by Sándor Márai
Gently, as if talking to a madman, I asked why he thought that olives, of the kind I had actually eaten some time in the past in a small Italian restaurant in that part of London known as Soho, were destined to play such an important part in my current and possibly future life. He listened to me carefully, his head slightly tipped to one side, and looked, as he always did when he was thinking, into the distance.
“Because that culture is over,” he said in a friendly, patient manner. “Everything we considered to be culture is done for. The olive was just one small element of the many flavors that made up that culture. All these little sparks of flavor, these individual delights and wonders, worked together to produce the marvelous feast we call taste. Taste is an aspect of culture,” he said, and raised his hand, like a conductor in a concert waving in some crescendo of destruction. “And it’s all vanishing. It will vanish even if elements of it remain. They may still be selling olives stuffed with pimientos somewhere in the future, but the class that cultivated the taste for it and understood what it meant will have vanished. There will remain only the knowing about it, which is not the same thing. Culture is experience, I say,” he intoned like a priest, his hand raised. “It is living experience, timeless as sunshine. To know about things is to know merely secondhand. It is like wearing secondhand clothes.” He shrugged, then added courteously, “Which is why I am glad that you did at least have the opportunity of tasting olives.” And as he finished the sentence, a shell burst nearby, like a precisely placed period, shaking the building.
“It’s time to pay,” he said, and stood up, as if the explosion had reminded him that it was all very well announcing the death of culture, but there were things to be done. He opened the door for me like a proper gentleman and we walked down the deserted Zerge Steps in silence. That is how our true relationship began.
We went straight to his place. On the way we crossed the beautiful bridge that within a few months would be mere wreckage in the water. Bundles of explosives were already dangling off it, the Germans having made meticulous preparations to blow it up. He gazed calmly, almost approvingly, at the neat arrangement.
“This too is doomed to destruction,” he said as we crossed it, and pointed to the vast iron arches that suspended and counterbalanced the weight of the great bridge. “It will be blown to pieces. Do you want to know why? Well,” he spoke quickly, as if answering himself in a complex debate, “because whenever people have given so much serious thought and applied so much expertise to preparing a plan, that plan will eventually be carried out. The Germans are brilliant at blowing things up,” he said. “No one knows better how to blow things up than the Germans. So this suspension bridge, our Chain Bridge, will be destroyed as will, one after the other, the rest of the bridges, just the way they destroyed Warsaw and Stalingrad. They do these things to perfection.” Having said this, he stopped in the middle of the bridge with his arm raised as if to declare the significance of the German capacity for destruction.
“But this is terrible,” I cried out in despair. “All these beautiful bridges …”
“Terrible?” he inquired in a thin voice, his head tipped to one side as he looked at me. “Why terrible?” He was tall, a head, at least, taller than I am. Gulls were swooping between the arches of the great bridge. There were very few people to be seen. Dusk was a dangerous time to be out.
How strange he should ask me why I thought it terrible that all these marvelous bridges should be destroyed. He seemed to be surprised at my agitation.
“Why?!” I repeated angrily. “Wouldn’t you regret the loss of such bridges? The loss of life? All those innocent lives?”
“Me?” he asked, still in that thin, surprised voice, as if I had accused him of not having given war and human suffering proper thought.
“But of course!” he declared, waving his hat. He was suddenly full of life and passion. “You think I don’t care about bridges and people! For heaven’s sake! Me?” he clicked his tongue, grimacing at the ridiculousness of the idea, its sheer stupidity. “Never—never, you understand.” He turned to me, his face close to mine, staring into my eyes like a hypnotist. “I’ve thought of practically nothing else. There is nothing I’ve sorrowed over more than the destruction of bridges and humanity!”
He was finding it difficult to breathe. He looked hurt, as if he was holding back tears. He’s an actor, I suddenly thought. A clown, a comedian! But I looked into his eyes and was shocked to see those gray-green eyes clouding over. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There was no doubt about it, the man was crying. Tears were rolling down his face. Nor was he ashamed of his tears. He didn’t care. His eyes seemed to have a will of their own.
