The Reluctant Trophy Wife

by Judith Petres Balogh

  “Taking a little walk in this fine weather?” they asked after the friendly greeting. Obviously she was, but was never irritated by the silly question and answered happily, “Would not miss my walks in this beautiful country, not even in rain or hail.” She was not sure that her fragmented Hungarian came through as intended, but the vintners smiled, appreciated her linguistic efforts and wished her a good day.

  The mutual salutation was a sweet ritual, which touched her and made her feel as if she truly belonged. When she told this to Sarah, she just laughed. “Don’t kid yourself. They are just being polite. You are and always will be a foreigner. You could live here thirty years, be married to a local vintner and have ten kids with him, but you would still be ‘that foreign woman András married’.”

  After she passed several vineyards, she reached a high point, a wide-open space. As far as she could see there were the well-tended vineyards on the hills, giving way to wheat fields below, already turning from tender green to golden yellow. The splendid display of poppies and blue cornflowers at the roadside made her wish she could paint like Sarah. And of course, from these high points she could always see the village with its white, unpretentious church and a little way below it the lake. The extensive surface was usually very clear, but it was a shallow lake that readily reacted to wind, light and the movement of clouds. It could turn almost within minutes from green to blue or from slate to inky dark. There were some mornings when a blanket of fog covered everything; but before long, the sun would burn up the fog and the distant hills from the opposite shore moved so close one could almost touch them. On other days the hills retreated into a fine haze in a meditative frame of mind and became distant and reserved, wrapped in a pale blue veil.

  It was a gentle landscape, void of complexities; all incongruous modern improvements were absent. She felt at peace.

  Somewhat out of breath she sat down under a tree to enjoy the view and rested her back against the tree trunk. The silence was deep and restful. She had no clear thoughts only a heightened sense of being, of existing, and a sense of tranquility never felt before. She believed that her spirit could slip out of her body and float up and away into a new dimension to discover new meanings, which until then were hidden. She felt that it would be possible to rise into some mysterious bliss and be lost forever in it; at the same time she felt a new, powerful energy surge through her. It was not the kind that used to drive her from one activity to the next. It was something altogether different, a simple life force, which made her feel strong and alive, but did not act as a slave driver urging her to frenzied activities.

  She sat there motionless in order to retain this sensation longer, which she knew would soon pass. Her gaze followed the dance of the light on the water and then said aloud “This is how death or birth must feel like. Or perfect love. It is the magic moment when life feels complete.” Her soul stopped revolting, the restless self was banished somewhere and the desire to escape was no longer frightening; it was a gentle promise.

  Indeed, a few moments later the sensation was gone just as she expected, but a change, a tingling excitement remained. Slowly, thoughtfully she started home, trying to explain to herself the odd experience, but words failed her. It was something tremendous and exciting and incomprehensible. For a dizzy few seconds she was hovering at the end of something, or perhaps at the beginning of something, but whatever it was, it had nothing to do with rational thinking and therefore she found no words for it.

  On arriving home she was still in a pensive mood, but the sight of an airmail envelope on the hallway table sobered her instantly. The letter was from Adrienne.

  It was the first communication she received from her and she tore open the envelope with hands shaking with excitement. Adrienne was away from her computer and the handwritten note was sent from the rehabilitation center. She was doing well physically, she wrote, and while she found the therapy exhausting and mostly unpleasant, she knew that she had to submit to it if she wanted to regain her former self.

  There was nothing in the letter about grief, or pain, and she sweetly reassured Lena that she understood the predicament Clyde caused. Adrienne’s nature was rational and absolutely fair; therefore, her letter held no trace of rancor about Lena’s sudden disappearance. There was not a hint of hurt feelings or of accusation. She accepted the “exile” for what Clyde intended it to be: a logical solution to stop the media from speculations and from inventing such stories that would increase the sale of the newspapers, even if such fabrications would deeply hurt the main characters in the drama. She even expressed gratitude for the sacrifice Lena and her husband made in order to silence the papers and so protect her.

  She did not go into details .Despite her ebullient life force, a certain finetuned reservation was always very much part of Adrienne’s character, but of course, she might have been also cautious now while writing the letter, lest uninitiated would read it. She stuck to a positive tone, but in spite of it the letter did have a pervasive tone of sadness. The void she felt was all there and Lena was close to tears. The letter was not about Adrienne and her life, but all about Lena and was full of questions about life in exile. “Do write me all”, she remarked on the last page of the letter. “Tell me the good and the bad, the strange and the exiting or the boring. I have been shut away from the world for so long that I am downright hungry for stories and gossips.”

  Lena needed time to fully absorb the message and the mood of Adrienne’s letter in order to respond appropriately. By late afternoon she was ready to answer and now the pages filled rapidly. She described the horror of the first days after the ’accident’ -- she was not able to write down ’murder’ -- and wrote about the days of frustration and tension that followed, and about Clyde’s decision to send her away. She related her arrival in Hungary, the dead man on the plane, the charm of the cottage that Clyde rented for her and about her friendship with Sarah and with Father Paul. She gave samples of their conversations. And then she stopped.

