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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Hungarian Antal Szerb is best known in the West as the author of three extraordinary novels, most notably Journey by Moonlight (1937), and a highly entertaining study of the Ancient Regime in France: The Queen's Necklace (1942). This selection of his stories and novellas, set variously in mythical times and in the London and Paris of the twenties and thirties, reflects his love of life and the irrepressible irony that is his trademark.
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Seitenzahl: 306
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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ANTAL SZERB
LOVE IN A BOTTLE
AND OTHER STORIES
Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix
CONTENTS
LOVE IN A BOTTLE
AND OTHER STORIES
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
IN 1947, two years after his death, a collection was made of Antal Szerb’s short stories and novellas. Overseen by his widow, it brought together everything he had published in this genre, together with fragments of a projected novel and three new stories found in desk drawers. Under its 1963 title Szerelem a palackban, it has enjoyed regular reprinting in Hungary. Though not exhaustive, it covers almost the full sweep of Szerb’s distressingly brief career: he was still a student in 1922 when “Ajándok’s Betrothal” was accepted by the influential literary journal Nyugat; “The Duke” (1943) was effectively the last thing he wrote.
In 2010 Pushkin Press published a selection of these tales in English translation, under the present title Love in a Bottle. This new edition adds two further short stories, “Cynthia” and “A Garden Party in St Cloud”. They had been omitted on the grounds that the author had probably never intended them for publication. In retrospect, that was too rigid a criterion for excluding two narratives of real brilliance that are central to his artistic development. To make that development easier to follow, in another departure from the 2010 volume, the material is here printed in strictly chronological order of writing.
It begins with three of Szerb’s youthful novellas, published in 1922 and 1923. Each reflects a different aspect of the idealism that drove him in these years. The settings are romantic and quasi-mythical, and the style appropriately mannered, but they are put to surprisingly modern purpose, weaving patterns of imagery and motif to produce real depths of resonance. All three explore questions of self-isolation, through the recurring image of a “tower of solitude”.
In “Ajándok’s Betrothal” (1922) its representative is the strange “tower-house” dreamt up by the heroine and her outlandish fiancé. Against it stands the imposing mill, embodying the working life of the village community and the bonds that hold it together. Both protagonists are solitaries by nature: he by virtue of what he is, she through an increasingly morbid disposition of character, which the folkloric conventions are skilfully harnessed to explore. As the tale proceeds, the seemingly idyllic portrait of rural life becomes increasingly charged with ambiguity, and we are left with disturbing paradoxes about the limits of what mankind can know and control.
The secluded astronomical tower in “The White Magus” (1923) seems at first glance altogether more benign—a place of arcane learning and spiritual detachment. The ideal it represents is contrasted with the instinctive compassion of the heroine, Princess Zoë. Two ancient and opposing religious traditions are invoked here, and as always with this writer, the argument is resolved through action. The narrative achieves a level of a mystical intensity that will not be seen again until his 1934 Anglo-Welsh novel The Pendragon Legend.
In “The Tyrant” (also written in 1923), the tower is one of “solitude and freedom”, constructed by the all-powerful Duke against the ‘dangers’ of personal love. Now, for the first time in Szerb’s art, the focus is on the protagonists’ inner struggle for self-knowledge. Both parties strive to know their true feelings, yet the greater the clarity they achieve, the less they seem to understand. Such ironies will haunt all Szerb’s fiction from now on.
Several years passed before Szerb returned to the genre. By then, the seemingly romantic novellas of his youth had given way to shrewdly observed stories of contemporary life. The prevailing tone is one of amused, sceptical intelligence, a self-deprecating irony born of experience. This new voice first appears in 1934—a milestone year—and is heard in almost everything he writes from this point on. It is the voice of a man finally coming to terms with the baffling and paradoxical nature of the world, with painful questions of love and sexuality, and with himself.
The struggle was hard-won. It involved the loss of the religious ardour that had marked his adolescence, and destroyed his earlier, idealising attitudes to women. Evidence of the latter process is glimpsed in the two stories he chose not to publish, “Cynthia” and “A Garden Party in St Cloud” (both written in 1932). “Cynthia”, with its racy, freewheeling tempo and throwaway manner, blithely parodies its creator’s fantasising tendencies, investing them with an almost surreal quality, but it culminates in a brutally candid analysis of a relationship in which both parties are simply using one another. “St Cloud” is even more pitiless in its scrutiny, and, like “Cynthia”, it ends on a note of desolation seldom seen in this writer’s work. Both stories are marked by a sense of personal relevance that might explain why Szerb kept them to himself. But they are carefully crafted and subtly shaped, and contain some of the most brilliant passages he ever wrote.
