“You’re having a giddy turn,” she said, and sent me to bed.
My friendship with Kornél really deepened when the first pimples appeared on our foreheads, the purple springtime buds of adolescence. We were inseparable. We read and argued. I defied him, refuted his wicked ideas. One thing is certain, he was the one who introduced me to all sorts of bad habits. He enlightened me about how children were born; he once told me that adults were yellow, tobacco-smelling, bloated villains and deserved no respect because they were uglier than us and would die sooner; he encouraged me not to study, to lie in bed as long as possible in the morning even if I was late for school; he suggested that I should break into my father’s drawers and open his letters; he brought me dirty books and postcards which you had to hold up to the candle; he taught me to sing, lie, and write poetry; he encouraged me to say dirty words, one after another, to watch girls getting changed through cracks in cubicles in the summer, and to pester them at dancing class with my improper desires; he made me smoke my first cigarette and drink my first glass of pálinka; he gave me a taste for the pleasures of the flesh, gluttony and fornication; he revealed to me that even in my pain there was a secret delight; he tore the scabs off my itching wounds; he proved that everything was relative and that a toad could have a soul just as much as a managing director; he gave me a liking for mute animals and silent solitude; he once consoled me when I was choking in tears at a funeral by tickling my side, at which I suddenly burst out laughing at the stupid incomprehensibility of death; he smuggled mockery into my feelings, rebelliousness into my despair; he advised me to side with those whom the majority spit on, imprison, and hang; he announced that death is eternal; and he wanted me to believe the wicked lie, which I opposed with all my might, that there was no God. My innocent, healthy nature never accepted those opinions at all. I felt, nevertheless, that it would be good to be free of his influence and finally to have done with him, only I lacked the strength: it seems that he still interested me. And then, I was greatly in his debt. He’d been my teacher and now I owed him my life, as does one that has sold his soul to the devil.
My father didn’t like him.
“Where’s that cheeky brat?” he burst into my room one evening. “Where’ve you hidden him? Where’s he hiding?”
I held out my arms, showing him that I was alone.
“He’s always here!” he thundered. “He’s always hanging about. Always pestering you. You eat off the same plate, drink from the same glass. You’re Castor and Pollux. Good friends,” he sneered.
He looked behind the door, behind the stove, in the cupboard. He even looked under the bed to see if Kornél might be there.
“Now you listen to me!” he trumpeted as his rage reached its peak. “If he ever again, just once, sets foot in this house, I’ll knock his block off, I’ll kick him out like a dog, and you as well, and you go where you like, I’ll disown you! So, don’t let him into my house again. Understand?”
He paced to and fro, hands behind his back, controlling his temper. His shoes squeaked.
“He’s a lazybones. He’s a mischief-maker. Can’t you make any other friends? He fills your head with nonsense. He’s driving you mad. Do you want to be a rotten character like him? He’s nobody and nothing, you know. He’ll never amount to anything.”
Kornél wasn’t allowed to show himself. He even avoided our street.
We used to meet in secret, out of town — at the cattle market, where the circus used to pitch their marquee every summer, or in the cemetery among the graves.
We strolled, arms round one another’s necks. On one such passionate walk we stumbled on the fact that both of us had been born in the same year, on the same day,and at the very same hour and minute: March 29, 1885, Palm Sunday, at six in the morning. This mysterious revelation affected us deeply. We vowed that as we had first seen the world on the same day and at the same hour, we would both likewise die at the same hour of the same day, neither outliving the other by a single second, and in the raptures of youth we were convinced we would perform our vow with ready joy, painlessly and without sacrifice for either of us.
“You aren’t feeling sorry about him, are you?” my mother questioned as I dozed in front of the oil lamp, thinking of Kornél. “It’s better this way, son. He’s not good for you. Make friends with other boys, honest, decent young gentlemen like young Merey, Endre Horváth, Ilosvay. They’re fond of you. He’s never cared about you. Just got you down, worried you, got on your nerves. How often did you suddenly wake up screaming in November? He isn’t fit for you. He’s got nothing going for him. He’s useless, has no heart. You, son, aren’t like that. You’re a good boy, good-hearted, you feel things deeply,” she said, and gave me a kiss. “You’re not like him at all, son.”
And so it was. There were no two people on the planet more different than Kornél and myself.
I found what happened a few days after that conversation all the more peculiar.
I was hurrying home from school in the midday sunshine with my books done up in their strap when someone called after me:
“Kornél!”
A gentleman in a green coat was smiling at me.
“Look here, young Kornél,” he began, and asked me to take a parcel round to the neighbors when I got home.
“I beg your pardon,” I stammered.
“What’s the matter, son?” he asked. “It looks as if you haven’t understood.”
“Yes I have,” I replied. “But you’ve made a mistake. I’m not Kornél Esti.”
“What?” the man in the green coat was puzzled. “Don’t play games, son. You live in Gombkötő utca, don’t you?”
“No, sir. We live in Damjanich utca.”
“Are you related to Kornél?”
“No, I’m sorry. I go to school with him. We’re in the same class, and he sits by me in the second row. But last term Kornél failed two subjects, his work was untidy, and his behavior was bad, but I’m top of the class, good marks in everything, my work’s tidy, my behavior’s good, and I’m also learning French and the piano privately.”
“I could have sworn …,” the man in the green coat muttered into space. “It’s strange,” he said, and he raised his eyebrows.
It also happened on several occasions that when we were out walking by the railway embankment on the other side of the woods passersby, strangers, spoke to us and asked whether we were twins.
“Look at those two,” they nudged each other, “just look at them,” and they laughed with pleasure.
They made us stand side by side, then back to back with our heads touching, and measured our height, putting their hands on top of our heads.
“A hairsbreadth isn’t much,” they assured us, shaking their heads. “But there isn’t even that much difference. Isn’t that remarkable, Bódi? Isn’t it just?”
Later on, when we had grown up and both of us were writing, there were from time to time many things that I myself failed to understand.
I would suddenly get letters from people I didn’t know, asking me to return the small amounts that they had placed at my disposal in Kassa, Vienna, or Kolozsvár, at the station, before the train left, because I’d told them that I’d lost my purse and given my word of honor to pay them back within twenty-four hours. Impolite telephone calls would accuse me of writing anonymous letters. My closest friends would see me with their own eyes wandering about for hours on end in the pouring winter rain through curving alleyways and disreputable streets, or lying blind drunk and snoring on the red tablecloth of a bar in some run-down area. The headwaiter of the Vitriol — a low dive — presented me with a bill, to avoid paying which I’d allegedly run out through a side door. Several reliable witnesses heard me in company make the rudest remarks about people of high standing, respected writers of national repute. Seconds in duels with jaunty monocles called on me, porters came with my visiting card, girls with the flower of their innocence broken unfolded before me my vows and offers of marriage. A stout, middle-aged lady from the provinces also arrived, called me te, and threatened me in her local dialect with a paternity suit.