by Sándor Márai
One evening there was someone else who was looking at her. Year ago, about midnight, when the place was almost empty, these two customers came in. The play in the theater next door had just failed, because it was all talk, all philosophy. They arrived about midnight, they sat here where you’re now sitting. They sat opposite the shelves where we keep the goods. And they looked at the photographs.
They were quiet drinkers. Refined types. You could see they were classy guys with proper reflexes. But you could also see they were drawing their pensions. It’s the kind of thing you immediately notice. Three-eighty a month, plus sickness benefit. One had snow-white hair like Father Christmas. The other had sideburns, like he’d still fancy a good time, but could no longer afford it, all he could afford being a bit of extra hair on the side of his head. I wasn’t really listening to them, but they were speaking a different version of English from the rest … they spoke like they hadn’t grown up with English but learned it. But they’d learned it not here in the U.S.A. but in England. Both wore glasses and well-traveled suits. I noticed that Santa’s sleeves were longer than they should be, because they weren’t made to measure for him, he’d bought the jacket cheap, off the peg at a thrift store—I guessed he hadn’t paid more than two Lincolns for them. All the same, they were nice guys, by which I mean they had no money.
But they went through their bludimeris like there was no tomorrow. They chatted away quietly. I half-heard them discussing the fact that in a country as wealthy as America very few people were happy. I pricked up my ears then, because I myself had formed that impression. That’s hard to see when you’re new here, and from over the water, but once you get used to it and become a regular Joe, like me, well, you get to thinking about it too, and soon there I am stroking my chin as if I’d forgotten to shave. Because, no good denying it, here where people have everything they need for the good life, it’s as if happiness—I mean real, joyful, ear-to-ear-grinning happiness—simply escaped them. Over at Macy’s nearby you can really buy anything you need in this world. You can even get a lighter that never needs new fuel. It comes in a case. But you can’t buy happiness, not even in the drugs department.
That’s what the two customers were saying. Actually it was the one with the sideburns doing all the talking, Santa just nodded. And as they grew ever more absorbed in their philosophizing it was suddenly like hearing Sweetheart’s voice. That last night she was saying something about how culture and happiness were the same thing … or maybe that’s what her scribbler hero said. I didn’t understand it then, I don’t really understand it even now, but when the two old guys started talking I remembered her words. I listened in discreetly.
They didn’t spend a long time on the subject. The one with the sideburns happened to mention, sort of casually, that there was a lot of amusement in this great country, but pure joy, the joy that comes straight from the heart, was rare. When I think back to that now, it seems the joy is going out of Europe, but here, in New York, it’s as if it hadn’t caught on in the first place. The devil knows why! But he couldn’t have understood it, either—the highbrow, I mean; he must have been an educated man—because he pulled a face and said the best thing would be if the government put up people’s pensions, then they’d have something to be happy about. On that they agreed. Then he paid and left. Santa remained, ordered one more, and lit a butt. When I offered him a light, he pointed at the photograph with his thumb and asked me in Hungarian, but casually, as if getting in on a conversation that had been going some time, “Were you there when she died?”
I leaned on the counter with both hands. I thought I was going to collapse. I looked at him hard. I recognized him. It was her husband.
I tell you, I’m not ashamed of it … My heart beat in my chest like someone was drumming in there. But then I took a deep breath and simply told him I wasn’t there. At dawn, when I returned from the bar, her face was still warm, but she didn’t say anything.
He nodded graciously, as if it was what he expected. He asked me questions in a low voice and smiled now and then. He asked if money was short and whether the jewels saw her through to the end. I assured him she hadn’t a care in the world, because I was there looking after her. He noted this, and nodded like a priest at confessional who listens through to everything, then offers you three Our Fathers. He would like to know, he said, but always polite and friendly-like, if she had a decent funeral, with everything necessary. I answered him obediently, but all the time I was clenching my fist. But he carried on in exactly the same voice.
I never discovered, not then, not later, how he found me, how he knew I was working there. How did he come by the details, the hotel, the jewels? … I’d never seen him in the bar before. Later I went to the Hungarian quarter on the right bank and asked people, but no one had heard of him. But he knew all there was to know about me, even the fact that my performing name was Ede. I knew that because he asked, again perfectly friendly, “And are you happy, Ede?”
