by Sándor Márai
Talked, I said? I tell you, he not so much talked as chatted in a relaxed low voice. His accent sounded faintly Slavic. The last time I heard that lilt, that regional dialect, was in Zemplén in my childhood.
“Dear soul,” he said. “I would like to help you. Once, a long time ago, a woman came to me who was in love with a man so much she killed him. She did not kill him with a knife or poison, but with her love, because she wanted that man completely, because she wanted to remove him from the world. They fought a great deal. The man got so tired of this that one day he died. The woman knew this. He died because he had had enough of fighting. You know, my daughter, people exercise various forms of power over each other. They have many ways of killing each other. It is not enough to love, dear soul. Love can take a very selfish form. One must love humbly, with faith. Life as a whole only makes sense when there is faith. God gave people love so they might bear the world and each other. But those who love without humility place a great burden on the beloved’s shoulders. Do you understand, child?” he asked so tenderly he was like an old teacher teaching a child the alphabet.
“I think I understand,” I said, a little frightened.
“You will understand it eventually, but you will suffer a great deal. Passionate souls like yours are proud and suffer greatly. You say you want to possess your husband’s heart. You also say your husband is a genuine man, not a fickle womanizer but a serious, pure-hearted man with a secret. What could that secret be? That is what you are determined to find out, dear soul; it is what you want to know. Don’t you know that God gave people individual souls, each his or her own? Each soul is full of secrets, each as great as the universe. Why do you seek a soul that God has created secret? It may be the meaning, the mission of your life to put up with it, to bear it. Who knows, perhaps you might injure your husband in the process, even ruin him if you succeeded in laying his soul bare, if you forced him to adopt a life, or to assume feelings, that he feels bound to resist. One shouldn’t love by force. The woman I was talking about was young and beautiful, like you, and did all kinds of stupid things to recover her husband’s love; she flirted with other men to make him jealous, she lived a fast life, tried to make herself still more beautiful, spent a fortune on Viennese outfits, high-fashion dresses, the way unfortunate women sometimes do when there is no faith in their hearts and they lose their spiritual balance. That having failed, she rushed out into the world, to clubs, to parties, everywhere where there are crowds and bright light, where people seek to escape the emptiness of their lives and their vain and hopeless passions, places where people go to forget. How hopeless it all is,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “There is no forgetting.”
That’s how he talked. I was all ears now. But it was as if he hardly noticed I was there. He was muttering away as if to someone else, the way old people mutter. It was as if it were the world he was trying to convince. Then he went on:
“No, there is no forgetting. God will not allow us to forget the questions life poses to us in a storm of passion. You are in a fever, child. A fever of vanity and selfishness. It may be that your husband’s feelings toward you are not precisely what you would have them be; it may be he is simply a proud or lonely man who cannot, or is afraid to, show his feelings, because they were badly wounded once. There are many such wounded people in the world. I cannot absolve your husband, dear child, because he too lacks humility. Putting two such proud people together can lead to a lot of suffering. But there is such greed in your soul at the moment it reminds me of sin. You want to dispossess another man of his soul. That’s always the case with lovers, it’s what they want. And that is a sin.”
“I didn’t know it was a sin,” I said, still kneeling, and started to shiver and tremble.
“It’s always a sin when we are not satisfied with what the world freely offers us, when people offer us something of themselves, when we greedily want to rob them of their secrets. Why can’t you live more modestly? With fewer emotional needs? … Love, real love, is patient, dear child. Love is endlessly patient and can wait. The course you have embarked on is impossible and inhumane. You want to take possession of your husband. But that is after God has arranged your mortal life to be the way it is. Can you not understand that?”
“But I am suffering, Most Reverend Father,” I said, and was afraid I might burst into tears.
“Then suffer,” he replied quite flatly now, almost indifferently.
“Why do you fear suffering?” he asked after a while. “Suffering is a fire that will purge you of greed and vanity. What is happiness? … And what gives you the right to be happy? Are you sure that your desire and love are so selfless they deserve happiness? If they were, you would not be kneeling here now, but would be living the life intended for you, going about your tasks, willing to do what life bids you do,” he said sternly, looking hard at me.
It was the first time he had looked at me with those small, bright, glittering eyes. Having done so, he immediately turned away and closed them.
Then, after a long silence, he spoke again.
“You say your husband is angry with you because of the child’s death?”
“That’s what I feel,” I answered.
“Yes,” he said, and turned the matter over in his mind. “It’s possible.”
It was clear the proposition did not take him by surprise; that he thought almost anything was possible where relationships between people are concerned. Almost as an incidental afterthought, he asked me:
“And you have never blamed yourself?” His voice was flat again, mere conversation.
His accent was marked, a little Slovakian. I don’t know why, but his regional accent was almost consoling in that moment.
“How can I answer such a question, Reverend Father? Who can answer a question like that?”
