Dezső Kosztolányi

Twenty Questions

Short story

 

...

What do unemployed writers do? The same as everyone else. Unemployed carpenters, in the first flush of their enforced idleness no doubt glue together and bang nails into anything around the house, fixing limping tables or wobbling chairs, indeed, out of wise foresight, maybe even size up and assemble coffins for themselves and their family. Unemployed magicians strive to use their wands to make gloomy thoughts disappear and create money from nothing. Unemployed teachers - so I imagine - rap their own offspring on the knuckles and get the dog to spell. For a while, each one pursues his own craft. Unemployed writers too. Due to their perseverance, they proceed at the old terminal velocity. Words are in motion within them that otherwise could have served great creative works; they overgrow feelings and thoughts and, for lack of a central streering and braking force, break loose from their customary orbit, rebel and demand their rights. The words start to live an independent life, just like tools that have been downed for too long: bored mallets that all at once jump out of their toolbox and hammer everything, left, right and centre, or undeservedly neglected planes, which in their desperation dash and slide around, back and forth, without their master's hands on them, deliriously planing down walls, carpets, mirrors, whatever is in reach. It's spooky, my friends. I noticed this in Jancsi too. He wrote less and less. In the end he wrote only the titles of his poems, or the rhyme scheme, as the most necessary elements, salvaging the motive force of form, the essence, and casting the rest away. That is how his eloquent but not exactly voluble poem about earthquakes came into being, in which he merely makes the following assertion about the giant who carries the Earth on his shoulders:

Atlas,
How tactless

which is how the similar poem 'Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner' also came into being, in which he strove to justify or excuse an unfortunate friend who was addicted to narcotics in the following manner:

Don't stand amazed at the morphinist.
Think rather what an orphan he is,
then you'll understand.

