by Sándor Márai
“And what did she say?”
“Nothing,” she replied, dreamily reminiscing. “She wept. But she didn’t say anything. When I had the fever, she fed me sweet water and medicine with a spoon. Once she kissed me,” she said, her eyes gentle, as though this was the nicest thing that had ever happened to her.
“When?” I asked.
“When the young master went away …”
“Where did he go?”
“Abroad,” she simply replied. “For four years.”
I listened. That was the period my husband spent in London, Paris, in the north, and in Italian cities. He was thirty-six when he returned from abroad to take over the factory. Sometimes he talked about it: his years of wandering, he called them … It was just that he never told me that Judit Áldozó was the reason for his four-year absence.
“And then, before he went away, did you talk?”
“No,” she said. “Because I was better by then. To tell you the truth, we only spoke once. That first time, before Christmas. That’s when he gave me the locket with the photograph and the lilac ribbon. But he cut off a piece of that. It was in a box,” she solemnly explained, as though this somehow changed the significance of the gift, as though every detail was very important, including the fact that the locket my husband gave to Judit Áldozó came out of a box … But I myself felt that every detail was of great importance then.
“And the other picture? Did you get that from him?”
“The other one? No,” and she looked down. “I bought that.”
“Where?”
“At the photographer’s studio. It hardly cost anything,” she said.
“I see,” I said. “You got nothing else from him?”
“Something else?” she asked, opening her eyes wide in wonder. “Oh, yes. He gave me a piece of candied orange peel once.”
“You like candied peel?”
She looked down again. I could see she was embarrassed by this sign of weakness.
“Yes,” she said. “But I didn’t eat it,” she added, as if in mitigation. “Would you like to see it? … I’ve kept it. Wrapped in a twist of paper.”
And she turned to the cupboard, keen to produce her alibi. I quickly extended my hand.
“No, Judit, leave it,” I said. “I believe you. And after that? What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” she said, as simply as if she were telling any old story. “He went away and I got better. Her Ladyship sent me home for three months. It was summer. Harvest time. But I was on full pay,” she boasted. “Then I came back. He was away a long time. Four years. And I felt at peace again. When he came back he no longer lived with us. We never talked again. He didn’t write, not once. Yes, it was a form of sickness,” she declared, as if going through an argument she had had with herself a long time ago before coming to a wise conclusion that she was determined now to prove right.
“And that was that?” I asked.
“That was that. He got married. Then the child was born. Then it died. I cried my eyes out and felt sorry for Your Ladyship.”
“Yes, yes. Let’s drop the subject,” I replied in a nervous, abstracted manner, clearly rejecting her offer of empathy. “Tell me, Judit. You say you never, but never, spoke after that.”
“Never,” she said, and looked me in the eye.
“Not even about that?”
“Not about anything,” she solemnly affirmed.
I understood that this was the truth and that it was carved in stone. Neither of them was a liar. I began to feel sick with fear, with the shock. I felt generally unwell. There could be nothing worse than the news that they had never spoken since. That they had remained silent for twelve years: that told me everything. And all the time one of them went about with a locket round her neck with the other’s photograph in it, and the other carried around a strip of lilac ribbon that he had cut away and hidden in the deepest recesses of his wallet. And one of them got married, taking me as wife, and when he came home not all of him arrived, because someone else was waiting for him. That said everything. My hands and feet were frozen. I began to shiver.
“Just answer me one more question,” I said. “I am not asking you to swear to the truth of all this. As far as I am concerned, I swore not to tell my husband and I will keep my promise. So just tell me this now, Judit. Did you regret it?”
“What?”
“Not accepting his offer of marriage?”
She crossed her arms and went over to the window, staring down into the shadowy yard of the inner-city house. After a long silence, she spoke over her shoulder.
“Yes.”
The word dropped between us like a bomb: it was as if someone had thrown an unexploded grenade into the room. In the silence we could hear our hearts and the invisible bomb, all of them ticking away. The bomb carried on ticking. It ticked for two whole years, and then it exploded.
There were noises in the hall. My mother-in-law had arrived. Judit tiptoed over to the door and, with one practiced movement, silently turned the key in the lock. The door opened and there on the threshold stood my mother-in-law in a fur coat with her hat on, just as she had arrived from town.
“It’s you,” she said, and went pale.
“We were chatting, Mama,” I said, and stood up.
The three of us stood in the maid’s room, my mother-in-law, Judit, and I, like the three Fates in a tableau vivant. The image suddenly came to me and, grief-stricken as I was, I gave a nervous laugh. But I couldn’t go on laughing, because my mother-in-law entered the room, paler than ever, sat down on Judit’s bed, covered her face with her hands, and started to cry.
“Please don’t cry,” said Judit. “She has sworn not to tell him.”
She gave me a long, slow, lingering look, examining me from head to toe, then left the room.
After dinner I rang Lázár. He wasn’t home; it was his servant who answered the phone. About half past four the phone rang: it was Lázár from town. He was silent for a while, as if he were a very long way away, in another galaxy, because he had to think very carefully about his answer to my request, which was, after all, ridiculously simple. I wanted to see him as a matter of priority.
