by Sándor Márai
But the game had some subtle refinements.
Peter pretended he was on edge, tortured by his memories. The writer pretended that he was rather too free and easy, a little too relaxed about it, because, after all, the strange situation was not entirely without stress for him either, since he would have felt guilty with Peter there, and that, precisely, was why he was being so loud and jovial. I “pretended” … but no, I wasn’t pretending, I just sat with them and stared, now at one, now at the other of these two grown, intelligent men who, for some reason I couldn’t begin to guess, were playing the idiot. I did slowly begin to understand the more subtle “rules of the game.” But I understood something else that evening too.
I understood that my husband, whom I had previously believed to be entirely mine—every last inch of him, as they say, right down to the recesses of his soul—was not at all mine but a stranger with secrets. It was like discovering something shocking about him: that he had served time in jail or that he had perverse passions, something that didn’t fit the picture I had of him—I mean the picture I had been painting of him in my own soul. I understood that my husband was only tied to me in certain specific ways, but that in others he remained a mysterious, unfamiliar figure, someone just as strange as the writer who had stopped him in the street and “brought him here.” I understood that what was going on was in some way against me but above my head; that, more than comrades, they were accomplices.
I understood that my husband inhabited worlds other than the one I knew. I understood that this other man, the writer, exercised a certain power over my husband’s soul.
Tell me—what do you think power is? … Because there is so much written and said about it. What is political power, what’s the cause of it, how does it happen that a man can exert his will over millions? And what does our power, women’s power, consist of? Love, you say. Well, maybe it is love. Myself, I have occasional doubts about the word nowadays. I don’t deny love, not by any means. It is the greatest earthly power. And yet sometimes I feel that men, when they love us, do so because they have no choice, and that they even look down on love—on us—a little. In every real man there is a kind of reserve, as if he had closed off some part of his soul, kept it away from women, and said, “You can come so far, darling, but no farther. Here is my seventh room. Here, I want to be alone.” It drives the more stupid kind of woman quite mad. They lose their tempers. The wiser sort are first sad and curious, then resign themselves to it.
But what kind of power can one person have over another’s soul? Why did this unhappy, restless, clever, frightening, and at the same time foolish, wounded person—this writer—exercise his power over my husband’s soul?
Because power he had, as I was to find out: a dangerous, even fatal power. One time, much later, my husband said that the role of this man was to be “a witness” to his life. He tried very hard to explain this. The way he put it was that there existed a witness figure of some kind in everyone’s life: someone we meet in youth, someone we recognize and consider stronger than we are, so that everything we do afterward is an attempt to hide whatever we are ashamed of from this witness-turned-merciless-judge. The witness-judge doesn’t readily believe us. He knows something about us that no one else does. We might become important people—we might be ministers of state, we might be awarded the Nobel Prize—but the witness simply stands by and smiles as if to say, “Do you really take yourself so seriously?” …
And he went on to explain that everything we did was, to some extent, done for this witness: it was he who had to be convinced, it was to him we had to prove something. Our careers, the great struggles of our individual lives, were all, first and foremost, for the witness’s benefit. You know that awkward moment when a young husband first introduces his wife to “the” friend, the great companion of his childhood, then stands by, anxiously watching to see if the friend approves his choice of partner and finds her attractive? … Naturally the friend is courteous and thoughtful, but secretly he is jealous, because, whatever he thinks of her, he is the figure the woman is replacing in a sentimental relationship. So, you see, that was the way they were both weighing me up that evening. The trouble was, they already knew a great deal, the two of them, much more than I could begin to guess.
Because another thing I understood from their conversation that evening was that these two accomplices, my husband and the writer, had their own thoughts about men and women and about human relationships in general, thoughts my husband had never discussed with me. This hurt, because it suggested that I was not worth talking to about such things—about things in general.
When the stranger left some time after midnight, I confronted my husband and asked him directly:
“Tell me honestly, do you look down on me, just a little?”
He gazed at me through cigar smoke, tired, his eyes screwed up, as though he were suffering a hangover after an orgy, and considered my question carefully. To tell you the truth, by the time this evening was over, by the time my husband had finished playing this peculiar game with the writer he’d brought home, I felt worse than if he’d been at a real orgy. We were both exhausted. Strange, bitter feelings were stirring in me.
“No,” he replied solemnly. “I don’t look down on you, not at all. Why should you think that? You are an intelligent woman with powerful instincts,” he added.
It sounded convincing but I didn’t quite trust him. I sat down opposite him at the cleared table—we had been sitting at the table the whole evening, not moving to the comfort of the parlor, because the guest preferred sitting and chatting among a heap of cigarette butts and empty bottles of wine.
“Yes, I am intelligent and have powerful instincts,” I answered, then hesitated. “But what do you think of my character, my soul?”
I was aware the question sounded a little pathetic. My husband gave me his full attention, but did not answer me.
It was as if he were saying: “That must remain my secret. Let it be enough that I acknowledge your intelligence and the power of your instincts.”
That might have been how it started. I remembered that evening for a long time.
