr Rimaszombati repeated. At the age of seventy he still considered making friends with men through the agency of women to be a better way to success than all that useless office work. ‘One must get involved in love somehow!’ Mr Rimaszombati was wont to state whenever he noticed an incipient attraction between a man and a woman. To spoil or to heat up the affair was all the same to Mr Rimaszombati. Therefore he was most surprised that Galgóczi, ‘without a word to anyone’, had stayed away from the Green Ace these three weeks.

In any case, he hurried to reassure the tavern-keeper’s girl, whose torments had given her a cast in one eye, while her reddened eyelids spoke of midnight floods of tears. ‘I’ll make sure to find him for I do not tolerate unfaithful men among my friends.’

‘Ah, unfaithful!’ repeated Jolan, snapping up the word like a chicken does a hemp seed, for when a woman is unhappy, sometimes she can’t find the simplest word until someone says it to her.

‘Unfaithful, unfaithful,’ she hummed to herself while doing her chores, alternating between tears and anger. It must have been market day in the Tabán because more people were clinking their glasses at the tables than usual.

For this reason, after a while Rimaszombati felt it advisable to offer a few words of comfort to the flustered girl: ‘We don’t know for sure that Galgóczi’s been unfaithful.’

‘Unfaithful!’ replied Jolan Foamwhite, as if she would never relinquish this word that said it all.

When the waitress turned to go, Rimaszombati had to admit to himself that he noted a medicinal smell, such as the scent that surrounds a corpse. Could his wine have lost its taste? Outside, on White Eagle Place, the October sun shone red and jaunty.

‘I think I smell an outlaw!’ snorted Rimaszombati, as he did whenever he wanted to please some female acquaintance who saw in him only a harbinger of manhood who had lots of fine words to say about those who had sent him as their herald, while he himself had for quite some time been hors de combat in matters of serious masculinity.

‘I smell an outlaw coming,’ Rimaszombati repeated and huddled into the cobwebby bay window as if trying to catch a distant glimpse of the outlaws whose scent had preceded them on the wind.

On White Eagle Place two hanged men were being carried away, in the very state they had strung themselves up.

We have seen large crowds gather to see the various guilds march forth with their huge flags aflutter, and religious banners also attract followers when paraded about in a procession. Even a police detachment marching with truncheons may draw many onlookers. But in the entire history of the Tabán district there has never been a multitude of the size that thronged White Eagle Place on this autumn day to accompany the two hanged men, Bitchkey and Botchkay, on their last journey.

Bitchkey, in his drunken stupor, had hanged himself by means of his belt on a crabapple tree, and his bodily attire, footwear and foot-rags hung down and trailed from his stiffly extended legs, just as they had when the crabapple tree was cut down to the roots. Now the dead man was being hauled away to the place where suicides are buried, together with his tree, for nobody dared to cut down the hanged man’s rope. (Or possibly no knife could be found to cut the sturdy belt.)

At the same time, another procession turned up from a side street, lugging the door with its hook where Botchkay, a bosom pal of the above-mentioned Bitchkey, had hanged himself, also in his drunken doldrums, by means of some packing string that he had carried about in his pocket for days, cuddling it like a lover. Superstitious folk dared not tempt fate by touching the suicide so they removed the heavy door and used it to transport the body to the place of burial for suicides in the Tabán.