Portraits of a Marriage

Part I

Look, see that man? Wait! turn your head away, look at me, keep talking. I wouldn’t like it if he glanced this way and spotted me; I don’t want him to greet us. Now you can look again … The little squat one there in the fur-collared coat? No, of course not. It’s the tall, pale-faced one in the black overcoat talking to that blond stick of a girl behind the counter. He is just having some candied orange peel wrapped. Strange, he never bought me candied orange peel.

What’s that, dear? … Nothing. Wait, I have to blow my nose.

Has he gone? Tell me when he has gone.

He’s paying now? … Can you see what his wallet looks like? Describe it carefully; I don’t want to look that way. Is it brown crocodile skin? Yes? Oh, I’m so pleased.

Why am I pleased? Just because. Well, yes, of course, I gave him the wallet, for his birthday. Ten years ago. Was I in love with him? … That’s a hard question, dear. Yes, I believe I did love him. Has he gone yet?

Good, I’m glad he’s gone. Wait, I must powder my nose. Does it show that I have been crying? … It’s stupid, I know, but see how stupid people can be? My heart still beats faster when I see him. Can I tell you who he is? I can tell you, darling, it’s no secret. That man was my husband.

Come on, let’s get some pistachio ice cream. I really can’t understand why people say you can’t eat ice cream in winter. I love this patisserie best in winter for the ice cream. There are times I almost believe that anything possible to be done should be done, not just because it’s good or makes sense, simply because it’s possible. For some years now in any case, ever since I’ve been alone, I’ve enjoyed coming here between five and seven in the winter. I like the crimson décor, the Victorian furnishings, the old waitresses, the big metropolitan square beyond the shop-window, watching the customers arrive. There’s a sort of warmth about it all, just a touch of fin-de-siècle. And there’s no better tea anywhere, have you noticed? … I know the new generation of women don’t go to patisseries. They prefer espressos, places where you have to rush, where there are no comfortable chairs, where it costs forty fillér for one black coffee, where they can eat salad for lunch, that’s how it is now. But it’s not my world. What I want is refined patisseries like this, with such furniture, with crimson carpets, with their ancient countesses and princesses, their mirrored cupboards. As you may imagine, I’m not here every day, but I do call in during the winter and feel comfortable here. My husband and I used to meet here pretty regularly, about six o’clock, at teatime, after he finished at the office.

Oh yes, he was on his way home from the office just now. It’s twenty after seven, his home time. I am familiar with every part of his routine, even now, as if it were his life I was living. At five minutes before six he rings for the office boy who brushes him down and presents him with his hat and coat, and he leaves the office, sending the car ahead so he can walk behind it and get some air. He doesn’t do much walking, that’s why he is so pale. Or there may be some other reason, I don’t know now. I don’t know the reason because I never see him, don’t talk to him, haven’t talked to him for three years. I don’t like those prissy little separations where the two parties walk arm-in-arm from the court, dine together at that famous restaurant in the park, are tender and solicitous toward each other as if nothing had happened and then, after divorce and dinner, go their own ways. I’m not that sort of woman: my morality, my blood pressure won’t allow it. I don’t believe that men and women can be good friends after divorce. Marriage is marriage; divorce, divorce. That’s what I think.

But what do you think? True, you’ve never been married.

I don’t think that relationships people have entered on and nurtured for decades, vows they have unthinkingly kept, are empty formalities, you see. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I think divorce is a kind of sacrilege. That’s how I was brought up. But I believe it anyway, not just because of my upbringing, but because my religion demands that I believe it. I believe it because I am a woman and a divorce is no mere formality for me any more than the ritual in the church before the registrar is a formality: either it binds people together, body and soul, for once and for all, or it divides them, absolutely, and sends them their utterly separate ways. Not for one minute did I console myself with the thought that my husband and I would remain “friends” after our divorce. He was courteous, of course, and remained concerned for me, and generous too, as custom dictates that he should be. Not me, though. I was neither polite nor generous. I even took the piano, yes, as was my right. I was furious for revenge, and would happily have taken the whole house, right down to the curtains — everything. The moment we divorced I became his enemy and I remain so, as I will till the day I die. I don’t want a friendly invitation to dinner at the restaurant in the park from him; I don’t want to play the little woman, to be delicate, to be someone who visits her ex-husband’s home and looks after things when the servant steals his linen. I wouldn’t care if they stole the lot, everything, nor would I rush over to him if I heard he was ill. Why? Because we are divorced, you understand? It’s not something to which one can become resigned.

Wait, I withdraw what I just said about him being ill. I wouldn’t want him to fall ill. If he did I would visit him in the sanatorium. What are you laughing at? Are you laughing at me? Do you think I’m hoping he’ll fall ill so I can visit him? Well, of course I hope that. As long as I have hope, I will carry on hoping. But I wouldn’t want him to be too ill. He was so very pale, did you notice? … He has been pale like that for some years now.

I’ll tell you everything. Have you got the time? Sadly, I have all too much.

Look, here’s the ice cream. After school, I found a job in an office. We were still writing to each other then, weren’t we? You went straight off to America but we carried on writing for a while, for three or four years, I think. I remember, there was an unhealthy, foolish puppy love between us. I rather disapprove of that now. It seems we can’t live without love. But then it was you I loved. In any case, your family was rich while we lived in three rooms and a kitchen opening onto a corridor — very much a middle-class kind of apartment opening onto a corridor. I looked up to you and that kind of admiration, I now realize, is already a sign of emotional attachment with young people. I too had a nanny but mine had to get her hot water secondhand, after I’d finished my bath. Such details are very important. There are frighteningly many shades of gentility between poverty and wealth. And from poverty down, how many shades of poverty do you think there are? You are wealthy, so you can’t know the enormous difference between four hundred and six hundred a month. It’s a bigger difference than between two thousand and ten thousand a month. I know a great deal about this now. Back home, our income was eight hundred. My husband earned six and a half thousand per month. One had to get used to this.

Everything was just a little different in their home compared with ours. We lived in a rented apartment; they in a rented villa. We had a balcony with geraniums; they had a little garden with two flower beds and an old walnut tree. We had an ordinary icebox that we filled with ice in summer, while my mother-in-law had a small electric refrigerator that could produce nice neat ice cubes too. We had a general handyman working for us; they had a married couple, a servant and a cook. We had three rooms; they had four, five in fact if you include the hall. But their hall was a proper hall with light chiffon covers on the doors, whereas ours was only an entrance hall with the icebox in it — a dark, urban Pest kind of entrance hall, together with a brush rack and old-fashioned coat stand. We had a three-valve radio set assembled by Papa from individually bought components, which received whatever station it felt like receiving; they had a radiogram, which was both a radio — on which you could even pick up Japan — and a gramophone, which worked by electricity and changed records automatically. I was brought up to earn my living; he was brought up, first and foremost, to live a refined, polite kind of life, one according to important social rules. Conformity was vital. There was an enormous social difference between us but I didn’t know it then.

There was a conversation we had over breakfast once. “Those mauve covers in the dining room are a little tiring,” he said. “They are quite crude and loud, like people who are always shouting at each other. Take a look round town, my dear, and find some different covers in time for fall.”

Twelve chairs needed recovering in some less “tiring” color.

I looked at him in confusion. I thought he was joking. But it was no joke — he carried on reading the papers with a perfectly serious expression. I could see that he had clearly thought through what he had just said, that the mauve color — a little common, I must admit — really did irritate him. My mother had chosen it. It was brand-new. I cried when he left. I’m not completely stupid; I understood perfectly what he meant … What he wanted to say was something that could never be said directly, in plain, simple words: that there was a gulf in culture between us, that his world was not mine; that though I knew everything and had learned all there was to learn, that though I was middle-class, just as he was, my circumstances were — in tiny but vital details — different from those he had loved and had gotten used to. The middle classes are far more sensitive to such subtle distinctions than the aristocracy are. Those in the middle are forever having to secure and display their status. The upper class have no such need: their positions are assured from birth. Those in the middle are always aspiring to some position or protecting it. My husband was no longer of the aspiring generation: he had in fact surpassed even those who had something to protect. He talked about this once. He was reading a German book, saying how he had discovered the answer to the great questions of life in it, including questions of the self. I don’t like such “great questions”—my view is that life consists of a million little questions and that it is always only the totality of those that really matters. So I asked, a little mockingly:

“Do you really think you have finally come to know yourself?”

“Of course,” he answered. And he looked at me from under his glasses with such childlike seriousness and goodwill that I regretted asking the question. “I am an artist,” he continued. “It is the only thing I have any gift for. It’s not uncommon in my class. That’s how families eventually come a cropper.”

He never talked about it again.

I didn’t understand it then. He never wrote, never painted, never played any musical instrument. He despised “art lovers.” But he did read a lot, “systematically”—his favorite word — a little too systematically for my taste. I read passionately, according to mood. He read as though he were carrying out one of life’s important duties. Once he had begun a book he wouldn’t leave it until it was finished — not even when it annoyed or bored him. Reading was a religious obligation for him: he valued letters as highly as priests do relics. But he was like that with pictures too, and with museums, theaters, and concerts. Everything interested him, literally everything. But the only thing I was “interested in” was him.

It was just that he did not practice any art. He ran the factory, traveled a lot, employed artists, and made a point of paying them particularly well. But he was very careful that he should not impose his tastes, which were far different from those of the majority of his employees and advisers, on his colleagues. He never raised his voice. He spoke gently and courteously, as if he had constantly to be apologizing for something; as if he were at a loss in some matter and required help. At the same time he knew when to stick to his principles in important matters — and in business.

Do you know what my husband was? He was that rarest of all beings in creation. He was a man. He was manly.

I don’t mean in the romantic, theatrical sense of the word. Not the way a champion boxer might be said to be manly. It was his spirit that was manly: inquiring, logical, restless, adventurous, and suspicious. That was another thing about him I didn’t know at the time. Discovering such things is one of life’s hardest lessons.

It’s not what we learned at school, is it, you and I?

Perhaps I should begin at the point when he introduced me to one of his friends, the writer, Lázár. Do you know him? … Have you read his books? … I’ve read everything he has written now. I have burrowed my way through his books, thinking there must be some secret hidden in them, as if they might solve the enigma of my own life. But no. There are no answers to enigmas like that. It is life itself that provides the answers, sometimes quite surprising ones. I hadn’t read a single line of his before. Yes, I knew him by name, but had no idea my husband knew him personally — that they were friends. I came home one evening in the third year of my marriage and found him with my husband. This was the beginning of my other education. It was the first time I realized I knew nothing about my husband. I’d been living with a man yet knew nothing about him. Sometimes now I think, or rather I know, indeed am all too aware of the fact, that I had no idea what he really liked, the kind of things he preferred, and was utterly ignorant of his desires. Do you know what the two of them were doing that evening, Lázár and my husband? …

They were playing.

It was a strange, unsettling kind of game.

It wasn’t a game of rummy: nothing like it. In any case, my husband hated and despised all formal recreation, and that included cards. They were playing, but in a grotesque kind of way, a little frighteningly, so I simply couldn’t understand it at first but was frightened and nervous as they talked, as if I had blundered into some lunatic conversation. I couldn’t recognize the man engaged with that stranger as my husband. As I said, we had been married three years. The stranger leapt to his feet, glanced at my husband, and, very politely, said:

“Welcome, Ilonka. I hope you don’t mind me bringing Peter home?”

And he pointed to my husband, who stood up awkwardly and gave me an apologetic look. I thought they’d gone mad. But they didn’t really pay me much attention after that. The stranger slapped my husband on the back and said:

“We met on Arena utca. Imagine, he didn’t want to stop, the idiot — he just said hello and went on. I wasn’t going to let him do that, of course. I said, ‘Peter, you old fool, you’re not cross with me? …’ Then I took his arm and brought him home. So, my dears,” he said and spread his arms, “give each other a hug. I will even allow you a kiss.”

You may imagine how I stood there. Gloves in hand, my handbag on my arm, still wearing my hat, I stood in the middle of the room like some donkey, wide-eyed and staring. My first thought was to run to the telephone and ring the doctor or the ambulance. Or the police. But my husband took my hand and kissed it, saying:

“Let’s put this behind us, Ilonka. I am so pleased you are happy together.”

Then we sat down to supper. The writer sat in Peter’s place, took charge, and issued his instructions as if he were master of the house. He addressed me using the informal te. Naturally, the maid thought we had all gone mad and was so frightened she dropped the salad dish. They didn’t explain the game to me that evening and that, in fact, was the point of the game. I should be told nothing. They had planned it, the pair of them, while waiting for me, and they acted it out perfectly, like professional actors. The game was based on the idea that I had divorced Peter some years ago and had moved in with the writer, my husband’s friend. Peter was so upset by this — in the game, that is — that he had left everything to us: the house, the furniture, the lot. In other words the writer was now my husband. Peter, so went the game, had met the writer in the street and the writer had taken him by the arm — by “him” I mean my offended, divorced husband — and said: “Look, let’s have no more of this. What’s happened has happened, come and have supper with us.” And Peter had accepted the invitation. And now we were together, all three of us, in the house where I had “previously” lived with Peter, having a friendly supper, the writer now “being” my husband, sleeping in Peter’s bed, taking his place in my life … You understand? That was the mad game they were playing.

But the game had some subtle refinements.

Peter pretended he was on edge, tortured by his memories. The writer pretended that he was rather too free and easy, a little too relaxed about it, because, after all, the strange situation was not entirely without stress for him either, since he would have felt guilty with Peter there, and that, precisely, was why he was being so loud and jovial. I “pretended” … but no, I wasn’t pretending, I just sat with them and stared, now at one, now at the other of these two grown, intelligent men who, for some reason I couldn’t begin to guess, were playing the idiot. I did slowly begin to understand the more subtle “rules of the game.” But I understood something else that evening too.

I understood that my husband, whom I had previously believed to be entirely mine — every last inch of him, as they say, right down to the recesses of his soul — was not at all mine but a stranger with secrets. It was like discovering something shocking about him: that he had served time in jail or that he had perverse passions, something that didn’t fit the picture I had of him — I mean the picture I had been painting of him in my own soul. I understood that my husband was only tied to me in certain specific ways, but that in others he remained a mysterious, unfamiliar figure, someone just as strange as the writer who had stopped him in the street and “brought him here.” I understood that what was going on was in some way against me but above my head; that, more than comrades, they were accomplices.

I understood that my husband inhabited worlds other than the one I knew. I understood that this other man, the writer, exercised a certain power over my husband’s soul.

Tell me — what do you think power is? … Because there is so much written and said about it. What is political power, what’s the cause of it, how does it happen that a man can exert his will over millions? And what does our power, women’s power, consist of? Love, you say. Well, maybe it is love. Myself, I have occasional doubts about the word nowadays. I don’t deny love, not by any means. It is the greatest earthly power. And yet sometimes I feel that men, when they love us, do so because they have no choice, and that they even look down on love — on us — a little. In every real man there is a kind of reserve, as if he had closed off some part of his soul, kept it away from women, and said, “You can come so far, darling, but no farther. Here is my seventh room. Here, I want to be alone.” It drives the more stupid kind of woman quite mad. They lose their tempers. The wiser sort are first sad and curious, then resign themselves to it.

But what kind of power can one person have over another’s soul? Why did this unhappy, restless, clever, frightening, and at the same time foolish, wounded person — this writer — exercise his power over my husband’s soul?

Because power he had, as I was to find out: a dangerous, even fatal power. One time, much later, my husband said that the role of this man was to be “a witness” to his life. He tried very hard to explain this. The way he put it was that there existed a witness figure of some kind in everyone’s life: someone we meet in youth, someone we recognize and consider stronger than we are, so that everything we do afterward is an attempt to hide whatever we are ashamed of from this witness-turned-merciless-judge. The witness-judge doesn’t readily believe us. He knows something about us that no one else does. We might become important people — we might be ministers of state, we might be awarded the Nobel Prize — but the witness simply stands by and smiles as if to say, “Do you really take yourself so seriously?” …

And he went on to explain that everything we did was, to some extent, done for this witness: it was he who had to be convinced, it was to him we had to prove something. Our careers, the great struggles of our individual lives, were all, first and foremost, for the witness’s benefit. You know that awkward moment when a young husband first introduces his wife to “the” friend, the great companion of his childhood, then stands by, anxiously watching to see if the friend approves his choice of partner and finds her attractive? … Naturally the friend is courteous and thoughtful, but secretly he is jealous, because, whatever he thinks of her, he is the figure the woman is replacing in a sentimental relationship. So, you see, that was the way they were both weighing me up that evening. The trouble was, they already knew a great deal, the two of them, much more than I could begin to guess.

Because another thing I understood from their conversation that evening was that these two accomplices, my husband and the writer, had their own thoughts about men and women and about human relationships in general, thoughts my husband had never discussed with me. This hurt, because it suggested that I was not worth talking to about such things — about things in general.

When the stranger left some time after midnight, I confronted my husband and asked him directly:

“Tell me honestly, do you look down on me, just a little?”

He gazed at me through cigar smoke, tired, his eyes screwed up, as though he were suffering a hangover after an orgy, and considered my question carefully. To tell you the truth, by the time this evening was over, by the time my husband had finished playing this peculiar game with the writer he’d brought home, I felt worse than if he’d been at a real orgy. We were both exhausted. Strange, bitter feelings were stirring in me.

“No,” he replied solemnly. “I don’t look down on you, not at all. Why should you think that? You are an intelligent woman with powerful instincts,” he added.

It sounded convincing but I didn’t quite trust him. I sat down opposite him at the cleared table — we had been sitting at the table the whole evening, not moving to the comfort of the parlor, because the guest preferred sitting and chatting among a heap of cigarette butts and empty bottles of wine.

“Yes, I am intelligent and have powerful instincts,” I answered, then hesitated. “But what do you think of my character, my soul?”

I was aware the question sounded a little pathetic. My husband gave me his full attention, but did not answer me.

It was as if he were saying: “That must remain my secret. Let it be enough that I acknowledge your intelligence and the power of your instincts.”

That might have been how it started. I remembered that evening for a long time.

The writer was not a frequent visitor. Nor did he meet my husband very often. But whenever they did meet, I felt like a woman who notices an unfamiliar scent on her husband, a scent that clings to his hands even though he has only shaken another woman’s hand. Of course I was jealous of the writer and for a while nagged at my husband to invite him to supper again. It embarrassed him and he dismissed the idea.

“He doesn’t lead much of a social life,” he said without looking into my eyes. “He’s a loner. A writer. He works all the time.”

But I discovered that they did sometimes meet in secret. I spotted them in a café one day. I was just across the street. I felt I’d been stabbed with a sharp object, a knife or a needle: it was a wild, sick feeling. They couldn’t have seen me. They were sitting in one of the booths, my husband speaking, both of them laughing. My husband’s face looked so much like a stranger’s: it was quite changed, nothing like his face at home, the face I knew. I quickly walked on and knew I had gone pale. The blood had drained from me.

You’re mad, I thought. What do you want? … That man is his friend, a famous writer, a special, highly intelligent person. So what if they meet sometimes? It means nothing. What do you want from them? … Why is your heart beating so fast? … Are you afraid they will not include you in their games, in one of their peculiar, grotesque games? Are you afraid they don’t think you clever or cultured enough? Are you jealous?

I had to laugh. But the pounding in my breast did not calm down. My heart was beating just the way it did the day I was to taken to the hospital to have the baby. But that second wild beating of the heart was a sweet and happy sensation.

I carried on down the street, walking as fast as I could, feeling cheated, left out of something. My husband didn’t want me to meet with this extraordinary man he felt privileged to know from his youth. My husband was not much of a talker generally. I felt I was being cheated, even betrayed somehow. My heart was still pounding that evening when, at the usual time, my husband came home.

“Where have you been?” I asked as he kissed my hand.

“Where?” He looked blank. “Nowhere. I’ve come home.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

He gave me a long look. He looked almost bored as he answered.

“You’re right. I forgot. I bumped into Lázár. We had coffee together. You see, I had forgotten. Did you see me in the café?”

His voice was sincere, calm, and just a touch surprised. I felt ashamed of myself.

“Forgive me,” I said. “I just feel unhappy knowing so little about that man. I don’t think he is a true friend of yours. Nor of mine. Of either of us. Do please drop him. Try to avoid him,” I begged.

My husband gave me a curious look.

“Oh,” he said and wiped his glasses with great care, as always. “There’s no need to avoid Lázár. He is never intrusive.”

And that was the last time he mentioned him.

By now I wanted to know everything about Lázár. Having found some of his books — all dedicated, with special inscriptions — in my husband’s library, I read as many as I could. What was peculiar about the inscriptions? They were … how to put it? … disrespectful … No, that’s not the right word … they were strangely mocking. It was as if the author despised not only the dedicatee, but his own books, and himself for ever having written them. There was something a little self-deprecating, ironic, melancholy, in the tone of them. It was as if what he had really written under his name was: “All right, I’ve signed, but I am not quite the person this book implies I am.”

Up to that point I’d regarded the writer’s calling as a kind of secular priesthood. The book was the solemn pulpit from which such people addressed the world! I couldn’t understand everything he wrote. It was as if he disdained people, even the reader, people such as me, and was determined not to reveal anything valuable about himself. Readers and critics had a great deal to say about that tendency of his. There were many who hated the writer, though, of course, some people hate anyone who is well known. He never spoke about his books or about literature when we met. He just wanted to know something about everything. One evening he called in and I had to explain to him in great detail how to prepare rabbit stew. Would you believe it? Yes, rabbit stew. He wanted it down to the last detail; he even asked the cook. Then he started talking about giraffes. It was all very interesting. He could talk about anything and he knew a great deal; it was only literature he never spoke about.

Was there a touch of madness in the two of them? I myself thought there might be at first. But then I dismissed the thought. It was simply — as so often in life — not what I expected. They were not mad, I thought, they were just peculiarly private people.

Then Lázár dropped out of our lives. We read his books and articles, but we didn’t see him. Sometimes there was gossip about his connection with some politician or a well-known woman, but no one knew anything for sure. Politicians swore that our famous author-friend was a member of their party; some women boasted of having captured this elusive exotic beast and bound him head-to-foot. But time after time, the fugitive went to ground and disappeared. Years passed and we saw nothing of him. What was he doing in that time? I don’t know. He lived. He read. He wrote. Maybe he performed conjuring tricks. And that reminds me …

It’s five years later now. I’d been married to my husband for eight years. The baby was born in the third. Yes, it was a boy. I sent you his photograph. I know — he was gorgeous. Then I stopped writing to anyone, including you. The child was everything: he was all I lived for: everyone else, close or distant, disappeared. One shouldn’t be allowed to love so intensely. Nor should anyone be the object of such love, not even our own children. Love is the fiercest kind of selfishness. So yes, when the child was born, our correspondence came to an end. You were my dearest friend, but I didn’t need you — not even you — anymore, because the child had arrived. Those two years while the child was alive were as much happiness as the world could offer. I felt superhuman, calm and fearful at once. I knew the child wouldn’t survive. How did I know? People just know such things. Some of us feel everything and are fully aware of our fates. I knew that such happiness, such beauty and goodness as was concentrated in that little child, was not to be. I knew he would die. No, don’t argue, and don’t look so horrified: I just know this better than you do. But those two years were years of happiness. He died of scarlet fever. It was winter, three weeks after his second birthday.

