by Sándor Márai
The café is almost empty. There’s this cold smoke everywhere. We can go too, if you like. But I’ll just get to the end of the story first. Give me a light. Thanks. Having started, I might as well finish—if I don’t bore you. I was talking about hope, and I should say how I discovered the truth and how I could live with it. Shall I go on?
All right, then, listen. I’m listening too. I am looking deep into my soul as I speak. I am all ears. I said I wanted to tell you the truth, so that is what I am obliged to do.
You see, dear boy, I was hoping for a miracle. What kind of miracle? Well, simply that love might prove to be eternal; that its mysterious, superhuman power might overcome loneliness, dissolve the distance between two people, and break down any artificial barriers that society had erected in the form of education, money, history, and memory. I felt in mortal danger and was looking for a hand to grasp. I longed for reassurance that there really was such a thing as empathy, as companionship: that all this was still humanly possible. So I reached out for Judit.
Once the first phase of confusion, tension, and anxious waiting had passed, we naturally turned to each other for love. I married her and waited for the miracle.
I imagined the miracle to be quite simple. I thought the differences between us might dissolve in the great melting pot of love. I lay down in bed with her as if I had finally arrived home after a long exile, at the end of a voyage. Home is much simpler, but more mysterious and more important, than abroad, because not even the most exotic foreign place can offer the experiences a few familiar rooms can. I mean childhood. It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives. It’s what we recall when, much later, we see the Niagara Falls or Lake Michigan. We see the light and hear the sound of surprises, joys, hopes, and fears locked away in childhood. That is what we love, what we are forever seeking. And for an adult, perhaps only love can conjure something of that tremulous hopeful sense of waiting … love—in other words, not just bed and all that bed entails, but those moments of searching, waiting, and hoping that throw two people together.
Judit and I lay down in bed and made love. We made love passionately, expectantly, in wonder and hope. We were probably hoping that what the world and mankind had ruined might be put right by the two of us eye-to-eye in this other, purer, more ancient realm, in that eternal country without and beyond borders. I mean in bed. Any love preceded by an extended period of waiting—though maybe it’s not exactly romantic love when just a few cinders remain unconsumed by the purgatorial fires of waiting—hopes for a miracle from both the other and itself. Neither Judit nor I was exactly a youngster by then, but we were not old, just man and woman, in the complete, most basic sense of those words. We reach an age when it is not purely sexual satisfaction we desire of each other, not full-blown happiness or release, but a simple and solemn truth that vanity and falsehood had previously hidden from us, hidden from us even when we were in love: it is the truth that we are human beings, we men and women, and that we share a common enterprise or responsibility on earth, a responsibility that may not be quite as personal as we think. Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it.
Once people are old enough, it is the truth they want, and they want it in bed, too, in the sheer physical underworld of it. It isn’t beauty we most want—after a while we stop noticing the beauty, anyway. It’s not that the other should be wonderful, exciting, wise, experienced, curious, lusty, and responsive. So what is it that matters so much? It is the truth. In other words, it is exactly the same thing as matters in literature and in all human affairs. This truth is a compound of spontaneity, readiness, and the willingness to be surprised by the miraculous gift of joy that arrives unplanned, unintended. Even when we are being selfish, wanting only to receive, it is the ability to give, to give in an almost distracted, vaguely conscious way, as it were, without planning, without mad ambition. It’s what I think of as “bed truth.” No, old man, there is no Soviet-style pyatiletka, no Five-Year Plan, nor Four-Year Plan, either. The feeling that drives two people together can have no plan.
Bed is jungle, wilderness, a place full of surprises, teeming with the unexpected; there is the same unbearable dank heat, the same extraordinary flowers and lianas with their deathly scent and their ability to twine around you; the same glowing eyes of the same beasts of prey watching you in the half-light, the heraldic beasts of desire and obsession, ever ready to pounce. Jungle and half-light, strange cries in the distance—you can’t tell whether it is a man screaming by a well, his throat ripped open by some predator, or nature itself screaming, nature, which is human, animal, inhuman at once—bed entails all that. This woman knew all there was to be known. She had the secret knowledge: she knew the body. She knew self-control and loss of self-control. Love for her was not a series of occasional meetings but a constant return to a familiar childhood base: a blend of homecoming and festival; the dark-brown light over a field at dusk, the taste of certain familiar foods, the excitement and anticipation, and, under it all, the confidence that once evening came, there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk. She was like a child tired of playing, making her way home because the light in the window was calling her to a hot dinner and a clean bed. That was love as far as Judit was concerned.
As I said, I was hopeful.
To hope is to fear what you desire, the things in which you neither trust nor genuinely believe. You don’t place your hopes in what you already have: what is possessed simply exists, as if by default.
