by Sándor Márai
The boys woke. There was the sound of running water. They were washing and talking quietly between themselves. The maid was searching for something in the kitchen. The work of the day was beginning, that curious, complex struggle in which she took part despite her immobility, not relaxing for a second but directing the affairs of the household as well as every stage of her sons’ lives from her bed. The sideboard opposite the bed contained the food. She had arranged it in such a position that she could keep an eye on the girl’s every movement, so that not a cupful of flour, no slice of bacon, no single egg should leave the sideboard without her observing before the girl closed it and deposited the key back under her pillow. She willed herself upright in bed when the boys went out of the house, gazing after them through the walls, mentally escorting them, watching them all the way. There were times she could swear she could see them hanging about some street corner in town as clearly as if they had been standing in front of her and could even hear their voices as they chatted with this or that person. In the evening when they returned she would interrogate them about their movements and sometimes their accounts tallied with what she had imagined.
The maid came in, kissed her hand, and set the breakfast, drawing open the blinds. The mother handed over the key and watched anxiously as the maid searched out items in the sideboard. She held the box of sugar in her lap and counted out five cubes. The boys received one and a half, she and the girl one each. The hot sun poured in through the window with the full strength of summer.
“Get some meat for dinner today,” she told the maid. “Open a jar of cherries. Use the old plum jam to make some jam pockets, it’s there next to the soap.”
She closed her eyes. Let everything be as though it were his birthday.
She should give him something today. She took mental note of her valuables, but every gift presented a risk and could lead to temptation. If she gave him the gold necklace he might sell it or give it away to some woman. Lajos once sold his watch. Her husband had once taken out three thousand crowns and gone off to a spa where he went through it all while she stayed at home struggling to bring up the boys. She had to make up the three thousand from the household budget and it took eight years, taking out ever more loans, saving pennies out of his captain’s and then his major’s salary. Prockauer needed white gloves every day of the week. In summer he changed shirts every other day. When time allowed he would blend cologne with the water he washed his face with while she, the mother, had to wash herself with crude soap.
“He said I smelled of tallow,” she said quietly to herself.
The maid’s hand hesitated in the act of laying out the food, but she didn’t look up, being familiar with the invalid’s habit of occasionally making strange comments without introduction or indeed any connection in the same low voice, some statement that did not require an answer. Mother looked sideways at the maid to detect whether she had heard. She didn’t mind being heard, in fact it gave her a certain satisfaction that under the cover of her illness she could time and again give voice to whatever incurable state of affairs preoccupied or tortured her. Prockauer had once admonished her for not using scented soap or perfumes. Her hands, like those of many officers’ wives, carried the permanent smell of paraffin since Prockauer’s gloves needed daily washing. These slights were a constant pain to her. Photographs of Prockauer hung on the wall opposite, above the bed, showing him at the various monotonous stages of a military career from second lieutenant to colonel in full dress and on horseback at his last frontline post. She had been talking to the pictures for the last three years, conversing with them through long nights and endless afternoons, silently or in a muttering whisper. Prockauer had made off to the front where he was undoubtedly carousing and getting into debt. It gave her a certain pleasure to think that Prockauer would have to be dealing with his creditors by himself. She sought out the colonel’s face in the picture and glared at it from under furrowed brows, mocking and ironic.
THE BOYS KISSED HER HAND AND SAT DOWN TO breakfast. Lajos had been wearing civilian clothes for a while now. He put on old summer outfits that he had slightly outgrown, whose waists were now a little tight so he looked like a schoolboy in them. He tucked his armless sleeve into his coat pocket. Ever since the amputation he had grown fatter and more suspicious. He complained of the small portions provided for him. He accepted offers of extra helpings from his mother and brother at dinner, put on a wheedling voice to plead for the tastiest parts, offered to swap things, and the maid sometimes complained that he had eaten the leftovers from dinner that she had put away for supper. Just as well that I keep the pantry in my room, thought Mother. In the few months since Lajos had returned from the hospital he had grown a belly and his mother suspected he was eating in secret somewhere. His mouth and his eyebrows had stopped twitching but the glazed, indifferent look in his eyes persisted, relieved only by the odd flash of curiosity or malevolence.
He is still handsome, thought the mother, his hair and brow reminiscent of the colonel. But his suddenly plump body and the awkward, uncertain movements of his remaining hand seemed grotesque. His voice too was strange: slow, drawling, singsong, faintly babyish and complaining, just as he did as a child when he wanted something and was not given it. He was sluggish and gluttonous. She did not dare send him out to work. She had to tolerate her twenty-year-old son idling away the day with his younger brother’s friends. There were times he put on his ensign’s uniform, pinned his medals on his chest, and stood staring at himself in the mirror in his mother’s room, turning round like a model, talking to himself as he used to do in childhood, completely ignoring his mother’s presence, as if he were playing at soldiers. He felt no shame before his mother nor did he answer her questions once he was deeply immersed in what he was doing.
