by Sándor Márai
“I?” I whispered, confused, especially confused now because I was practically choking. “What could I have done?”
“Everything, Esther,” he said, innocent as a newborn child. It was the old voice, the voice of his youth. “Everything. Why did you not answer my letters? Why did you not answer my letters while you still could have? Why did you forget the letters and leave them with us when you left? Éva found them.”
He came over to me now, quite close, and leaned over me.
“Have you seen these letters?” I asked.
“Have I seen them?…I don’t understand, Esther. I wrote them.”
And I could tell by his voice that for once, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was not lying.
17
“Now let me tell you something,” he said, and, leaning against the sideboard with the photographs on it, he lit a cigarette and threw the match distractedly into the box holding people’s calling cards. “Something happened between us that we can no longer settle by not speaking about it. One can remain silent all one’s life about the most important things. People die in silence. But there may be occasions to speak, when one should not remain silent. I believe it was this kind of silence that might have been the original sin of which the Bible speaks. There is an ancient lie at the heart of life, and it can take a long time before a man notices it. Don’t you want to sit down? Sit down, Esther, and hear me through. No, excuse me, this time, just this once, I would like to be judge and prosecutor. All this time you have been the judge. Sit down, please.”
He spoke courteously but in an almost commanding manner.
“There you are,” he said, and pushed a chair toward me. “Look, Esther, for twenty years we have been talking at cross-purposes. Things are not so simple. You have read out your list of charges against me—you and others—and they are indeed faults, alas, and perfectly true. You talk of rings and lies, of promises not kept, of bills that I have not paid. There is more, Esther, and worse. There’s no point in telling it all…I make no excuses for myself…but details like this will no longer decide my future. I have always been a weak man. I would like to have achieved something in the world, and I believe I was not altogether without talent. But talent and ambition are not enough. I know now they are not enough. To be properly creative one needs something else…some special strength or discipline or a mixture of the two; the stuff, I think, they call character…And that quality, that talent, is something that is missing in me. It’s like a strange deafness. It is as if I knew the music, the tune being played, precisely, but could not hear the notes. When I met you I was not quite so certain of what I am telling you now…I didn’t even know that you represented character for me. You understand?”
“No,” I honestly replied.
Somehow it was not his words that astonished me but his voice, the way he spoke. I had not heard him speak like this before. He spoke like a man who…but it is almost impossible to pin the voice down. He spoke like a man who has seen or discovered something, some truth, or is on his way to doing so though he could not yet declare it, because he was getting ever closer and was shouting his impressions at the world for all he was worth. He spoke like a man who felt something. It was not a voice I was used to with him. I listened without speaking.
“It’s so simple,” he said. “You’ll understand it straightaway. It was you: you were what I was missing, you were my character, my being. One recognizes this sort of thing. A man without character, or with an imperfect character, is morally something of a cripple. There are people like that, people who in every other respect are perfectly normal but for a missing arm or leg. Such people are given prostheses, an artificial arm or leg, and suddenly they are capable of working again, of being useful. Please don’t be angry at my analogy, but you must have been a kind of artificial limb to me…a moral prosthesis. I hope I haven’t offended you?” he asked tenderly, and leaned over to me.
“No,” I said. “It is simply that I don’t believe it, Lajos. There is no such thing as a prosthetic being. You can’t graft the moral character of one person onto another. Forgive me, but these are just ideas.”
“No, they are not just ideas. A moral character is not something you inherit but a quality you acquire. People are not born with morals. The morals of wild animals, the morals of children, are not the same as the morals of a sixty-year-old circuit judge in Vienna or Amsterdam. People acquire their moral characters in the same way as they acquire their mannerisms and their culture.”—He was intoning like a priest.—“There are people who are more adept at moral character, yes indeed, there are moral geniuses just as there are musical and literary geniuses. You are such a moral genius, Esther; no, please don’t deny it. I feel it in you. I am tone-deaf when it comes to issues of morality, practically illiterate. That is why I needed to be with you, or that at any rate is the chief reason, I think.”
