24 Aug 2018: The apostle (extract) by Sándor Petőfi

(English translation by Victor Clement) The town is dark, night lies upon it, the moon roams over other regions and the stars have closed their golden eyes. The world is black as bought-off conscience. One single, tiny light glimmers above faintly, faltering like the eye of a languid dreamer, like a last hope. It is the pale light of a garret. Who keeps vigil by the light of the lamp? Who keeps vigil there above? Two sisters: virtue and misery. Great, great is the misery there, it hardly has room in the tiny chamber. The garret is small, like a swallow’s nest, and not more ornate than the nest of swallows. Dreary and bare are the four walls, or they would be bare had not mould painted on them flowers, had not rain, trickling down through the roof, striped them moodily … The heavy rain streak reaches down like a bell-rope in a mansion of the rich. The air is dense with sighs and the smell of mould. The hounds of the mighty lords, bred in better quarters, would waste away in such surroundings. Pine bedstead, pine table, which would not sell at a rag-fair, a sack of straw at the foot of the bed, a few straw chairs by the table, a worm-eaten chest at the head of the bed, these are the room’s furnishings. Who are the dwellers here? Shadow and light struggle in the tired blinking of the lamp … the figures, like dream images, are faded, and loom vaguely in the dimness. Does the feeble light deceive the eye? Or, are the dwellers here all really so pale, such ghostly apparitions? Near the bedstead, on the chest, the mother sits with her child. With hoarse moans the infant sucks, sucks at its mother’s shrivelled breast, and it sucks in vain. The woman sits brooding, and her thoughts must be sorrowful for, like snow melting from the eaves, her tears cascade down upon the cheeks of the little one … Or, perhaps, unwittingly, merely out of habit, the tears gush from her eyes, like a brook from the rocks? Her older child, thank God, sleeps quietly. Or does he only seem to be sleeping? He lies on his bed near the wall, covered by a coarse blanket; the straw shows from under it. Sleep, little man, sleep, dream bread into your wasted hand, and your dream will be kingly. A young man, the father, sits darkly brooding at the table … Is it the gloom oozing from his brow, that saturates the garret? ‘Tis a heavy tome, this brow, the woes of the world, all are inscribed upon it: this brow is an engraving, the hunger and torment of a million lives are etched into it. But below the sombre brow, two smouldering eyes flicker like two vagrant comets which fear no one but are feared by all. His gaze soars always farther, always higher, until it is lost up there in the infinite, like an eagle among the clouds.