“Poor bridge,” he muttered, as if I weren’t there. “Poor, lovely bridge! And poor people! Poor humanity!”
We stood perfectly still. Then he brushed away his tears, wiped his hands on his coat, and dried them, sniffling a little. He gazed at the bundles of explosives and shook his head, as at a scene of desperate neglect, as if the charges were a disorderly mass of rogue humanity, a bunch of useless adolescents that he, the writer, was helpless to address, having neither the words nor the power to bring them to their senses.
“Yes, all this will go,” he said, and sighed. But I thought I detected a note of satisfaction in that sigh. Perhaps he felt everything was going to plan, that somebody had worked all this out on paper, done his sums and demonstrated how certain human instincts were bound to produce certain consequences. So, while he was full of tears and lamentation at the prospect, some part of him was pleased that his calculations had proved right.
“All right,” he said simply. “Let’s go home.”
He tended to talk in the plural like that—“Let’s,” “Let us”—as if we had agreed on everything. And you know the strangest thing? I really did feel we had discussed and agreed on everything, talked things over at great length: everything important, that is, everything that mattered most to us both. What had we agreed? It might have been that I would become his lover some time in the future or that he might employ me as a servant. Without saying anything more we set off “home,” the pair of us, over the doomed bridge. He walked fast, and I had to scurry after him not to be left behind. He didn’t look at me on the way. For all I knew he had forgotten I was there, following him like a dog. Or like a member of his household staff who had accompanied her master on some errand. I kept a tight hold on the satchel in which I had stowed my lipstick, my powder, and my ration cards, the way I had guarded the little luggage I had once carried to Budapest when looking for a job. I was his servant, running after him.
And as we went along on our way I suddenly felt calm. By that time I had spent some years as a lady. I could blow my nose as delicately as I would at a garden party at Buckingham Palace, though I occasionally recalled that my father never used a handkerchief, because he simply didn’t have one. He had no idea what a handkerchief was. He sneezed by pinching his nose between his fingers then wiping his fingers on his trouser leg. When I was a maid I blew my nose the way I learned from him. But now, jogging along beside this man I felt the kind of relief you feel at having finished some tiring, pointless task so you can finally rest. I knew that if we got to the statue of Széchenyi and I felt an urge to sneeze I was free to pinch my nose, then wipe my fingers on the skirt of my fine shantung-silk dress without him even noticing. Or if he did happen to glance at me that moment, he would feel no contempt and would not look down on me but simply observe how a woman in expensive clothes was blowing her nose like an ordinary peasant. He’d observe my habits the way he would the habits of some domesticated animal. And there was something reassuring about this.
We arrived at his apartment. I was as calm as if I were going home. When he opened the front door and let me into the dark, camphor-smelling hall, I felt at peace the way I did when I first left home and came to Budapest to find employment as maid-of-all-work for my future husband’s parents. I was at peace because I knew that I had finally found
somewhere to shelter myself from the wild, dangerous world outside.
And I stayed, already determined to spend the night. I fell asleep immediately. I woke at dawn feeling I was about to die.
It wasn’t a heart attack, darling, or rather, it was that, but something else too. I felt no pain. I wasn’t even afraid. A delicious calm spread through my whole body: a deathly silence. I felt my body had stopped functioning, that my heart was no longer beating, that its mechanism had run down. My heart had simply got bored and given up, I thought.
When I opened my eyes I saw him standing next to me, beside the couch. He was holding my wrist, touching my pulse.
But he didn’t hold it the way doctors do. It was more the way a musician touches strings, or the way a sculptor taps at the stone, he was using all his fingers. His fingers were holding a conversation with my skin and blood, and through these, with my heart. He touched me as though he could see something in the darkness, like blind people who see with their hands, or the deaf who hear with their eyes.
He was still wearing the clothes he had worn in the street. He hadn’t undressed. He didn’t ask me anything. The hair that remained on his bald head was tousled round his brow and on his nape. The desk lamp was burning in the neighboring room. I understood that he had been sitting, reading, while I slept and suddenly woke to find myself dying. He stood beside me on the couch where I had made up a bed, and set about making himself busy. He brought a lemon, mixed some sugar in with the lemon juice, and made me drink the bittersweet mixture. Then he made coffee in a little red copper pot, a cup of Turkish coffee strong as poison. He took a medicine bottle and put twenty drops into a glass, diluted it with water and poured it down my throat.
It was well past midnight and the sirens were sounding again, but we didn’t listen to their frantic howling. He only took shelter if he happened to be outside at the time and a policeman ushered him into one or another cellar. Otherwise he’d remain in his apartment and read. He liked reading at such times, he said, because finally the town was quiet. Indeed, there was an otherworldly silence … There were neither trams nor cars, just the thud of anti-aircraft guns and bombs. But that didn’t disturb him.
He sat by the couch, occasionally feeling my pulse. I lay with my eyes closed. There was heavy bombing that night, but I had never felt as calm, as secure, as protected and hidden. Why? Maybe because I was aware of human care. That’s not at all a common feeling with people, and it’s no more common with doctors. This man was not a doctor, but he could help. Artists are the people who can really help you in times of trouble, the only people, it seems … Yes, you, my darling, you and all artists. He once happened to mention that a long time ago the artist, the priest, and the doctor were all one man. Anyone who knew anything was an artist. That is what I somehow felt, and that’s why I was so much at peace—at peace and almost happy.
After a time I felt my heart beating regularly again. I could feel the whole mechanism working, the way I saw in the panopticum at Nyíregyháza when I was a girl. They had an image of a dying pope there, made of wax. A machine was working his heart. That was the way I felt when my heart started beating again.
I looked up at him, and I wanted him to say something, not having the strength to speak myself. But he already knew the danger was past.
“Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?” he asked in a friendly manner.
The question didn’t scare me, didn’t even offend me. It sounded perfectly natural, like everything he said. I made a gesture to say that I hadn’t, knowing it was pointless telling him a lie as he would immediately see through it. Then he asked me how many cigarettes I smoked in a day. But, you know, I wasn’t smoking back then, or at least not continually, the way I do nowadays in Rome. It’s only here I started smoking recklessly, puffing away at that acrid American tobacco. Back then I only lit up after a meal now and then. I told him that too.
“What caused this?” I asked, putting my hand on my breast in the region of my heart. I felt very weak. “What was it? I have never felt anything like it before.”
He gave me a careful look. “It is the shock of the body remembering,” he said.
But he didn’t say what it was the body was remembering. He carried on looking at me for a while, then stood up and, with slow faltering steps, as if limping, went into the other room and closed the door behind him. I was left alone.
. . .
There were times later when he would leave me alone like that, morning or evening, at any time, because after a while, without any formal arrangement, I moved in. He gave me a key without thinking twice about it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. There was a woman who came to clean for him, sometimes even cook. But she didn’t have to tidy after him. Everything was perfectly accommodating … even the apartment, those handsome, well-proportioned rooms with their old Viennese furniture. There was nothing particularly grand about the place: it was just three rooms on the fifth floor of a relatively new block. One of the rooms was filled with books.
When I first arrived he treated me as a guest. He would produce delicious tidbits out of some invisible pantry, such as tinned sea crab. While everyone else was living off beans he treated me to tinned pineapples. He even offered me vintage brandy. He never drank any himself, but he did store wine. He had a personal collection of the great wines of France, of Germany, of Burgundy, of the Rhine, and all the best Hungarian regions, the bottles covered in cobwebs. He collected rare wines the way other people did postage stamps or fine porcelain. And when he opened one of these bottles, he would examine it with rapt attention, tasting the wine like a pagan priest preparing for sacrifice. He would offer me a glass now and then—a little resentfully, I thought, as if he didn’t think me quite worthy of the wine. He preferred to pour me brandy. Wine was not a woman’s drink, he said.
