by Sándor Márai
. . .
Have another look at his photograph, take a good look. I kept it because I paid the photographer good money for it, when I was still a maid, because he was still with his first wife.
Let me adjust the bolster under your head. Go on, relax, stretch out. You should always relax when you’re with me, darling. I want you to feel good when you are with me. It’s exhausting enough for you working all night in that bar with the band. When you are here in bed with me, you should do nothing except love me, then relax.
Is that something I said to my husband too? No, sweetheart. I did not mean for him to feel good when he was in bed with me. And that was the trouble, really. Somehow I couldn’t resolve in myself to make him feel good with me, though he did everything to please me, poor man, undertook every kind of sacrifice for my sake. He broke with his family, with society, with all his usual ways. When he came to me it was really like emigrating, the way some bankrupt man-about-town sets out on a sea voyage to a faraway land. Maybe that was exactly why I could never reconcile myself to him; he just wasn’t at home with me. All the time he was with me it was as if he had run away to an exciting, spicy, hot country like Brazil and married some local woman. Does such a person ever wonder how he got there? And when he is with that local woman, even at the most intimate moments, isn’t his mind elsewhere? Isn’t he thinking of home? Perhaps. It made me nervous. That was why I didn’t want him to feel too good when we were together, at table or in bed.
What was that home he was thinking about? Where was it? Was it his first wife? I don’t think so. Home, real home, is not to be found on maps, you know. But home stands for a great deal, not just good and lovely things, but hateful, contrary things too. We are learning that lesson ourselves now, aren’t we, now that we no longer have a home? Don’t imagine we’ll get it back by paying the odd home visit. There’ll be good-byes and tears, some will feel heartbroken, some will strut about proudly waving their new foreign passports while paying a bill with their traveler’s check … But the home we think about when we’re abroad, that has gone for good. Do you still dream of your home in Zala? I do sometimes dream of the wetlands in the Nyírség, but whenever I do I wake with a headache. It seems home is not just a region, a town, a house, or people but a feeling. What’s that? Are there eternal feelings? No, dear, I don’t think so. You know very well I adore you, but if one day I stopped adoring you because you have cheated on me or gone off with someone—but that’s all impossible, isn’t it? Should it ever happen, should I ever have to say good-bye to you, please don’t think my heart will break. We’ll carry on having charming conversations, if you like … but there will be one thing we won’t talk about, because that will have been over, vanished into thin air. There’s no time for mourning. There is only ever one home in your life, like love, the one true love. And it passes like love, like true love. And it’s right it should be like that; otherwise it would all be too much for us to bear.
That first woman, my husband’s first wife—she was a refined lady. Very beautiful, very self-controlled. It was her self-control I most envied. That seems to be one of those things you can’t learn or buy with money. It’s something you’re born with. It may be that the stuff these strange people, the rich, are so busy cultivating all the time is nothing more than a kind of self-discipline. Their blood cells, their very glands, are all precisely under control. I hated this capacity in them, and my husband knew I hated it. It was precisely because his first wife was cultured and self-controlled that my husband left her one day. He had grown tired of self-control. I was more than just a woman to him: I was a trial, a rehearsal, an adventure, both hunt and prey, a form of fraud, a sacrilege—like when someone in polite society suddenly spits on the carpet. The devil knows what these things mean. I’ll fetch a cognac, a three-star bottle, all right? I’ve grown thirsty with all this talking.
Drink, my dear. There—you see how I drink? I put my lips to where your lips have touched the glass … what surprising, tender, marvelous ideas you have! I could weep when something like this occurs to you. I have no idea how you do it. I’m not saying the idea is entirely original, it might be other lovers in the past have thought of it … but it’s still a wonderful gift.
There—now I have drunk after you. You see my husband never made tender gestures like this. We never once drank from the same glass while looking into each other’s eyes as we are doing now. If he wanted to please me, he would buy me a ring—yes, that nice ring with the turquoise stone, the one you were looking at just now with such fascination: that too was a present from him. What’s that, darling? Fine, you can take it, have the ring valued as you did the others, at that first-rate man of yours. You shall have whatever you want.