“Shall I come over to you?” he eventually asked rather gruffly.
But there was no point, because I was expecting my husband any moment. I couldn’t suggest meeting in a café or Konditorei either. Somewhat annoyed, he relented in the end, saying:
“If you insist, I’ll go home and wait for you at the apartment.”
I immediately accepted the invitation. I really didn’t think much about it in the meantime. In those days generally, but particularly in the hours following the conversation in the morning, I was in such an extraordinary state of mind I seemed to be moving at the dangerous fringes of life, in a space somewhere between prison and hospital, in another world altogether, where the normal rules of life—those that govern social and domestic life, simply did not apply. Even the trip to Lázár’s house felt like a strange emergency, like being in an ambulance or in a police car … Only once I was ringing the bell did the trembling of my hands remind me that what I was doing was something out of the ordinary, something not entirely proper.
He opened the door, kissed my hand, and without saying a word led me into a large room.
He lived on the fifth floor of a new building on the Danube embankment. Everything in the building itself was brand-new, comfortable and modern. Only the décor of his own apartment was old-fashioned, somehow secondhand and provincial. I looked around and was really surprised. However agitated and preoccupied I was, I still took it all in, and was starting to assess various details of the furnishings, because, well, you know how strange we all are, how even when we are being led off to be hanged, we carry on registering things, like a bird in a tree or a wart on the judge’s chin as he reads the death sentence … So there I was in this apartment. It was as if I’d called at the wrong place. Deep inside me, you know, I had already imagined Lázár’s den, and
was expecting something exotic, something faintly Wild West, a wigwam perhaps, along with a mass of books and the scalps of his female conquests—or of his competitors. But it was nothing like that. There were bits of nineteenth-century cherrywood furniture, covered with regulation lace doilies, the sort you are greeted with out in the country—you know, those uncomfortable high-backed, fancy chairs, and the glazed sideboard stuffed with all kinds of office-clerk trash: glasses from Marienbad, Prague pottery … It was a room that might have been occupied by a middle-income country lawyer who had moved up to the city, whose wife had inherited the furniture and they couldn’t yet afford anything new … But there was no sign of a woman’s touch, and Lázár, as far as I knew, was quite wealthy.
He did not take me to the room with “all those books,” the one in which he received Judit Áldozó. He was courteous in every way, the way a doctor is to his sick patient on a first visit. He showed me to a seat and, naturally, did not offer me any refreshment. From the beginning to the end he was attentive, correct, and reserved, as though he had seen all this before and knew, the way that doctors know when addressing a terminally ill patient, that the conversation was pointless, that all he could do was listen, politely nodding and maybe scribble some ineffective prescription, a syrup or a powder, without offering any hope … What did he know of the situation? Only that there was no advising people in matters of feeling. I myself suspected this in my own vague way. Sitting there opposite him, I was annoyed to realize that it had been a pointless journey. There is no such thing as “counsel” in life. Things just happen and there’s an end of it.
“Did you find her?” he asked without preamble.
“Yes,” I answered, since he wasn’t someone who needed a wealth of explanation.
“And do you feel better and calmer for it?”
“I wouldn’t say so. And that’s precisely why I’ve come to you. I want to find out what happens next.”
“I really can’t tell you,” he replied without emotion. “Maybe nothing. You will recall that I warned you not to pick at the wound. It had healed quite nicely. There was, as doctors say, a decent cicatrix. But now it has been disturbed. It has suffered a small cut.”
The medical terms did not surprise me. It felt like a doctor’s waiting room or surgery anyway. There was, I should stress, nothing in the least “literary” about this, nothing like what you might imagine being in a famous writer’s apartment … No, everything was bourgeois, middle-class, terribly modest and orderly. He noticed my eyes flicking around. It wasn’t an entirely comfortable feeling sitting opposite him, because I could see he noticed everything. I felt exposed, as if I were on an operating table. I expected it all to finish up in a book one day.
“I need a certain order around me,” he explained. “People are so disorderly. Ideally one should be as orderly as a postmaster in one’s affairs. I can’t concentrate in a disordered environment.”
He did not say what it was he could not concentrate on; probably on life in general … on surfaces, on depths, on the places where lilac ribbons flutter.
“I have sworn not to say a word to my husband,” I said.
“He’ll find out anyway,” he nodded.
“Who will tell him?”
“You will. It’s just not possible to keep it quiet. It’s not only words that will tell him, it’s your very soul. Your husband will discover everything, and soon.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, without ceremony, he almost snapped.
“What do you want from me, madam?”
“A clear and precise answer,” I retorted, and it surprised me how clear and precise I could be. “You were right when you said that something in our lives would explode. Did I set it off, or was it an accident, mere chance? … I don’t suppose it matters now. In any case, there’s no such thing as chance. My marriage has failed. I fought like crazy and sacrificed my whole life for it. I don’t know what I did wrong. I found a piece of evidence—a few clues. I finished up talking to someone who told me she was closer to my husband than I was.”
He leaned on the table, listened, and smoked.