He could surprise me with his opinions. He was generally a little fixed in his views, like an old person who no longer wants to argue about things.
I was also surprised at how tidy his personal things were. I mean his cupboards, his drawers, and the shelves where he kept his manuscripts and books. It wasn’t the cleaning woman who was responsible for that, but he himself. He positively radiated order: he was quite obsessive about it. He wouldn’t let ashes or cigarette butts pile up in the ashtray. Every half hour he would empty it into a bronze bucket that he himself would tip into the general waste in the evening. His writing desk was as neat as a draftsman’s in an engineer’s office. I never once saw him move furniture about, but whenever I got there it looked as if the cleaning woman had just left. The order was within him, in his person and in his life. But that was something I understood only later, and even now I don’t know whether I really understood it. It was an artificial, not a living, order, if you know what I mean. It was precisely because the world outside was falling to pieces that he was so determined to maintain his own internal sense of order. It was a last line of defense against external chaos, a little personal revolt. As I said, I don’t really understand it even now. I’m just telling you.
I slept that night with a proper, regular heart. He was right: the body was remembering something. But what? I didn’t know then, but I can explain it now … He reminded me of my husband. I hadn’t thought of him in a very long time, not having seen him for years, never having wanted to see him. I imagined I had forgotten him. But my skin, my organs, and indeed my heart had not forgotten. And when I entered the life of this bald man who had been my husband’s close friend, my body instantly started remembering. Everything about him reminded me of my husband. There was something about the way this bald, silent figure had appeared out of nothing. He was like an ill-tempered, indifferent magician who is no longer interested in magic or tricks. It took me some time to understand why I was drawn to him, and what it was I remembered.
It was like a dream then, everything strangely dreamlike. People were being rounded up like dogs. Rounded up and murdered. Houses were collapsing. The churches were as crowd
ed as the beaches had been.
Very few people remained in their homes, so there was nothing particularly odd about me going in and out of another person’s apartment, but I knew I had to be careful and not make any mistakes or else he’d throw me out. Or he would disappear at the very worst moment of the war and leave me there alone. I knew that if I tried to seduce him or made myself too agreeable, he would simply open the door, and who knows where I’d finish up. I also knew there was nothing I could do to help him, simply because he didn’t need anything. He was one of those unfortunates who can tolerate anything, any kind of deprivation or humiliation, who can put up with anything except the idea of being helped.
What’s that? Was he a snob? Of course he was, among other things, a snob. He couldn’t stand being helped because he was solitary and a snob. Later I understood that there was something under this snobbish manner of his. He was protecting something—not himself, no; he was trying to preserve a culture. It’s not funny. I expect you’re thinking of those olives. That’s why you’re laughing? We proles, we don’t really get the idea of “culture,” sweetheart. We think it’s a matter of being able to quote things, of being fussy, of not spitting on the floor or belching when we’re eating, that kind of thing. But that’s not culture; it’s not a matter of reading up and learning facts. It’s not even a matter of learning how to behave. It’s something else. It was this other idea of culture he was wanting to protect. He didn’t want me to help him, because he no longer believed in people.
For a while I thought it was his work he wanted to protect. It’s a lousy enough world to protect your work against. But when I got to know him, I was astonished to discover that he had completely stopped working.
So what did he do? you ask. He just read and walked. It might be hard for you to understand this, you being a born artist, a proper professional drummer. You can’t imagine life without drumming. But he was a writer, a writer who no longer wanted to write because he no longer believed that writing could change human nature. It’s not that he was a revolutionary: he didn’t want to change the world in that way, because he didn’t believe human nature could be changed by revolutions. One time he happened to mention that it wasn’t worth changing society because people would be exactly the same after as before. It was something else he wanted. It was himself he wanted to change.
