Sunflower by Gyula Krudy Page B

oh ecstasy, whose chalice I never drank from.”
    Eveline angrily knit her brows—then cast a sly glance from under those eyebrows as if weighing whether to believe the promise. Would he deceive her like a wandering organ-grinder, who plays sad songs under the window, making your heart ache and cry, waking the sad ghosts of the house, while laughing to himself as he licks the last drop of wine from his mustache?
    Eveline was a bold and businesslike lady. She had never done anything that she later regretted. She was concerned that all this might be a trick.
    â€œWord of honor?” she asked, mostly to stall for time, to better appraise the situation.
    Mr. Álmos-Dreamer nodded without emotion, a most peculiar nod, like a one-legged man confronting his lost limb preserved in spirits.
    â€œSwear on the cross,” murmured Eveline, having noted nothing suspicious in Mr. Álmos-Dreamer’s behavior.
    Ãkos Álmos-Dreamer dropped to one knee. Eveline’s hand reached for the heavy silver crucifix that had for centuries served to pacify and silence the dying curses of forebears. The crucifix could have passed for a weapon, at a pinch. Rightly swung, the hefty silver object indeed could have promoted one’s passage to the other world.
    Ãlmos-Dreamer took the crucifix in hand and softly swore a clearly audible oath in the vaulted room:
    â€œI, Ákos Álmos-Dreamer, swear by the Almighty and by the seven wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ that after an hour’s passage I shall no longer be among the living but will lie stretched out dead, never to return from the nether world.”
    Eveline nodded her assent.
    She took one glance at the glass-encased clockworks where at the stroke of midnight the twelve apostles would pass in single file.
    It was a clock face worn out by all the expectant, desperate, fatal glances cast by eyes that had long ago turned into varicolored pebbles along the Upper Tisza. The Roman numerals had faded, the hands were bent like a drooping mustache, the circumambulant pilgrims’ robes tattered. But the tireless mechanism labored on, it still had so much left to accomplish here on earth: such as marking the hour of someone’s death.
    â€œWhen the apostles appear, your time’s up,” she murmured and blew out the candle.
    And what happened to Eveline after she had taught the first Álmos-Dreamer how to die of joy and grief, for love of a woman? For, ever since then, curious little females have been asking Álmos-Dreamers, and with good cause: “Could you do something grand for me? Would you die for me?”
    Nine months later Eveline gave birth to a wistful, moody little boychild, whom she would take many a time to his father’s green sepulchral mound, located, in deference to the deceased’s wishes, like Lensky’s grave, in a small copse of white birches. On the bookshelf, to this day you may find
Onegin
(in French), with the page folded at the appropriate place.
    At his christening the child was given the names Andor Zoltán, the latter fashionable at the time in Hungary, favored by widowed mothers who followed the example of the poet Peto´´fi’s young widow, née Countess Szendrey. Widows who do not stay faithful to their husband’s memory sense their kinship from afar, like nomadic Gypsies who leave behind intertwined straws or some other sign of their passage across the countryside; women, by donning a certain ball gown or particular chapot, let each other know that they don’t mind bestowing their favors upon newcomers. This is a strange fact, but true. In bygone days village dames read through lists of guests at soirées, participants at masked balls, and were able to tell at a long distance whom their lady acquaintance meant to please with her carnival outfit. Via the pages of
Conversation Pieces
and
Ladies’ Courier
, Eveline kept in close touch with events at the capital. Even from her rustic