The Hat

by Dezső Kosztolányi
This translation is of the complete text, but it is only a rough draft.

Among other hats, Esti had a black bowler of the sturdiest sort.

He regularly wore this hat when he was going to pursue some shady adventure in the suburbs and didn’t want to be recognized. The large, stiff brim gave unity to the features of his face and a severity to his profile.

He was wearing the hat this very morning, a gray winter morning full of wind.

At the corner of a street, as he was hurrying to cross and reach the opposite sidewalk, a gust of wind caused his hat to fall to the ground just at his feet. He bent down to pick it up. At that instant the wind lifted it back up and it bounced with a dry noise first left and then right. Esti ran after it until he lost his breath. The hat set itself to rolling, a gust of wind pushing it along, until it rolled into the middle of the street. There it stopped.

Not a bit slow or composed, Esti went after the hat. But, having reached the middle of the street, he was about to pick it up when a car came at him with a diabolic speed, a tempest of honks. He had barely the time to jump to the side.

On the sidewalk, the passers-by screamed.

-It’s finished for him, finished fin-ished.

-Has he been crushed?

-And how! they said, laughing.

Esti, on hearing these confused clamour, checked himself from head to toe in terror, then, realizing that nothing hurt, in all haste he joined the group of curious on-lookers which had formed on the sidewalk, just as he himself formed right away whenever there was a fatal accident.

The people were smilling and pointing with their fingers at the very spot.

They welcomed Esti with interest and respect, and when they lavished their regards upon him, their smiles switched off and a certain compassion appeared on their faces. As for the next of kin to the hat, it was all the same to him.

His hat lay in the middle of the street. In passing over it, the tires of the car had horribly flattened it, compressed it, laminated it, one might have said that a small black dog lay run over in the dust of the road. There remained nothing but a dark stain.

He waited until the traffic let up and, taking advantage of the armistice between the vehicles, he went near it.

“Perhaps it lives yet,” he thought.

But it lived no more. The hat was absolutely flat, without life, without soul. It had to have died from the blow. Esti remembered that it had even uttered a “poof.” That was the instant when its soul took flight.

Its brim was cracked on the outside, its lining and its leather were gone from the inside. It had succumbed to grave internal lesions.

For a long moment, Esti stayed standing before it, bare-headed, like before the dead.

Then, with the lightness which makes us pass over the small as the great tragedies., he entered a haberdasher’s shop located nearby. He bought himself a brown hat made of rabbit fur.

Esti left, his hat still lay there, a corpse without a grave, but it was no longer the center of attention, already it no longer surrounded by nothing but indifference and neglect. The cars rushed past to the side or even on top of it.

Esti remained pensive, his new hat on his head, as if accused of infidelity.

The hat, it can be said, is the most noble article of clothing. It covers our skulls, with its domed shape it is an imitation of it, it is like a supplementary skull to us, filling itself also with the spark and smoke of our mind. For two years, Esti’s hat served him in a variety of circumstances, for affairs the same as funerals. More than one night, while Esti amused himself at a show and during that time the hat waited at the coatroom of the theatre, with patience, with resignation, several hours at a time, without the idea ever having come to it to make an escape.

Esti felt a pang in his heart.

He returned to the haberdasher’s.

-I would like a black ribbon, he said.

-That wouldn’t go with this hat, the vender explained, raising his eyes to him. Or are you going to dress in morning for someone?

-Yes, Esti responded resolutely.

Outside, he raised his beribboned hat of mourning before the other which died prematurely and sinisterly.

He mourned for six weeks, like for all the distant parents.