Why do innocent children die? Can you tell me that? Have you thought about it? I have thought deep and long. Not even God answers questions like that.

I don’t have very much else to do, so this is what I think about. Yes, even now. And I will think about it as long as I live. One never recovers from such a loss. The death of a child is the one true form of torture. Everything else is merely a shadow of this one agony. You are not acquainted with it, I know. And you know what? I don’t know what to say, whether I envy or pity you for not knowing it … I think I pity you.

Perhaps it would have been different if the child hadn’t arrived that third year. And other things might have been different too, very different, if he had survived. They might. A child is, after all, the greatest of miracles, the one true meaning of life; and yet — we shouldn’t deceive ourselves on this point — no child can resolve the problems between two people. A child cannot calm fits of anxiety or solve insoluble complexities. But there’s no point in talking about that now. The fact is, the child was born on a particular day, lived two years, and then died. I spent two more years after that with my husband, and then we separated.

I’m quite sure now that we’d have separated in the third year of the marriage had it not been for the child. Why? … Because by that time I knew I could not live with my husband. There is no pain like the pain of knowing you love someone but cannot live with them.

“Why?” I asked him once, and he told me what he thought the problem was.

“You want me to give up my humanity,” he said. “I can’t do that. I’d sooner die.”

I immediately understood and replied: “Then don’t die. Live on and remain a stranger to me.”

He always meant what he said: he was that kind of man. He didn’t always do it straightaway — sometimes it took a few years for words to become deeds, but sooner or later deeds followed. Other people talk about hopes and plans after supper by way of conversation, then immediately forget what they’ve said; when my husband talked of such things, action followed. It was as if he were bound to his words in some visceral way: what he said once remained with him and would not let him go. If he said “I would sooner die,” then I was to know he meant it, that he would not surrender himself to me but would rather die first. It was part of his character, his fate … Sometimes, in the course of a conversation, he would let fall a few words, criticizing somebody, or suddenly reveal a plan — then time would pass without further mention until, one day, I’d notice that the person he’d criticized had vanished from our lives; that the plan mentioned in passing had two years later turned into reality.

By the third year I knew our marriage was in deep trouble. My husband treated me with courtesy and tenderness. He loved me. He did not cheat on me. He was not involved with any other woman, only with me. And yet — please look away a moment, I think I am blushing — I felt that in the first three years of marriage, and especially in the last two of being together, that I was not so much his wife as …

He loved me, no question about it. But at the same time it was as if he were merely tolerating me in his house, in his very life. There was patience and tolerance in his manner, but it was as though he had no choice in that matter and he’d simply resigned himself to living with me, to sharing a home with me, sharing one room of his life. That’s how it felt. He carried on talking to me as charming and affectionate as ever, taking off his glasses, listening, giving advice, sometimes even joking, and we’d go to the theater and lead a social life — and I’d watch him lean back, his arms folded, taking good-natured stock of the others, with just a hint of suspicion visible in his mocking, doubtful expression. Because he did not entirely yield himself to others, either. He listened to them seriously, fully sensible of his obligations to them, then answered them politely; but there was in his voice, I saw, a patronizing note, a certain pity, as if he did not quite believe them, as if he was aware that under even the most sincere human declarations there remained unarticulated layers of despair, fury, lies, and ignorance. It wasn’t something he could actually tell people, of course, and that was why he listened through to them with that deprecating forbearance, with that serious skeptical expression, smiling occasionally and shaking his head, as if telling the other person: “Do carry on. I know what I know.”

You were asking me earlier if I loved him. I suffered a great deal with him. But I know I loved him — and I even know why I loved him … I loved him because he was sad and solitary; because he was beyond anyone’s help, even mine. But it took a long time, and a lot of suffering, before I realized and understood this. For years I thought he was looking down on me, that he had a low opinion of me … but it was something else.

At forty years of age that man was as isolated as a monk in the desert. We lived in a world capital, in fine style, with many acquaintances, part of a considerable society. It just so happened that we were alone.

Just once I saw him in a different light, just once and for a moment only. It was the moment the child was born, when that pale, sad, lonely figure was first allowed into the room. He entered awkwardly, as if he were taking part in a scene that was deeply embarrassing, overfamiliarly human, as if he were a little ashamed to be an actor in it. He stopped by the crib, leaned forward uncertainly, his hands clasped behind his back as usual, wary and reserved. I was exhausted at the time but I watched him very closely. He leaned over the crib and then, for a moment, that pale face of his lit up with some inner glow. But he didn’t say anything. He gazed at the baby for a long time, for maybe twenty minutes in all, without moving. Then he came over, put his hand on my brow and stood silently by my bed. He didn’t look at me but stared out of the window. It was dawn on a foggy October day. He stayed by my bed a while longer, stroking my brow. His palm was hot. The next moment he was talking to the doctor. It was as if he had abruptly finished one conversation and started another, with a different subject.

But now I know that in that moment, perhaps for the first and last time in his life, he was happy. He might even have considered revealing something of the secret he called his humanity. While the child was alive he talked to me differently, with a greater intimacy, but I still felt I was not entirely part of him. I know there are people who struggle desperately to overcome a kind of inner resistance, some blend of pride, fear, sensitivity, and uncertainty, that won’t let them join the crowd like the others. But he would, up to a point at least, for a while, have made his peace with the world for the sake of the child. I could see him struggling with himself and was filled with a kind of crazy hope while the child was alive. He was trying to change his nature, to domicile it the way a circus trainer tames a lion. Silent and proud and sad as he was, he was doing his best to be humble and obedient. He’d bring me presents, for example. It was enough to make me weep the way this newly “humble” man — a man who’d always been ashamed to bring me little presents for Christmas or my birthday but insisted on something expensive like a pleasure cruise, a fur coat, a new car, or jewelry — now started bringing me what I had really been missing, touching little gifts hardly worth anything, such as a bag of hot chestnuts he’d bought on the way home, sweets, and so on. Up till that time I’d had the best of everything: the best doctors, the finest nursery, and this wonderful ring I am wearing now. Yes, it is valuable. But now he’d arrive home wearing a shy smile and clumsily unwrap a little package containing, say, a delicately crocheted baby’s jacket and bonnet. He’d put it down on the nursery table, give a brief, apologetic smile, then quickly leave the room.

I tell you I could have wept at those times. Wept with joy and hope.

But there was another feeling too, an important part of the complex whole, and that was fear. It was the fear that he would not win the struggle, that he could not overcome himself, that neither of us could manage our lives, not even with the help of the baby. It was the fear that there was something not right about all this. But what could it be? … I’d go to church and pray. Help me, God! I pleaded. But God knows that the only help we can receive is that which we ourselves give.

But he certainly struggled with himself while the child lived.

I can see you’re impatient. You ask me what the problem was between us. You want to know what kind of man my husband really was … It’s a hard question, darling. I have been puzzling over it for eight years. Even after we parted I continued puzzling. Now and then I think I finally have the truth. But it’s made up of entirely unreliable pieces of guesswork. I can’t name the disease: I can only tell you the symptoms.

You asked me if he loved me? … Well, yes, he loved me. But I think he only truly loved his father and his son.

He cared for his father and was full of respect for him. He visited him every week. My mother-in-law dined with us each week. “Mother-in-law”: there’s something nasty about the word. But this woman, my husband’s mother, was one of the most refined creatures I had ever met. When father-in-law died and when this wealthy, highly elegant woman was left alone in the big house, I feared she would get too used to us. People are so prejudiced. But she was all sensitivity, all consideration. She moved into a small apartment, was a burden on no one, and managed all the difficult, fiddly bits of her life by herself with considerable care and foresight. She asked for neither pity nor kindness. Of course she knew things about her son that I couldn’t know. Only mothers know the truth. She knew her son was tender, respectful, and attentive; it was just that she didn’t love him. Such a terrible thing! But we should consider it calmly, because that is what I got used to with my husband — it was something we both learned from Lázár: that the truth had a certain creative, cleansing power. There was never any argument or disagreement between those two, between mother and child. “Mother dear,” said he, and “Yes, dear son,” she answered. There was always that ritual of kissing hands, a certain formal courtesy, if you like. But there was never any intimacy. The two never spent any time alone in a room together; one was always standing up and finding something else to do elsewhere, or inviting someone in to join them. They feared being left alone together, as if there were some urgent matter that they’d immediately have to discuss and there would be trouble, real trouble, if their secret was revealed, some secret that they, mother and son, could never talk about. That’s what I felt, anyway. Was it really like that? I sometimes wondered. But yes, that’s how it was.

I would like to have made peace between them. But that could only be when they were not cross with each other! I tried to probe the nature of the relationship, proceeding very carefully, the way you’d probe a wound. But the first touch frightened them and they immediately started talking about something else. What could I have said? … Neither accusation nor complaint had any clearly visible, tangible object. Might I have suggested that mother and son had injured each other some time in the past? I couldn’t, because both were, perfectly properly, “fulfilling their obligations.” It was as if they had been constructing alibis their whole lives. Our name days, birthdays, Christmas, those lesser and greater tribal rituals common to all families, were properly conducted, down to the minutest detail. Mama received a present; Mama gave a present. My husband kissed her hand; she kissed his forehead. At dinner or supper Mama took her place at the head of the family table and everyone conducted respectful conversations with her, on the subjects of family and the world at large, never arguing, listening to Mama’s precise, courteous, quietly stated views — and then they ate and talked of something else. Oh, these family dinners! Those silences between conversations! It was this talking-about-something-else, this polite silence, forever and ever! This wasn’t something I could talk about with them between soup and main course, between birthday and Christmas, between youth and aging. I couldn’t say to them, “You are always talking about something else.” I couldn’t say anything because even with me, my husband was always talking about something else, and I suffered the same silences, the same shutting out as my mother-in-law, and sometimes I even thought that we were both to blame, his mother and I, because we didn’t know how to go about it: we had not succeeded in getting him to reveal his secret; we had not accomplished our mission, the one real mission of our lives. We simply didn’t understand this man. She had given him life and I had given him a child … is there any more a woman could give a man? You do agree — she can’t give any more? I don’t know. One day I began to doubt. And that is what I want to tell you, today, because we have met, because I have seen him, and I feel now that everything has built up inside me and I must tell someone, because I think about it all the time. So I’ll tell you now. I’m not boring you? Do you have half an hour? Listen, there may be just time enough.

He might have respected both of us, even loved us to some degree. But neither his mother nor I understood him. That was the great failure in our lives.

You say we need not, indeed it is impossible, to “understand” love? You’re wrong, darling. I used to say that, said it for a long time. I said these things were decreed by God. Love just is or is not. What is there to “understand”? … What, after all, is the value of human feeling if it’s just the product of things we can explain? … But then, as we grow older, we learn it’s not like that, it’s different from what we thought: we do, after all, have to try to “understand” things, including love. No, don’t shake your head and smile, it is true. We’re human beings: we are conscious of everything that happens to us. Our feelings and passions become tolerable or intolerable through consciousness. It is not enough to love.

Let’s not argue about that. I know what I know. And I have paid a considerable price for it. What price? … My life, darling, my whole life. The fact that I am sitting here with you in this patisserie, in this lovely crimson salon, watching my husband buying candied orange peel for someone else. Not that it particularly surprises me, him buying candied orange peel. He had such taste in everything.

Who is he buying it for? For the other woman, of course. I don’t even like to say her name. The one he went on to marry. Didn’t you know he had remarried? I imagined the news would have spread to Boston too; that you might have heard, even in America. It shows how silly we can be. How silly to think our personal affairs, things really close to our hearts, should be matters of world importance. While it was all happening — I mean the divorce and my husband’s second marriage — events of genuine world importance were taking place, countries were being divided, people were preparing for war, and one day war did break out … Not that it was surprising. When people prepare for something, said Lázár — war, for example — with such assiduity, such determination, such foresight, such calculation, that thing is bound eventually to happen. All the same I wouldn’t have been surprised at that time to see banner headlines carrying news of my own personal war, my own battles, my defeats, my occasional victories — an entire survey of the front line that was my life … But that’s another story. At the time the child was born that was all in the dim and distant future.

Perhaps I could put it this way: that in the two years when we still had the child, my husband made peace with the world and with me. Not a proper permanent peace, not yet, just a kind of amnesty, a ceasefire. He waited and watched. He worked to put his soul in order. He was, after all, a man of unimpeachable soul. As I told you before, he was a man. And more than that: he was a gentleman. I don’t mean the sort that goes to gentlemen’s clubs, of course, the sort that fights duels or shoots himself because he cannot pay his gambling debts. He never touched cards, in any case. On one occasion, I remember, he declared that a gentleman does not play at cards because he has no right to money that he has not earned. In other words, he was that sort of gentleman. He was polite and patient with the weak. With those who were his equals he was strict and mindful of his rank, because he did not recognize any other kind of rank. No social rank, in his opinion, was higher than his own. The only other people he admired were artists. They have chosen the most difficult path, he said. They were God’s children. Only real artists, no one else, were superior to him.

And because he was a gentleman, he tried, when the child was born, to alleviate that frightening sense of detachment in his soul that was so painful to me. He made genuinely moving efforts to get closer to me and the child. It was like a tiger deciding to go on a vegetarian diet or to join the Salvation Army. How hard life is, how hard it is to be human …

That’s how we lived for two years. Not entirely well, not happily. But quietly. Those two years must have cost him dear. It needs a superhuman effort to go against one’s nature. He sweated blood for happiness. Starting from a position of absolute paralysis he tried to become relaxed, carefree, easygoing. The poor thing! … He might perhaps have suffered less if I’d released him psychologically, so all my needs, all my demands for love, could be satisfied by the child. But something was changing in me too, something I didn’t understand then. My love for my child was, exclusively, through my husband. Maybe that is why God decided to punish me.

What are you staring at me for? … You don’t believe me? … Or maybe you’re frightened? … Ah, my dear, I know this story of mine isn’t exactly charming.

I was mad about the child, lived only for him, and it was only in these two years I felt my life had meaning and purpose … but it was because of him I loved the child: it was for his sake I loved him, do you understand now? I wanted the child to bind him to me, to bind his entire being. Dreadful as it is to say, but I now know that the child, for whom I remain in perpetual mourning, was merely a tool, a means to force my husband to love me. If I were driven into a confessional and made to stay there till dawn, I could not have found the words to say this to him. But even without words, in his heart of hearts, secretly he knew it, just as I knew it, even without the words, because I did not yet have words for things in life … The right words always come too late and we pay a terrible price for them. It was Lázár who had the words then. One day my husband was to provide me with the words, without particularly meaning to, half by accident, the way we discover a secret compartment. But that comes later. In the meantime we carried on, knowing next to nothing of each other. Everything was in shipshape order, on the outside at least. At breakfast time the nurse would bring in the baby, who was dressed in light blue and pink. My husband would talk to me and to the child, then get in the car and drive to the factory. We’d often invite guests for dinner. They’d drink to our happiness, praise our lovely home: me, the young mother, the beautiful baby, and our perfect lives. What were they thinking when they left? The foolish ones were jealous, but those who were wise and sensitive must have breathed a sigh of relief when they left our house, and thought, “Alone at last!” We served excellent food and the rarest foreign wines; we enjoyed quiet, thoughtful conversation. It was just that something was missing, and the guests who could sense this were inevitably happy to leave. My mother-in-law tended to arrive in a state of mild panic and leave as soon as she decently could. We felt all this but did not know it. Maybe my husband did know it; he probably did … But there was nothing he could do at the time except clench his teeth and go on being helplessly happy.

I wouldn’t let go of him, would not let his soul escape for a second. I clung to him with the child. I silently blackmailed him with my emotional needs. Can these powers bind human beings? … Yes, they can; they are the only power. My every moment was dedicated to the child, but only because I knew that while there was a child my husband was mine and only mine. It is the sin God can’t forgive. You can’t make someone love you, nor can you make yourself love them. Nevertheless you try to impose your will; you strain every muscle and nerve to love. It’s the only way, you say? … Well, it was the way I loved him.

We lived off the child and fought each other. Our wars were fought not with words but with smiles, conversation, and temper. Then one day it happened. I just grew tired and my energy gave out. It was as if my feet and hands had gone to sleep. Because he wasn’t the only one who gave all his energy to his work: I did too.

I tired myself out, in the way people do when they are going to be ill. This was in early fall, many years ago. It was a mild, sweet fall. The child had just had his second birthday and was beginning to be really interesting, an utterly delightful, heartstring-tugging, proper character, a somebody. One evening we were sitting in the garden. The child had been put to bed.

“How about going to Merano for six weeks?” my husband suggested.

Two years earlier it was I who had asked if we could visit Merano in the early fall. I’m superstitious; I like a bit of quackery and believed in the grape cure diet. He didn’t come with me the first time, making some excuse to stay behind. I knew he didn’t enjoy traveling with me, because he feared the closeness implied by a journey, feared the days when two people are thrown entirely on each other’s resources in a hotel room in a strange place.

At home the house, our work, our friends, and the business of our lives came between us. This time he wanted to reward me the best he could.

We went to Merano. My mother-in-law moved into our house while we were away, as was the custom. She looked after the child.

It was a strange journey. It was a honeymoon, a valediction, a process of getting acquainted, a running of the gauntlet: it was all of these at once. He tried to bare his soul for me. Because you can be certain of one thing, my dear: that it was never boring in this man’s company. I suffered much, it almost killed me, occasionally I was almost a complete blank, occasionally I felt reborn when with him, but not for one moment was I bored. That’s just to set the record straight. So, one day we set off to Merano.

Fall was golden, lush, operatic, glorious. We traveled by car. The trees were hung with yellow fruit. The air was richly scented and ripe; the whole world was a garden at the point of turning. There were people in the streets, rich people, people without a care, swarming everywhere, swimming. Big, fat-bellied wasps were humming in the heat, heavy with light. There were Americans just getting drunk on the sun; there were French women bright as dragonflies and more cautious English visitors. The world had not been boarded over yet; for a moment everything — Europe, life itself — was bathed in intense light. But there was a touch of panic too, a sense of having to enjoy everything at once before it all went. People could feel fate working against them. We were lodging in the best hotel, went to concerts, heard fine music, had two adjoining rooms with a view of the mountains.

What were these six weeks about? What were we waiting for? Were we hoping for something? We seemed to be living in silence. My husband had brought books to read: he had perfect pitch as far as language was concerned and, like a great musician, could tell the false note from the true. He was like Lázár in this respect. We’d sit on the balcony at twilight and I’d read to him: French poems, English novels, heavy German prose. And Goethe and some scenes from Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. He loved that play. He had seen it on stage once, in Berlin, and had never forgotten it. He also loved Büchner’s Danton’s Death. And Hamlet, and Richard III. I was obliged to read him verses by the great Hungarian poet János Arany, from his late Autumn Crocuses cycle. Then we’d dress, have supper in one of the best restaurants, drink sweet Italian wine and eat sea crab.

In some ways we were living like nouveaux riches, like people who want to make up for everything they have ever lacked, to enjoy it all, and all at once. People that listen to Beethoven while chewing on a capon and slurping French Champagne in time to the music. But it was also like saying good-bye to something. Those years, the last years before the war, were drenched in this peculiar atmosphere. It was like saying good-bye without quite knowing it. My husband said precisely that: something about Europe. I said nothing. It was not Europe I was leaving. Can we, just the two of us, as women, own up to the fact that, concepts such as “Europe” have little to do with us? What I knew deep in my heart was that I lacked the strength to cut myself off from something more important. I was almost choking with helplessness.

One night we were sitting on the balcony. There were grapes in a glass bowl, and big yellow apples. It was apple-gathering time in Merano. The air was so sweet, so full of the smell of apples, it was as if someone had left the lid off an enormous jar of preserves. Below us a French palm-court orchestra was playing melodies from an old Italian opera. My husband had wine brought to the table; the wine — Lacrima Christi — was dark and stood in a crystal jug. There was sweetness in everything, even in the music, something a little overripe, a touch sickening. My husband felt it too and declared:

“Tomorrow we go home.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s be on our way.”

Suddenly he spoke up in that melancholy, deep voice of his that always touched me. It was like a solemn instrument of some primitive tribe:

“Tell me, Ilonka, what do you think we should do after this?” he asked.

Did I understand what he meant? He was talking about us, our life together. It was a starry night. I looked at the stars, the autumnal stars in that Italian sky, and shuddered. I felt the moment had come when we had to speak the truth. My hands and feet were cold but my palms were sweating with excitement.

“I don’t know, I really don’t know. I couldn’t bear to leave you. I can’t imagine life without you,” I said.

“I know, it’s very difficult,” he calmly replied. “I wouldn’t want it, either. Maybe it’s not the right time yet. Maybe there will never be a right time. But there’s something in our life together, just as there is in this holiday, as in everything in our mutual lives, that is shameful and unbefitting. Is it that we daren’t tell each other what that is?”

At last he had said it. I closed my eyes and felt dizzy. I stayed silent like that, my eyes closed.

“So tell me at last, what is it that is driving us apart?” I asked.

For a long time he said nothing, simply thought. He put out his cigarette and lit another. He was smoking strong English cigarettes at that time, the smoke of which always made me feel a little giddy. But that smell was part of him too, like the smell of hay in his linen cupboard, because he loved to scent his clothes with a bitter oil smelling of hay. What extraordinary details constitute our sense of a person!

“I don’t feel a great need to be loved,” he finally said.

“That’s impossible,” I said, grinding my teeth. “You are a human being. You have an absolute need to be loved.”

“It is precisely this that women don’t believe, cannot know, and do not understand,” he said as if addressing the stars. “That there exists a type of man who has no need of love. He gets on fine without it.”

He spoke without pathos, from a great distance, but perfectly naturally. I knew he was telling me the truth now. At least he believed he was telling me the truth. I started to argue.

“You can’t know everything about yourself. Maybe you just don’t have the courage to feel. You should be less certain, more humble,” I pleaded with him.

He threw away his cigarette. He stood up. He was tall — did you see how tall he was? — a head taller than me. But now he towered over me, leaning against the balcony railings, looking more melancholy than ever with the foreign stars behind him. I wanted to unravel him, to find his secret heart. He crossed his arms.

“What is a woman’s life?” he pondered. “Feeling possesses every cell of her, from head to foot. I am perfectly aware of this, but I can only understand it in an intellectual way. I can’t surrender myself to feeling.”

“And the child?” I raised my voice.

“That’s the point,” he retorted, his voice slightly shaking. “I’m willing to put up with a lot for the child’s sake. I love the child. It’s through the child that I am able to love you.”

“And I …” I began, but did not finish. I did not dare tell him that it was the opposite for me, that the child was a vehicle for my love of him.

We spoke for a long time that night, with many long silences. Sometimes I think I remember every word.

“It’s impossible for a woman to understand. A man’s life depends on the state of his soul. The rest is all extra, a side product. And the child? The child is this strange miracle,” he said, then turned to me.

“This is the right time to make a vow. Let’s do it right now. Let’s vow to stay together. But try to love me a little less. Love the child more,” he pleaded, a little hoarse, almost as if he were threatening me. “Your heart must let me go. That’s all I want. You know I have no ulterior motive. I can’t live under conditions of such emotional tension. There are men more feminine than me, for whom it is vital to be loved. There are others who, even at the best of times, can only just about tolerate the feeling of being loved. I am that kind. It is a kind of shyness, if you like. The more masculine a man, the more shy he is.”

“What do you want?” I cried. “What can I do?”

“Let’s make a pact,” he said. “Let’s do it for the child’s sake so we can stay together. You know exactly what I want. Only you can help,” he continued, frowning. “Only you can loosen this knot. If I really wanted to leave, I would simply leave. But I don’t want to leave either you or the child. However impossible it might prove, I want to try harder. I want us to stay together: together, only not so intensely, not so unconditionally, not so much as a matter of life or death. Because I can’t go on like this,” he added. “I am very sorry but I just can’t.” And he gave a polite smile.

Then I asked something stupid.

“In that case, why did you marry me?”

“When I married you I knew almost everything about myself. But I didn’t know enough about you. I married you because I didn’t know you loved me as much as you do.”

He looked almost frightened as he said that.

“Is that a crime?” I asked. “Is it such a crime to love you as I do?”

He laughed. He stood in the darkness, smoking his cigarette, softly laughing. It was sad laughter, not in the least cynical or superior.

“It’s worse than a crime,” he answered. “It’s a mistake.”

Then he added, in a friendly way:

“I didn’t make that answer up. Talleyrand said it first when he discovered that Napoleon had had the young duc d’Enghien executed. I have to tell you, it’s a cliché.”

Fat lot I cared about Napoleon and the duc d’Enghien! I understood exactly what he wanted to say. I began to bargain with him.

“Listen,” I said. “The situation may not be quite so intolerable. We will both grow old. You might find the warmth of love more comforting once you yourself grow cold.”

“But that’s precisely it,” he quietly replied. “That’s the whole point. It is the thought that old age is inevitable, that it’s creeping on.”

He was forty-eight at the time he said this, forty-eight precisely that autumn. He looked a lot younger, though. It was after our separation that he began to age.

We didn’t say any more about it that night. Nor the next day — not ever. Two days later we set off home. On our return we found the child in a fever. He died the following week. After that we never talked about anything personal again. We simply lived together waiting for something. For a miracle, perhaps. But there are no miracles.

One afternoon, a few weeks after the child’s death, I came home from the cemetery and went into the nursery. My husband was standing in the dark room.

“What are you doing here?” he asked me roughly. Then he came to his senses and left the room.

“I’m sorry,” he said, over his shoulder.

It was he who had fitted out the room. He had personally chosen every piece of furniture and arranged everything about it, right down to the position the furniture was to occupy. True, he hardly ever entered the room while the child was alive, and even then he used to stand confused on the threshold, as if he feared the awkwardness and ludicrousness of an emotional scene. But he asked to see the child each day, in his room, and every morning and evening he had to have a report of how the child had slept and its general state of health.

Afterwards he only once went in there: that was a few weeks after the funeral. In any case, we locked up the room and I had the key, and that’s how it stayed for three years, until our divorce came through, nor did we ever open it; everything stayed just as it was the moment we took the child to the clinic. I did sometimes sneak in to clean … without anyone knowing, of course.

I was half-crazy in those weeks after the funeral. But I pulled myself together and dragged myself about, if only because I didn’t want to collapse altogether. I was drawing superhuman strength from somewhere. I knew it was perfectly possible that he was feeling even worse than I did, that he might be close to a serious breakdown, and that even if he denied it, he needed me.

But something happened between us in those weeks, or rather between him and the world … I can’t quite find the words for it. Something in him did break. All this, of course, happened without anything being said. Isn’t that always the case with serious, even life-threatening, events generally? When a person begins to cry or scream, the crisis is past.

He was calm during the entire funeral too. He said nothing. His calm was infectious. We followed the little white-and-gold coffin in silence, with straight backs and dry eyes. But do you know — he never once came to the cemetery with me to visit the grave? … He might have gone there by himself, I don’t know.

“When someone starts crying, you know it’s a cheat. Everything is over by then,” he said to me once. “I don’t believe in tears. Pain is silent and sheds no tears.”

What was happening to me in those weeks? Looking back now I would say I was working my way up to revenge. Revenge? Against whom? Against fate? Against those who treated him? That would have been stupid. Believe me when I say the child had been treated by the best doctors in town.

People say all kinds of things about times like this. “It was as much as they could bear,” they say. That’s how it was. It was as much as I could bear. But it happened in stages. Everyone was busy with all kinds of things in those few days when the little one was dying. Their smallest cares seemed to exercise them more than the saving of my child’s life. I can’t forgive them for this, of course, not even now. I wanted to be revenged on them. But I felt the desire for another kind of revenge too, a revenge not in my mind but in my heart. It was the revenge of indifference. A strange indifference and contempt burned within me then. It was a fierce cold flame. Because it’s not true that suffering purifies people; that we become better, wiser, more understanding in the process. We become cold and indifferent. When, for the first time in our lives, we properly understand our fate, we become almost calm. Calm and extraordinarily, terrifyingly lonely.

During those weeks I didn’t go to confession as I used to. What would I have had to confess? What was my sin and how had I committed it? I felt I was the most innocent creature that ever lived. I don’t feel that way now … Sin is not just what the catechism says it is. Sin is not simply that which we commit. Sin is also what we desire but are too weak to do. When my husband — for the first and last time in his life — barked at me in that peculiar hoarse voice in the nursery, I understood my sin. I had sinned, in his eyes, because I was unable to save the child.

You’re staring into space. I can see you’re confused. You feel that only deeply wounded feelings or acute despair can lead a man to such an unjust accusation. Not for one moment did I feel his accusation to be unjust. “Yes, but think of all you did do,” you say. Well, yes, it wasn’t something I could be arrested for, whatever anyone thought. I sat at that child’s bedside for eight days. I slept there and nursed him. I was the one who went against usual practice and called other doctors when the first, and then the second, failed to help. Yes, I did all I could. But I did it all so my husband should find strength to live, so that he should remain mine, so he should love me — because there was no other way but through the child. You understand? … It was for my husband I prayed when I was praying for the child. My husband’s life was the life that mattered. That was the only reason the child’s life was of importance. That’s a sin, you say! … What is sin? I didn’t know then. I do know now. People who are part of us need to be loved and supported: those closest to our hearts, the love of whom lies deepest in us, they need all our power. It all collapsed when the child died. I knew I had lost my husband because, even though he said nothing, he blamed me. Ridiculous and unfair to blame me, you say. I don’t know. I find it impossible to talk about.

After the child died, I felt utterly exhausted, and of course I immediately fell ill with pleurisy. For months I lay in bed, got better, then relapsed again. I was in hospital. My husband brought me flowers and visited me every day, at lunchtime and in the evening when he came home from the factory. I had a nurse. I was so weak I had to be fed. And all the time I knew that none of this would help, that my husband would not forgive me; that being ill would not relieve me of my guilt. He continued as tender and courteous as ever … I wept each time he left me.

My mother-in-law visited me a lot at this time. Once, just before spring, when I had recovered some of my strength, she was sitting at my bedside, quietly knitting as usual. She gave me a friendly smile and murmured confidentially:

“What do you want revenge for, Ilonka?”

“What?” I asked, startled, and felt myself flushing. “What’s this talk about revenge?”

“It’s something you kept repeating when you were in a fever. ‘Revenge, revenge!’ you cried. There’s no revenge to be had, my dear, only patience.”

I listened. I was excited. It was the first time since the child’s death that I’d really listened to anything. Then I started speaking.

“I can’t bear it, Mama. What did I do wrong? I know I am not innocent, but I simply can’t understand where I went wrong, what sin I committed. Am I not part of his life? Should we divorce? If you think it would be better for us to separate, Mama, I’ll divorce him. You must know I think of nothing else, that all my feelings are directed at him. But if I can’t help him, I’d sooner be divorced. Please advise me, Mama.”

She looked at me with a serious, wise, sad expression.

“Don’t upset yourself, child. You know very well there’s no advice I can give. It’s just life: we have to live and put up with it.”

“Live?! Live?!” I shouted. “I’m not a tree! I can’t live life like some tree. We need something to live for. I met him and I grew to love him: suddenly life had meaning. Then everything changed in a strange way … It’s not that he has changed. It’s not that he loves me any less now than he did in the first year of our marriage. He loves me, even now. But he is angry with me.”

My mother-in-law said nothing. She didn’t seem to approve of what I’d just said, but she didn’t seek to contradict me.

“Am I right?” I anxiously asked.

“Not in the way you put it,” she said, picking her words carefully. “I don’t think he is exactly angry with you. Or, to put it more precisely, I don’t think it is with you that he is angry.”

“With who, then?” I asked in a temper. “Who has hurt him?”

“That’s a difficult question.” The old woman frowned. “It’s hard to answer.”

She sighed and put her knitting down.

“Has he never spoken to you about his childhood?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Occasionally. In his own way. With the same odd, nervous laugh he gives whenever he talks of something personal. People, friends … But he has never said that anyone had harmed him.”

“No, of course not,” she said dismissively. “You couldn’t possibly put it like that. Harmed him? Life can damage people in so many ways.”

“Lázár,” I said. “The writer … you know him, Mama? He may be the only one who knows anything about him.”

“Yes,” said my mother-in-law. “He used to adore Lázár. That man certainly does know something about him. But there’s no point in talking about him. He’s not a good man.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I feel the same way.”

She picked up her knitting again. She smiled gently and added, almost as an afterthought:

“Don’t excite yourself, child. The pain is all too fresh at the moment. But life comes along and miraculously arranges human affairs, including all those things that now seem intolerable. You’ll leave the hospital, go home, and another baby will arrive to take the place of the first one …”

“I don’t believe that,” I said, and felt my heart shrink with despair. “I have such a bad feeling. I think we are at the end of something. Tell me the truth: do you think our marriage is a genuinely bad marriage?”

She gave me a sharp look from under half-closed lids, through her glasses.

“No, I don’t think your marriage is a bad marriage,” she pronounced.

“Interesting you should say that,” I bitterly replied. “Sometimes I think it is as bad as it could possibly be. Does Mama know of better ones?”

“Better?” she asked quizzically, and turned away her head as if she were looking into the distance. “Maybe. I don’t know. Happiness, real happiness, tells no tales. But I certainly know of worse. For example …”

She fell silent. It was as if she were suddenly frightened, regretting opening her mouth. But I wouldn’t let her drop the subject now. I sat up in bed, threw off the covers, and demanded she continue.

“For example?”

“Well, yes,” she said, and sighed. She picked up her knitting again. “I’m sorry we should have to talk about these things. But if it is any comfort to you, I confess my own marriage was worse, because, frankly, I did not love my husband.”

She said this calmly, almost indifferently, the way old people sometimes speak when they are near death, people who know the true meaning of words, are afraid of nothing, and care more for truth than for keeping the peace. I went pale.

“That’s impossible,” I muttered like an idiot. “You had such a good life together.”

“It wasn’t a bad life,” she replied in a dry voice, knitting away furiously. “I got him the factory, you know. He, in his turn, brought me love: one party always gives more love than the other. But it’s easier for those who do the loving. You love your husband, so it’s easier for you, even though you suffer for it. I had to pretend to a feeling that had nothing to do with what I really felt. That’s much harder. I put up with it all my life, and you see, here I am. That’s always the case with life. Romantic, passionate people expect more, of course. I was never passionate. But, believe me, your situation is better. I almost envy you.”

She tipped her head to one side and looked hard at me.

“But don’t you go thinking I had a hard life. My life was no different from anyone else’s. I only tell you this because you asked, and because you are muddled with fever. Well, so now you know. You were asking if your marriage was as bad as it could be. I don’t think it is. It’s a marriage,” she declared, as if pronouncing judgment.

“Would Mama advise us to stay together?” I asked in fear.

“Of course,” she answered. “What are you thinking of? What do you think marriage is? A mood? A bright idea? It’s a sacrament, one of the laws of life. One shouldn’t even think about it,” she admonished me, apparently insulted.

We said nothing for a long time. I gazed at her bony hands, her clever, nimble fingers, and the knitting pattern; I looked at her pale, calm face with its smooth features, ringed by white hair. There was no sign of suffering there. Even if she had suffered, I thought, she has succeeded in achieving the greatest of human triumphs: she had passed the test of life with distinction. She has not been broken by it. What more can anyone do? Everything else — desire, dissatisfaction — is nothing compared to this. That’s what I told myself. But deep inside me I felt I couldn’t simply accept the situation. So I told her:

“I can’t deal with his unhappiness. If he can’t be happy with me, let him go and seek happiness elsewhere, with someone else. With her.”

“Who?” my mother-in-law asked me, closely examining the stitches in her knitting, as if there could be nothing more important.

“With his true wife,” I answered harshly. “You know. The real one. The one intended for him.”

“What do you know about her?” my mother-in-law asked, her voice quiet, still not looking at me.

It was I who was embarrassed again. Whenever I argued with these people, with mother and son, I always felt like a child, someone who had not been granted admittance to the serious adult rooms of life.

“About who?” I asked greedily. “Who is there I should know about?”

“Her,” my mother-in-law cautiously responded. “The real wife you were talking about … the intended one.”

“Why? Is there an intended? Does she exist somewhere?” I asked, very loudly now.

My mother-in-law bent over her knitting. Her voice was quiet.

“There is always an intended one somewhere.”

Then she fell silent. And I never heard her talk of this again. She was like her son: there was something final about her.

But then, a few days after this conversation, I had gotten myself into such a condition of terror, I got better. I hadn’t understood my mother-in-law’s words straightaway. It was hard to feel seriously jealous at first, since she had spoken in general terms, in a kind of symbolic fashion. Well, of course, the intended always must live somewhere. But what about me, me, what was my role? I asked as I recovered. Who is his real wife, his intended wife, if not me? Where does she live? What is she like? Is she younger? Is she blond? How much does she know? I was utterly terrified.

I panicked. I quickly recovered, went home, had dresses made, hurried to the hairdresser, played tennis, went swimming. I found everything in order at home … so much so I thought someone had moved out of the house. Or it was something else: you know … the realization that my life had, in the last few years, been relatively happy — that despite the suffering, the restlessness, and all I had thought intolerable, now that it was gone, all was well, better than it had even been? It was an odd feeling. Everything in the house was in its place, but the rooms felt empty, as if the executor had been through them, as if the most important items of furniture had — carefully, sensitively — all been removed somewhere. It’s not furniture that furnishes a house, of course, but the feeling that fills people’s hearts.

My husband’s life was so detached from mine at this time he might as well have been living abroad. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have received a letter from him one day, delivered from the next room.

Before all this he would talk to me about the factory, about his plans, hesitantly as though conducting an experiment. Then he would wait with bowed head and listen to my answer as though he himself were being examined. There was no discussing plans now: it seemed he had no special plans for anything anymore. He didn’t invite Lázár, either. A whole year passed and we didn’t see him, only read his books and articles.

One day — I remember it perfectly, it was an April morning, the fourteenth, a Sunday — I was sitting out on the terrace, reading a book, the garden, cautiously planted for spring with yellow euphorbia, in front of me, when I felt something happen inside me. Please don’t laugh. I have no wish to play Joan of Arc with you. I heard no heavenly voices. But there was a voice, a voice so strong it was like the most passionate feeling you could ever feel. The voice told me that I really couldn’t go on living like this, that there was no sense in anything, that my situation was demeaning, ruthless, inhuman. I had to change. I had to perform a miracle. There are dizzying moments in life when we see everything clearly, when we are aware of our power and our potential, when we see what it is we have been too timid or cowardly to do. These are life’s decisive moments. They come to us unannounced, like death or conversion. This was one of them.

I shuddered. My whole body tingled: it was like goose pimples. I started to feel cold.

I looked at the garden and my eyes filled with tears.

What was it I was feeling? I felt that I was responsible for my own fate. That my life depended on me. There was no point in waiting for some angelic visitation either in my personal life or in any relationship. My husband and I had a problem of some sort. I don’t understand my husband. He doesn’t belong to me, doesn’t want to belong entirely to me. I knew there was no other woman in his life … I was pretty, young, and I loved him. Lázár was not the only powerful figure in his life, the only one with powers. I had powers of my own. I should use them.

I felt such absolute power surge through me, I could have killed someone or built a whole new world with it. Maybe it is only men who truly feel such power and are conscious of it at the decisive moments of their lives. We women are generally terrified and paralyzed at such times.

But I had no intention of backing down. That day, on Sunday, the fourteenth of April, a few months after the child’s death, I made the one and only fully conscious choice in my life. You needn’t look at me with those big frightened eyes of yours. Listen carefully. I’ll tell you what happened.

I decided to take possession of my husband.

Why aren’t you laughing? You mean it’s nothing to laugh at? I didn’t feel like laughing, either. The prospect of the task daunted me. I was so frightened, I was quite out of breath at the thought. Carrying out this task was the meaning of my life, I thought. I couldn’t hold back any longer. There was no way of leaving it for time or chance to sort out; I simply couldn’t wait for something to happen, couldn’t just accept the alternative of going on as I was until it did. I knew right then that it wasn’t I who had decided on a course of action: the action had decided me. My husband and I were engaged in a life-or-death struggle, but we couldn’t be separated until something of devastating power came between us. Either this man was going to come back to me, body and soul, without reserve or shame, or I would leave him. He had a secret I knew nothing about and I would get it out of him even if I had to dig it out, tooth and nail; even if it was buried deep beneath the ground like a long-buried bone the dog digs up, or like a body some mad lover wants to disinter. It was either this or I move on. Things could not go on the way they were. It was exactly as I said: I decided to take possession of my husband.

Put it like that and it sounds simple enough. But you’re a woman too, so you know it is one of the hardest tasks you can undertake. Sometimes I think it’s the hardest of all.

You know how it is when a man decides to do something and overcomes every obstacle, anything that might prevent him carrying out his plan and imposing his will … well, yes, this was that kind of situation, that state of mind. Those we love are the world. When Napoleon — about whom I know little more than that he was master of the world for a while and had the duc d’Enghien killed, and that doing that was more than a sin; it was a blunder — have I mentioned that before? What I mean to say is that when Napoleon decided to conquer Europe, his decision was no more momentous than mine was then. It was what I vowed to do that breezy Sunday in April.

An explorer might feel something of the sort when he decides to go to Africa or to the North Pole, caring little about what wild animals or climate he might encounter there, if in so doing he might discover something, find something previously undiscovered or unknown, something no explorer had ever come across before … Yes, the project of a woman setting out to discover a man’s secret is as enormous as that. But she will get that secret even if she has to go through hell for it. That was what I had decided to do.

Or it could be that it was my decision that decided me … you never really know how these things happen. People do whatever circumstances allow them to do. It’s like being a sleepwalker, a water diviner, the local witch doctor, someone the tribe avoids out of a superstitious awe. And not just the tribe, either, but the authorities too, because there is something frightening in their eyes, something not to be trifled with. It’s as if there were a kind of sign on their brow to show that they are about a uniquely dangerous business and will not rest until it has been completed … That was how I felt when, having realized the situation and made a conscious decision, I waited for him to come home that day. That was my state of mind at noon when he returned from his Sunday stroll.

He had been down the valley, walking that dog he was so fond of, the tan-colored Vizsla he took wherever he went. He opened the garden gate and came in. I watched him, arms folded, from the top step of the veranda. It was spring, the light was strong, and the breeze that was tossing the boughs was ruffling my hair. I will never forget that moment, the cold light on the distant landscape, on the garden, and in me too. I felt possessed.

Master and dog came to a wary, involuntary stop, the way people instinctively do when confronted by anything strange, somewhat on the defensive. “Come on, then,” I thought calmly. “Come on, all of you — other women, friends, childhood memories, family, the whole hostile human world — come on. I am going to take this man from you.” So we sat down to eat.

After lunch I had a slight headache. I went to my room, drew the curtains, and lay down, remaining there till the evening.

I am not a writer, like Lázár, so I can’t describe my condition that afternoon, what I was thinking, what thoughts ran through my head … All I could see was the task ahead; all I knew was that I could not afford to be weak, that I had to do what I had decided to do. At the same time I knew that no one could help me, that I had no idea how to go about it or where to begin … You understand? There were moments I thought I was being ridiculous letting myself in for such an impossible task.

“What can I do?” I kept asking myself over and over again. I mean, I couldn’t write to the newspapers asking for advice and encouragement, signing myself “Cheated Wife.” I know those kinds of letters and the answers they receive from editors, encouraging the cheated woman not to give up, saying her husband is probably laden down with work, that she should look after the house, use this or that ointment and powder at night because that will keep her looking fresh, and her husband will fall in love with her all over again. Well, that sort of thing would not help me. I knew ointments and powders would not do the trick. And anyway, I had always done a first-rate job of housekeeping, everything in the house being absolutely where it ought to be. And I was beautiful then too, more beautiful that year than ever, perhaps. You goose, you silly goose, I thought, even to think of this. This was something altogether different.

There were no soothsayers or sages I could consult on the matter, I could not write to famous writers for advice, nor was it something I could openly discuss with women friends or members of the family — not this apparently unimportant issue that was nonetheless of ultimate importance to me, which was: how to take possession of a man … My mild headache had become the usual raging migraine by the evening. But I took two doses and said nothing to my husband, going out to the theater, followed by supper.