Shall I tell you more about the rich? There is no way of telling anyone everything about them. I mean, I lived among them for years, but it was like walking in my sleep, in a deep sleep filled with dread. I always worried about saying the wrong thing when I talked to them. I worried in case I listened wrong or touched things in the wrong way. They never shouted or cursed at me, certainly not! They trained and educated me instead, sensitively, patiently, the way the Italian organ grinder out in the street trains his monkey, showing him how to perch on his shoulder and how to preen himself. But they also taught me the way one might teach a cripple, someone incapable of walking, of doing anything the way it ought to be done. Because that is what I was when I first went to them: a cripple. I couldn’t do anything properly. I couldn’t walk, not as they understood walking, couldn’t say hello, couldn’t speak … and as for eating? I hadn’t the foggiest notion how to eat! Even listening was beyond me—listening properly, that is, listening with purpose: in other words, with evil intent. I listened and gawped. I was a fish out of water. But little by little I learned everything they had to teach me. I worked at it and got on. It surprised them how much and how quickly I learned. It was I who left them gawping in the end. I’m not boasting, but I do believe they were quite astonished when they saw how much I learned.
I knew about the family vault, for example. The mausoleum. Oh, lord, that mausoleum! You know how it was back then, when I was still a maid in their house. I saw how everyone was robbing them. The cook made a bit on the side, the servant took backhanders from the salesmen who inflated the prices for brandy, wine, and the best cigars, the chauffeur stole and sold the gas in their cars. All this was to be expected. My employers were perfectly aware of it: it was part of the household budget. I didn’t steal anything myself, since I only cleaned the bathroom, where there was nothing to steal. But later, once I had become “Her Ladyship,” I couldn’t help thinking of everything I had seen in the cellar and the kitchen, and the mausoleum was too much of a temptation. I couldn’t resist it.
You see there came a day when my husband—a proper gentleman—suddenly felt his life was incomplete without a family vault in the Buda graveyard. His parents, the old gentleman and the old lady, were old-fashioned in their death, turning to dust under simple marble tombstones without a proper mausoleum. My husband grew quite morose when this omission occurred to him. But he soon recovered and set to work to remedy the fault. He asked me to negotiate with the designer and the clerk-of-works to create the perfect mausoleum. By that time we had more than one car, a summer house in Zebegény and a permanent winter residence on exclusive Rózsadomb, not to mention a mansion in Transdanubia, near Lake Balaton, on an estate that my husband found himself lumbered with as the result of some deal. We certainly couldn’t complain we had nowhere to live.
But a mausoleum we did not have. We hastened to correct this oversight. Naturally we couldn’t trust any ordinary builder with the job. My husband took great pains to discover the leading funerary expert in the city. We had plans brought over from England and Italy, whole books, their pages printed on heavy burnished paper … you have no idea the amount people have written on the subject of funerary monuments. I mean, after all, to just go and die, that’s nothing special—people scrape out a bit of eart
h and shove you in, end of story. But gentlefolk lead different lives, and, naturally, their deaths are different too. So we employed an expert to help us choose a model, and had a beautiful, spacious, dry mausoleum built, complete with cupola. I wept when I first saw the mausoleum from within, the sheer glory of it, because, for just a moment, it made me think of the sandy ditch we lived in out on the wetlands. I mean, the vault was bigger than the ditch. With careful foresight they had left enough space at the center for six graves, I have no idea for whom. Maybe they were expecting guests, the visiting dead, just in case someone dropped in and needed somewhere to stretch out. I looked at the three spare places and told my husband I would sooner be buried by dogs than lie in this crypt of theirs! You should have seen him laugh when I said it!
