Sunflower by Gyula Krudy

window pane. While, inside, the young lady of the house is already fast asleep, like Aladdin in the enchanted cave.
    In the daytime Eveline dared not think of the night. Like a good child or an old-fashioned bride, she preferred to listen to tales told by Mr. Álmos-Dreamer who, being the village beau that he was, in order to keep the thread of conversation going, surely must have conned a page or two in some antique tome before leaving his island.
    Mr. Álmos-Dreamer brought into the house a fresh winter scent that smacked of plain everyday life and prompted one to quickly confess everything—sins, diseases, meanness, weakness, desperation and bitterness—and rapidly reel off one thing after the other, to be absolved as quickly as possible, so that refreshed, reformed and bathed clean, one might turn a new leaf, and launch upon a carefree, openly selfish, relaxed and ordinary life. It meant leaving behind forever the curses of civilized life, its soulless pleasures, exotic agonies and neurotic dances. It meant pulling on a pair of peasant boots, biting into a garlic sausage, and joining the washerwomen on the frozen river by the hole cut into the ice; it meant lugging grimy little kids in a knapsack on one’s back. It meant eating plenty and squatting on the snow like the nomadic Gypsy women who can run like gazelles, and give birth and die in birch groves, where crows congregate.
    Eveline was petite, with black hair. She loved the color red. To amuse herself at home she dressed as a Gypsy girl, and told Mademoiselle Montmorency’s fortune: she predicted the wilting old maid would have ten children.

2. The Return Of a Bygone Eveline
    One fine day Mr. Álmos-Dreamer up and died.
    He did this every year after spending some time in Miss Eveline’s company, at times when love, the torments of lone wolves and the howling winds assailed him. At times like these, he started to play the violin in the house on this island frequented by the wind and storm-tossed birds. At such times his servant boy, with his brass buttons, shabby white gloves and antique spats, would retreat into a cubbyhole. Mr. Álmos-Dreamer played the violin from dusk to dawn in front of his lectern like an officer in Queen Maria Theresa’s bodyguard preparing for a duel to the death. He played old melodies from a score on which the writer’s hand had doodled roses and ladies’ faces. French chansons: grandmothers’ reveries. German student songs: souvenirs of Hungarian gentlemen traveling abroad. Viennese waltzes: the light-hearted, floppy perukes of forefathers. Compositions by Lavotta and Czerny: fantasies of musicians returned to their homeland to muse over the aimlessness of life.
    While making music, Álmos-Dreamer neither ate nor drank. He sat wearing a black tailcoat, white vest and lacquered pumps. His face as serene as an autumn landscape, his eyes brooding over dry fallen leaves, his lips proudly pressed together—all this was no mere histrionics. He was in truth a specimen of the dreamy, retiring and scornful Hungarian country gentleman who asks nothing more of the world than a nook from where all obnoxious climbers are banished. A place where life’s business may be conducted with the occasional small gesture or barely audible word. Such behavior would be called depressed by some people, yet it is in fact a splendid human trait, this regal disdain.
    He liked to call these hours “withdrawing from life.”
    He did not have to go far, in his solitude, to arrive at his goal. The house, built on this remote island wilderness by an eccentric ancestor to escape the “yellow peril” that would one day overrun Hungary and all of Europe, was a natural home to death and extinction. Around this household there could be no lust for life, for life was a succession of monotonous, idle days, its sole purpose, a preparation for extinction. The gutter hung from the roof, slowly dying like a