by Sándor Márai
There’s nothing more I can tell you about my first wife.
That part no longer hurts, and I don’t feel guilty thinking about it. I know we killed the marriage: I myself, life, chance, the death of the child—all these played a part in killing it. That’s the way life kills. The stuff you read in the press is crude exaggeration, cheap muck. Life is more complicated, and prodigiously wasteful. It doesn’t care about this or that Ilonka … collectives and aggregates are what interest it: all the Ilonkas, all the Judits, all the Peters. What it wants to tell us, to articulate to us, concerns the lot of them, as a package. It’s no great revelation that this should be the case, but it takes a long time to learn it and reconcile oneself to it. I kept thinking, and eventually all feeling, all passion vanished. Nothing remained except responsibility. That’s all that ever remains for a man, whatever the experience. We move among the living and the dead, and are responsible … There’s nothing we can do to help. But I wanted to talk about my second wife. Yes, the one who has just left with the stocky gentleman.
Who was the second? No, that was not a middle-class woman, old chap. She was a prole. A working-class woman.
Do you want to know about her? Fine, I’ll tell you. And I want to be perfectly truthful with you.
She was a servant. She was fifteen when I first met her. She worked in our household, as a maid. I don’t want to bore you with adolescent love affairs. But I’ll tell you how it began and how it ended. As to what came between, I myself am not sure about that yet.
It began with the fact that no one in my family dared love anyone else in it. My father and mother lived a theoretically connubial existence; in other words, it was pretty abominable. They never raised their voices. It was all: “What would you like, my dear?” “What can I do for you, darling?” That was how they lived. I don’t even know whether it was a bad life. It’s just that it wasn’t a good life. My father was proud and vain. My mother was a respectable middle-class woman in every sense of the word. Responsibility and discretion. They lived, died, loved each other, gave birth to me, and brought me up as if they were both priest and congregation at some kind of superhuman sacrament. Everything was ritual with us; breakfast and supper, social life, the contact between parents and children—even the love between them, I believe, or what tends to be called that, took the form of an impersonal rite. It was as though they had constantly to be accountable for something. Our lives were strictly planned. There are new and powerful states that prepare four- and five-year plans they carry out, with a ruthless, furious devotion, not caring whether their citizens like it or not. Because what matters to them is not the happiness of this or that individual but the happiness, at the end of those four or five years, of the collective, the nation, the people. There are many recent examples of this. And that is the way it was with us at home, only not with four- or five-year plans, but with forty- or fifty-year ones, quite irrespective of each other’s and our own personal happiness. Because all those rituals, all that work, the engagements, even death itself, had a deeper meaning: the preserving of order in the ranks of both class and family.
When I consider my memories of childhood I sense an anxious, grim sense of directedness behind everything. We worked like robots, going about our rich, refined, ruthless, emotionless, robot work. There was something we had to save, something we had to prove, every day, in everything we did. We had to prove we were of a certain class. The middle class. The guardians. We were doing an important job. We had to embody the notions of rank and manners. We were to suppress the revolt of the instincts, of the plebeians; we were not to run scared, not to succumb to the desire for individual happiness. You ask whether this is a conscious project.… Well, I wouldn’t exactly say my father or mother sat down regularly at the dinner table every Sunday to announce that week’s program of action or make speeches in which they outlined the next fifty-year family plan. But I couldn’t exactly say that we merely accommodated ourselves to the idiotic demands of class and occasion, either. We knew perfectly well that life had singled us out for a difficult series of tests.
It was not only our home, our carefully wrought way of life, our dividends, and the factory we had to protect, but the spirit of resistance that constituted the imperatives and deeper meaning of our lives. We had to keep up our resistance to the attractive powers of the proletariat, the plebs who wanted to weaken our resolve by continually tempting us to take various kinds of liberties, whose tendency to revolt we had to overcome, not in the world, but also in ourselves. Everything was suspect: everything was dangerous. We, like others, were careful to make sure the delicate machinery of a persnickety and ruthless society should continue to work undisturbed. We did this at home, judging the world on appearances while suppressing our desires and regulating our inclinations. Being respectable requires constant exertion of effort. I am referring here to the creative, responsible layers of the middle class—in other words, not the pushy lower orders who simply want a more comfortable, more diverse kind of life. Our ambition was not to live in greater comfort, or more diversely. Under all our acts, manners, and forms of behavior there was an element of conscious self-denial. We experienced it as a kind of religious vocation, being entrusted with the mission of saving a worldly, pagan society from itself. The task of those who perform this role, under oath and in accordance with the rules of the order, is to maintain that order and to keep secret that which should remain secret when danger threatens the objects of their care. We dined with that responsibility in mind. Every week we dutifully went to a performance—to the Opera House or to the National Theater. We received our guests, other responsible people, in the same spirit: they came in their dark suits, they sat down in the drawing room, or at the candlelit dining table with its fine silver and porcelain, where we served good, carefully chosen food and made empty conversation about sterile subjects, and believe me, there was nothing more sterile than our conversation.