And so we were prepared for all eventualities. Naturally the mausoleum was equipped with electric lights, lights in two colors, blue and white. When everything was ready we called the priest to consecrate this house of dead pleasure. Everything you could possibly think of was provided, darling—gilt letters above the entrance, and, on the elevation, modestly small, the aristocratic family crest, the crest they wore on their underpants. Then there was a forecourt where they planted flowers, with columns at the entrance leading to a sort of marbled waiting room for visitors should they fancy taking a breather before they died. You then passed from the zinc hall, through the wrought-iron gates, into the parlor, where the elders were arranged. It was a proper mausoleum, set up for eternity, as if the dead interred there were not to be thrown out after thirty to fifty years. There they were, including the most illustrious among them, for eternity, until the last trumpet called them forth in their distinguished pajamas and privileged dressing gowns.
I earned an eight-thousand-pengő commission doing the mausoleum, the builder wouldn’t give me more. I had an account in a bank and one day, stupidly, I deposited this little extra cash. My husband came across the statement quite by chance, the statement revealing how my little-here and little-there had started to amount to a reasonable sum. He didn’t say anything—of course he didn’t say anything, what a crazy idea!—but I could see it upset him. He thought a member of the family shouldn’t be making a profit on his parents’ family vault. Can you credit that? I couldn’t understand it myself, not to this day. I only tell you the story to show you how strange the rich are.
There’s something else. I got used to everything, I bore it all silently. But they had one habit I really couldn’t stand. Even today I have to take a deep breath because I feel sick just thinking about it. It was that one step too far! I have learned a few things in my time, and there is never an end to learning. But I can bear it all; I am resigned to it. You never know, perhaps I might even get used to the idea of getting older. Silently. But that habit of theirs I couldn’t bear. I redden when I remember it, red with helpless fury, like a turkey.
You mean bed? Yes, but not the way you think. It was related to bed, but in another way. I mean their nightgowns and their pajamas.
You don’t understand. Well, I agree it’s hard to explain. What I mean is that I looked around me, amazed at everything in the house: I felt an almost religious awe, the way you do when you see a giraffe in the zoo. There was the colored toilet paper, the Swedish chiropodist, the lot. I understood that such unusual people could not live by ordinary, everyday rules. They had to have food served a different way, the beds made a different way, like no ordinary mortal being.
Naturally, their food had to be cooked differently because their digestive system had to be quite different, like the kangaroo’s. I’m not absolutely sure how it was with their intestines, but they certainly digested their food in a way no ordinary mortal does. Not naturally, in the regular way, but in a way that forced them to use peculiar laxatives, strange enemas … the whole thing was a great secret.
So I looked on while they did all this, gazing in wonder, mouth open, often with goose pimples. High culture, it seems, is not just a matter of museums but something you find in people’s bathrooms and the kitchens where others cook for them. Their way of life did not change, not a bit, not even during the siege, would you believe it? While everyone else was eating beans or peas, they were still opening tins of delicacies from abroad, goose liver from Strasbourg and such things. There was a woman in the cellar, who spent three weeks there, the wife of an ex–minister of state whose husband had fled west to escape the Russians, who stayed here because she had some other man … and believe it or not, this woman was on a diet, a diet she maintained even as bombs were falling. She was looking after her figure, cooking some tasty something on a spirit flame using only olive oil because she feared that the fat in the beans and the gristle that everyone stuffed themselves with out of fear and anxiety might lead her to put on weight! Whenever I get to thinking about it, I marvel what a strange thing this thing called culture is.
Here in Rome there are all these wonderful statues and paintings and grand tapestries, like the castoffs of a lost world, the kind we get in junk shops back home. But maybe all the masterworks of Rome offer just one view of culture. It might be that culture is also what happens when people cook for the rich, with butter or oil, with complicated recipes prescribed by the doctor—as if it were not only their teeth and guts that required nourishment but they had to have a special soup for the liver, a different cut of meat for the heart, a particular blend of salads for the gall bladder, and a rare form of pastry with raisins for the pancreas. And having eaten all this, the rich withdraw into solitude so that their mysterious organs of digestion can get on with digesting. That’s culture too! I understood it all, admired it, and full-heartedly approved of it. It was just their way with nightshirts and pajamas I failed to understand. I could never reconcile myself to it. Damn the God that invented such things!