I was obstinate. “I don’t believe it,” I said, “but even if it were so, Lajos, you cannot want someone to act as moral nanny to all kinds of morally imperfect beings. A woman can’t play moral nurse her whole life.”
“A woman! A woman!” he said quickly, courteously waving my answer away. “I am talking about you, Esther. I mean you.”
“A woman,” I said, and felt the blood rush to my face. “I know you mean me. I have had enough of being the model for a false view of the world all my life. Get that into your head at last. There is no point in me saying it again…though maybe you are right, we cannot remain silent about this forever. I don’t believe in your ideas, Lajos, I believe in reality. The reality is that you deceived me; once upon a time people might have put this in a more flowery, romantic way, such as: ‘I was your plaything, your toy.’ You are a strange gambler; you play with passions and people instead of cards. I was one of the queens in your hand. Then you stood up and went off elsewhere. Why? Because you grew bored. You had had enough and simply walked away. That’s the truth. That is the terrible immoral truth. One can’t throw a woman away the way one does a matchbox simply because one has passions, because that happens to be one’s nature, because one finds it impossible being tied to a woman or because one is ambitious, or because everything and everyone is merely useful. I can even understand that…it is a low act with something human in it. But to discard someone out of sheer carelessness, that is lower than low. There is no excusing that, because it is inhuman. Do you understand now?”
“But I called you, Esther,” he said quite quietly. “Don’t you remember? Yes, I was weak. But then, at the last moment, I came to my senses and knew that only you could help me. I called you, I begged you. Don’t you remember my letters?”
“I know nothing about any letters,” I said, and was frightened to note how sharp my voice sounded, sharper than it had ever been, almost shrieking. “It’s all lies. The letters are a lie, like the ring, like everything you ever said or promised me. I know nothing about the letters, I don’t believe in them. Éva has only just told me that she had found letters like that…in the rosewood box…how should I know what is true in all this? I don’t believe you. I don’t believe Éva either. I don’t believe in the past. It is all lies and conspiracies, a piece of theater full of stage properties, old letters and vows that were never made. I don’t go to the theater nowadays, Lajos. I haven’t been to a theater in fifteen years. I don’t go out. I know the truth, do you understand? The truth. Look at me! This is the truth! Look into my eyes! I am old. We are at the end of life, as you yourself so grandly declared. Yes, it is the end, and you are the reason that this is the way it has passed, so empty, so false; it is why I stayed here, living alone like an old maid who is thrifty with her feelings but eventually buys a cat and a dog as pets…my pets are people.”
“Yes,” he admitted, bowing his head in guilt. “That is a very dangerous thing to do.”
“Yes, dangerous,” I repeated, instinctively more quietly now, then fell silent. I had never spoken for as long and as passionately as that at one go. I was quite out of breat
h.
“So, let us leave it,” I said. Suddenly I felt weak. I did not want to cry, so I sat there with my arms folded and my back straight, but I must have gone very pale because Lajos looked at me, concerned.
“Do you want a glass of water? Shall I call someone?”
“Don’t call anyone,” I said. “It’s not important. It looks as though I am no longer as healthy as I was. Look, Lajos, while two people are still at the stage where one doubts the words of the other, then there is soil enough, however shallow, to build a relationship on. The soil may be marshland or loose sand. You know that what you build will eventually fall down, yet there is something in the enterprise that is real, human and destined. But those cursed by fate to build on you have a far worse time of it, because one day they are obliged to notice that they have built on mere air, on nothing. Some people lie because it’s their nature, because they seek some advantage or spontaneously for a moment’s excitement. But you lie the way rain rains: you can lie with tears, you can lie with your actions. It must be very difficult. There are times I think you’re an absolute genius…the genius of lies. You look into my eyes or touch me, your tears welling, and I start to feel how your hand trembles, but all the time I know you are lying, that you have always lied, right from the first moment. Your life has been one long lie. I don’t even believe in your death: that will be a lie too. Oh yes, you’re a genius all right.”
“Well, there you are,” he replied calmly. “In any case, I have brought you the letters. I did, after all, write them for you. Here they are.”
And with a simple courteous gesture he produced the three letters from his coat pocket and handed them over to me.
18
At that point I was not too concerned with the contents of the letters. I was fully aware of Lajos’s capabilities as a letter writer. But I did have a thorough look at the envelopes. All three bore my name and address, the hand was clearly Lajos’s, and the franking proved them to have been mailed to my address twenty-two years ago, the week before Vilma and Lajos were married. I am sure that I never received them. Somebody must have intercepted them. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to steal them: it was always Vilma, endlessly curious about mail, who took the letters from the mailman, and it was she who had the key to the sideboard. I carefully examined the backs of the envelopes, then threw them down beside the other objects displayed on the sideboard, next to the photograph of Vilma.
“Don’t you want to read them?” asked Lajos.
“No,” I said. “Why? I believe they say what you told me they said. They are not of great importance. You,” I said, almost crazy, pronouncing the words as if making a great discovery. “You can even make facts lie.”
“You never received these letters?” Lajos asked calmly, as though he were not too concerned with my criticisms of him.
“Never.”
“Who stole my letters?”
“Who stole them? Vilma. Who else? Who else would benefit from doing so?”
“Of course,” he said. “It couldn’t have been anyone but her.”
He went over to the sideboard and took a good look at the stamps on the letter and the franking, then leaned closer to look at Vilma’s picture, with a smile of good-natured interest, the cigar in his hand emitting clouds of curling smoke. He gazed at the picture fully absorbed, as though I was not in the room, wagging his head, then giving a low whistle of appreciation, the way one burglar might admire the work of another. He stood there, legs widely spaced, one hand in his coat pocket, the other with the smoking cigar, a satisfied professional.
“She made a good job of it,” he said eventually, and turned to me, stopping one step from me. “But in that case,” he went on, “what is it you want from me? What is my crime? My debt? The great thing I failed to do? What is the lie? It’s just details. But there was a moment,” he pointed to the letters, “when I did not lie, when I put out my hands because I was dizzy, the way a high-wire walker starts to get dizzy. And you did not help me. No one lifted a finger. So I danced on as best I could, since a thirty-five-year-old man does not fancy falling from such a height…You know I’m not particularly given to sentimentality, that’s right, I’m not even a passionate man. It was life that interested me…risks…the game, as you called it. I am not, nor have I ever been, the kind of man who stakes everything on a woman, on passion and sentiment…Nor was it any unstoppable tide of sentiment that swept me to you, I can tell you that now. You see, I don’t want to make you cry, it’s not that I want your heart to melt. That would be ridiculous. I did not come to beg. I came to demand. Do you understand now?” he asked quietly, amicable but solemn.
“Demand?” I said almost inaudibly. “That’s interesting. Go on. Demand.”
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll try. It is nothing I could put down on paper or go to the law with, of course. But there are other kinds of law. You may not realize it, but this is the moment you should become aware that beside the moral law there is another, just as binding, just as valid…how to put it? Are you beginning to suspect what it might be? There’s a kind of self-knowledge people are usually very reluctant to bear. You should know that it is not only words, vows, and promises that bind people together, nor is it feelings or sympathies that determine the true nature of their relationship. There’s something else, a law that is firmer and more severe, that determines whether one person is bound to another or not…It’s like the law between fellow conspirators. That is the law that bound me to you. I knew about this law. Even twenty years ago, I knew. I knew as soon as I met you. There’s no point in being modest now: I believe that of the two of us, Esther, it is I who am made of sterner stuff. That ‘stuff’ is not sterner in the sense that handbooks of moral guidance pretend. Nevertheless it is I, the faithless, the fly-by-night, the fugitive, who am more capable of remaining true to that law in both soul and will, this law of which you will find no trace in books or in the tables of the law but which is, nevertheless, the true law. And it is a very hard law…Listen. The law of life is that what is once begun has to be finished. This does not make for a particularly happy state of affairs. Nothing happens when it’s supposed to: at the very moment when you have spent your precious time preparing to receive an important gift, life gives you nothing. This belatedness, this disorder, can hurt you for years. We think someone is just playing with us. But one day we notice that everything has been exactly as it is supposed to be, in perfect order, in perfect time…it is impossible for people to meet one day sooner than they are supposed to. They meet when they’re ready for meeting…They’re ready not necessarily by virtue of their whims and wishes but by virtue of something deeper, some undeniable stellar law, the way planets meet in infinite time and space, precise to within a microsecond, colliding at a unique moment, one in a billion years in the vastness of space. I don’t believe in chance meetings. I am a man who knows a good number of women…forgive me, but this is an unavoidable part of what I have to say…I have met beautiful ones, high-spirited ones, in fact I have known some who were animated by some fire-breathing demon; I have known heroic women who could wade through Siberian snows in the company of a man, remarkable women who could help me and were prepared to share with me the terrible loneliness of existence for a while. Yes, I have known all these,” he said quietly, reminiscing, more to himself than to me.
