by Sándor Márai
Enough of your sniggering. Do you or don’t you want me to go on?
Well, of course they came knocking at my door, a considerable number of them, I should say. But this, my second husband, he was only my husband on paper.
In ’48, you see, I arrived in Vienna with nothing but two suitcases, because I had had enough of democracy. The suitcases were all that remained of the good life, them and the jewels.
This man, my second husband, had been living in Vienna for some years by then. He made his living by getting married, then divorced. As soon as the war was over, he strolled into Vienna, because he was a smart guy, you know, clever enough to leave beautiful Hungary while the going was good. He had the right papers, though heaven knows how he got them. He married me, asking forty thousand for the privilege. And then he wanted another twenty thousand for the divorce. I paid it by selling jewels. But you know that. After all, there were some jewels left for you, weren’t there? There, you see. It’s good to economize. Everything was fine with him, the only problem being that one day he came to the hotel where I lived alone and insisted it wasn’t just a marriage of convenience, that he had connubial rights. I kicked him out, of course. They are so common nowadays, you know, these marriages of convenience: women marry to get hold of the papers they need abroad. There are some marriages of convenience in which three children quickly appear, one after the other. You have to be really careful. As I said, I kicked him out. By way of farewell he asked for the silver cigarette case he saw on the bedside table. I never saw him again. He went off looking for new brides.
My real husband? That’s the one in the fur coat, the one you’re looking at. What do you think of him? Do you reckon he looks like a proper gentleman? People certainly referred to him as a gentleman. It’s just that, you know, it’s hard to tell the difference between gentlemen and those who just pretend to be one and turn out to be fake. There are rich gentlemen with good manners, and there are less-rich gentlemen whose manners are nothing special, but still they’re gentlemen. There are a great many rich, well-turned-out men. But gentlemen are few. So few they’re hardly worth mentioning. They’re as rare as that peculiar creature I once saw in the London Zoo: the okapi. Sometimes I think that no one really rich could ever be a real gentleman. You might find a few among the poor, maybe. But they’re as rare as saints. Or okapi.
My husband? I told you, he was very much like a gentleman. But he wasn’t entirely, unquestionably a gentleman. You know why he wasn’t? Because he took offense. When he got to know me. I mean, when he really and truly got to know me. He took offense and divorced me. That’s how he failed the test of being a gentleman. It’s not that he was stupid. He himself knew that any man you can offend, or who takes offense, isn’t a proper gentleman. There are gentlemen even of my kind. Yes, they’re rare, because we were as poor as the field mice with which we slept and lived in my childhood, but they’re gentlemen.
My father harvested melons in the wet country, the Nyírség. He was what they call there a Canadaman. We were so poor we had to dig a shelter in the ditch and live there through winter, together with the field mice. But whenever I think of my father, you know, I picture him as a gentleman. Because you could never offend him. He had an inner calm. When he was angry, he struck out, of course, and his fist was hard as stone. Sometimes he was helpless with anger because the world despised him, because he was a beggar. At such times he kept silent and kept blinking. He could read, and could sign his name in his own fashion, but he rarely used book knowledge, or any knowledge. He just kept silent. I do believe he was thinking, but only briefly. Sometimes he’d get hold of liquor, cheap pálinka, and drink himself senseless. But when I put all the pieces together and think of him, this man, my father, who lived with my mother and their children in a ditch full of mice, I think of him as a gentleman. One winter, when he had no shoes, the postman gave him a pair of galoshes with holes in them, and he went about in them, wrapping his feet in rags. I can tell you, he never felt offended.
My first husband, my real husband, kept his shoes in a shoe cupboard, because he had so many fine shoes he needed to have a cupboard made for them. And he was always reading books, damned clever books. For a long time I thought it was impossible to offend a man so wealthy that he even had to have a shoe cupboard. It’s not for nothing I mention the shoe cupboard. When I first entered the service of my husband’s family, it was the shoe cupboard I liked best. I liked it but it scared me too. I didn’t have any shoes for a long time when I was a child. I was over ten years old when someone gave me a pair that fitted and actually belonged to me. It was a used pair given to the cook by the deputy sheriff’s wife. It was the kind people wore during the war, low-heeled shoes, the sort you buttoned up. They were too tight for the cook, and one winter morning when I was fetching milk for the house she took pity on me and gave me these marvelous shoes. Maybe that was why I was so glad to have this great trunk, the one I left back in Pest when I skipped the democracy after the Russian siege of Budapest. The trunk was still in one piece after the siege, complete with the shoes. I was so happy … Well, that’s enough about shoes.
Here’s the coffee. Wait, I’ll bring some cigarettes too. These sweet American cigarettes make me gag. Yes, I understand you need the cigarettes for your art. Night shifts in the local bar require cigarettes too. But careful of your heart, my angel. I couldn’t bear it if any harm befell you.
How did I come to be employed in that gentleman’s household? Well, it wasn’t a wife they were advertising for, you may be sure of that. It was only much later I became a wife there, a wife and a lady, with the full complement of old honorifics: “honorable” lady, “excellent” lady, “most excellent” lady … I was hired as a servant, a general maid.
