Poise and taste were evident in her every movement. For that matter, she scarcely did move. That great calm was a trifle odd. She mused and did nothing. Sometimes Esti thought that at some point — when she sneezed or blew her nose — he would suddenly lose interest in her. But he was mistaken. As time went by, every such little tiny surprise merely reinforced his swift feeling of warmth toward her. Even inactivity didn’t make her boring. Everything that she did, or didn’t do, was good, beautiful, pleasing, and it was good, beautiful, or pleasing the way she did it, or didn’t do it.
As profound an affection for her awoke in him as if he were seeing his own mother. It did him good to look at that woman, to know that she was in the world and so close to him.
Meanwhile, time slipped by in such a way that he didn’t notice it.
Naturally, he gathered these observations slowly, bit by bit, something every minute, because he couldn’t be indiscreet, could only watch her for short periods, as if by chance, and then fly back with the precious, stolen pollen, to make it into honey in the buzzing beehive of his imagination.
Once, just as he was withdrawing again to hide behind the cover of Il Cuore, frowning and reading most intently, it struck him that the girl was whispering something to her mother.
In fact, he had been hearing this whispering — if such it may be called — this sotto voce murmuring ever since entering the compartment. He had, however, paid no attention to it. After a while he had become accustomed to it, as to the droning of a fly in a room on a summer afternoon.
The girl clung to her mother’s arm and whispered into her ear. Sometimes she made her hand into a funnel and whispered like that. What she whispered couldn’t be heard. Her mother sometimes paid attention to it, sometimes not. She would nod or shake her head in denial. When the whisper — or rather rustling sound — rose to a mutter or a buzz, she would quiet it, try mechanically, with half-words, to check it: “Hush, dear.” “Yes, dear.” “No, no, dear.” But that was all.
Esti didn’t understand the situation. This business made him a little anxious. The girl’s disquiet unsettled him. As did — perhaps even more so — her mother’s calm. Now, therefore, he stopped peeping from behind his book in search of further data on the dear unknown acquaintance, and didn’t watch, but listened.
It was a feverish, hasty rustling, a confused flow of words, inarticulate, incomprehensible, and as gabbled as if it were being read from a book, badly.
Until then he had, so to speak, paid no attention to the girl, as her mother had fully absorbed his interest. On entering the compartment, he had seen that she was a teenager, at the most fifteen. He had also seen that she wasn’t pretty. That was probably the reason why he had instinctively avoided looking at her.
Now he squinted at her round the edge of Edmondo de Amicis.
She was a slip of a girl, insignificant, quite insipid. Skinny legs, a thin, piping voice. She was wearing a white, spotted cambric dress, an expensive Swiss brooch, and new, showy, patent leather shoes. In her lusterless, pale blonde hair gleamed a huge bow of strawberry-colored satin ribbon, which made her pale face seem even paler. She wore a ribbon of the same material at her neck, very broad, to conceal her scrawniness.
She was dressed as if she were being taken not on this summer journey but to a ball, a glittering winter ball, a quite improbable children’s ball, quite unsuitable for her.
Her small head, flat chest, lean shoulders, the two “saltcellars” that showed above the scooped neckline of her dress, her hands, her ears, her everything at first aroused pity, but then straightaway displeasure. This creature wasn’t only graceless; she was repulsive, definitely loathsome.
Poor thing, thought Esti. He couldn’t even bear to look at her for long. He looked out the window.
It was slowly getting dark. The girl was vanishing in the gloom, blending into her mother. All that could be heard was her whisper, her unending, irritating whisper, which in the darkness became more agitated, more rapid. She buried herself in her mother’s ear and whispered. It was beyond understanding that she wasn’t tired out after all those hours and that her mother wasn’t tired of listening to her. Why did she lisp all the time? Why wasn’t she hoarse by now, why didn’t she have to stop? Esti shrugged. It was all quite beyond him.
The train had long ago left Gyékényes* and was heading at full speed into the starless summer night. Overhead on the ceiling the gas lamps were lit. Esti escaped into his book.
He made every effort to concentrate on the text. He had scarcely read four or five pages, however, when he noticed something that thoroughly annoyed him.
He noticed that the girl kept pointing at him. She was clinging to her mother’s arm and whispering, as ever, and pointing at him. That was too much, really too much.
At this, now, he became indignant. But he was so overcome by anxiety that his indignation cooled. He tried to think calmly. So the pointing was directed at him. But in that case the one-sided dialogue had also been about him from the start, and he had become the focus of an interest of which he knew neither the origin nor the purpose.
What the devil did this girl want of him? He had to suppose that she was making fun of him for some reason. Perhaps because of his clothes? He had dressed in his best for the journey, his dark blue suit, new that spring. He was distinctively attired. He wore a high collar, reaching to his chin, and a narrow, white, piqué tie, which made him resemble both an international tenor and a provincial clerk, but he was perfectly satisfied with it and thought that nothing could express more appropriately his bohemian nature, his whimsical poetic soul that sighed for the infinite. So perhaps that chit of a girl now found him amusing, or did she think he was ugly? But he knew that wasn’t it. He was a slight, slender boy. His brown hair, parted on the side, fell abundantly over his forehead. His gray eyes burned with a pained longing, a hesitant curiosity, at that time even much more clearly and fierily than later, when disappointment and doubt about everything had clouded the gleam of those eyes to as leaden and drunken-murky a hue as if he were in a state of permanent intoxication.
He didn’t beat about the bush for long. He waited for the girl to point at him again, and when her finger was next waving in front of her nose he dropped his book into his lap and turned toward her, requiring an explanation.
The girl, like one caught in the act, was taken aback. Her slender finger seemed frozen into ice. It hung in the air like that. Slowly she lowered it.
Yet even then her mother spoke not a word. She took the girl’s hand — the erring little hand, the one that had been pointing — put it between her two hands, enclosed it, and began with gentle, infinite gentleness and patience to pat it, as if she were playing “bunnies” with it. “This man went rabbiting … this man caught it …”
Something like an armistice ensued. The whispering died away, or became so quiet as to be almost inaudible. Midnight approached. The woman opened her handbag. She took out a knife, a golden knife with a sharp, pointed, slender blade. Next she took out something wrapped in cotton wool. From the cotton-wool wrapping there emerged a lovely, butter-yellow Calville apple.* Dexterously and carefully she peeled it, cut it into segments, picked them up on the point of the knife, and raised them one by one to the girl’s mouth.
She ate. Not nicely. She chomped.
As she caught the segments between her slightly swollen lips a white, sticky froth began to form as on the beaks of swallow chicks, like a scum or foam setting under internal warmth. She opened her beak clownishly for every morsel. In so doing she exposed her anemic gums and her few rotten little teeth, which shone black inside her mouth. “D’you want some more, dear?” her mother asked from time to time. The girl nodded.