People often reproach me—Kornel Esti was speaking—for taking all my stories from the time of my youth, a period which could with some justification be termed prehistoric. Well, that is natural; I look where I am most likely to find. We are all really alive for no more than about the first twenty years or so of our lives, and it is during those years that treasures are deposited in our souls—buried so deep sometimes that we can scarcely manage to dig them up again throughout the rest of our lives. For me, life will always be my childhood and that part of my youth that I spent studying in the country or strolling along the magnificent boulevards of Budapest, still resplendent with the stormy light of peace.

After a certain age our sensibilities and our receptivity seem to diminish, as anyone over thirty must have experienced for himself. Winter and Spring deteriorate into mere dates on the calendar, as we grow less and less aware of them. It is as though by a certain time an image were already completely formed within us and there is nothing the passing years can add to it. At this stage of my life, for example, I would find nothing startling in the sight, let us say, of an American skyscraper on fire. A fire to me is that flaming hut on the Hungarian plains that I once came upon, all unawares, as a child. So that if I had to describe how the burning skyscraper looked, I would have to steal the colors and the flames from that other—apparently so much less significant—experience. And what is true of events is true of people also. New people I have met over the years may be worthier than those I knew a long time ago, but it is only the old ones who have any real existence to me. They represent people, just as the old things represent things—the things that make up the world. Feeling as I do, I am often told that I do not live in the present—which is ridiculous. I live, and I will die in the present, just like everybody else. Yet what is one to do against that eternal law of the soul which insists that at a certain point in life a process is concluded for good? I do not turn away from the present—it is the present that turns away from me. No matter how long I stare at it, I cannot see anything but facts and strangers. One cannot compel experience, and persistence counts for nothing in this regard. For the light does not come from without, but from within.

For all that, I would not say that there are no surprises in store for me; occasionally something does happen or a face turns up which I can dwell on for a long time. Yet when that occurs, it always seems to me that if only I explored more deeply, I would discover that the face or the event is an echo of some memory from the past—though nowadays one is lucky to find even an echo.

Just think how lucky I was the other day, for instance. Something happened at the Café Sziriusz that is worth telling about. It happened almost yesterday in the most immediate of presents of a young friend of mine with the very common name of John James. Oh, I beg your pardon, you don’t approve of his name? You think it’s overdone? I’m sorry, but John James happens to be his real name. Life is improbable and so are names. (While I am at it, let me warn all you novelists and short-story writers—never give a name like John Smith to a perfectly ordinary character or a name like Titus Timoranszky to, let us say, a world famous pianist. The reader won’t believe you, for he will sense in them the improbability of the probable. He might trust you more, in fact, if you switched the names around—he would recognize in that an example of the probability of the improbable. Keep this in mind.)

_____________

Well, John or Johnny or James, whichever you prefer, was twenty-nine years old and a poet. He spent the long years of his short life waiting. He waited for the sun to come up in the morning and he waited for it to set in the evening—though why he waited, he could not have explained himself. There was nothing in particular he was hoping for—he expected nothing—he had no hope of hope. He spent a lot of time waiting for streetcars and buses. Often he would take a seat in one of those glass-enclosed sheds at the streetcar stops and watch some ten or fifteen streetcars go by. Then, like someone who has accomplished what he set out to do, he would get up and leave, walking off toward some unknown destination. Finally he ran aground in the shallows of the Café Sziriusz, his friends’ hangout; members of the postwar generation, they were paying reparations with their aimless lives for the orgy of blood that had been staged by a previous generation without their knowledge or consent. The bill, by a fatal error, had been handed over to them.

These young men were not disillusioned. Only those who have had illusions can lose them, and they were never given a chance for that sort of thing. While still in grade school they had learned from the newspapers they found lying about in the mud how people kill each other with rifle-butts and burn down hospitals full of patients. So there was nothing for them to be disillusioned about—they had never believed as we did that adults are wiser or more honest than children. They had learned their lesson in world history and the conclusions to be drawn from it straight from newspaper headlines, and they had learned it so well they never forgot it. So when they meet nowadays they just sit around. They do not complain, they do not make fun of anything, they do not rebel. For that sort of thing you must have prejudices of some sort, beliefs, strength. But they need only look at one another, exchange a nod, and they know everything.

It took a long time before I could understand them myself, for two generations have never been so remote from one another as are ours and theirs. When we reached the age of twenty, for example, our fathers worked out, pencil in hand, how much we would be likely to earn in one or another of the professions and how much of a pension we could look forward to when we retired; starting from these certainties we could, if we chose, deviate from the routine we were expected to follow. For them, however, the opposite was true. It was the orderly life that was an adventure, for everyone around them behaved so irregularly. If we had to magnify the small events of our era in order to keep alive, they, poor devils, had to minimize the events they had seen for much the same reason.

