by Sándor Márai
Because the moment he discovered that the woman had left town and gone to England—it was just that no one knew her address in England, neither her family nor her friends—my husband became genuinely ill with waiting, and there is probably no greater suffering than waiting. I know the feeling … Later, once we were divorced, I was waiting for him much the same way, for about a year. You know how it is: you wake up in the morning like an asthmatic, gasping for air. You put a hand out in the dark seeking another hand. You can’t understand how the other person is no longer there, nearby, in the next house or the next street. You walk down the street but the other person is not there to meet you. There’s no point in having a telephone; the papers are full of news that means nothing to you—items of no consequence, such as that a world war has broken out, or that in a capital city of some one million inhabitants whole rows of streets have been destroyed … You hear out the news politely, as it goes in one ear and out the other, and say things like: “Really? … Imagine! … How interesting!” or “How sad!” But you don’t feel anything. There is a lovely, wise, sad Spanish book—I’ve forgotten the author’s name; it was the kind of name a toreador might have, a very long name—in which I read that in this sleepy, feverish, magical state, the state experienced by those who wait or are absent from those they love, there is something of the self-induced trance; even their eyes are like the eyes of sick people when they wake from sleep, exhausted, far away, their eyelids slow to rise. People like that see nothing of the world, they just see a face, the one face; nor do they hear anything, just the one name.
But one day they wake.
Take me, for example.
They look around and rub their eyes. They can see rather more than one face now … or to be precise, they still see the face but it’s as if through a haze. They see a church spire, a copse of trees, a picture, a book, other people’s faces: they see the infinite variety of the world. It is an extraordinary feeling. What was unbearably painful and raw to the touch one day no longer hurts. You sit on a bench and feel calm. You think thoughts like “Chicken stew” or “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Or “I should buy a new bulb for the table lamp.” All this constitutes reality, each part as important as the rest. Yesterday all this seemed impossible, pointless and uncertain: yesterday was a different reality. Yesterday you still yearned for revenge or deliverance, you wanted him to ring you or to need you, you wanted him to be carted off to jail and executed. While you still feel this, the other person is out of reach and laughing. While you still feel it, you are in his power. As long as you are crying out for vengeance, he is gleefully rubbing his hands together, because vengeance is desire too: vengeance is dependency. But there comes a day when you wake, rub your eyes, give a yawn, and suddenly discover you don’t want anything. You could bump into him in the street and it wouldn’t matter to you. Should he ring, you’d pick it up if you felt like it. Should he want to see you and insist you must meet, well, why not? And you know what? All this time, you are relaxed, at ease with yourself … there is no tension, no pain, nothing trancelike in it. What happened? You don’t understand. Now you no longer want vengeance, no vengeance at all … and you discover what real vengeance is, the only, perfect form of vengeance, which is that there is nothing you want from him, you wish him no harm but no good either, he cannot hurt you anymore. Men in bygone days used to write letters to their lovers at such times, addressing them as “Dear madam …” And that said everything, you know. What it said was: “There is no more pain to be got out of me.” That was the point a wise woman started sobbing. Or not. A wise man may then send a magnificent gift, a bunch of roses or a life annuity … why not? You can do anything, now it no longer hurts.
That’s how it is. I’ve been through it. One day I woke and started to live again. I got on my feet and walked.
But my husband, poor soul, did not wake. I don’t know whether he is cured even now. Sometimes I pray for him.
So two years passed. How did we spend our time? We carried on living. My husband said good-bye to the world, quit his social circle, stopped seeing people—all without saying a word, like a swindler who is secretly planning to skip the country but keeps working, apparently conscientiously. The other person—his real wife—was abroad. We waited for her. It wasn’t a bad life: the fact is, we got on quite well those two years. Sometimes, at table or reading a book, I stole a glance at his face, the way a relative might steal a glance at the face of someone sick, and while they are inwardly horrified at the other’s sickly pallor, they smile sweetly and pass a cheerful remark, such as “You’re looking much better today.” We were waiting for Judit Áldozó, who had vanished from town, the monster … Because she knew that was the worst thing she could do. You don’t believe me? You think she might not have been a monster? You think she too paid a price, she too fought, she too is a woman, maybe, she too felt something? Am I right? … Go on, comfort me, because I would really like to think so myself. She had sat around for twelve years and then she charged off to England. There she learned English, she learned how to eat in polite company, she got to see the sea. Then one day she came home with seventy pounds in her purse, wearing a tartan skirt and cologne by Atkinson. That was the point at which we divorced.
It broke my heart, of course. For a whole year I thought I might die of it. But then one day I woke up and learned something … yes, the most important thing a person can learn by herself.
Shall I tell you what that is?
I won’t hurt you?
You can bear it?
Well, yes, I bore it. But I am reluctant to tell just anyone, I don’t want to take away people’s illusions by telling them they have invested all that faith in a false idol, one that begets so much suffering and so much that is wonderful: heroic deeds, works of art, extraordinary human endeavors. I know you are in that condition at the moment. You still want me to tell you? …
All right, since you ask. But you mustn’t be angry with me afterwards. Look, darling, God has punished—and rewarded—me by allowing me to suffer and not die in the process. What was it I discovered? … Well, my dear, it was this: that there isn’t a real wife; not a real anything.
