The reporters pushed them aside. Zima complained to the waiter for serving such things to “the press.”
Pál picked up his steaming glass, which must have burned the skin of his hand, and tossed it back to the dregs.
Esti dropped the paper. He leaned back in his seat, horrified, and stared at him. He was thinking — and the very thought was terrible — of that red-hot liquid scalding his esophagus and stomach wall.
Gergely observed the effect and glanced at Esti. Zima clasped his hands together. Vitényi and Bolza shook their heads. Skultéty, however, who had seen some strange things in his time and was almost immune to the stimulus to laugh, released a gale of laughter into his handkerchief.
Pál noticed the laughter and as a defense against it, joined in. He too laughed, abstractedly.
“Give me a cigarette,” he said.
Five cigarettes flew toward him from the five reporters. Pál lit one. He inhaled the smoke and blew it out. The others lit up too, with the exception of Gergely, who only smoked cigars. Otherwise they all lit cigarettes. Esti too.
Pál didn’t really want to perform to order. He merely said to Zima, sitting beside him:
“I’m going to have my teeth seen to as well.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He shrugged. “Well, so that they’ll be in order. You know, so that I can chew. I’ve just got to have two at the back here out. I’ve got a first-class dentist.”
He opened his mouth wide in an unsightly gape, and showed Zima, whom he scarcely knew, the back of his mouth. The gold of bridges gleamed darkly among the various saliva-bright stumps. He cautiously poked a finger toward the two which the first-class dentist would painlessly extract.
This was still not amusing. Gergely tried to provoke him into doing one or other of his better numbers.
“Fortunately Pál’s got a hearty appetite.”
“Yes,” said Pál, “I eat thirty apricots a day.”
“How many?” asked Skultéty.
“Thirty.”
“Couldn’t you manage, say, forty?”
“Not that many. Thirty.”
He launched into a wide-ranging account, for the benefit of Zima, of the importance of food, clothing, and health. And he mentioned that he had ordered four new suits.
“Let me have a cigarette,” he said.
Again the five journalists tossed cigarettes, but they paid scarcely any attention to him. In the course of the evening they had heard on numerous occasions about the teeth, the thirty apricots, the four suits, and were beginning to find it all boring. Their quick nervous systems, attuned to immediately accepting and dismissing every horror, then registering “boredom,” could find nothing to sustain them, and furthermore they were embarrassed in front of Esti for having dragged him out to no purpose and drawn a blank over Pál. And so Skultéty fished out of an inside pocket a galley proof, Pál Mo-gyoróssy’s last article, sent from Hévíz a week before, and which the editor had naturally not used. Pál had signed it with his full noble style: Pál Mogyoróssy of Upper and Lower Mogyoród.
While Pál was giving an account of his love affairs and conquests, as if holding a rapid, cut-price clearance sale of his life, Esti took the opportunity to read the article at leisure under the table.
It was a report, a straightforward, beautifully written piece of reportage. It told of how that summer by the Balaton, an unpickable lock had been invented, all the villas fitted with it, and in consequence within twenty-four hours the burglars of the region had moved to the northeastern part of the country. At the last sentence Esti could not prevent a smile.
Gergely saw that smile and, together with Skultéty, went for Pál with inquisitorial ferocity.
“Now, Pál, what’s this about the widows and orphans of journalists?”
“Oh yes,” said Pál, turning his flushed but flaccid face. “Shall we tell him as well?” And he winked at his friends who had already heard it.
“Of course, that’s what he’s come for,” and they gestured at Esti.
“Esti, you won’t breathe a word to anybody, will you?” requested Pál in a confidential tone.
“No,” replied Esti, “not a word.”
“Well,” said Pál, and looked round. “We’re all millionaires. You are, and I am. How much do you want for one of your stories? Go on,” he said, encouraging Esti with the sort of forgiving kindliness that would overlook any greed. “Five hundred? A thousand? You’ll get it.”
“Where from?” mumbled Esti, so as to get a word in edgeways.
“Where from?” repeated Pál scornfully. “Give your word of honor not to tell anyone. Otherwise the jig’s up. Other people will be doing it.”
“Go on, then,” the journalists urged him.
“Give me a cigarette first. Look,” he said, as he struck a match, “the whole thing’s simple. Not to mention, noble in purpose. Journalists’ widows … journalists’ orphans …”
“We know, we know. Just get on with it.”
“Anyway, tomorrow you and I and somebody — we’ll decide who — will go into town by car and call on all the shopkeepers in Budapest and tell them my idea, which I’ll let them have for nothing. For the widows of journalists …”
“Never mind the widows,” said the reporters.
“So we’ll tell the shopkeepers to put in their windows signs saying, Starting today, everything 25 % off. That’s all. But you haven’t got the point yet.”
“No,” replied Esti decisively.
“Wait a bit. What will be the result? The public will storm the shops like madmen, the shopkeepers will sell out and take millions, and we, from the vast profit, will contract for only 5 percent, say; just five percent. That’s not a lot. It’s reasonable. They’re sure to agree. Do you still not get it?”
“No.”
“The point is,” and now he was whispering, “the shopkeepers will go on selling their goods at the prices they did before. That’s the clever bit. At the old prices. Now do you get it?”
“I see.”
Esti was upset. He was amazed that “it” was nothing more, so routine and mechanical. The reporters too were disappointed in Páclass="underline" he’d flopped. It had been a silly business. Hats in hand, they proposed moving on.
Pál was happy to go with them because he too didn’t think this coffeehouse was suitable, and he wanted another where there were fewer people and they could talk more confidentially. He took Esti’s arm, and — forgetting his earlier plan — suddenly promised that he’d send a Lancia for him in the morning.
Outside the summer night had cooled somewhat. It was sweet and wonderful, perhaps even more enchanting than the afternoon, which had faded so quickly. Quiet and undulating, it moved this way and that, slowly, rhythmically, in its deep peace, throbbed with its great waves which, governed by the laws of the tides, rose and fell, driving each other away by turns, adumbrating beneath them vast plains and chasms. Sparks gleamed on the bridges, wreaths of fire on the Danube and Svábhegy,* which with its points of light resembled an ocean liner setting sail. Lights flared up. Street lamps blazed as at other times, but more sharply. The roadside acacias filtered the rays of the gas lamps and cast on the asphalt a black tracery of shadows, which seemed to quiver, expanding and contracting flexibly like the mirror of the water. Budapest had become a city submerged. Wagons floated along, rocking heavily in the swell of the night, trucks turned into motorboats, sweeping noisily through the splashing foam of darkness, and the many watercraft gave wings to Pál, who swam enraptured with arms outstretched, swept along at magical speed toward his goal. He delighted in that order, that sense of purpose, that speed. And wherever the waves tossed him it was good, ecstatically exquisite, and blissful.