by Sándor Márai
But now I know that in that moment, perhaps for the first and last time in his life, he was happy. He might even have considered revealing something of the secret he called his humanity. While the child was alive he talked to me differently, with a greater intimacy, but I still felt I was not entirely part of him. I know there are people who struggle desperately to overcome a kind of inner resistance, some blend of pride, fear, sensitivity, and uncertainty, that won’t let them join the crowd like the others. But he would, up to a point at least, for a while, have made his peace with the world for the sake of the child. I could see him struggling with himself and was filled with a kind of crazy hope while the child was alive. He was trying to change his nature, to domicile it the way a circus trainer tames a lion. Silent and proud and sad as he was, he was doing his best to be humble and obedient. He’d bring me presents, for example. It was enough to make me weep the way this newly “humble” man—a man who’d always been ashamed to bring me little presents for Christmas or my birthday but insisted on something expensive like a pleasure cruise, a fur coat, a new car, or jewelry—now started bringing me what I had really been missing, touching little gifts hardly worth anything, such as a bag of hot chestnuts he’d bought on the way home, sweets, and so on. Up till that time I’d had the best of everything: the best doctors, the finest nursery, and this wonderful ring I am wearing now. Yes, it is valuable. But now he’d arrive home wearing a shy smile and clumsily unwrap a little package containing, say, a delicately crocheted baby’s jacket and bonnet. He’d put it down on the nursery table, give a brief, apologetic smile, then quickly leave the room.
I tell you I could have wept at those times. Wept with joy and hope.
But there was another feeling too, an important part of the complex whole, and that was fear. It was the fear that he would not win the struggle, that he could not overcome himself, that neither of us could manage our lives, not even with the help of the baby. It was the fear that there was something not right about all this. But what could it be? … I’d go to church and pray. Help me, God! I pleaded. But God knows that the only help we can receive is that which we ourselves give.
But he certainly struggled with himself while the child lived.
I can see you’re impatient. You ask me what the problem was between us. You want to know what kind of man my husband really was … It’s a hard question, darling. I have been puzzling over it for eight years. Even after we parted I continued puzzling. Now and then I think I finally have the truth. But it’s made up of entirely unreliable pieces of guesswork. I can’t name the disease: I can only tell you the symptoms.
You asked me if he loved me? … Well, yes, he loved me. But I think he only truly loved his father and his son.
He cared for his father and was full of respect for him. He visited him every week. My mother-in-law dined with us each week. “Mother-in-law”: there’s something nasty about the word. But this woman, my husband’s mother, was one of the most refined creatures I had ever met. When father-in-law died and when this wealthy, highly elegant woman was left alone in the big house, I feared she would get too used to us. People are so prejudiced. But she was all sensitivity, all consideration. She moved into a small apartment, was a burden on no one, and managed all the difficult, fiddly bits of her life by herself with considerable care and foresight. She asked for neither pity nor kindness. Of course she knew things about her son that I couldn’t know. Only mothers know the truth. She knew her son was tender, respectful, and attentive; it was just that she didn’t love him. Such a terrible thing! But we should consider it calmly, because that is what I got used to with my husband—it was something we both learned from Lázár: that the truth had a certain creative, cleansing power. There was never any argument or disagreement between those two, between mother and child. “Mother dear,” said he, and “Yes, dear son,” she answered. There was always that ritual of kissing hands, a certain formal courtesy, if you like. But there was never any intimacy. The two never spent any time alone in a room together; one was always standing up and finding something else to do elsewhere, or inviting someone in to join them. They feared being left alone together, as if there were some urgent matter that they’d immediately have to discuss and there would be trouble, real trouble, if their secret was revealed, some secret that they, mother and son, could never talk about. That’s what I felt, anyway. Was it really like that? I sometimes wondered. But yes, that’s how it was.
I would like to have made peace between them. But that could only be when they were not cross with each other! I tried to probe the nature of the relationship, proceeding very carefully, the way you’d probe a wound. But the first touch frightened them and they immediately started talking about something else. What could I have said? … Neither accusation nor complaint had any clearly visible, tangible object. Might I have suggested that mother and son had injured each other some time in the past? I couldn’t, because both were, perfectly properly, “fulfilling their obligations.” It was as if they had been constructing alibis their whole lives. Our name days, birthdays, Christmas, those lesser and greater tribal rituals common to all families, were properly conducted, down to the minutest detail. Mama received a present; Mama gave a present. My husband kissed her hand; she kissed his forehead. At dinner or supper Mama took her place at the head of the family table and everyone conducted respectful conversations with her, on the subjects of family and the world at large, never arguing, listening to Mama’s precise, courteous, quietly stated views—and then they ate and talked of something else. Oh, these family dinners! Those silences between conversations! It was this talking-about-something-else, this polite silence, forever and ever! This wasn’t something I could talk about with them between soup and main course, between birthday and Christmas, between youth and aging. I couldn’t say to them, “You are always talking about something else.” I couldn’t say anything because even with me, my husband was always talking about something else, and I suffered the same silences, the same shutting out as my mother-in-law, and sometimes I even thought that we were both to blame, his mother and I, because we didn’t know how to go about it: we had not succeeded in getting him to reveal his secret; we had not accomplished our mission, the one real mission of our lives. We simply didn’t understand this man. She had given him life and I had given him a child … is there any more a woman could give a man? You do agree—she can’t give any more? I don’t know. One day I began to doubt. And that is what I want to tell you, today, because we have met, because I have seen him, and I feel now that everything has built up inside me and I must tell someone, because I think about it all the time. So I’ll tell you now. I’m not boring you? Do you have half an hour? Listen, there may be just time enough.