Like an old acquaintance. No, not like that … Like a boss meeting an employee, as if he were still in the chair and me under it. I answered politely. But as I told you, I was clenching my fists all the time. Because it was dawning on me that someone had grassed me up. You know, the way he spoke so quietly. He was so polite, so natural. As if I weren’t even worth screaming at. He could have called me names, what would I have cared? He spoke to me like we weren’t on opposite sides. That’s why I felt so angry, that’s why my fists were clenched. Because if he screamed at me, shouting “I know everything, now talk!”—well, we would have been equals. If he said, “Look here, Ede, I’m long retired, but I’m still the doctor and you the patient,” well, I’d have answered him as best I could. If he had said, “I played the fool with that woman, but that was a long time ago and it doesn’t matter anymore—tell me how she died,” I’d have muttered something like “Sorry, nothing I could do, that’s how it was.” If he hits me, fine, I hit him back. We may roll around on the deck a little while the boss rings the cops and they take both of us away; that would have been fine too, it would have been gentlemanly. But this quiet chat in the crazy enormous world, here in the bar … it made the blood rush to my head. Because such quiet words counted as offense in our situation. I felt my fingers itching and my gorge rising.
He took a Lincoln from his pocket. I could see his hand was trembling. I started closing up the till. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t hurry me. He leaned on the counter and winked, as if he had had one more than was befitting a gentlemen of his standing. And he started smiling, a saintly kind of smile.
I looked him over carefully out of the side of my eye. You could see he was at the end of the road. Old clothes, a shirt he’d clearly been wearing for days, and those glassy eyes behind the glasses. It didn’t need careful examination to see that this man, who had to be addressed as “Doctor”—that’s what I remember—who after the siege on the Danube embankment had left her standing there, as if she weren’t the woman he’d gone crazy over, but someone who once worked for him that he had no more use for—this man was now strictly lower-class. And he still thinks he’s superior? I could feel the gorge rising in my throat and had to keep swallowing. I was all worked up inside like I’d never been. If this big shot left the bar now without confessing that the game was up and that it was me who had come out on top … You understand? I was afraid there’d be trouble. He gave me the Lincoln.
“It’s for three,” he said. He took his glasses off and polished them. He stared straight ahead in that shortsighted way. The bill said three-sixty. I handed back one-forty. He waved me away.
“Keep it, Ede. It’s yours.”
This was it. The flashpoint! But he wasn’t looking at me, he was trying to stand up. That wasn’t too easy for him, and he had to clutch at the counter. I looked at the one-forty in my palm and wondered whether to throw it in his face. But I couldn’t speak. Eventually, after a good deal of trouble, he managed to straighten up.
“You parked far away, Doc
tor?” I asked.
He shook his head and gave a smoker’s cough.
“I don’t have a car. I’ll use the subway.”
I answered him as firmly as I could.
“Mine’s parked nearby. It’s new. I’ll drive you home.”
“No,” he hiccupped. “The subway is fine. Takes me right home.”
“Now you listen to me, buddy!” I bellowed at him. “I’ll drive you home in my new car! Me, the stinking prole.”
I came out from behind the counter and took a step toward him. If he refuses, I thought, I’ll knock his teeth out. Because, in the end, you just have to.
It was like the cat got his tongue. He squinted up at me.
“Okay,” he said, and nodded. “Take me home, you stinking prole.”
I put my arms around him and helped him through the door, the comradely way only men know, the kind of men who’ve slept with the same woman. Now that’s real democracy for you.
He got out at One Hundredth, just before the Arab quarter. He disappeared, like concrete in the river. I never saw him again.
Here come the writers. You’d best clear off—quick, that way, to the left. There might be a labor-camp vet from the old country among them … No harm in being careful. Call in again at the end of the week. And mind to steer well clear of the cement trade.
Welcome, gentlemen. You are served, sir!
*This is a joke impossible to translate directly. Ede / Lajos is mispronouncing the names of the two leading, opposing schools of Hungarian writing in the twentieth century: he says népis instead of népies (popular ruralist) and turbánus (or turbanists) instead of urbánus (urbanist, cosmopolitan).
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived the war, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy, then to the United States. His novel Embers was published for the first time in English in 2001.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
George Szirtes is the prize-winning author of thirteen books of poetry and several translations from Hungarian, including Sándor Márai’s Casanova in Bolzano and The Rebels. He lives in the United Kingdom.