One day I woke, sat up in bed, and smiled. I felt no pain at all. Suddenly I understood that none of this was real. That there is no real anything on earth or in heaven. No real wife, no intended, that’s for certain. There are only people, and there isn’t that certain one-and-only, wonderful, single being, the one fated to make you happy. There are only people, and people have something of everything in them: sugar, salt, the sweet and the bitter, the lot … Lázár knew that when we stood in the door and parted, but he said nothing, only smiled, because I had told him that I was going away and would find my husband’s intended, his real life. He knew she was nowhere to be found … But he didn’t say anything, then went off to Rome and wrote a book. That’s what all writers do in the end.
My husband, poor soul, was not a writer: he was a solid citizen, an artist without an art. That’s why he suffered so much. Then, when one day Judit Áldozó returned, the woman he believed to be his real wife, wearing cologne from Atkinson, saying “Hello” on the phone like an Englishwoman—well, that was when we divorced. It was a difficult divorce, even if I say so myself. I insisted on the piano.
He didn’t marry her straightaway, only a year later. How do they get on? Just fine, I think. You saw him a little while ago, buying candied orange peel for her.
It’s just that he’s aged. Not a lot, but in a melancholy sort of way. Do you think he knows by now? … I fear it may be too late by the time he finds out, that life will have passed him by.
Now look, they really are closing the shop.
I’m sorry? … What did you say? Why I started weeping when I saw him just now? Why, if there is no such thing as “the intended”—the chosen one, the real wife—and one is completely over it all, why I should have started powdering my nose when I saw he was still using that crocodile-skin wallet? Wait, let me think. I
think I have the answer. The reason I felt embarrassed and started powdering my nose was because while there is no such thing as the one-and-only, special intended, and while I have no more illusions, I still happen to love him. Which is different. When we love someone, we can’t help our hearts beating a little faster every time someone talks about them, or whenever we see them. What I mean is: everything passes, but love does not. It’s just that it no longer has any practical significance.
Let me give you a kiss, my dear. Good-bye. Shall we meet here again next Tuesday? … It was such a nice conversation. About a quarter after seven, if it suits you … not much later than that. I’ll be sure to be here before a quarter after seven.
Part II
See the pair just leaving, there by the revolving doors? That woman there. The blond one in the round hat? No, the tall one in the mink, yes, the tall brunette, without a hat. The one getting into a car. That stocky fellow is helping her into it, isn’t he? They were sitting at that table in the corner earlier. I spotted them as soon as we came in, but I didn’t want to say anything. They never even saw me. But now that they’ve gone I can tell you that that was the man with whom I had that stupid, embarrassing duel.
On account of the woman? … Well, of course because of her.
I’m not sure I’m putting that quite right. There was definitely someone I wanted to kill at the time. But maybe it wasn’t our stocky friend. He was nothing to do with it really. He was simply the nearest object.
Can I tell you who this woman was? … Oh, I can tell you all right, old man. That woman was my wife. Not the first, but the second. We’ve been divorced for three years. We divorced immediately after the duel.
Another bottle of wine? After midnight this place suddenly empties out and grows rather chilly. Last time I was here I was still an engineering student—it was at the time of the carnival. These famous old rooms were full of women then: colorful, glittering creatures of the night, laughing all the time. I didn’t come back for many years. Time passed; they dolled the place up, and the customers changed too. Nowadays it’s the cosmopolitan crew out for a night’s entertainment … you know, what they call cosmopolitan. I had no idea my wife was a regular here, of course.
Nice wine. As pale green as Lake Balaton before a storm. Cheers.
Will I tell you the story? If you like.
It might not be a bad thing if I did once actually tell it.
Did you know my first wife? No, I don’t think so, because you were in Peru then, building the railroad. You were lucky to find yourself in a big wild country straight after finishing the course, when we both got our diplomas. I must confess I envied you sometimes. If fate had taken me abroad I might have been happier than I am now. As it worked out I stayed at home, taking care of things … Well, one day I got tired of all that, so I’m not taking care of anything now. What was I taking care of? Was it the factory? A way of life? I really don’t know. I used to have a friend, Lázár, the writer, do you know him? You’ve never heard of him? Aren’t you the happy man! I knew him well. At one time I thought he was my friend. This man kept arguing that I was a rare representative of a vanishing form of life, the pick of my class, a model citizen. According to him, that was why I stayed at home. But I can’t even be sure of that.
