“When I was a boy I heard that he kept gold in the drawers of his chest and that he stuffed his mattresses with thousand-korona notes. How much of that was true I don’t know, but it was a fact that he was made of money. He lived like a typical cottager. He wore a blue guba, a pörge hat, and boots.‡ Smoked foul tobacco in a clay pipe, lit it with matches that made a terrible smell. In winter he would sit dozing on the bench of the banyakemence, wrapped in his suba, like a bear sleeping its winter sleep.§ Then when spring came he would settle down outside the house, on the wooden bench, and sit there until autumn. He didn’t say a word to anybody. Just sat in silence. Sat there as if he were sitting on his money.
“The old man was dreadfully mean. For all he cared, the whole world could rot. True, he spent money on his daughter. But she was his only child. Apart from her he had nobody. He’d buried his wife a long time before.
“Young Zsuzsa went to the convent school, learned French, and played the piano. She wore a hat, like all our girls. She was pretty and unhappy. There was no way that she could find her place in our accursed society, which had so much artifice and so many unfathomable rules and regulations that no schooling or etiquette could list them or even adequately cover the subject. If anyone spoke to her she blushed to the ears, and if anyone of ered his hand she turned pale and withdrew hers in alarm. She would smile when she should have been solemn, and vice versa. But what did that matter? Despite it all, she was gorgeous.
“You say you only saw her once or twice? She didn’t really go anywhere. She lived with her silent father and became as silent as him. For the most part she hid indoors. If she went into town she avoided people. She was permanently embarrassed. For instance, not for all the tea in China could you have got her to go into a cukrászda and eat a szerecsenfánk.*
“For a long time she didn’t marry. Yet she had so many suitors that she could scarcely manage to turn them down. The problem was that she didn’t know where she belonged. She looked down on peasant boys and they didn’t dare to approach her, while in the young men of the so-called gentry she saw gold diggers and in their company she was ill at ease — overcome by respectfulness and disdain together, like a sort of stage fright. Actually, do you know what it was? It was the historic stage fright of her emergent social class, which had not previously played a leading role on the stage of history, whose name wasn’t even in the program, because it had always approved or disapproved only in the background, and always anonymously.
“On Sundays she used to go to the szagosmise† at half past eleven in the ancient Franciscan church. I saw her there several times. Oh, she was such a lovely creature! In summer she wore a white dress with a red leather belt and carried a red silk parasol through which the burning Alföld sun would filter, tinting her pale little face. She was like a lily under a Bengal light, like a posy of wild flowers, white and red, cowbane and poppies, white and red all together. Like a young noblewoman going incognito or a young duchess in disguise as a peasant. I wonder, was I in love with her too?
“Anyway, one Sunday, when the gilded youth of the town were standing in a semicircle outside the church, dangling their slender canes and brand new kid gloves, polishing their monocles in lordly fashion, and observing the ladies as they emerged, Pista Boros caught sight of her and fell fatally in love. He rushed after her and spoke to her. Zsuzsa screwed up her face in horror. But Pista went on talking. At that, Zsuzsa took her hands from her ears, began to pay attention, looked at him, and smiled — when she actually should have, for once.
“So how did Pista score that success which none of the rest of us had been able to claim? Well, you see, he was a wonderful fellow, an absolute marvel. First of all he was a handsome man, with curly hair and an aquiline nose. He dressed like Imre Lubloy, the famous actor, when he was playing a filthy rich count. Even in summer he wore spats. And then he had such an impressive natural air of culture, the kind that can’t be acquired, you have to be born with it.
“He knew everything. He knew at least a thousand Hungarian folk songs, all the words and tunes, he could handle Gypsies, give them instructions and keep them in order, check their familiarity with the flicker of an eyelid, then win their affection with a lordly, condescending, and yet fraternal-playful sidelong glance, he could call ’‘ácsi’ * perfectly, shout at the first violin when he didn’t strike up Csendesen, csak csendesen quietly enough and at the cimbalomist when the padded sticks didn’t make the steel strings thunder and rumble sufficiently in Hullámzó Balaton,† he could kiss the viola player’s pock-marked face, give the double bass a kick, break glasses and mirrors, drink wine, beer, and marc brandy for three days on end out of tumblers, smack his lips at the sight of cabbage soup and cold pork stew, take ages inspecting his cards (with relish, one eye closed), dance a quick csárdás for a whole half-hour, urging and driving himself on to stamp and shout and toss his partner high in the air and catch her, light as a feather, with one arm: so, as I said, he could do everything that raises Man from his animal condition and makes him truly Man.
“He could also speak Zsuzsa’s language. He’d been brought up on Csantavér puszta. He remained a peasant at heart, a son of the puszta. If he opened his mouth the people itself spoke. He was a living collection of folk poetry bound in human skin.
“Quite how he made a conquest of Zsuzsa I don’t know. As I imagine it, however, within five or six minutes he was wooing her with ‘Zsuzsika, I kiss your hands, your dear little hands, for you I’d be a sheepdog for two years.’ He must have expressed himself even more astutely, more spontaneously than that, however. Our imaginations aren’t really up to such things. But whatever the case, by the time he’d walked her home, Zsuzsa was in love with him and almost fatally.
“Things were certainly not easy for them. They could only meet after Mass on Sunday, and for a short time. The old man watched his daughter like a savage kuvasz. Here I must mention that there were two real savage kuvasz in their yard. They were let of their chains in the evening, and the moment there was a sound at the fence they would rush to the gate with eyes rolling, suffused with blood, and rouse the neighborhood with their din. It was impossible even to make signals with them around. For a while Pista was gloomy, drank, had himself serenaded. Then he decided to ask for her hand in proper form and order.
“He put on his ferencjóska,* stuck a panama hat on his head, borrowed Tóni Vermes’s gold watch and chain, and called on the wealthy peasant. His hopes were not high. He was at the time a mere assistant notary, twenty-three years of age, and his salary was only enough to hold his importunate creditors at bay. At most he could have cited his various fine and lengthy styles of nobility, but he was aware that he would achieve little with that sort of thing.
“On that sweltering summer morning the old man had been sitting in his weed-ridden yard since early dawn, bundled up from head to foot and wearing boots and hat. He looked at Pista. But only once. He sized him up with his eye and found him a frivolous, thin, overdressed dandy — a useless scrounger unfit to be a husband. He immediately turned his head away, as if to say ‘there’s more room in the street.’ He didn’t ask him in. They stayed in the yard. He didn’t even of er him a seat. Pista sat down uninvited and spoke his piece. The old man said neither yes nor no. He said nothing. And that was a considerable difficulty. If someone opposes you, it may still be possible to talk him round him somehow. Faced with silence, everyone is powerless. Pista slunk out crestfallen. As he left he extended a hand, but the old man ignored it. He just raised an index finger — slowly, stiffy, and deliberately — to the brim of his hat.