The next day, Monday the fifteenth of April — you see how precisely I remember these days; it’s a matter of life or death remembering such things! — I woke at dawn and went down to that little church in the Tabán district I had last visited some ten years before. My usual church was the one in the Krisztina where we also got married. It was where Count István Széchenyi vowed to be true to Crescence Seilern. If you didn’t already know that, I am telling you now. The marriage, they say, was not a great success. Not that I believe in such tittle-tattle, but people must always be gossiping.

The church in the Tabán was completely empty that morning. I told the sacristan I wanted to make a confession. I waited for a while in one of the pews of the dimly lit church. Eventually an old, unfamiliar, solemn-looking, white-haired priest appeared, entered the confessional box, and gestured for me to enter and kneel. It was to this unknown priest whom I had never seen before, nor have seen since, that I revealed everything.

It was a confession the like of which you make only once in your life. I spoke of myself, the child, my husband. I confessed I wanted to regain my husband’s heart and that I didn’t know what to do, that I was calling on God to help me. I told him I had led a moral life, that I never even dreamed of any lover but my husband. I told him I didn’t know where the fault lay, in me or in him … In other words, I told him everything. Not as I am telling you now. I couldn’t talk about everything now, I would even be wary of doing so … But in that dim church, that morning, before that unfamiliar old priest, I stripped my soul bare.

The confession took a long time. The priest listened.

Have you visited Florence? Do you know Michelangelo’s statue — you know, that wonderful sculptural group with four figures in the Duomo … wait a minute, what is it called? Yes, the Pietà. The main figure is a self-portrait, the elder Michelangelo. I was there once with my husband; it was he who showed me the statue. He said that the face there was a human face without desire, without anger, a face purged by fire, one that knew everything and wanted nothing, not even revenge, not even to forgive — nothing, absolutely nothing. Standing before the statue, my husband told me that was what we should be like. That this was ultimate human perfection, this sacred indifference, this absolute solitude and deafness to both joy and sorrow … That’s what he said. As I was confessing, I stole the odd glance at the priest’s face and with tears in my eyes I saw how terrifyingly similar his face was to the marble one in the Pietà.

He was sitting with half-closed eyes, his arms folded across his chest. He hid his hands in the folds of his habit. He wasn’t looking at me. His head was slightly tipped to one side, listening almost like a blind man, keeping strangely silent, as if he weren’t listening at all. It was as if he had heard all this many times before; as if he knew that everything I said was superfluous and hopeless. That was how he listened. He listened hard, gave me his complete attention, his entire strange, squat being. And his face, yes … his face was that of someone who knew it all anyway, who knew everything, having heard all kinds of people talk about their suffering and misery, and he still knew something more that could not be said. When I finally stopped, he remained silent for a while.

“You have to believe, child,” he said eventually.

“I do believe, Most Reverend Father,” I mechanically replied.

“No,” he said, and that calm, almost dead-looking face began to come alive, his watery old eyes briefly flashing. “You have to believe differently. Don’t spend your time concocting schemes. Just believe. That’s all you have to do. Believe,” he muttered.

He must have been very old by then, and my long speech must have exhausted him.

I thought he didn’t want to, or could not, find anything else to say, so I waited for my penance and absolution. I felt we had nothing more to say to each other. But after a long silence, just as he seemed to be nodding off, he opened his eyes wide and began to talk animatedly.

I listened to him and was filled with amazement. No one had talked like that to me before, certainly not at confession. He spoke in simple words in a natural conversational tone, as if he were not in a confessional box but holding forth in company somewhere. He spoke in simple words, without unctuousness, sighing occasionally as though lamenting, like a kindly, very old man. He spoke as naturally as if the whole world were God’s church and all things human belonged to God, so one didn’t have to put on special airs for God, turn eyes to heaven or to beat one’s breast, only to tell the truth, but the whole truth, the full truth … That’s how he talked.

Talked, I said? I tell you, he not so much talked as chatted in a relaxed low voice. His accent sounded faintly Slavic. The last time I heard that lilt, that regional dialect, was in Zemplén in my childhood.

“Dear soul,” he said. “I would like to help you. Once, a long time ago, a woman came to me who was in love with a man so much she killed him. She did not kill him with a knife or poison, but with her love, because she wanted that man completely, because she wanted to remove him from the world. They fought a great deal. The man got so tired of this that one day he died. The woman knew this. He died because he had had enough of fighting. You know, my daughter, people exercise various forms of power over each other. They have many ways of killing each other. It is not enough to love, dear soul. Love can take a very selfish form. One must love humbly, with faith. Life as a whole only makes sense when there is faith. God gave people love so they might bear the world and each other. But those who love without humility place a great burden on the beloved’s shoulders. Do you understand, child?” he asked so tenderly he was like an old teacher teaching a child the alphabet.

“I think I understand,” I said, a little frightened.

“You will understand it eventually, but you will suffer a great deal. Passionate souls like yours are proud and suffer greatly. You say you want to possess your husband’s heart. You also say your husband is a genuine man, not a fickle womanizer but a serious, pure-hearted man with a secret. What could that secret be? That is what you are determined to find out, dear soul; it is what you want to know. Don’t you know that God gave people individual souls, each his or her own? Each soul is full of secrets, each as great as the universe. Why do you seek a soul that God has created secret? It may be the meaning, the mission of your life to put up with it, to bear it. Who knows, perhaps you might injure your husband in the process, even ruin him if you succeeded in laying his soul bare, if you forced him to adopt a life, or to assume feelings, that he feels bound to resist. One shouldn’t love by force. The woman I was talking about was young and beautiful, like you, and did all kinds of stupid things to recover her husband’s love; she flirted with other men to make him jealous, she lived a fast life, tried to make herself still more beautiful, spent a fortune on Viennese outfits, high-fashion dresses, the way unfortunate women sometimes do when there is no faith in their hearts and they lose their spiritual balance. That having failed, she rushed out into the world, to clubs, to parties, everywhere where there are crowds and bright light, where people seek to escape the emptiness of their lives and their vain and hopeless passions, places where people go to forget. How hopeless it all is,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “There is no forgetting.”

That’s how he talked. I was all ears now. But it was as if he hardly noticed I was there. He was muttering away as if to someone else, the way old people mutter. It was as if it were the world he was trying to convince. Then he went on:

“No, there is no forgetting. God will not allow us to forget the questions life poses to us in a storm of passion. You are in a fever, child. A fever of vanity and selfishness. It may be that your husband’s feelings toward you are not precisely what you would have them be; it may be he is simply a proud or lonely man who cannot, or is afraid to, show his feelings, because they were badly wounded once. There are many such wounded people in the world. I cannot absolve your husband, dear child, because he too lacks humility. Putting two such proud people together can lead to a lot of suffering. But there is such greed in your soul at the moment it reminds me of sin. You want to dispossess another man of his soul. That’s always the case with lovers, it’s what they want. And that is a sin.”

“I didn’t know it was a sin,” I said, still kneeling, and started to shiver and tremble.

“It’s always a sin when we are not satisfied with what the world freely offers us, when people offer us something of themselves, when we greedily want to rob them of their secrets. Why can’t you live more modestly? With fewer emotional needs? … Love, real love, is patient, dear child. Love is endlessly patient and can wait. The course you have embarked on is impossible and inhumane. You want to take possession of your husband. But that is after God has arranged your mortal life to be the way it is. Can you not understand that?”

“But I am suffering, Most Reverend Father,” I said, and was afraid I might burst into tears.

“Then suffer,” he replied quite flatly now, almost indifferently.

“Why do you fear suffering?” he asked after a while. “Suffering is a fire that will purge you of greed and vanity. What is happiness? … And what gives you the right to be happy? Are you sure that your desire and love are so selfless they deserve happiness? If they were, you would not be kneeling here now, but would be living the life intended for you, going about your tasks, willing to do what life bids you do,” he said sternly, looking hard at me.

It was the first time he had looked at me with those small, bright, glittering eyes. Having done so, he immediately turned away and closed them.

Then, after a long silence, he spoke again.

“You say your husband is angry with you because of the child’s death?”

“That’s what I feel,” I answered.

“Yes,” he said, and turned the matter over in his mind. “It’s possible.”

It was clear the proposition did not take him by surprise; that he thought almost anything was possible where relationships between people are concerned. Almost as an incidental afterthought, he asked me:

“And you have never blamed yourself?” His voice was flat again, mere conversation.

His accent was marked, a little Slovakian. I don’t know why, but his regional accent was almost consoling in that moment.

“How can I answer such a question, Reverend Father? Who can answer a question like that?”

“Now look here,” he suddenly said, so informally, so gently that I wanted to kiss his hand. He spoke with zeal, in the simple rural manner that only old village priests can manage. “I can’t know what is hidden in your soul until you tell me, and what you have confessed to me today, child, is just some kind of strategy or ploy. But what God is whispering in my ear is that it is not the whole truth. What he is whispering is that you are full of self-accusation on this or that count. I could be mistaken, of course,” he added to excuse himself, and suddenly stopped there and fell silent. I could see he was regretting something.

“But that’s good,” he said after a while, his voice faint, almost shy. “If it is self-accusation, it is good. Because then you might eventually be healed.”

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Pray,” he simply said. “And work. That is what religion commands us to do. I know no more than that. Are you sorry for your sins? Do you regret them?”

“I am sorry and do regret them,” I garbled.

“Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys,” he said. “I absolve you.”

Then he began to pray. He wanted to hear no more from me.

Two weeks later, one morning, I found the lilac ribbon in my husband’s wallet.

Believe it or not I never went through my husband’s wallet or pockets. I never took anything from him. He gave me everything I asked for, so why should I steal? I know, many women steal from their husbands out of a sense of obligation, almost as an act of virtue. Women generally do a great deal in the name of virtue. “I’m not that kind of tramp,” they say, and get on with doing that which they have no taste for. But I am not that sort. I’m not boasting, I’m simply not.

And I was only looking into his wallet that morning because he rang to say he had left it at home and was sending one of his clerks for it. That’s no reason, you will say, of course. But there was something odd about his voice, something hurried, almost excited. He sounded anxious on the phone. You could tell from his voice that this little act of forgetfulness meant something to him. This is the kind of thing a person hears not with the ears but with the heart.

It was the crocodile-skin wallet he was carrying just now, the one you’ve just seen. Did I tell you I gave it to him? … He faithfully used it too. Because I should tell you quite clearly, that man was faithful and true. He kept faith, even with mere objects. He wanted to keep and look after everything. It was the bourgeois in him, the noble bourgeois. Nor was it only objects he wanted to preserve, but all he found delightful, beautiful, valuable, and meaningful in life — you know, the lot: good habits, ways of doing things, furniture, Christian ethics, bridges, the works people had constructed with enormous labor, ingenuity, and suffering, geniuses and laborers both … And it was all part of the same thing to him: he loved this world and wanted to preserve it from danger. Men call this culture. We women don’t use big words like that when talking to each other. It’s enough to remain wisely silent once they start quoting Latin. We know the true essence of things. All they know are concepts. The two are usually quite different.

But back to the crocodile-skin wallet. He looked after that too, because it was beautiful, because it was finely made, and because I gave it to him. When it needed mending, he had it mended. He was a stickler for detail. One time he said — laughing as he said it — that he was a true adventurer, since you could only have adventures if you had order about you and took care of things … You are amazed? Yes, I was often amazed when he talked like that. Living with men is very difficult, darling; they have souls, you see …

Would you like a cigarette? … I’m going to light one, because I feel a bit agitated. Remembering that lilac ribbon always brings back that tremulous, anxious feeling.

As I was saying, there was something about his voice that day. He wasn’t in the habit of phoning home about such minor matters. I offered to take it in to the factory myself at lunchtime, if he needed it. But he thanked me and rejected the offer. “Put it in an envelope,” he said. “The clerk will be there in no time.”

So now I set to examining the wallet, every last little nook and cranny of it. It was the first time in my life I had done something like that. Believe me, I was pretty thorough.

The outermost section had money in it, his Institute of Engineers card, 8 ten-fillér stamps and 5 twenty-fillér ones, and besides that there was his driver’s license and a season ticket for the baths, complete with photograph. The picture had been taken ten years ago, just after a haircut, when men tend to look ridiculously younger than they are, as though they had just failed their school exams. Then there were a few of his calling cards, with just the name, no crest, no position. He was very particular about such things. He would not have any heraldic device stitched into his linen or engraved on the silver. It was not that he despised them, but that he was careful to conceal them from the world. There was only one kind of rank among people, he used to say, and that was character. He would come out with things like that sometimes, matters of pride and sensitivity.

There was nothing important in the outer pockets of the wallet. It was all very orderly, like his whole life, like the drawers of his desk, like his wardrobe, like his notes. There was always order around him, so, naturally, there was order in his wallet too. Maybe it was only his heart that was not completely in order, that did not work in perfect harmony, you know … people who are very particular about external order may be covering up real disorderliness inside. But this was no time for meditation. I burrowed my way through his wallet like a mole through crumbling earth.

In the innermost pocket I found the photographs, including the child’s photograph. The boy was just eight hours old in the picture. He had a lot of hair and, wouldn’t you know it, he was clenching his little fists and raising his arms. He was three kilo eighty and fast asleep … That’s when they took the picture. How long do you think that goes on hurting? As long as we live? That’s what I think.

That was what mattered to me most when I searched through the innermost pocket of that wallet; that and the lilac ribbon.

I took the ribbon out, felt it, and, naturally, sniffed it. It had no smell. It was an old ribbon, dark lilac. It smelled of crocodile skin. It was four centimeters long — I measured it — and one centimeter wide. It had been tidily cut with a pair of scissors.

I was so frightened I had to sit down.

I stayed sitting like that with the ribbon in my hand, my heart still firmly resolved to possess my husband, to conquer him the way Napoleon wanted to conquer England. I sat like that, badly shaken, as if I had just read that my husband had been arrested on the outskirts of town because he had robbed or killed someone. I was like that woman married to the “Monster of Düsseldorf” who discovered one evening that the police had taken her husband away because that hearty fellow, that exemplary father, a man who paid his taxes on the button and who liked to go out for a drink after supper, tended to disembowel people he met on the way. It was like that for me the moment I spotted and took out the lilac ribbon.

You think I was being hysterical? No, darling, I’m a woman: both criminal and master detective, both saint and spy, everything at once when it comes to the man I love. I’m not ashamed of it. That’s the way God made me. That is my mission on earth. The room was spinning around me. There was good reason for it to be spinning — several good reasons, in fact.

One reason was that I knew nothing about the ribbon, had never seen it before. Women just know such things. I’d never worn such a ribbon ever, on any dress or hat of mine. I made a point of not wearing such solemn, funereal colors. That much was certain, no point going on about it: the ribbon had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t a ribbon my husband had snipped off any hat or dress of mine so that he might treasure it as a token of me. More’s the pity, I thought and felt.

Another reason — and this is why I felt pins and needles in both hands and feet — was because the ribbon was not only not mine, it was not my husband’s, either. What I mean is, whatever object, whatever material a man like my husband holds in such high regard that he keeps it in his wallet for years, that he rings home about from the office in excitement — I hardly need say it was the ribbon he was ringing about, since he wouldn’t have felt a burning need for money or calling cards, or proofs of membership, not in the morning, in the factory — that object was more than a souvenir or memento to him. No, this was criminal evidence. Hence my numbness.

What it meant was that my husband was carrying round some kind of token that was of more importance to him than I was. That was what the lilac ribbon meant.

Could it have meant something else? The ribbon hadn’t faded, simply looked a little worn in the peculiar way dead people’s possessions often do. Have you noticed how the hats and handkerchiefs of the dead tend to age, practically from the moment the wearer dies? They lose color somehow, like leaves torn off the branch, and the green begins immediately to fade as green watercolor does … It seems there is a certain electricity that runs not only through people but also through all their belongings; something that radiates the way the sun does.

The lilac ribbon was barely alive in those terms. It was as if it had been worn a very long time ago. The person who’d worn it might already be dead … or at least dead to my husband. That’s what I was hoping. I gazed at it, sniffed it again, rubbed it between my fingers, questioned it … but the ribbon did not give up its secret. It remained obstinately silent, with all the defiance of an inanimate object.

And yet at the same time it was perfectly alive. It was superior, dense with schadenfreude. It was as if a mischievous goblin had stuck out its apoplectic lilac tongue to mock and ridicule me. What it said in goblin language was: “See, I have ventured behind the neat, well-arranged façade of your life. I had an existence then and continue to exist now. I am what is hidden, the secret, the truth.”

Did I understand what it was saying? … I felt so agitated, so cheated, so shaken! Such fury and curiosity burned in me that I would not have balked at rushing into the street to find the woman who had once worn it in her hair or her corset … I was red with fury at being so insulted. See, even now my face is quite hot, flushed and red, just thinking of the lilac ribbon. Wait, lend me a little powder, let me make myself presentable.

There. Thank you, I feel better now. Well, the clerk soon appeared and I tidily put back everything in the wallet: the calling cards, the proofs of identity, the money, and the lilac ribbon that was so important to my husband that he rang home excitedly from the factory in the morning and had to send a clerk for it … And then I stood there, the great decision made in my heart, blazing with indignation, understanding nothing of life.

Or to be more exact, I did know something about it.

My husband was neither an oversensitive youth nor a pathetic, aging lecher. He was a mature man, so his actions were rational and comprehensible. He was not the sort to carry a woman’s lilac ribbon around in his wallet in secret without having a reason for it — that much I understood. If that was the secret, I understood it as perfectly as we do the secrets of our own lives.

So if he does something like this, if he carries a sentimental trifle around for years, there must be a serious, proper reason for it. In which case the person to whom this little rag once belonged must be of supreme importance to him.

More important than I was, for sure. He didn’t carry my photograph around. You might say — I can see you are about to say it even though you’re keeping quiet — that he didn’t need a photograph of me because he saw quite enough of me, day and night. Yes, but that’s never enough. He should see me even if he is not there beside me. And should he reach for his wallet, it should be to take out my photograph rather than some other woman’s lilac ribbon. Don’t you think? … There you are, you see. It’s the least a man can do.

There I was, smoldering, as though someone had set fire to my quiet family home with a careless match. Because whatever lay there behind the façade of our lives, whatever might have happened, it was still a solid and substantial thing, a genuinely mutual form of life, complete with roof and foundation … It was the roof that single burning match had landed on.

He didn’t come home for lunch. We had a dinner invitation. I dressed to kill that night, straining every sinew to be beautiful. I wore a white dress, the one I kept for grand occasions. It was made of silk, like a wedding dress. It was ceremonial and dignified. I spent a whole two hours at the hairdresser in the afternoon. And even then I did not sit on my laurels but went into town to buy a rosette made of lilac ribbon, a ribbon in the shape of a violet, a sweet, idiotic little trifle of the kind quite fashionable that year. You could get it in various shapes and sizes. I pinned the ribbon, the color of which was precisely the same shade as the ribbon my husband carried around in his wallet, to the white dress, just where it opened. I took such care dressing for the evening I might have been an actress at a premiere. By the time my husband arrived home I was in my fur stole. He changed quickly, because he was late. Just this once it was I waiting patiently for him.

We sat in the car without speaking. I could see he was tired, his mind elsewhere. My heart was beating fast but at the same time I felt a terrifying, solemn calm. All I knew was that that evening would decide the course of my life. I sat beside him graciously, my hair beautifully arranged, in my blue-fox fur and white silk dress, scented and deathly serious, the bunch of lilac ribbon right above my heart. It was a grand house we were visiting, with the Swiss guard at the gate and footmen down the hall. Having taken off his coat and handed it to the valet, he glanced at the mirror, saw me there, and smiled.

I was so beautiful that evening that even he noticed.

He threw off his undercoat and adjusted his tie in the mirror with a distracted, slightly nervous movement, as though he were disturbed by the solemn-looking valet’s presence. Men who dress quickly and don’t particularly care about clothes tend to fiddle with their bow ties, because they are forever slipping to one side or another. He gave me a smile in the mirror, a very sweet, courteous smile, as if to say, “Yes, I know you are very beautiful. Maybe the loveliest of all women. The trouble is that that doesn’t help. The problem lies elsewhere.”

But he didn’t say anything. I, for my part, was wondering whether I was more beautiful than that other woman, the one whose ribbon he so carefully looked after. Then we entered the grand hall, where a whole host of guests were already assembled: famous men, politicians, the leading figures of the country as well as well-known beautiful women, all chatting to each other as though they were relatives, as though whoever they were talking to already knew everything, everything that had been hinted at and suspected, all of them fully initiated. Initiated into what? Into the delicate, decadent, exciting, stuffy, superior, hopeless, cold conspiracy that constitutes an entire world, the world of society. It was a vast hall with columns of red marble. Between the guests scuttled servants, their legs clad in britches and white stockings, bearing crystal trays loaded with cocktails and highly colored, bitter-as-poison liqueurs. I merely sipped at one of those bitter drinks, because I can’t take alcohol: it immediately makes me feel dizzy. In any case I had no need of intoxicants that evening. I felt an irrational, ridiculous, quite childish sort of tension, as if fate had marked me out for a difficult personal task, as if everyone were watching me, particularly me, all these beautiful, interesting women and those clever, powerful men … I was continually giggling. I was very charming to everyone, behaving as if I were an eighteenth-century princess in a powdered wig. And you know what? People really were talking about me that evening … It’s impossible to resist life radiating from someone in my position. Suddenly I saw myself standing among the red marble columns in the middle of the hall with men and women standing around me, myself as the focal point, people bowing to me, my every remark a triumph. I was radiant with a terrifying confidence that night. Oh yes, I was a real success … But what is success? Success is willpower, or so it seems: an enormous willpower, which burns everything and everyone that comes into contact with it. And all this simply because I had to know whether there was anyone anywhere who had once worn a lilac ribbon on her dress or her hat, someone who might matter more to my husband than I did …

I had never touched cocktails before and I left them alone that night too. Later, at supper, I drank half a glass of acrid French Champagne. I was behaving as though I were a little tipsy … but in a strangely sober fashion; it was a clearheaded kind of intoxication.

We were waiting for supper to be set and had formed groups in the hall, as on a stage. My husband was standing in the doorway to the library talking to a concert pianist. Now and then I felt him glance at me, and I knew these were anxious looks he was casting, not understanding my popularity, the sudden, complete, irrational social success I was enjoying, pleased with it but worried at the same time. He looked puzzled, and I was proud sensing his confusion. I was certain of my task now, and I knew the evening would be mine.

