Portraits of a Marriage

by Sándor Márai

  You don’t get it—of course you don’t get it. I myself didn’t get it for a long time; I didn’t believe him. I just trod carefully around him, happy that he was willing to tolerate me. The place was full of people leading secret lives, men and women, and Jews most of all. People hiding from the militia … Okay, okay, relax. I believe you, you had no idea what was going on in Budapest. You couldn’t possibly know how people lived there, how they lived like insects, in silence. A lot of them slept in their wardrobes, the way moths do in the summer, with the smell of naphthalene all around them. It was the way I set up camp in his apartment too. I tried not to make any noise, to give no signs of life.

  He paid no attention to me. Sometimes he sat up and, as if noticing I was there, he’d smile and ask me some commonplace question, politely, cheerfully, but always as though we had already spent years in conversation.

  Once I arrived at seven in the evening. There was already an autumnal smell in the air, and the days were closing in. I entered and saw his bald head as he sat by the window in the half-light. He wasn’t reading, just sitting there, his arms folded, staring out of the window. He heard my footsteps but didn’t turn round.

  “Do you know Chinese numbers?” he asked over his shoulder.

  There were times I thought he was genuinely mad. But I had learned by then how to deal with that. The trick was to enter the conversation without any intervening talk, picking up exactly where he left off. He liked me to answer briefly in a word or two, just a yes or a no. So I obediently answered him. I said “no.”

  “I don’t know, either,” he calmly answered. “I don’t understand the writing at all, because they use concepts, not letters. I don’t have any idea about their numbers. I only know they don’t use Arabic numerals. Nor the older Greek ones. So we may suppose”—this being one of his favorite expressions, and he would always raise his long forefinger at this point, like a teacher when explaining something to a particularly dense class—“that they have numbers unlike any other Western or Eastern ones. And that precisely,” he declared, “is why they have no technology. Because technology begins with Arab numerals.”

  He looked tired sitting there, gazing out into the damp gray evening. The thought that Chinese numbers were not like the Arabic clearly bothered him. I simply stared and said nothing, because all I knew about the Chinese was that there were a lot of them, that their skins were yellow, and that they were constantly smiling. I’d read that in a picture magazine.

  “So technology begins with Arabic numbers?” I asked nervously.

  There was a great explosion that moment somewhere near the bottom of Castle Hill, the sound of an anti-aircraft gun being fired.

  He looked over in that direction and, with a great deal of satisfaction, answered, “Yes,” nodding as if delighted that his argument should be so vividly illustrated. “You heard that explosion? That’s technology. It is one of the reasons we need Arabic numerals. It’s much harder to multiply and divide with Greek or Roman numbers. Just consider how much time it would have taken for someone to work out how to write down two hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and twelve in the Greek system. It is impossible, madam, quite impossible in Greek numerals.”

  He seemed satisfied with this. However uneducated I was, I understood his every word. It was just what the words added up to, the man as a whole, I didn’t understand. You know—what he was. Who he really was. Was he a comedian? Was he mocking me? He looked excited, as though standing in front of a newfangled device, like someone holding a new kind of lock or a calculating machine. I didn’t know how to get through to him. Should I give him a kiss? Slap him? He might kiss me back. But he might just put up with the kiss or slap and calmly make some kind of reply. He might say something like: did I know that with each step a giraffe takes it advances by fifteen feet? He did once say just that in the middle of conversation for no reason at all. He said giraffes were angels of the animal world out in the wild, because there was something angelic about their very being. Even their names suggested angels, their original name being “seraph.”

  We were walking through woods in the fall toward the end of the war. He was speaking loudly about giraffes, in ecstasies about how much vegetation they needed to consume in order to survive, so that they should be able to maintain those long necks and tiny heads, that great chest and those enormous hooves … it was as if he were reciting a poem, some incomprehensible hymn. He got quite carried away by his recitation, by the fact that he was alive and that such things as giraffes should exist in the world. I felt uneasy when he talked about giraffes or the Chinese like that. But in time I grew less afraid; it was as if I too could get drunk on his words. I closed my eyes and listened to his breaking voice … It wasn’t what he was saying that affected me, but the strange, irrational loss of control—the way he was shy and jubilant at the same time. It was as if the world were one big festival and he the priest, bellowing like a dervish, chanting and proclaiming the meaning of the festival to the world at large … whether the festival was giraffes or Arabic numerals.

  Do you know what else lay behind it? Lust.

  Not as the world knows it or as people generally feel it. Lust as perhaps plants, huge ferns, scented lianas, or giraffes or seraphs know it. Maybe it is the kind of lust writers possess too. It took me some time to understand that he wasn’t crazy, simply full of lust. It was the world that brought on his lust, the fabric of it; word and flesh, voices and stones, everything that exists is tangible and, at the same time, impossible to grasp in its meaning and essence. When he talked like that, he was as serious as people are in bed after an orgasm, when they lie there with their eyes closed. Yes, darling … Like that.