The process of maturing also required his leaving Budapest. After periods of wandering through Italy, Szerb spent two further years (1929–31) in Paris and London, passing his days first in the Bibliothèque nationale, then in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The former experience is reflected in “Musings in the Library” (1934), the latter in The Pendragon Legend, published later in the same year.
It was probably in London that Szerb found his true direction. He arrived widely read in several European literatures, but it was the English tradition that spoke to him most intimately. His publications already included a study of Blake and a short History of English Literature, but his tastes were catholic, and the sheer breadth of his reading is remarkable. Appropriately, the first of the new-style stories is “Fin de Siècle” (early 1934), with its cheerfully irreverent portraits of Wilde and Yeats.
The new manner is far more than a matter of voice. In these stories Szerb found his true material—the comic confusions of everyday life and the elementary blindnesses we are all capable of. The theme is the devious workings of the ego, with its endless rationalisations and self-deceptions. This goes well beyond the usual purposes of comedy. The very notion of ‘self’ as something fixed and stable is revealed as illusory, and, typically, the self he most hilariously demolishes is his own. At times these narratives read like exercises in spiritual mortification—as devised by a latter-day St Ignatius Loyola with a bizarre sense of humour. Wryly noting his own follies, it is the unheroic hero who provides the lucid consciousness through which the action is mediated. It is this lucidity, perhaps even more than the irony it results in, that marks Szerb’s originality and greatness as a writer.
The next three tales continue the exploration of fantasy and idealism begun in 1932. The narrative ‘I’ is now the voice of Dr János Bátky, Szerb’s cruelly parodic alter ego, and, despite the underlying pathos, the tone is relentlessly comic. In “A Dog Called Madelon” the hero, like the narrator of “Cynthia”, persuades himself that he will find “erotic charge” only in a woman with aristocratic credentials; in “Musings in the Library” his criteria are academic and intellectual. The blend of irony and pathos, of comedy and despair, is entirely Szerb’s own.
The title story, “Love in a Bottle” (1935)—a pointed reversion to the early novella format—gives idealised love its final and devastating comeuppance. In doing so it prepares the way for Szerb’s 1937 masterpiece Journey by Moonlight. Central to the 1937 novel is the hero’s obsession with his adolescent femme fatale Éva, a morbid passion characterised by “the exulting humiliation of knowing I was lost for love of her and that she didn’t care for me”. The 1935 story gives this mawkish sentiment wonderfully short shrift. But despite its savagely funny ending, it is by no means cynical. Released from his devotion to the appalling Guinevere, Lancelot enters a joyous world, teeming with possibilities, where a spontaneous delight is discovered in the simplest things.
Obsessive behaviour again features in “The Incurable”, making sport of another problem with which the writer was only too familiar. It adds a passing reminder of his amused admiration for the English (by which, like all Hungarians, he means the British), with their absurdly magnificent Empire and other foibles and eccentricities.
The Duke, the last of these tales and written in wartime, differs markedly in tone. Essentially, it is a miniature companion piece to Szerb’s great historical study, The Queen’s Necklace, which had appeared the year before. Through the ‘imaginary portrait’ of the somewhat comical Duke he gives us a cameo of late-Renaissance Italy, not sparing “the nepotism, the anarchy, the hundred different kinds of decadence” at its core. The sumptuous period details are handled with affectionate irony; the touch is always light, despite a deep underlying nostalgia. The prevailing tone of all-forgiving tolerance is, given the personal circumstances in which it was written, both remarkable and moving.
*
Over these twenty-one short years Szerb’s art developed and changed, but there is also a subtle continuity. If we attend closely, the same endearingly sympathetic presence can be felt behind the words. Everything he writes, especially once he has found his mature voice, comes across as personal, written from the heart—a heart that, for all the lucid intelligence of the mind, seems both intensely in love with life and unusually vulnerable.
The youthful novellas, with their earnest tone and burning idealism, reveal the core from which everything followed. Having decided against a life in the Church, and with his hopes for a liberal post-war Hungary dashed, the young writer poured his feelings into the sweetness and purity of these tales—and other less successful ones, not translated here. At the same time they skirmish with personal concerns of a sexual and spiritual nature that will be more fully addressed later.
