Esti actually stood up, showed himself as he really was, went over to the caller, so that his rough proximity might influence her to come to the point.
Slowly she came round to it.
She unbosomed her complaints, brought them out one by one as if from an open drawer.
And that had a good effect on her. She stopped weeping.
Pain, in its abstract entirety, seen at a distance, is always more terrible than close up: attention to detail sobers us up, disarms us, at least demands our concentration, self-discipline, makes us produce order from chaos. At such times we find a wheel, a screw, a hinge, which does the trick. All is now a question of detail, an easy matter. Small things reassure us.
Esti was ready for anything. He expected death and famine, prison and plague, scarlet fever, meningitis, madness.
The particular, objective data followed:
The woman’s late husband had been a headmaster in a provincial town and had died the previous summer after a long battle with cancer at the age of fifty-two.
“Quite,” said Esti, as if approving of cancer.
They had moved from the country, the five of them, and were now in an apartment consisting of one room and a kitchen. She had four children, that was to say. Large family, small pension, as was nowadays the fashion. The smallest boy was twelve, and had been operated on for inflammation of the middle ear, and the wound was still open and discharging.
“Quite.”
His elder brother had gone to a factory and was learning to be an electrician, but was not being paid yet.
“Quite.”
The elder girl was a seamstress, but could not go out of doors because now, in the winter, she had no shoes.
“Quite.”
Esti was expecting consumption, and — speak of the Devil — the widow said the word: consumption. The smaller girl had consumption.
As for herself, the woman would like to find work, anything, because she could still work, she was thinking in particular of a tobacconist’s or at least a newspaper kiosk in which she could sit, summer and winter, from morning to night.
“Quite, quite.”
Esti was hearing a lot less than he had braced himself for.
After all, these were those modest — and uninteresting — complaints that life produces, for the most part with industrial, frightening uniformity. Mass production doesn’t permit anything original.
But perhaps it was just that lack of imagination that surprised him, this grayness and banality: the fact that such shoddy goods were set before him, and yet certain people to whom they were shared out tolerated them as destiny.
And he thought:
“Is that all?”
And he waited.
But there was no more. It was all gone.
Esti sat down. He turned to the woman:
“How can I help you?”
With a sum of money, which was not large — to him, really, nothing at all — but with which the whole unfortunate family, which deserved a better fate, could be put on its feet for the time being. He should not misunderstand all this. She and her hapless, sick children were not asking for this as alms or a gift, only as a loan which they would redeem by their hard work, or if necessary repay in kind, here or elsewhere, but in any case they would repay to the last fillér, the very last fillér, in precise monthly installments which could be fixed in advance.
This infuriated Esti. All these people offered deals, hinted at alluring profit on capital. They were all strictly based on capital. So reliable were they that the Bank of England seemed untrustworthy by comparison.
“Indeed,” he muttered, “the Bank of England,” and all but burst out laughing at the silly idea.
He liked idiotic things like that.
He was afraid that, faced by all that suffering, he was about to roar with laughter. He bit his lip so that physical pain should prevent anything so disgraceful, and began to speak rapidly and lightly, because he also knew that when we keep our lips and minds busy we find it easier to refrain from laughter.
“So that’s what you’d like, is it now? I understand about this money, temporarily, just to tide you over. Look, my dear lady. I myself have obligations of my own.” That was a phrase that he had heard years before from a banker from whom he had begged money no less desperately (though in more prepossessing circumstances), and as he vividly saw and heard that scene he went on even more rapidly. “I have relations and friends. My staff. Etc., etc. I too work. Like a slave. Quite enough. Every letter means a bit of bread.” “You mean cake,” whispered something inside him. “Cake, cake, you liar.”
The widow did not reply. She looked calmly into his eyes.
Esti could still hear the whispering voice. He jumped up. Hurried out into the next room.
From there he returned a little more slowly. He was holding his left fist clenched. He put down on the table a bank note. He did not look at it.
The widow, however, although she did not mean to, glanced at it at once, and amazement lit her face; it was distinctly more than she had asked for, he had rounded the amount up.
The frost which had held her almost rigid when she came in had melted, fallen away, like the melted snow on the floor. She did not know whether she could accept it. Of course, of course, just put it away.
She clutched the money in her hand. She expressed her gratitude. Expressed it with the greatest word, than which there is none greater.
“My God.”
“Good,” Esti interrupted. “Write down your address. So you live in Kispest. By the way, how old’s the younger girl?”
“Sixteen.”
“Is she feverish?”
“Only in the evening. Never in the morning.”
“Right. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps I’ll manage to get her into the sanatorium. Can’t say yet. Anyway, I’ll try. Give me a call next week. Any time. Here’s my phone number.”
Next day he received a letter from them, which all five had signed. It was a long letter. It began Your Lordship!
According to that salutation he had been granted a new title, promoted, elevated in their sphere of influence.
They had written “Your Lordship’s heart …” Esti laid a hand on his heart. His noble heart.
He himself had not taken seriously his promise perhaps to get the younger girl into some hospital or somewhere. He had done that rather by way of tact, for appearances, obeying his polished sense of style, to divert the widow’s attention from the money in the moment of parting as she slipped it into her battered handbag, and by steering her thoughts toward a future kindness to stem the unceasing flow of her constantly repeated gratitude, which he could really no longer endure.
In the morning when he woke up Esti had the telephone brought to him in bed. He put it by his pillow, under his warm quilt, like other people put the cat. He liked that electric animal.
While he stretched out in the wide bed, feeling refreshed after his rest, he picked up the receiver and asked for a number. The city came into his bed. Still half asleep, he could hear the attentive voices of officials at the other end of the line, the background morning din of a distant TB sanatorium. He asked for the doctor in charge, an old friend of his.
“I wonder if you’ve got a free bed?” “Really, that’s something we’ve never got, but we can always manage somehow. Tell the little girl and her mother to come in and bring their papers, and we’ll see what we can do.”