by Sándor Márai
I’ll never forget the gossip in Budapest near the end of the war. One day, for example, the Germans ranged cannons along the embankment on the Buda side of the city. Enormous cannons they were, properly dug in by the bridgeheads. They broke up the pavements and placed machine-gun nests all the way along the lovely chestnut-lined shore. People looked at them anxiously, but there were some smart people who declared there would not be a siege of Budapest because all those terrifying weapons, the heavy artillery by the bridges, the bundles of explosives on the bridges themselves, were all a confidence trick. It was a trick to pull the wool over the Russians’ eyes. They didn’t really want a battle. That’s what they were saying. But it was no trick: at least it didn’t fool the Russians. The Russians arrived at the river one day and shot everything to pieces, including the cannons. So I have no idea if what the South American said will come true, but I suspect that, in the end, it will work out exactly as he said, if only because it sounded so ridiculous at first hearing.
I also thought a lot about what this very refined man said about how the Americans would win because they were rich. The rich—now there is something I do understand. My experience was that you had to be very careful with the rich because they are extraordinarily crafty. They possess enormous resilience … though heaven alone knows where the resilience comes from. One thing is certain—they are subtle, and it is never easy dealing with them. What I said about their nightwear is evidence of that. People who have you prepare their pajamas the way I was told to prepare them are not ordinary people. Such people know exactly what they want, day and night, and a poor man should cross himself when coming into their presence. Of course I mean only the genuinely rich, not those who just happen to have money. Those are less dangerous. They flash their money around the way a child blows bubbles. And it all ends as it does with soap bubbles: the bubble just bursts in their hands.
My husband was genuinely rich. That might be why he was always so tired.
Pour me another glass, just one finger. No, darling, no, I won’t drink from your glass this time. Inspired ideas are not to be repeated. They quickly wear out and lose their magic. Don’t take it the wrong way.
Don’t rush me, I can only tell it in its proper order.
He was offended, yes, he was terminally offended. That was something I never understood, because I was born poor. There is a strange similarity between the really poor and the really rich … you can’t offend either of them. My father, who was a barefoot fruit picker in the wetlands, was as impossible to offend as the prince of the Rákóczis. My husband was embarrassed by his wealth: far from him to flash it about! He would have worn any disguise to avoid his wealth being pointed out. His manners were so refined, so quiet, so fearfully courteous that you couldn’t offend him with words, with manners, or with acts, since it all washed off his refinement like water off a leaf. They left no scar. No, the only person capable of offending him was himself. And the tendency to offend himself grew in him like some wicked, sickly passion.
Later, when he began to suspect that there was something wrong with him, he started to panic. He was like someone dangerously ill who suddenly loses faith in the famous physician, in the whole range of science and medicine, and turns instead to the woman selling herbal cures because she might be able to help. That was how he came to me one day, leaving his wife and his old life behind. He thought I could offer a kind of herbal cure for him. But I was no herbalist.
Pass me that photo, let me have another look at him. Yes, that’s what he was like fifteen years ago.
Have I said I wore this picture round my neck a long time? In a small locket, on a lilac ribbon? Do you know why? Because I’d paid for it. I was just a servant then and bought it out of my wages: that was why I looked after it. My husband never knew what an important matter it was for someone like me to pay money for something for which there is no pressing need, I mean real money, like the change from my wages or a tip. Later I spent money like water—his money—I threw thousands around the way I sent dust flying with my feather duster on mornings when I was still a servant. It wasn’t real money to me. But my heart was in my mouth when I bought this photograph, because I was poor and felt it a sin to spend money on things that were not absolutely essential. That photograph was a sin for me, mere vanity. I bought it all the same, sneaking a visit to the famous, highly fashionable photographer in the city center, ready to pay the full price without bargaining. The photographer laughed and sold it to me at cut price. Buying his photograph was the only sacrifice I ever made for that man.
He was reasonably tall, a couple of inches taller than me. His weight was steady. He controlled his body the way he controlled his words and manners. He put on a few pounds in winter, but lost them again in May and remained at that weight till Christmas. Don’t think for a moment that he dieted. Forget diets. It was just that he treated his body the way he might treat one of his employees. His body was required to work for him.
He treated his eyes and his mouth the same way. His eyes and mouth laughed separately, as and when they were required. They never laughed at the same time. Not the way you did, my precious, so freely, so sweetly, both eyes and mouth smiling at once, yesterday when you truly excelled yourself and sold that ring—and came home to me with the good news.
That was something he could never do. I lived with him, I was his wife and, before that, his servant. Needless to say, I felt much closer to him as a servant than when I was merely his wife. Even so, I never saw him give a full-hearted laugh the way you do.
He was far more likely to smile. When I met that hunk of a Greek in London, the man who taught me a great many things—don’t go bothering me with what he taught me, I couldn’t tell you everything, we’d be here till dawn—he warned me never to laugh in company when in England because it was considered vulgar. I should just smile and keep smiling. I tell you this because I want you to know everything you might find useful sometime.