  But it wasn’t a dumb silence, not like he had nothing in his head. I mean, you too can listen beautifully when you’re with the band, next to the bass sax, and you look round the bar so seriously, with that Greek-god profile of yours … But however majestic you look in your white dinner jacket, I can see on your face that you are simply listening, not thinking of something else. He listened like he had heard something about something else. And he could listen with great concentration. He could listen the way others shout. He was a sad man.

  I never tired of listening to him. It felt pleasantly dizzy, like hearing music. But I did tire of his own listening. Because one had to listen with him and pay close attention to whatever it was he was not saying.

  I could never guess what he was thinking of at such times. The times when he suddenly started speaking of giraffes or something like that and suddenly fell silent, I felt the true meaning of what he wanted to say was about to be revealed. But when he started listening he was simply far away from me.

  It surprised me and frightened me a little. He was like the man in the fairy tale who has a cap made of fog and suddenly becomes invisible. He disappeared inside his listening. One moment he was there with me, muttering something in a cracked voice, about something I didn’t understand, then he was gone, just like that, as if he were far away. He wasn’t rude about it. I never once felt affronted because he stopped talking to me. Not at all! I felt he was paying me a compliment by being willing to share his silence with me.

  You want to know what it was he was so good at keeping quiet about? So intensely, so logically? Oh, my dear, you do ask such difficult questions!

  I didn’t imagine, not for a moment, that I could pry into his silence.

  But there were occasional signs that something was happening in him, and I began to understand. The time I met him he was setting out to strangle the writer in him. He had made thorough, systematic preparations for it. He was like a murderer preparing to commit a murder or a conspirator who would sooner take poison than betray his secret. Or, let’s say, a missionary terrified in case he gave away some sacred formula to hostile savages. He would sooner die than do that.

  I’ll try to tell you how I slowly grew to understand him.

  “Sin is the art form of the petit bourgeois,” he once said in pass
ing.

  As usual, whenever he said something like this, he stroked his bald head the way a conjurer does when he produces doves from his top hat. Later he tried to explain his peculiar opinion. What he said was that sin, to the petit bourgeois—a pleb, in other words—was what vision and creation were to an artist. But an artist is after more than a plebeian. He wants to articulate some hidden message, then to say it, or paint it, or compose it in music: something that enriches life.

  These things are beyond us, my dear.

  He told me how bizarre ideas are realized in the mind of a sinner, how a sinner weighs up possibilities—a murderer, a general, a statesman, no matter which—and then, like an artist at the moment of inspiration, how he realizes his idea, quick as lightning, with breathtaking skill and ingenuity. How he commits the crime that is his dreadful masterpiece. There is a Russian writer—don’t frown, darling, it ruins your magnificent marble brow, and his name doesn’t matter in any case; I myself have forgotten it. I see how grumpy, how ill-tempered you become when I start talking about writers. You really don’t like the type. But anyway, said my bald friend, there was a Russian writer who wrote a book about murder. And, so my friend went on, it is not impossible that this Russian might actually have wanted to commit a murder. But he didn’t commit one, because he wasn’t a pleb but a writer. He wrote about it instead.

  He didn’t want to write anymore. I never once saw him writing. I never even saw his handwriting. He did have a fountain pen, I did see that. It lay there on his writing desk next to the small portable typewriter. But he never opened the typewriter case, not once.

  For a long time I didn’t know what his problem was. I thought he had dried up, that he no longer had the energy either for sex or for writing. Instead, he was playing out some comic part, pretending to be hurt, putting on a dumb show because he no longer felt able to exercise his miraculous, unique gift, the gift only a “master,” a vain, deluded, aging writer, possessed. The world would have to do without him. That’s what I thought. I thought he’d realized he’d come to the end of his talent. No longer capable of making love to a woman, he’d set out to play the celibate, someone who has had more than enough of success in bed and was simply bored. The game was no longer worth the candle. Resentment had turned him into a hermit. But eventually I understood why he had stopped—what this long preparation was all about.

  The man didn’t want to write anymore because he was afraid that every word he committed to paper would fall into the hands of traitors and barbarians. He felt the new world would be one where everything an artist produced, whether in words, paint, or music, would be falsified, betrayed, sold down the river. Don’t look so surprised. I can see you don’t believe me. You think I am imagining it, making it all up! You couldn’t possibly understand this, my darling, because you are a heart-and-soul, fully committed artist, an artist through and through. You can’t imagine throwing away your drumsticks the way that man locked his manuscripts up in his drawer and let his pen gather dust. Am I right? I can’t imagine it, either, because you are the sort of man who will go on practicing his art as long as he lives. Drum till you die. But this poor unfortunate was a different kind of artist, darling.

  This poor unfortunate was afraid of becoming a collaborator, a kind of traitor, by writing anything at all, because he was convinced that in the days to come, everything writers ever wrote would be falsified. He feared his words would be misinterpreted. He was like a priest who is terrified that excerpts from his sermons should help sell mouthwash or provide a text for a political rant on some street corner. So he stopped writing.

  What’s that? You want to know what a writer is? A bum? Someone of less consequence than a mechanic or a lawyer? Yes, if that’s the way you think, a writer is indeed a bum. And we don’t need writers anymore … just as we don’t need anyone without money or power? A waste of space, as my ex-husband put it?