But these empty conversations had a function, a deeper purpose. It was like speaking Latin among the barbarians. Beyond the polite phrases, the banal, meaningless arguments and ramblings, there was always the deeper sense that we responsible middle-class people had come together to observe a ritual, to celebrate an honorable compact, and that the codes we were speaking in—because every conversation was about something else—were ways of keeping a vow, proof that we could keep secrets and compacts from those who would rise against us. That was our life. Even with each other, we were constantly having to prove something. By the time I was ten years old I was as self-conscious and quiet, as attentive and well behaved, as the president of a major bank.
I see you’re looking amazed. You didn’t know this world. You are a creative man, someone who makes things happen. You and your family have only just begun to learn this lesson. You are the first of your family to move up a class … You are ambitious. I had only memories, traditions, and duties. For all I know, you might not understand any of this. Please don’t be cross if you don’t. I’m doing the best I can.
The apartment was always a little on the dark side. It was a nice apartment, a proper house with a garden, always something being built and improved. I had my own room upstairs where I lived, my tutor or governess sleeping in the room next door. I don’t think I was ever completely alone, not in all my childhood. I was taught to be amenable both at home and at school. They tamed the wildness in me, the human part, so I should be a proper member of my class and put on a decent show. That may be why I so obstinately, so desperately, craved solitude. I have been living alone now, without even a single servant, for some time now. There’s just a woman who comes in occasionally when I am not at home, who tidies my room and generally disposes of the flotsam and jetsam of my life. At last there is no one breathing down my neck, checking on me, keeping an eye on me: no one to whom I am responsible … There are considerable joys and satisfactions in life. They often come late, in the wrong, unexpected forms. But they do come. When, having left the family house, after two marriages and
divorces, I found myself alone, I felt—for the first time in my life—a kind of melancholy relief on having at last achieved something I actually wanted. It was like serving a life sentence in prison, then being released on account of good behavior … for the first time in decades you sleep without fearing the guard patrolling the night corridor who looks in on you through the peephole in the middle of the night. Life has its blessings, even blessings like this. You have to pay heavily for them, but in the end life hands them to you on a plate.
“Joy” is not quite the right word, of course. Comes the day, and suddenly life goes quiet. It is no longer joy you desire, but at least you no longer feel cheated and annihilated. When that day comes, you see quite clearly that you have seen it all and have had your punishments and rewards, both precisely in the proportion you have deserved. If you lacked the courage, or were simply not quite heroic enough to strive for something, you did not get it. End of story. So it’s not joy really, just resignation, acceptance, and calm. In due course it comes your way. It’s just that you have had to pay dearly for it.
As I was saying, back in the family house we were not only conscious of our class roles, but were prepared to play them. Whenever I think of childhood I see darkened rooms. The rooms are full of magnificent furniture, like in a museum. It’s a place in constant need of cleaning and tidying. Sometimes the cleaning makes a lot of noise and involves electrical equipment and open windows, at other times the process is silent and unseen, employing rented staff, but it always entails somebody, a servant or someone in the family, stepping into the room to tidy something away, to blow a speck of dust off the piano, to smooth something out, or to rearrange the folds of a curtain. The apartment was always being jealously tended, as if everything in it—the furniture, the curtains, the pictures, our very habits—were somehow objects on exhibit, artifacts in a museum that needed constant attention, repair, and cleaning, and we had to walk through the halls of this museum on tiptoe because it was inappropriate to walk and talk without restraint among exhibits that insist on a holy hush. There were so many curtains: even in the summer they soaked up the light. The chandeliers hung from the high ceilings, their eight-armed illumination somehow aimless in rooms where everything swam in an indistinct gloom.
Glazed cabinets lined the walls, full of relics that both staff and family passed in a state of awe, objects one never touched or picked up or examined closely. There were gilt-rimmed pieces of Alt Wien porcelain, Chinese vases, paintings on ivory, portraits of unknown men and women, ivory fans never used for fanning people, tiny items made of gold or silver or bronze; pitchers, animals, miniature dishes, none of which were ever used. One cabinet contained the “family silver” the way a casket might contain the bones of a saint. The silver dining service was hardly ever used, which was also the case with the damask tablecloths and the fine china; they were all there to be guarded according to the secret rules of the house, preserved for an incomprehensible, hard-to-imagine, special ritual when there would be twenty-four places at table. But the table never was laid for twenty-four. We had guests, of course, and then the silver service, the damask, the porcelain, and the glass exhibits would be brought out, and the dinner or supper would be conducted with such anxious, careworn ceremony you might have thought the company was far less concerned with eating than with conducting a terrifyingly complex operation in which no one should commit any kind of faux pas or break a plate or glass in the course of conversation.
The facts themselves will be familiar to you in your own life; I am talking about the feelings that constantly welled up in me when I was there, in the rooms of my parents’ house; feelings in childhood and even later, as an adult. Yes, there were guests for supper or simply calling by; we lived there and “used” the place, but under the practical, everyday aspect of living there, the house had a deeper meaning and purpose: that meaning and that purpose were locked in our hearts like a last line of defense.
