Esti spoke to Pál about going home, going to bed, and having a good rest. Pál seemed not even to hear him.
When they arrived outside police headquarters Esti took his leave. Pál seized his hand.
“Not going, are you?” he asked sorrowfully. “Are you leaving us?” and his eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Now? But you ought to have seen everything,” and he would not release his hand.
So Pál pulled him inside.
Esti was touched. He lived so solitary a life in Budapest that he might well have been in Madagascar or Fiji, and had never experienced such warmth of friendship. He went with him.
The company burst into the building with a great to-do. Detectives, clerks, and officials all greeted Pál, whom they had known for twenty years. Many others came and joined the shifting group, in the middle of which stood Pál clinging to Esti’s arm. Inquisitive strangers smiled sympathetically as they addressed questions to him and followed him beneath the echoing vaults. Pál was not surprised at this. He found it natural that everyone “was together” on that night, which was not like the rest, and that others too were aware of the pleasing change thanks to which epoch-making new plans flashed with unimpeded lightness in his brain. While Gergely and Skultéty were discussing with the office on separate telephones at the same time what ought to be done with the poor fellow, Esti turned his attention to something else. He observed the idyll of the night, the policemen’s rooms bathed in green light, the hard plank beds on which policemen slept, swords at their sides, on rough mattresses, men stabbed in brawls awaiting medical reports, the healthy, smart, mustached constables who, untainted among so much corruption, watched at an iron rail over vagrants picked up by police patrols, the occasional headscarved nursemaid, street girls of almost aristocratic appearance, and youthful pimps, and he thought of how Pál’s finest years had slipped by in this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief.
They were walking on the Ring Road again. Pál and Esti were in front. Pál no longer needed to take Esti’s hand or arm. He felt safe in releasing it. Esti went without it being held. He was drawn by pity. Behind their backs the five journalists were arguing loudly. Bolza, kindly and bald, was of the opinion that Pál should be put into a cab straightaway and taken home to his family. Gergely objected, saying that he could injure someone — he was a public menace. Skultéty agreed. Pál, on the other hand, obstinately insisted that he had to meet a woman at the West station at half past one, and that at half past two he had to address at least five hundred colleagues in the Erdélyi wine bar concerning his plan for the widows and orphans of journalists and the 25 percent and 5 percent with the Budapest shopkeepers. In any case, the opinion that he should be “put away” that very night brooked no contradiction.
Meanwhile they went into another coffeehouse. There they drank sweet white wine. Ten minutes later they were in another, drinking császárkörte * liqueurs. Another ten minutes and they were in a third, drinking red wine. Everywhere they smoked cigarettes. Everywhere they were known to the waiters, those faithful proletarian friends of the press, who migrate from one coffeehouse to another as journalists do from paper to paper. Everywhere they were objects of uncommon attention. Pál was still not content anywhere, none of these places was any good, he had to keep going on and on, driven by some religious passion from the fourth coffeehouse to the fifth. The coffeehouse is the journalist’s place of worship.
At this point Gergely and Skultéty, after a lengthy professional consultation, decided to telephone the psychiatric department of St Miklós hospital. A Dr. Wirth replied that they should bring the patient in, he was on duty and at their disposal. At the cashier stand in the coffeehouse they discussed for some time the means of doing this, because as crime reporters they wanted everything to go smoothly and tastefully.
They were in that big coffeehouse where Esti had once caught sight of Pál, deeply immersed in himself, at a quarter to five on a No vember afternoon. He and Pál now went and sat at that same table. On this occasion, however, the plateglass window had been lowered, and the night was flooding into the quiet, deserted coffeehouse as if melting into one with it. The two of them leaned their elbows on the brass rail. For a while the proprietor stood by their table, listening with furrowed brow to the poor szerkesztô úr,* and when he was called away bowed to them more deeply than usual, in a clear expression of sympathy. Kindly, bald Bolza prepared to leave. He had three daughters and so worked day and night and was always up early. He raised his bowler hat to Pál without a word. On this occasion he did not say “see you soon.”
Vitényi and Zima went with him.
Pál dismissed them scornfully. As Gergely and Skultéty were still plotting at the cashier stand, he and Esti were left alone.
“I’m going to write,” said Pál.
“Good.”
“Novels, short stories,” he went on, and with a sort of desperate movement leaned toward Esti’s face. “I’m leaving the paper. I’m through with being a reporter. It’s beneath me.”
He looked out into the night. A cab was rumbling along the wooden roadway.
“The wheels of the cab are ‘roaring,’” said Pál. “Roaring.” He emphasized the word. “What a fine language our Hungarian is. That’s the way to write. They’re not ‘going,’ they’re ‘roaring.’”
“Roaring,” repeated Esti, and he, who weighed every word so many times, became bored with it, and brought it up again, could not deny that he too liked the word.
“But what am I to write?” Pál burst out in a faltering, plaintive voice.
“Simply anything. Whatever interests you. Whatever comes into your head.”
“Tell me, for example, is this all right? The woman comes up to my apartment. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” said Esti, who had by that time a splitting headache.
“You know, she’s got brown hair, but not black, or chestnut,” Pál pondered, “her hair’s a sort of chocolate color. Her eyes are like those little blue flowers, what are they called?”
“Violets?”
“No, no,” Pál shook his head.
“Forget-me-nots?”
“That’s right. Forget-me-nots. And she’s like fire,” he went on so wildly that he was alarming. “Her body’s warm, but I don’t like it. I sprinkle her thighs, her back, with ice-cold eau de cologne until she’s quite cool. And I put a garland of those little blue flowers on her head. She’s like a dead bride in her coffin. Then she goes away.” He thought for a moment. “How am I to put it? What shall I say when she goes?”
“What people usually say: ‘Good-bye.’”
“No,” Pál did not like that, and an idea crossed his mind, “I’ll say to her: ‘Sincere tenderness of heart.’ You can seduce any woman with that. She’ll have a feeling that she can’t resist. Do you hear? Like this: ‘Sincere tenderness of heart,’” he enunciated with a peculiar, crafty smile, staring at Esti, and his eyes were like fire. “Nod if you feel it as well. Do you feel it now?”
Esti could not feel what that woman was supposed to, but he could imagine what Pál must be feeling, and he nodded.
It was a relief for him when Gergely and Skultéty linked arms with Pál and took him into the street. Pál would not hear of a cab. He protested to his journalist friends and let go of their arms time and again. He looked for Esti, speaking across to him as Gergely and Skultéty led him along.
“Esti, I’m going to learn Italian. This very night I’m going to learn Italian, Esti.”
At the West station he had fortunately forgotten about the chocolate-haired woman. Not, however, about the Erdélyi wine bar.