Kornel Esti (19 page)
“The delicious twelve-course meal was served at once. Most of all I wish to extol the crab, which swam with its marbled pink flesh in a thick, light gray sauce. Otherwise I rather drank. First, my favorite drink, a light beer, the golden nectar whose bitter foam, reminiscent of freshly baked rye bread, and nourishing scent of hops I have adored since childhood. I followed that with wine, Rhine wine and Greek
aszú
. Finally I settled on champagne. Bottle after bottle came to the ice-bucket, sweet and brut, and cooled slowly among the crystals of artificial snow.
“The fish was brought from the fish kitchen, the coffee from the coffee kitchen. Fresh bouquets were placed in the vases several times so that they should not wither while my eye and nose took pleasure in them.
“After dinner I asked for the bill. The staff clasped their hands and smiled. All meals went like that. They appeared altogether exceptionally willing. If I had asked them to set fire to the town for my pleasure, or to kill their beloved prince and place his head on my table in a silver tureen, cooked as Irish stew, I really believe that they would have done so without the least objection.
“Their courtesy grew and grew. So, however, did their number. This I sometimes estimated at four hundred, sometimes eight hundred. As, however, in my whole stay in the hotel I saw only eight guests, including myself, there were approximately a hundred staff to each guest.
“As I went down the corridor with its sound-absorbent carpet, they stood like silent caryatids along the walls. I only became aware of their existence when they raised their hats and greeted me quietly. Modesty and good manners were second nature to them. They were machines, not people.
“Just once it happened that a waiter was holding a cigarette furtively in his palm and exhaling smoke, but after glancing at me he was embarrassed at succumbing to so vile a passion, and his cigarette vanished at once. Where it vanished to, I do not know to this day. Perhaps he threw it into one of the ubiquitous asbestos-lined airtight ashtrays, or perhaps, pricked by conscience, he took it into his mouth, chewed it up, and swallowed it, burning tip and all. The latter seems the more likely.
“I repeat, the staff were without equal. Every day they favored me with something. They pressed into my hand announcements printed on wood-free Japanese paper and worthy of consideration as works of art, and marvelously edited and wonderfully informative catalogues. With unflagging zeal they brought to my attention the hotel’s Dalcroze dance school
*
and its Mensendik gymnasia, its bacteriological laboratory, its copying, shorthand, and typing office, its elegant swimming pool for dogs, its private car tire store, and indeed its lavishly equipped psychiatric institution, in which distinguished psychiatrists gave devoted attention at all hours of the day or night to the hotel’s deeply respected nervous and mental patients.
“I don’t wish to bore you all with further details, and will only say that I lived for ten days in that delightful, refined milieu.
“One morning I said into the recording machine at my bedside that the next afternoon I would be leaving for home on the two-fourteen electric train, and therefore they were to forward my trunk and suitcases—with the exception of my crocodile leather briefcase, in which I keep my manuscripts—to my Budapest address. I had the wax cylinder of the recording machine taken down to my friend Edison by Nicholas II. The Tsar brought a wax cylinder back. On placing this in the machine I was informed that the porter ‘had taken the necessary steps.’
“From this point the attention of the staff was redoubled, and minute by minute, hour by hour, increased by geometrical progression. Annie Besant, the cleaner, greeted me with sighs. Cléo de Mérode, Fanny Elssler, and Marie Antoinette came and went sorrowfully around me, as if they would scarcely survive my departure, and in their grief would end their young lives with poison. Chopin, Einstein, Murillo, Bismarck, Schopenhauer, Torricelli, Nicholas II, Caruso, Rodin, and the hapless little Dauphin too greeted me passionately with ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good evening’ every time that we met in the corridor. It sounded like the reminder of the Carthusians in the monastery:
Memento mori.
“What were they reminding me of, in fact? Sometimes I thought that perhaps it was of the tip which they certainly deserved. It was enough, however, for me to glance into their faces, which reflected the pain caused by my imminent departure, enough for me to look into their eyes, red with weeping and which they tried in vain to hide, for me to be convinced of the contrary.
