Free The Diary of Geza Csath by Geza Csath

the advice of the vivacious but malevolent general’s widow, Mrs Zsoldos, who suggested that presenting Margit N. with a bouquet of flowers would be quite the thing for me to do.
    An unusual case occurred on the last day of August. Mrs B, the vacationing aunt of a doctor from Teschen, came to see me for a check-up. She was a rotund, hunchbacked woman with pretty buttocks, pink skin on her face, fine features, grey hair and tiny ivory-white hands. Her entire being was flirtatious, assured, kind, and sexual. Despite her 52 years she was attractive and arousing, a widow with seven grown children, spiritually still fresh, with a lively appetite for life, and without self-pity on account of her bodily defect. This was natural, as she was loved, and thoroughly at that (seven!), and she could not see her hunched back unless she used a double mirror. (How can we explain the lively wits, will to live, and good nerves of hunchbacks? I believe it is the excellent circulation of blood to the spine and brain.) After just a few minutes, under the effect of the woman’s provocative smile, a faint excitement began to take hold of my nerves. We spoke. She mentioned her grown-up son, a first lieutenant in the chiefs of staff. Then I examined her. I made her lie down on the couch. She smiled. Between her full, pretty, blood-red lips, her beautiful porcelain-white teeth sparkled. I took her hand and suddenly started kissing it. Smiling calmly, she watched. In a state of strong excitement, I continued the kissing until I reached the finely shaped arc of her elbow. Then I suddenly bent down and kissed her lips. I glued myself onto them for a long time. She blushed. I covered her cheeks, her forehead, and her shapely jawline with insatiable kisses. She suddenly started laughing. She laughed at me. She pushed me away.
    ‘Aber Herr Doktor, was machen Sie, einem solchen alten Weiss?’
‘Sie sund nicht alt, Gnädige, verzeichen Sie wegen meine Freiheit, aber ich bin entzückt von ihrer Schönheit und Reiz und von ihrer Jugend! Verdannen Sie mich nicht. Ich fühle nur eine unendliche Ehre gegen Sie!’ 15 (It’s queer that my knowledge of German always triples in such situations.)
She sat up and allowed me to continue kissing her hands, but then she laughed again. Her laughter was not chiming, but distorted:
‘Hee-hee-hee, heeheehee.’
That cooled me down. I sat down. We talked of inconsequential matters for a few minutes more. But I did not accept money from her. Anyway, she wasn’t with me long. It wasn’t her touch of rheumatism that brought her to the baths, she was just on holiday. Her group left the next day. But the night before, on the Promenade, I won a kind and slightly ironic goodbye smile from her. I would have liked to convince her of my tender feelings for her, but cruel nature, which limits the possibility of sexual enjoyment for women to precise time periods, deprived me of this special pleasure.
In midsummer a blue-eyed woman in mourning came to my office (with her husband). I later found out Mrs B was born a H…szky girl. She was one of the most brazen hysterics at the baths. Her face and body could have been called decidedly attractive, but her voice, manner of speaking, and intellect spoiled the effect. I received daily visits from her. She behaved provocatively from the start, complimented me, spoke of her intimate affairs. Her husband, a nervous and stupid Slovakian merchant, was exceptionally possessive of her and frequently wrote her long, jealous letters. In one of them, he wrote his whole life story in hopes of swaying the lady. The letter was quite pitiful yet still interesting. What I learned from it is that love increases to an incredible degree the expressive powers of even a person of low intelligence. The woman translated the letter for me and had some good laughs as she did so; I was in no doubt about the effect she wanted to achieve. She wanted to inhibit me from honestly feeling sorry for her husband and