We traveled for a while. Then we came home and rented an out-of-town property. It was Judit, not I, who arranged all this. The next natural step would be to introduce her to “society,” if she wanted it. I was looking to bring home intelligent people who were not snobs, who might regard what had happened as more than food for gossip. “Society,” that strange world of which, only a little while ago, I had been a perfectly respectable member—the world in which Judit had only recently been a servant—followed our lives with keen interest and, in its own way, accepted what had happened. People always need something to spice up their lives. When it comes, they immediately sit up, their eyes begin to sparkle, and soon they’re on the phone from morn till night … It wouldn’t have surprised anyone in society if the papers had discussed “the affair” in their leading articles: they brought up the subject, they talked about it, they analyzed it in the minutest detail as if it were a crime of some sort. And who knows? They might have been right according to the rules on which society depends. People don’t tolerate the agonizing boredom of cohabitation for nothing; it’s not for nothing they continue squirming in the sharp-jawed snares of a relationship that has long ago lost interest; and, surely, something must lead them to accept the necessary self-denials involved in the social contract. Nobody, they feel, has the right to seek satisfaction, peace, and joy as an individual while they, the majority, a great many of them, have agreed to censor their feelings and desires in the interest of the grand sum of censorship—civilization. That is why they snort and grunt and set up kangaroo courts and advertise their verdicts in the form of gossip each time they hear someone has dared to rebel, seeking individual recourse against loneliness. But now that I am alone, I sometimes wonder whether they are so wrong in censuring people who venture outside the rules.
I’m just raising the question, you know. Just between the two of us, now it’s past midnight.
Women don’t understand this. Only men understand that there is something else beside happiness. This difference may be that great hopeless gulf in understanding between men and women, the gulf that’s always there, each and every time. Women—real women—have only one true home: the place occupied by the man to whom they are attached. For men there is another home: the great, eternal, impersonal, and tragic place symbolized by flags and borders. I don’t mean to say that women feel no loyalty to the community into which they are born, to the la
nguage in which they take oaths, lie, and shop, to the land where they grew up; nor do I say that loyalty, fidelity, the readiness for self-sacrifice, sometimes even for downright heroism on behalf of the man’s other realm, lie beyond them. But women never really die for a country: they die for a man. Every time. Joan of Arc and the others are the exceptions, masculine women. There are ever more of these now. Women’s patriotism is much quieter than men’s. They have fewer slogans. They agree with Goethe, who said that when a peasant cottage burns down, that is a genuine tragedy, but when one’s homeland is devastated, that is, on the whole, a symbolic loss. Home, for women, is always that peasant cottage. That’s the home they jealously guard, the home they live and work for, the home for which they are ready to perform every sacrifice. In that cottage there is a bed, a table, a man, and any number of children. That is woman’s true home.
As I was saying, we loved each other. And now I want to tell you something, in case you didn’t know: love, true love, is always fatal. What I mean is, it does not aim at happiness, at an idyll, at a hand-in-hand eternity of sentimental walks under flowering lime trees, with a gentle light burning on the veranda behind, the house swimming in cool scents. Life can be that, but not love. Love burns with a fierce, more dangerous flame. One day you discover a desire in yourself to encounter this all-consuming passion. It is when you no longer want to keep anything for yourself, when you don’t want love to offer you a healthier, calmer, more fulfilled kind of life, but you just want to be; you know, to exist in a total sense, even at the cost of perishing in the process. This desire comes late in life: some never feel it, never encounter it. They are too cautious, but I don’t envy them that. Then there are the gluttons, the curious, who have to sample everything and can’t pass any opportunity by. They are genuinely to be pitied. There are also the obsessed, the desperate: love’s pickpockets, who, quick as lightning, dip their hands into your heart to steal a feeling, discover some secret physical susceptibility there, then immediately vanish into the darkness, melt into the crowd, snickering with malicious delight. Nor must we forget the cowards, the calculating, who even in love work out everything strategically, as if love were a matter of economics and production deadlines, people who live according to a precise agenda. Most folk are like this: they are true wretches. And then there comes a day when someone really understands what life desires of love, why life has given us sensibility. Does life mean well? Nature is not benign. Do you think it means to make you happy with this feeling? Nature has no need of human pipe dreams. All nature wants is to beget and destroy: that is its business. It is ruthless because its plan is indifferent to the human predicament, beyond the human. Nature has gifted us with passion, but it insists that the passion be unconditional.