I will always remember my father’s room. It was a long room, a real hall. The floors were covered with thick oriental rugs. There were a great many pictures on the walls, of all kinds: expensive paintings in gilt frames, paintings showing distant, never-seen forests, oriental ports, and unknown men of the last century, mostly with beards and dressed in black. An enormous writing desk stood in one corner of the room, the kind known as a diplomat table, over three yards long and some five feet wide, complete with a globe of the world, a copper candelabrum, a tin inkpot, an attaché case of Venetian leather, and a mass of ornaments and mementos. Then there was a collection of heavy leather armchairs gathered around a circular table. By the fireplace surround two bronze bulls were engaged in combat. The pediments of the bookcases displayed other bronze items, eagles and bronze horses, and a tiger half a yard in length, looking ready to spring. That too was made of bronze. And all along the walls a range of glazed bookcases. They contained a vast number of books, four, maybe five thousand, I don’t know exactly how many. Literature had its own bookcase, as did religion, philosophy, and social science, the works of English philosophers bound in blue buckram, and sets of all kinds bought from an agent. No one actually read these books. My father spent his time reading the newspapers and accounts of travel. My mother did read, but only German novels. Book dealers occasionally sent us their latest acquisitions and we got stuck with them, so the valet would have to ask Father for the keys and arrange the newly accumulated volumes in the cases. They were careful to lock the cases, of course, ostensibly so that the books should be protected. The truth is they were locked so as to prevent anyone ever taking a book out on a whim, which rash action might result in them being confronted by the secret and possibly dangerous material it might contain.
This room was referred to as Father’s “study.” No one in human memory had ever actually studied there, least of all my father. His study was the factory and the club he frequented in the afternoons with other manufacturers and financiers, where he would enjoy a quiet game of cards, read the papers, and debate matters of business and politics. My father was undoubtedly a clever man with a sound sense of the practical. It was he who had developed the factory from the workshop set up by my grandfather and expanded it into a major enterprise. It grew in his care until it became one of the country’s leading businesses. This required strength, art, foresight, and a deal of ruthlessness—in fact, everything required by any enterprise where one man sits in a room on the top floor deciding what should go on in all the other rooms of all the other floors on the basis of instinct and experience. My father had sat in that particular room of our factory for forty years. It was where he belonged, where he was honored and feared, his name being mentioned with respect throughout the business community. I have no doubt at all that my father’s commercial morals, his concepts of money, work, usefulness, and capital, were exactly those the world, his business partners, and his family would have expected of him. He was a creative sort of man: in other words, not one of those tightfisted, ugly capitalists who sit on their money and squeeze all they can out of their employees, but someone naturally bold and entrepreneurial who respected work and aptitude and paid talent better than he did mere mechanical ability. But all this—father, the factory, the club—was yet another form of association: that which was sacred and ritualistic at home was the same, only less refined and more secretive, at work and in the world at large. The social circle founded by my father among others would accept only millionaires as members, always just two hundred of them, no more. When a member died, the circle chose a replacement with the same care and delicacy as did the Académie Française its own members or the order of Tibetan monks the new Dalai Lama among the upper classes of Tibet. Everything—the selection process and the invitation—was carried out with the utmost secrecy. The select two hundred felt, despite title or rank, that they constituted a power in the state greater than even that of a governmental department. They were the alternative power, the invisible partner with which official power was obliged to parley and come to agreement
. My father was one of them.
We knew this at home. I never entered the “study” without a sense of awe and self-consciousness. I’d stand before the diplomat table at which no one in human memory had ever been known to work, a desk that only the valet spent time at, every morning arranging and dusting the ornaments. I would gaze at the bearded, unknown men in the portraits, imagining that these dour people with their piercing eyes would, in their own day, have been a member of just such a solemn association of two hundred as my father and his friends at the club were; that they’d have ruled over mines and forests and factories, and that there existed some unwritten compact between life and time, a kind of eternal blood-brotherhood that meant they were stronger and more powerful than other men. The thought that my father was of their company filled me with a certain anxious pride. An anxious sense of ambition, I should say, because I did want to take my father’s place among them at some stage. It took fifty years for me to learn that I was not, nor was fitted to be, one of them; it was not until last year that I stepped out of their ranks, the ranks to which they had admitted me, so that I might “withdraw,” as they put it, from “any kind of business involvement,” though that was not something I could possibly have known back then. That was why I gazed so wide-eyed at Father’s “retreat,” why I pored over the titles of books no one read, why I began vaguely to suspect that something barely perceptible but significant, something perfectly unremitting, was being enacted behind these strict outward signs and appurtenances, and that this was how it had to be, how it was and always would be, and yet there was something not quite right about the whole thing, even if only because no one actually talked about it … For whenever conversation, whether at home or in company, turned to the subject of work, to money, to the factory, or to the society of two hundred, my father and his friends fell noticeably quiet, stared stonily into space, and began to speak of something else. There was a limit, you know, a border with an invisible barrier … but of course you know. I’m telling you this now because once I start I feel like telling you absolutely everything.
