by Sándor Márai
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
A Note About the Author
A Note About the Translator
Also by Sándor Márai
Copyright
1
THE DOCTOR’S SON LAY ON THE BED, STIFF with cramp. His whole body was covered in sweat, and he felt feverish. He stared at the expanse of window in which the angles of the street, the single tree, a roof, and three further windows were slowly fading. A vertical line of smoke rose from the chimney opposite. By now it was darker in the low-arched room than it was outside. Through the window pressed the stifling early summer heat and in the steamy twilight the gas lamps outside glowed faintly green. Sometimes on spring evenings an invisible fog descends that lends a touch of green to the streetlights. The servant was singing and ironing in the kitchen. In the pane of the partly open window sputtered a ring of sparks from the iron: it was like the striking of a match in the darkness. The girl in the hallway was swinging the fiery metal box above her head.
He lay in a cramp, stared straight ahead, lost in thought. The gang had gone by three o’clock. Without transition it seemed to him that he had woken from some terrible nightmare and that everything would be all right now, he just had to be fully awake, step back into life, and, exercising his best charm and desire to please, make something of it. He gave a painful grin. Slowly he struggled upright, becoming conscious of his limbs, dangling his feet, gazing dreamily at the world around him. His movements were leaden as he raised himself from the bed, made his way to the basin, felt around in the darkness for the jug of water, lowered his head to the tray, and splashed the warm standing water over his damp hair and brow. Dripping with water, practically blind, he found the door and tapped around for the light switch. He sat down at the table and distractedly began to dry his hair with a thick towel.
The alarm clock was ticking on the bedside table. Seven o’clock; he was expected. He had been lying there for four hours, cramped, unmoving. He turned his head like a man with a tight collar, inserting his finger trying to adjust it for comfort. He found it hard to swallow. He went to the basin, washed his hands, rinsed his mouth, swilled the mouthwash round, gargled. Having stopped singing, the girl in the kitchen doorway noticed the light in the student’s room. The boy buttoned his collar and took a few steps round the room. His aunt would not be back before eight.
A long time ago, in his childhood, his aunt had told him that she would leave her treasure to him. That “treasure,” according to her, was stashed away in a secret place where no “agents and brokers” could get at it. Auntie hated the stock market, though she never really explained her loathing. In the child’s imagination the stock exchange remained a dark cave at whose mouth Ali Baba and the forty thieves were grappling with a few powerful, armed men determined to guard their treasure. The bad luck associated with Fridays also played a part in the aunt’s account whenever she spoke of treasure. She spoke of treasure often, with a significant emphasis, telling him that she had checked its secret location that day and that it was all right. Ábel should not worry about the future because the treasure would be his and their lives were almost certain to be free of further trouble. The boy once sought out the secret place, a tin box in the drawer of his aunt’s washstand, where he found some old, no longer valid Lombard Street bills, a few banknotes of the Kossuth era, and some worthless lottery tickets. Auntie’s treasure could no longer help him. He stood at the mirror staring at his creased face, then sat back down at the table. It was a moot point whether money was of any use now, he thought. Perhaps there were matters where money, and all that money could buy—time, travel, distance, health—was of no help at all. He sat before the desk. He pulled open the drawer where notebooks and sheets scribbled over with writing lay in a heap, picked up a poem, and read it. Forgetting all else he read it in an undertone, craning over it. The poem was about a dog lying in the sun. When had he written it? He couldn’t remember.
The girl appeared, stopped in the doorway, and asked whether he would be staying home for supper. She posed there lazily, leaning against the doorpost, one hand on her hip, with a teasing smile on her face. The student ran his eyes over her and shrugged. She had brought the sharp, piquant tang of the kitchen with her, a damp smell hidden in the folds of her skirt that made him wrinkle his nose. He asked whether his aunt had returned yet. No, she wouldn’t be home before eight, she replied.
Nowadays it seemed to him that there were moments when his whole life flashed past him. It was as if the change he had lived through had trapped everything he had experienced on the surface of his memory, so he could see his childhood, his father, and hear the lost voice of his mother, experience it all in individual movements of Aunt Etelka as she bowed before him. He looked around him amazed. The girl followed his eye movements, uncertain what to do.
The room was in a sorry state. The gang had wreaked havoc in it: torn books and magazines lay under the bed, one volume, Fidibus, was soaking in a pool of liqueur from an upturned bottle that gave out a hideous sweet-sickly stench. A muddy footprint was smeared across the plush cover of one of the chairs. Cushions were strewn about the floor. He had finished his exams at eleven in the morning and had waited in the schoolyard for the three members of the gang who had followed shortly after him in alphabetical order, and they had come directly back here to his place, taking no detours. Béla, the grocer’s son, only called his father once they had arrived, telling him that he had passed and that they should not expect him home for dinner. Tibor did not contact his family, keeping from them the news that despite his patently strenuous efforts he had failed; his critically ill mother could wait to find that out in the evening, or the next day come to that. This was such an insignificant matter for the time being, it counted for so little, they didn’t even mention it. In six weeks’ time they would be in uniform and, with one great effort, even if the training dragged on, they’d be out at the front by the end of August.
