Before an inexplicable chill of nostalgia erupted from beneath his skull and shuddered down the core of his spine to his sweaty lumbar, Csongor Toth reminisced of his childhood as an impoverished peasant frolicking in the pastoral lands of eastern Hungary—although he did not appreciate the vigor of his peasantry nor the depth of his poverty until the eventful years of adolescence.

He recalled his father sitting on a shabby chair with three wobbly legs and telling colorful stories of the great Hungarian Revolution. The event had played out in 1848, three years after Csongor’s birth, and consequently meant little to him.

He remembered a dreary vision of his mother stumbling across a plowed stretch of dark ground on a bright spring morning with a large bag strapped over her shoulder, but he could not recollect the cheerless expression on her face or the pointless contents of the bag.

He remembered his infatuation, at the age of 14, with a flirtatious peasant girl, his elder by three years, and he recalled with delicious clarity the savagely-prurient dreams that began emerging from the murky subliminal folds of his pubescent mind following the night she spurned him.

He remembered the days after his sixteenth birthday when the startling epiphany erupted into his thoughts that his unfortunate birth into an impoverished peasant family was an absurd cosmic error demanding immediate rectification. He recalled his promise to take whatever actions were necessary to remedy the error. He subsequently made plans to procure the wealth necessary to finance both travel to a larger city and a suitable female tutor who could provide for his education and play a central role in his increasingly ravenous dreams.

He remembered the night he entered the home of the wealthy family, only a few miles away from the disgusting little hovel his own family had lived in from the time before his birth. He did not originally intend to take anyone’s life, but after emptying a box of jewelry and precious coins rather noisily, his discovery by the father had left him no other choice. After using his fists to beat the poor gentleman nearly unconscious, he had employed a length of curtain cord as a garrote to finish the job.

It was regrettable that he had wandered into the man’s bedroom across the hallway, because he was thereby obligated to asphyxiate the man’s deliciously plump wife with her own nightgown—an act that had required equal measures of dexterity and strength. But in both instances he had experienced a curious surge of euphoria, which he later discovered could not be recreated in any other way—although the euphoria soon faded and usually vanished altogether within a day.

He discovered the children, a boy and a girl, in separate rooms at the end of the hallway. He decided to let them sleep after experiencing a fleeting twinge of conscience (this surprised and amused him at the time).

He remembered the primal urge to look up the peasant girl who had rejected him a few years earlier. After several inquiries he learned of her unfortunate demise from cholera. He recalled weeks of depression following the discovery of this wasted opportunity. He eventually recovered from his emotional muddle and began his journey to Budapest.

He soon found living quarters appropriate to his recently improved financial status. He placed an advertisement in the newspaper for a female tutor with expertise in philosophy, languages, and mathematics. After interviewing six highly-qualified but rather unattractive applicants, a woman in her twenties who possessed the requisite intellect and presentation arrived on his doorstep in desperate need of a job. (It turned out that she was also on the run from an avaricious suitor and needed a place to hide, but this little nicety was not revealed during the interview.)

Csongor had hired the young lady on the spot with the understanding that she would tutor only him and that she would teach him something new every day—unless some dramatic personal calamity allowed the possibility of a day off.

He remembered his sacred pledge to control the full expression of his salacious appetites until he had achieved mastery of mathematics, English, German, and philosophy. Regrettably, he fell somewhat short of this promise on a rainy Friday afternoon during a contentious debate on Immanuel Kant’s notions of ethics.

Although the exquisite rapture temporarily assuaged the tiresome consequences of this untidy business—another newspaper advertisement, more interviews with disagreeable women, arduous negotiations over petty details, and, of course, the inconvenience of….