“Do you think this woman has left a permanent mark on my husband? Do you think she has lodged herself in his heart, in his memory, in his nerves forever? Is that what it’s all about? Is that what love is?”
“Forgive me,” he said courteously, but with a trace of mockery in his voice. “I am just a writer, and a male one at that. I don’t have the answers to difficult questions like that.”
“Do you believe,” I asked, “that there is one true love that grows to dominate a person’s soul so they can’t love anyone else?”
“Possibly,” he replied, with a proper concern, cautious like the good doctor who has seen a great deal and prefers not to give a careless answer. “Such things happen. Do they happen often? … No.”
“What happens inside a person when they’re in love?” I asked like a naïve schoolgirl. “What do they feel in their soul?”
“Feel in the soul?” he immediately answered. “Nothing. Feelings don’t happen in the soul. They work through some different system. But they can pass through the soul and submerge it, the way a flood covers a floodplain.”
“Could we stop the flood if we were really wise and clever?” I asked.
“Well, now,” he replied, clearly interested, “that is indeed an interesting question. I’ve given the matter considerable thought. My answer would have to be: yes, up to a point. What I mean is … intelligence in itself can neither produce nor end feeling. But it can regulate. Should our feelings become a source of common danger, we might be able to contain them.”
“You mean cage them up, like a tiger? …” I blurted out.
“Yes, a tiger, if you like,” he shrugged. “Once enclosed, our poor wild feelings can stride round and round the cage, roar, grind their teeth, claw at the bars … but in the end they’ll be broken, their fur and teeth will fall out, and eventually they’ll grow melancholy and obedient. That’s quite possible … I’ve seen it happen. That’s the product of intelligence. You can control and tame emotions. Though one has to be careful, of course,” he warned. “One mustn’t open the doors of the cage too early. Because the tiger can get out, and if it is not completely tamed, it can cause a great deal of inconvenience.”
“Can’t you be plainer than that?” I asked. “I need to know quite explicitly.”
“I can’t be much plainer than that,” he retorted. “You want to know if intelligence can overcome feeling. In plain words, the answer is no. But I do offer you some comfort. I suspect that occasionally, with a bit of luck, we can tame our emotions and allow them to atrophy. Take me, for example. I managed to do it.”
I can’t tell you what I felt at that moment, but I couldn’t bear to look into his eyes. I suddenly remembered the evening I first met him and I grew quite red. I remembered that peculiar game … I was blushing like a schoolgirl. Nor did he look at me, but simply stood in front of me leaning against the table, his arms folded, looking toward the window as though examining the house opposite. This mutual embarrassment lasted a little while. It was the most awkward moment of my life.
“Back then, when all this was going on,” I started again, gabbling nervously, wanting to change the subject as quickly as possible, “you didn’t suggest to Peter that he should marry the girl, did you?”
“I was against it,” he said. “I opposed it with all my heart. I was utterly against the marriage. At that stage I still had influence over him.”
“No longer?”
“No.”
“Does that woman have more power over him than you do now?”
“The woman?” he asked, and tipped his head back while his mouth moved silently, as if he were counting, trying to gauge the true balance of power. “Yes, I do believe so.”
“Was my mother-in-law of any help then?”
He shook his head as if recalling a bad memory.
“Not a lot.”
“But surely you c
an’t imagine,” I asked indignantly, “that a woman as proud, as refined, as extraordinary as she is, would have agreed to such an act of madness?”
“I don’t imagine anything,” he replied with care. “I only know that this proud, refined, extraordinary woman, as you put it, had lived for years in a state of suspended feeling. She lived not so much in an apartment as in cold storage. People as thoroughly frozen through as she was are readier to understand someone desperate for warmth.”
“And it was you who prevented Peter warming himself—as you put it—in the fire of this strange attraction?”
“I did so,” he explained, like a patient teacher, “because I don’t like people who offer a certain warmth to some but roast others alive.”
“Did you think Judit Áldozó was as dangerous as that?”
“In herself? … That is a hard question. Not in herself, probably. But the situation to which her very being might give rise: that was dangerous, yes.”
“And the alternative, the situation which did then arise—you considered that less of a danger? …” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Easier to control, in any case,” he replied.
I really didn’t understand that. I listened and stared.
“I see you don’t believe what a traditional, old fashioned, law-abiding man I am, madam,” he said. “We writers may be the only law-abiding people on earth. The middle classes are a far more restless, rebellious bunch than is generally thought. It is no accident that every revolutionary movement has a nonconforming member of the middle class as its standard bearer. But we writers can’t entertain revolutionary illusions. We are the guardians of what there is. It is far more difficult to preserve something than to seize or destroy it. And I cannot allow the characters in my books—the characters my readers love—to rebel against the established order. In a world where everyone is in a veritable fever to destroy the past and to build the new, I must preserve the unwritten contracts that are the ultimate meaning of a deeper order and harmony. I am a gamekeeper who lives among poachers. It’s dangerous work … A new world!?” he declared with such agonized and disappointed contempt that I found myself staring again. “As if people were new!”