He might have respected both of us, even loved us to some degree. But neither his mother nor I understood him. That was the great failure in our lives.
You say we need not, indeed it is impossible, to “understand” love? You’re wrong, darling. I used to say that, said it for a long time. I said these things were decreed by God. Love just is or is not. What is there to “understand”? … What, after all, is the value of human feeling if it’s just the product of things we can explain? … But then, as we grow older, we learn it’s not like that, it’s different from what we thought: we do, after all, have to try to “understand” things, including love. No, don’t shake your head and smile, it is true. We’re human beings: we are conscious of everything that happens to us. Our feelings and passions become tolerable or intolerable through consciousness. It is not enough to love.
Let’s not argue about that. I know what I know. And I have paid a considerable price for it. What price? … My life, darling, my whole life. The fact that I am sitting here with you in this patisserie, in this lovely crimson salon, watching my husband buying candied orange peel for someone else. Not that it particularly surprises me, him buying candied orange peel. He had such taste in everything.
Who is he buying it for? For the other woman, of co
urse. I don’t even like to say her name. The one he went on to marry. Didn’t you know he had remarried? I imagined the news would have spread to Boston too; that you might have heard, even in America. It shows how silly we can be. How silly to think our personal affairs, things really close to our hearts, should be matters of world importance. While it was all happening—I mean the divorce and my husband’s second marriage—events of genuine world importance were taking place, countries were being divided, people were preparing for war, and one day war did break out … Not that it was surprising. When people prepare for something, said Lázár—war, for example—with such assiduity, such determination, such foresight, such calculation, that thing is bound eventually to happen. All the same I wouldn’t have been surprised at that time to see banner headlines carrying news of my own personal war, my own battles, my defeats, my occasional victories—an entire survey of the front line that was my life … But that’s another story. At the time the child was born that was all in the dim and distant future.
Perhaps I could put it this way: that in the two years when we still had the child, my husband made peace with the world and with me. Not a proper permanent peace, not yet, just a kind of amnesty, a ceasefire. He waited and watched. He worked to put his soul in order. He was, after all, a man of unimpeachable soul. As I told you before, he was a man. And more than that: he was a gentleman. I don’t mean the sort that goes to gentlemen’s clubs, of course, the sort that fights duels or shoots himself because he cannot pay his gambling debts. He never touched cards, in any case. On one occasion, I remember, he declared that a gentleman does not play at cards because he has no right to money that he has not earned. In other words, he was that sort of gentleman. He was polite and patient with the weak. With those who were his equals he was strict and mindful of his rank, because he did not recognize any other kind of rank. No social rank, in his opinion, was higher than his own. The only other people he admired were artists. They have chosen the most difficult path, he said. They were God’s children. Only real artists, no one else, were superior to him.
And because he was a gentleman, he tried, when the child was born, to alleviate that frightening sense of detachment in his soul that was so painful to me. He made genuinely moving efforts to get closer to me and the child. It was like a tiger deciding to go on a vegetarian diet or to join the Salvation Army. How hard life is, how hard it is to be human …
That’s how we lived for two years. Not entirely well, not happily. But quietly. Those two years must have cost him dear. It needs a superhuman effort to go against one’s nature. He sweated blood for happiness. Starting from a position of absolute paralysis he tried to become relaxed, carefree, easygoing. The poor thing! … He might perhaps have suffered less if I’d released him psychologically, so all my needs, all my demands for love, could be satisfied by the child. But something was changing in me too, something I didn’t understand then. My love for my child was, exclusively, through my husband. Maybe that is why God decided to punish me.
What are you staring at me for? … You don’t believe me? … Or maybe you’re frightened? … Ah, my dear, I know this story of mine isn’t exactly charming.