“Now look here,” he suddenly said, so informally, so gently that I wanted to kiss his hand. He spoke with zeal, in the simple rural manner that only old village priests can manage. “I can’t know what is hidden in your soul until you tell me, and what you have confessed to me today, child, is just some kind of strategy or ploy. But what God is whispering in my ear is that it is not the whole truth. What he is whispering is that you are full of self-accusation on this or that count. I could be mistaken, of course,” he added to excuse himself, and suddenly stopped there and fell silent. I could see he was regretting something.
“But that’s good,” he said after a while, his voice faint, almost shy. “If it is self-accusation, it is good. Because then you might eventually be healed.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Pray,” he simply said. “And work. That is what religion commands us to do. I know no more than that. Are you sorry for your sins? Do you regret them?”
“I am sorry and do regret them,” I garbled.
“Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys,” he said. “I absolve you.”
Then he began to pray. He wanted to hear no more from me.
Two weeks later, one morning, I found the lilac ribbon in my husband’s wallet.
Believe it or not I never went through my husband’s wallet or pockets. I never took anything from him. He gave me everything I asked for, so why should I steal? I know, many women steal from their husbands out of a sense of obligation, almost as an act of virtue. Women generally do a great deal in the name of virtue. “I’m not that kind of tramp,” they say, and get on with doing that which they have no taste for. But I am not that sort. I’m not boasting, I’m simply not.
And I was only looking into his wallet that morning because he rang to say he had left it at home and was sending one of his clerks for it. That’s no reason, you will say, of course. But there was something odd about his voice, something hurried, almost excited. He sounded anxious on the phone. You could tell from his voice that this little act of forgetfulness meant something to him. This is the kind of thing a person hears not with the ears but with the heart.
It was the crocodile-skin wallet he
was carrying just now, the one you’ve just seen. Did I tell you I gave it to him? … He faithfully used it too. Because I should tell you quite clearly, that man was faithful and true. He kept faith, even with mere objects. He wanted to keep and look after everything. It was the bourgeois in him, the noble bourgeois. Nor was it only objects he wanted to preserve, but all he found delightful, beautiful, valuable, and meaningful in life—you know, the lot: good habits, ways of doing things, furniture, Christian ethics, bridges, the works people had constructed with enormous labor, ingenuity, and suffering, geniuses and laborers both … And it was all part of the same thing to him: he loved this world and wanted to preserve it from danger. Men call this culture. We women don’t use big words like that when talking to each other. It’s enough to remain wisely silent once they start quoting Latin. We know the true essence of things. All they know are concepts. The two are usually quite different.
But back to the crocodile-skin wallet. He looked after that too, because it was beautiful, because it was finely made, and because I gave it to him. When it needed mending, he had it mended. He was a stickler for detail. One time he said—laughing as he said it—that he was a true adventurer, since you could only have adventures if you had order about you and took care of things … You are amazed? Yes, I was often amazed when he talked like that. Living with men is very difficult, darling; they have souls, you see …
Would you like a cigarette? … I’m going to light one, because I feel a bit agitated. Remembering that lilac ribbon always brings back that tremulous, anxious feeling.
As I was saying, there was something about his voice that day. He wasn’t in the habit of phoning home about such minor matters. I offered to take it in to the factory myself at lunchtime, if he needed it. But he thanked me and rejected the offer. “Put it in an envelope,” he said. “The clerk will be there in no time.”
So now I set to examining the wallet, every last little nook and cranny of it. It was the first time in my life I had done something like that. Believe me, I was pretty thorough.
The outermost section had money in it, his Institute of Engineers card, 8 ten-fillér stamps and 5 twenty-fillér ones, and besides that there was his driver’s license and a season ticket for the baths, complete with photograph. The picture had been taken ten years ago, just after a haircut, when men tend to look ridiculously younger than they are, as though they had just failed their school exams. Then there were a few of his calling cards, with just the name, no crest, no position. He was very particular about such things. He would not have any heraldic device stitched into his linen or engraved on the silver. It was not that he despised them, but that he was careful to conceal them from the world. There was only one kind of rank among people, he used to say, and that was character. He would come out with things like that sometimes, matters of pride and sensitivity.
There was nothing important in the outer pockets of the wallet. It was all very orderly, like his whole life, like the drawers of his desk, like his wardrobe, like his notes. There was always order around him, so, naturally, there was order in his wallet too. Maybe it was only his heart that was not completely in order, that did not work in perfect harmony, you know … people who are very particular about external order may be covering up real disorderliness inside. But this was no time for meditation. I burrowed my way through his wallet like a mole through crumbling earth.
In the innermost pocket I found the photographs, including the child’s photograph. The boy was just eight hours old in the picture. He had a lot of hair and, wouldn’t you know it, he was clenching his little fists and raising his arms. He was three kilo eighty and fast asleep … That’s when they took the picture. How long do you think that goes on hurting? As long as we live? That’s what I think.
That was what mattered to me most when I searched through the innermost pocket of that wallet; that and the lilac ribbon.