These creations, to which I could not totally deny all spark of curiosity, already show a deformation and stunting of his art, demonstrating where the greatest God-given talents can end up if insufficient scope is given to their abilities.
But that's what they were like, all of them; they lay fallow, untapped, interminably. What were they to do? They played, that's what. Words played with them, so they themselves played too. Or rather, since a writer's job is essentially play, "they worked." They played and worked with the futile tools of their futile craft. They played with vowels and consonants, speaking fluently with 'e' as the only vowel, so that the 'army' became select he-men-engendered deterrent strength. They played Twenty Questions, raising that exercise in mental gymnastics to an unimaginable degree of virtuosity and, by narrowing the field of concepts, deducing every conceivable and inconceivable item in the shortest possible time from a respondent's yes's and no's - for instance, the flint in Poincaré's first cigarette lighter, or Oedipus's own hale and hearty Oedipus complex. They played at 'framing sentences', in which the most ridiculous foreign names would be artistically blended, woven and worked into a Hungarian text - the names of Rabindranath Tagore or Count Axel Oxenstierna. They played with the initials of proper names. At the drop of a hat, they could reel off every poet, scholar or philosopher whose name began with a U or W, so at least at these times and in this manner they saw some use for their broad cultivation - out-of-work writers for their familiarity with world literature, out-of-work linguists for their years-long exhaustive delvings, out-ofwork mechanical engineers and out-of-work paediatricians for their schooling in natural history and their multiple universities - because, having rattled off the various eminent names for around half an hour, with everyone by now worn out and having given up, someone at the very last moment would clap their brow and pronounce the name of a barely known Polish biologist whose name began with a U or W, thereby winning that game, the prize, as well as recognition and admiration from us all. But they played most of all with words themselves, these mysterious minutiae of language, these supposedly non-decomposable elements of language, constantly searing and distilling them in their alembics, like alchemists in the Middle Ages, and in the course of their labours they would triumphantly discover that deliver read backwards is reviled or top bard notes putrid tang backwards is gnat-dirt upset on drab pot, while the more outstanding among them were, in next to no time, able to compose lengthy poems and stories that made almost as much sense when read from front to back as they did when read back to front. That is how they prattled and wittered on, the poor things, without material or object, running on empty, like windmills, thrashing the air-nothing.
Suffice it to say, the other day, getting on for the evening, about seven o'clock, I too was sitting among them at the long marble table in the Sirius, wallowing in this tepid nothingness. In comes Johnny. Without so much as a greeting he settles at the table, resting his elbows on it and saying not a word. He holds his tongue.
He looks a little pallid. But then his normal complexion, you must know, is always pale as a sheet from all the fasting he has done, both of old and more recently. He seemed excited, and that was picked up on by the others too. Something extraordinary had happened to him. Something was the matter with him. They asked him too: What's wrong?
He just shrugged his shoulders.
What could possibly be wrong? It's wrong that we are born into the world and have to live. It's also wrong that we depart from here and die. It's wrong that we are healthy and so have to eat. It's wrong that we are sick and so cannot eat. One way or another a lot is wrong in the world. It could be worse.
"All the same, what's wrong with you? Come on, spit it out. What's got into you?"
Johnny smoothes back his curly, up-brushed hair, twirls his minuscule moustache. A cocky chap, a gutsy fellow, and no mistake. Flimsy in frame but very manly.
"Did you lose you job, perchance? You've been declared bankrupt? Gone totally bust?"
Jests and jibes of this kind have long ceased to get a rise around here. Neither the wags nor those who are ragged are amused.
Lalojka, the waiter, rushes over to him. He bows politely and confidentially:
"The usual extra-large draught will that be, sir?"
Johnny nods.
Lalojka comes back with two glasses of water, setting them down before him on a tray. Johnny drains both of them, one after the other. Look how thirsty he is.
Balthazar, Ullmann and Kellner return to grilling him.
"Why are you saying nothing, you pudding?"
The reason he is saying nothing is that he sees no sense in it. Nothing can be done about it. He throws out:
"Guess."
"Is it something that happened today?"
"Yes."
"This morning?"
"No."
"This afternoon?"
"Yes."
"You had no suspicion of it even yesterday?"
"No."
He answers in this fashion, casually. The least of his problems is that they will guess.
At the far end of the table, an overweight, dark-haired young man is blocking his ears with both hands as he is immersed in the Daily Mail crossword. Every blessed day he solves all the domestic and foreign crosswords: he qualified as a teacher of Greek and Latin eight years ago, and for eight years he has had no job.
Out of boredom, he has also learnt Arabic, Persian and Turkish. His name is Dr Scholz. His friends once used to call him Socrates because of his sharpness of mind and brilliant polemical flair. Later, when he pursued his luck at the race track, putting a florin on every horse, they called him Suckeratgeegees. Very recently, though, since he had started to neglect his apparel, changing his shirt only on rare occasions, they used neither that name nor the other but simply called him Socksarecheesy, both behind his back and to his face, the writers just as much as Lalojka and the other waiters, which he took cognisance of with an understanding and unconcern worthy of a philosopher.
He writes into the squares of the crossword the appropriate English words - an Australian river, an Indian wild animal or an American statesman - then, like someone who has done their daily duty, heaves a sigh of satisfaction. He yawns. He takes off his grubby spectacles, wipes them with his grubby handkerchief, which only makes the glasses even grubbier, though the handkerchief is no cleaner for it. He listens to how Johnny is being assailed. He raises his tired gaze to him.
He thinks they are playing Twenty Questions. He is wrong, however. They are not yet playing Twenty Questions, or they are as yet unaware that they are. The instinctively curious questions and instinctively curt replies gradually, unremarked, tip over from reality into game as when an aeroplane lifts off from the ground to hover above it, albeit by only a few spans as yet.
Scholz smiles at the amateurishly bungling game - it's something in which he is a true master. He already knows what the task is: to ascertain what happened to Johnny and what is the cause of his melancholy. He takes over the game purely out of compassion. He levels his questions with scientific methodicalness at Johnny's chest, and the latter responds apathetically.
"Object?"
"Yes."
"Just an object?"
"No."
"A concept as well?"
"No."
Scholz purses his lips, as he considers that unless it is an "abstract concept" the task is unworthy of his efforts.
"An object and person together."
"Yes."
"An invented figure."
"No."
"Living?"
"I can't answer that."
"Not living? Dead?"