The writer was not a frequent visitor. Nor did he meet my husband very often. But whenever they did meet, I felt like a woman who notices an unfamiliar scent on her husband, a scent that clings to his hands even though he has only shaken another woman’s hand. Of course I was jealous of the writer and for a while nagged at my husband to invite him to supper again. It embarrassed him and he dismissed the idea.
“He doesn’t lead much of a social life,” he said without looking into my eyes. “He’s a loner. A writer. He works all the time.”
But I discovered that they did sometimes meet in secret. I spotted them in a café one day. I was just across the street. I felt I’d been stabbed with a sharp object, a knife or a needle: it was a wild, sick feeling. They couldn’t have seen me. They were sitting in one of the booths, my husband speaking, both of them laughing. My husband’s face looked so much like a stranger’s: it was quite changed, nothing like his face at home, the face I knew. I quickly walked on and knew I had gone pale. The blood had drained from me.
You’re mad, I thought. What do you want? … That man is his friend, a famous writer, a special, highly intelligent person. So what if they meet sometimes? It means nothing. What do you want from them? … Why is your heart beating so fast? … Are you afraid they will not include you in their games, in one of their peculiar, grotesque games? Are you afraid they don’t think you clever or cultured enough? Are you jealous?
I had to laugh. But the pounding in my breast did not calm down. My heart was beating just the way it did the day I was to taken to the hospital to have the baby. But that second wild beating of the heart was a sweet and happy sensation.
I carried on down the street, walking as fast as I could, feeling cheated, left out of something. My husband didn’t want me to meet with this extraordinary man he felt privileged to know from his youth. My husband was not
much of a talker generally. I felt I was being cheated, even betrayed somehow. My heart was still pounding that evening when, at the usual time, my husband came home.
“Where have you been?” I asked as he kissed my hand.
“Where?” He looked blank. “Nowhere. I’ve come home.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
He gave me a long look. He looked almost bored as he answered.
“You’re right. I forgot. I bumped into Lázár. We had coffee together. You see, I had forgotten. Did you see me in the café?”
His voice was sincere, calm, and just a touch surprised. I felt ashamed of myself.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I just feel unhappy knowing so little about that man. I don’t think he is a true friend of yours. Nor of mine. Of either of us. Do please drop him. Try to avoid him,” I begged.
My husband gave me a curious look.
“Oh,” he said and wiped his glasses with great care, as always. “There’s no need to avoid Lázár. He is never intrusive.”
And that was the last time he mentioned him.
By now I wanted to know everything about Lázár. Having found some of his books—all dedicated, with special inscriptions—in my husband’s library, I read as many as I could. What was peculiar about the inscriptions? They were … how to put it? … disrespectful … No, that’s not the right word … they were strangely mocking. It was as if the author despised not only the dedicatee, but his own books, and himself for ever having written them. There was something a little self-deprecating, ironic, melancholy, in the tone of them. It was as if what he had really written under his name was: “All right, I’ve signed, but I am not quite the person this book implies I am.”
Up to that point I’d regarded the writer’s calling as a kind of secular priesthood. The book was the solemn pulpit from which such people addressed the world! I couldn’t understand everything he wrote. It was as if he disdained people, even the reader, people such as me, and was determined not to reveal anything valuable about himself. Readers and critics had a great deal to say about that tendency of his. There were many who hated the writer, though, of course, some people hate anyone who is well known. He never spoke about his books or about literature when we met. He just wanted to know something about everything. One evening he called in and I had to explain to him in great detail how to prepare rabbit stew. Would you believe it? Yes, rabbit stew. He wanted it down to the last detail; he even asked the cook. Then he started talking about giraffes. It was all very interesting. He could talk about anything and he knew a great deal; it was only literature he never spoke about.
Was there a touch of madness in the two of them? I myself thought there might be at first. But then I dismissed the thought. It was simply—as so often in life—not what I expected. They were not mad, I thought, they were just peculiarly private people.
Then Lázár dropped out of our lives. We read his books and articles, but we didn’t see him. Sometimes there was gossip about his connection with some politician or a well-known woman, but no one knew anything for sure. Politicians swore that our famous author-friend was a member of their party; some women boasted of having captured this elusive exotic beast and bound him head-to-foot. But time after time, the fugitive went to ground and disappeared. Years passed and we saw nothing of him. What was he doing in that time? I don’t know. He lived. He read. He wrote. Maybe he performed conjuring tricks. And that reminds me …
It’s five years later now. I’d been married to my husband for eight years. The baby was born in the third. Yes, it was a boy. I sent you his photograph. I know—he was gorgeous. Then I stopped writing to anyone, including you. The child was everything: he was all I lived for: everyone else, close or distant, disappeared. One shouldn’t be allowed to love so intensely. Nor should anyone be the object of such love, not even our own children. Love is the fiercest kind of selfishness. So yes, when the child was born, our correspondence came to an end. You were my dearest friend, but I didn’t need you—not even you—anymore, because the child had arrived. Those two years while the child was alive were as much happiness as the world could offer. I felt superhuman, calm and fearful at once. I knew the child wouldn’t survive. How did I know? People just know such things. Some of us feel everything and are fully aware of our fates. I knew that such happiness, such beauty and goodness as was concentrated in that little child, was not to be. I knew he would die. No, don’t argue, and don’t look so horrified: I just know this better than you do. But those two years were years of happiness. He died of scarlet fever. It was winter, three weeks after his second birthday.
