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In his short story Shoe Laces¸ written in 1912 at the age of twenty-four, Frigyes Karinthy describes his imaginary death. He goes to help a woman tie her shoes, but as he bends down lower and lower he has a stroke. His spine breaks in two: "I opened my mouth..., a pathetic whine ... I tried to cry for mercy, wailed and felt dreadfully frightened in my heart... but it was too late. My vertebra cracked for a last time, making a hollow rattling sound. I could still hear a distant drumbeat. The blood gushed first from my mouth. I let my head down slowly, and rested it there on the pavement."
Karinthy loved Siófok and the Balaton; in his striped swimming trunks, he was one of its spectacles; he and his family used to travel there by train, and spent lots of time at the Vitéz Guest House. On 29th October, 1938, twenty-seven years after writing the short story quoted above, they were there, too, and were preparing to go home to Budapest.
As Ilona Harmos, the wife of the poet Dezső Kosztolányi, described it, the weather was autumn-like; it was pouring with rain, the wind was blowing and stirring up the water on the lake.
As often happened, Karinthy and his wife Aranka Böhm were arguing. It was after lunch, early in the afternoon. In spite of it being well into the day, Karinthy was still in his pyjamas and slippers. He asked their hostess's daughter for an aspirin. "He went back up to his room. A few minutes later, a crash was heard from upstairs. Vera and the maid rushed up to see what had happened, Vera carrying the aspirin. Frici was lying on the floor in his pyjamas. He was already dead. He had one shoe on, a black one, untied. It was thought he had been going to tie it up, and, as he strained to bend down, he was seized with apoplexy like the man in an early short story of his, who, intending to tie a woman's shoes, bends down and dies due to breaking his back."
Along the road in front of where the Vitéz Guest House was in Siófok, the tops of the poplars still interlock with one another.
Nearby is the railway station, the clattering of the trains can clearly be heard. Like a not so distant drumbeat.
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