Have patience, I’m about to tell you. After making the bed I had to lay the nightshirt on top of it facedown, folding the bottom end of it back and over, spreading the sleeves. See what I mean? Looked at this way, the nightshirt or pajamas looked faintly Arabic, like some Eastern pilgrim at prayer, stomach to the ground, his arms spread over the sand. Why did they insist on this? I have no idea. Maybe because it’s more convenient that way, because it involves one movement less, because you just need to pull it on from the back and there you are, ready for bed, without having to struggle into it and tire yourself out before going to sleep. But I hated this kind of calculation, absolutely loathed it. I simply couldn’t tolerate this affectation of theirs. My whole nervous system rebelled against it. My hands shook with fury whenever I made their beds, folding and adjusting their nightgowns, pajama jackets, and trousers the way the manservant taught me. Why?
People are peculiar, you see. They are born that way, even when they’re not rich. Everyone is annoyed or driven mad by something. Even the poor who tolerate everything for a while, who resign themselves to everything and bear the weight of the world on their backs with a certain awe and helplessness, accepting whatever comes their way. There comes a moment for them, one that came for me each evening when I was making the bed, putting out their nightwear in the required manner. That was when I understood that soon people would no longer put up with the world as it was. I mean individuals as well as nations. Someone would scream out loud that they had had enough, that things had to change. And that when this happened, people would take to the streets and go on the rampage, smashing and breaking things. Though that’s only the circus part, a sideshow. Revolution, I mean real revolution, is that which has already happened inside people. Don’t stare at me like an idiot, gorgeous.
I might be talking rubbish, but not everything runs according to the laws of normal logic, not everything people say or do has to make sense. Do you think it’s rational or logical that I should be lying with you in this bed? Don’t you get it, sweetheart? Never mind. Just keep your mouth shut and carry on loving me. Our logic makes no sense—but here we are.
So that’s the nightwear business. I loathed this habit of theirs. But eve
ntually I resigned myself to that too. They were so much stronger, after all. It is possible to hate dominant forms of life just as it is possible to admire them, but you cannot deny them. I grew to hate them. I hated them to the extent that I joined them and became rich myself; wore their clothes, lay down in their beds, started to watch my figure, and, eventually, got to taking laxatives before I went to bed, just like the rich. I didn’t hate them because they were rich and I was poor, no, please don’t misunderstand me. It would be nice if someone finally understood the true state of affairs.
Newspapers and parliaments are constantly going on about this now. Even the movies are full of it, or so I understood watching a newsreel the other day. Everyone is talking about it. I wonder what has got into people. I can’t imagine it’s good for people to be talking so crudely, so generally about rich and poor, about Americans and Russians. I don’t understand it. They even say there is bound to be a great revolution and the Russians will come out on top, along with the poor, by and large. But a very refined man once told me in a bar—a South American, I think, a drug dealer, so I heard, who supposedly kept a stash of heroin in his dentures—that that was not how it was going to be, that it would be the Americans who’d win out in the end, because they had more money.
I thought a good deal about this. The saxophonist said the same thing. He said the Americans would drill a great hole in the ground and pack it with atom bombs, and then this little guy in glasses, the man who was currently the president over the ocean, would get down on his hands and knees, carrying a burning match, and crawl over to the hole, light the fuse of the atom bomb, and then—whoosh!—the whole caboodle would go up. I thought it a load of nonsense at first. But I can’t bring myself to laugh anymore. I have seen a great deal that seemed just as ridiculous but soon became reality. My experience is that, generally, the more stupid the idea, the more certain that, one day, it will be turned into fact.