I was mad about the child, lived only for him, and it was only in these two years I felt my life had meaning and purpose … but it was because of him I loved the child: it was for his sake I loved him, do you understand now? I wanted the child to bind him to me, to bind his entire being. Dreadful as it is to say, but I now know that the child, for whom I remain in perpetual mourning, was merely a tool, a means to force my husband to love me. If I were driven into a confessional and made to stay there till dawn, I could not have found the words to say this to him. But even without words, in his heart of hearts, secretly he knew it, just as I knew it, even without the words, because I did not yet have words for things in life … The right words always come too late and we pay a terrible price for them. It was Lázár who had the words then. One day my husband was to provide me with the words, without particularly meaning to, half by accident, the way we discover a secret compartment. But that comes later. In the meantime we carried on, knowing next to nothing of each other. Everything was in shipshape order, on the outside at least. At breakfast time the nurse would bring in the baby, who was dressed in light blue and pink. My husband would talk to me and to the child, then get in the car and drive to the factory. We’d often invite guests for dinner. They’d drink to our happiness, praise our lovely home: me, the young mother, the beautiful baby, and our perfect lives. What were they thinking when they left? The foolish ones were jealous, but those who were wise and sensitive must have breathed a sigh of relief when they left our house, and thought, “Alone at last!” We served excellent food and the rarest foreign wines; we enjoyed quiet, thoughtful conversation. It was just that something was missing, and the guests who could sense this were inevitably happy to leave. My mother-in-law tended to arrive in a state of mild panic and leave as soon as she decently could. We felt all this but did not know it. Maybe my husband did know it; he probably did … But there was nothing he could do at the time except clench his teeth and go on being helplessly happy.
I wouldn’t let go of him, would not let his soul escape for a second. I clung to him with the child. I silently blackmailed him with my emotional needs. Can these powers bind human beings? … Yes, they can; they are the only power. My every moment was dedicated to the child, but only because I knew that while there was a child my husband was mine and only mine. It is the sin God can’t forgive. You can’t make someone love you, nor can you make yourself love them. Nevertheless you try to impose your will; you strain every muscle and nerve to love. It’s the only way, you say? … Well, it was the way I loved him.
We lived off the child and fought each other. Our wars were fought not with words but with smiles, conversation, and temper. Then one day it happened. I just grew tired and my energy gave out. It was as if my feet and hands had gone to sleep. Because he wasn’t the only one who gave all his energy to his work: I did too.
I tired myself out, in the way people do when they are going to be ill. This was in early fall, many years ago. It was a mild, sweet fall. The child had just had his second birthday and was beginning to be really interesting, an utterly delightful, heartstring-tugging, proper character, a somebody. One evening we were sitting in the garden. The child had been put to bed.
“How about going to Merano for six weeks?” my husband suggested.
Two years earlier it was I who had asked if we could visit Merano in the early fall. I’m superstitious; I like a bit of quackery and believed in the grape cure diet. He didn’t come with me the first time, making some excuse to stay behind. I knew he didn’t enjoy traveling with me, because he feared the closeness implied by a journey, feared the days when two people are thrown entirely on each other’s resources in a hotel room in a strange place.
At home the house, our work, our friends, and the business of our lives came between us. This time he wanted to reward me the best he could.
We went to Merano. My mother-in-law moved into our house while we were away, as was the custom. She looked after the child.
It was a strange journey. It was a honeymoon, a valediction, a process of getting acquainted, a running of the gauntlet: it was all of these at once. He tried to bare his soul for me. Because you can be certain of one thing, my dear: that it was never boring in this man’s company. I suffered much, it almost killed me, occasionally I was almost a complete blank, occasionally I felt reborn when with him, but not for one moment was I bored. That’s just to set the record straight. So, one day we set off to Merano.
Fall was golden, lush, operatic, glorious. We traveled by car. The trees were hung with yellow fruit. The air was richly scented and ripe; the whole world was a garden at the point of turning. There were people in the streets, rich people, people without a care, swarming everywhere, swimming. Big, fat-bellied wasps were humming in the heat, heavy with light. There were Americans just getting drunk on the sun
; there were French women bright as dragonflies and more cautious English visitors. The world had not been boarded over yet; for a moment everything—Europe, life itself—was bathed in intense light. But there was a touch of panic too, a sense of having to enjoy everything at once before it all went. People could feel fate working against them. We were lodging in the best hotel, went to concerts, heard fine music, had two adjoining rooms with a view of the mountains.
What were these six weeks about? What were we waiting for? Were we hoping for something? We seemed to be living in silence. My husband had brought books to read: he had perfect pitch as far as language was concerned and, like a great musician, could tell the false note from the true. He was like Lázár in this respect. We’d sit on the balcony at twilight and I’d read to him: French poems, English novels, heavy German prose. And Goethe and some scenes from Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. He loved that play. He had seen it on stage once, in Berlin, and had never forgotten it. He also loved Büchner’s Danton’s Death. And Hamlet, and Richard III. I was obliged to read him verses by the great Hungarian poet János Arany, from his late Autumn Crocuses cycle. Then we’d dress, have supper in one of the best restaurants, drink sweet Italian wine and eat sea crab.
