Esther's Inheritance

4

It was after midnight that Nunu came into my room. Our house still has no electric light — Mama had no time for the invention, and after her death we kept postponing it because of the expense — so Nunu’s entrances tend to be a little theatrical. This time, too, she stood there with the flickering candle in her hand, her gray hair standing up everywhere, in her nightgown, like some midnight apparation. “Lady Macbeth,” I said, smiling. “Come over here and sit down.” I knew she would look in on me that night.

Nunu is the family member who “stands in” for all the other family members in the house. She had arrived thirty years before, part of the nomadic process whereby families drift about the world like mythical figures: she arrived out of an archaic past, part of the genealogical fabric of great-aunts and grandnieces, just for a few weeks. Then she stayed because she was needed. And later she stayed because everyone else in the family had died off before her, so Nunu was left, decade on decade, step by step, to ascend the ladder of family hierarchy, until she finally took Grandmother’s place, moved into the room upstairs, and inherited her sphere of influence. Then Mama died, and then Vilma. One day Nunu noticed that she was not “standing in” for anybody; she noticed that she, the newcomer — she, the remnant — was the only family.

The successful conclusion of this complex career did not go to her head. Nunu had no ambition to be “mother” to me, nor did she pretend to be a guardian angel. As years went by she became ever more taciturn and sensible, so ruthlessly and dryly sensible it seemed she must have experienced everything life had to offer, so matter-of-fact and impassive she might have been a piece of furniture. Laci once said that Nunu had the air of something varnished, like an old walnut cabinet. She always dressed the same, summer and winter, in a dress of some smooth material that was not silk but was not taffeta either and which struck strangers, and even me, as a little too Sunday-best. In recent years she spoke just as much as was necessary and no more. She never told me anything of her previous life. I knew she wanted to share my every thought, my every care, but this plea was silent, and when she did say something it was as if we had been arguing for months, arguing fiercely and passionately, about the same subject, and she were simply putting the final full stop to it with a brief sentence. This was the way she spoke now as she sat down on my bed.

“Have you had the ring looked at?”

I sat up and rubbed my temples. I knew what she was thinking; I also knew that she was right: we had never talked about this, in fact I may never have showed her the ring, but still I knew she would be right, that the ring would prove a fake. I guessed as much. Nunu was uncanny like this. When did she hear of the ring? I wondered, then put the question aside, because it was perfectly natural that Nunu should know everything that pertained to the house, to the family, to my person, indeed to my life, including everything my dead sister had hidden away in the cellar or in the attic, so she would have known of the ring too. I had all but forgotten the story of the ring, because it was painful to think of it. When Vilma died, Lajos gave me this piece of jewelry, Grandmama’s ring. This middling-size diamond set in platinum was the only object of value my family possessed. I can’t quite understand how it remained in our possession — Father, too, valued the ring, regarding it with superstitious awe, and took great care of it though he was free enough with land and other valuables. It had the status of those famous diamonds in royal collections, the Kohinoor, the kind of precious stones that go in catalogs, whose market value no one considers and which are only meant to sparkle at the official anniversaries of dynasties, on the finger of a leading member of the family or on a queen’s brow, and that was how we, four generations of us, had guarded it, “the ring.” I never knew the actual value of the stone. In any case it would have fetched a good price, though nothing as princely as family legend would have it. It passed from Grandmama to Mama, and after our mother’s death it went to Vilma. When Vilma died Lajos suddenly waxed sentimental and in a moment of high pathos presented it to me.

I well remember the scene. Vilma had been buried in the afternoon. When we returned from the funeral I lay down exhausted on the divan in my darkened room. Lajos entered, head to foot in black, having dressed with such care for the funeral he might have been a soldier on parade — I recall he had special black buttons made for the occasion — and with a few grave words he handed me the ring. I was so tired and confused that I didn’t properly understand what he said and just stared vacantly as he placed the ring on the little table beside the divan, nor did I object when later he reminded me of the ring and put it on my finger. “You should have the ring,” he solemnly declared. I came to my senses afterward. The ring belonged to Éva, naturally: it belonged to my dead sister’s daughter, of course it did. But Lajos found an ingenious way to counter my argument. This kind of ring, he said, is not a family heirloom, it is a symbol, the symbol of family hierarchy. It therefore followed that after the deaths of both Mother and Vilma it should pass to me, since I was the oldest female. That settled it.

I said nothing and put the ring away. I had no intention, of course, not for a moment, of keeping the family heirloom. My conscience and the letter I have written in the case of my death — it’s there in the sideboard next to the ring and the underwear — bears witness to the fact that I have kept it for Éva and have arranged for her to have it when I die. Then I decided to send the ring to Vilma’s daughter for her engagement or her wedding, should she marry. The letter that deals with my few humble possessions clearly appoints Vilma’s orphans as the inheritors, on condition that they should not sell the house or the garden while Nunu is alive. (Somehow I imagined Nunu would go on living for many years yet, and why not? She has no particular reason to die, just as she has no particular reason to live! In any case the feeling that she will outlive me is both exciting and reassuring.) I put the ring away because I didn’t want to argue with Lajos and because I felt that this modest piece of jewelry, which might nevertheless help one of us given our circumstances — I thought the price it would fetch might cover the cost of a young woman’s trousseau — was better placed with me than be lost in the kind of clutter that naturally accumulated around Lajos, clutter that multiplied like weeds in a favorable climate. He’ll sell it or lose it in a game of cards, I thought, and was somewhat moved by his gesture of offering it to me. And just at the moment — God give me strength and help me be honest — when we had just laid my sister’s coffin in the earth, I hoped that the lives of Lajos, the children, and, indeed, my own life, might be put in order. The ring no longer mattered very much, it was the situation as a whole that mattered…So I put the ring away. And that’s how I took it away with me later when we separated and hid it among my mementos together with my will.

And in the meantime, in those years when I saw nothing of Lajos, I did not once look at the ring, because I was certain, the way a sleepwalker is certain, that the ring was fake.

“I was certain.” What a thing to say! I had never held the ring in my hands. I was frightened of it. I feared the knowledge I had never put into words. I couldn’t help but know that everything Lajos touched lost its original meaning and value, broke down into its elements, changed as did the noble metals once the alchemists got them into their retorts…I couldn’t help but know that Lajos was not only capable of changing the nature of metals and stones but could turn true people into false ones. I couldn’t help but know that a ring could not remain an innocent object once Lajos got his hands on it. Vilma had been ill a long time and couldn’t mind all the household affairs, so Lajos had the run of the place and had taken possession of the ring…the very moment Nunu said it, I knew it was true. Lajos had conned me with the ring, as with everything else. I sat up in bed, quite pale.

“Have you had a look at it?”

“Yes,” said Nunu quite calmly. “One time when you were not at home and left me with the keys. I took it to the jeweler. He had changed the setting too. He had picked some white metal for the clasp. Steel is less valuable than platinum. White gold, they said. He had changed the stone too. The ring you have looked after so carefully all these years is not worth five krajcárs.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

Nunu shrugged.

“Wake up, Esther!” she scolded me.

I watched the candle flame and said nothing. Of course, if Nunu said it, it must be true. And why should I pretend not to have suspected it for a long time, from the moment Lajos gave me the ring. A fake, I thought there and then. Everything he touches instantly becomes a fake. And his breath, it’s like the plague, I thought. I clenched my hand into a fist. It wasn’t because of the ring…what did a ring or any number of rings matter at my time of life? Everything he has touched is fake, I thought. And then I thought something else, saying it out loud:

“Was giving it to me a calculated act? Because he feared being pursued, by the children or someone else, later…and since the ring was a fake anyway he gave me the copy so they should discover I had it and once it turned out to be fake, blame me?”

I was thinking aloud, as I always did when with Nunu. If anyone understood Lajos it was old Nunu, who knew him inside and out and read his every thought, even those thoughts he dared not actually think. Nunu was always fair. She answered in her usual way, gently and without fuss.

“I don’t know. It’s possible. But that would be a really lowdown thing to do. Lajos was not a schemer of that kind. Lajos has never once committed a criminal act. And he loved you. I don’t think he would have used the ring to drag your name through the dirt. It simply happened that he had to sell the ring because he needed the money, but lacked the courage to admit he had sold it. So he had a copy made. And he gave you that worthless copy. Why? Was it a calculated act? Was it cheating? Maybe he just wanted to be generous. It was such a wonderful moment, everyone arriving fresh from Vilma’s funeral, his first gesture being to hand over to you the family’s only valuable heirloom. I suspected it as soon as you described the grand moment. That’s why I had it looked at later. It’s a fake.”

“Fake,” she repeated mechanically, in the flattest of tones.

“Why wait to tell me now?” I asked her.

Nunu brushed a few gray locks from her forehead.

“There was no need to tell you everything straightaway,” she said, almost tenderly. “You had had quite enough bad news about Lajos.”

I got out of bed, went over to the sideboard, and searched out the ring in the secret drawer, Nunu helping me look in the light of the billowing candle flame. Having found it, I held the ring to the flame and thoroughly examined it. I don’t know anything about precious stones.

“Scratch the surface of the mirror with it,” suggested Nunu.

But the stone made no mark on the glass. I put on the ring and gazed at it. The stone sparkled with a cold vacant light. It was a perfect copy, created by a master.

We remained sitting on the edge of the bed gazing at the ring. Then Nunu kissed me, gave a sigh, and went off without a word. I carried on sitting there for a long time staring at the fake stone. Lajos has not even arrived yet, I thought, but he has already taken something from me. That’s all he can do, it seems. That’s the way it is, it is his constitution. A terrible constitution, I thought, and started shivering. That’s how I fell asleep, all goose-flesh, the fake ring on my finger, my senses dulled. I was like someone who has spent too long in a stuffy room then suddenly feels dizzy in the pitiless sharp air of truth that roars about her like a gale.