XVII
In which Ürögi drops in for a chat.
IT WAS SEVEN IN THE EVENING WHEN DANI ÜRÖGI CALLED.
Unfortunately, few will know who he is nowadays. He’s still around. He works in the office of a pottery factory, and his sideline is teaching ladies to play bridge. He writes hardly anything. In the old days, however, he wrote a lot and talked about it a great deal.
In the time when the coffeehouses of Budapest were differenti-ated not by their price lists, their coffee, and their cold meats but exclusively by their “literary” tendencies, he too used to sit with his pale face in the baroque gallery of the New York like a faint but ever more brilliant star in the literary firmament.
Ürögi had one very famous sonnet and one very short piece of blank verse in which the word “Death” occurred no fewer than thirty-seven times, always with a different tone color, always more surprisingly and alarmingly, and then one rhyme, a very long, thirteen-syllable rhyme — and no one has yet discovered a more fortunate one.
But it was sufficient for the World War and sundry revolutions to break out, for twenty million to die on the planet (some on the battlefield, some from Spanish flu), for a few kings to be reduced to refugee status, a few world banks, a few countries to be completely ruined — and people forgot those poems and him personally as if they had never been.
Kornél Esti was not such an ingrate. He forgot nothing that happened, he remembered everything that was really important.
As soon as he heard that this infrequent visitor had arrived, his face lit up. True, more than once, a year had gone by without his seeing him. When he did see Ürögi, however, he was always pleased. At such times the colored lights of his youth blazed up, far of, behind the summer foliage of merrymakings, the ragged curtains of theaters.
Dani Ürögi was pale and bald. The poor fellow was no longer a star, only a faint, dying moon among the black storm clouds of economic world revolution. He had always had an anxious disposition. But now he too was past the age of forty, and with advancing age had become even more anxious.
“Am I disturbing you?” he asked.
“Not at all,” replied Esti.
“Really?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I won’t trouble you for many minutes,” he added sternly.
“Really, please. I’m glad you’ve come. Sit down. Have a cigarette, Dani. Here.”
Dani sat down. And lit a cigarette. But as the match flame danced above his slender fingers he glanced at Esti, threw the match into the ashtray and the cigarette after it, and jumped up.
In a calm but determined voice he declared:
“I am disturbing you.”
“Idiot.”
“Oh yes, yes: I am disturbing you.”
“Why should you be?”
“I can tell.”
“From what?”
“From everything. From your eyes, first of all. You don’t usually look at me like that. Now it’s as if a kind of artificial light were pouring from them, as if you’d switched them to a new circuit. It’s not natural. Nor is your pleasant, encouraging, master-of-the-house smile natural, which you’ve stuck onto your mouth simply in my honor. Nor is your tone natural, the way you say ‘Not at all’—simply not natural.”
“You’re an ass,” Esti shrugged. “I suppose you’d prefer it if my eyes closed and I yawned? Believe me. If I tell you that you’re not disturbing me, that means neither more nor less than that you’re not disturbing me. If, that is to say, you were disturbing me, I’d say ‘You’re disturbing me,’ and that would mean precisely ‘You’re disturbing me.’ Now do you see? Is that clear? So, why aren’t you answering?”
“Give me your word of honor that it’s really so.”
“On my word of honor.”
“Once more.”
“On my sacred word of honor.”
Esti called for coffee, a whole water-jugful, and filled tumblers so that they could drink coffee as they used to in the old days.
Dani sat back down. He said nothing for a while. Only after that silence did he speak. He said that he’d been out for a walk there in the Buda hills on that fine moonlit evening — which was beside the point — and there he’d suddenly thought of his friend and decided to look him up, surprise him — but that too was beside the point — and he’d like to ask a favor, which he was going to tell him about shortly.
His sentences crawled along, pausing amid a thousand doubts and changes of mind, like the wheels of a train descending a mountain. In the middle of one sentence he stopped. Did not finish it. His mouth remained open. Suspicion gleamed in his dark eyes. He jumped up again. He wagged a forefinger at Esti and said, in a tone that brooked no contradiction:
“You were working.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were,” he repeated darkly, like a prosecuting counsel. “And here am I round your neck, holding you up, and you secretly — and quite rightly — are wishing me to the devil.”
“I hadn’t the slightest intention of working.”
“Are you telling the truth, Kornél?” he asked, smiling like someone who has caught out a child in some crafty fib, and while the smile spread over his face like a mask he wagged his raised forefinger slightly and began to threaten his friend. “Kornél, Kornél, don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not,” Kornél protested. “I haven’t been able to get anything done for a week now. I hate all work. Especially my own. The stuff I’m scribbling at present is so atrocious that if my enemies and the people who envy me were to find out how little I think of my talent they’d surely start to argue with me, rise in my defense, and finally accept me as a friend forever. Today I’ve just been sitting about and feeling bored. I was just hoping that one off my creditors would call me and take my mind of things a bit, but even they aren’t speaking to me. Then I wanted to swat some flies, but there aren’t even any flies in my apartment. Then I started to yawn. If someone’s very bored, even yawning is an amusement of sorts. I yawned for about two hours. Finally I got tired of yawning. So I stopped yawning and just sat in this armchair where you see me now, waiting for time to pass, getting a couple of hours older, a couple of inches closer to the grave. Please get this straight: at present, the thought that that terrible acquaintance of mine, whose idea of a joke has for years consisted of calling his wife ‘old girl,’ would knock on my door, that some complete stranger would come in and ask me for a loan of a hundred pengős for ten months on his word of honor, or that some unappreciated writer would do me the favor of reading me the novel he’s working on — that thought would have made me happy at once, but the thought that you would call, Dani, you, for whom I constantly thirst, who shared my former years of beggary and my vagrant fame, my brother in ink and passion — that thought would have rendered me ecstatic, and so enticing, so remote a thought was it, so like a fairy vision, that I didn’t dare even to dream it. Excuse me, don’t interrupt, I’m talking. As to my work plan for today, I’m free until nine, for two whole hours, and at your disposal. We’ll drink coffee here, chat or sit in silence together, and then I’d like to go for a walk, because I haven’t been out of this dump all day. If you’ve no objection I’ll keep you company, see you home. All right?”
“All right.”
Dani breathed more easily and took a gulp of his espresso. He spoke again about the circumstances of his coming, of the irrelevant Buda hills, the irrelevant idea that had whirled him to Esti’s, and the request to which he would come in a moment, but with which he would not trouble Esti yet because it was important only to him, not to Esti, and therefore it too was irrelevant. Suddenly he was silent. Something had come into his mind. He said: