by Sándor Márai
They talk about something being “brand-new,” fresh from the box the shop provides for you. Budapest was not so much a box as a mass grave out of which people were still climbing. It was the same mass grave he himself had emerged from. There was not a crease on the suit. His light-beige gabardine raincoat—“Made in England”—was casually draped across his arm, a very roomy coat, almost obscenely comfortable, as I remember. I was the one who unwrapped the package from London when it arrived. Much later, I was to pass the shop in London the coat had been bought from. It was there in the window among other things. He carried the coat in an almost careless fashion, thrown across his arm because it was a mild end-of-winter afternoon.
He wore no gloves, of course, because he only wore gloves in the very depths of winter when it was freezing. So I looked at his hands too. They were white and clean, his nails so unobtrusively manicured you’d think they’d never seen a pair of scissors. But that was him all over.
You know what was the strangest thing? When you put him up against that filthy, muddy, ragged crowd creeping over the bridge, his presence should have been practically incendiary. And yet he was almost invisible. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone from among the crowd came over, took him by the lapels, and shook and poked him, just to check that he was real. Imagine what would happen in the French Revolution, in those months of the Terror, when aristocrats were being hunted all over Paris the way children hunt sparrows with catapults, if an elderly nobleman appeared on the street in lilac frock coat and powdered wig, amiably waving at carts filled with fellow counts and earls on their way to the scaffold. There would be nothing to choose between him and my husband, each as spectacular as the other. He was mysteriously different from the toiling throng around him, as if he had emerged not from one of the many bombed-out houses but from an invisible theater, a piece of period drama for which he was appropriately fitted by the dresser. It was an old part in an old play, the kind that’s never going to be put on now.
So this man appears on the smoking stage set of the city, a man who has not changed, who is untouched by siege or suffering. I worried for him. The mood was for revenge: you annoyed people at your peril, and once people were annoyed, there was nothing to stop them doing something. Guilt was at the bottom of it: it was guilt behind the fury and the desire for revenge, behind all those glowing eyes and lips spitting hatred. People spent whole days rushing around to grab what they could: a spoonful of lard, a handful of flour, one solitary gram of gold. Everyone kept a crafty eye on everyone else. No one was free of suspicion. Why? Because we were all criminals, all guilty one way or another? Because we had survived when others hadn’t?
Now here was my husband calmly sitting beside me, as if he were the one innocent among us all. I couldn’t understand it.
I closed my eyes. I had no idea what to do. Should I call a policeman to take him away? He hadn’t done anything wrong. He hadn’t taken part in any of the terrible things that had gone on, not then or before, all over the country. He hadn’t killed any Jews, he hadn’t gone after those who thought differently from him, he hadn’t ransacked the apartments of people who had been dragged away to death or exile: he hadn’t harmed anybody. Nobody could point a finger at him. He hadn’t so much as stolen a crumb from anyone. I never heard anything bad about him, not even much later. He hadn’t gone looting like the rest, far from it! In fact he was one of those who were robbed of almost everything. When I met him on the bridge at the Buda end, he was, for all purposes, a beggar like everyone else. Later I discovered there was nothing left of the family fortune, just a suitcase of clothes and his engineering diploma. That’s all he took with him when he went to America, or so they say. For all I know he is working on some factory floor there. He had given me the family jewels long before, when we separated. You see how good it is that the jewelry survived. I know my jewels are the last thing on your mind, darling. You are just helping me to sell them out of the kindness of your dear heart. Don’t look like that at me. You see, I have come over all tearful now. Wait till I dry my eyes.
What’s that? Yes, it’s getting on for dawn. The first greengrocers’ trucks are out delivering. It’s gone five o’clock. They’re going toward the river, to the market.
Are you sure you’re not cold? Let me cover you up. It’s getting chilly.
What’s that? No, I’m not cold. Not at all; in fact I feel a bit hot. Excuse me, darling, I’ll just close the window.