“That evening, after dinner, Edison and the headwaiter placed before me a slip of paper on a silver salver. It was a railway receipt showing that the train would take all my luggage home as express freight, and that the hotel had—in advance, naturally—‘settled’ the bill.
“I nodded in approval and made for my room.
“Before I could get to sleep I was startled by a terrible din. A raucous chorus of male voices was howling ‘Good night’ into my ear from close range. I leapt out of bed. There was no one in my room. What was happening was that the hotel’s enthusiastic and attentive male staff, who, as everyone knew, had a private reception and transmission set, were calling on me by radio.
“The same thing happened in the morning too, the difference being that on this occasion I was awoken by the dulcet tones of the female staff wishing me a good morning.
“Early in the morning of that final day I called on Edison at the reception desk, as I wished to pay. At the mention of money there appeared on his face that disparaging, world-weary smile. He assured me that I would still have time to ‘settle up,’ as my train did not leave until after two and I would still be taking lunch with them. In any case, my bill was mostly ready, and the finishing touches were being made to it even then in the Central Accounts office.
“With my crocodile leather briefcase in hand, I strolled slowly out into the palm grove at the end of the town, where I had previously worked every day on my garland of love songs, worthily famous on account of its immediacy and warm spontaneity, entitled
Inhibitions and Transpositions
.
“I sat down on the marble rim of the fountain. I daydreamed for a while. Then I attempted in my old established way to evoke the creative urge. I struck my forehead several times, one after the other, on the marble rim. I can only create if I completely switch off my intelligence.
“Unfortunately, this was not immediately successful. Intelligence is an extraordinarily stupid thing. On this occasion too it persisted in forcing itself upon me.
“Then others also drew my attention to the fact that there is intelligence on earth. Among them, the staff of the hotel.
“When I sneezed, the male and female staff of the hotel conveyed to me from a radio installed up a fifteen-foot palm tree and equipped with a loudspeaker, their wishes for my health.
“Nevertheless, in a couple of hours I succeeded in writing one of my major works—a two-line poem telling of the prescient hatred felt toward me by Elinor, my most recent inamorata.
“This exceedingly spiritual work quite wore me out. Afterwards I stared into space for a further two hours and waited for my intelligence to return.
“I was astonished to see an airplane land, as lightly and elegantly as a dragonfly, in a nearby clearing.
“It was making for my home. I myself don’t know why, but I got in and ordered the airplane to take me home at full speed.
“Up in the air, when the altimeter was reading twenty thousand feet and that swift, blue-watered stream looked as big as the platinum bracelet that Elinor wore on her wrist, above the clouds, above the snowy mountains, I suddenly realized that I’d forgotten to pay my hotel bill and had unintentionally not given tips to the staff who had so good-heartedly watched over me for almost two weeks.
“As a man phenomenally well trained in psychology, I know that there is no such thing as ‘unintentional’ and that we don’t ‘forget’ anything without cause. I immediately viewed my lapse as suspicious.
“I began to analyze myself with lightning speed. While the airplane looped the loop with a daring rush and I hung with my head upside-down, I continued my psychological analysis, which I quickly brought to a successful conclusion.
“I realized that my action had been subconsciously conscious, or rather consciously subconscious. But it had been astute, very astute. Nor could I have acted otherwise.
“When all was said and done, it would have been unthinkable to insult so excellent a hotel, such excellent staff , by offering them money. That would have been tactlessness, gross tactlessness.”
*
Cléopatra Diane de Mérode (1875–1966), much-portrayed beauty and celebrated dancer.
†
English theosophist (1847–1933) who followed Madame Blavatsky as high priestess of that movement.
*
Hugo Eckener (1868–1954), aeronautical engineer, who in 1924 piloted the airship ZR3 on the first transatlantic airship flight.
†
Evangelista Torricelli (1608–47), mathematician and physicist, associate of and successor to Galileo.
