That strange broken laugh! While he is almost running along the row of barren, wintry trees.
Meanwhile smoking a cigarette. Now and then he glances over his shoulder. Is he expecting a voice? What kind of voice? He stops. He stares into the silent line of trees. A look numb and full of amazement. Where did I get to? What kind of city?
I was telling him about dreadful matters. At that time: the Fifties. With a mournful face, with somber, hearty laughs. János! They are throwing us out everywhere. Throwing us out? They aren’t even letting us in! Doors are closing! (Like this, very dramatically.) What doors? There aren’t any. There aren’t any editors, any periodicals. There is absolutely nothing.
He stared at me. With that numb look.
“That’s terrible!”
That is all he said. But he wasn’t terrified. Somehow I sensed this in his eyes. He had no sense of terror. Though I did as well as I could. It wasn’t pleasant running into me in those days.
And yet... I felt that down deep, in the depth of his soul some kind of belief existed. A belief surviving on its own, orphaned. And compassion too. The way he touched my arm.
“But maybe not! They can’t do this!”
“Oh yes they can!”
He looked at me with profound sympathy.
Another scene. The Lengyels’ flat. Time: the same. 1951. Characters: Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Balázs Lengyel, János Pilinszky, and I. We were drinking coffee. We talked, we were silent.
The outcasts. (Solemnly.) The washouts. (Less solemnly.) Our writings had not been publish-ed for a long time. Only our rewritings. The Great Age of Rewriting! We rewrote everything.
Everything and everybody. We didn’t even spare the classics. Few escaped adaptation. I even came to hate Mark Twain. Just as I did the radio plays of Paula T. Forgách.
I stared over the cup into space.
“Bumbi Balogh!”
“What’s this? What are you saying?” (Balázs)
“He can’t express a thing! Simply unable!”
“Dear Iván, why should he have anything to say?” (Ágnes’s worried voice.) “And would you please enlighten us as to who this Bumbi Balogh is?”
“A soccer player.”
“But Iván, you really like these types.”
“Not in a radio play. In the old days... on the field.”
Balázs (to Pilinszky): “Now comes the Ferencváros team! He’ll now reel off the old Ferencváros line-up.”
I didn’t. Crestfallen silence above the cup.
“Oh, I see! Somebody wrote a radio play, and you have to revamp it,” Ágnes said.
“Do you know how long I’ve been at it? Days! Weeks! and still nothing!”
Silence around me. Pilinszky’s soft, remote voice:
“There will be a dictionary.”
“There will be what, János?”
“Someday there will be a dictionary of literature.” He lit a cigarette, blew some smoke. A strange half light. Like someone about to do something. Then that broken laugh. “Yes, everything will be in it. Every periodical we ever wrote something for.” He slowly turned toward Ágnes: “Hungarian Star. Silver Age. Vigil.”
“Hungarians.”
“New Moon.”
He kept nodding and blowing smoke.
“And then nothing,” Balázs said.
“Not at all. Now the Golden Age will dawn! Playbills! Price lists! Shop signs! Advertise-ments! And then the crowning achievement! An Easter egg! Our latest piece on an Easter egg!”
“What? What was that, János?”
“An inscription on an Easter egg.”
He shook with laughter. We all did. Balázs collapsed over the table. Ágnes applauded.
“Easter egg! Maybe with a little verselet! (singing) Verselet! Verselet!”
“And prose! Is there no prose? At least one line on that egg.”
I grew dizzy with laughter. Weak. I slipped off the chair. Down, onto the floor. I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears poured from my eyes.
Pilinszky repeated it. The history of our careers. Our careers in ascendancy.
Hungarian Star!
Silver Age!
Vigil!
Hungarians!
New Moon!
Playbills!
Price Lists!
Shop Signs!
An Egg!
An Easter Egg!
How long did this go on? How did I get up? What did I hold on to? A chair? The table? How did I get going? Tottering in a half-faint. A drenched face. How did I get going? Where to?
He performed one of my pieces. Yes, yes! One of my plays. At the Lengyels of course.
Scene: A room. A man is sitting on an old, tattered armchair. It is the only piece of furniture in the room. It is not as if the furniture had been sold. Definitely not. There had always been only the armchair. And the man in the chair. A barren palm behind them. It is not inconceivable that it has never been watered. The man is motionless. He gazes into space with a timeless look. Perhaps he is time itself. One of his hands moves. Is he signaling to someone? The hand drops back on the armrest.
The man stares into space.
The curtain descends slowly.
Suddenly he rises to his feet. What is this? Is he standing up? Is he going somewhere? Is he leaving the chair? The room with the palm?
The curtain is almost down.
The stage is a tiny slit.
The only thing still visible is the man sitting down again.
Curtain.
Pilinszky took a short cut across the street. Across another one. Then on and on. A dark green musette bag hanging from his shoulder. A discharged soldier. Or the wanderer of the world himself.
Where has he come from? Warsaw? London? Paris? By that time he had been all over the world. He was known everywhere. He and his writings too. (The years of the Fifties, the years of the Great Age of Rewriting had passed.)
How did fame affect him? Did he enjoy it? Or was he frightened by it all, instead?
Once he blessed me on the boulevard.
He caught a glimpse of a passerby in the hubbub on the boulevard. A fallible human being.
He raised his hand. He blessed him.