My husband could smile like nobody’s business. I was so jealous of it sometimes I felt quite sick just thinking about his smile. It was as if he had learned a high art at some mysterious university where the rich go to get their education and smiling is a compulsory subject. He even smiled when he was being cheated. I tried it on with him sometimes. I cheated him and watched. I cheated him in bed and watched to see what he’d do. There were moments when that was dangerous. You never know how someone will react when they’re cheated in bed.
The danger was a deathly thrill to me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one day he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed me in the stomach—like a pig at slaughter time. It was only a dream, of course: wish fulfillment. I learned the term from a doctor I consulted for a while because I wanted to be fashionable like the others, because I was rich and could indulge myself with a few psychological problems. The doctor got fifty pengő for an hour’s work. This fee entitled me to lie on a sofa in his surgery and to regale him with my dreams as well as all the rude talk I could muster. There are people who pay to have a woman lie on a sofa and talk filth. But it was I who did the paying, learning terms like “repression” and “wish fulfillment.” I certainly learned a great deal. It wasn’t easy living with the gentry.
But smiling was something I never learned. It seems you need something else for that. Maybe you have to have a history of ancestors smiling before you. I hated it as much as I did the fuss about the pajamas … I hated their smiles. I cheated my husband in bed by pretending to enjoy it when I didn’t really. I’m sure he knew it, but did he draw a knife and stab me? No, he smiled. He sat in the huge French bed, his hair tousled, his muscles well toned, a man in top condition, smelling faintly of hay. He fixed me with a glassy look and smiled. I wanted to cry at such moments. I was helpless with grief and fury. I am sure that later, when he saw his bombed-out house, or still later, when they kicked him out of the factory and expropriated him, he was smiling the same smile in exactly the same way.
It is one of the foulest of human sins
, that serene, superior smile. It is the true crime of the rich. It is the one thing that can never be forgiven. Because I can understand people beating or killing each other when they have been hurt. But if they merely smile and say nothing, I have no idea what to do with them. Sometimes I felt no punishment was enough for it. There was nothing I, a woman who had clambered out of the ditch to find myself in his life, could do against him. The world could not harm him, whatever it did to him, to his wealth, to his lands, or to anything that mattered to him. It was the smile that had to be wiped out. Don’t those famous revolutionaries know this?
Because shares and precious stones may vanish, but the trace of these things, a kind of residual bloom, will hang around the rich even after they have lost everything. When you take the really rich and strip them to their bare skin, they still retain the aura of wealth, an aura no earthly power can drag from them. The fact is that when you have someone truly rich, someone with fifty thousand acres, say, or a factory with two thousand workers, and they lose it all, they still remain richer than my kind, however well we happen to be doing.
How they do it? I don’t know. Look, I was there when wealthy people were having a particularly bad time back home. All the odds were stacked against them. Everyone hated them. Little by little, step by methodical step, they were deprived of everything, all their visible goods, and later, with supreme skill, of their invisible goods too. And yet these people remained as serene as before.
I stood there gaping. I wasn’t angry. I did not feel in the least like mocking. I don’t want to make a big song and dance about money to you, or to go on forever about the rich and the poor. Don’t get me wrong, I know it would sound good if I started shouting at dawn about how much I hated the rich, about their money, their power. I hated them, yes I did, but it wasn’t their wealth I hated. It was more that I was afraid of them, or rather that I was in awe of them the way primitive man feared thunder and lightning. I was angry with them the way people used to be angry with the gods. You know about the little gods, those tubby ones, those of human proportions, who talk big, screw around, and are real rogues, those who interfere with the mess of ordinary people’s lives, who worm their way into others’ beds, into women’s lives, who steal the food off the table, gods who behave much as people do. They are not gods like that; they are middling, helpful gods of human size.
That’s how I felt when I thought of the rich. It wasn’t their money, their mansions, their precious stones that made me hate them. I was not a revolutionary proletarian, not a worker with a proper consciousness, nothing like that.
Why not? It was because of the depths from which I’d risen. I knew more than street-corner orators did; I knew that under it all, right at the bottom of things, there isn’t, nor has there ever been, justice; that when you end one injustice, it is immediately replaced by another. More than that, I was a woman, a beautiful woman at that, and I wanted my own place in the sun. Is that a crime? Maybe the revolutionaries—those who thrive by promising that everything will be fine providing we kick out whatever exists and is bad and do something that in other circumstances we would consider bad—maybe they would despise me for it. But I want to be honest with you. I want to give you everything I have, that I still have, not just the jewels. That’s why I must tell you that the reason I hated the rich was because it was only money I could take from them. But the rest, the secret and meaning of wealth, that sense of otherness which cast a more frightening spell over me than money did, that they did not give me. They hid it so well that no revolutionary could take it from them. They stowed it away more securely than valuables in the safes of foreign banks, than the pieces of gold buried in their gardens.