In all true life there comes a moment when a man is so deep in passion, it is as if he had cast himself into the waters of Niagara without a life belt. I don’t believe in love that begins like a picnic, a holiday excursion complete with rucksack and singing and sunbeams breaking through the boughs … You know, that flood of spring-is-here feeling most people experience at the start of a relationship … I am deeply suspicious of it. Passion does not celebrate holidays! It’s a dark force that builds and destroys worlds and waits on no answer from those it has touched, nor does it ask them whether they feel good as a result. Frankly, it doesn’t care either way. It gives everything and demands everything: it is that unconditional passion of which the deepest stratum is nothing less than life-and-death. There is no other way of experiencing passion … and how few make it that far! People comfort and cosset each other in bed, tell whopping lies, and pretend to feel all kinds of things, selfishly robbing the other of what they fancy, possibly throwing some superfluous tidbit of joy the other’s way in return … But they have no idea that this is not passion. It is no accident that history has regarded great lovers with the same awe and veneration as heroes, as brave pioneers who have risked all by voluntarily embarking on a hopeless but extraordinary human enterprise. Yes, true lovers run every kind of risk, literally, in every possible sense. It is a joint enterprise, in which the woman is as much the guiding force as the man, just as heroic, just as full of valor as a knight setting out to seek the Holy Grail, that being the whole point of the crusade, of the battles, of the wounds received, of the final vanquishing … What else should lovers want? What other purpose has that ultimate, unconditional sacrifice toward which fatal passion drives all those it has touched? Life articulates itself through this power, then immediately turns away from those it has sacrificed, completely indifferent to them. All ages and all religions honor lovers for this reason. Lovers bind themselves to the stake when they are in each other’s arms. The true lovers, I mean. The courageous, the few, the chosen. The rest simply hope to find a woman the way they might a beast of burden, or to spend a few hours in sweetly pale and comforting arms, either to flatter their male or female vanity, or to satisfy the legal demands of a biological urge … But that’s not love. Behind each lover’s embrace stands the figure of Death, whose shadows are no less powerful than those wild flashes of joy. Behind every kiss looms the secret desire for annihilation, for an ultimate happiness that is no longer in the mood for argument but knows that to be happy is to cease entirely and surrender to feeling.
Love is feeling without an end in view. Maybe that is why lovers have always been honored by old religions, by ancient epic poems, and in song … Deep in unconscious memory people recall how love was great once, when it was not just a form of social commerce or a way of whiling away time, a game or an amusement to be compared with bridge or a society ball. They recall that there was once a frightening task all living beings had to accomplish, that task being to love, love being the full articulation of life, the most complete experience of existence and of its natural consequence, nonexistence. But people don’t learn this till very late. And how unimportant are the virtues or moral standing or beauty or fine qualities of the partner in this enterprise! To love is to know joy as completely as it can be known and then to perish. But all those people, those hundreds of millions of people, carry on, hoping for help, waiting for their lovers to perform some act of charity on their behalf, a show of tenderness, patience, forgiveness, comfort. And they have no idea that what they receive in this way is unimportant: it is they themselves who must give, only they, give unconditionally—that is the meaning of the game.
That’s how we set out on love, Judit Áldozó and I, when we started life in the house just outside town.
That, at least, is how I set out. That was the kind of thing I felt. And I hoped. I still went into the office, but I felt so detached from everything I was like a crook who knows he must be discovered one day, and that when that day comes, he will have to leave his job and all that goes with it … What did I discover? I discovered I no longer had anything to do with the part I played in the world, but I kept proper hours and followed the rules as strictly as ever. I was first to arrive at the factory, and the last to leave, at six, when there was only the doorman left in the place, and I carried on walking across town, just as before. I used to visit the old cukrászda and would sometimes see my wife there—“my first wife,” I almost said, my real wife. Because I never once felt that Judit was my wife. She was the other woman.
What did I feel when I saw the first, my real wife? I didn’t feel sentimental. But the blood always drained from my face. I gave her an embarrassed greeting and firmly looked away. Because the body remembers, you know, it never forgets. It’s like a sea and a shore that once belonged together.
But that isn’t what I wanted to talk about now, now that I have told you almost everything. The end of this story is as stupid as anything you will hear from the most stupid or ordinary man. Shall I tell you anyway? Well, of course, now I have started you will want me to finish.
Look, old man, we lived for a year under these highly unlikely physical and psychological circumstances. I lived for a year as if I were living in the jungle among wild beasts and poisonous
plants, with snakes beneath each stone or bush. That year might well have been worth it. Worth what had preceded it and what was to come.
As to what preceded it, you know most of that now. What happened next took even me a little by surprise. I can see you are thinking that one day I discovered that Judit had been cheating on me. No, old man, I wasn’t to know that until much later. She only betrayed me once she had no other choice.
It took me a year to discover that Judit Áldozó was stealing from me.
Don’t look at me with that incredulous expression. I don’t mean it figuratively. It wasn’t my feelings she was robbing me of, it was the money in my wallet. I mean in the usual sense of the word, the way the police report it in their notebooks.
When did she start stealing? Oh, immediately, from the very first moment. No, wait. Let me think. No, it wasn’t at the very beginning. At that stage she was merely deceiving me. I told you how, at the beginning of the relationship, when we were still living in the hotel, I opened an account for her at my bank and provided her with a checkbook. The account was very soon overdrawn. It was almost impossible to understand this flood of spending, this waste. Yes, she bought a great many things, furs, accessories, but I never looked to see what she was doing. I never cared about the quantity or quality of her shopping, only about her feverish acquisitiveness. It was the pathological fury of the over-compensation that worried me. To put it bluntly, a letter arrived from the bank one day to inform me that her account was exhausted. Naturally, I deposited more money in it, but somewhat less this time. A few weeks later the account was drained again. At that point I warned her, but only in a light, joking manner, not seriously, that she had no idea of our material circumstances. Her ideas of money and property had changed in England: here, at home, we were more modest, less steeped in wealth than she imagined. She dutifully heard the sermon through. She did not ask for more money. Then we moved into the house with the garden and I gave her a monthly allowance that was far more than necessary for housekeeping and her own requirements. We never spoke of money again.