The next decade or so, spent mostly (and perforce) teaching in a commercial secondary school in Budapest, is marked by prolific scholarship. His doctorate on the Hungarian poet Kölcsey was quickly followed by studies of Ibsen, Blake, the History of English Literature mentioned earlier, a work on the Hungarian Pre-Romantics and monographs on various national poets. These achievements, and the periods spent abroad, brought a mature confidence. When he returned to fiction in 1934, with the first of the new-style stories and The Pendragon Legend, he had found his instrument, that unmistakably personal tone: genial, gently ironical, wryly disillusioned. One can argue that everything Szerb writes before 1937 is, one way or another, a preparation for his acclaimed masterpiece of that year, Journey by Moonlight.
These were precious years. In that same annus mirabilis of 1934 his History of Hungarian Literature brought him public acclaim: a major literary prize (the Baumgarten) and the presidency of the Hungarian Academy of Writers. Three years later, despite fierce opposition provoked by his Jewish descent, he was finally offered a university position. His next volume, the History of World Literature (1941), sought to place the tradition of his own country in the wider Western European context. It was supplemented by countless reviews and essays, on books and writers from every major Western country.
But the times were changing. His work was denounced in Parliament and banned. A wave of anti-Jewish laws stripped him of his university post and led to periods of forced labour. Increasingly, his fascination with philosophical and psychological matters ceded to an even older preoccupation, history. It was now, he tells us, his ‘country of refuge’. A more broadly ‘political’ outlook partly distinguishes his third novel OliverVII (1941) from its two predecessors, but its greatest fruit was of course The Queen’s Necklace (1942). His very last (posthumous) publication, which has enjoyed lasting success, was a compilation of one hundred poems translated from different European languages—his final monument to the civilisation he saw collapsing all around him.
Through all the horror, he never lost faith in humanity, never lapsed into cynicism. Even with the end approaching, he retained his self-effacing gentleness, repeatedly putting the lives of others before his own—eventually with fatal results. There are writers who create works of great inspiration and beauty while behaving no better than the rest of us, or indeed rather worse. The Antal Szerb whose life was so pointlessly squandered in 1945 is not one of them.
LEN RIX 2012
PART ONE1922–23
AJÁNDOK’S BETROTHAL
St John of the Flowers,
how bright is your night
as I stand here before you,
in simple reverence—
till your clear bright skies
grow sombre with clouds.
IT WAS ST JOHN’S NIGHT, the night of St John of the Flowers, the shortest night of the year, when darkness crouches low on its ankles before rising slowly, slowly, to its full height once again.
The wagon of the Great Bear had already been wheeled out, freshly washed, into the sky, and the entire village, both young and old, in all their festive finery, flocked up the hill to where the statue of the Blessed Virgin stood wreathed in flowers. At its feet they made a pile of straw and brushwood and, at the appointed hour, set it alight in the time-honoured fashion. The straw flickered with a young, skittering flame, as did the glowing cheeks of young Lidi as she was led into the centre, and soon the brushwood followed, slow and hesitant, like the dancing of the older women, and the fire of flowery St John was fully ablaze.
The next instant, from every hilltop far and near, answering fires flashed out greetings to one another, like so many kings of the summer throned in radiance above the wide plains.
Along one side of the conflagration sat the worthy elders, among them the miller, as proud as if the whole summer were his own, for the entire harvest was piled high in his barn. On the other side the venerable older women, including the miller’s mother—renowned for her wisdom in seven villages—sat looking across to where the comely younger women were seated. With these was her oldest granddaughter, the same Lidi, whose gaze was directed in turn to where the handsome young men of the village were seated. Among them was Bálint, the miller’s foreman, her secret sweetheart.
The boys all carried long sticks with lengths of straw attached to the ends. These were now set alight and brandished overhead in waving, snake-like movements, leaping nightmarishly in all directions, while the girls threw their fresh flowers onto the fire. The young people shouted and danced, until the blaze finally settled down to burn with a gentle, steady flame (St John’s bonfire never did last very long) and then the games began. A handful of the girls set the song in motion, and the rest quickly followed:
villog, nap ragyog
hunyor a személye,
rózsa nyílik
és utána liliom
Fire burns, sun shines
incarnate in the hellebore,
the rose opens before it
and after it the lily
and Lidi said to Bálint, and Bálint said to Lidi: “You are my treasure,” and all the young people shrieked with laughter, as if hearing this news for the first time. Bálint muttered something under his breath, then rose to his feet, as did the furiously blushing Lidi, and there they stood, side by side, an acknowledged couple. They waited while the girls sang the wooing song, then jumped, hand in hand, through the fire. The miller just smiled and smiled, thinking of his grandchildren as budding ears of corn in God’s great field—there would be so many children, a happy family in the old windmill, and he would be prouder than the Emperor himself when the guard paraded before him.
The embers clung to their waning life, and the couples leapt through it one after another in response to the changing lines of the song. Then when everyone had taken St John’s blessing, the lads came to a stop facing the girls. One of the younger girls would now have to run between the lines shouting, “Lidi Miller’s house is burning, put it out, put it out”. She would then be followed by all the publicly acknowledged couples, starting with the last in line, the girl running ahead of the boy. But when the boys got themselves in position to set off down the line, they realised that none of the younger girls were where they should have been. They had all been sent home to bed, in order not to lose face. The only ones left standing opposite their partners and waiting to run were those already betrothed. Just one unattached girl remained on the scene, a mere child, the miller’s youngest daughter, aged fifteen. Her grandmother had sent her over with instructions to run down the line shouting the required words so that the couples would not be disappointed. She approached with a smile on her face that was a joy to see—but as she grew closer, and cast her eye over the many fine young men standing there with their partners, she burst into tears and ran away, sulking.
Few of the villagers, being all (the women especially) so busy with their plans and dreaming up little love nests for the couples, can have spared a thought for that one little girl among all the others, now wandering somewhere out of sight, alone. The song and the games continued, nor did the miller’s old mother forget to bake the ceremonial herbs over the flames, and the revels went on until suddenly it was very late, and with the next day’s labours in mind they all set off homewards.
Ajándok—for that was the little girl’s name—was the late-born child of elderly parents. She wandered through the gardens, not bothering to dry her weeping eyes, her lips red from sulking and her mouth turned down, reluctant to venture as far as the main road. It was a wonderfully clear night, full of palpitating stars, with not a single cloud in all its pathless expanse. Peering through hedges, she could make out, here and there, broken-down old people sitting in the porches in front of their houses, their faces gazing up at the shining galaxies. Even the dogs were silent. Perhaps they had all gone off to celebrate in some other place, where their kind have a seat at their masters’ bone-covered tables. At the far end stood the windmill, its huge four-armed sails motionless, as under a spell, with not a whisper of wind to drive them.
“Perhaps I should just throw myself in the river,” the child thought sadly. “The fishermen would haul me up in their nets before dawn, with golden fishes in my hair, and lay my body out in the market square, and everyone would come and cry over me, and a rich and powerful man would take me back to the village in a golden coach, and my parents would wail and weep, and say: ‘She was such a little thing when she was alive, and now she’s dead, and she was the most beautiful of all of them.’ And a hundred young men would come and stare at me, but it would be too late, my mouth would be cold and white, and I would be all cold and white, as white as a lily.”
Ajándok was indeed beautiful, as beautiful as fairy gossamer, soft and supple, with long golden hair. But she was still very young, not yet marriageable, not at all ready to be led away as a bride. And she was as solitary as a river by night. She gazed long and thoughtfully at her barely rounded arms, thinking of the future bridegroom she would one day cradle in them—the young man who had only now set out across unimaginably distant seas, his road beset by every sort of terror—and she grieved that the lamp in her eyes could never cast its beam to that faraway place because it was running out of oil and, one night soon, would die out altogether.
She had now reached the silent mill. It lay in darkness. The sight of its mute sails deepened her loneliness and made the far-off stranger seem even more hopelessly remote. Somewhere in its kitchen darkness was preparing dinner, and oh! she wished, if only the mill could suddenly launch itself into the sky above the fields, like a terrifying bird of the night, clanking and rattling as it flew, and reach heaven by dawn! In heaven, among the golden clouds… that was where she would find her rest.
A merry din was heard as everyone—the miller, his mother, Lidi, Bálint, the serving girls and the young workmen—came banging their way up the wooden stairs and into the mill. The long table was already laid and waiting. There was to be a double celebration that night, for the moment they arrived at the front door Bálint had gone up to the miller, doffed his cap and asked for Lidi’s hand in marriage. There had been none of the customary sending of an apple, or a woman with two oven mops, or the man with the flask of wine: this suitor had no need of such tokens—the couple had understood one another quite long enough. Nor was there any of the ritual wrangling between the families, just handshakes all round, the men crowding round Bálint to pump his hand and the women showering Lidi with kisses. Ajándok went over, fell on her older sister’s neck in tears, then promptly ran out of the room.