These are the most remarkable moments of life. Suddenly, a world opens up and everyone’s eyes are on you. I would not have been surprised to have people propose to me that night. I should tell you that that world, the other world of high society and the international set, is hopelessly alien to my nature. It was my husband who introduced me to it, and I always felt stagestruck. I tiptoed through it with great care, the way you might in an amusement park, in the haunted house with the moving floors … I was frightened in case I should slip and fall. Whole years went by with me being overpolite and overrestrained in company, or, conversely, overnatural … In other words, I was scared, cold, over-friendly, in fact everything except what I really am. It was as though I were in the grip of some terrible cramp before, but that evening released me. I was no longer cramped. I saw everything through a faint mist — the light, the people’s faces. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find people bursting into applause for me.

Then I felt someone was staring at me. I turned round slowly and looked for the person whose gaze seemed so physical, so electric. It was Lázár. He was standing by a pillar talking to our hostess, but his eyes were on me. We hadn’t seen each other for a year.

The footmen opened the mirror-covered double doors and people started filtering into the dimly lit, candle-illuminated dining hall, everyone moving as though they were part of a theatrical procession.

Lázár came over to me.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, his voice choked back, almost formally.

“Why?” I asked, my voice a little hoarse, still dizzy with success.

“Something is different with you,” he said. “I just wanted to say I am sorry now for the cheap trick we once played on you. Do you still remember it? …”

“I remember,” I said. “Please don’t give it a thought. Geniuses love to play.”

“Are you in love with someone?” he asked, perfectly calm, perfectly serious, looking me straight in the eye.

“Yes,” I replied just as calmly, just as solemnly. “With my husband.”

We were standing in the doorway of the dining hall. He looked me over from head to foot. Very softly and with enormous sympathy, he whispered:

“Poor soul.”

Then he gave me his arm and led me to the table.

He was one of my neighbors at supper. The other was an aged count who had no idea who I was and kept paying me overblown compliments. Next to Lázár, on his left, was seated the wife of a famous diplomat, who spoke only French. The food too was French. Between courses and pieces of French conversation Lázár turned to me and said in a very low voice, naturally, without any prevarication, as though we were simply continuing a discussion begun much earlier:

“And what have you decided to do?”

I was slowly working my way through the poultry and the sauce. I leaned over the plate with knife and fork in hand, smiled at him, and answered as lightly as if it were the merest chitchat.

“I have decided to take possession of him. I mean to take him back.”

“That’s impossible,” he said. “He has never left you. That’s precisely why it’s impossible. You can take back those who have been unfaithful. You can take back those who have gone away. But those who have never really, properly arrived, that’s impossible. It can’t be done.”

“Then why did he marry me?” I asked.

“Because he would have been lost if he hadn’t.”

“Lost in what way?”

“Emotionally. He felt something that was much stronger than he was and he felt unworthy of it.”

“Emotionally?” I asked quietly in a level voice while still leaning over the table but so that no one else could hear me. “The emotion that bound him to the woman with the lilac ribbon?”

“What do you know about that?” he asked and sat up straight.

“Only as much as I need to know,” I said truthfully.

“Who mentioned this to you? Peter?”

“No,” I replied. “Don’t you think we know everything about those we love?”

“That’s true,” he solemnly agreed.

“And you?” I asked him, astonished at my steady voice. “Do you know the woman with the lilac ribbon?”

“I …?” he muttered and bowed his bald head. He looked at the plate, clearly discomposed. “Yes, I know her.”

“Do you see her sometimes?”

“Rarely. Practically never.” He gazed into the air above him. “It is a very long time since I last saw her.”

He began drumming nervously on the table with his long, bony fingers. The diplomat’s wife was asking something in French and I responded to something the old count had said; he — who knows why? — had tried to amuse me with a few Chinese mottoes. But I found it hard just then attending to his Chinese mottoes. Champagne arrived, and fruit. Once I had taken a first sip of the pale pink Champagne and the count had managed to extricate himself with some difficulty from the conversation about Chinese mottoes, Lázár turned to me again.

“Why are you wearing that lilac favor this evening?”

“You noticed it?” I asked, and picked a grape from the bunch.

“Immediately — as soon as you entered the room.”

“Do you suppose Peter has noticed it too?”

“Be careful,” he warned me. “That is a very dangerous game you are playing.”

Like fellow conspirators we both glanced over to Peter. There was something haunting in the great hall, in the flickering candlelight, in the hushed tones of our conversation, in the words we used and even more in the mood they conjured. I sat up straight, unmoving, looking fixedly ahead, and smiled as if my neighbors at table had been amusing me with wonderful jokes and fascinating stories. Needless to say, I was interested in what was being said. Never before or since have I heard anything that interested me more than what Lázár was saying that evening.

When we rose from the table Peter came over.

“You were laughing a great deal during supper,” he said. “You look pale. Would you like to come out into the garden?”

“No,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just the light.”

“Come with me to the conservatory,” said Lázár. “We can get some black coffee there.”

“Take me along,” said Peter, nervously smiling. “I could do with a laugh myself.”

“No,” I said. Lázár agreed.

“No. The rules of this game are different from the last. It’s the two of us playing this time, and we’re not letting you join in. Go and talk to your countesses.”

It was at that moment my husband noticed the lilac ribbon. He blinked at it shortsightedly as was his custom and involuntarily leaned toward me as though he were examining something. Then Lázár took my arm and led me away.

I looked back from the entrance to the conservatory. My husband was still standing in the dining-hall doorway while the table was being cleared behind him, myopically staring at us. There was so much sadness, helplessness, and, yes, despair, in his face that I had to stop and look back. I thought my heart would break in the looking. Maybe I never loved him so much as at that moment.

So we sat in the conservatory, Lázár and I … I hope this story isn’t boring you? Do say if it is. But I won’t bore you much longer. That evening flashed by like a dream, you know.

The conservatory was full of scents, muggy, hot, exhausting, like a jungle. We sat under a palm and through the open door could see the brilliantly lit halls inside … Somewhere far off, in a corner of the third room, there was music: quiet, delicate music. Guests were dancing. There was a game of cards going on in another room. It was a grand occasion, splendid and soulless, like everything in that house.

Lázár was smoking a cigarette, listening, watching the dancers. I hadn’t seen him for a year and now he seemed like a complete stranger … He radiated such extraordinary loneliness, he might as well have been living at the North Pole. Loneliness and calm. A sad calm. I suddenly understood that he had stopped wanting things: he didn’t want happiness, he didn’t want success, maybe he no longer wanted even to write. All he wanted was to know the world, to understand it, to get to the truth of it … He was bald and always looked as though he were politely bored. At the same time there was something of the Buddhist monk about him, his slightly slanted eyes inscrutably watching the world so you couldn’t tell what he thought of anything.

Once we had drunk our black coffee he spoke.

“May I be honest with you?”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” I answered.

“Listen,” he said harshly. “No one has a right to interfere in somebody else’s life. I’m not an exception. But Peter is my friend … not just in the cheap, casual sense of the word. I have very few friends. This man, your husband, has kept the magical memories of our youth, along with its secrets. What I want to say may sound a little dramatic.”

I sat there serene, white as a statue, like the benevolent ruler of a tiny nation. I was carved in stone.

“Carry on,” I encouraged him.

“Well, then, let me put it in the crudest possible way. Forget it!”

“That is indeed crude,” I said. “But I don’t understand. Forget what?”

“Peter, the lilac ribbon, and the person with the lilac ribbon. Do you understand? I’m putting it crudely, the way they do in the movies. Forget it … You don’t know what you’re doing. You are poking your fingers in a wound that had begun to heal. It no longer bleeds. The blood has started to clot. It has a very delicate crust. I’ve been observing your lives for five years now, watching this situation develop. You want to probe the wound now. But I warn you, if you probe it, if you scratch it with your nails, there will be blood everywhere … Something — indeed someone — in him might bleed to death.”

“As dangerous as that?” I asked, watching the dancers.

“I believe so,” he said, carefully thinking it over. “As dangerous as that.”

“Then I simply have to do it,” I said.

There was something in my voice, a certain hoarse ringing or tremulousness … He took my hand.

“Be patient. Bear with it,” he pleaded. He was quite agitated now.

“No,” I said. “I will not bear with it. I have been cheated for five years. It’s worse for me than for women whose husbands are faithless, besotted, skirt-chasing fools. For five years I have been struggling with somebody to whom I could not put a face, someone who lives with us, in the house, like an apparition. Well, I’ve had enough of it. I can’t help my feelings. Let my enemy be flesh and blood, not a phantom … You once said that the truth was always simpler than it appears.”

“It is simpler,” he tried to soothe me, “and infinitely more dangerous.”

“Then let it be dangerous,” I said. “What could be worse than living with someone who is not mine? … Who is harboring some memory and seeks to free himself from what he feels and remembers through me, simply because he deems the memory and feeling, that desire, to be unbefitting to him? … Didn’t you yourself tell me that? Well, let him own up to the unbefitting desire. Let him go to her and give up his rank, his dignity.”

“That’s impossible,” he said, his voice cracking from excitement. “He’ll perish in the process.”

“Either way we perish,” I calmly replied. “The child died of it. I am practically a sleepwalker now. I know I’m moving toward the edge, to the border between life and death. Please don’t meddle, please don’t raise your voice, or I will fall. Help if you can. I joined my life to his because I loved him. I thought he loved me … For five years I have lived with a man who has never given me his whole heart. I’ve done all I can to make him mine. I struggled to understand him. I consoled myself with impossible explanations. He’s a man, I said. He’s proud. He’s a man of his class, a lonely man. But this was all lies. Then I tried to bind him to me with the strongest possible human tie, the child. I failed. Why? Can you tell me why? … Is it just fate? … Or is it something else? … You’re the writer, the clever man, the accomplice, the witness to Peter’s life … why are you quiet now? Sometimes I think you had a hand in all this, in all that has happened. You have power over Peter’s soul.”

“I had once,” he said, “but I had to share it with someone else. You should be prepared to share it too. That way everyone might survive,” he said, but he was uncertain and confused.

I had never seen this apparently confident but lonely man so uncertain. The Buddhist monk was now just an ordinary man who would happily have run away rather than answer such painful, dangerous questions. But I wouldn’t let him go.

“You know better than I do that there is no sharing in love,” I said.

“That’s a cliché,” he retorted in bad temper, and lit a cigarette. “You can share anything. Especially in love.”

“What remains of my life if I share?” I asked so passionately that I frightened myself. “A house? A social position? Somebody I dine with, at whose hands I receive the occasional gift of tenderness the way you give an invalid a spoonful of medicine? … Do you suppose there is anything more humiliating, more inhumane, than sharing this kind of half-life with somebody? When I want someone, I want all of him,” I said, almost loudly.

So I went on: despairing, a little theatrical perhaps. Passion always has a touch of theatricality.

Just then someone passed through the conservatory, someone in military uniform … He stopped, startled, looked back, and hurried on, shaking his head.

I felt ashamed. In a quieter, more apologetic tone, I repeated.

“A whole person, someone not to be shared with others. Is that so impossible?”

“No,” he said, examining the potted palm with great care. “It’s simply very dangerous.”

“And our lives, our life together, is that not dangerous the way it is? … What do you think? It’s deadly dangerous,” I declared, and now, having put it like that, I went pale, because I felt it was true.

“The nature of life,” he replied, now courteous and cool, like someone back in his element, leaving the world of passion, returning to the milder climate of precise thoughts and concepts, employing the appropriate formulations. “Deadly dangerous is what life is. But people live with danger in various ways. There are those who live as though they were proceeding along an eternally level plain, walking stick in hand. And there are those who are constantly wanting to leap headfirst into the Atlantic. Dangers are for surviving,” he said very seriously. “It is the most difficult thing, sometimes the most heroic thing, anyone can do.”

There was a small fountain in the conservatory, the water warm to the hand. We listened to its living music as well as the music inside, the music of worldly fashion, a primitive belching.

“I don’t even know,” I said after a while, “who it is I am supposed to share him with. A person or a memory?”

“That’s not important,” he said, shrugging. “It’s the memory of someone rather than a living being. There’s nothing the other one wants, it’s just …”

“Just that she exists,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered.

“In that case we have to get rid of her.” I stood and started looking for my gloves.

“Of whom? The person? …” he asked and slowly unwillingly stood up.

“The person, the memory, the life,” I said. “Can you conduct me to this person?”

“I won’t,” he said. We moved toward the dancers.

“Then I’ll find her by myself,” I said. “There are a million people in this city, several million in the country. I have no evidence to go on, only the lilac ribbon. I have never seen her photograph; I don’t know her name. And yet I am as certain as a water diviner of finding water on an endless plain. Or a prospector who can feel the ore beneath his feet … I am absolutely sure I will find her, this someone, this memory or flesh-and-blood being who is an obstacle to my happiness. Do you doubt me?”

He shrugged. He looked at me carefully, with his sad, searching eyes.

“Maybe,” he said. “I generally believe in people who let their instincts have free rein. I believe in all their miracles and mischief … I believe you will find someone among all those millions, who will answer your call the way one shortwave radio station responds to another. There’s nothing mysterious in this. Powerful feelings reach out to each other … But what do you think will happen then, when you have succeeded?”

“Then?” I asked uncertainly. “Everything will be clearer then. I have to look her in the face, take stock of her … And if it is indeed she …”

“She?” he asked impatiently.

“Just she,” I retorted, just as impatient. “The other one, the enemy … If it is indeed she who prevents my husband’s happiness, if she is the reason why my husband cannot be entirely mine, because of some desire that ties him to her, some memory, some sentimental misunderstanding, whatever it is … well, then, I’ll leave them to their fates.”

“Even if it means the end of Peter? …”

“Too bad. If that’s what finishes him off, let him lump it,” I angrily replied.

We were already in the doorway of the great hall.

“He has done everything possible. You have no idea how much effort it has been for him these past years. You could move mountains with the strength he has spent in denying that memory. I think I know everything there is to know about it. I marveled at it sometimes. He tried to do the most difficult thing in the world. Do you know what he was doing? He was consciously trying to alienate himself from his feelings. It was like someone talking and reasoning with a stick of dynamite, persuading it not to go off.”

“I don’t believe you,” I answered in confusion. “That’s impossible.”

“Almost impossible,” he solemnly replied. “And yet he tried. Why? … To save his soul. To save his self-respect, without which no man can live. And he did it for you too; and when the child came along, he did it for the child, straining every nerve and sinew … Because he loves you. I hope you understand that?”

“I know,” I said. “I wouldn’t be fighting for him if he didn’t … But he doesn’t love me completely, unconditionally. There’s someone between us. Either that other person goes or I go. No doubt this person in the lilac ribbon is powerful, and terrifying? …”

“Should you find her,” he said, blinking and looking into the far distance, “you will be amazed. You will be amazed how much simpler the truth is than you imagine, how much closer to hand, more ordinary, and at the same time more grotesque and dangerous.”

“And on no condition will you tell me her name?”

He said nothing. I could tell from his eyes and voice that he was uneasy, unable to decide.

“Do you like going to your mother-in-law’s house?” he suddenly asked.

“My mother-in-law?” I asked, astonished. “Of course, delighted to. But what has that to do with anything?”

“All I am saying is that Peter feels at home at his mother’s house too,” he mumbled. “When people are looking for something, they always look at home first … Life sometimes arranges things as artfully, as arbitrarily, as in detective fiction … You know how it is: the police are feverishly looking for clues here and there, sticking pins into the wall, while the letter they are looking for is lying in front of them, on the victim’s desk. But nobody thinks to look there.”

“Should I be seeking help in finding the woman with the lilac ribbon from Peter’s mother?” I asked, ever more confused.

“All I can say,” he answered cautiously, not looking at me, “is that before you set off into the wide world to look for Peter’s secret, you should look round Peter’s other home, his mother’s. I am sure you’ll find something there to help you. The parental home is always, to some extent, the scene of the crime. You’ll find everything you need to know about a man there.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Tomorrow morning I will visit her and have a look around … Only I don’t understand what I am supposed to be looking for.”

“It’s the way you wanted it,” he said, as if disclaiming all responsibility.

The music began to howl. We entered the hall among the dancers. Men talked to me; then, after a while, my husband took my arm and led me away. We went straight home. This all happened on the fifteenth of April, on Monday evening, in the fifth year of our marriage.

I slept deeply that night. I was like a burned-out element. The electricity sometimes runs through things and burns the resistance away. The soul darkens. When I woke and went into the garden — it was early spring and the mornings were warm with a touch of the sirocco, so some days I had breakfast set in the garden — my husband had already gone. I breakfasted alone, sipping bitter tea, not feeling hungry.

There were newspapers lying on the table. For lack of anything else to do, I read one of the headlines. A small state had just disappeared off the map. I tried to imagine how the people in that foreign country might feel, waking up at dawn to discover that their lives, their customs, everything they believed or had sworn by, had disappeared from one day to the next, had ceased to matter, and that they were now on the threshold of something entirely new — maybe better, maybe worse, but something that, at any rate, was utterly different from the country they knew, which might just as well have sunk beneath the waves, and that was where they had to live thenceforth, under entirely new conditions, underwater. I thought about it, and also about myself, and what I wanted … What divine commandment had I received, what was the message from heaven? What was the meaning of this continuous excitement in my heart? What was my anxiety, my humiliation, my sorrow compared to the anxiety and sorrow of those millions upon millions of people who were waking this morning to find they had lost what was most precious to them, that had been the center of their lives, the sweet, secret, familiar order of their homeland? … But I kept leafing distractedly through the papers, unable to give world affairs my full attention. I asked myself what right I had in a world like this to worry so intensely about myself, to be so obsessed by what would happen to me and whether I had any right to care so much about my own life … With so many millions of people living in fear and misery, should I really be worrying about whether I really owned every last little bit of my husband’s heart? What was my husband’s secret, or my personal happiness, compared to the world’s secrets, the world’s misery? What was I doing playing detective in a world that is savage enough, frightening and mysterious enough, already? … But these were pseudo-questions, you know, pretenses … One woman’s feelings don’t amount to an entire world. Then I thought back to what the old priest had said, and wondered if he was right. Maybe I didn’t have enough faith, enough humility … Perhaps there was something arrogant about me, something unworthy of a Christian, a woman, indeed of a human being; something arrogant about this crazy project, this amateur-detective attempt to scrape away the surface of a private world and reveal my husband’s secret; something unworthy about trying to find that certain mysterious person with her lilac ribbon. Perhaps … but I was so overwrought at the time I can no longer explain my feelings clearly.

I sat in the garden, the tea got cold, the sun was shining. The birds were already restless, chattering away. Spring was coming on. I thought how Lázár didn’t like the spring: all that fecundity, all those emissions, he said, affect the gastric juices and upset the balance between feeling and reason … That’s what he said. And then I remembered all we had talked about just a few hours ago at night, with the music in the background, beside the fountain, in that rich, cold, grand house, in the suffocating jungle smells of the conservatory. I remembered, and now it seemed as though it were all just something I’d read.

Do you know the feeling you get when you are beyond pain and despair, beyond the most tragic events, and suddenly become very sober, indifferent, almost cheerful? For example, when the person you loved best is being buried, and you suddenly remember that you have left the refrigerator door open back home and the dog is probably eating the cold meat you had saved for the wake? … And the very moment when everyone is singing and standing around the coffin, you start arranging things, whispering, as calm as you like, something about the refrigerator? … Because we are quite capable of that: we live between such infinitely divided shores, in a world of such vast distances. I sat in the sunlight and it was as if I were contemplating someone else’s bad luck, thinking quite coldly and rationally about all that had happened. I recalled what Lázár had said, word for word, but his words did not strike me now with the force they had then. The tension of the previous day had dissolved. I recalled sitting in the conservatory with the writer but it was as if it hadn’t been me. I thought of the lilac ribbon the way you might of a piece of society gossip. By the end, the content and nature of my life might have been summed up by others over tea or supper as follows: “Do you know the Xes? … Yes, the industrialist and his wife. They live on the hill at Rózsadomb. Things aren’t going well for them. The wife has discovered that her husband is in love with someone else. Just imagine, she found a piece of lilac ribbon in his wallet, then it all came out … Yes, they’re separating.” That would have been a way of putting it, what had happened to me, to us. How often had I heard this kind of thing about other couples, stray remarks overheard in company, and not even bothered with it … Could it be that one day we too would become subject to society gossip, my husband and I and the woman with the lilac ribbon?

I closed my eyes, leaned back in the sunshine and, like the wise woman of some primitive village, tried to imagine the face of the lilac-ribboned woman.

Because that face had a life — in the next street, somewhere in the universe. What did I know about her? What can we know of anyone? Five years I had lived with my husband, believing I knew everything about him, knowing his every habit, every gesture: the way he hurriedly washed his hands before meals, never even glancing at the mirror, combing his hair with one hand; the way he’d suddenly be smiling an absentminded, furious smile, never telling me what he’d been thinking of; and more — all we learn of another’s body and soul through intimate contact, however frightening, indifferent, moving, depressing, wonderful, or dull that might be. I believed it was all there was to know. Then one day I discovered I knew nothing about him … knew less, in fact, than Lázár, that strange, disappointed, sarcastic figure who exercised such power over my husband’s soul. What kind of power? … Human power. It was different from mine: greater than my powers as a woman. I can’t explain it, can only feel it, and have always felt it, from the moment I first saw them together. But that very same man had just told me the day before that he was now obliged to share his power with the lilac-ribboned woman … And now I knew that whatever wonderful or terrible things were happening in the world, it was pointless accusing myself of selfishness, lack of faith, or lack of humility, pointless comparing my problems to those of the world of nations, the problems of those millions suffering their various tragedies, because there was nothing I could do — selfish and petty as I was, obsessed and blind as I was — except get out on the street and search out the woman I had to confront face-to-face, the woman I had to talk to. I had to see her, to hear her voice, look into her eyes, examine her skin, her brow, her hands. Lázár said — and now, closing my eyes in the sunlight, I heard his voice again as clearly as if he were sitting opposite me and we were at the party with the music, back in the dizzying, unreal atmosphere of our conversation — that the truth was dangerous but at the same time far more commonplace, closer to hand, than I could imagine. What might that “commonplace” truth be? What did he mean by that?

In any case, had he suggested where to look, had he given me a clue as to where I might find her?

I decided to visit my mother-in-law that very morning and have a serious talk with her.

I was flushed with heat. Once again I felt as if I had stepped into a hot, dry stream of air. I tried to cool down by deliberately thinking rational thoughts. I was burning up the way I was that moment I first opened — oh so long ago, the same time the previous day — the secret pocket in my husband’s wallet. Lázár had told me not to touch anything and to wait … Could it not all have been some horrific vision? Maybe the incriminating evidence, the lilac ribbon, was of less significance than I imagined? Or maybe it was just Lázár playing games again, the same peculiar, incomprehensible game he had been playing that evening some years ago? Could it be that life was no more than a terrible, extraordinary game to him, something to conduct experiments on as he pleased; that he was a chemist working with dangerous acids and corrosives, who wouldn’t care if one day he blew up the world? … There had been something cold about his eyes, in that ruthless, objective, calm, indifferent, and yet infinitely curious gaze of his, when he said I should go to my mother-in-law’s house and “look for clues” to Peter’s secret there … And yet I knew he was telling the truth, not playing games. I knew that the danger he warned me about was real.