I couldn’t work out the way they could suddenly change subject and simply talk about something else the very moment when the subject seemed most exciting and painfully relevant. There were moments I was so furious my heart beat in my mouth. I was furious when in love, furious when I had been hurt, furious when I saw injustice, when someone was suffering—sometimes I felt like screaming out in righteous indignation. But they—they stayed quiet and smiled at such moments. It’s beyond words as far as I am concerned. Words are never really enough, not when anything really matters, matters as much as birth or death. Words don’t do those occasions any real justice. Maybe music can do it, I don’t know. Or when we feel desire and touch someone, like this. Don’t move. There was a good reason that other friend of mine hid the dictionaries in the end. He was looking for a word. But he couldn’t find it.
So don’t be surprised. I’m no good at explaining myself. I’m just talking … How far off the point talking is when you really want to say something!
Give me the photograph again. Yes, that’s what he looked like when I met him. Later, when I last saw him—after the siege—he was just the same. He had changed only the way a well-made object changes with use … a little more shiny, a little smoother, a little more burnished if you like. He was aging like a good razor or cigarette holder.
Heaven knows. Maybe I should make an effort to tell you what happened. You know what—I’ll start at the end. Maybe that way it will be clearer, leaving out the beginning.
His problem was that he was bourgeois. What’s bourgeois? The pictures in Red propaganda show us evil, potbellied figures who spend the entire day studying share prices while driving their workers to exhaustion. That’s the way I pictured them, too, before I found myself among them. But later I understood that the whole business of the bourgeois and the class war was different from what we proles were told.
These people were sure they had a role in the world; I don’t mean just in business, copying those people who had had great power when they themselves had little power. What they believed was that when it came down to it, they were putting the world into some sort of order, that with them in charge, the lords of the world would not be such great lords as they had been, and the proles would not remain in abject poverty, as we once were. They thought the whole world would eventually accept their values; that even while one group moved down and another one up, they, the bourgeois, would keep their position—even in a world where everything was being turned upside down.
Then one day he asked to speak to me. He said he wanted to marry me—me, the maid! I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but at that moment I hated him so much I could have spat at him. It was Christmas and I was squatting by the fire, preparing to light it. I thought it was the greatest insult I’d ever received. He wanted to buy me like he would some fancy breed of dog—that’s what I felt. I told him to get out of my way. I didn’t even want to look at him.
So he didn’t make me his wife then. After a while time passed and he got married. He married a proper lady. They had a child but the child died. The old man died too, and I was sorry about that. When he died the house was like a museum where people only dropped by to take a look. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a bunch of schoolchildren turned up one Sunday morning, rang the bell, and said it was an educational visit. By that time my husband was living in a different house, with his wife. They did a lot of traveling. I’d stayed with the old gentleman. The old woman wasn’t daft. I was scared of her, but I loved her too. There was some knowledge flickering in her, some age-old female wisdom. She had cures for liver and kidney ailments. She knew about washing and how to listen to music. She knew about us too, about the boy’s rebellion, without saying a word … she recognized the long-standing tension between us the way only women know, as if by a kind of radar. Women can sniff out the secrets of any man in their vicinity.
So she knew her son was hopelessly lonely because the world into which he’d been born, to which he belonged heart and soul—in his memories, in his dreams, even when he was wide awake—could no longer protect him. It couldn’t protect him because it was falling apart, disintegrating like an old piece of cloth, beyond use even as a decorative throw or a rag for wiping. She knew her son was no longer moving forward, no longer on the attack: he was on the back foot
, merely defending. She knew that people who stop moving forward and spend their lives on the back foot are no longer alive: they merely exist. The old woman sensed this danger: her ancient female weaving-and-spinning instincts told her as much. She was aware of this secret the way families are aware of a sinister genetic weakness that is not to be spoken of because considerable interests are at stake. No one should know or speak about the fact that anemia or madness had ravaged the family in the past.
What are you looking at? Yes, I am just as neurotic as the rich. And it wasn’t being among the rich that gave me my neurosis. I was neurotic in my own way in the ditch back home … that is to say if I ever had anything of the kind people call “home.” Whenever I say the word “family” or “home,” I see nothing, I only smell things: earth, mud, mice, human smells. Then, beyond all that, another smell, one hovering over my half-animal, half-human childhood, over the pale blue sky, the mushroom-smelling wood wet with rain, the taste of sunlight, a smell like metal when you touch it with your tongue. I was a neurotic child too, why deny it? It’s not just the rich that have secrets.
But it’s the end I want to tell you about, the very last time I saw my husband. Because, sitting with you here at dawn in this hotel in Rome, I feel I know for certain that that was the last time.
Wait, let’s not drink any more. A black coffee instead … Give me your hand. Put it to my heart. Yes, it’s pounding. That’s how it pounds every dawn. It’s not the black coffee or the cigarettes, it’s not even being with you that does it. It pounds because I remember that moment—the moment I last saw him.
Please don’t think it is desire that makes my heart pound like this. There is no cheap movie scene involved in that pounding. I have already told you that I never loved him. There was a time when I was in love with him, of course, but that’s only because I hadn’t yet lived with him. Love and being in love don’t go together, you know.