I took the ribbon out, felt it, and, naturally, sniffed it. It had no smell. It was an old ribbon, dark lilac. It smelled of crocodile skin. It was four centimeters long—I measured it—and one centimeter wide. It had been tidily cut with a pair of scissors.
I was so frightened I had to sit down.
I stayed sitting like that with the ribbon in my hand, my heart still firmly resolved to possess my husband, to conquer him the way Napoleon wanted to conquer England. I sat like that, badly shaken, as if I had just read that my husband had been arrested on the outskirts of town because he had robbed or killed someone. I was like that woman married to the “Monster of Düsseldorf” who discovered one evening that the police had taken her husband away because that hearty fellow, that exemplary father, a man who paid his taxes on the button and who liked to go out for a drink after supper, tended to disembowel people he met on the way. It was like that for me the moment I spotted and took out the lilac ribbon.
You think I was being hysterical? No, darling, I’m a woman: both criminal and master detective, both saint and spy, everything at once when it comes to the man I love. I’m not ashamed of it. That’s the way God made me. That is my mission on earth. The room was spinning around me. There was good reason for it to be spinning—several good reasons, in fact.
One reason was that I knew nothing about the ribbon, had never seen it before. Women just know such things. I’d never worn such a ribbon ever, on any dress or hat of mine. I made a point of not wearing such solemn, funereal colors. That much was certain, no point going on about it: the ribbon had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t a ribbon my husband had snipped off any hat or dress of mine so that he might treasure it as a token of me. More’s the pity, I thought and felt.
Another reason—and this is why I felt pins and needles in both hands and feet—was because the ribbon was not only not mine, it was not my husband’s, either. What I mean is, whatever object, whatever material a man like my husband holds in such high regard that he keeps it in his wallet for years, that he rings home about from the office in excitement—I hardly need say it was the ribbon he was ringing about, since he wouldn’t have felt a burning need for money or calling cards, or proofs of membership, not in the morning, in the factory—that object was more than a souvenir or memento to him. No, this was criminal evidence. Hence my numbness.
What it meant was that my husband was carrying round some kind of token that was of more importance to him than I was. That was what the lilac ribbon meant.
Could it have meant something else? The ribbon hadn’t faded, simply looked a little worn in the peculiar way dead people’s possessions often do. Have you noticed how the hats and handkerchiefs of the dead tend to age, practically from the moment the wearer dies? They lose color somehow, like leaves torn off the branch, and the green begins immediately to fade as green watercolor does … It seems there is a certain electricity that runs not only through people but also through all their belongings; something that radiates the way the sun does.
The lilac ribbon was barely alive in those terms. It was as if it had been worn a very long time ago. The person who’d worn it might already be dead … or at least dead to my husband. That’s what I was hoping. I gazed at it, sniffed it again, rubbed it between my fingers, questioned it … but the ribbon did not give up its secret. It remained obstinately silent, with all the defiance of an inanimate object.
And yet at the same time it was perfectly alive. It was superior, dense with schadenfreude. It was as if a mischievous goblin had stuck out its apoplectic lilac tongue to mock and ridicule me. What it said in goblin language was: “See, I have ventured behind the neat, well-arranged façade of your life. I had an existence then and continue to exist now. I am what is hidden, the secret, the truth.”
Did I understand what it was saying? … I felt so agitated, so cheated, so shaken! Such fury and curiosity burned in me that I would not have balked at rushing into the street to find the woman who had once worn it in her hair or her corset … I was red with fury at being so insulted. See, even now my face is quite hot, flushed and red, just thinking of the
lilac ribbon. Wait, lend me a little powder, let me make myself presentable.
There. Thank you, I feel better now. Well, the clerk soon appeared and I tidily put back everything in the wallet: the calling cards, the proofs of identity, the money, and the lilac ribbon that was so important to my husband that he rang home excitedly from the factory in the morning and had to send a clerk for it … And then I stood there, the great decision made in my heart, blazing with indignation, understanding nothing of life.
Or to be more exact, I did know something about it.
My husband was neither an oversensitive youth nor a pathetic, aging lecher. He was a mature man, so his actions were rational and comprehensible. He was not the sort to carry a woman’s lilac ribbon around in his wallet in secret without having a reason for it—that much I understood. If that was the secret, I understood it as perfectly as we do the secrets of our own lives.
So if he does something like this, if he carries a sentimental trifle around for years, there must be a serious, proper reason for it. In which case the person to whom this little rag once belonged must be of supreme importance to him.
More important than I was, for sure. He didn’t carry my photograph around. You might say—I can see you are about to say it even though you’re keeping quiet—that he didn’t need a photograph of me because he saw quite enough of me, day and night. Yes, but that’s never enough. He should see me even if he is not there beside me. And should he reach for his wallet, it should be to take out my photograph rather than some other woman’s lilac ribbon. Don’t you think? … There you are, you see. It’s the least a man can do.