There are days, you know, when one doesn’t really want to leave one’s room. When the sun, the stars, your environment, everything, speaks to you, when everything is pressingly relevant and wants to say something. No, not just about the lilac ribbon and what lay behind it in my mother-in-law’s house or elsewhere. It’s reality: the truth they’re after.

Then cook came out into the garden to give me the housekeeping book and we did our sums and discussed dinner and supper.

My husband was earning a lot of money at the time, and he gave me as much as I wanted without bothering to keep track of it. I had a checkbook and could spend as and when I liked. Naturally, I was very careful, particularly at that time, to buy only the essentials. But “the essentials” is a rather general concept … I was obliged to notice that for me, “the essentials” meant many things that, just a few years ago, would have been mere vanity — impossible luxuries. Our fish came from the most expensive delicatessen in town, our poultry was ordered, unseen, by phone. It was years since I had visited the market either with or without cook. I couldn’t tell you how much it cost for the first fruit of spring, I simply demanded the staff should buy the best and most expensive … My sense of reality was a little confused back then. And that morning, with the housekeeping book in my hand, the book in which that greedy magpie of a cook had scribbled whatever figures she fancied, for the first time in years it occurred to me that all the unhappiness and despair I felt, everything I took to be of primary importance, might be the product of money and the wicked, terrifying spell it exercised over me … I thought that if I were poor I might worry less about my husband, about myself, and about things like lilac ribbons. Poverty and sickness have this miraculous power of completely changing one’s priorities; one’s sentimental and psychological values go out the window. But I was neither poor nor sick in the strictly medical sense of the term. That was why I told cook:

“Prepare some cold chicken with mayonnaise tonight. But I only want breast of chicken. And lettuce salad.”

Then I went into the house to dress and get out into the world in search of the woman with the lilac ribbon. That was my mission. I didn’t plan it. There was nothing I specifically intended to say or do: I was simply obeying an internal command.

I was walking down the street, the sun was shining, and of course I had not the least idea where I was going or what I was looking for. I should call on my mother-in-law, I knew that much. However vague this sounds, I had not the slightest doubt that I would find the person I was looking for. The one thing I couldn’t know was that Lázár, with one word, almost his last word, had already set things up, and that I would stumble on the secret straightaway: I would simply dip into the tangled web of the world and pluck it out.

And yet I felt no surprise when I found her. Such a cheap word, “found” … I was just an instrument then, a performer in the play of fate. Whenever I think back now, I grow dizzy and feel a deep humility. I marvel at how everything turned out to be in such remarkable order, every detail immediately and closely following the one before it, everything fitting together with pinpoint precision. It was as if it had all been arranged by someone, perfectly timed, mysterious yet reassuring … I really learned the meaning of faith then. I had been like those people of little faith, abandoned on a stormy sea … but now I discovered that the world that looks so chaotic on the surface has an inner order, an order as rational and miraculous as music. The situation of which our personal destinies were a part, the destinies of three people, suddenly resolved itself: destiny was fulfilled. And every aspect of it suddenly became beautifully clear. It was like coming upon a tree bearing poisoned fruit. I was left simply staring.

But then I believed I was the active force, busy doing something, so I did just as Lázár suggested and took a bus to my mother-in-law’s house.

I thought I was simply doing a quick sweep, taking stock of the place. I might even stop there for a while to take in something of the clean air of her blameless life: it might help me recover a little from the horribly stifling experiences that had so occupied mine. I might tell her what I knew, do a little sobbing, and ask her to strengthen and console me … If she knew anything of Peter’s past she would tell me. That’s what I thought. I sat on the bus and imagined my mother-in-law’s house as a sanatorium on a high mountain. It was as if I were finding my way there from a fetid marsh. That was the mood in which I rang her bell.

She lived in the inner city, on the second floor of a hundred-year-old tenement building. Even the stairwell smelled of English lavender water. I might have been in a linen cupboard. As I rang and waited for the elevator, that cool scent hit me and I felt an overwhelming nostalgia for a different life, a cooler, leaner life free of passion. My eyes filled with tears as the elevator rose. And I still didn’t know that the power that had arranged all this was, in these moments, simply directing me. I rang the bell and the maid opened the door.

“What a shame,” she said once she recognized me. “The dear lady is not at home.”

Suddenly, with a well-practiced movement she caught my hand and kissed it.

“Please don’t,” I said, but it was too late. “Forget the formalities, Juditka. I’ll wait for her.”

I smiled at the calm, proud, open face before me. This was Judit, my mother-in-law’s maid, who had been with her for fifteen years. She was a Transdanubian peasant girl and had joined my mother-in-law’s household when there was still a proper staff. She was a scullery maid then, very young, maybe no more than fifteen. When my father-in-law died and they gave up the large apartment, the girl moved into the inner-city apartment with my mother-in-law. In the meantime, Judit, who in marriageable terms was an old maid of thirty by then — or even over thirty years old — had been promoted to the rank of housekeeper.

We were standing in the dimly lit hall, so Judit put the light on. The moment she did so I started trembling. My legs were shaking and the blood drained from my face, but I continued to stand up straight. The housekeeper was wearing a colored cotton-print dress that morning, and a low-cut dirndl — cheap working clothes. She wore a white head scarf. And round her pale, muscular, peasant-servant neck, on a lilac ribbon, hung an amulet, a cheap locket of the kind you get on the market.

I stretched out my hand without hesitating, without thinking, and with a single movement tore the ribbon from her neck. The locket fell to the floor and opened. You know what was the strangest thing? Judit made no attempt to pick it up. She stood erect and, with a slow, easy movement, crossed her arms across her chest. She looked down at me without moving as I bent down, picked up the locket, and examined the two photographs inside it. Both showed my husband. One of them was very old, taken about sixteen years ago. My husband was twenty-two at the time, Judit fifteen. The other was taken last year, the one he was supposed to have had done for his mother, for Christmas.

We stood there a long time, both of us quite still.

“Forgive me,” she eventually said, courteously, almost grandly. “We shouldn’t just be standing here. Please, do come in.”

She opened the door and led me into her room. I entered without speaking. She stood on the threshold, shut the door, and firmly, quite decisively, turned the key — twice.

I had never entered that room before. Why should I have? … Believe it or not, I had never really studied her face before or regarded it as important.

I studied it now.

There was a white painted table in the middle of the room, and two chairs. I was weak and was afraid I might lose my balance, so I slowly made my way over to one of the chairs and sat down. Judit did not sit; she stood by the locked door, her arms folded, calm and determined, as if wanting to prevent anyone else coming in and disturbing us.

I took a good look around. I had a lot of time on my hands. I knew that every single object, each tiny scrap, was of paramount importance to me here, here at “the scene of the crime”—that’s the phrase that vaguely came to mind, the phrase Lázár had used for the room where I was now sitting. It was an expression I came across each day in the papers, when they reported how the police, having arrested the criminal, would go to the scene of the crime and conduct a thorough investigation … I was investigating the room in exactly the same way. Something had happened here, or some place like it, many years ago, an event lost in the mists of time … and now suddenly here I was — judge, witness, and perhaps victim too. Judit said nothing. She did not disturb me, understanding precisely how important everything about this room was to me.

But there was nothing surprising there. The furnishings were not exactly poor, but neither were they comfortable. It was the kind of room you see in a convent, a guest room prepared for the better class of secular visitor: the copper bed; the white furniture; the white curtains; the striped peasant rug; the picture above the bed of the Virgin, complete with rosary; the little jug of flowers on the bedside table; the extremely modest but carefully chosen little decorative objects ranged along the glass shelf above the basin. Do you know what this said to me? It said: resignation. It had an air of conscious, voluntary resignation. You could practically breathe it … And the moment I breathed it I no longer felt angry, I felt only sadness and a deep, bottomless fear.

Of course I felt all kinds of emotions and sensations in those long minutes. I noticed everything and sensed what lay beyond each individual item, lapping at them like a sea. It was someone’s fate: it was a life. Suddenly I felt scared. I could hear Lázár’s sad, hoarse voice, clearly and precisely predicting that I would be amazed to find the truth much simpler, much more ordinary, but much more frightening than I ever imagined. True enough, this was all pretty ordinary. And yes, frightening too.

Wait, I want to get things properly in perspective.

Just now I was saying that I detected an air of resignation. But I observed secrecy and outrage too. Don’t go away thinking this was a hovel, one of those Pest slums where poor servants find accommodation. It was a clean, comfortable room: a maid’s room at my mother-in-law’s could be no other. I also said it was the kind of guest room you find in a convent: little cells where the guest not only lives, sleeps, and washes, but is also obliged to consider his soul. Every object in such a place — the whole atmosphere — is a constant reminder of strict commandments issued by a superior being … There was no trace of perfume, cologne, or scented soap in the room. Beside the basin lay a common cake of tallow soap, the kind you use for laundry. Next to that some water for rinsing the teeth, a toothbrush, a brush, and a comb. I also spotted a box of rice powder and a facecloth of chamois leather. That was the sum of this woman’s worldly possessions. I took all this in, item by item.

There was also a framed group photograph on the bedside table. Two little girls, two spry adolescent boys, one of them in uniform, and a startled-looking older couple, a man and a woman, in ceremonial dress. In other words, the family, somewhere in Transdanubia. Next to them, fresh catkins in a glass of water.

A tangle of undarned stockings lay in a sewing basket on the table beside an out-of-date tourist brochure whose brightly colored cover showed children playing on the sandy beach of a faintly ruffled sea. The brochure looked worn, its corners turned down: you could see it had been read over and over again. And on the door there hung a maid’s black working dress with a white pinafore. That was the total sum of the room’s contents.

These commonplace objects implied a conscious self-discipline. You could tell from them that whoever lived here did not need to be taught order, that the order sprang from within, that she was quite capable of teaching herself. Do you know enough about servants’ rooms to know what they are stuffed with? Extraordinary objects, all those things their inner lives require: fancy hearts made of candy; brightly colored postcards; ancient, long-discarded cushions; cheap little china figurines; things thrown away by that other world, the world of their social superiors … I once had a chambermaid who collected boxes of the rice powder I had finished with and my empty perfume bottles; she collected this stuff the way wealthy connoisseurs collect snuffboxes, Gothic carvings, or works by the French impressionists. In the world they inhabit, these objects represent what we consider beautiful, as works of art. Because no one can live with just the bare necessities in the real world … we need a little superfluity in our lives, something dazzling, something that sparkles, something lovely, however cheap or worthless. Few people can live without the dream of beauty. There has to be something — a postcard, all red and gold, showing a sunset, or dawn in a forest. We’re like that. The poor are no different.

But what I was confronted with, in that room behind the locked door, was not like that.

The woman who occupied this room had quite deliberately stripped away all elements of comfort, bric-a-brac, and cheap glitter. You could see she had strictly, ruthlessly, denied herself anything the world might cast away or regard as luxury. It was a severe room. It was as though the woman had undertaken certain vows to live here. But the vows, the woman, the room — none of it was welcoming. That’s why it frightened me.

This was not the room of some kittenish little flirt who inherits her mistress’s silk stockings and discarded clothes, secretly sprays herself with Madam’s French perfume, and makes eyes at the master of the house. The woman facing me was not the normal household demon, the lower-orders lover, the alluring siren of an ailing, decadent, bourgeois home. This woman was not my husband’s sweetheart, not even if she kept his portrait in a locket suspended on a lilac ribbon around her neck. Do you know what this woman was like? I’ll tell you what I felt: I felt she was hostile but my equal. She was a woman just as passionate, sensitive, strong, worthy, vulnerable, and full of suffering as I was, as is everyone who is conscious of her rank. I sat in the chair, the lilac ribbon in my hand, unable to utter a word.

Nor did she say anything. She was not agitated. She stood up straight, as I do. She had powerful shoulders — not slender, certainly not slim, but very well proportioned. If she had walked into the house we were at last night, among all those famous men and beautiful women, people would have looked at her and asked: “Who is that woman?” … And everyone would have felt she was someone who mattered … Her figure, her bearing, was what people call regal. I have seen a princess or two in my time, but none of them had that regal bearing. This woman had it. And there was something in her eyes, in her face, something about her, in her things, in the look and feel of the room, that — as I say — frightened me. I’m reminded of the phrase I used before: conscious, voluntary resignation … But beneath the resignation there was a tense alertness. A readiness. Something that demanded all or nothing. A prowling, untiring instinct, instilled over years, over decades. A close attention that would never relax. Nor was the resignation humble or selfless, but proud — even haughty. Why do people jabber on about the aristocracy being proud, puffed up with self-importance? I have met a great many countesses and princesses, and not one was proud in that sense. On the contrary, they were, if anything, hesitant and a little shamefaced, like all aristocrats … But this Transdanubian peasant girl, whose eyes met mine so boldly, was neither humble nor shamefaced. Her gaze was cold and glittering. It was like a hunter’s knife. She was self-controlled and had a clear conscience. She said nothing, she made no move, she didn’t even blink. She was a woman fully aware that this was the crowning moment of her life. Her whole body, her soul, and her sense of destiny were living that experience.

Did I say a guest room in a convent? … Well, yes, that too. But it was also a cage, the cage of a wild animal. For sixteen years she had stalked up and down in her cage, brushing against its bars, or in another cage exactly like this. She was a refined wild animal embodying passion and patience. I had stepped into her cage and now we were watching each other. This woman wouldn’t be paid off with cheap little knickknacks. She wanted it all, life entire, destiny with all its dangers. And she could wait. She was good at waiting, I admitted to myself, and shuddered.

The locket and ribbon were still lying in my lap. I sat there, paralyzed.

“Would you please give me back the picture,” she finally said.

When I made no move, she continued:

“I’ll let you keep one of them, the one taken last year, if you like. But the other one is mine.”

It was her property. She said it as if she were pronouncing judgment. Yes, the other picture had been taken sixteen years ago, before I had met Peter. But she already knew him then, probably better than I ever did. I took one more look at the pictures, then, without speaking, I handed her the locket.

She too looked at the pictures, checking them over attentively as if to make sure no harm had befallen them. She went over to the window and, from under the bed, brought out an old battered traveling case, found a tiny key in her bedside drawer, opened the worn case, and stowed the locket away. She did all this slowly, deliberately, without the least sign of excitement, as if she had all the time in the world. I watched her carefully and registered, as it were in passing, that just now, when she addressed me and asked for the photographs, she did not use the normal class honorifics, no “miss,” no “ma’am.”

There was something else I felt in those few moments. It’s many years ago now and I see it all more precisely. This feeling all but overwhelmed me, telling me that everything that was happening just then was nothing out of the ordinary. It was as if I’d seen it all before. I was, of course, astonished by how right Lázár had been the previous night when he told me directly that the woman with the lilac ribbon, the finding of whom was a matter of life or death to me, would be so close, merely a few streets away, at my mother-in-law’s apartment. I was astonished that she was someone I had often met and had even talked to. When I set out that morning, like a woman obsessed, to find my one and only enemy in life, I did not expect my very first venture would lead straight to her … No doubt about it, if someone had predicted this yesterday, I would politely have asked them to change the subject, as I don’t like to joke about serious matters. But now that it had happened, I was no longer astonished. I was surprised by neither the person nor the room. All I knew about Judit before was that she had been a “splendid support” to my mother-in-law, that she was regarded as practically a member of the family, miraculous evidence of what proper training could achieve. But now I felt I knew much more about her: that I knew everything. Not in words, not intellectually. I mean by instinct, as part of my destiny: I knew everything about her, and myself, despite never having spoken to her in all these years other than bidding her good day, asking whether anyone was home or if I could have a glass of water. I must have been scared of her: her face. There was simply this woman on the other side of the tracks, going about her business, waiting and aging, as I was … and there I was on my side, not knowing why my life lacked something, why it was unbearable, or what to make of the feeling that haunted my days and nights, those feelings that worked their way into my bones like some wicked, mysterious radiation, the sense that things were not quite right … I knew nothing about my husband or Judit. But there are moments in life when we understand that the most unlikely, the most impossible, most incomprehensible things are actually the simplest and closest to hand. Suddenly life’s mechanism is laid bare before us: those we considered important vanish as through a trapdoor and out of the background step figures about whom we know little that is certain but for whom — we suddenly understand — we have been waiting, as they, with their own burden of fate, have been waiting for us, for this precise moment …

And it was all exactly as Lázár said it would be: right on my doorstep.

The situation was that a peasant girl had been keeping my husband’s photographs in a locket hanging round her neck. She was fifteen when she moved from her village into town, to work for this upper-middle-class family. Naturally, she falls in love with the young master of the house. In the meantime the young master grows up and gets married. The maid and the young master see each other occasionally but are no longer close. The class difference proves ever more a chasm between them. And time ticks on for them both. The man ages. The girl is practically an old maid. She has never married. Why has she not married? …

It was as if I had been thinking aloud. She answered me.

“I’ll leave the house. I am sorry for the old lady, but I have to go.”

“Where will you go, Juditka?” I asked, using the familiar form of her name, which seemed to come easily to me now.

“I’ll go into service,” she said. “In the country.”

“Can’t you go home?” I asked, glancing at the photograph.

“They’re poor,” she said without expression, quite matter-of-fact.

The word echoed in the room like a cracked bell. It was as if, ultimately, this was the reality that underlay everything we could discuss from then on. It was as if some object had flown through the room and we had both followed its path, I out of curiosity, she indifferently, without comment. The word was familiar to her.

“I don’t think that will help,” I said after a while. “Why should you leave? No one has harmed you and no one will. If you want to go now, why did you stay so long in the first place? Don’t you see,” I said, as if arguing with her, as if hitting on an important point, “that now that you have stayed so long, you might as well stay on. Nothing new has happened.”

“No,” she said. “I’m going.”

We spoke quietly, two women together, in brief half-sentences.

“Why?”

“Because it’s out in the open now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he knows.”

“My husband?”

“Yes.”

“Did he not know till now?”

“He knew,” she answered. “But he has forgotten.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And who is there to tell him seeing he has forgotten?” I asked her.

“You, ma’am,” she stated quite simply.

I put my hand to my heart.

“Look here, my girl,” I said. “What are you talking about? That is your fevered imagination talking. Why do you think I would tell him? What could I possibly say?”

By now we were staring at each other with undisguised curiosity, looking into each other’s eyes so keenly, so greedily, we were like people who had lived together for years with our eyes closed. Now that our eyes were open, we could not get enough of what we saw. And at the same time we knew for the first time that all these years we had never been brave or honest enough to let our eyes meet. We always looked away and talked of something else. We lived in our respective spaces. It was just that both of us carried a secret, and this secret was the meaning of both our lives. And now we had admitted it.

What did she look like? Maybe I could describe her for you.

But first a glass of water, is that all right? My throat is dry. Miss, just a moment, a glass of water, please. Thank you. Look, they have started putting the lights out already … But there isn’t much more. Would you like another cigarette?

Well, she had a wide brow, a pale, open face; her hair was a bluish black. It was pinned up in a bun, parted in the middle. She had a snub, Slavic nose. Her face was quite smooth, with fine, clearly defined features, like the face of Mary in mourning in one of those village altarpieces painted by some anonymous, traveling artist. It was a proud face, so pale it was almost white. The blue-black hair framed that white like … but I’m not good at comparisons. What can I say? I leave that kind of thing to Lázár. Not that he would say anything: he’d only smile, because he thinks comparisons are below him. It is facts he wants, simple sentences.

So I’ll stick to plain facts, if you’re not bored.

It was a beautiful, proud peasant face. In what way peasant? It just was. It lacked the patently obvious complexity of expression you invariably find on middle-class faces, that tense, vulnerable air of sourness. This face was smooth, implacable. You couldn’t charm it into a smile with cheap compliments and niceties. It was a face alive with memories, memories of ages long since vanished, memories that were probably not even personal. Tribal memories. The eyes and the lips led independent lives. Her eyes were blue-black like her hair. I once saw a puma at the Dresden Zoo. Her eyes were like that.

Those eyes were staring at me now the way a drowning man might stare at someone on the shore, possibly a murderer, or a potential rescuer. My eyes are feline too, a warm light brown … I know my eyes were glittering too that moment, searching her face the way beams search when an army is expecting an assault. But it was her lips that were most terrifying. Soft, pouting lips. It was the mouth of a big beast that was no longer carnivorous. Her teeth were a brilliant white, strong and straight. She was clearly a powerful woman, muscular and well proportioned. And now it was as if a shadow had fallen across that white face. But she made no complaint. She answered me quietly and confidentially, in the voice not of a servant but of a woman like myself.

“There are these,” she said. “The pictures. He will know now. I’ll go away,” she obstinately repeated, almost a little crazed.

“Could it be that he hasn’t known till now?”

“Oh,” she said, “it’s a long time since he looked at me.”

“And you always wear that locket?”

“Not always,” she said. “Only when I’m alone.”

“What happens when you are on duty and he is here, visiting?” I asked more confidentially. “Don’t you wear it then?”

“No,” she replied, equally confidentially, “because I don’t want to remind him of it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Just because,” she said, and opened her blue-black eyes wide as if staring down a well, into the distant past. “Why should he remember, now that he has forgotten?”

Very quietly, I asked her, in confidence, wanting to tease out the answer:

“What, Judit? What was there to forget?”

“Nothing,” she replied, cold and harsh.

“Were you his lover? Tell me.”

“No, I wasn’t his lover,” she replied, her voice clear and strong, as if she were accusing someone.

We fell silent. There was no arguing with that voice; I knew it was the truth. And you can hate me, you can tell me I was wrong, but at the very moment I relaxed a secret inner voice told me: “It’s a pity she’s telling the truth. How much simpler it would all be …”

“So what happened? …” I asked.

She shrugged, clearly flustered, fury, indignation, and despair flashing across her face like lightning over a deserted landscape.

“Will Madam keep it to herself?” she asked in a cracked, raw voice, as if in warning.

“Keep what?”

“If I tell her, will she keep it to herself? …”

I looked into her eyes. I knew I had to be true to whatever I promised. This woman would kill me if I lied to her now.

“If you tell me the truth,” I eventually said, “that will be the end of it.”

“Swear,” she said, solemn and uncertain.

She stepped over to the bed and took the rosary from the wall, handing it to me.

“Will you swear?” she asked.

“I swear,” I said.

