A couple of days later the doctor called him back. He informed him that his protégée had been admitted.
Now all that remained was the newspaper kiosk.
He felt that it was his duty to take this step too. And not a human duty, but one of kinship. Since he had spoken to the widow it was as if he had become related to her.
First he visited the family.
In the room where they lived, a bare wire dangled from the ceiling, and on it a single unshaded bulb shed a garish light.
Margitka, the younger girl, was by then in the sanatorium. The older girl was called Angela, and was not pretty. She looked dull. She spoke in a singsong. She had a straight, white nose, which might have been carved out of chalk. Lacika, the schoolboy with the bad ear, was hunched over his Latin grammar. The electrician had come home after a fruitless search for work, scarcely spoke to them, and with proletarian cheerlessness withdrew to a corner, from where he eyed the visitor with such gloomy and searching attention that he might well have wanted to sketch him. Esti had no idea what to make of him.
Finding a newspaper kiosk proved dif cult.
At the office where that kind of licence was issued, the official informed him with a smile that in Hungary it was easier to get a ministerial post than one of those glass cages. There was absolutely no prospect of a vacancy in the foreseeable future.
Esti took note of that. As, however, there was no likelihood of a ministerial post for the widow either — some people at least would have found that strange — he held out for the glass cage. He knew that there were laws, clauses, and resolutions which were hard and remorseless, but behind every law, clause, and resolution was a mortal man who was corrupt, and with the necessary expertise could be circumvented. Nothing is impossible when it is only from men that we want it. And so he smiled, lied, flattered, crawled, browbeat, and importuned as necessary. In one place he called the widow a close relative, a dependent, and a fervent Catholic; in a second a staunch Calvinist and a refugee under the peace treaty;* and in a third a victim of the White Terror, a refugee returning from Vienna.
Esti had no scruples over such matters.
What gave him strength? He himself wondered about that.
When the family came to mind at night, or when he sometimes got up early in order to catch someone whom he needed at the office, he asked himself that question.
Perhaps he was deluding himself with the possibility of saving someone?
Was he enjoying the role of patron, living out a secret desire for power? Was his mawkish readiness to be a sacrifice influencing him? Was he atoning for something? Or was it just the excitement of the chase, of seeing the results of his amusing experiment or the extent to which people could be influenced?
Esti weighed the reasons and was compelled to answer each question in the negative.
He was after something else. Simply because he had tossed out that money in a moment of stress. It had been the direct consequence of that that he had obtained a free bed in the sanatorium for the girl, and from that it had followed that he had also had to guarantee the mother’s means of support. His one action ineluctably gave rise to the other. Now, however, he would have been sorry if his work was wasted. He wanted to see a little more perfectly, a little more roundly.
As they say in business, in technical jargon, “he wanted to protect his investment.”
At length the widow got her newspaper kiosk, in an excellent position at a busy corner on the Ring Road.
September sunshine gleamed on the glass, gilding the foreign magazines, drawing Dekobra and Bettauer into a wreath of rays. She came and went among them with a convalescent smile as on the stage, isolated and yet part of the life of the street, in the full glare of the limelight.
As the kiosk was on his way, Esti would sometimes stop there, no longer as a patron but just as a customer. He would buy a paper but did not even need it. He inquired how Margitka was.
“Thank you,” the widow would gesture, as she straightened the papers with a half-gloved hand, “thank you very much. She’s not too bad. Only the food’s poor. They don’t give them enough,” she whispered confidentially. “We have to make it up. We take her a little butter every day or two. We walk, because I can’t afford the tram.”
Then she spoke of the schoolboy.
“Poor little chap’s had to repeat the year. He failed three subjects last year. You know, it’s because of his ears. He can’t hear. Can’t hear what the teacher’s saying. He’s gone deaf in his left ear.”
Esti did not believe that anything on earth could be put right. He could see that as soon as he patched up misery in one place it immediately broke out somewhere else. Secretly, however, he hoped for at least a speck of improvement, some evident relief, some relative calm, a kind word, which would cheer him, reward him. Now he was the one looking for charity.
In winter the rain poured down. The kiosk was like a lighthouse in the universal floods. Instead of the widow the seamstress was serving. She sang out with nervous gaiety:
“Mum’s caught a chill. Her legs are bad. I’m standing in for her.”
On his way home Esti thought of the kiosk, in which — it seemed — the elder girl too was cold, and of the widow, lying sick in bed. He sat down at his fireside. The embers cast a ruddy glow on the light brown curtains.
He stood up in irritation.
“I’m tired of this,” he sighed, “really tired.”
After that he watched the kiosk halfeartedly, from a distance, while he waited for the omnibus. He was sick of them. If he possibly could, he avoided them.
“Let them die,” he muttered. “I shall die as well, just as miserably. Everybody does.”
The widow and her family were not importunate. After repeatedly saying that they owed everything — all these things — to him and him alone, they went their way. They did not want to burden him further.
He did not see them, did not hear of them.
One restless May evening the wind was blowing up dust in the road. Esti had been drinking chocolate in a café. As he left he bumped into the widow.
She had not noticed him.
Esti spoke to her. “What’s new?” said he, “I haven’t seen you in ages.”
For a while she did not speak.
“My little Laci,” she stammered, “my little Laci,” and her voice choked.
The little schoolboy had died two months previously.
Esti lowered his eyes to the ground, in which the boy was crumbling.
The widow told him everything bit by bit. Margitka was having fevers in the morning too, and they wanted to send her home from the sanatorium as they could keep her no longer. Angela had lost her job at the dressmaker’s because she had had to stand in for her mother so often. The kiosk had been given up. She herself had not been able to stand about there with her bad legs. Perhaps it was just as well.
Esti nodded.
“Quite, quite.”
He was standing under a gas lamp. He looked at the widow’s face. She was no longer as ravaged and disheveled as when he had first met her. She was numb and calm.
If she had not been so much like his mother and those female relations of his who had likewise become dull, gone into a decline, all would have been well. But there was a look of accusation about her. An aching, almost insolent reproach.
That incensed him.
“So what can I do about it?” he raged inwardly. “Perhaps you think that I personally am doing all these dreadful things to you? What the Hell do you want from me, always from me?”
He made a gesture of refusal. He grabbed at the widow. Held her arm. Shook the thin old woman in her black clothes, struggled with her.