Why do innocent children die? Can you tell me that? Have you thought about it? I have thought deep and long. Not even God answers questions like that.
I don’t have very much else to do, so this is what I think about. Yes, even now. And I will think about it as long as I live. One never recovers from such a loss. The death of a child is the one true form of torture. Everything else is merely a shadow of this one agony. You are not acquainted with it, I know. And you know what? I don’t know what to say, whether I envy or pity you for not knowing it … I think I pity you.
Perhaps it would have been different if the child hadn’t arrived that third year. And other things might have been different too, very different, if he had survived. They might. A child is, after all, the greatest of miracles, the one true meaning of life; and yet—we shouldn’t deceive ourselves on this point—no child can resolve the problems between two people. A child cannot calm fits of anxiety or solve insoluble complexities. But there’s no point in talking about that now. The fact is, the child was born on a particular day, lived two years, and then died. I spent two more years after that with my husband, and then we separated.
I’m quite sure now that we’d have separated in the third year of the marriage had it not been for the child. Why? … Because by that time I knew I could not live with my husband. There is no pain like the pain of knowing you love someone but cannot live with them.
“Why?” I asked him once, and he told me what he thought the problem was.
“You want me to give up my humanity,” he said. “I can’t do that. I’d sooner die.”
I immediately understood and replied: “Then don’t die. Live on and remain a stranger to me.”
He always meant what he said: he was that kind of man. He didn’t always do it straightaway—sometimes it took a few years for words to become deeds, but sooner or later deeds followed. Other people talk about hopes and plans after supper by way of conversation, then immediately forget what they’ve said; when my husband talked of such things, action followed. It was as if he were bound to his words in some visceral way: what he said once remained with him and would not let him go. If he said “I would sooner die,” then I was to know he meant it, that he would not surrender himself to me but would rather die first. It was part of his character, his fate … Sometimes, in the course of a conversation, he would let fall a few words, criticizing somebody, or suddenly reveal a plan—then time would pass without further mention until, one day, I’d notice that the person he’d criticized had vanished from our lives; that the plan mentioned in passing had two years later turned into reality.
By the third year I knew our marriage was in deep trouble. My husband treated me with courtesy and tenderness. He loved me. He did not cheat on me. He was not involved with any other woman, only with me. And yet—please look away a moment, I think I am blushing—I felt that in the first three years of marriage, and especially in the last two of being together, that I was not so much his wife as …
He loved me, no question about it. But at the same time it was as if he were merely tolerating me in his house, in his very life. There was patience and tolerance in his manner, but it was as though he had no choice in that matter and he’d simply resigned himself to living with me, to sharing a home with me, sharing one room of his life. That’s how it felt. He carried on talking to me as charming and affectionate as ever, taking off his g
lasses, listening, giving advice, sometimes even joking, and we’d go to the theater and lead a social life—and I’d watch him lean back, his arms folded, taking good-natured stock of the others, with just a hint of suspicion visible in his mocking, doubtful expression. Because he did not entirely yield himself to others, either. He listened to them seriously, fully sensible of his obligations to them, then answered them politely; but there was in his voice, I saw, a patronizing note, a certain pity, as if he did not quite believe them, as if he was aware that under even the most sincere human declarations there remained unarticulated layers of despair, fury, lies, and ignorance. It wasn’t something he could actually tell people, of course, and that was why he listened through to them with that deprecating forbearance, with that serious skeptical expression, smiling occasionally and shaking his head, as if telling the other person: “Do carry on. I know what I know.”
You were asking me earlier if I loved him. I suffered a great deal with him. But I know I loved him—and I even know why I loved him … I loved him because he was sad and solitary; because he was beyond anyone’s help, even mine. But it took a long time, and a lot of suffering, before I realized and understood this. For years I thought he was looking down on me, that he had a low opinion of me … but it was something else.
At forty years of age that man was as isolated as a monk in the desert. We lived in a world capital, in fine style, with many acquaintances, part of a considerable society. It just so happened that we were alone.
Just once I saw him in a different light, just once and for a moment only. It was the moment the child was born, when that pale, sad, lonely figure was first allowed into the room. He entered awkwardly, as if he were taking part in a scene that was deeply embarrassing, overfamiliarly human, as if he were a little ashamed to be an actor in it. He stopped by the crib, leaned forward uncertainly, his hands clasped behind his back as usual, wary and reserved. I was exhausted at the time but I watched him very closely. He leaned over the crib and then, for a moment, that pale face of his lit up with some inner glow. But he didn’t say anything. He gazed at the baby for a long time, for maybe twenty minutes in all, without moving. Then he came over, put his hand on my brow and stood silently by my bed. He didn’t look at me but stared out of the window. It was dawn on a foggy October day. He stayed by my bed a while longer, stroking my brow. His palm was hot. The next moment he was talking to the doctor. It was as if he had abruptly finished one conversation and started another, with a different subject.