He sat down on the bed. He looked at the girl. If I were not so timid, not so lacking in courage, thought the student, I’d pull her to me and lay my head on her breast. A decent sleep is the cure for everything. Pity she smells of the kitchen, as I can’t stand kitchen smells, but that’s because I’ve had an upper-middle-class upbringing: my grandfather was a landowner and my father is a practicing doctor. There’s a reason for everything. It may not reflect well on me but sometimes a smell is more powerful than reason. It might be that she cannot stand my smell either, the way the Chinese find the smell of white men disgusting. There are certain barriers between people. The girl had been working there a year and the thought of her full body sometimes haunted his dreams and worked on his fantasy, and often, at moments of adolescent boyish regression, he imagined her as a model. She had a nice face, pale and soft, a blond pigtail amusingly perched on the crown of her head.
The girl started putting the room in order, and in an unintentionally quiet voice he asked her for a glass of milk. He took tiny sips of it, the bland standby drink of childhood, because for days on end they had been drinking wine and spirits, sweet sticky liquor that he quaffed with a stoical obligatory manliness though he didn’t like the taste of it, nor could his stomach digest it. Milk felt good, the drink of that other, lost world. He went to the wardrobe, took out a clean collar, and brushed his coat down while the girl tidied and made the bed. She was sweeping the remnant of a pack of cards from under the table: he suddenly remembered he had no money. Searching his various pockets he found just three crowns, and couldn’t understand it at first for his aunt had handed him twenty crowns in the morning before he set off for his exams. Under normal circumstances this would have cons
tituted a healthy sum and he had to stop for a moment and recall what he had spent it on. After his aunt’s celebratory dinner they had started a game of Ramsli with the German “William Tell” pack and he had lost. His memory of it was somewhat blurry, but he seemed to recall he did not want to play but someone—was it Tibor? was it Ernõ?—made him. He stuffed the remaining money into his pocket and told the girl not to expect him for supper because he might be home late. He stopped in the doorway. One of the pack, an ace of hearts, lay on the threshold so he absentmindedly picked up the greasy and none too clean card, the rest of the pack being strewn on the table where the maid had deposited them. The top card there was another ace of hearts. He reached for it carefully with two fingers and examined it, turned it this way and that way, comparing it with the one he had found on the threshold. In the packs supplied by Piatnik there was usually only one ace of hearts. The two aces looked equally greasy, spotty, and well-used, inviting confidence, both with similar blue backs. He sat down at the table and sorted the pack into its four suits. He discovered two acorn aces as well, and two tens, one of leaves and one of bells. The four cards represented four winners at vingt-etun. After Ramsli they would often go on to play vingt-etun. The doubled cards were exactly like all the others in the pack. The cheat had been careful: they might have been using the pack for months by now. In any case the cards were foolproof. He himself had fished out the pack from a drawer in his father’s writing desk. It was a very old, much-used pack.
HE POCKETED THE CARDS. HE WENT OVER TO his father’s room. People know the precise moment when they leave a place forever, a room, for example, where they have spent a long time. There was no thought in his head but he stood on the threshold and looked back. His mother had had this room at one time. Three generations of his family had occupied the house and this room had always been the women and children’s room. It might have been because of these bright feminine furnishings: the light-colored cherrywood furniture, the low arches under which there swam the constant odors of childhood illnesses, of chamomile tea, violet-root, almond-flavored milk, and baby food. His mother had spent a very short time, perhaps only some three years, in the house, but all those highly potent oriental scents, so powerful that it was enough to leave one bottle unstoppered for a day for the room to be saturated with them for years, like the memory of her own presence, completely filling the house. Certain objects continued living their taboo lives: his mother’s glass, her sewing table, her pincushion survived as if in a bell jar, separated out, though this was something they never spoke about. He couldn’t think of his mother as anything but a very frail, much younger elder sister, and he knew that this early-departed woman lived in his father’s memory the same way. He looked back at the room where he had spent his childhood, where he had been born, where his mother had died. He switched off the light.
In the low light of the streetlamp his father’s current room felt like someone had been buried there, quite recently, someone whose memory the survivors did not dare disturb. There was something trancelike about the condition of the objects, the way the belongings of the dead remain frozen, rather as in a museum. True, his father was still alive, and was at this very moment standing at the operating table of a field hospital, sawing off a leg. Or maybe he was smoking a cigarette in his room, tugging at his beard with one hand, taking off his glasses. For the sake of piety and tidiness Etelka had covered the operating table in the room with a crocheted cloth, and the old surgical chair had taken on the appearance of an unfashionable rocking chair. He didn’t light the lamp. He stood in the doorway, his hands deep in his pockets, his perspiring fingers toying with the cards. A great tide of heat rolled through him. The card parties had started at Christmas when the gang first broke out in a fever of ungovernable anxiety that had dominated their lives ever since. It was possible that someone had cheated in that first moment: he himself had certainly been losing constantly since then. His tutorial fees, the aunt’s little contributions, the sums his father occasionally sent, everything. Was it the winning individual who was the cheat? Perhaps it was precisely the opposite, the loser who had started cheating, now, near the end? He saw their three faces before him and closed his eyes.