It’s money they ask for, she thought and closed her eyes. It was morning and battle was about to commence, the battle that never ended, not at night, not even in her dreams. She tightened her thin bloodless lips. She had calculated last night how much she would give Tibor: five crowns for the photograph and ten for the banquet. She wanted to give him an icon too, the picture of St. Louis, the patron saint of the family, because the elder Prockauer was named Louis, after him. She wasn’t sure whether her gift of St. Louis would delight Tibor. All the same she extracted it from her prayerbook and put it out ready on the bedside table.
“Mother,” Lajos wheedled in his singsong voice. “Tibor needs some money.”
They had discussed this final two-pronged attack at dawn while they were washing. No one else could help them now. Mother would give them the money so they could pay Havas off in the afternoon, then they could smuggle the silver back into its proper place. Tibor would volunteer for military service and the gang would break up in the evening. No one mentioned the night that had just passed. Lajos had taken Tibor home, laid him down on the bed, pulled off his shoes as though he were an invalid, covered him up, and sat at his bedside until he fell asleep. Tibor surrendered himself entirely, offering no resistance. At night he woke, went over to Lajos’s bed, and, when he saw the one-armed one’s eyes were closed in sleep, quietly stole over to the basin and gave his face a good wash with soap and brushed his teeth. He rubbed at his face a long time, then went back to bed.
He lay restless and wide awake, occasionally raising his hands to his mouth to rub his lips. The bed was slowly spinning with him but there was something reassuring about the dizziness: he felt he had stopped dancing, in a moment the record would stop turning and it would be quiet, and they would be standing perfectly still, the sun would rise and there would be light. I’ll go to the swimming pool in the morning, he thought. He felt he had plummeted from a great height to a deep, very deep place, the kind where one could lie flat out, quite calm, because nothing more could happen and it was only that he did not dare to move in case he discovered he had broken his arm or his leg. From time to time he would put his fingers to his lips and smile in relief. No more harm could befall him now: he was over
it all. Mother would give him the money and they could all go on living their own lives. I could recover, he thought. Once I’m away from here I will be well again.
“I don’t know anything,” said Mother instead of answering. “No one tells me anything. I lie here, helpless, I might not even make it through to morning, but you come home at dawn, climbing through that damned window. Tibor, my baby, I don’t even know whether you passed your exams.”
The fact that Tibor had failed, and the consequences of that failure, had completely slipped their minds since yesterday so now they quickly had to think of something to say.
“Where’s the certificate, my dear?” asked Mother.
The one-armed one looked around as if their mother were quite elsewhere and said encouragingly:
“They’ll give you one, you’ll see. Trust me. They have to give you one, no question about it.”
Tears began to roll down Mother’s cheeks. She could cry at will. Tibor watched her with a desperate indifference. He had got used these last three years to his mother crying each time he was asked something.
“They haven’t given them out yet,” he assured her. Mother continued crying exactly as before, her tears neither more nor less copious, as if some engine had been turned on and now had to run its course before switching itself off. Once she had dried her tears she picked up the icon and presented it to Tibor.
“This will protect you,” she said, sniffing. “I daren’t even ask where you were last night. I know you need money today, Tibor, my baby. I have already made inquiries. The photographer will cost five crowns. How much is the banquet?”
“They’re not giving a banquet,” Lajos answered. “They are arranging a May picnic.”
“A picnic? What a strange idea,” she said disapprovingly. “You’ll only catch a chill in the end. Lajos, be sure to take your coat.”
“Mother,” pleaded Lajos, “I spent four months bivouacking by the Isonzo, in a trench, in the rain. There’s nothing I don’t know about cold and damp.”
He stood up and put his hand behind his back, standing as the Prockauers tended to do, and walked up and down the room. Mother watched him timidly. It had been Lajos’s habit, as it was his father’s, to put his hands together behind his back and crack his fingers. Of course he can’t do that now, she thought with forbearance. She was frightened because there was no discipline now. Any moment now they might rebel, come over, and gently, without any violence, lift her from the bed, deposit her elsewhere, and fall to searching the mattress and the bolster, and there, before her very eyes, seize the silver, the jewels, and the money, her cries and entreaties falling on deaf ears, the boys triumphantly ransacking the whole apartment—and should she scream for help they might even stuff a napkin in her mouth to shut her up. Something had happened. She had lost her authority over the boys. She gazed at the various photographic images of Colonel Prockauer’s military career as if beseeching his help. It was, when you came down to it, easier with Prockauer. She understood that what wrecked a life were those unpredictable moments when a person loses courage, remains silent, fails to open his or her mouth, and allows events to take control. Maybe she should have asked Prockauer not to go to the front. Being a high-ranking officer he could, presumably, have stopped the war.
