The articles that he wrote were not about aggravated robbery, bank swindles, or arrests, but stories about himself and his fellow men, things which perhaps had not actually happened, only might — poems, novels — in short, he was a practitioner of the stricter profession of writing.
He’d never before even set foot in that coffeehouse where the crime reporters smoked little, nervous cigarettes, hanging on the phone at about two in the morning, shouting into the mouthpiece to the duty stenographers accounts of rapists, murderous servants, and monsters who had exterminated their families, spelling out their names and those of their victims, or where they dozed until first light on the worn plush sofa, yawning, cursing, and keeping watch on the endless series of the nation’s dying, so that when an aging politician or an old and distinguished writer finally had the goodness to die, they could call the night editor to have the lead columns, set weeks beforehand, framed in black and oozing with fresh consternation and tears, inserted in the paper.
He looked around with unfamiliar eye.
Esti was a tall man of powerful physique, strong in appearance but inwardly soft and gentle. His watchful blue eyes constantly reflected alarm. His gestures were limp, hesitant. In his lack of confidence he was always inclined to let his opponent have his way. His skeptical spirit was ill at ease. His sensitivity used to be of such a degree that formerly he could have burst into tears at any moment over anything, at the sight of a battered matchbox or a tired face, but over the years he had schooled this inherent shakiness of nerve, hardening it to the point of harshness and consciously harnessing it to his art like a driving force. All he wanted was to see and feel. This was the one thing that kept him alive and to some extent bound him to the fellowship of men, together with the fact that he was afraid of the ultimate requirement of death. In his home, therefore, he barricaded himself behind medical books, washed his hands in disinfectant before meals, was appalled by and attracted to the sick and the sickly, the ruined and the special, and sought the opportunity of seeing deadly diseases, perhaps in the knowledge that if he could not overcome death, at least he could look into its entrance hall, and he was in general morbidly aroused by dreadful things, dramas small and great of annihilation, of destruction slow or swift, because he hoped that nonetheless he would be able to descry something of the moment when the unknown foot tramples us and being imperceptibly drifts into non-being.
Now too this was what had brought him there.
When he heard the news on the telephone at home he slammed the earpiece onto its hook, put out the light, left the manuscripts on which he’d been working in disorderly heaps on his desk, and rushed to the journalists’ coffeehouse.
His friends were installed beneath a chandelier: its half-burnt-out bulbs drizzled onto the company an inhospitable reddish light. In the thick, pungent smoke he could scarcely make them out. Gergely extended his right hand, in which a light Media glowed in a cigar holder.
Esti shook hands with his colleagues — Gergely, who had phoned for him, Skultéty of the long, sallow face, Vitényi, whom he was meeting for the first time, Zima, the German journalist, and dear, bald Bolza, who as a joke greeted everyone with “Lo.”
He left Pál Mogyoróssy for last.
Pál, it seemed, was pleased that Esti had come. He immediately stood up and waited while he shook hands with the others, and then would not release his hand for a long time, warming it in the velvety, glycerine-softened palm which was hotter than Esti’s own. He leaned toward him slightly too, as if intending to embrace him, to lay his head on his chest.
“Esti,” said he, in a quiet, hoarse voice, “it’s really good that you’re here as well. I need you tonight,” he said with a look of gratitude. “I was waiting for you.”
That took Esti by surprise.
The two of them had never been close friends, though they had known each other since childhood. Their work and spheres of interest had called them to different areas. In all their lives, therefore, they had scarcely exchanged more than thirty or forty sentences, and those too of disjointed words such as “Hello, what’re you up to?” “Nothing much.” “Good to see you, bye.” Esti, however — only now was he aware of it — had a secret sympathy for him. It suddenly came to him that in the course of the twenty years that had gone by while their youth was fading, he had, despite himself, been observing him and had paid more attention to him than he’d thought.
Above all he had been intrigued by Pál’s boyish ways, which had preserved his exterior from apparent aging. He also liked the fact that he was an inexorable listener, who sometimes went weeks without speaking to anybody and never talked about himself. His financial problems, which were almost considered a glory in that set, he never mentioned. His suit, his shirt, his brilliantly polished finger-nails were always immaculate. He said nothing about his ancient noble family. In addition, he cultivated his shrewd professionalism to a high degree but with a certain dif dence, and though he treated people with fastidious politeness, he knew how to remain aloof. Consequently, Esti had involuntarily felt himself honored if Pál, with a barely perceptible lordly gesture, invited him to his table in a wine bar; he would sit down beside him and look at him for a couple of minutes but would soon go away, because Pál would not, on his account, forsake his obdurate, apparently enduring, silence. He would drink like a fish — wine, pálinka, whatever came his way. He used to “put away” a huge amount, and was almost constantly drunk. This, however, did not show on him. He merely became somewhat paler: a waxen mask would spread over his face which served rather to intensify his grave appearance.
All this Esti recalled so quickly and suddenly that at that moment he could scarcely have analyzed it into its component parts. Then he saw two further images, two scenes clipped long ago from films, which had not faded in his excellent memory. Once — it must have been twenty years previously — Pál had been drinking champagne in the Orfeum, in the small hours, and in the light of the arc lamps had his hand on the cellulite-flabby thigh of a yellow-skirted danseuse on whose face was a beauty spot, larger than normal, which was obviously covering some infection or wound. The other image was less significant, but still germane. A couple of years before, at a quarter to five one November afternoon, Pál had been sitting idly in the plateglass window of the big coffeehouse in the Ring Road, alone, lost in thought, holding a bamboo-framed newspaper in his hand but not reading it, while Esti, passing on the sidewalk right before him, tapped on the window student-fashion. Pál did not hear this and kept staring into space, but all the way home Esti wondered what Pál could have been thinking of.
Now Pál gestured him to his table with that grand, scarcely perceptible movement. Esti sat down. He asked what was new. But no one replied.
From then on the five reporters paid attention only to Esti. Pál was no longer the focus of their interest, as he had been the moment before, because they knew what they knew. Now they would have liked to see the surprise, which they themselves had painfully and with creepy pleasure drunk to the dregs, the horror, and the laughter spring up again on Esti’s face, as well-worn anecdotes acquire new charm if they are told to others.
Esti’s face gave nothing away. He lowered his head toward the floor, whether in embarrassment or arrogance. He picked up a newspaper from the marble table to hide behind.
From behind this he took just one glance at Pál. He was more restless than usual, and his face was a bright pink. It looked as if he had had more to drink, and stronger stuff too, than was good for him.
The espressos were brought, all seven together.
They were hot, undrinkably so. At least a hundred and forty degrees. The vapor condensed on the inner rims of the glasses in fat drops.