“Why did I do that?” he wondered as they parted. “Never mind. Next time there’s any lifesaving to be done I may be able to call him.”
The telephone number lay unused on his desk for a long time, then vanished. He didn’t call him. Nor did Elinger call. Months went by without any sign of life from him.
Esti, however, often thought of Elinger.
People that we’ve long been expecting mostly show up just when we’re having a shave, are cross at having broken a new gramophone record, or have been getting a splinter out of a finger and our hand is still bleeding. The petty circumstances of life never permit ceremonious, decorous meetings.
Before Christmas it was freezing hard. Esti’s mind was on anything but swimming and drowning. It was a Sunday, about half past eleven. He was getting ready for a lecture which began at one.
Then Elinger was shown in.
“Glad you’ve come at last!” Esti exclaimed. “What’s new, Elinger?”
“I would have come before,” said Elinger, “only my mother’s been ill. Seriously ill. Last week she was taken into hospital with a brain hemorrhage. I’d be grateful if you could …”
“How much do you need?”
“Two hundred pengős.” *
“Two hundred?” said Esti. “I haven’t got that much on me. Here’s a hundred and fifty. I’ll send fifty round in the morning.”
Esti sent the other fifty round that same day. He knew that this was a debt of honor which he had to discharge. After all, he had received his life from Elinger on credit, and he was entitled to that much interest.
As his mother’s illness continued, he gave Elinger in lesser and greater amounts a further two hundred pengős, and then, when she died, three hundred and fifty more after the funeral, which he himself raised on credit.
After that Elinger called several times. He got from him, on various pretexts, on his word of honor, small, trifling amounts. Sometimes twenty pengős, sometimes just five.
Esti paid out with a certain delight. Afterward his feeling was one of relief. He simply couldn’t stand his presence, those bloodless gums, his gold tooth, and his boring chatter.
“This fellow,” thought Esti, waking up to the truth, “is one of the biggest idiots in the world. It took somebody like him to save my life. If he were any brighter he’d surely have left me to drown.”
One day, when Esti came home in the small hours, there was Elinger sitting in his study.
He informed Esti cheerfully:
“Just imagine, I’ve been given the sack. Without notice or severance. And I’ve had nowhere to live since the first. I thought I’d come here for tonight and sleep here. If you’ll let me.”
“Naturally,” replied Esti, handing him a clean nightshirt. “You can sleep here on the couch.”
Next day, however, he inquired:
“Well, what’re you planning to do now?”
“I really don’t know. It wasn’t much of a job. Pen-pushing from eight in the morning till eight at night. For a miserable hundred and twenty pengős a month. It wasn’t really worth it.”
“You’ll have to look for something better,” Esti remarked.
Elinger spent several days going around and then announced despondently that there were no openings.
“You mustn’t let it get you down,” Esti consoled him. “You can live with me until you find something suitable. And I’ll give you some pocket money every first of the month.”
He was a quiet, unassuming young man. He went out with him to the artists’ circle for lunch and dinner, and sometimes to dress rehearsals too. In the apartment he sprawled full-length on his couch. He seemed to be out of luck. He had obviously used up the last of his strength in saving Esti’s life.
Only one thing was unpleasant.
When Esti was writing, in torment, screwing up his face, Elinger would sit opposite him and watch him curiously as he would an exotic animal in a cage.
“Elinger,” said Esti, putting his fountain pen down, “I’m very fond of you, but for God’s sake don’t stare at me. If you do, I can’t write. I write with my nerves. Take yourself into the other room.”
For several months they lived on without anything special happening. Elinger made himself quite at home. At Easter he spent his whole month’s pocket money on a new kind of cologne atomizer with a rubber tube, and sprayed all his friends.* In his spare time he read theater magazines with extraordinary attention.
One day he put a theater magazine, on the cover of which was a film actress, under Esti’s nose. He said:
“I bet she knows all about it.”
“Knows about what?”
“Well, you know, carrying on.” And Elinger gave a sly wink.
Esti was furious. He stormed into his study and thought:
“Filth is filth. I know he saved my life. But the question is, for whom did he save it — for himself or for me? If things go on like this I won’t want my life, I’ll send it back to him postage-paid, like a sample, no value, and he can do what he likes with it. Anyway, by law the finder is only entitled to ten percent of lost property. I repaid that ten percent long ago, in money, time, and peace. I don’t owe him anything.”
He put his foot down at once.
“Elinger,” he said, “this cannot go on. You’ve got to pull yourself together. I’ll support you, but only you can help yourself. Work, Elinger. Courage!”
Elinger hung his head. In his eyes was reproach, great reproach.
After that he continued to sprawl on the couch, continued to read theater magazines, and continued going to dress rehearsals — the office had by then issued him with a personal ticket, as they did to the staff of the theater’s hairdressers, tailors, and gynecologists. And the months went by.
One night in December they were strolling homeward along the Buda embankment.
Elinger was asking about the private lives of actresses, how old they were, who was married to whom, who had how many children, and who was getting divorced. Such stuff drove Esti mad, and he found it degrading to answer.
“You know what?” said Elinger suddenly, “I’ve written a poem.”
“Never!”
“Shall I recite it?”
“Go on then.”
“My Life,” he began, and paused to give the italics their full effect. “That’s the title. What do you think of that?”
Slowly, with feeling, he recited it. The poem was bad and long.
Esti bowed his head. He was mulling over where all this was leading to, and what he had in common with this loathsome fellow. He looked at the Danube between the steep banks, with its murky waves and floating broken ice.
“What about pushing him in?” he thought.
But he didn’t just think. In he pushed him, then and there.
And ran.
* Perhaps an autobiographical allusion. Kosztolányi was thirty-two in March 1917; this story dates from 1929. In his untitled poem Most harminckét éves vagyok (published in 1924) he says, “Now I am thirty-two. It is summer. Perhaps this is what I have been waiting for. The sun beats with golden light upon my healthy, bronzed face …” The second stanza begins “ When I am dying I shall whisper ‘It was summer. Alas, happiness betook itself elsewhere. The sun beat with golden light upon my healthy, bronzed face …’”
* Up till now the conversation has used maga, the honorifi c form of address. Hungarian custom is that the elder of the pair may initiate the use of the familiar te, as Esti now proposes and does.
* Pengő, “tinkler,” was the unit of currency replacing the korona on January 1, 1927.
* A reference to the Hungarian custom of spraying (with water or eau de cologne) at Easter. The recipients are only women.