What are you looking at? I’m not joking.
As I said, I was a servant. Not even a proper servant, just a scullery maid, essentially a cleaner. Because this was an elegant house, my sweet, a house proper for gentlefolk. I could tell you a great deal about it and what went on there, how they lived, their habits, their dinners, their conversations, their boredom. For years I went about on tiptoe there, hardly daring to breathe. I was scared. It took years, you know, before I was admitted into the inner rooms, because I knew nothing about what to do and how to behave in such refined company. I had to learn. At first I was only allowed to work in the bathroom and the toilet. They wouldn’t even let me near the food in the kitchen, I could only peel potatoes or help with the washing up … It was as if my hands were considered filthy. They had to be careful in case anything I touched got dirty. But maybe it wasn’t them: not them, not the master, not the cook or the serving man, no. It was me. I felt my hands were never clean enough for an elegant house like that. I felt like that for a long time. My hands were often red then, creased, hard, and full of sores. Not as soft and white as they are now. Not that they ever criticized my hands. It was just that I did not dare touch anything, because I feared I’d leave a mark. I certainly never dared touch their food. You know the way doctors put on a thin gauze mask when they are performing an operation, because they’re worried about infecting the patient. I held my breath when handling their things … the glass from which they drank, the pillows on which they slept. You, you may laugh, but even when I was cleaning the toilet bowl after them I was careful that the lovely white porcelain should not be dirtier for me having touched it. This fear, this anxiety, lasted for years. It was a very superior household.
I can see what you’re thinking! You think fear and anxiety were done with the day my luck turned and I became lady of the house, an “honorable” and “most excellent” so-and-so. No, little one, you’re wrong. It didn’t stop. That day certainly arrived, but I was just as anxious then as I had been those years before, when I was only a scullery maid. I was never at peace, never happy in that house.
Why not, when that house gave me everything? Everything good: everything bad. Every harm and every satisfaction.
That’s such a hard question, sweeth
eart. The question of satisfaction, I mean … Sometimes I think it’s the hardest question anyone can ask.
Pass me the photograph. It’s a long time since I last looked at it … Well, yes, that was my husband. The other? The one who looks like an artist? Who knows? Perhaps he was an artist. Not a real artist, though. Not an artist through and through—like you, for example. You can tell by looking at him. He was always looking at me so solemnly, so ironically, it seemed he couldn’t believe in anything, not a solitary thing; in nothing and no one, not in himself, not even in the idea of himself as an artist. He looks tired there, and had aged a little when I took the picture. He himself said he looked secondhand in it. You know, like those pictures in the papers showing before and after. I took it in the last year of the war between two bombing raids. He was sitting at the window, reading. He didn’t even know he was being photographed. He didn’t like pictures of himself, either photographs or drawings. He didn’t like being looked at while he was reading. He didn’t like being spoken to when he was quiet. He didn’t like … yes, he didn’t like it … when people loved him. What’s that? Did he love me? No, my dear, he didn’t love me, not even me. He just put up with me for a while, in the room a corner of which you see there. That bookcase and all those books there, they were destroyed soon after I took the picture. The room you see was wrecked. And the house, of which this is the fourth floor. We used to sit there between bombings. Everything you see in this picture has been destroyed.
Here’s the coffee. Go on, drink it. Here’s your cigarette. Now listen.
I’m always nervous when talking about this, so don’t be surprised if I sometimes show it, sweetheart. A lot of things happened to us. We, who lived in Pest throughout the siege and all that came before and after it. It was a mercy you were away from it in the provinces at the time. You are a wise man. So wonderful.
Well, I’m sure everything was better in Zala. But we who were rotting away in the cellars of Pest, waiting for bombs, we had a hard time. You were also wise to find your way to Pest no earlier than ’47, by which time there was a government in place and the bars were open. I believe you when you say they welcomed you with open arms. But don’t talk about that to anyone. There are a lot of bad people about, and some Jew, a survivor of the labor camps, might suggest you had some reason for lying low in Zala till ’47. All right, all right, I’ll shut up.
This man, the artistic one, once told me we had all gone mad, all of us who survived the siege. And that we’re all in the madhouse now.
Who was this artistic-looking gentleman? Well, he was not a drummer. There is only one drummer in the world that matters, darling, and that is you. He didn’t have an Italian work permit … the kind of work he did needed no permit. For a while he wrote books. Take that frown off your face, I know you don’t like reading. I can’t bear to look at you with your brow furrowed like that. Don’t rack your brains, you wouldn’t have heard of him anyway. What did he write? Lyrics? The kind of song lyrics your band plays in the bar? No, I don’t think that was his sort of thing. True, by the time I met him, he was playing with the idea of writing songs for café singers, and he might have if they’d asked him. That’s because, by that time, no other form of writing interested him. He might even have been willing to do some copywriting, he felt such contempt for the written word. He loathed his own writing too, not just the stuff others wrote, that anyone ever wrote. Why? I don’t really know, but I have my suspicions. He once told me he understood book burning because there has never been a single book that could help people.
