“Have I woken you?”
“Not at all.”
“I've written a poem,” said Sárkány, like an excited emissary from another planet. “Will you listen to it?”
Without waiting for an answer, he straightaway read out, rapidly:
The moon, that pale lady of the sky,
Kisses the wild, sable night.
He has drunk champagne …
“Lovely,” murmured Esti.
The remark disturbed Sárkány. He acted like one interrupted in mid-kiss. He gave him a cross look. Once he realized, however, what Esti had said, a smile of gratitude spread across his face.
Esti asked his friend:
“Start again.”
Sárkány started again:
The moon, that pale lady of the sky,
Kisses the wild, sable night.
He has drunk champagne and his somber, tousled hair
Enfolds her …
He was holding in his left hand a page of squared paper torn from a notebook and pressed his right hand to his face as if a tooth were aching slightly. Thus he read.
This boy looked like an unhappy first violinist in a Gypsy band, dark and passionate. His pale face was crowned by a shock of jet-black hair. His mouth was red, almost as red as blood. A brass ring shone on his hairy index finger. He wore a narrow tie. A cutaway, purple waistcoat. A worn but pressed black suit. Brand new patent-leather shoes. He used an orchid perfume. The whole room was permeated with it.
Esti listened to the poem all through, eyes closed.
The day before they had been for a walk together and had admired the moon above the tenements and railway warehouses of Ferencváros.* Now that moon reappeared behind Esti's closed eyelids, in his darkened eyeballs, as in the sky the previous night. There floated the moon, the moon in the poem, somewhat crudely painted, as was the fashion of the 1930s, a little flirtatious and overdressed, but much more beautiful than the real thing.
“Magnificent!” exclaimed Esti when the poem came to an end. He jumped up from the couch.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Better than Crazy Swing?”
“No comparison.”
“Swear?”
“I swear.”
Sárkány was still throbbing to the pulse of his poem. He felt that a tremendously important event had occurred.
Esti too felt that. He rummaged round in the disorder of his rented room. As he searched the floor for his socks he asked:
“When did you write it?”
“In the night. As I was going home.”
They were silent for a while.
Sárkány turned to him:
“Didn't you write anything?”
“No,” said Esti gloomily. “Not yesterday. Where are you going to send it?”
“To Független Magyarország.”*
He sat down at Esti's desk to make a clean copy in ink.
Meanwhile Esti slowly dressed. As he pulled on his trousers he read the literary section and poetry in the morning paper. He moistened his face slightly. That passed for a wash with him. He was so attached to his individuality that he was loath to wash off the layers that accumulated on him in the daytime. He considered people who bowed to the fetish of excessive cleanliness devoid of talent.
He used neither brush nor comb. He ran his fingers through his hair so that it should be disheveled in a way different from that of the night — feathers from the pillow were sticking to it — and arranged his curls in front of the mirror until he could see in it the head which he imagined as himself and was happiest to consider his own.
Sárkány, busy at his copying, was humming a popular song.
“Hush,” said Esti, nodding toward the door, which was obstructed by a cupboard.
Behind it lived the people of the house, two elderly ladies, the principal tenants — enemies of subtenants and of literature.
They both became solemn. They looked at the cupboard and in it saw reality, which always made them feel helpless.
“What shall we do?” they asked in a whisper.
Before them was a day, a new day, with its boundless freedom and opportunity.
For a start, they went downstairs and sat in the nearby restaurant, the dining room of a hotel.
There they were still themselves.
The dining room gleamed white. The mauve light of arc lamps rustled on the freshly laundered linen tablecloths, the untouched, undefiled altars at which no sacrifice had yet been made. Waiters bustled about, shirtfronts gleaming, fresh before work, like escorts at a ball. An elevator rattled between the walls of the hotel. The half-open door gave a glimpse of the foyer, leather armchairs, palms. A chambermaid yawning with the divine promise of a chance love affair. They reveled in the morning still life. They imagined that when there was no one there but them, all that was theirs, and as they imagined it, in fact it was all theirs.
Neither of them was hungry, but they decided to have lunch just to be done with it. On the strength of his new poem, which he could take to the office at three that afternoon, but without fail between six and seven, Sárkány asked for a loan of two koronas on his word of honor. They had rolled fillets of anchovy, mopping up the oil with bread, haunch of roe with cranberries, and vanilla creams. They drank spritzers and each smoked a green-speckled, light Média.
Noon was striking by the time they reached the Ring Road. Budapest, the youthful city, was glittering. The early September sun enveloped the facades of the houses in sheets of gold. Their heads baked in the hot sun. The sky was blue, a pristine blue, like the ceilings of newly painted flats, still tacky and smelling of paint. Everything around them was so new. This was the time when the new school term was starting. Primary school pupils were going around with satchels on their backs, clutching transfers they had been given at stationery shops.
Suddenly Esti and Sárkány stopped.
A young man was approaching them, his back to them, going backwards, crabwise, but with great skill, at a very swift pace.
On top of his head danced a cheap straw hat. He wore white trousers and a gray coat of thick material with flesh-colored rubber bands at the cuffs. He twirled an iron-tipped stick.
A moment later they too had turned round and were making for him in the same fashion, at a smart pace.
When they drew level with him they burst out laughing.
“Hello, you idiot!” they called to him, and embraced one another.
At last they were all three together, Kanicky, Sárkány and Esti, no one was missing, the circle was closed, the world was complete; the club was in session, the Balkan club, the prime objects of which included the free, courageous, and open practice of such eccentiricites.
The passersby looked ill-humoredly, with a certain contempt but also an undisguised interest, at these three cheerful young men, these three frivolous, immature boys. They didn't understand them, so they hated them.
Kanicky spat on the asphalt. His saliva was black. As black as ink.
He was chewing liquorice.
The liquorice was in his left pocket, and in the right was a medlar, in a paper bag.
They made for their favorite resort, the New York coffeehouse.
On the way Sárkány read his new poem to Kanicky. There was a bedroom in the window of a furniture shop, two wide poplar wood beds, made up, silk eiderdowns, pillows and night tables. In their thoughts they got into the beds wearing their shoes. They imagined at their sides putative spouses, as big as titanic china dolls, with bouffant hairstyles and eyebrows drawn in India ink. All that was so farfetched and improbable that they were ashamed of the fantastic idea and dismissed it as a subject for a poem. They went into a pet shop. They bargained for a monkey and inquired how much a lion would cost. The shopkeeper saw what kind of customers he had to deal with and showed them out.