Gyula Krúdy - Life Is A Dream

The clock struck two in the church steeple, and in the still of the night one could clearly hear the earlier actors around the tower yielding their places to the new performers of the night. Shadows changed shape as their terms of duty expired. The shadow of the tower shifted from where it had sprawled before. It was followed by the transformations of the yellow-stained underwear hung out to dry in various courtyards. The newborn on the midwife’s sign started to screech, whereupon the door flew open as if by clockwork and the midwife stepped out, her little chapeau slapped on askew, a mantilla around her neck, and with the baby now inside her mysterious bag she began her rounds from house to house — where would she gain admission? The wretched young man retired from the balcony, his sheet trailing in his wake like a cloud.

By now everyone was tired of listening to Galgóczi night after night just to help him find a way out of his severe malady. ‘Incurable’ was the verdict passed by the nocturnal folk Jolan sent over at closing time from the Green Ace to White Eagle Place. Galgóczi, given permission to appear on the balcony, repeatedly apologized to his listeners and recounted the tale of his enchantment, the same old song. He burst out in tears when Jolan sent him a medicine man, although in days past he loved to hang on to the tail of this wizard’s cloak, roaming through far-off districts in search of undiscovered taverns, for this itinerant scholar’s main occupation was visiting each and every one of the capital’s 3,240 restaurants, wine cellars and taverns in order to write down in a pocket journal his observations about the specialties of each.

‘We have already been to 240 taverns,’ said the wizard, from below the balcony. ‘That leaves only 3,000 more! Don’t you feel like continuing? I know a wine cellar near the old Obuda cemetery where not even the crow flies.’

‘I made a promise never to enter a tavern again, and may I break a leg if I ever set foot in one!’ whispered Galgóczi.

‘So you made a promise to the old lady?’ the wizard inquired sotto voce . (Although he was getting on in years — some claimed he had been sighted in the Tabán a hundred years earlier — he also liked to make women appear older, once they were past their first communion, no longer schoolgirls, and going to church for reasons of their own.) ‘If you made a promise to a woman, I have a way of absolving you. I will simply carry you on my back across the threshold of the tavern — just as I used to give you piggyback rides in the past every time Golden Rooster Street proved too steep for you. Come on, jump down, and I’ll catch you.’

This wizard — whose origins, home and family have remained a mystery in the Tabán over the last hundred years, who was forever on the move, in dream and in waking life, rain or shine, but mostly in nasty weather when he could not stand still — this wizard would surely have helped Galgóczi escape, had it been solely up to him. True, he would have taken him away for ever, for he thought ‘something was rotten in the Tabán’ ever since that philanthropic ‘skirt’ Miss Brunszvik had set up camp in the neighbourhood.

But not even this former drinking buddy, the wizard himself, could liberate our young man from his enchanted state, still beset by the shivers, crushed by illness, spouting words familiar to no one, as if some stranger had crawled inside Galgóczi’s skin.

‘The devil is inside him. He must have swallowed the devil in an unguarded cup, the way Kerschanz the barman swallowed the corkscrew. He will never crack open another bottle,’ opined the wizard at the Green Ace where Rimaszombati sat mournfully at a table by candlelight like some old outlaw and Jolan crouched sniffling in a dank corner, counting the years she still had left to live. ‘I’ll be a straw widow for two more years, then I can die in peace,’ she said to console herself. Rimaszombati merely emitted an ill-smelling groan, something he had never dared in this restaurant, and shifted his weight from one elbow to the other. And so the wizard soon vanished without a word of goodbye, for he had many a tavern left to haunt because of the curse that lay upon him.

‘Another day, another hope gone!’ said Rimaszombati, who was now refusing all food and drink, as the all-seeing door of the Green Ace closed behind the wizard. ‘I can understand why some men get tired of living when they become unable to resist their fate.’

Jolan kept sniffling: ‘How could Uncle Rimaszombati have grown tired of living? You’ll always find other pals to play pranks on!’

‘But never again the youth, love and wine that your friendship meant to me when my moods served as the viola playing the melody that brought you two together, I’ll never again see the likes of old acquaintance like that!’ moaned Rimaszombati. ‘Oh, won’t you please put your little foot over here, on my heart.’

That meant he desired the tavern-keeper’s daughter to fill up the wine glass, the one that bore the initials R and J flanking a heart, etched into it at the last Tabán fair. ‘What good is drinking by yourself, Uncle?’ asked Jolan.

Galgóczi, learning to walk again, liked to stroll in the churchyard, near the spot where the flood of 1838 had washed away the dead and their coffins, leaving behind empty grave pits as mementoes for careless men to stumble into. Some of the local men, especially in their seasons of intemperance, had slept for a spell in just about every one of these unoccupied graves; only a stranger would send up a scream stumbling into some abandoned hole, and keep screaming until some night watchman came to his aid with a sacristan in tow, who handled ladders and wax candles in the neighbourhood. At one time or another Galgóczi had fallen into one of these pits, but he never called for help except when someone else fell on top of him and started to heave up wines consumed at unfamiliar taverns. Otherwise he would wait until dawn.

But this time Galgóczi avoided falling into a hole, although nearing the church he had such a bad attack of vertigo that he felt like plunging into the earth head-first, in mid-stride, before he put his foot down. In fact the spell cast on him still prevented Galgóczi from taking sure steps, without halting and groping uncertainly in mid-stride, hesitant foot trembling in the air as if he did not know where to put it. The spell also kept him hearing voices behind his back, and all around him, voices of people he of course could not see.

Jolan would only show her rainy face peeking around a corner, like moonlight hiding behind the clouds on Hallowe’en. As yet she had refrained from speaking to Galgóczi, while he staggered about, but some of the dead, who had survived even the flood, spoke to him all the more. The red marble memorial plaque of a burgher named Rottenbiller, set into the wall of the church, was addressed by the crazed Galgóczi in the following manner:

‘Mr Mayor, your Honour, if it be true that repentant souls receive forgiveness from their fellow humans while still in this world, then I choose to remain among the penitent. Although I am too poor to make amends for all the wrong I have done, and cannot take back all the lies I have based my whole life upon, I do promise to stop lying and to live a wholesome and righteous life from now on. I will not stray from the path of decency, which will be all the easier since I shall never again take a drink of wine.’

What did Rottenbiller reply from the wall of the church? No one knew, not even those busybodies who lurked in the wake of Galgóczi’s footsteps as if here were a dying man about to bury his treasure in some hole.