Was he crazy? Well, you see, that had never occurred to me. What a clever man you are!
Do you want to know what went on there, in the elegant house where I served as a maid? All right, I’ll explain. But listen carefully to what I am about to tell you, because it’s no fairy tale: it’s what school textbooks call history. I know books and schools were never your style. Nevertheless, listen, because what I am about to tell you has vanished from the world. It’s as distant as those stories you hear about ancient Hungarians who went about the world on horseback and tenderized their steak by keeping it under the saddle. They wore helmets and armor, they lived and died in those things. My employers were historical characters, like them, like the great chieftain Árpád, father of the Hungarians, leader of the seven chieftains, as you might remember from your village school. Wait, I’ll sit down next to you on the bed. Give me a cigarette. Thanks. So it was like this.
I want to explain to you why I never felt comfortable in that lovely house. Because they treated me very well. The old man, His Excellency, treated me like an orphan, a poor little soul—you know, like a relative with a clubfoot from the poor side of the family forced to take shelter with the rich side. And the charitable family does everything possible not to make the newcomer self-conscious about the sad difference in status. It might have been the charity that was the most annoying thing. It made me so angry!
Mind you, I made my peace with the old master pretty soon. Do you know why? Because he was mean. He was the only one in the family who never tried to be kind to me. He never addressed me as “Judit, love.” He gave me no cheap gifts, no hand-me-down clothes from gentlefolk, like the old lady—Her Ladyship—who gave me her ragged winter coat, or the young master, the young master who later married me, who gave me the right to be called Her Ladyship. He himself had some office, such as lord of the City Council, but he didn’t care much for titles and never used it. He didn’t even like people calling him the usual “Your Excellency.” It was to be “Doctor” at all times. But I was already Her Ladyship by then. Not that he bothered with that, either. It amused him when the servants started addressing me as “Your Ladyship.” It was a slightly sarcastic sort of amusement at silly people who took such things too seriously.
The old master was different. He tolerated the “excellency” stuff because he was a practical man who knew that the great majority of people were not only grasping but vain and stupid too and that there was nothing you could do about it. The old man never asked. He ordered. If I made a mistake, he growled at me, and I was so frightened I would drop the tray or whatever I was holding. If he so much as looked at me, my palms would begin to sweat and I trembled. He looked like one of those bronze statues you see in Italian towns, in the square … you know, those early-century statues when merchants became proper subjects for bronze … potbellied little squirts in frock coats and rumpled trousers. In other words, patriots, patriots who did nothing but get up in the morning and play the patriot till it was time for bed again; the kind of people who earn a statue by founding the local horse abattoir, that kind of thing. And their pants were just as rumpled in real-life cloth as in bronze. The old man would look about him in the manner of those turn-of-the-century statues, giving us his statue look, much like the real merchants, the statues’ originals, I expect.
I might have been an insignificant puff of wind as far as he was concerned, not quite human. I was nothing. When I brought the orange juice to his room—they were strange like that, starting the day with orange juice, followed by gym and the punching bag, then a sugarless tea, with proper breakfast only later, a big breakfast enough for two in the morning room, as regularly as Easter mass in the village church at home—when I brought in the orange juice, I wouldn’t dare look at the old man as he lay in bed, reading by the bedside light. I was too frightened to look into his eyes.
The old man wasn’t, in fact, all that old at the time. Nor was I always nothing to him. I think I can tell you now that he’s gone, that sometimes—when I was helping him on with his coat in the dark hall—he went so far as to pinch my ass or pull my ear. In other words, he gave me unmistakable signs that he thought me attractive and that the only reason he wasn’t about to proposition me was that he was a man of taste who considered me below his rank. He was not the kind to have an affair with a servant. What I thought was: I’m just a servant in the house. If the old man wants to have his way, if he insists, let’s just put up with it and
drop the idea of pleasure. I had no right to resist the wishes of such a powerful, stern figure. It was probably what he thought too. He would have been mightily surprised if I did resist.
But it never came to that. He was the master, that’s all, so whatever he wanted would have to be. He would never have thought of taking me for wife, not in his wildest dreams. Nor would he have wondered, not for a second, if it was right or wrong to have his way with me. That’s why I preferred serving on the old man. I was young, healthy, and vigorous, fully aware of my youth and health, and I loathed the idea of being ill. The old man still had a healthy, vigorous mind. His wife and his son—the one who later married me—were already ill. It’s not that I thought as much: I just knew it.
Everything in the elegant house was beset with danger. For a long time I just stared and gawked the way I did as a child when I was sick and found myself in hospital. The hospital was quite an experience for me, perhaps the greatest and most beautiful experience of my childhood. A dog had bitten me, here on the calf, and the district medical officer wouldn’t have me being tended in the ditch where we were living, bound up in rags, the way we always were whenever we cut ourselves. He sent a gendarme for me and had me carried to hospital by force.
