Gyula Krúdy - Life Is A Dream

The two deceased men were loners who had not a soul in the world other than each other. Not even a lover could be found to accompany them, to weep for their miserable fate. Rimaszombati had seen events more remarkable than the wilful demise of these two orphans who had obviously decided on a mutual pact, but he still huddled wordlessly for quite a while at the window that opened so seldom to air out the Green Ace, watching the boot heels and slippers on the feet of that mass of humanity — men, women and children — shuffling past White Eagle Place. This malevolent spectacle so discombobulated him that he found himself striking a third matchstick to revive the half-smoked cigar he had thriftily saved. ‘I knew that fellow!’ he pronounced with a shrug, seeing Bitchkey and the crabapple tree taken away. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he muttered when he saw the brown door, with its upper part still showing traces of the letters C + M + B some parish clerk had chalked there on Epiphany day, now passing by the window, with the dead man strung up on the hook.

On occasions such as this old crones come forth from all kinds of stove pipes and dusty old tomes and put on black robes and jackets of faded green, airing underskirts that not even fleas bother to visit any more, in honour of the ill-starred pair of lushes; after them came in their blonde and autumn-gold gowns the younger women (who always manage to show up no matter how closely they are kept under lock and key), stepping past the dead men and their still live memories with an unfathomable indifference, blithely ignoring the fact that they were in part responsible for the demise of those two. Then darkness fell and one could hear those invisible people stopping in the streets, these who, ever since the world began, like to discuss the events of the day. One voice stubbornly saws away like some woodsman on a sawhorse, and his companion grunts periodically, just to say something; another unseen one enthuses, planting his back against the mouldy wall of a building, unwilling to move before fully expounding his detailed opinion on suicides; a third one has a voice that creaks like a key grinding the lock of a gate in the evening, a voice to make the hair stand on the back of your neck while its owner passes judgement on the hanged men. These invisible men, these windbags who stick their noses into everything, were muttering in the darkness outside the tavern that now it was Rimaszombati’s turn, he was the next in line among the town drunks to hang himself in an outhouse (so they opined).

‘I’ll let the lovers go first!’ was Rimaszombati’s courteous reply to these invisible ones who really start to speak up after the third or fourth cup of wine, when the bibulous man begins to commune with his soul.

‘I think I’ll let the lovers precede me in the order of hanging!’ declared Rimaszombati, afraid that he had not quite got the words right, concerned as he was, as an affiliate of the Royal Hungarian High Court of Justice, always to employ the correct terms of expression.

‘In any event, Jolan, let’s get spruced up and go to Countess Brunszvik’s soirée, as long as we’ve been invited,’ he said to the tavern-keeper’s daughter who, in spite of her unhappiness, loved to attend social gatherings.

Mother-of-pearl buttons adorned Jolan’s grey, so-called ‘coachman’s’ cape with wings that made her look like some foreign lady who had wandered into the Tabán by mistake. This same coachman’s cape could have been seen in metropolitan Vienna. A fragrantly scented soap had scrubbed away the onion smell from her hands (that not even the most exquisite of tavern-keepers’ daughters can escape). A red velvet beret strained to contain her spray of blonde curls, those tendrils having an ardent young life of their own, untamable by human hand. ‘That’s right,’ quoth Rimaszombati, ‘the young lady’s mane is like a horse’s tail. There’s no crupper that will keep a filly’s tail from slapping you around.’ This bon mot was intended by Rimaszombati as a compliment to Jolan’s hair and we only mention it in order to give some idea of the rest whispered into her ear as he, the proper cavalier, escorted her to the house on White Eagle Place while managing not to be flattened by the autumn wind or the coughing fits that seize you by the throat when you venture forth from the hothouse air of a tavern. Jolan’s black velvet shoes fluttered their butterfly wing laces to the tattoo rattled out by her heels. ‘I’d like to stay by your side until the end of the world!’ stammered Rimaszombati in solemn devotion, hanging on to the girl’s arm for dear life.

At the town house on White Eagle Place the guests were greeted by the wedding march from Lohengrin , as at some church wedding. Countess Brunszvik artfully rendered the tune on a reed harmonium, always so soothing for the soul.

Next on the programme was Mrs Kornicky, former alto soloist at the Bazilika, now performing only at Sunday musical masses at churches in Buda, yet still pursued by jealous intrigue. Even the mildest choir masters became incensed by the wild and unbelievable rumours her colleagues circulated about Mrs Kornicky, although down in the nave one would like to believe that only angels dwelled up there in the organ loft, behaving angelically. Well yes, they did sing like angels, especially Mrs Kornicky and her like, who had studied with Károly Noseda or at Kanitz’s school, but beyond that their activities could not be called angelic. At the town house on White Eagle Place this alto diva sang her heart out, lavishing all her vocal treasures in the cause of teetotalism, while her aigrettes quivered like the head-dresses worn by horses drawing a funeral hearse. At the end of her song the singer spat, following the custom of foreign divas performing at the Budapest Opera House.

After the vocal rendition the indefatigable Helen Brunszvik and her harmonium accompanied a violinist. The player was a local music teacher who only a day or two earlier had been one of the most inveterate drunkards of Tabán, comparable in the amounts of liquor consumed to the bassoonist of Krucifix Street, whose apartment even on the tenth anniversary of his death yielded up secret bottles of brandy stashed in the cupboard. But our music teacher, pimply-faced, tentative-handed, hoarse-voiced, scrawny and tubercular-looking, had been converted by Countess Brunszvik, and now played a movement from a Mass on his violin, the piece he had once played for the Bishop at the cathedral in Veszprem, when he had been in love with a fat soprano about whom all he remembered was her tight-fitting yellow skirt with a hand’s breadth of blue ribbon edging. That skirt had driven him to excessive drinking, and in return for his conversion Helen Brunszvik had promised to find a similarly attired lady for the musician. Was there anything that this blessed creature would not do to make a talented man give up the drink that leads to an early grave?

This performance by the singer and the violinist had a beneficial effect on the audience whose delight in entertainments for the heart and soul was all the keener when the admission was free.

Among those attending were some who had taken the pledge earlier, such as Guguli the gingerbread-maker whose shop had been in the same location for the past century and a half, with the sign on the door reading ‘Apprentice Wanted’ these same 150 years, until Guguli came to realize that his business had had one flaw all this time: namely, that his earnings got left behind at the taverns that were found in such abundance in the environs of both Buda and Pest, especially at the fairgrounds and in the neighbourhoods frequented by Guguli while peddling his merchandise. He had as many adventures as any stall-keeper, but as a rule he never remembered how these ended for at each fair he managed to find the booth that sold the best wine and there he would forget all.