  She dropped the ballpoint pen and gazed out into the garden for a long time. She found it impossible to write openly about him and was not able to share her emotions, because she was not at all clear about them. In a very short time, he meant more to her than just a pleasant luncheon partner, more than what she was willing to admit to herself. He was of course, and above all else, untouchable and unreachable, but that did not trouble her, because she wanted nothing more than friendship. But still, she found it all but impossible to write about this harmless and splendid friendship that offered so much.

  It was impossible to analyze and to explain what happened to her thinking and to her emotional world. They have never spoken about anything personal until just recently; yet there it was, this strange emotion, in all its beauty and richness. This fascination had nothing to do with love. It lacked the overpowering desire connected with it. The feeling was so pure, so untainted that she feared putting it into words. Words had sometimes a way of converting something sacred into a very common and trivial thing, and so destroy the magic. She also knew that it would be cruel to talk about a beautiful relationship to a friend, who just lost one herself.

  She continued to gaze into the garden where a goldfinch was alighting at the birdbath to have a drink, or a bath. It was carefree and in its small bird-head there was space only for pictures of water, food and perhaps the danger signs of cats or snakes. It certainly did not worry about anything else. The bird’s antics amused her and it brought the recollection of meeting Father Paul a few days ago, when another bird was joining them.

  It was late in the morning on that day when she discovered that the instant coffee was almost gone, and on a sudden impulse walked down to the village to buy some more. On the way home she stopped at the cemetery, perhaps because she recalled it as a peaceful place, or perhaps she hoped to meet him there. Or both. It is amazing how easily but innocently she could fool herself, never admitting that visiting the cemetery was premeditated. She found a bench and sat there for a while,
when indeed he appeared at the door of the church, and saw her.

  After they exchanged greetings and the usual preliminaries, she smiled at him and remarked, “We met here shortly after I arrived in Hungary. I thought you were perhaps the caretaker, who asked impertinent questions.”

  “I am a care-taker, and am sorry about my impertinence.” He took a seat next to her and offered some candy. “I always carry these, in case I meet children. We know each other, the kids and I. They expect it.”

  “You asked me then whether I was a believer.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. No. Sometimes. Are you scandalized?”

  “Hardly. Why should I be? Ambiguity about the Faith is probably more common than total belief or total denial. Do you care to talk about it?”

  “Do you believe that you could resolve my ambiguities?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I am sure that I could not. Everyone has to resolve them on his own. But I am a good listener.”

  “I guess you must be. Otherwise you could not last long in the confessional booth. It must be terribly depressing.”

  “It is not, because I meet those very special people there, who are seeking, searching, and wanting to improve their conduct, but most of all, who want to make peace with God. I do not think of it as confession, but more as reconciliation and reconnection. That is hardly depressing; on the contrary, it makes me happy. I also have a few remedies for their soul, quite as effective as those the botanists recommend for the garden, or the doctors for the body.”

  “Such as?”

  “For the plants: fertilize, water judiciously, get rid of weeds and love your plants. For the body: eat well, exercise, rest, avoid stress, work with joy. For the soul: pray and don’t lose hope, live in peace. Forgive those who trespass against you and also forgive yourself. Help others. Above all, love. Love should always be part of life, because spiritual growth is not possible without it. God is love itself, and He is partial to hearts that overflow with love, because so does His. That is it. An added benefit to my remedies is that I don’t charge for the advice, and there are no ill side effects.”

  She did not respond and he did not prod. Bees were buzzing untiringly among the flowers. The circle of life, she thought. The dead are below, and above them the flowers grow, from which the bees collect the nectar to make honey for countless breakfast tables. A tiny lizard scurried from a cool hiding place, looked around carefully then chose a warm spot at the base of a memorial stone for the daily sunbath. Magnificent peace settled among the tombstones.

  “I no longer go to church regularly,” she said then. “I married a divorced man and this act closed the gates of the Church with a reverberating bang. I am also full of doubts. Perhaps I listened too often to Hawking. Somehow our ancestors’ piety seems medieval and irrelevant.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? Really?”

  “Of course. I hear it all the time. Nowadays we have too much science, and the commitment to religion is flagging. Actually it is barely there. There is too much enchantment with new discoveries, and it is easy to follow a rich selection of counterfeit gods. Sciences do attempt to answer many of our questions; the ones they cannot, they just ignore. Unfortunately, the ones they cannot answer are the truly important ones. Scientists can explain how a human body works, but not why it does. They understand the mechanics of life, but cannot tell its purpose. Without knowing the purpose, the quality of our life would be on the level what a troglodyte experienced.”