We did our best to ruin our health, for example, living constantly in the fever of sublime or sordid love affairs; they do not smoke, they exercise, they marry early. We wanted to die at least five or six times a day; they would prefer to live, if possible, but many obstacles stand in the way of this reasonable desire. Yet they have tried everything, one way or another—proudly, obstinately, humbly—and they cannot be accused of half-heartedness, or laziness. John is an example; he tried everything under the sun. He worked as well as studied, but after years had gone by and his manuscripts were still being rejected, he at last understood that he was not needed and he stood aside. Now he is to be found at the Sziriusz Café It provides his social life, it is where he and his brilliant contemporaries gather daily—Hernád, the talented novelist who cannot get his novels published, Ullmann the talented critic who has no books to review, Baltazár, the talented editor who has no paper to edit, Bolváry, Céza Kerner, and the rest.

What do writers do when they are unemployed? Exactly what other unemployed workers do. Unemployed carpenters (in the first phase of their idleness, at least) glue everything together that has come apart and nail down everything that needs nailing down; they repair tables and chairs and perhaps take their own and their family’s measurements for coffins, which they assemble in prudent anticipation. Unemployed magicians do conjuring tricks with their gloomy thoughts and try to juggle money out of nothing. Unemployed teachers—or so I imagine—bring their own children to heel and teach their dogs the alphabet. For a time, at least, each of them pursues his own particular profession. Thanks to their tenacity the writers remain as prolific as before, but the words, which might otherwise have been put to work serving great creations, move inside them instead. In the absence of a central controlling force, they swamp sentiments and thoughts; they rebel and demand their own rights. They begin to lead independent lives, like idle tools which have been lying about too long. It is as though bored hammers were suddenly to leap from their toolboxes and start hammering away at everything all over the place, or planes which had been undeservedly neglected were to run up and down in despair, leveling walls, carpets, mirrors, everything in reach without the hand of the master to guide them. Ghastly it all is, my friends.

_____________

I noticed this happening in John’s case. He was writing less and less, and eventually reached a point where he wrote poems that consisted of nothing but titles and rhymes. He retained only the essentials, the primary impulse, so to speak, behind the form—the rest he cast aside. One of these expressive, though laconic, creations of his was about the Tokyo earthquake and described Titan holding up the globe as follows:

Atlas
degenerates
a(t) las(t)

Another poem was called “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner,” and had been written to excuse, or justify, a friend of his who was a drug addict. It went like this:

Those who take cocaine
Do not live in the Land of Cockaigne
That’s why they take it, ain’t it?

These creations—which, I must admit, had a curious charm—nevertheless showed how far John’s art had degenerated and grown distorted. They proved once again how talent can go astray for lack of space and opportunity.

And it was no different with the others at the Café Sziriusz. They allowed themselves and their talents to go to ruin. What else could they do? Well, they could play games.

They played games with words—that is to say, the words played games with them, so they played along. Or, since the work of a writer is a game in essence, they “worked” by playing with the wasted tools of their wasted profession. They played with vowels and with consonants, setting each other tasks like making up definitions which had to be entirely alliterative. “Give a definition of ‘police force,’” someone would say, and someone would come up with “trained troops of tricky trouncers.” And so on.

Or else they played a game called “framework sentences” of which the point was to weave the most difficult foreign names—Rabindranath Tagore, Count Oxenstierne Axel—into the rhythm of Hungarian sentences. Another game was to try to think of as many famous people as possible—poets, scholars, philosophers—whose names began with a particular initial. This game gave the players a chance to show off their broad culture. The unemployed writers could display how much they had read, the unemployed linguists could justify their most laborious researches, the unemployed mechanical engineers or child specialists could show how much information they had acquired at various universities. For it always happened the same way: after the game had been going on for about half an hour and all the players seemed to have dried up, one member of the group would suddenly tap his head and come up with something at the last minute: an obscure Polish biologist, let us say, whose name began with “W.” He would then be declared the winner, and be awarded the prize as well as the respect and admiration of the rest of the company. Most often, however, they played with the words themselves, heating those mysterious atoms in their retorts like the alchemists of the Middle Ages. Triumphantly they would discover that “Able was I ere I saw Elba” reads the same backward and forward, yet “Roma” acquires a new meaning when read backward. The most brilliant of them could even compose poems and stories which made as much sense read either way.

Another game they played was the children’s game of Barkokhba¹ which they perfected to the highest possible degree. They had reached a level of skill at this game where, guided by nothing more than the yesses and no’s of the person being questioned, they could guess such things as “the cylinder of Stephenson’s first locomotive” or “the Oedipus complex of Oedipus himself.”

Thus, poor devils, they clattered and rattled about without purpose or substance like mills without grist grinding away at the air.

_____________

To cut a long story short, the other day, at about seven in the evening, I am sitting among them at one of the long marble tables at the Café Sziriusz when John comes in. Without greeting anyone, he sits down at the table and rests his head in his hands. Something is wrong. He looks pale, but that is nothing unusual—he is almost always the color of a piece of dry timber, because he never eats anything. It is something else. He seems vexed and the others immediately notice that something out of the ordinary has apparently happened to him. They press him to find what it is.

He replies to their questions with a shrug. What was the trouble? It is trouble to be born and to have to go on living; it is trouble to be healthy and to have to eat; it is trouble to be ill and not to be able to eat. One way or another there is a lot of trouble in this world. So, why bother being troubled?

“In that case, what’s bothering you? Out with it. What’s happened?”

John fidgets with his hair, which is wavy and sticks out in all directions. He is sure of himself, a bit of a vagabond, slight of build, yet very masculine. He does not look like a poet—which is one of the proofs that he is a real one.

“Have you lost your job? Are you bankrupt?”

These witticisms have no effect here, for neither the wits themselves nor their victims laugh at them.

Lalojka, the waiter, rushes over to our table. He bends over John familiarly, yet with deference.

“The usual extra large serving?”

John nods. Lalojka returns with two glasses of water on a tray and places them in front of him. John gulps down both glasses of water, one after the other. He seems very thirsty.

Baltazár, Ullmann, Kellner renew their questioning.

“Why won’t you talk, you monkey? What’s happened?”

John does not speak because he does not seem to find it worth the effort.

“Guess,” he hurls at them suddenly. “See if you can guess.”

“Did it happen today?”

“Yes.”

“This morning?”

“No.”

“This afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have any idea yesterday that it was going to happen?”

“No.”

His replies are casual and indifferent. He could not seem to care less about whether they find the answer or not.

A fat young man wearing a dark suit is seated at the far end of the table. He has covered both ears with his palms and is gazing down at the crossword puzzle of the London Daily Mail. It is his custom, every single day, to solve the crossword puzzles in both the Hungarian newspapers and several that come from abroad. Eight years ago he qualified as a teacher of Greek and Latin but he has been unemployed ever since. Out of boredom, he has learned Turkish, Arabic, and Sanskrit. His name is Dr. Scholz, but his friends at one time called him Socrates in deference to his sharp wit and his skills as a debater. Later on, when he was pursuing his luck at the race track and would bet a shilling across-the-board on every horse in the race, they changed his name to Aristotalizer. Lately, however, since he cares very little about his appearance and seldom bothers to change his shirt, he is called—both behind his back and to his face—Sloppy Joe, a nickname he accepts with the understanding and condescension of the sage. With lightning speed he inserts the correct English word into the appropriate square—the Australian river, the animal that lives in India, the American statesman; then with the air of one who has fulfilled a daily obligation, he sighs with satisfaction. Yawning, he takes off his dirty glasses, and rubs them once with his dirty handkerchief which makes the glasses even dirtier without making the handkerchief any cleaner. Raising his sleepy eyes, he listens for a while as the others continue to badger John with their questions. He is under the impression that they are playing Barkokhba, but he is mistaken—so far at least. They are not playing Barkokhba, or at least they are not doing so consciously. But gradually, their prying questions and John’s clipped replies fall into a familiar rhythm and a shift takes place from the level of reality to the level of play, as an airplane shifts from the ground into the air at the moment of takeoff.

Dr. Scholz smiles at the amateurs, for he is the real master at the game of Barkokhba. He knows the problem that is to be solved: to locate the cause of John’s sadness. Out of pure compassion he takes control of the game. He fires questions with scientific precision and John answers with total indifference.

“Is it an object?”

“Yes.”

“Is it only one object?”

“No.”

“Is it an object possessing abstract properties?”

“No.”

Dr. Scholz purses his lips, for he feels that if the object in question is not abstract the problem is unworthy of him. Nevertheless he proceeds.

“Is there a person in addition to the object?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a fictitious person?”

“No.”

“Is this person living?”

“I cannot answer that.”

“Is this person dead?”

“I cannot answer that either.”

Dr. Scholz pauses for a moment. “What—neither alive nor dead? Is this person perhaps both dead and alive?”

“No.”

“Ah, I understand,” says Dr. Scholz. “At this moment you do not know whether the person in question is alive or not.”

He still feels, however, that a link is missing and recalls the more difficult and splendid games of his career—how last year at carnival time he guessed first the entity “color blindness” and after that “the hole a nail drives into the wall.” He remembers how he finally guessed the “grandmother of the Lady of Shalott” (a non-existent relative, in other words, of a fictitious personage who was not even worthy of the poet’s attention) and how he once divined the hypothetical psychiatrist who could have, or perhaps did, diagnose the madness of the Mad Hatter.