“That you will never tell your husband what you heard from me, from Judit Áldozó?”

“Never,” I said. “I swear.”

I can see you don’t understand this. Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure I understand it, either. But then it all seemed so natural, so simple.… I was standing in my mother-in-law’s maid’s room, swearing to a servant that I would never tell my husband what I was about to hear from her? Is that simple enough? Yes, I think it is.

I swore.

“Good,” she said, and seemed to have calmed down. “So now I’ll tell you.”

There was such exhaustion in her voice! She hung the rosary back on the wall. She walked to and fro, across the room, twice, her steps long and light … yes, very like a puma in a cage. She leaned against the cupboard. She was tall now, much taller than me. She threw her head back, folded her arms, and gazed at the ceiling.

“How did you know who it was? …” she asked suspiciously, with considerable disdain, talking like a cheap suburban servant now.

“I just knew,” I replied in the same way. “I found out.”

“Did he talk about it?”

There was a certain familiarity in that “he,” but a great deal of respect too. I could see she was still suspicious, wary in case there was something not quite right behind the scenes, worried that I might cheat her. She stood there the way the accused stands before the detective or the prosecutor; there is that helpless sense of waiting and then, under a conclusive “weight of evidence,” the collapse and desire to confess, but then the words stick in the throat … The criminal worries that the lawyer will trick him, that the lawyer doesn’t really know the truth but is just pretending, that he is wheedling a confession out of him, getting at the underlying truth by pretending to be nice, using some psychological sleight-of-hand … But he knows he can’t keep silent any longer. It’s like a process that, once begun, cannot be stopped. Now he actually wants to confess.

“No,” I said.

“Fine,” she said, and closed her eyes for a second. “I believe you.”

A moment of silence.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said, breathing heavily. “He wanted to marry me.”

“I see,” I said, as if nothing could be more natural. “And when was that?”

“Twelve years ago, in December. And he persisted. For two whole years.”

“How old were you then?”

“Eighteen.”

So my husband was thirty-six years old at the time. I carried on in my friendly way, as if nothing had happened.

“Do you have a photograph from that time?”

“Of him?” she asked, surprised. “Yes. You have just seen it.”

“No,” I said. “Of you, Judit.”

“I have,” she said sourly, more like an ill-tempered servant now. “It happens I have.”

She pulled open the dressing-table drawer and picked up a school exercise book covered in checkered paper — you know, the sort we used at school for French conversation and comprehension, notes on La Fontaine, and so forth … She leafed through it. There were religious images, advertisements snipped from newspapers … I stood up and looked over her shoulder as she turned the pages.

The religious images were of Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Joseph. But otherwise, everything in the book suggested a remote or close association with my husband. The newspaper cuttings were advertisements for my husband’s factory. There was a bill for a top hat sent by a city hat shop. Then there was my father-in-law’s obituary. And the announcement, on watermarked paper, of our forthcoming engagement.

She leafed through all this without emotion, a little tired, as if, having looked at such scraps often enough in the past, she was almost bored of them, yet unable to let them go. For the first time I was watching her hands: strong, bony, and long, with carefully trimmed but unvarnished nails. Long, powerful, bony fingers. With two of them she picked up one of the photographs.

“Here it is,” she said with a bitter smile, the corners of her mouth turned down.

The picture showed Judit Áldozó at the age of eighteen, just the age when my husband wanted to marry her.

It had been taken somewhere in town, in a cheap studio. Gold letters on the back advertised the fact that the owner was prepared to commemorate all moments of family rejoicing. It was a conventional photograph, posed and artificial: invisible metal rods adjusted the girl’s head to the required position, so that she should be looking toward something far away, her eyes startled and glazed. Judit Áldozó had braided the two bunches of her hair into a crown for the occasion, in the style of Queen Elizabeth of Habsburg. Her proud and frightened peasant face looked as if it were pleading for help.

“Give it back,” she said harshly, and took it away from me, slipping it back into the checkered notebook as though hiding something private from the outside world.

“That’s what I looked like back then,” she said. “I’d been here three years by then. He never talked to me. Then one day he asked me if I could read. I said I could. Good, he said. But he never gave me a book. We didn’t talk.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing,” she said, shrugging. “That’s all.”

“You just knew?”

“You can tell.”

“True,” I sighed. “And then?”

She looked up toward the ceiling and leaned against the cupboard. There was the same glazed, slightly startled expression in her eyes as in the photograph, as if she were gazing into the distant past. “So, after three years,” she said, speaking more slowly and haltingly now, “he talked to me. It was afternoon on Christmas Day. We were both in the parlor. He spoke for a long time. He was very nervous. I just listened.”

“Yes?” I said, and swallowed.

“Yes,” she repeated, and took a gulp too. “He said he knew it was very difficult. He didn’t want me to be his lover. He wanted us to go away together, somewhere abroad. Italy,” she said, and the tension vanished from her face. She smiled and her eyes sparkled as if she had really understood the full meaning of that wonderful word, as if it meant everything to her, more than anyone could say or hope for in life.

We both instinctively glanced at the cover of the dog-eared tourist brochure lying on the table, the sea slightly ruffled, the children playing in the sand … That was as close as she got to Italy.

“And you refused?”

“I did,” she said, her expression darkening.

“Why? …”

“I just did,” she snapped back. And then, uncertainly: “I was afraid.”

“Of what? …”

“Everything,” she said, and shrugged.

“Because he was master and you were servant? …”

“That among other things,” she quietly agreed, and cast me a look that was almost grateful, as if thanking me for saying so instead of her, saving her the agony. “I was always afraid. But not just of that. I felt something was wrong. He was too far above me,” she said, shaking her head.

“Were you afraid of your mistress?”

“Of her? … No,” she said and smiled again. I could see she thought me a little dense, someone completely at sea in matters of the real world, so she began to explain the situation to me as if she were talking to a child.

“I was not afraid of her, even though she knew.”

“Your mistress knew? …”

“Yes.”

“Who else knew? …”

“Only she and his friend. The writer.”

“Lázár?”

“Yes.”

“Did he speak to you about it? …”

“The writer? Yes. I went to his apartment.”

“Why?”

“Because he asked me to. Your Ladyship’s husband.”

The use of the term stood out, mocking and remorseless at once. What it said to me was: “To me he is ‘he.’ That much I know. To you he is just your husband.”

“All right,” I said. “In other words two people knew, my mother-in-law and the writer. And what did the writer say?”

She shrugged again.

“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “He just looked at me and listened.”

“For a long time?”

“Long enough. He—” again that extending “he”—“wanted to talk to me, to take a good look at me. To persuade me. But he didn’t say anything. There were a lot of books in the room. All those books! I had never seen so many books … He didn’t sit down, just leaned against the stove. He just looked and smoked. He carried on looking at me till it grew dark. Only then did he speak.”

“What did he say?” I asked. I could see them clearly, Lázár and Judit Áldozó, standing silently in the darkening room, struggling over my husband’s soul without saying anything, with “all those books!” around.

“Nothing. He simply asked how much land we owned.”

“And how much is that?”

“Eight acres.”

“Where?”

“In Zala.”

“And what did he say then?”

“He said, ‘That is little. Four people have to live off that.’ ”

“Yes,” I said quickly, confused. I’m not familiar with such things. But I understood enough to know that it was little.

“And then?”

“He rang the bell and said, ‘Judit Áldozó, you may go now.’ Nothing more. But by then I knew nothing would come of it.”

“Because he was against it?”

“He and the whole world. And that’s not the only reason. It was also because I didn’t want to. It was like a sickness,” she said, and slammed her fist on the table. I hardly recognized her. It was as if something in her had exploded. Her limbs jerked as if in an electric shock, as if a flood had hit her. Her words were quiet, but it was as if she were shouting. “The whole thing was like a sickness … I didn’t eat for a year, only tea. But don’t go thinking it was for him I starved,” she quickly added, and put her hand to her heart.

“What do you mean?” I asked, astounded. “What does it mean to starve for someone?”

“They used to do it in the village, a long time ago,” she said, and looked down as if it weren’t quite proper to betray the secrets of the tribe to a stranger. “One person remains silent and refuses to eat until the other does it.”

“Does what?”

“What the other person wants them to do.”

“And does it work?”

“It works. But it’s a sin.”

“I see,” I said, and she knew that whatever she said now it was likely that I would think she really did “refuse to eat” for my husband. “But you did not commit that sin?”

“No, not I,” she quickly answered, and shook her head, blushing, as though she were confessing. “Because by that time I wanted nothing; because the whole thing was like a sickness. I couldn’t sleep; I even developed a rash on my face and thigh. And I was racked with fever for a long time. Her Ladyship looked after me.”

“And what did she say?”

“Nothing,” she replied, dreamily reminiscing. “She wept. But she didn’t say anything. When I had the fever, she fed me sweet water and medicine with a spoon. Once she kissed me,” she said, her eyes gentle, as though this was the nicest thing that had ever happened to her.

“When?” I asked.

“When the young master went away …”

“Where did he go?”

“Abroad,” she simply replied. “For four years.”

I listened. That was the period my husband spent in London, Paris, in the north, and in Italian cities. He was thirty-six when he returned from abroad to take over the factory. Sometimes he talked about it: his years of wandering, he called them … It was just that he never told me that Judit Áldozó was the reason for his four-year absence.

“And then, before he went away, did you talk?”

“No,” she said. “Because I was better by then. To tell you the truth, we only spoke once. That first time, before Christmas. That’s when he gave me the locket with the photograph and the lilac ribbon. But he cut off a piece of that. It was in a box,” she solemnly explained, as though this somehow changed the significance of the gift, as though every detail was very important, including the fact that the locket my husband gave to Judit Áldozó came out of a box … But I myself felt that every detail was of great importance then.

“And the other picture? Did you get that from him?”

“The other one? No,” and she looked down. “I bought that.”

“Where?”

“At the photographer’s studio. It hardly cost anything,” she said.

“I see,” I said. “You got nothing else from him?”

“Something else?” she asked, opening her eyes wide in wonder. “Oh, yes. He gave me a piece of candied orange peel once.”

“You like candied peel?”

She looked down again. I could see she was embarrassed by this sign of weakness.

“Yes,” she said. “But I didn’t eat it,” she added, as if in mitigation. “Would you like to see it? … I’ve kept it. Wrapped in a twist of paper.”

And she turned to the cupboard, keen to produce her alibi. I quickly extended my hand.

“No, Judit, leave it,” I said. “I believe you. And after that? What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” she said, as simply as if she were telling any old story. “He went away and I got better. Her Ladyship sent me home for three months. It was summer. Harvest time. But I was on full pay,” she boasted. “Then I came back. He was away a long time. Four years. And I felt at peace again. When he came back he no longer lived with us. We never talked again. He didn’t write, not once. Yes, it was a form of sickness,” she declared, as if going through an argument she had had with herself a long time ago before coming to a wise conclusion that she was determined now to prove right.

“And that was that?” I asked.

“That was that. He got married. Then the child was born. Then it died. I cried my eyes out and felt sorry for Your Ladyship.”

“Yes, yes. Let’s drop the subject,” I replied in a nervous, abstracted manner, clearly rejecting her offer of empathy. “Tell me, Judit. You say you never, but never, spoke after that.”

“Never,” she said, and looked me in the eye.

“Not even about that?”

“Not about anything,” she solemnly affirmed.

I understood that this was the truth and that it was carved in stone. Neither of them was a liar. I began to feel sick with fear, with the shock. I felt generally unwell. There could be nothing worse than the news that they had never spoken since. That they had remained silent for twelve years: that told me everything. And all the time one of them went about with a locket round her neck with the other’s photograph in it, and the other carried around a strip of lilac ribbon that he had cut away and hidden in the deepest recesses of his wallet. And one of them got married, taking me as wife, and when he came home not all of him arrived, because someone else was waiting for him. That said everything. My hands and feet were frozen. I began to shiver.

“Just answer me one more question,” I said. “I am not asking you to swear to the truth of all this. As far as I am concerned, I swore not to tell my husband and I will keep my promise. So just tell me this now, Judit. Did you regret it?”

“What?”

“Not accepting his offer of marriage?”

She crossed her arms and went over to the window, staring down into the shadowy yard of the inner-city house. After a long silence, she spoke over her shoulder.

“Yes.”

The word dropped between us like a bomb: it was as if someone had thrown an unexploded grenade into the room. In the silence we could hear our hearts and the invisible bomb, all of them ticking away. The bomb carried on ticking. It ticked for two whole years, and then it exploded.

There were noises in the hall. My mother-in-law had arrived. Judit tiptoed over to the door and, with one practiced movement, silently turned the key in the lock. The door opened and there on the threshold stood my mother-in-law in a fur coat with her hat on, just as she had arrived from town.

“It’s you,” she said, and went pale.

“We were chatting, Mama,” I said, and stood up.

The three of us stood in the maid’s room, my mother-in-law, Judit, and I, like the three Fates in a tableau vivant. The image suddenly came to me and, grief-stricken as I was, I gave a nervous laugh. But I couldn’t go on laughing, because my mother-in-law entered the room, paler than ever, sat down on Judit’s bed, covered her face with her hands, and started to cry.

“Please don’t cry,” said Judit. “She has sworn not to tell him.”

She gave me a long, slow, lingering look, examining me from head to toe, then left the room.

After dinner I rang Lázár. He wasn’t home; it was his servant who answered the phone. About half past four the phone rang: it was Lázár from town. He was silent for a while, as if he were a very long way away, in another galaxy, because he had to think very carefully about his answer to my request, which was, after all, ridiculously simple. I wanted to see him as a matter of priority.

“Shall I come over to you?” he eventually asked rather gruffly.

But there was no point, because I was expecting my husband any moment. I couldn’t suggest meeting in a café or Konditorei either. Somewhat annoyed, he relented in the end, saying:

“If you insist, I’ll go home and wait for you at the apartment.”

I immediately accepted the invitation. I really didn’t think much about it in the meantime. In those days generally, but particularly in the hours following the conversation in the morning, I was in such an extraordinary state of mind I seemed to be moving at the dangerous fringes of life, in a space somewhere between prison and hospital, in another world altogether, where the normal rules of life — those that govern social and domestic life, simply did not apply. Even the trip to Lázár’s house felt like a strange emergency, like being in an ambulance or in a police car … Only once I was ringing the bell did the trembling of my hands remind me that what I was doing was something out of the ordinary, something not entirely proper.

He opened the door, kissed my hand, and without saying a word led me into a large room.

He lived on the fifth floor of a new building on the Danube embankment. Everything in the building itself was brand-new, comfortable and modern. Only the décor of his own apartment was old-fashioned, somehow secondhand and provincial. I looked around and was really surprised. However agitated and preoccupied I was, I still took it all in, and was starting to assess various details of the furnishings, because, well, you know how strange we all are, how even when we are being led off to be hanged, we carry on registering things, like a bird in a tree or a wart on the judge’s chin as he reads the death sentence … So there I was in this apartment. It was as if I’d called at the wrong place. Deep inside me, you know, I had already imagined Lázár’s den, and was expecting something exotic, something faintly Wild West, a wigwam perhaps, along with a mass of books and the scalps of his female conquests — or of his competitors. But it was nothing like that. There were bits of nineteenth-century cherrywood furniture, covered with regulation lace doilies, the sort you are greeted with out in the country — you know, those uncomfortable high-backed, fancy chairs, and the glazed sideboard stuffed with all kinds of office-clerk trash: glasses from Marienbad, Prague pottery … It was a room that might have been occupied by a middle-income country lawyer who had moved up to the city, whose wife had inherited the furniture and they couldn’t yet afford anything new … But there was no sign of a woman’s touch, and Lázár, as far as I knew, was quite wealthy.

He did not take me to the room with “all those books,” the one in which he received Judit Áldozó. He was courteous in every way, the way a doctor is to his sick patient on a first visit. He showed me to a seat and, naturally, did not offer me any refreshment. From the beginning to the end he was attentive, correct, and reserved, as though he had seen all this before and knew, the way that doctors know when addressing a terminally ill patient, that the conversation was pointless, that all he could do was listen, politely nodding and maybe scribble some ineffective prescription, a syrup or a powder, without offering any hope … What did he know of the situation? Only that there was no advising people in matters of feeling. I myself suspected this in my own vague way. Sitting there opposite him, I was annoyed to realize that it had been a pointless journey. There is no such thing as “counsel” in life. Things just happen and there’s an end of it.

“Did you find her?” he asked without preamble.

“Yes,” I answered, since he wasn’t someone who needed a wealth of explanation.

“And do you feel better and calmer for it?”

“I wouldn’t say so. And that’s precisely why I’ve come to you. I want to find out what happens next.”

“I really can’t tell you,” he replied without emotion. “Maybe nothing. You will recall that I warned you not to pick at the wound. It had healed quite nicely. There was, as doctors say, a decent cicatrix. But now it has been disturbed. It has suffered a small cut.”

The medical terms did not surprise me. It felt like a doctor’s waiting room or surgery anyway. There was, I should stress, nothing in the least “literary” about this, nothing like what you might imagine being in a famous writer’s apartment … No, everything was bourgeois, middle-class, terribly modest and orderly. He noticed my eyes flicking around. It wasn’t an entirely comfortable feeling sitting opposite him, because I could see he noticed everything. I felt exposed, as if I were on an operating table. I expected it all to finish up in a book one day.

“I need a certain order around me,” he explained. “People are so disorderly. Ideally one should be as orderly as a postmaster in one’s affairs. I can’t concentrate in a disordered environment.”

He did not say what it was he could not concentrate on; probably on life in general … on surfaces, on depths, on the places where lilac ribbons flutter.

“I have sworn not to say a word to my husband,” I said.

“He’ll find out anyway,” he nodded.

“Who will tell him?”

“You will. It’s just not possible to keep it quiet. It’s not only words that will tell him, it’s your very soul. Your husband will discover everything, and soon.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, without ceremony, he almost snapped.

“What do you want from me, madam?”

“A clear and precise answer,” I retorted, and it surprised me how clear and precise I could be. “You were right when you said that something in our lives would explode. Did I set it off, or was it an accident, mere chance? … I don’t suppose it matters now. In any case, there’s no such thing as chance. My marriage has failed. I fought like crazy and sacrificed my whole life for it. I don’t know what I did wrong. I found a piece of evidence — a few clues. I finished up talking to someone who told me she was closer to my husband than I was.”

He leaned on the table, listened, and smoked.

“Do you think this woman has left a permanent mark on my husband? Do you think she has lodged herself in his heart, in his memory, in his nerves forever? Is that what it’s all about? Is that what love is?”

“Forgive me,” he said courteously, but with a trace of mockery in his voice. “I am just a writer, and a male one at that. I don’t have the answers to difficult questions like that.”

“Do you believe,” I asked, “that there is one true love that grows to dominate a person’s soul so they can’t love anyone else?”

“Possibly,” he replied, with a proper concern, cautious like the good doctor who has seen a great deal and prefers not to give a careless answer. “Such things happen. Do they happen often? … No.”

“What happens inside a person when they’re in love?” I asked like a naïve schoolgirl. “What do they feel in their soul?”

“Feel in the soul?” he immediately answered. “Nothing. Feelings don’t happen in the soul. They work through some different system. But they can pass through the soul and submerge it, the way a flood covers a floodplain.”

“Could we stop the flood if we were really wise and clever?” I asked.

“Well, now,” he replied, clearly interested, “that is indeed an interesting question. I’ve given the matter considerable thought. My answer would have to be: yes, up to a point. What I mean is … intelligence in itself can neither produce nor end feeling. But it can regulate. Should our feelings become a source of common danger, we might be able to contain them.”

“You mean cage them up, like a tiger? …” I blurted out.

“Yes, a tiger, if you like,” he shrugged. “Once enclosed, our poor wild feelings can stride round and round the cage, roar, grind their teeth, claw at the bars … but in the end they’ll be broken, their fur and teeth will fall out, and eventually they’ll grow melancholy and obedient. That’s quite possible … I’ve seen it happen. That’s the product of intelligence. You can control and tame emotions. Though one has to be careful, of course,” he warned. “One mustn’t open the doors of the cage too early. Because the tiger can get out, and if it is not completely tamed, it can cause a great deal of inconvenience.”

“Can’t you be plainer than that?” I asked. “I need to know quite explicitly.”

“I can’t be much plainer than that,” he retorted. “You want to know if intelligence can overcome feeling. In plain words, the answer is no. But I do offer you some comfort. I suspect that occasionally, with a bit of luck, we can tame our emotions and allow them to atrophy. Take me, for example. I managed to do it.”

I can’t tell you what I felt at that moment, but I couldn’t bear to look into his eyes. I suddenly remembered the evening I first met him and I grew quite red. I remembered that peculiar game … I was blushing like a schoolgirl. Nor did he look at me, but simply stood in front of me leaning against the table, his arms folded, looking toward the window as though examining the house opposite. This mutual embarrassment lasted a little while. It was the most awkward moment of my life.

“Back then, when all this was going on,” I started again, gabbling nervously, wanting to change the subject as quickly as possible, “you didn’t suggest to Peter that he should marry the girl, did you?”

“I was against it,” he said. “I opposed it with all my heart. I was utterly against the marriage. At that stage I still had influence over him.”

“No longer?”

“No.”

“Does that woman have more power over him than you do now?”

“The woman?” he asked, and tipped his head back while his mouth moved silently, as if he were counting, trying to gauge the true balance of power. “Yes, I do believe so.”

“Was my mother-in-law of any help then?”

He shook his head as if recalling a bad memory.

“Not a lot.”

“But surely you can’t imagine,” I asked indignantly, “that a woman as proud, as refined, as extraordinary as she is, would have agreed to such an act of madness?”

“I don’t imagine anything,” he replied with care. “I only know that this proud, refined, extraordinary woman, as you put it, had lived for years in a state of suspended feeling. She lived not so much in an apartment as in cold storage. People as thoroughly frozen through as she was are readier to understand someone desperate for warmth.”

“And it was you who prevented Peter warming himself — as you put it — in the fire of this strange attraction?”

“I did so,” he explained, like a patient teacher, “because I don’t like people who offer a certain warmth to some but roast others alive.”

“Did you think Judit Áldozó was as dangerous as that?”

“In herself? … That is a hard question. Not in herself, probably. But the situation to which her very being might give rise: that was dangerous, yes.”

“And the alternative, the situation which did then arise — you considered that less of a danger? …” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

“Easier to control, in any case,” he replied.

I really didn’t understand that. I listened and stared.