In recent days he had been keenly aware of the figure of his father. His father had come to his bedside in dreams and leaned over him with his sad, solemn eyes. Naturally, everyone had a father. Everyone was born somewhere. How much is it possible to know of such things? Perhaps, once all this was over, if he was still alive, when he had developed a portly belly and grown a mustache, he would be walking down a foreign street and would suddenly have to stop because there was his father coming towards him with a face that was swelling to monstrous size as faces in the cinema tended to do, taking on superhuman proportions, and then, coming even closer, his father would part those giant lips of his and say something, pronouncing the single word that explained his whole life. That’s what would happen: he would turn up sometime in a town in the dark that was glimmering ever so slightly, then growing ever brighter, so you could see every leaf on every tree, and the gates to the various houses would open, people step out into the street and start talking. Finally one mouth would bend over another mouth and the eyes close, then faint away.
The room was chilly. The surgical instruments sparkled in the glazed cupboard. In one of those drawers Father kept his slides, sections of diseased brain tissue he had once written a book about and published at his own expense. Several hundred copies of the work lay untouched in the library. In the days just before the war started his father was no longer seeing patients, only the three regulars he had somehow managed to keep on from the old practice: the magistrate, the old woman with the constantly shaking head, and the paranoid Gypsy bandleader who would turn up in the middle of a meal and play the violin for them while they were eating. Father treated these three like members of the family. His invalids respected him. Usually they sat in this very room after supper as if they were part of the family circle gathered to pay each other unctuous compliments. The lady with the shaking head sat with Etelka as they both plied their crochet, the magistrate sat solemnly, ceremoniously, vaguely expectant, under the great chandelier, holding the boy on his knees, and the Gypsy bandleader stood by the piano, leaning a little to one side, his bow in his hand, his violin under his arm, in the careless pose adopted by many famous concert artistes. They could stay like that, silent for hours, as if waiting for something to happen, not saying a word while Father took no notice of them and examined the slides at the desk. At eleven o’clock he would raise his hand to signal that they could go. They would bow deeply and take their leave. It was rare for his father to say anything at these gatherings, and the three invalids’ expressions would be full of respect and an almost agonized seriousness as they turned towards him to acknowledge a chance remark like “It’s been a cold day,” then, having bent their heads, they would withdraw once more into a world of profound meditation. The woman with the shaking head would indicate her agreement by rapidly batting her eyelids, the magistrate and bandleader would frown and concentrate on the deeper implications of the observation. His childhood was full of such incidents.
He recalled two specific occasions in the room. One of them underlay every memory involving his father. He would have been four or five years old, sitting on the floor of this room, playing. His father steps in, sits down beside him on the floor, and without further ado begins to sing:
…Au clair de la Lune
Mon ami Pierrot…
He knows the song. Etelka has taught it to him. His father’s mouth opens and closes, the face is curiously twisted as it laughs, the song emerges from between those enormous teeth with a kind of whimsical childish lisp. He immediately understands that his father wants to put everything right, all that had passed between them from the moment of his birth, the silence, the isolation, the distance, the magic spell under which they had hitherto lived together; this single gesture is to release them from it, that’s what this sitting besi
de him and singing in such whimsical manner is about. Has he gone mad? he wonders. His father’s voice is losing confidence. He is still singing:
…Non, je ne prête pas ma plume
À un vieux savetier…
but then he stops and they are left staring into each other’s eyes. There is a statue in the main square, an enormous bronze soldier, pointing his rifle at the tyrant’s chest: it’s as if the soldier had leapt off its plinth, fully armed and uniformed, and was running along on all fours. Vieux savetier…, he repeats, his lips trembling, to console his father for whom he now feels a terrible pity. He starts crying. His father slowly gets to his feet, goes to the table, rummages among his books as if searching for something, notices that the child is watching him even through his tears, shrugs his shoulders, and hurries out of the room. For a long time after this they are like two people joined by a lie that degrades them both: their eyes do not meet.
Much later, some ten years later. Father is sitting at his table examining a slide under the table lamp when the boy enters. It’s an early afternoon in winter. The boy stops in the half-light but the father extends his hands towards him and invites him to come closer. There is some dry blue matter between the two sheets of glass, something with blotches and lines on it, like the map of the country he sees in his geography book. The father’s bony finger is following the lines of this peculiar map, moving along its branches, its curves, carefully tracing every kink of one particularly sinuous line, and where the line, somewhere near the edge of the slide, breaks, he taps at the glass.
It is my most beautiful slide, says his father.
The boy knows that his father’s finger is moving over a section of a brain. The image is full of variety, of dangerous, restless twists and turns. “What a map!” he thinks. His father bends close to the sheet of glass, the light intensely illuminating his face whose expression is of agonized, helpless curiosity, transforming his normally self-disciplined gaze into a mask that is almost grotesque. Involuntarily, he too leans closer. His father’s finger is delicately, circuitously following some point in the image where the crooked line gathers into a knot, then moves off in several directions. Like a cartographer who cannot quite orientate himself on a strange map, like a doctor feeling round a body to discover the secret of a diseased organ, he is helpless and impatient.