As I was saying, I was looking at him, and what I saw gave me a cold shiver that ran through my knees right down to my toes. My hands were sweating, and it was all because this refined, familiar gentleman, my ex-husband, was smiling at me.
Please don’t think it was a mocking or superior smile. It was just a smile, a polite smile of the kind people give when hearing a joke that is neither funny nor dirty … the kind someone well brought up smiles at all the same. He was pretty pale, no doubt about it. When you really looked, you could see he too had spent time in the cellar. But his pallor was the kind you have if you’ve been ill for a few weeks and then got out for the first time. He was pale about the eyes. His lips looked bloodless. Otherwise he was exactly as always, as he had been his whole life … let’s say after ten in the morning, after shaving. Maybe even more so. But maybe I just got that impression because of everything around us, because he stood out from it the way an object in a museum stands out when they take it from its glass case and put it in a grimy working-class apartment. Imagine if that statue of Moses we were looking at yesterday in the dimly lit church were to be displayed in the home of some local mayor, between two cabinets. “My dear sir, this is not a masterpiece like that statue of Moses.” But he was simply being himself that moment, a museum object that had found its way onto the street. Smiling.
I’m very hot now! Just look how red my cheeks are—all the blood has rushed to my head. That’s because I have never spoken to anyone about this. Maybe it has been preying on my mind without my knowing it. And now I get a hot flush as I am talking about it.
There was no need to wash this man’s feet, my dear; he washed them by himself in the morning, in the cellar, you may be sure. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that something had changed—he needed no sedative, no consolation. From start to finish he insisted that life had only one meaning, one point. It was courtesy. Good manners meant invulnerability. It was as if he had guts of marble. And this marble-inside, flesh-and-blood-outside figure, dressed in touch-me-not armor, would not come an inch closer to me. The recent earthquake that had shaken and shifted whole countries had no effect at all on his stony constitution. I felt he would sooner die than say a single word other than “I think” or “I’m afraid.” Had he actually inquired how I was, or if I needed anything, I would have told him, and he would, I’m sure, have done anything to help: he’d immediately have taken off his coat or given me the wristwatch some Russian had absentmindedly forgotten to steal, and he’d have smiled just to show me he was no longer angry with me.
Now listen. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. It is not true that people are invariably greedy and feral. Sometimes they are very willing to help each other. But doing people favors is nothing to do with goodness or empathy. The bald man was probably right when he said that people are sometimes good because there are too many obstacles to them being bad. The best we can say is that we are good simply because we’re afraid of being bad. That’s what the bald man said. I’ve never said it to anyone myself. Only to you now, my darling, my dearest love.
We couldn’t sit at the cave entrance, opposite the natural springs, forever. After a while my husband coughed, cleared his throat, and said “he thought” it might be best if we stood up and, seeing it was nice weather, walked about the ruined villas of Mount Gellért for a while. And, yes, “he was afraid” that he would not have many more opportunities to talk to me in the near future. He thought we should use the time left to us. He didn’t say it quite like that, but there was no need to, as I my
self knew this would be our last conversation. And so we set off on our walk up Mount Gellért, along the steep roads, among ruins and dead animals. It was a sunny winter’s day.
We strolled about for roughly an hour. I have no idea what he was thinking as I walked the slopes beside him for the last time. He spoke calmly, without apparent feeling. I asked him tactfully how he had got here and what had happened to him, and wasn’t the world extraordinary and topsy-turvy? He replied very politely that everything was fine just as it was. It was all as it should be. What he meant was that he was utterly ruined, had nothing left, and was preparing to go abroad to make his living doing manual work. I stopped on one of the bends of the winding road and very carefully asked him—I did not dare look directly at him—what he thought might happen, how the world would turn out.
He stopped too, looked at me solemnly, and thought for a while. It seemed he took a deep breath before answering. He tipped his head to one side, gazed sadly, first at me, then at the bombed house in whose gateway we were standing, and said:
“I’m afraid there may be too many people in the world.”
Having said this, it was as if he had answered any possible further questions. He set off for the bridge. I hurried to keep step with him, because I didn’t understand what he meant. Quite enough people had died needless deaths at that time. Hadn’t they always? Why should he be worried about there being too many people? But he didn’t elaborate, just walked on like a man in a hurry, too busy to answer. I suspected he was joking or playing a trick on me. I remembered the two of them, my ex-husband and his bald friend, and how they used to play games where they pretended to be dull people saying the most obvious things. There are people who insist on calling a spade a spade and nothing else, people who when it’s hot and everyone is dripping with perspiration, when the very dogs are dropping dead in the street, frown and point to the sky and pronounce in stern, magisterial tones: “It’s hot!” And, having pronounced this, they look inordinately proud, the way everyone does when they have said something particularly obvious and stupid. That was a game they played. So now, having declared that there were too many people, I wondered if he was mocking me. He was right in the sense that the crowd on the bridge had the look of a natural disaster, that they looked like Colorado beetles in a potato field. The thought startled me and I changed the subject. “But really, what will you do?” I asked him.
I always used the impersonal vous form of “you” with him, maga, not te. He, on the other hand, addressed me familiarly, as te. I never dared address him that way. For other people he always used the more formal, impersonal manner, even for his first wife, his parents, and his friends. He never liked the stupid, overfamiliar way people of the same class and same type went straight to te in the hope of demonstrating their mutuality, as if to prove they were members of the same important club. But he always addressed me as te. It wasn’t anything we talked about; it was just the way things worked between us.
He took off his glasses, drew a clean handkerchief from his cigar pocket, and carefully cleaned the lenses. Once he had put them back, he looked over to the bridge, where the queue was growing ever longer. Quite calmly, he said, “I’m leaving, because I’m superfluous: it is me that is the one too many.”
His gray eyes gazed steadily ahead. He didn’t blink, not once.
There was no pride in his voice. He spoke in matter-of-fact tones, like a doctor diagnosing an illness. I didn’t ask him anything else, because I knew he’d not say anything, not even under torture. We walked on toward the bridge. Once there, we bid each other a silent farewell. He carried on along the embankment toward Krisztinaváros. As for me, I took my place in the slow, winding queue and shuffled my way toward the steps leading onto the bridge. I saw him just once more, hatless, his raincoat over his arm, slowly but deliberately making his way, the way people do when they are absolutely certain where they are going—that’s to say, to their own annihilation. I knew I’d never see him again. There is something about knowing such things that seems the first step to madness.
What did he mean? Maybe that a man is only alive as long as he has a role to play. Beyond that, he is no longer alive: he merely exists. You won’t understand this, because you do have a role in the world: your role is to love me.
There! I’ve said it. Don’t look at me so archly. It’s getting toward dawn, you’ve just come back from the bar, and here I am, your Roman odalisque, fussing over you in a hotel. If anyone could hear our conversation, someone suspicious by nature, someone who could observe and listen to us, they’d think we were a pair of conspirators. They’d see a common woman who once found herself among the lords of the world, gossiping with her pretty lover about all she has seen there, betraying their secrets, and there you are, drinking it all in, because you want to know what tricks the rich get up to. It’s a wicked world, he’d think. Don’t go frowning and wrinkling that lovely brow. Go on, laugh. After all, we know the truth about each other. You’re not just a pretty boy, you’re an artist through and through, my one and only benefactor, the man I adore, who is helping me through what remains of the farce of my life. You help by selling the jewels my wicked husband left me. You help because you are kind and soft-hearted. And I am not really a common woman, nor ever was, not even when I took money from my husband the only way I knew, not because I needed the cash but because I needed justice. What are you grinning at? It’s a secret between the two of us.
So yes, my husband was quite a peculiar man. I watched him leave and suddenly felt curious. I would love to have known what the man lived for, why he felt superfluous now, and why he was going away to be a house painter in Australia or an odd-job man in America. Wasn’t the stuff he believed in so firmly, the role he was playing, just a ridiculous charade? I don’t read the papers. I glance at the headlines when some bigwig gets murdered or a movie star is divorced; that’s all I read, nothing else. All I know of politics is that no one trusts anyone, and everyone thinks he knows better than the next man. As I watched him walk away I saw a troop of Russian soldiers march past, rifles slung over their shoulders, bayonets fixed, big strapping lads who were in Hungary, whose presence meant everything would be different from now on, different from the time when my husband thought he had a role in the world.
I shuffled along in the queue, over the bridge, over the yellow, dirty, end-of-winter Danube. The river was high. There were planks, blasted remains of ships and corpses washed along the tide. No one paid any attention to the corpses; everyone looked straight ahead, carrying things in backpacks, bowed under the weight. It was as if all humanity had set out on a long, penitential march. So we wound over the bridge, hordes of us, each of us laden down by our own guilt. And, suddenly, I no longer felt myself to be important, no longer in a hurry to get to Király utca to trade my tattered paper money for nail-polish remover. Suddenly I saw no point in going anywhere at all. The meeting had upset me. Although I never loved the man, I was horrified by the idea that I didn’t resent him, either, not really, not the way you are supposed to hate your enemy. The thought hit me hard: it was like losing something valuable. There comes a time, you know, when people realize it’s not worth being angry. That is, let me tell you, a very sad moment.
It’s almost dawn. The light suddenly becomes so hot, so effervescent! In Rome there seems to be no transition between night and dawn. Wait, let me raise the blinds. Look at those two orange trees outside the window. They’ve produced two oranges each, all four wrinkled and withered—the kind you only get in this town. Those two trees are like old people: the wrinkled oranges are the feelings they have struggled to produce.
Doesn’t the light hurt your eyes? Myself, I like these Roman mornings, this sultriness. The light comes on so suddenly and so bright it’s like a young woman throwing off her nightgown and going over to the window naked. There’s nothing immodest about her then: she’s simply naked.
What’s that mocking laughter about? Am I being too poetical for you? Yes, I know I tend to talk in co
mparisons. I see you must be thinking I got this from the bald man. Versifiers and scribblers, you think. We women are always imitating the men that interest us.
No point in leafing through the album. You won’t find anything. I don’t have a picture of him.
I see the light is bothering you. I’ll let the blinds down halfway. Is that better? The street is still deserted. Have you noticed how empty our little Via Liguria is even during the day? He lived here, you know. Who? Him—the bald man. Move over, I want to lie down. Pass me the small cushion. And the ashtray. You want to sleep? I’m not sleepy, either. Let’s lie here quietly for a while. I like just lying still at daybreak, not moving at all but staring at the ceiling in this old house in Rome. When I wake up at three in the morning and you are still out at the bar, I lie like this for a long time.
What? Did the bald man stay in this very room? I don’t know. Don’t go on about it. Run down to the hotel desk and ask the porter if you want to know.
Yes, he might have stayed here.
So what! That I was following him? Mad, quite mad—what on earth are you thinking of? He’d been dead two months by the time I left home.
It’s not true—you’re talking rubbish. No, it was not his grave I was looking for in the Protestant cemetery. It was the grave of a poet, a poor English writer. The only part that’s true is that the bald man once told me something about these famous graves. He himself is not buried there, though: his grave is in the cemetery on the outskirts, in a cheaper plot. In any case he wasn’t Protestant like the English poet. No, he was not a Jew. What was he? I have no idea. All I know is that he wasn’t religious.
I see from your look that you suspect something. You think I was secretly his lover after all and followed him here, to Rome? Nothing so sensational. There was nothing between us. Everything was very simple as far as he was concerned. God didn’t make him an interesting, artistic figure like you, my darling. No, he was more like a clerk or a retired schoolteacher.