*
The Viennese sisters Fanny (1810–84) and Therese (1808–78) Elssler were celebrated dancers.
*
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1941), the Swiss inventor of eurhythmics.
In which the president, Baron Wilhelm Eduard von Wüstenfeld,
immortal figure of his student years in Germany
and his mentor and preceptor,
sleeps through the entire chapter.
MY DATE WAS FOR A QUARTER TO TWO IN THE MORNING AT
the Torpedo coffeehouse.
I tried to be precisely on time. But I couldn’t get a cab straightaway. Then it started to rain cats and dogs. The cab could go only very cautiously, at walking pace. It was approaching a quarter past two when I opened the door of the private room in the Torpedo.
My arrival was greeted by a frantic hushing. Kornél Esti, who had been in full flow, glanced disparagingly in my direction and fell silent.
Around him was his usual motley company, nine or ten writers of various sorts and a woman or two. In front of him was a glass of Bull’s Blood
*
and a silver dish on which lay the fabulously delicate skeleton of a trout and the remains of a light green sauce.
In the unfriendly silence I threw down my fur coat and lit a cigarette. Someone informed me in a whisper of the preliminaries of the story which had begun.
He had been telling them about his student years in Germany and about a distinguished, refined elderly gentleman, prominent in public life in Darmstadt—his full name was Baron Wilhelm Friedrich Eduard von Wüstenfeld—who had been president of Germania, the local cultural association, and also president and director of numerous other political, literary, and scientific associations, societies, clubs, unions, conferences, committees, and subcommittees.
“So,” Kornél went on, “it always happened as I said. The president would open the session and go to sleep. The lecturer wouldn’t even have reached the table and he’d be asleep. He’d go off quickly, like lightning, the way little children do. He’d plunge from the brink of wakefulness straight into the bottomless abyss of sleep. He’d close his eyes and sleep deeply and sweetly.
“The lecturer would step to the table, acknowledge the applause, bow, sit down, shuffle his ominously high pile of script, clear his throat, and set about his lecture on something like
The Observation of the Essence of Dynamic Existence
or
Plant and Animal Names in the Erotic Poetry of Heinrich von Morungen
, but that no longer concerned the president, who had slipped discreetly from the world of consciousness by an invisible secret door, leaving behind only his body as a token in the presidential chair.
“When the lecturer had finished, the president would call the second and then the third to the rostrum from the printed program, and when they had performed their duties he too performed his.
“Understand me: the lecturers and the president’s briefly interrupted sleep, which could yet be called uninterrupted and continuous, interacted, were in close contact, almost in a causal relationship. The president opened the session and closed his eyes. The president closed the session and opened his eyes. At first this was a mystery to me.
“I was young and inexperienced when I went to Germany. At the time I’d been drifting around among the lighthearted, easygoing French, but in Paris I received a stern telegram from my father telling me to go at once to Germany and there continue my studies, and work only at my studies, not at creating literature as I had been doing. In his telegram he emphasized that if I didn’t do as I was told he’d cut off my monthly allowance. Whether for that reason, or because of my measureless love for him, I complied with his request right away. And to this day I’m grateful to him for making me go.
Otherwise I’d hardly have gotten to know the Germans.
“Naturally, I’d heard a thing or two about them. I knew that they were one of the world’s greatest peoples and had given humanity music and abstract thought. They were
Cloudy and burdened with thought
, as their divine Hölderlin has it. When I’m really down in the dumps I hum Bach fugues and say lines of Goethe to myself. ‘Among pine forests and hills lives an earnest, industrious people,’ I thought, ‘with the starry sky and the moral world order above their heads.’ So I had a great respect for the Germans. Perhaps I respected them more than any other people. But I didn’t know them. The French, however, I loved.
“What a loss it would have been had I missed this close acquaintance. A new world opened before me. As soon as my train had rolled onto German soil, one surprise followed another. My mouth, so to speak, was constantly agape, from which my fellow-travelers deduced that I was a half-wit. Order and cleanliness were everywhere, in things and, indeed, in people alike.