  Calm down, no need to shout. Yes, you’re right, he was a bum. But what was he like close up? Not a lord or a minister of state. Nor a party secretary. Take money, for example; he was peculiar in that way. Believe it or not, he did have money. He was the kind of bum who secretly thought of everything, even money. Don’t go thinking he was a crazy hermit, the kind that wears animal skins, lives on locusts he catches in the desert, and slurps water from tree bark the way bears do. He did have money, but he didn’t deposit it in an account. No, he preferred to keep it in the left-hand pocket of his coat. When paying, he would draw out a wad and hand it over. It was a negligent sort of gesture since decent people keep their money in a bank account—the way you do ours, am I right, darling? When I saw him hand over money negligently, like that, I knew he was not a man you could cheat or steal from, because he would know precisely how much money he had, right down to the last dime.

  But he had more than the worthless currency of our homeland. He had dollars, thirty ten-dollar notes. And French gold napoleons too. I remember he kept his gold in an old tin cigarette case that once contained Egyptian cigarettes. He had thirty-four gold napoleons. He counted them in front of me once, very anxiously. His spectacles were glittering at the end of his nose as he examined them and put the gold pieces to his nose to smell them. He put his teeth to each one and tried it in his hand. He gave each a thorough look and held it to the light. He was like a picture of one of those old money dealers, going about his business with ruthless, even malicious, efficiency.

  But I never saw him earn a penny. When he was brought a bill he would study it with deep concern without saying anything, with great solemnity. Then he paid and added a handsome tip to the person bringing the bill. I do believe that, deep down, the truth was that he was miserly. One time, round about dawn, when he had drunk his wine, he started talking about how one had to respect money and gold because they had some magical property. He didn’t explain what he meant by that. Knowing how much he respected money, it was surprising how extraordinarily grand his tips were. He threw tips around, not like the rich—I have known a number of rich men, my husband included, but never found one who handed out tips the way this bum of a writer did.

  I believe the truth is that he was poor. But he was so proud he didn’t think it worthwhile denying his poverty. Please don’t imagine I could tell you what he was really like. I just observed him with a pained fascination. But never, not for one moment, did I myself imagine I knew what the man was like inside.

  You asked me what a writer is. Good question. What is he, after all? A big nobody! He has neither rank nor power. A fashionable black bandleader earns more than he does, a police officer has more power, the commander of a fire brigade has a higher rank. He knew all that. He warned me that society has no official way of recognizing a writer—that’s the kind of nobody a writer is. Sometimes they put up statues of writers or throw them in jail. But really a writer means nothing in society. He is just a scribbler. You could address a writer as “Mr. Editor” or “Dear Genius.” But he wasn’t an editor, because he wasn’t editing anything, and he couldn’t be a genius, because geniuses had long hair and an imposing appearance, or so they say. He was bald, and by the time I met him he wasn’t doing anything. Nobody addressed him as “Dear Writer,” because it seemed to make no sense. Somebody was either a proper person or a writer. One couldn’t be both. It’s pretty complicated.

  Sometimes I wondered—though I could never quite tell—whether he really believed what he said. Because whatever he happened to be saying, I felt the opposite was also true. And when he looked into my eyes, it was as if it were not me he was speaking to. For example, once—this was a long time ago and I haven’t thought of it since, but it suddenly seems clear now—I was sitting in his room between two air raids with my back to the writing desk. I didn’t think he was paying me any attention, because he was reading a dictionary at the time. I took my compact out of my handbag and started powdering my nose. Suddenly I heard him say, “Best be careful!”

  I was startled and stared at him, openmouthed. He rose from the table an
d stood in front of me, his arms folded.

  “What should I be careful of?”

  He looked at me with his head to one side and gave a soft whistle.

  “Best be careful, because you’re beautiful!” he said in an accusing tone. But he spoke with concern, apparently seriously.

  I laughed. “What should I be careful of? Russkies?”

  He shrugged.

  “Them? They just want to give you a hug. Then they’ll be off. But there will come others … people who’ll want to strip the very flesh off your face. Because you’re beautiful.”

  He peered at me shortsightedly. He pushed his glasses up to the top of his nose. It was as if he had just noticed I wasn’t plain, that I had a pretty face; as if he had never really looked at me the way people should look at a woman. So, finally, he was looking at me. But it was appraisingly, the way a hunter looks at a well-bred dog.

  “Strip the flesh off me?” I laughed again, but my throat was dry. “Who? Sex maniacs?”

  He spoke sternly, like a priest preaching.

  “Tomorrow, everyone who is beautiful will come under suspicion. As will those with talent and those with character.” His voice was hoarse. “Don’t you understand? To be called beautiful will be an insult; talent will be called a provocation, and character an outrage. Because it’s their turn now, and they will appear everywhere, from everywhere, emerging in their hundreds of millions and more. Everywhere. The ugly ones, the talentless, those without any character. And they’ll throw vitriol in the face of beauty. They will tar and slander talent. They will stab through the heart anyone with character. They’re here already … And there’ll be more of them. Be careful!”