Every nook and cranny of the long room was stuffed with unnecessary furniture, objects to which the foul smell of the sickroom clung, the smell of isolation and neglect. This, the room in which Mother lay, was where they had to eat. Once, in a circus, she had seen a woman in an evening dress control two wild wolves with no more than a look and a whip. She felt she had to engage her sons’ eyes, and that once she had done so order might be restored: one flash of her own eyes would draw the boys back into her magic circle. But the boys avoided her eyes. The contact was broken. She no longer had power over them. They were silent when they entered her room nowadays. She knew this silence spelled danger. They had been silent for months. She was wholly ignorant of the reason for their peculiar absences: they did not share their thoughts with her. They were preparing for something. Maybe their plans had already come to fruition and they were only waiting for the opportune moment when they could rise in rebellion, they might even have accomplices, the maid, or some other person. Maybe they had already agreed that on some given signal they should seize her and pick up her thin body, though maybe Tibor could do that by himself while Lajos searched the mattress and the bed with his remaining hand. But they wouldn’t dare touch the ready cash she carried on her own body, she quickly thought. She clenched her hands. She felt the onset of fear and started shivering.
Suddenly she sat up and pushed the bolster under her back.
“Get out,” she said. “I’ll give you money. Now out with you!”
The one-armed one shrugged, gestured to Tibor, and they returned to their room. Mother listened carefully, her hands on her chest. They’re on the alert now, she thought. They might even be spying. Fortunately she had positioned her bed so it could not be seen through the keyhole. Whenever she was obliged to give them money she sent them out of the room. Her hand tightened on her breast and she wondered what she would feel at the very end. She thought back to the moment of Tibor’s conception, in the eighth year of their marriage, after several months of sleeping apart. Prockauer returned one afternoon from the training ground wearing his riding boots, dusty, whip in hand, his brow lightly perspiring, and threw his military cap on the table. They were alone in the room. Little Lajos was outside, playing in the garden. They had hardly exchanged a word for several months. Prockauer slept in the dining room on a divan, while she slept with little Lajos in the double bed in the bedroom. They were past the stage of looking for excuses to loathe one another. They struggled with it for a long time, but by the eighth year all loathing had faded, as had the times they had fallen back into each other’s arms. The constant battle that was consuming both their souls, the war they were fighting with and against each other, had run out of steam. For the past few months they had silently, calmly, almost forbearingly, as if out of a common sympathy, settled down to simply hating each other. She was sitting in the rocking chair by the window attempting to remove a grease spot from Prockauer’s yellow breeches, a particularly fine pair of twill breeches, the grease spot presumably caused by the oiled saddle, somewhere near the knee. This spot, which was larger and eye-catching, much like everything else in Prockauer’s life, seemed more than usually vivid to her now as she recalled it. She felt peculiarly compelled to remove such spots. Prockauer came up to her, quite calmly, and without saying a word, put out a hand and grabbed the scruff of her neck, raising her some way from the chair the way he would have lifted a sleeping dog, gripping it where it was least likely to hurt. While struggling in Prockauer’s embrace her body was infused by a delicious pain that told her she was alive, that she was still living, inhabiting this specific moment, and that what would follow would be a downward slope that led, possibly, to death. She thought back to that moment now, to that one moment of perfect consciousness, struggling in Prockauer’s arms and, somewhere between sleeping and waking, felt alive, quite alive for a moment. Never again was she to experience such a feeling. Tibor was the product of that moment. Prockauer had touched her a few more times later, but she couldn’t remember those occasions. Gently, with some trepidation, she opened her nightshirt and brought out the pouch: this was what she now had to attend to. The pouch was attached to her nightshirt with a safety pin. She sought out fifteen crowns, deposited the coins on the icon on the bedside table, then, somewhat assured, leaned back on her pillows.
She called to them in a weak voice and timidly pointed to the money. Lajos stared at her without saying anything, then sat down in a chair opposite her bed. Tibor counted the fifteen crowns, nodded, and pocketed the coins.
“I know we have no money, Mother,” he addressed her cordially. “I wouldn’t in fact ask you for any. I have to go out now. When I return this evening I would like you to provide me with the sum of six hundred
crowns. Do you understand? Six hundred.”
“Six hundred crowns,” said Mother rather fast, as if addressing a natural request in a perfectly relaxed manner.
“Will you give it to me?”