“I got off first at a small spa, to wash the dust off. I didn’t have to ask anyone where the sea was. There were elegant pillars at precise ten-yard intervals in the clean, swept streets, bearing white enamel signs showing a pointing hand with the words
To the Sea
beneath. The stranger could not have been given clearer directions. I reached the sea. There, however, I was rather taken aback. On the pebble beach, a yard from the water, another pillar drew my attention; it was identical to the rest, but the white enamel sign was rather larger and bore the words:
The Sea
.
“Having come from among the Latin races, I felt at first that this was exceedingly superfluous. Before me foamed restless infinity, and it was obvious that no one could mistake the Baltic for a spittoon or a steam laundry. Later I realized that I had been wrong in my youthful superiority. This was where the true greatness of the Germans lay. This was perfection itself. Their philosophical tendency demanded that the argument be concluded and the outcome demonstrated, as the mathematician often writes in the course of a deduction that 1 = 1, or as is often stated in logical proofs, Peter = Peter (and not Paul).
“In Darmstadt I rented a modest little student’s room in the house of a master cooper. There too a series of surprises awaited me. The family was pleasant, considerate, and very clean. The cooper’s father, an old man who seemed to be simple, treated me, a nobody who had been tossed ashore there from abroad, with kindly, human affection. In the evening, when I came in, he always questioned me:
Well, young man, tell me, what have you experienced today, 1. humanly, 2. literarily, 3. philosophically?
I couldn’t answer this question at first. Not only because I could as yet hardly speak German. This profundity, this classification so normal to the German mind but to which I was not accustomed, confused me. My unrefined brain all but exploded. It came to my mind that that morning I had read Hegel in the library, then had some dill sauce in the refectory, and in the afternoon strolled with Minna in the town park. Was the library a human experience, the dill sauce a literary experience, and Minna a philosophical experience, or vice versa? To me these three had been one until then. I mixed up the library with the dill sauce and Minna, experiences human, literary, and philosophical. It was quite some time—and required constant mental gymnastics—before I was able to separate them.
“They’re an enigmatic people, I can tell you. There’s no people so enigmatic. They think all the time. One after another I met eccentrics who ‘on principle’ ate only things that were raw, who every morning ‘on principle’ did breathing exercises, who in the evening, ‘on principle,’ slept on hard beds with no quilts, even in the dead of winter. Their level of culture is astounding. They go from school to university but don’t finish their studies even then, and I suspect that after that all of them enroll in the universe. The universe with its myriad stars is there in their calculations, indeed in their appointment diaries too. Even girls and women refer to it like a popular place of entertainment. German women are, on the whole, sensitive and romantic. They’re like French women. The only difference between them is perhaps that French women tend to have large eyes, whereas German women have large feet and souls which absorb at once everything that is noble and beautiful. The moment one makes their acquaintance, they describe themselves exhaustingly, cleverly, and abstractly. They reveal the length and breadth of their spiritual lives, two or three of its fundamental attributes, and their basic symptoms, like a patient revealing the history of his disease to a doctor. They are terribly sincere. And they don’t conceal their faults. They are not embarrassed by anything human. I had scarcely begun courting one delightful, divorced little woman, beneath the limes one sunny autumn morning, than she confessed that she had had hemorrhoids since giving birth and was suffering badly from them that very day. All that not for my interest, just because it was sincere and human. It’s a bewildering world.
“One after another the doors of the best houses opened to me. They accepted me into their circle as if I were not a foreigner. What little merit there was in me they appreciated. They respect all other nations just as much as they love their own. They do not proclaim international principles—they practice them. The Germans are instinctively welcoming. There was a place for me too at their table. I’ll not conceal, however, that here too I was surprised at this and that. At the end of dinner, for instance, they serve a longish, stick-shaped, dead-white, very smelly cheese, which they call ‘Dead Man’s Finger’ (
Leichenfinger
). They filled my glass with a dark red liqueur the name of which was, according to the manufacturer’s label, ‘Blood Blister’ (
Blutgeschwür
). As a well-brought-up person I sank my teeth into the dead man’s finger and washed it down with the sticky secretion of the blood blister.