“I am so glad,” I said stiffly when he stopped, “so delighted that you have chosen to come back to me and regale me with your acquaintances.”
But I immediately regretted the words. They were unbecoming to me, and unbecoming to what Lajos had just said too. He looked at me calmly and nodded, bemused.
“What was I to do when it was always you I was waiting for?” he asked almost tenderly. It was simple. It was elegantly and modestly said.
“What was I to do?” he said more loudly. “And what can you do with this belated confession that, at our time of life, has neither meaning nor virtue. One shouldn’t say things like this. But the manners of should o
r should not are worthless when discussing the truth. See, Esther, a leave-taking can be just as mysterious and exciting as a first meeting…I have long known this. Revisiting someone we loved is not the same as ‘returning to the scene of the crime,’ ‘driven by an irresistible compulsion,’ as the detective stories have it. All my life I have loved only you, not out of some strict necessity, nor quite according to the laws of logic…Then something happened, not only the accident of the letters, the letters Vilma stole. You didn’t really welcome love. Don’t deny it! It is not enough to love somebody, you must love courageously. You must love so that no thief or plan or law, whether that be the law of heaven or of the world, can come between. The problem was that we did not love each other courageously enough. And that is your fault, because a man’s courage in love is ridiculous. Love is of your making. It is the only respect in which you achieve greatness. That is where, somehow, you fell short, and as you failed so did everything else, everything that might have been, all that was obligation, mission, the meaning of life. It is not true that men can be held responsible for this or that love. Go on, love heroically. But you committed the worst sin a woman can commit, you took offense, you ran away. Do you believe me yet?”
“What does all this add up to?” I asked. “What does it matter whether I believe or confess or resign myself?” My voice sounded so odd I might have overheard it in another room.
“That is why I have come,” he said, more quietly now because the room had darkened and we instinctively dropped our voices as if everything—all the objects in the room, all we had to say—was fading with the light. “I wanted you to know,” he went on, “that people can’t end anything by simply wanting it to end, one can’t abandon something before it has run its course. It is impossible!” he declared, and gave a satisfied laugh. I was half expecting him to rub his hands together like a card player who has, to his greatest astonishment, discovered that he has won a round he firmly expected to lose. “You are part of me, even now, when time and distance have annihilated all we once had together…Do you understand yet? You are responsible for everything that has happened in my life, just as I—in my fashion, in a man’s fashion—am responsible for you, for your life. There was bound to come a day when you would know that. You must come away with me, with us. We’ll take Nunu too. Listen, Esther, just this once you have to believe me. What possible advantage would I have in telling you anything but the truth, the last mortal truth?…Time burns away everything, everything that is false in us. What remains is the truth. And what remains is that you are a part of me even though you ran away, even though I was what I was and am. Yes, I too believe that people don’t change. You are a part of me even though you know I have not changed, that I am the same as I was, as dangerous and unreliable. You cannot deny it. Raise your head, look into my eyes…Why won’t you raise your head? Wait, I’ll turn on the light…You still have no electricity?…Look, it is completely dark now.”