  “Do you believe in superstitions? I mean do you believe things, even if these are improvable?”

  “Helena, this flimsy line of argument is not worthy of your intellectual capacity.”

  “I was not arguing, only wondering how one could distinguish between various beliefs and dogmas, all abstract, all beyond common understanding, none of which can be proven. Who decides what is superstition, and what is true religious belief?”

  “If you accept that the laboratory is not the only place to prove things, then it should not be difficult to sort it out. Many modern sciences are built on case studies, historical facts, ancient writings, archeological findings, mathematical equations, inferences, deductions and so on. With the help of these other tools it is quite easy to separate superstitions and errors from truths. By the way, in the end many an eminent but doubting scientist discovered that all along the Teaching was right.”

  “Even if I would accept this as valid argument, and of course I do, or at least try to, I am not feeling it. Do you know what I mean? I have this conviction that faith ought to be a very strong emotional experience, such as the martyrs felt, when they died horrible deaths for it. Even if I say ‘I believe’, I do not feel anything. My mouth says the right words, but my heart is left out of it. The saints, who are set before us as examples, shine with exaltation. I am not even close to anything like it.”

  A willow tit found its way into the cemetery and alighting close by, scared the little lizard into a safer place. Fear, or at least precaution, seems to be a constant in this imperfect universe of ours. The little bird apparently had no murderous intentions, it only came to rest a while from its labors and intended no harm; yet, the lizard was cautious nonetheless and was of the opinion that it was better to be prepared than be victimized. As he scurried away the movement frightened the bird and it too fled. Who is afraid of whom? Peace returned. The day was lovely, the rest on the bench was good and the world was a good place for humans, birds or bees, even for lizards. The cemetery offered whatever each creature needed: shade or sunshine, hiding place or nectar, peace for the living and for the dead.

  “The exaltation you mention Helena, comes from love, which is the result of recognition, of knowing.”

  “This knowing is a commodity that is very hard to get nowadays.”

  “But not impossible.”

  “Do you think that people always had doubts, that they were always frightened by the unknown and the unknowable?”

  “I suppose so, but I also think that in the past there were fewer agnostics and atheists. In the new millennium we are witnessing a split in the consciousness of western civilization that could be fatal for us living in these parts. I am talking about the gap between the educated mind and the uneducated soul. And the gap is growing wider as the decades pass. Logic and facts are the new deities. Knowledge perceived by the right side of the brain is neglected, ridiculed and no longer trusted. Many find it difficult to make a commitment to God, because nobody has seen Him. Transcendental affirmations are mostly beyond the grasp of human vision and comprehension; therefore, it is easy to treat them as mere illusions. Man attempts to rationalize God and the central doctrines of the faith, and when he is stuck, he files away the entire question in a safe place under the title ‘human delusions.’ The divinity, an intelligent plan in the creation of the Universe, or the hereafter are beyond the realm of scientific proof, or indeed of human experience, and herein is the root of the difficulty. It is easy to believe that the earth rotates and the atom can be split, even if most of us have never seen either of these events, but a Creator or a dimension other than what can physically be experienced now and here is unacceptable to earthbound minds. We are dedicated to things that can be measured, labeled and categorized, quite forgetting that the scientists we trust had often erred in the past and were forced to revise their theories. No doubt, they will have to do so in the future too. Interestingly, Einstein’s elegant theory was not understood, nor was it proven for some time, yet it was accepted years before it could be verified. This proves that the human mind is not totally resistant to unproved and seemingly incomprehensible ideas. Faith, by the way, is to believe in something that cannot be proven, at least not in the usual ways.”

  “Whoa! Slow down, Father Paul! You are not talking to a distinguished assembly of theologians! It is just me, Helena, remember?” He laughed but did not take her protests seriously. For a while he was gazing far into the distance but then turned to her again.


  “This sort of modesty won’t take you far. You know quite well what I am talking about, even if you still resist. The world is now very much like an overheated cauldron bubbling and boiling over with unresolved problems, all of them difficult and all have the potential to change the world, perhaps for the worse. Take for example the currently trendy enchantment with liberalism. Its ultimate achievement will be to eliminate religion and the spiritual life that goes with it. Virtue and loving-kindness is traded for social and political vacuity. The resulting irretrievable moral failure will act negatively upon the world’s cultures and ultimately upon the personal life of every mortal. Ersatz virtues, greed, vanity and slogans cannot replace generosity, faith, hope and love. But we can learn to withstand the assault. And as for love, we can learn that too,” he said gently.

  She was not contradicting out of sheer stubbornness, and she did want to believe, even if she was selective about what she accepted and what she could not. She sensed that he would not settle for individualized, custom-made credos. His motto was all or nothing.

  “Some of my confusions have to do with the basic issues,” she confessed after a while. “For example, there is the issue of evil. I studied the classics at the university and I still recall the quote written by some forgotten Greek skeptic: