Kornel Esti Read Free Page B

said.
    “But it’s all I can do,” I said.
    “Oh really,” he replied, and gave me a hard look.
    “Don’t misunderstand me, Kornél. I’m not showing of , only complaining, like you. Make me whole again, like you used to. In those days, when I was asleep you were awake, when I cried you laughed. Help me now too—remember the things I forget, and forget what I remember. I’m worth something as well. Everything I know will be at your disposal. I’ve got a home, everything there helps my work, and it will help yours too. I work hard, I’m devout and loyal. So loyal that I can’t upset anyone with whom I’ve exchanged a single word, not even in my mind. I’m so loyal, Kornél, that because of my old dog I won’t even pet other dogs, or play with them, or even look at them. Even to inanimate objects—sometimes I ignore my fifteen excellent fountain pens and bring out a worn-out, scratchy pen which it’s torture to write with, and scratch away so as to cheer it up, poor thing, and prevent it from feeling unwanted. I’m loyalty incarnate. You’ll be disloyalty, instability, at my side. Let’s start a business partnership. What can a poet achieve without anyone? What can anyone achieve without a poet? Let’s be joint authors. One man isn’t enough to write and live at the same time. Those who’ve tried it have all broken down sooner or later. Only Goethe could do it, that calm, cheerful immortal; when I think of him a shiver runs down my spine, because there’s never been a cleverer and more fearsome man, that splendid, Olympian monster, beside whom even Mephistopheles is a worthless snob. Yes, he forgave and saved Margaret, whom the earthly judges had imprisoned, and took the mother who had killed her child to heaven among the archangels and learned men of the faith, and made hidden choirs sing his eternal defense of womanhood and motherhood. A few years later, though, when he sat as a magistrate in Weimar and had to pass judgment on a similar infanticide mother, Margaret’s former champion condemned the girl to death without batting an eyelid.”
    “So he sent her to heaven too,” muttered Kornél. “He acted consistently.”
    “Quite,” I retorted. “Only neither of us would be capable of such vicious and divine wisdom. But if we joined forces, Kornél, we might perhaps get somewhere near it. Like Night and Day, Reality and Imag ination, Ahriman and Ormuzd. What do you say?”
    “The trouble is,” he complained, “I get bored, bored beyond words with letters and sentences. You scribble away and in the end you see that the same words keep repeating themselves. It’s all no, but, that, rather, therefore . It’s infuriating.”
    “I’ll see to that. All you need to do is talk.”
    “I’ll only be able to talk about myself. About what’s happened to me. And what has happened? Just a minute. Nothing really. Hardly anything happens to most people. But I’ve imagined a lot. That’s part of our lives too. The truth isn’t just that we’ve kissed a woman, but also that we’ve secretly lusted after her, wanted to kiss her. Often the actual woman’s the lie and the lust is the truth. A dream is also reality. If I dream that I’ve been to Egypt, I can write an account of the journey.”
    “So will it be a travelogue?” I joked, “or a biography?”
    “Neither.”
    “A novel?”
    “God forbid! All novels begin: ‘A young man was going along a dark street, with his collar turned up.’ Then it turns out that the man with the turned-up collar’s the hero of the novel. Working up interest. Dreadful.”
    “What, then?”
    “All three in one. A travelogue—I’ll say where I would have liked to go—and a biography in the form of a novel: I’ll give details of how often the hero died in my dream. But one thing I insist on—don’t glue it all together with an idiotic story. Everything must be exactly what you’d expect from a poet: fragments.”
    We agreed to meet more often in future,