“There was one thing that I couldn’t accept for a long time: their mustard pots. On the best families’ tables there is a very strange mustard pot from which—as I later found out—the manufacturer had become wealthy; his product was in demand everywhere and he could not make enough. This mustard pot was in the shape of a tiny, white porcelain lavatory pedestal, with a brown wooden lid that closed, a deceptively faithful replica with only the inscription ‘Mustard’ (
Senft
) to betray what it was. In this they keep the yellowish-brown mustard which they put on their blood sausage during a meal. At first they didn’t understand that I could only eat with limited appetite when that witty, risible little object was set playfully before me. They found it amusing. Even engaged couples looked at it with a smile and knew in advance that their future home would contain one like it. Respectable mothers of families, in whose presence it would be unthinkable to make the slightest risqué remark, passed it nonchalantly to guests. Small boys screwed up their faces as they sniffed at it and licked off the brown fragments that stuck to the porcelain bowl, and little girls, whom their doting parents had photographed with hands clasped in prayer, took a delight in scraping at the paste that had congealed in it and, like enthusiastic mudlarks, softening it with vinegar.
“I confess that for a while I found that healthily studentish good humor repulsive. Previously, however, I’d been through the school of Paris, enjoyed all the coarse slapstick and thinly veiled double entendres of the bawdy theater of Montmartre; I’d studied decadent poetry too, which often enthrones indecency and filth. This, however, was repugnant to me. It was the openness that shocked me, the cosy sniggering at this devilment. But who can understand a people?
“I repeat, this people is unfathomably enigmatic. They are loyal, clever, and attentive. If I was unwell, my landlady herself made my bed, plumped up my pillow and smoothed it down, made up embrocations, took my temperature, made me drink linden leaf tea, and nursed me with motherly love and with such knowing skill. Only German women know how to nurse the sick. A doctor would be called too. German doctors have no equal. The least of them is worth more than a university professor in another country. Their forget-me-not-blue eyes would look at my fevered brow with inexpressible objectivity and concern. Their medicines, prepared in a million forms by the best factories on earth, cure us the moment we look at them. I’ve often said that I’d like to be sick and die only among the Germans. But I’d rather live somewhere else—here in Hungary, and when I’m on holiday, in France.
“However, I hadn’t gone there to live, but to study. First and foremost, to study their rather difficult, harsh, tortuous, complex, but splendid and ancient language, in which as yet I could only stammer incompetently and inadequately. I frequently didn’t understand what they said. They frequently didn’t understand what I said. These two defects didn’t cancel one another out, they increased each other. It was my sole ambition to learn German. I listened like a secret policeman. I talked to everybody. Living grammars and dictionaries were all around me. I tried hard to turn the pages. I even spoke to three-year-old children, as they spoke better German than I did although I had read and understood Kant’s
Prolegomena
in the original. If I failed to understand a snatch of conversation in the street, my pride was injured. Once I almost felt disposed to commit suicide when a shopkeeper noticed the foreign accent of my otherwise tolerable speech and didn’t answer my questions but—no doubt out of consideration—made signs like a deaf-mute or a savage would. I worked with indefatigable industry and lost no opportunity to ensure progress. Unfortunately, numerous disasters befell me. I went home by cab late one night after a student feast. I asked the driver what I owed him. I presumably misunderstood him and didn’t give him enough. He began to shout, called me a lousy villain, even threatened me with his whip, but all that I could do was admire his wonderful command of strong verbs, the masterly way that he maneuvered subject and predicate, his rich and varied vocabulary, and took out a pencil with which to make notes of it all. At that the cabby too was amazed, but at the patient way I had borne his filthy tirade. He thought that I was either the founder of a religion or mad. But I was only being a linguist.