He digs into his pocket for the only object of value he possesses: a flat silver box in which he keeps lime-flavored gumdrops. He offers them around as always, and, as always, every member of the company refuses. He helps himself, chewing on the green lozenges with his black teeth.

“Come on,” he mutters, urging himself on. “So this person is as human as the next man? A man or woman between twenty and thirty?” He pauses.

“Is it your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Marika,” Scholz says looking down. Then he adjusts his glasses and looks straight at John.

“The object in question, was it flung at your head? Was there a quarrel?”

“No,” replies John firmly, and his tone at once silences the rising laughter.

“No,” Scholz repeats. He feels he is losing the thread.

“Well, all right. But this object bears some relation to your present state of mind, is that not correct?”

“Yes.”

“Is this object large? Is it as large as my head? Is it as small as my fist?” He extends his dirty hand, the fingers clenched.

“Have you got it with you? Has your wife got it? Is it on her, perhaps? On her head? Ears? Hands? Is it beside her on the ground?”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

A few minutes go by as Dr. Scholz narrows his search for the object. He has at last discovered where the object in question is to be found at the present time.

“This object, then, is in her stomach now, or once was. . . . Is it food of some kind? No?” Dr. Scholz lowers his raised eyebrows.

“Is it organic?”

“No.”

“Inorganic?”

“Yes.”

He mutters to himself: “An inorganic industrial product, a medicine, but neither you nor I have ever taken it.” He pauses for an instant.

“Ah, poison,” he says quickly.

“Yes.” John answers. The company has listened rapt all this time, dividing their attention between John and Scholz.

“Poison,” repeats Scholz. “Yes, poison.”

Somebody interjects: “You lost your poise on that one.”

“Quiet!” the interrogator shouts. “Don’t disturb me. Since it is inorganic, is it a sublimate?”

“Yes.”

“Corrosive sublimate,” says a voice. “Mercuric chloride.”

“That is of no importance,” Scholz snaps, and he rushes ahead to his goal, now within reach.

_____________

My friends, I shall not continue. Suffice it to say that I have seen a lot in my time but nothing like that. Scholz, after a few more minutes of verbal sparring and combat at close range, had extracted from John the information that his wife Marika, dear little Marika, had swallowed mercuric chloride, in an attempt to kill herself a few hours before. An ambulance had brought her to the hospital where she now was.

I swear that the cold sweat broke out on my forehead. An outsider would have thought the whole thing was a bluff, some kind of practical joke, but I thought nothing of the sort, for I know these young men living in 1933. They don’t “pretend” as we did, they deceive neither themselves nor others. We were romantics, they are realists. John stated the facts objectively and according to the strictest rules of the game of Barkokhba and they accepted them with equal detachment.

It had never occurred either to him or to any of them to raise any questions. They were not even greatly astonished, for, as I said before, they are not capable of great astonishment.

God knows why John permitted himself to take part in an exercise in such dubious taste. There were reasons, I suppose. Perhaps he was tired and upset, and in any case he did no one any harm by playing the game. Marika, in the meantime, was receiving expert treatment at the hospital—she had been given an emetic, then made to drink hot milk, and the poison had been flushed from her body. John had only been in the way at the hospital and they were probably glad to get rid of him for an hour. He could not have been of any help to Marika at the time, so he must have been looking for distraction. He had to kill time somehow before he would be allowed in to see her again.

I don’t judge him too harshly. He was in love with his wife and still is. When they were first married I remember how he carried four little cakes around in his pocket and boasted to everyone that Marika had baked them. You may think perhaps that this only proves that the cakes were inedible; but in that case wouldn’t he have thrown them away instead of keeping them for a month like relics? Well, as I said before, he loves his wife.

After the game was over, John drank two more glasses of water and rushed back to the hospital. He did not return until much later that night, bringing back word that Marika was out of danger and that the doctors believed she would recover without ill effects.

At the Sziriusz. the Russian musicians (you know them—they are the ones who stayed behind after the armistice) set up their usual racket. Once, long ago, wearing their national costume, they had played only Russian melodies, but gradually with the passing of time, their tunics grew threadbare and they forgot their own songs. Now they play Hungarian tunes almost exclusively, but they play them in accordance with the Slavic temperament: drowsily, drawn out, and often out of tune. So we fled.

I accompanied John home to the Boulevard Hungaria, where he rents a room. He sat down on the narrow divan, which at other times serves as his and Marika’s bed. Tonight, he remarked, he would be sleeping alone. He was regretful but matter-of-fact. He got up and threw a thin eiderdown and a checkered cushion onto the divan. Then he began to pace up and down, his hands behind his back, not saying a word. He stopped in front of the window and looked out at the boulevard. He seemed to be waiting for something. I have mentioned before that this boy was always waiting for something.

The night was dark and cloudy. No doubt he was waiting for the dawn.

¹ A variation of “Twenty Questions.”