Kornel Esti by Deszö Kosztolányi

and the company can do what they like by way of teasing the person concerned. Only there was something very serious and frightening in her immobility and her pose.
    So what was all this about? Esti again gave the mother a questioning look. This time a couple of words were on his lips, he meant to implore her, to say that the time had come for her at last to explain things to him, because it was becoming a little unbearable. She, however, avoided his eye. Esti choked back his words.
    He was no longer surprised at the girl. What surprised him was that the woman wasn’t surprised at her. She just sat there, staring at nothing. Clearly, she was used to her. Had she seen such things before, and stranger too? Clearly, she could have acted no differently. She made nothing of it. And that was the most natural thing.
    The train clattered on. Esti took out his pocket watch every five minutes. Half past one. Two o’clock. The girl still didn’t tire. They were approaching Zagreb.
    Now the mother got up and, like one acting against her principles and better judgment, went to the girl. Once more she was warmhearted, as she had been at the start of the journey. She knelt down beside her, put her face to hers, and began to speak. She spoke quietly, nicely, sensibly, cheek to cheek, spoke into her face, her ears, her eyes, her forehead, her whole body, talked and talked without tiring, with a constant flow and impetus, and it was all incomprehensible, as incomprehensible as the girl’s whispering had been before, and incomprehensible too that one could find so much to say: what old words, pieces of advice, exhortations, what banalities she must have been repeating—previously painful but now no longer felt, known by heart, deadly dull—banalities which she had obviously used thousands and thousands of times before in vain, and which had long since been gathering dust in a lumber room, unused.
    The part of the heroine in a five-act tragedy can’t be so long, nor can a single prayer, not even the whole rosary, that a believer mumbles to his unknown, unseen god. The girl took no notice whatever. She wasn’t disposed to budge from the spot.
    Thereupon the mother grasped the girl’s neck, pulled her hard to her, with great force lifted her into the air, and sat her at her side.
    She stroked her hair. She dabbed her forehead with a cologne-scented handkerchief. She smiled at her too, once, just once, with a smile, a wooden, impersonal smile which must have been the remains, the wreckage of that smile with which long ago she must have smiled down at that girl when she was still in swaddling clothes, gurgling in the cradle, shaking her rattle. It was a wan smile, almost an unseeing smile. But like a mirror that has lost its silvering, it still reflected what that girl must have meant to her back then.
    She was holding a silver spoon in her hand. She filled it with an almost colorless liquid which Esti—who was the son of a pharmacist—recognized from its heavy, volatile scent as paraldehyde. She meant to administer this to her daughter, and that was why she had smiled. “Now, dear, you have a nice, quiet sleep,” she said, and put the spoon to the girl’s lips. The girl gulped the medication. “Go to sleep, dear, have a nice sleep.”
    They arrived in Zagreb.
    The sleepy life of the train came to. There was shunting, whistling. The heated wheels were tapped with hammers, and the sound wafted musically through the nighttime station. The engine took on water, and a second engine was attached so that two could pull the carriages to the great height of the Karszt mountains. The friendly Croat guard appeared again with his lamp. Just a few passengers got on. They were not disturbed.
    The woman gave the girl a sweater, pulled her skirt down to her knees, and retied—more neatly—her strawberry-colored bow. She dressed her for the night rather than undressing her. She spread a soft, warm, yellow blanket over her legs. The girl closed her