That he could register at once. He stood rigid for about ten minutes, however, as if expecting world revolution to change the incontestable decision of fate and the banker to give back his gold coin.
In the coffeehouse they were waiting for him as a savior. Two messengers, who had come back and wanted their money, were dunning Kanicky. He tried for a while to explain by rational arguments that they weren't entitled to any, then took an aspirin, dashed of his sketch under the watchful eye of the messengers, and sold it, also under the watchful eye of the messengers. He even brought money back and tossed some to his friends.
They went off to Sárkány's, in Mária utca, as he was expecting a letter from the kindergarten teacher. They went to the Kanickys', where they drank tea. The family lived in one enormous room. One of Kanicky's sisters was painting, the second was playing the piano, while the third, all the time the visitors were there, sat facing the wall, goodness knows why. The father, a likable, kindly old man, was sitting writing in the middle of the room with the sobriety of age, dipping his pen in the inkwell, carefully tapping of the excess ink, and taking no notice of the roaring din about him. They went downstairs after the gate was shut. Kanicky was reciting loudly from The Tragedy of Man.* In a dark square, a peasant who was a coachman or something, whip in hand, came straight up to him, put a hand on his shoulder and said:
“Tell you what? I'll give you back your fifty fillérs, but give me the halter.”
“No!” replied Kanicky. “I need the halter.”
Esti didn't know what the fifty fillérs and the halter were all about, didn't know whether this was actually something planned or something unexpected, and felt nervous. The black rags of night lay about him. He would rather have been back at home, lying by himself on his couch. He despised himself, despised his friends too, but couldn't bring himself to leave them. The sense of foreboding came over him which he had known in childhood when he'd felt that he was asking for something forbidden. Beneath the gas lamps, people, stupefied by the day's work, stared into his face as if paying attention to him, came after him with noisy footsteps as if following him. He was glad when they went into the Rabló.
The pianola was playing the overture to Tannhäuser. József Gách, his cousin, the medical student, put both his hands to Esti's nose and made him smell them. He'd done his first dissection that day. Faltay, the leather-sandaled Tolstoyan, was eating semolina pudding. Bisszám, the bearded young theosophist, with a face as red as an apple and teeth as white as porcelain, looked warmly into their eyes and urged them to love Nature and live in harmony with the Universe.
For that, they thought, they had plenty of time, and called into the coffeehouse again.
There the elevated, intellectual drinking was now becoming a carousal. The second team had taken its place on the gallery, youngsters of eighteen or nineteen. Over espressos with rum and Egyptian cigarettes, Putterl, little Hajnal, and young Wallig were setting up a polemic periodical, of the highest possible quality, against ossified traditions, the Academy, and the old guard. Next to them Ab-mentis was writing words to music and singing his first line: Oh, lágy madárkám. Instead of lágy he could have gone with a two-syllable, iambic word, and so tried the line Oh, kemény madárkám.* That he couldn't use either. As he sang he tried to find a new adjective which would do both for the text and for the little bird. The older generation was represented by Erdôdy-Erlauer. He was sitting hunched in the first cubicle, staring at his writing paper, on which all that he'd written all afternoon was Such is my life … And then he'd been unable to go on. He didn't know what his life was like, couldn't find anything to compare it to, which wasn't surprising: Erdôdy-Erlauer's life wasn't like anything; that was exactly how his life was.
They left them there to their manuscripts, their grief-filled lives. They strolled along the Danube embankment, round the Keleti station. In all parts of the city they picked up would-be writers who were wandering in the dark as if performing an all-night service: Exner, Szilvás, Dayka the Neo-Kantian, Moldvai, Czakó, and a few more besides, who likewise had something to do with the arts and the intellectual sciences: Orbán the music teacher, Csiszér, and Val-entini too, who must have been a cabinetmaker or something. This storm-swept little group drifted around the houses of Ferencváros at about three in the morning.
On the corner stood a girl of the streets. Exner spoke to her and the rest surrounded her. They allowed no opportunity to pass of studying the depths of life and, in the meantime, of showing of their well-informed state. They addressed these women with a superior, amiable informality, though they were usually much older than themselves, at least of an age with their mothers' women friends, whose hands they would politely kiss at home with a deep bow. This disrespectful libertinism increased their self-esteem.
They talked about something. A dialogue took place between the men and the girl, interrupted every few moments by the laughter of the group. In the middle Exner flourished his jaunty walking stick. The girl replied quietly.
Esti stood apart from them. He didn't want to become involved in that game. He thought it both tasteless and immodest. But he knew that part of the world better than any of them. He knew those streets at all times of day and night because some kindred horror drove him there, often in such a way that at home he jumped out of bed and ran there. He had known that quarter early in the morning, when there was no one about, on Saturday evenings between nine and eleven, when activity was at its peak, and on sweltering days at the height of summer between one and two in the afternoon, when the girls in their finery gleamed from the clinging heat like cheap sugar cakes. He knew the houses one by one, the doors and windows in which lamps burned and were extinguished. He knew the men too, who hung about here abstractedly, as if looking for something else, and scuttled in looking at the ground so as at least not to see anything else, and then the unfeeling and stupid, who openly inspected the goods on sale, the fat, lonely old gentlemen who puffed at their cigars in holders as they speculatively eyed the prostitutes walking the other sidewalk, and then with sudden decisiveness, as if something were pulling them on a string, made for a chocolate-colored gate. He knew the special expressions of the region, which constantly met his ear, concerning the objective details of the profession. Above all he knew the women, personally or by sight, the pleasant ones and the brutish-dulled, the ladylike and the uncouth, the tall and the short, those that had pink scars or bites like caterpillars on their chins, or who had dogs on leashes, or wore glasses, or the nightmares that sometimes appeared toward dawn, double black veils covering their faces because they had no noses. He knew this girl too, whom his friends were now entertaining: he had often seen her going this way, had watched her, kept an eye on her.
The girl took Exner's walking stick and set off slowly down the side street. The group followed her. Esti too trailed after them to see what else would happen. They rang at the gate. In they went, all eleven.
Inside, in the low, ground-floor room, the din was like that in a house on fire when the brigade arrives. They shrieked and cried out because of the strangeness of the situation. The woman was afraid that the police would charge her with disturbance of the peace and scandalous conduct. She hushed them, but to no effect. Five of them sat on the bed, so that it creaked and all but collapsed under their weight. The “marquis” spread out his arms and in rounded periodic sentences preached to the woman that she should flee from pollution, return to a better way, then blessed her as his daughter and called her “a violet.” Exner looked at her glue-backed photographs. Sárkány rummaged among her belongings. Czakó lifted the lid on the red glazed pot that stood on the iron stove, in which he found the remains of her dinner, cold beef stew with cold tarhonya,* which was being kept for next day.