Gyula Krúdy - Life Is A Dream

Miss Brunszvik appeared in the graveyard when she thought it was time for the convalescent to return indoors and stop conversing with autumn leaves, clouds and the dead. Miss Brunszvik, goodness personified, took Galgóczi by the hand and led him back to the house on White Eagle Place, where, like lessons in a schoolroom, Temperance slogans covered all the walls. After all, Galgóczi has been saved …

But Jolan refused to let herself be forgotten. Words of encouragement heard at the Green Ace, as well as her own intuition led her to take certain steps in Galgóczi’s direction. One night, lying in her bed after all was quiet at the Green Ace, she broke into heartrending sobs. Had Galgóczi died, she could not have wailed any louder; but staying alive as he did, without coming back to her, Jolan’s sobs were more plaintive than any sort of female weeping could be. She learned to cry non-stop, at length, setting up a keening that proved unbearable even for those apothecaries of feminine tears, priests and undertakers. Jolan managed to introduce into her sobs all the howling pain of love-tormented womankind ever since the world began. Her sobs were enough to split ears, to crack bones and brains and infuriated even the mildest of men who heard them. Her keening continued uninterrupted, like some wild beast bellowing after her mate, like a mad dog howling at the moon, like some relentless magic incantation that leaves not a moment’s peace to the hearer. Jolan had stubbornly made up her mind to succeed through her sobs, even if it broke her.

After she had mastered the art of crying, she went out one midnight and stood under the balcony where she had last seen Galgóczi shrouded in a white sheet, and launched into weeping, like some spirit that had stumbled there from the beyond, her voice allowing Galgóczi no respite, lest he believe, as he had already begun to believe, that during this illness of many months’ duration he has expiated all his sins on earth. ‘No, not all debts have been settled!’ signified this female weeping night after night, without saying it in so many words. Malicious souls, who like to amuse themselves at other people’s expense, encouraged Jolan to persist, as they crossed White Eagle Place at night, and hurried away. Mr Rimaszombati, who could have done something to smooth things over, was of the opinion that it was more or less all the same (for him) whether Jolan laughed or cried; he had done his best to instruct her about kissing, but she would not listen to good advice. When a woman takes it in her head to follow her own counsel the results are rarely salutary. After all, love is always the private affair of the one who’s in love. The one who drew the Joker from the deck! thought Rimaszombati, as did so many other men, when women nearly break their hearts in pain.

Oh young women, you whose saffron and ivory legs step so carefree in the Tabán and elsewhere, prancing through life as you do over the cobblestones, whether sent from heaven as meteors or surfacing from earth’s depths to linger here awhile: Oh young women, each of you may encounter some malheur , when in your hottest love affair you find yourselves having to compete against some powerful opponent, whereas you had envisioned your love running a smooth course, regular as the moon. Such an opponent, one to upset all your expectations, is wine, wine that has engendered so many thoughts in this world, good and bad alike. Indeed, who could tell if people would be ultimately happier getting drunk only on love and not also on wine? But wine can be an even greater enemy of love when it runs out, vanishes, never again lending its ecstasy to love, which had arisen precisely because of wine. Alcohol may be love’s accomplice, but when accomplices fall afoul of each other, foul play must follow, one accessory to the crime murdering the other.

This is what happened in the case of Galgóczi and Jolan. Galgóczi, when sobered up, free of the wine in whose ecstasy he had loved Jolan, as fate would have it, also sobered up from his infatuation, simply because wine no longer transported him to the point where Jolan always seemed the loveliest, most exquisite, most desirable girl in the whole world.

‘Just one more meeting, and I can die in peace,’ Jolan said, in letters and in messages sent in frenzied desperation, since on the sixth of November Galgóczi was sighted in the Tabán promenading in a new green suit like some schoolboy who has passed his exams with flying colours. The same day Jolan draped a small mourning veil over her chapeau even though she was not quite certain if it suited her outfit. But she dressed in black now, for women will don black whenever given a chance. Jolan wept tears as she darned her black stocking, as if she were already trudging through the rain, on her ‘journey to the beyond’, as all sentimental women since time immemorial call their road to the final assignation. To go out on a date is no small thing even in everyday life; but a last rendezvous: it’s better perhaps not to set out because surely every doorpost, little dog, and wizened, grimacing ancient hag will insist on getting in your way.

Mr Rimaszombati accompanied Jolan at a distance, to be on hand in case there was trouble in the old church where so many had already rendezvoused before. He witnessed how Jolan, at some distance from St Andreas, who was lugging a weighty beam of the crucifix, as well as from St Jacob, who was leafing through a great big tome, had dropped to the flagstone of a side altar, her knees apart, her waist bent, as if no longer kneeling but altogether collapsed, like some little ditty that could fly only this far, to die here and leave the rest to the saints who will see justice done in her stead. Forsaken fiancées kneel like that, sunk into themselves, in seemingly eternal abandonment at the side altar while at the main altar proceeds the wedding that should have been, as promised, her occasion to say ‘yes’ in front of the priest, sacristan and wedding party. Not even the hawk-nosed, cocky yet teary-eyed best man in attendance, wearing his old jacket thrown over a shoulder, remembers to bother with the abandoned betrothed. (Mr Rimaszombati, as he later explained, was present on the premises just in case he was needed as witness to a clandestine marriage.) There lay Jolan by the side altar as, the stone saints of the old church will readily attest, deceived fiancées had always done.

Galgóczi arrived somewhat tardily to this ‘final’ meeting, as if after all he would rather be elsewhere. But, as we may see in his case, only wine-drinking men can sit back and calmly linger as long as they like at some establishment while someone expects them for a ‘final’ meeting somewhere. Whereas the man whom wine did not empower to be cruel will still set out, although he knows in advance that no good can come of this meeting. Thus wineless, cowardly Galgóczi, all his former strength gone, walked into the church and stopped under the organ to wait until Jolan had said all her prayers. Jolan now rose and noiselessly stepped to Galgóczi’s side in the silent church that was empty before evensong.

‘I only wanted to say goodbye, that’s why I asked you to come …’ she faltered behind clasped hands and cast a timid sidelong glance at Galgóczi’s haggard face that, it was said at the Green Ace, was not unlike that of a hanged man cut down from the gallows. (As indeed Countess Brunszvik had cut Galgóczi’s rope.)

Galgóczi trembled and remained silent, as men are wont to be at times like this.

‘I thank you for coming when everyone said you wouldn’t. What business could you have with a girl you’ve abandoned?’ Jolan continued and again looked at Galgóczi, who still had not spoken, although appearing to be extremely moved.