Sunflower by Gyula Krudy Page A

female, too, would follow on the mysterious highways of the heavens. At sunrise, when it is still too dark, in high altitudes’ golden oceans the bird would swim after her mate, just like a sad, worry-worn swan.
    â€œGhee-gaw!” comes from the other world Lord Álmos-Dreamer’s cry, and Eveline, humbling herself, would obediently follow in his wake to the land of dreams.
    Spring was on the way, the Tisza region full of witching vapors and miasmic exhalations. Sir Álmos-Dreamer spent a moonlit night in the boggy fen, with a clear view of the ladder stretching up on which souls like tiny dust motes climbed toward milky heaven. The spring night sparkled miraculously above the toady clods of earth. Fogs, mists, and plumes of fume floated up toward the heights like bygone beauties’ curves on dallying display for the moonbeam’s benefit. Now the water snake sheds its old skin, fish and lizards borrow their brightness from the moon and ancient, mute waterfowl vow eternal silence. The earth below splits open like a bivalve, and mysterious night betroths the seedling never yet seen by human eyes.
    The time was here for Sir Ákos Álmos-Dreamer’s tragic demise.
    Swamp fever, on the Tisza island, stole snakelike into his indestructible system, slithered down his throat and through his eyes like poison fumes, terminally deranging an already unbalanced psyche. His case baffled doctors: the so-called malaria, like most other Indian diseases, usually treated with quinine, took the form of delirium in Mr. Ákos Álmos-Dreamer. His actions, at least, indicate that the tragic gentleman went mad in his insular solitude.
    One May night, after prolonged staring at a rufous moon that appeared to squat on the marsh’s edge, coming down on the furze thickets like visiting royalty among rustic wenches, the thought ripened: he must end his tortured existence. But first...
    With the stealth of the insane he approached Eveline’s bedroom. That merciless lady always bolted the oaken door for the night, although her husband had quoted the Bible to her to prove she had no right to do so. Eveline looked away and shrugged. Who cares about the Bible?
    But on this night, as if she had had a premonition (the way her little finger could sense changes in the weather), this extraordinary woman left the door ajar, and woke from a deep slumber to a heavy hand on the nape of her neck, a trembling, joyously quivering palm cleaving to the mound, not unlike the mons veneris, found in buxom women below their neck vertebrae and from where miraculous cables and telegraph wires signal the nuptial moment. An ancient minstrel song already calls the nape the most desirable and most vulnerable bastion of that splendid castle known as the female physique. Eveline had a neck equally suited to the necklace and the noose. Beauteous feminine necks, as self-possessed as if they led their own swanlike existence, and seemingly without the brain’s overlordship, execute their fairylike motions; they see and hear, speak, rise and humbly, submissively bend—such necks have been known to send the brains of many a man into his bootlegs.
    Eveline suffered the caresses only until her dream had flown out the window. When the bird was gone, she hissed a question:
    â€œWhy did you wake me?”
    â€œWhy indeed...” mused Mr. Álmos-Dreamer. “Because I want to say good-bye to you, my dear wife, my darling.”
    â€œIs that why you woke me?”
    Mr. Álmos-Dreamer sadly nodded like a wanderer stranded in the night:
    â€œThat’s right, my child. I shall be leaving life in an hour. Like a runaway cat, the movements of my hands and feet are abandoning me as I descend on slippery steps down to the icehouse and the door slams behind. I want this last hour of my life to be happy. Not to think, not to dread, not to quake, not to recoil from invisible blows...For one hour, eyes open or closed: to sense and see only you,