After waiting a suitable length of time for her to calm down and become more amenable, her grandmother went to see how she was. She tracked her down to the woodshed, where she was sitting on a pile of logs.
“Why are you crying, my pretty flower? Tell me why.”
Ajándok made no answer. She did not know what to say. She just clung to her granny’s shoulder while the sobs shook her like a winnowing sieve.
“My little one, my blessed girl, don’t cry. Haven’t you got a lovely father to guide your thoughts, and your beautiful older sister, see, who’s now become engaged? Who ever saw anyone cry on such a wonderful day? You have everything you could possibly want. You’ve got your pussy-cat Mirók, the little scamp, with a silk ribbon round his neck, and your lovely shock-headed doll Faraj. Nobody sends you out into the fields at dawn to sweep up the gleanings. You live like the fairy Ilona. You aren’t like any of the other girls. You have lovely blonde hair, my angel, and the colour of the ever-faithful forget-me-not in your eyes. Your skin is finer, your bones are more delicate than other people’s, and we take such good care to shelter you from the sun, and the wind, and nasty words that put a curse on you—so you really mustn’t cry.”
Ajándok replied: “It’s no use—not even if Mirók and Lidi, and Faraj, and all the treasures of the fairy Ilona were tucked under my pillow… Granny, I’m so alone in this big wide world.”
“Ah, now I see. So the little girl would like to be a big girl, is that right, my little lily-of-the-valley? I know only too well what a bitter thing it is to be single on flowery St John’s Night and not have a young man. At times like this a girl is like a look-out tree. There she stands, all alone, naked to the wind, gazing around the wide meadow for days on end, waiting for the time for when she will finally be fed with the sweet food of the heart… and then, just before dawn, she hears the neighing of horses telling someone: ‘That’s where the miller’s beautiful daughter lives’—and the bridegroom enters, with dust on his boots, and a diamond-studded whip in his hand.”
“Granny… if you really know everything… tell me when he will come, and what sort of man he will be.”
The old lady became serious.
“You are asking me a very big thing, my flower. It’s not for us to look for short cuts to find out what the future will bring in its own good time. But you know there is a way to do it, and it’s lucky that you ask me this question on St John’s Night, because it’s the best time for every sort of magic. So keep your ears open, my girl, and make the sign of the cross, in case some passing evil spirit should overhear our conversation and draw near.”
Ajándok did as she was told. She could feel the magic of the night, and the dark air closing in around her filled with unseen presences, all just waiting for her to turn her back or shut her eyes for a second, when they would poke their fearsome great heads out at her.
“Now listen carefully, my girl. You must go up to the very top of the mill, to the wheel that drives the sails. There, at the bottom of a large chest, you will find all the lengths of ceremonial herbs and grasses I have dried over the fire on previous St John’s Nights. Gather them up into a little bundle and bring it down with you. On the stroke of midnight, you must leave the mill and, whatever happens to you then, do not look behind you but go straight to the old ruined well. There, you must say three Hail Marys over the water, lie down beside the rim, and place the bundle under your head. You will then fall asleep, and you will sleep just as you would in your own bed. Pay very careful attention to your dreams, because the person you see in your dreams will be the bridegroom you long for. Do as I say, and be sure to forget none of what I have told you.”
Ajándok wiped away her tears and set off for the attic at the top of the mill. She had never liked going up there, not even by day: but this was St John’s Night, after all. It was a fearful place. Here, it was said, the mad young mill-worker Gergely had hanged himself. The winding staircase seemed to go on for ever in the darkness, twisting and turning all the way. At every landing it was as if someone had been sitting there just a moment before and then fled noisily up another flight. After countless turnings and twistings she reached the round window, the huge Cyclops eye of the mill. She thought of those evenings in her childhood, all those times when on her way home from the fields she had seen some creature stick its terrifying head out of the window, then draw it back… perhaps someone was lurking there now? But she gathered up her strength and peered out through it. Down below lay the empty fields. Between the clusters of pitch-black trees, and as far as the most distant seas, the world was utterly deserted. As she sat there, on the staircase that went on for ever, the little girl’s heart beat in total isolation.