"I can't answer that either."
"What do you mean? Neither living nor dead? Living dead, then?"
"No."
"Ah! I see," says Scholz. "As of now you don't know whether the person is dead or alive," he adds, though sensing that something is not quite right.
He thinks back on the nice and hard games he has played in his life. He thinks that at Shrovetide last year he worked out colour-blindness and also the hole that a nail makes in a wall, and not long ago he hit upon Abigail Kund's maternal grandma, or in other words a fictitious, non-existent figure's fictitious, non-existent relative whom the poet himself did not consider it worth making up, and he had equally hit upon the purely hypothetical psychologist who diagnosed, or might have diagnosed, the same Abigail Kund's madness.
He hauled an article of value out of one of his pockets, a flat silver case containing green gum-drops. He offered them around the table, as was his habit, but the company refused, as was its habit with anything that he had touched. He alone took one. He chewed the green gum-drop with his black teeth.
"Let's get on with it," he urged himself on. "So, this is a person like you or me?
Male? Female? Between twenty and thirty? Your wife?"
"Yes."
"Marika," Scholz says to himself pensively, adjusting his spectacles on the bridge of his nose and staring at Johnny.
The others likewise stare at him.
"The object in question," Scholz carried on, "was it slung at your head? Did you have a row?"
"No," Johnny answered sternly, and with that 'no' simultaneously quelling the sniggers that had already started to sputter around him.
"No?" Scholz asks, and he has a sense of having lost track. "All right, then. But this object is still related to your present psychological state, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Is this object large? Is it as big as my head? Is it as big as my fist?" displaying his grubby fist. "Is the object on you now? Is it with your wife now? On her perhaps?
On her head? On her ears? On her hand? Is it beside her, on the ground?"
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no."
A few minutes later, with the game still going on, Scholz cries out:
"So, this object is or was in you wife's stomach, it doesn't matter which. An item of food? Not that?" he says and lowers his raised eyebrows. "Organic? Inorganic? An inorganic industrial article; a medicine, but something that neither I nor you have yet taken? Poison?" he slipped in quickly.
"Yes," Johnny answers.
The company is leaning forward attentively, but without any great excitement, because the excitement is fraternally divided between Johnny, who seems to be the hero of a domestic tragedy, and Scholz, who has figured this out.
"Poison," Scholz reiterates, "Right, so poison."
Someone started whistling. ".bubbling as it goes in."
"Silence, please!" Scholz yells. "Don't distract me. Given that it's inorganic, could it be a sublimate?"
"Yes."
"Corrosive sublimate, mercuric dichloride," sounded a voice. "HgCl2."
"That's neither here nor there," Scholz gestured for the voice to desist, now with the goal in sight.
I won't continue, my friends. Just that I have taken many things to heart, but nothing like that. After a few minutes of fencing with words and close combat, Scholz had winkled it out of him that his wife, Marika, the good and amiable Marika, barely an hour beforehand, for an unknown reason but with the intention of ending her life, had swallowed a lozenge of corrosive sublimate. An ambulance had taken her to hospital and that was where she was right then.
So help me! there were beads of cold sweat on my forehead. You, of course, would have supposed that the whole thing was just a leg-pull, a juvenile prank, a bluff. That wasn't what I was thinking. I know those lads who are living in 1933. They don't act up like we do, and they never lie, either to themselves or to others. We were romantic; they were objective. Johnny objectively communicated how matters stood, according to the strict rules of Twenty Questions, and they accepted it just as objectively. It did not occur to any of them to doubt it for a second. They were not even greatly surprised. They can't be surprised by anything.
As to why Johnny fell in with a game of such questionable taste, God only knows. Perhaps out of tiredness, or nervousness maybe. He hurt nobody by doing so. Marika was meanwhile receiving expert treatment in hospital: they pumped her stomach out, made her drink milk, and dripped many litres of water through her. They sent Johnny away so he would not get under their feet; he was only supposed to go back an hour later. Right at that moment, then, there was nothing he could do. He wanted at least to help himself; he had to kill time somehow until he could see her again.
I don't condemn him. He loved that wife of his and still loves her now. I recall that in the early days of his marriage he went around with four scones constantly in his pocket, happily showing them to everyone as having been baked by his wife. What does that prove? Not what you maintain: that the scones were inedible, because then he would have thrown them away and not kept them in his pocket for months on end, like some sort of holy relic. In short, he loves his wife. After the Twenty Questions, he drained two more glasses of water then dashed over to the hospital. He returned only hours later, late that evening. He reported that Marika had got through the critical time, she had been saved. She was feeling fine and the doctors were confident there would be no after effects.
The Russian musicians in the Sirius struck up with their scraping - you know, the prisoners of war who got stuck here after the war ended. For a while they wore national dress and played Russian songs; then, as their clothes got shabbier, they forgot the Russian music, and now they play almost nothing but Hungarian popular songs - in line with their Slav temperament, dreamily, languidly, and usually also flat as well. So we fled.
I accompanied Johnny back to his home on Hungária Boulevard. He has a monthly rented room there. He sat down on the divan on which they had previously been sleeping together. He registered that today he would be sleeping alone. His pain was objective. He got to his feet, threw a gaudy cushion and a thin quilt onto the divan. After that he paced up and down, hands behind his back, without saying a word. He stopped every now and then in front of the window. He looked out onto the street. It seemed he was waiting for something. I already told you, he was a chap who was always waiting for something. It was night-time now, a dark and cloudy night. He was obviously waiting for the dawn.
[1933]

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1936)
was a leading poet, novelist, short-story writer and critic of the period. He also worked
as a journalist all his adult life and was a regular at the literary cafés in Budapest.
He was among the few who recognised József's great talent at an early stage and
encouraged the young poet. The incident he describes, also recounted in Tibor Déry's
memoir (see pp. 47-58), appeared as one in the series of his semi-autobiographical
stories called Esti Kornél. Kosztolányi was not present at the scene, it was the critic Andor
Németh who told him about it. Judit Szántó (Marika in this story), the poet's companion at
the time, but not his wife, tells in her memoirs that she had discovered the manuscript of
József's great love-poem, Ode, which the poet had written to another woman, and that
caused her to attempt suicide. The Ode has excellent English translations, including one
by Edwin Morgan (in Sixty Poems by Attila József. The Mariscat Press, Glasgow).