It is only facts you can be sure of; they are what matter … All those explanations we give to account for the facts are pure, irredeemable fiction. Literature. I should tell you that I am no longer a great admirer of literature. I used to read a lot in the past, everything I could lay my hands on. I suspect it is bad literature that fills men’s and women’s hearts with lies and false feeling. It is the false teaching of dubious books we have to thank for most of the contrived tragedies of human life. Self-pity, false sentiment, all those artificial complications are, to a great extent, the direct consequence of fake, ignorant, or simply mischievous fiction. You find it under banner headlines in the press and in smaller articles on other pages: the seamstress who drinks lye because the joiner has left her, or the female representative involved in an accident after she’d taken Veronal, all because the famous actor failed to turn up for a date. The glorious fruits of literature! Why are you looking at me like that? Surprised? You want to know what I most despise? Literature? The tragic misunderstanding that goes under the name of love? People in general? That’s a hard question. I don’t despise anyone or anything, I have no right to. But in what remains of my life I intend giving myself over to a passion. A passion for truth, that is. I will not have people lying to me anymore, neither books nor women, and I will have no patience at all with the lies I tell myself.
You say I have suffered. That I’ve been hurt. That’s true. It might have been that woman you saw just now, my second wife, who hurt me. It might have been the first. Something went wrong in any case, and whatever it was it was a dreadful emotional experience. I’ve become quite solitary as a result. I am angry. I have no faith in women, in love, or in people. What a ridiculous, pathetic creature, you must be thinking. You’d like tactfully to remind me that there are plenty of people who are both happy and passionate; that there is love and patience and participation and forgiveness. You’d like to accuse me of lack of courage, of impatience with the people I happened to have met, of not having the guts, now that I am this solitary wild creature, to admit that it was all my fault. Look, old man, I have heard and considered all these charges. You could torture me and put me on the rack and I’d still think what I think, feel what I truly feel. I have examined the lives of people close to me, I have looked through the windows of other people’s lives; I have not been too shy or too reserved, I searched and listened. I myself thought the fault was mine, that it was in me. I explained it in terms of greed, selfishness, lust, social constraints, the ways of the world. Explained what? Failure. That well of loneliness into which everyone is eventually plunged, the way a traveler might stumble into a ditch at night. We are men: nobody is going to help us in this respect; we have to live alone and have to pay the full price of everything down to the last penny. We have to put up with loneliness, with being who we are, and we have to do so in silence. These are the laws of life as far as men are concerned.
And family? I can see you want to ask me about that. Don’t I think the family is, in abstract terms, the highest meaning in life, a superior kind of harmony? Life is not about happiness. Life is about supporting your family, bringing up your children as honorable people, and not expecting either gratitude or happiness in return. But I want to give you a straight answer, and my answer is, you are right. It’s just that I don’t believe family “makes you happy.” Nothing can “make” you happy. The family is a vast project, so enormous and important, both for us personally and for the world at large, that it’s worth putting up with all the incomprehensible cares of life, all that superfluous pain, for its sake. Nevertheless, I don’t believe in “happy” families. I have seen families where there was a certain harmony of purpose, a proper set of human relationships, families where each member’s life ran a little against the grain of the others, where every member of the family led a separate life, but where the whole, all the members of the clan, despite fighting each other tooth and nail, still lived for each other and somehow held together.
Family … a big word. Yes, one’s family might sometimes be the whole point of life.
But that doesn’t solve anything. And in any case I never had a family in quite that sense.
So I kept listening and paying attention. I listened to fashionable sermons about how loneliness was a middle-class disease, sermons with twisted ideas that kept referring to “society”—that magnificent thing, society—a society that embraces and elevates the individual so that suddenly he has a purpose in life, because he knows he is not living simply for a narrowly defined family but for the far better, all-but-superhuman concept of society. I listened very hard to such tirades. I thought about their application not just in theory but in the here and now, where I could properly grasp their implications, i
n life itself. I considered the lives of “the poor”—they, after all, constitute the largest element of society, are in themselves a society. Did they enjoy a fuller, richer, more vital kind of life for the knowledge that they were part of a union—the steelworkers’ union, for example—or of a self-employed workers’ pension scheme? Were they happier for the knowledge that they had representatives in parliament, people who could speak, and write articles, on their behalf? Surely it is just as vital to know that there are an infinite number of steelworkers and self-employed in the world who would like to lead better, more humane lives; that their worldly condition improves only in gradual stages, after bitter conflict, after countless unsatisfactory compromises under which their pay is no longer 180 pengő but 210. Looking down, everything seems bottomless. When you’re near the bottom, you’re very glad of anything that improves your horrible condition. But that’s not happiness. Nor did I find happiness among people whose employment or vocation placed them at the heart of social affairs. No, what I found there was resentment, sadness, dissatisfaction, rivalry, fury, struggle, resignation, and idiocy: the clever and foolish constantly at war with each other. I found people who believed in amelioration: that, very slowly, after many unpredictable twists and turns, given time, there would be some improvement in human life. It’s nice to believe this. But believing it, or even feeling assured of it, doesn’t make anyone less lonely. It’s not true that it is only the middle class who feel alone. A peasant on a distant farm can be as lonely as a dentist in Antwerp.
Then I went on to read, and believed for a while, that it was the mere fact of civilization that created loneliness.