Then, just a few steps higher, stumbling and very close to tears, she felt a wave of dizziness. She snapped her mouth shut, and suddenly—she nearly screamed—she bumped into something. It was the attic door. After an awkward scraping it gave way to the pressure of her hands. As she entered her nose was assaulted by the smell of musty old jumble. She was surrounded by unfamiliar objects, each demanding its due, its toll of pure terror.
“Courage, Ajándok. The heroines of fairy stories have faced far more terrifying ordeals on the path to the diamond-studded gates.” It was an altogether different Ajándok, now defiant and sinister to behold, who ran unsteadily over the creaking floorboards in the blue light shed by the thin, fruitless ploughings of the moon that added to her fear. An unseen joist blocked her way, almost jumping up at her, and she had to step over it as over a dead animal. It was followed by what looked like another. Seeing it, she leapt back and sat down hard on the joist. Something was hanging from this second beam, a black, lumpish mass. Her heart fluttered like the wings of a lost bird, as her tearful eyes slowly made out that this object, the source of so much alarm, was nothing more than a haunch of ham hung up to be smoked.
Without knowing how she managed it, she eventually found herself at last in the centre of the boarded space where the great chest stood. She rummaged through the pile of old clothes, calendars and household jumble, gathered up the herbs in her trembling hands, stuffed them into her bag, gave a deep sigh and started on her way back. Fear gripped her once again, even though the situation was now a little less desperate. At what seemed an immense distance down below she could now make out the light from the fireplace, signalling that there would at some point be an end to her frightful journey. But she was still a good few paces from the door when her feet froze in terror, rooting her to the spot.
She had heard a whirring, rustling sort of noise, and it made her flesh creep the way it does when someone stares at us from behind. But she dared not turn round. She was incapable of movement. The moon held her body trapped between its narrow spikes, and she stood there like a person bewitched. Very slowly, as in a nightmare, she managed to force herself round, and immediately clapped her hand to her eyes. This was no dream. Beneath the cloth sail of the windmill stood the pitch-black figure of a man, with something held tight under his arm. Ajándok screamed. The mysterious figure gave a sudden start, flitted away between the sails, and vanished.
Still clutching her bundle, Ajándok ran back down to her room. People begged, demanded, to know what had happened. But she had no words to describe her terror.
Now they were all seated around the table. The vapour from the warm wine had lifted everyone’s spirits, and the sight of the two keys, one for the bride’s old home and one for the new, had driven away all thoughts of night. Kindliness shone in everyone’s eyes, and their laughter wore festive garments.
There was a knocking at the door. Silence fell, and people were still trying to decide who this very late visitor might be when he finally entered. The unexpected caller was a figure clad in black, his boots covered in dust, with a large book bound in pigskin clutched under his arm. His cloak—which looked wide enough to drive clouds along with—hung down all round him, like the folded wings of a raven. Indeed his whole aspect was that of a great wind-blown bird, and his voice, when he spoke, was low and hoarse with the dust of the highways of seven counties.
“My name is Máté the Scholar. I am one of the paupers of the famous order of St Lazarus. I am a wanderer, good people, and exhausted from a long journey. I must ask you for a place to sleep this fine night, and a little milk, and a loaf of bread, since I cannot pay you for them.”
The miller was a hospitable and jovial man, and he made the pauper of St Lazarus take his seat at the table, though he did not particularly relish this sort of visitor. And indeed, although the scholar filled his place at a corner of the table quietly enough, there was little about him of the cheerfulness that filled his neighbours. It was as if his black cloak cast its shadow over the entire table, like some huge-winged buzzard hovering over the courtyard killing the joy of the merry chickens, and after his arrival the conversation became rather subdued. The talk was all of plans for the wedding, finding a best man who would also be a skilful rhymester, and calculating just how much wine would have to be ordered. They tried to draw the wandering scholar in, but to no avail. He heard them out, but in a manner that suggested he had never known what the words ‘wedding’, ‘bride’ or ‘happiness’ might mean.
For all that, the old lady took good care of him. She set down a fresh, uncut loaf of bread before him, and a full mug of milk. It was St John’s Night, and she knew what she was doing. He fell to, but ate very strangely, not as a Hungarian would. He scrutinised the loaf from one side and then the other, and sniffed the milk cautiously before every sip, as if afraid that they were about to poison him. Meanwhile he spoke not a word, and looked to neither left nor right.