“I see you don’t believe what a traditional, old fashioned, law-abiding man I am, madam,” he said. “We writers may be the only law-abiding people on earth. The middle classes are a far more restless, rebellious bunch than is generally thought. It is no accident that every revolutionary movement has a nonconforming member of the middle class as its standard bearer. But we writers can’t entertain revolutionary illusions. We are the guardians of what there is. It is far more difficult to preserve something than to seize or destroy it. And I cannot allow the characters in my books — the characters my readers love — to rebel against the established order. In a world where everyone is in a veritable fever to destroy the past and to build the new, I must preserve the unwritten contracts that are the ultimate meaning of a deeper order and harmony. I am a gamekeeper who lives among poachers. It’s dangerous work … A new world!?” he declared with such agonized and disappointed contempt that I found myself staring again. “As if people were new!”

“And is that why you were against Peter marrying Judit Áldozó?”

“That wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t allow it, of course. Peter is bourgeois, a valuable member of the bourgeoisie … there are few like him left. He embodies a culture that is very important to me. He once told me, by way of a joke, that my role was to be the chief witness to his life. I answered, equally by way of a joke, but not altogether as jokingly as you might at first think, that I had to look after him out of sheer commercial interest, because he was my reader, and writers have to save their readers. Of course it was not the size of my readership I meant to preserve, but those few souls in whom my sense of responsibility to the world I know continues to exist … They are the people for whom I write … If I didn’t, there would be no sense in anything I wrote. Peter is one of the few. There are not many left, not here, not anywhere in the world … I am not interested in the rest. But that was not the real reason — or to put it more precisely, this wasn’t the reason, either. I was simply jealous because I loved him. I have never liked surrendering to my feelings … but this feeling, this friendship, was much more refined, much more complex than love. It is the most powerful of all human feelings … it is genuinely disinterested. It is unknown to women.”

“But why were you jealous of that particular woman?” I persevered. I was listening to everything he was saying but still felt he was not being straight with me, that he was avoiding the real issue.

“Because I don’t like sentimental heroes,” he eventually admitted, as if resigned to telling the truth. “More than anything else, I like to see everyone and everything in its proper place. But it wasn’t only the difference in class that concerned me. Women are quick to learn and can make up centuries of evolution in a few moments … I do not doubt that with Peter at her side this woman would have learned everything in a trice, and conducted herself as perfectly as you or I did at that grand house last night … Women generally are far superior in culture and manners to the men of their own class. Nevertheless, Peter would still have felt like a sentimental hero to himself, a hero who was a hero from the moment he rose to the moment he went to bed, because he was doing something the world did not approve of, embarking on a mission that is entirely human and perfectly acceptable to God and man, but one whose undertaking required him to be a hero, a sentimental hero. And that’s not all. There was the woman. This woman would never forgive Peter for being middle-class.”

“That I don’t believe,” I said, feeling stupid.

“I know different.” He frowned. “But none of this resolves your problem. What was decided at that point was the fate of a condition, a feeling. What was at stake for Peter in that feeling, what it meant in terms of passion and desire … I don’t know. But I felt the earthquake, witnessed it at its most dangerous moment. His entire being was shaken, his sense of belonging to a class, the foundations on which he had built his life and the way of life such foundations implied. One’s way of life is not a purely private matter. When such a man — one who preserves and articulates the entire meaning of his culture — when such a man collapses, it is not only he who is destroyed but a part of the world to which he belongs, a world that was worth living in … I took serious note of that woman. It wasn’t that she came from another class. It may be best for everyone, may be the most fortunate course of events, that children of different classes be swept together by the tides of some great passion … No, it was something in her character to which I couldn’t help responding, something I could not reconcile myself to and to which I could not abandon Peter. She had a certain ferocity of will, a kind of barbaric power … Did you not feel it?”

His sleepy, tired eyes flashed suddenly as he turned to me. He proceeded uncertainly, as if seeking the right words.

“There are people who are possessed of a fierce primeval power, who can suck from others, from their entire environment, whatever sustenance makes life possible — just as, for example, there are certain vines or lianas in the jungle that absorb the water, the salts, the nourishment required by the great trees on which they feed, even over a length of hundreds of yards. That’s just the way they are: it is their nature … You can argue with wrongdoers, you can pacify them, maybe even resolve some of the inner suffering that leads them to take revenge on other people, on life itself. These are the lucky ones … But there are other kinds, people like those vines, who are not at all ill-intentioned but simply squeeze the life out of their environment by enveloping it in an embrace so fierce and willful that it proves fatal in the end. It is a barbaric, elemental form of execution. It is rare to find it in men … more common in women. The power that emanates from them destroys anything that might be in their way, even strong characters like Peter. Did you not feel this when you were talking to her? It was like talking to a simoom or a tsunami.”

“I was simply talking to a woman,” I said, and sighed. “A very powerful woman.”

“Well, that is true. Women’s response to other women is quite different,” he readily admitted. “Personally, I respect their power and fear it. This should make it easier for you to respect Peter. Try to imagine the kind of tide he was swimming against in those years, what strength it required for him to tear himself from the invisible embrace of this dangerous power. Because that power wanted simply everything. It wasn’t a backstreet she was looking for, a two-bedroom apartment up an alley, a silver-fox wrap, a three-week vacation in secret with her lover … She would have wanted everything, because she was a real woman, not an imitation. Did you not feel this? …”

“Yes,” I said. “She would rather starve.”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, and now it was he who was surprised.

“Starve,” I said. “That’s what she told me. It’s a stupid, wicked superstition. Where people set out to starve themselves, and keep fasting until they see they are going to get their way.”

“Did she say that?” he pondered. “There is such a custom in the east of the country. It is a form of will transference.” He gave a sudden, nervous, ill-tempered laugh. “So there you are. Judit Áldozó is the most dangerous exponent of it. Because there are women you can take out to supper in the most glittering restaurants, where they can eat crab and drink Champagne, and they present no danger. Then there are others who would rather fast … they are the dangerous ones. I am still worried that you might, needlessly, have set her off. She had begun to tire … It was a long time since I last saw her, years ago, but then I felt that your lives, your stars, were shifting, that there was a certain indifference, a kind of sponginess … Because life is not all inundations and barbaric powers … There’s more. There is a law of helplessness too. You should honor that law.”

“I am in no position to honor anything,” I said, “because this is not the way I want to live. I don’t understand Judit Áldozó, I don’t have her measure. I can’t tell what she once meant to my husband or what she means to him now; I don’t know what danger she presents … I don’t believe there are passions whose embers continue burning in one’s soul the whole of one’s life, all smoke and the odd flicker of flame, like an underground fire down a mine … They may exist here and there, but I believe life can put such fires out. Don’t you agree? …”

“Yes, of course,” he replied, rather too readily, and gazed at his cigarette.

“I see you don’t believe it,” I continued. “Well, I might be wrong. Maybe certain passions are stronger than life or meaning or time. Everything gets burned, everything is consumed in fire … Maybe … In that case, let them really burn. No more lapping flames but a proper inferno. I don’t want to build a home at the foot of a volcano. I want peace, and calm. That’s why I’m not sorry this has happened. The way things are, my whole life is an unbearable failure. I have powers of my own; I can wait and exercise my will as well as Judit Áldozó, even if I have to starve myself to no purpose, for no one; even if I carry on eating my supper of cold chicken with mayonnaise … I want an end to this unspoken rivalry, this ridiculous duel. You have been a second in the contest; that’s why I am talking to you. Do you think Peter still has feelings for this woman?”

“I do,” was his unvarnished reply.

“In that case he has no real feeling for me,” I said, loudly but calmly. “Then let him do something about it; let him marry her or not marry her, let them ruin each other’s lives or let them prosper, but let him find his own peace. I don’t want to live like this. I swore to this woman that I would not tell Peter, and I will keep my promise. But I won’t be upset if you, on a suitable occasion, in the not-too-distant future — say, in the next few days — should tactfully, or not so tactfully, discuss this with him. Would you do that?”

“If that’s what you want,” he agreed, without much enthusiasm.

“I very much want it,” I said, and stood up, pulling on my gloves. “I see you would like to know what will become of me,” I continued. “I will tell you. I will abide by whatever decisions are taken. I don’t like dumb shows that go on for decades; I don’t like confrontations with unseen opponents hovering in a state of pale, bloodless tension. If there must be a scene, let there be a good loud scene, complete with blows and corpses, with applause and whistling. I want to know who I am supposed to be, what my role is in this drama and what I am worth. If my role is to fail, I will leave the stage. Let things be as they must be. I will take no further interest in Peter’s life nor in Judit Áldozó’s.”

“That is not true,” he calmly replied.

“It is true,” I said. “It will be true because I will it. If he can’t make up his own mind after twelve years, then it’s up to me to make it up for him. If he can’t work out who is his real wife, I’ll decide.”

“And who will that be?” he flashed back at me, all ears now, almost cheerful, as he had not been in the course of the entire conversation. It was as if he had just heard a surprising, especially amusing declaration. “Who is that real wife to be?”

“I have already told you,” I answered, a little confused. “Why are you smiling like that, as if you didn’t believe me? … My mother-in-law once told me that there is always a real wife somewhere. That could be Judit Áldozó, or it could be someone else. Well, he can’t find her, so I will.”

“I see,” he said. He gazed at the carpet, clearly not wanting to argue.

He escorted me to the door without saying anything. He kissed my hand, still with that strange smile on his face. He gravely opened the door for me and made a low bow.

But we should pay and go now; they really are wanting to close. Miss, I had two teas and a pistachio ice. No, darling, you are my guest. No protests, please. And don’t feel sorry for me, either. It’s the end of the month, but this little treat will not ruin me. I lead a carefree, independent life; my alimony always arrives precisely on the first, and it is considerably more than I need. See, it’s not such a bad life.

Ah, but you’re thinking, it lacks a certain meaning? … That’s not true, either. Life is very full. Just as I was on my way here to meet you I was walking down a street and it suddenly started to snow. It was pure delight. The first snow … I couldn’t give myself over to sheer enjoyment before. I was constantly attending to one man and had no time for the rest of the world. I lost the man and gained a world. Do you think that’s a poor exchange? … I don’t know. You might be right.

I don’t have much else to tell you. You know the rest. I have divorced my husband and live alone. He lived alone for a while too; then he married Judit Áldozó. But that’s another story.

None of it happened as quickly as I imagined it might at Lázár’s apartment. I carried on living with my husband for two more years after that. It seems everything in life runs according to some invisible minute hand: one can’t “decide” anything a moment sooner than one is meant to, only once all other matters and the situation itself make the decision for you … To do it any other way is foolish, an act of aggression, practically immoral. Life decides, suddenly, wonderfully … and, once it does, everything seems simple and natural.

After visiting Lázár I went home and said nothing about Judit Áldozó to my husband. By that time, poor man, he knew everything. It was only the most important fact he was missing. And I couldn’t tell him, because I didn’t know it myself then, and would not know it for some time afterwards … Only Lázár knew — yes, then, as I was saying good-bye, when he suddenly went strangely silent. It must have been what he was thinking of. But he said nothing himself, because the most important things are not the kind of things you can say to anyone. People have to learn it for themselves.

The most important thing? … Look, I don’t want to upset you. You are a little in love with that Swedish teacher, aren’t you? … Am I right? … Fine, I am not asking for confessions. But allow me to keep silent too. I wouldn’t want to ruin that lovely, sweeping emotion. I wouldn’t want to hurt you in any way.

I don’t know when my husband actually spoke with Lázár, the next day or weeks later, nor do I know what was said. But everything worked out the way Lázár said it would. My husband knew everything: he knew I had found the lilac ribbon, and that I knew who wore the locket. He knew I had spoken with Judit Áldozó, who did in fact resign from my mother-in-law’s service at the beginning of the next month. She disappeared for two years. My husband hired private detectives to find her, but grew tired of it and fell ill. He called the detectives off. Do you know what my husband did in the two years of her disappearance?

He waited.

I had no idea it was possible to wait like that. It was as if he had been sentenced to forced labor and set to breaking stones in a quarry. He broke the stones with such strength, with such discipline, with so much devotion, in such despair … By that time not even I could help him, and if I had to tell the truth while lying on my deathbed, I would have to confess that I didn’t actually want to help him. My own heart was full of bitterness and despair then. I watched his terrible spiritual exertion for two years. This smiling, wordless, courteous, ever paler, ever more silent argument with somebody or something … You watch how some people rush for the morning mail: it’s as if they were a kind of drug addict. They put a hand into the mailbox, feel there is nothing there, and you see their hand emerge, hovering, empty … You watch someone’s head jerk to attention as the telephone rings. You see his shoulder tense when he hears the doorbell. His eyes flick hither and thither in the restaurant and the theater foyer, always searching, searching every corner of the universe. We spent two years like this. But there was no trace of Judit Áldozó. Later we discovered she had traveled abroad and worked as a maid in an English doctor’s house in London. Hungarian servants were in demand in England then.

Her family heard nothing from her, nor did my mother-in-law. I visited my mother-in-law pretty regularly in those two years. I spent whole afternoons there. Her health was deteriorating, poor thing: she had suffered a thrombosis and had to lie immobile for months on end. I used to sit at her bedside. I grew very fond of her. We sat, we read, we knitted and made conversation. It was almost as though we were weaving a tapestry, the way medieval women did while their husbands were away in the war. I knew that my husband’s part in the battle was likely to be dangerous. He could be killed any moment. My mother-in-law knew it too. But neither of us could help him now. That was his problem now … he was alone, his life in considerable danger, and he himself could do nothing but wait.

The two of us, my mother-in-law and I, walked about on tiptoe in the meantime; we lived and wove our tapestry around him. We were like nurses. We talked about other things, sometimes cheerfully, as if nothing had happened. It might have been a peculiar form of tact or just intense embarrassment, but eventually it got so that my mother-in-law never spoke about what had happened. That noon, when she sat down opposite us in the maid’s room and wept, we formed an unspoken pact to help each other, as far as possible, promising we would not talk unnecessarily or despairingly about the situation. If we talked about my husband, it was as of a charming, amiable invalid who happened to be in a condition that concerned us but not in immediate danger of his life … Yes, as of someone who could still go on a long time … Our role was simply to adjust the pillow under his head, to open the odd jar of preserves, or to amuse him by chatting about events in the world at large. And indeed, throughout these two years, my husband and I led a calm and orderly life at home, without very much socializing. My husband had already begun to dismantle everything that might tie us to society and the world outside. Over two years he slowly, with the greatest tact and refinement, made his exit, walking away from his own life, but in such a manner as not to offend anyone. Little by little our acquaintances were cut off and we remained alone. Actually it wasn’t as bad as you might think. We spent five days out of the seven at home. We listened to music or read. Lázár never visited us again. He too went abroad, and lived in Rome for several months.

So that’s how we lived. All three of us were waiting for something: my mother-in-law for death, my husband for Judit Áldozó, and I for the moment that either death or the return of Judit Áldozó, or some other unforeseen, unavoidable event, should make it clear what I should do with my life and where I belonged … You were asking why I did not leave my husband. How could I live with someone who is waiting for someone else, who springs to attention each time the door opens, who has grown pale, is avoiding people, cuts himself off from the world, is sick unto death with some disease of the emotions, who is eaten away with simply waiting? Well, it wasn’t easy, not at all. It is not the most pleasant of situations. But I was his wife and couldn’t leave him, because he was in trouble and in danger. I was his wife and had made a sacred vow to remain with him and suffer with him, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, as long as he wanted me, as long as he had need of me. Well, he needed me now. He would have wasted away if left alone those two years. We carried on, waiting for some earthly or heavenly sign. We were waiting for Judit Áldozó.

Because the moment he discovered that the woman had left town and gone to England — it was just that no one knew her address in England, neither her family nor her friends — my husband became genuinely ill with waiting, and there is probably no greater suffering than waiting. I know the feeling … Later, once we were divorced, I was waiting for him much the same way, for about a year. You know how it is: you wake up in the morning like an asthmatic, gasping for air. You put a hand out in the dark seeking another hand. You can’t understand how the other person is no longer there, nearby, in the next house or the next street. You walk down the street but the other person is not there to meet you. There’s no point in having a telephone; the papers are full of news that means nothing to you — items of no consequence, such as that a world war has broken out, or that in a capital city of some one million inhabitants whole rows of streets have been destroyed … You hear out the news politely, as it goes in one ear and out the other, and say things like: “Really? … Imagine! … How interesting!” or “How sad!” But you don’t feel anything. There is a lovely, wise, sad Spanish book — I’ve forgotten the author’s name; it was the kind of name a toreador might have, a very long name — in which I read that in this sleepy, feverish, magical state, the state experienced by those who wait or are absent from those they love, there is something of the self-induced trance; even their eyes are like the eyes of sick people when they wake from sleep, exhausted, far away, their eyelids slow to rise. People like that see nothing of the world, they just see a face, the one face; nor do they hear anything, just the one name.

But one day they wake.

Take me, for example.

They look around and rub their eyes. They can see rather more than one face now … or to be precise, they still see the face but it’s as if through a haze. They see a church spire, a copse of trees, a picture, a book, other people’s faces: they see the infinite variety of the world. It is an extraordinary feeling. What was unbearably painful and raw to the touch one day no longer hurts. You sit on a bench and feel calm. You think thoughts like “Chicken stew” or “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Or “I should buy a new bulb for the table lamp.” All this constitutes reality, each part as important as the rest. Yesterday all this seemed impossible, pointless and uncertain: yesterday was a different reality. Yesterday you still yearned for revenge or deliverance, you wanted him to ring you or to need you, you wanted him to be carted off to jail and executed. While you still feel this, the other person is out of reach and laughing. While you still feel it, you are in his power. As long as you are crying out for vengeance, he is gleefully rubbing his hands together, because vengeance is desire too: vengeance is dependency. But there comes a day when you wake, rub your eyes, give a yawn, and suddenly discover you don’t want anything. You could bump into him in the street and it wouldn’t matter to you. Should he ring, you’d pick it up if you felt like it. Should he want to see you and insist you must meet, well, why not? And you know what? All this time, you are relaxed, at ease with yourself … there is no tension, no pain, nothing trancelike in it. What happened? You don’t understand. Now you no longer want vengeance, no vengeance at all … and you discover what real vengeance is, the only, perfect form of vengeance, which is that there is nothing you want from him, you wish him no harm but no good either, he cannot hurt you anymore. Men in bygone days used to write letters to their lovers at such times, addressing them as “Dear madam …” And that said everything, you know. What it said was: “There is no more pain to be got out of me.” That was the point a wise woman started sobbing. Or not. A wise man may then send a magnificent gift, a bunch of roses or a life annuity … why not? You can do anything, now it no longer hurts.

That’s how it is. I’ve been through it. One day I woke and started to live again. I got on my feet and walked.

But my husband, poor soul, did not wake. I don’t know whether he is cured even now. Sometimes I pray for him.

So two years passed. How did we spend our time? We carried on living. My husband said good-bye to the world, quit his social circle, stopped seeing people — all without saying a word, like a swindler who is secretly planning to skip the country but keeps working, apparently conscientiously. The other person — his real wife — was abroad. We waited for her. It wasn’t a bad life: the fact is, we got on quite well those two years. Sometimes, at table or reading a book, I stole a glance at his face, the way a relative might steal a glance at the face of someone sick, and while they are inwardly horrified at the other’s sickly pallor, they smile sweetly and pass a cheerful remark, such as “You’re looking much better today.” We were waiting for Judit Áldozó, who had vanished from town, the monster … Because she knew that was the worst thing she could do. You don’t believe me? You think she might not have been a monster? You think she too paid a price, she too fought, she too is a woman, maybe, she too felt something? Am I right? … Go on, comfort me, because I would really like to think so myself. She had sat around for twelve years and then she charged off to England. There she learned English, she learned how to eat in polite company, she got to see the sea. Then one day she came home with seventy pounds in her purse, wearing a tartan skirt and cologne by Atkinson. That was the point at which we divorced.

It broke my heart, of course. For a whole year I thought I might die of it. But then one day I woke up and learned something … yes, the most important thing a person can learn by herself.

Shall I tell you what that is?

I won’t hurt you?

You can bear it?

Well, yes, I bore it. But I am reluctant to tell just anyone, I don’t want to take away people’s illusions by telling them they have invested all that faith in a false idol, one that begets so much suffering and so much that is wonderful: heroic deeds, works of art, extraordinary human endeavors. I know you are in that condition at the moment. You still want me to tell you? …

All right, since you ask. But you mustn’t be angry with me afterwards. Look, darling, God has punished — and rewarded — me by allowing me to suffer and not die in the process. What was it I discovered? … Well, my dear, it was this: that there isn’t a real wife; not a real anything.

One day I woke, sat up in bed, and smiled. I felt no pain at all. Suddenly I understood that none of this was real. That there is no real anything on earth or in heaven. No real wife, no intended, that’s for certain. There are only people, and there isn’t that certain one-and-only, wonderful, single being, the one fated to make you happy. There are only people, and people have something of everything in them: sugar, salt, the sweet and the bitter, the lot … Lázár knew that when we stood in the door and parted, but he said nothing, only smiled, because I had told him that I was going away and would find my husband’s intended, his real life. He knew she was nowhere to be found … But he didn’t say anything, then went off to Rome and wrote a book. That’s what all writers do in the end.

My husband, poor soul, was not a writer: he was a solid citizen, an artist without an art. That’s why he suffered so much. Then, when one day Judit Áldozó returned, the woman he believed to be his real wife, wearing cologne from Atkinson, saying “Hello” on the phone like an Englishwoman — well, that was when we divorced. It was a difficult divorce, even if I say so myself. I insisted on the piano.

He didn’t marry her straightaway, only a year later. How do they get on? Just fine, I think. You saw him a little while ago, buying candied orange peel for her.

It’s just that he’s aged. Not a lot, but in a melancholy sort of way. Do you think he knows by now? … I fear it may be too late by the time he finds out, that life will have passed him by.

Now look, they really are closing the shop.

I’m sorry? … What did you say? Why I started weeping when I saw him just now? Why, if there is no such thing as “the intended”—the chosen one, the real wife — and one is completely over it all, why I should have started powdering my nose when I saw he was still using that crocodile-skin wallet? Wait, let me think. I think I have the answer. The reason I felt embarrassed and started powdering my nose was because while there is no such thing as the one-and-only, special intended, and while I have no more illusions, I still happen to love him. Which is different. When we love someone, we can’t help our hearts beating a little faster every time someone talks about them, or whenever we see them. What I mean is: everything passes, but love does not. It’s just that it no longer has any practical significance.

Let me give you a kiss, my dear. Good-bye. Shall we meet here again next Tuesday? … It was such a nice conversation. About a quarter after seven, if it suits you … not much later than that. I’ll be sure to be here before a quarter after seven.