Journey by Moonlight

I

ON THE TRAIN everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back-alleys.

Mihály first noticed the back-alleys when the motor-ferry turned off the Grand Canal for a short cut and they began appearing to right and left. But at the time he paid them no attention, being caught up from the outset with the essential Veniceness of Venice: the water between the houses, the gondolas, the lagoon, and the pink-brick serenity of the city. For it was Mihály’s first visit to Italy, at the age of thirty-six, on his honeymoon.

During his protracted years of wandering he had travelled in many lands, and spent long periods in France and England. But Italy he had always avoided, feeling the time had not yet come, that he was not yet ready for it. Italy he associated with grown-up matters, such as the fathering of children, and he secretly feared it, with the same instinctive fear he had of strong sunlight, the scent of flowers, and extremely beautiful women.

The trip to Italy might well have been postponed forever, but for the fact that he was now married and they had decided on the conventional Italian holiday for their start to married life. Mihály had now come, not to Italy as such, but on his honeymoon, a different matter entirely. Indeed, it was his marriage that made the trip possible. Now, he reasoned, there was nothing to fear from the danger Italy represented.

Their first days were spent quietly enough, between the pleasures of honey-mooning and the gentler, less strenuous forms of sightseeing. Like all highly intelligent and self-critical people, Mihály and Erzsi strove to find the correct middle way between snobbery and its reverse. They did not weary themselves to death ‘doing’ everything prescribed by Baedeker; still less did they wish to be bracketed with those who return home to boast, “The museums? Never went near them,” and gaze triumphantly at one another.

One evening, returning to their hotel after the theatre, Mihály felt he somehow needed another drink. Quite what of he wasn’t yet sure, but he rather hankered after some sort of sweet wine and, remembering the somewhat special, classical, taste of Samian, and the many times he had tried it in Paris, in the little wine merchant’s at number seven rue des Petits Champs, he reasoned that, Venice being effectively Greece, here surely he might find some Samian, or perhaps Mavrodaphne, since he wasn’t yet quite au fait with the wines of Italy. He begged Erzsi to go up without him. He would follow straightaway. It would be just a quick drink, “really, just a glass” he solemnly insisted as she, with the same mock-seriousness, made a gesture urging moderation, as befits the young bride.

Moving away from the Grand Canal, where their hotel stood, he arrived in the streets around the Frezzeria. Here at this time of night the Venetians promenade in large numbers, with the peculiar ant-like quality typical of the denizens of that city. They proceed only along certain routes, as ants do when setting out on their journeyings across a garden path, the adjacent streets remaining empty. Mihály too stuck to the ant-route, reckoning that the bars and fiaschetterie would surely lie along the trodden ways, rather than in the uncertain darkness of empty side-streets. He found several places where drinks were sold, but somehow none was exactly what he had in mind. There was something wrong with each. In one the clientele were too elegant, in another they were too drab; another he did not really associate with the sort of thing he was after, which would have a somehow more recherché taste. Gradually he came to feel that surely only one place in Venice would have it, and that he would have to discover on the basis of pure instinct. Thus he arrived among the back-alleys.

Narrow little streets branched into narrow little alleyways, and the further he went the darker and narrower they became. By stretching his arms out wide he could have simultaneously touched the opposing rows of houses, with their large silent, windows, behind which, he imagined, mysteriously intense Italian lives lay in slumber. The sense of intimacy made it feel almost an intrusion to have entered these streets at night.

What was the strange attraction, the peculiar ecstasy, that seized him among the back-alleys? Why did it feel like finally coming home? Perhaps a child dreams of such places, the child raised in a gardened cottage who fears the open plain. Perhaps there is an adolescent longing to live in such a closed world, where every square foot has a private significance, ten paces infringe a boundary, decades are spent around a shabby table, whole lives in an armchair … But this is speculation.

He was still wandering among the alleys when it occurred to him that day was already breaking and he was on the far side of Venice, on the Fondamenta Nuova, within sight of the burial island and, beyond that, the mysterious islands which include San Francesco Deserto, the former leper colony, and, in the far distance, the houses of Murano. This was where the poor of Venice lived, too remote and obscure to profit from the tourist traffic. Here was the hospital, and from here the gondolas of the dead began their journey. Already people were up and on their way to work, and the world had assumed that utter bleakness as after a night without sleep. He found a gondolier, who took him home.

Erzsi had long been sick with worry and exhaustion. Only at one-thirty had it occurred to her that, appearances notwithstanding, even in Venice one could doubtless telephone the police, which she did, with the help of the night porter, naturally to no avail.

Mihály was still like a man walking in his sleep. He was abominably tired, and quite incapable of providing rational answers to Erzsi’s questions.

“The back-alleys,” he said. “I had to see them by night, just once … it’s all part of … it’s what everyone does.”

“But why didn’t you tell me? Or rather, why didn’t you take me with you?”

Mihály was unable to reply, but with an offended look climbed into bed and drifted towards sleep, full of bitter resentment.

“So this is marriage,” he thought. “What does it amount to, when every attempt to explain is so hopeless? Mind you, I don’t fully understand all this myself.”

II

ERZSI however did not sleep. For hours she lay, with knitted brow and hands clasped under her head, thinking. Women are generally better at lying awake and thinking. It was not exactly new or surprising to her that Mihály could say and do things she failed to understand. For a time she had successfully concealed her lack of comprehension, wisely asking no questions and acting as if eternally familiar with everything to do with him. She knew that this wordless assumption of authority, which he thought of as her ancestral, intuitive woman’s wisdom, was her strongest means of holding on to him. Mihály was full of fears, and Erzsi’s role was to comfort him.

But there is a limit to everything, especially as they were now married and on a proper honeymoon. In those circumstances to stay out all night seemed grotesque. For an instant she entertained the natural feminine suspicion that Mihály had in fact been with another woman. But this possibility she then completely dismissed. Setting aside the utter tastelessness of the idea, she well knew how timid and circumspect he was with all strange women, how terrified of disease, how averse to expense, and above all, how little interest he had in the female sex.

But in point of fact it would have been of some comfort to her to know that he had merely been with a woman. It would put an end to this uncertainty, this total blankness, this inability to imagine where and how he had spent the night. And she thought of her first husband, Zoltán Pataki, whom she had left for Mihály. Erzsi had always known which of the office typists was his current mistress. Zoltán was so doggedly, blushingly, touchingly discreet, the more he wished to hide something the clearer everything became to her. Mihály was just the reverse. When he felt guilty he always laboured to explain every movement, desperately wanting her to understand him completely, and the more he explained the more confusing it became. She had long known that she did not understand him, because Mihály had secrets even from himself, and he did not understand her since it never occurred to him that people other than himself had an inner life in which he might take an interest. And yet they had married because he had decided that they understood each other perfectly, and that, for both, the marriage rested on purely rational foundations and not fleeting passion. For just how long could that fiction be sustained?

III

A FEW EVENINGS later they arrived in Ravenna. Mihály rose very early the next morning, dressed and went out. He wanted to visit, alone, Ravenna’s most important sight, the famous Byzantine mosaics. He now knew there were many things he could never share with Erzsi, and these he reckoned among them. In the matter of art history she was much better informed, and much more discerning, than he, and she had visited Italy before, so he generally left it to her what they would see, and what they would think when they saw it. Paintings only rarely interested him, and then at random, like a flash of lightning, one in a thousand. But the Ravenna mosaics … these were monuments from his private past.

Once in the Ulpius house he, together with Ervin, Tamás, and Tamás’s sister Éva, poring over these mosaics in a large French book, had been seized by a restless and inexplicable dread. It was Christmas Eve. In the vast adjoining room Tamás Ulpius’s father walked back and forth alone. Elbows on the table, they studied the plates, whose gold backgrounds glittered up at them like a mysterious fountain of light at the bottom of a mineshaft. Within the Byzantine pictures there was something that stirred a sleeping horror in the depth of their souls. At a quarter to twelve they put on their overcoats and, with ice in their hearts, set off for midnight mass. Then Éva fainted, the only time her nerves ever troubled her. For a month afterwards it was all Ravenna, and for Mihály Ravenna had remained to that day an indefinable species of dread.

That profoundly submerged episode now re-surfaced in its entirety, as he stood there in the cathedral of San Vitale before the miraculous pale-green mosaic. His youth beat within him with such intensity that he suddenly grew faint and had to lean against a pillar. But it lasted only a second, and he was a serious man again.

The other mosaics held no further interest for him. He went back to the hotel, waited for Erzsi to make herself ready, then together they systematically visited and discussed all there was to see. Mihály did not of course mention that he had already been to San Vitale. He slipped rather ashamedly into the cathedral, as if something might betray his secret, and pronounced the place of little interest, to atone for the morning’s painful disclosure.

The next evening they were sitting in the little piazza outside a café. Erzsi was eating an ice-cream, Mihály trying some bitter beverage previously unknown to him but not very satisfying, and wondering how to get rid of the taste.

“This stench is awful,” said Erzsi. “Wherever you go in this town there is always this smell. This is how I imagine a gas attack.”

“It shouldn’t surprise you,” he replied. “The place smells like a corpse. Ravenna’s a decadent city. It’s been decaying for over a thousand years. Even Baedeker says so. There were three golden ages, the last in the eighth century AD.”

“Come off it, you clown,” said Erzsi with a smile. “You’re always thinking about corpses and the smell of death. This particular stench comes from life and the living. It’s the smell of artificial fertiliser. The whole of Ravenna lives off the factory.”

“Ravenna lives off artificial fertiliser? This city, where Theodoric the Great and Dante lie buried? This city, besides which Venice is a parvenu?”

“That’s right, my dear.”

“That’s appalling.”

In that instant the roar of a motorbike exploded into the square and its rider, clad in leathers and goggles, leapt down, as from horseback. He looked around, spotted the couple and made straight for their table, leading the bike beside him like a steed. Reaching the table he pushed up his visor-goggles and said,“Hello, Mihály, I was looking for you.”

Mihály to his astonishment recognised János Szepetneki. In his amazement all he could say was, “How did you know I was here?”

“They told me at your hotel in Venice that you had moved on to Ravenna. And where might a man be in Ravenna after dinner but in the piazza? It really wasn’t difficult. I’ve come here straight from Venice. But now I’ll sit down for a bit.”

“Er … let me introduce you to my wife,” said Mihály nervously. “Erzsi, this is János Szepetneki, my old classmate, who … I don’t think … I ever mentioned.” And he blushed scarlet.

János looked Erzsi up and down with undisguised hostility, bowed, shook her hand, and thereafter totally ignored her presence. Indeed, he said nothing at all, except to order lemonade.

Eventually Mihály broke the silence:

“Well, say something. You must have some reason for trying to find me here in Italy.”

“I’ll tell you. I mainly wanted to see you because I heard you were married.”

“I thought you were still angry with me. The last time we met was in London, at the Hungarian legation, and then you walked out of the room. But of course you’ve no reason to be angry now,” he went on when János failed to reply. “One grows up. We all grow up, and you forget why you were offended with someone for ten years.”

“You talk as if you know why I was angry with you.”

“But of course I know,” Mihály blurted out, and blushed again.

“If you know, say it,” Szepetneki said aggressively.

“I’d rather not here … in front of my wife.”

“It doesn’t bother me. Just have the courage to say it. What do you think was the reason I wouldn’t speak to you in London?”

“Because it occurred to me there had been a time when I thought you had stolen my gold watch. Since then I’ve found out who took it.”

“You see what an ass you are. I was the one who stole your watch.”

“So it was you who took it?”

“It was.”

Erzsi during all this had been fidgeting restlessly in her chair. From experience she had been aware for some time, looking at János’s face and hands, that he was just the sort of person to steal a gold watch every now and then. She nervously drew her reticule towards her. In it were the passports and traveller’s cheques. She was astonished, and dismayed, that the otherwise so diplomatic Mihály should have brought up this watch business, but what was really unendurable was the silence in which they sat, the silence when one man tells another that he stole his gold watch and then neither says a word. She stood up and announced:

“I’m going back to the hotel. Your topics of conversation, gentlemen, are such that … ”

Mihály looked at her in exasperation.

“Just stay here. Now that you’re my wife this is your business too.” And with that he turned to János Szepetneki and positively shouted: “But then why wouldn’t you shake hands with me in London?”

“You know very well why. If you didn’t know you wouldn’t be in such a temper now. But you know I was in the right.”

“Speak plainly, will you?”

“You’re just as clever at not understanding people as you are at not finding, and not looking for, people who have gone out of your life. That’s why I was angry with you.”

Mihály was silent for a while.

“Well, if you wanted to meet me … we did meet in London.”

“Yes, but by chance. That doesn’t count. Especially as you know perfectly well we’re not talking about me.”

“If we’re talking about someone else … it would have been no use looking for them.”

“So you didn’t try, right? Even though perhaps all you had to do was stretch out your hand. But now you’ve another chance. Listen to this. I think I’ve traced Ervin.”

Mihály’s face changed instantly. Rage and shock gave way to delighted curiosity.

“You don’t say! Where is he?”

“Exactly where, I’m not sure. But he is in Italy, in Tuscany or Umbria, in some monastery. I saw him in Rome, with a lot of monks in a procession. I couldn’t get to him — couldn’t interrupt the ceremony. But there was a priest there I knew who told me the monks were from some Umbrian or Tuscan order. This is what I wanted to tell you. Now that you’re in Italy you could help me look for him.”

“Yes, well, thanks very much. But I’m not sure I will. I’m not even sure that I should. I mean, I am on my honeymoon. I can’t scour the collected monasteries of Umbria and Tuscany. And I don’t even know that Ervin would want to see me. If he had wanted to see me he could have let me know his whereabouts long ago. So now you can clear off, János Szepetneki. I hope I don’t set eyes on you again for a good few years.”

“I’m going. Your wife, by the way, is a thoroughly repulsive woman.”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

János Szepetneki climbed onto his bike.

“Pay for my lemonade,” he shouted back, and vanished into the darkness that had meanwhile fallen.

The married couple remained where they were, and for a long time did not speak. Erzsi was furious, and at the same time found the situation rather ridiculous. “When old classmates meet,” she thought … “It seems Mihály was deeply affected by these old schoolboy doings. I suppose for once I’d better ask who this Ervin and this Tamás were, however ghastly they might be.” She had little patience with the young and immature.

But in truth something quite different bothered her. Naturally she was upset that she had made so little impression on János Szepetneki. Not that it would have had the slightest significance what such a … such a dubious creature might think about her. All the same there is nothing more critical, from a woman’s point of view, than the opinion held of her by her husband’s friends. In the matter of women men are influenced with incredible ease. True, this Szepetneki was not Mihály’s friend. That is to say, not his friend in the conventional sense of the word. But there was apparently a powerful bond between them. And of course the most foul-minded of men can be especially influential in these matters.

“Damn him. Why didn’t he like me?”

Basically, Erzsi was not used to this sort of situation. She was a rich, pretty, well-dressed, attractive woman. Men found her charming, or at the very least sympathetic. She knew it played a large part in Mihály’s continuing devotion that men always spoke appreciatively of her. Indeed she often suspected that he looked at her not with his own eyes but those of others, as if he said to himself, “How I would love this Erzsi, if I were like other men.” And now along comes this pimp, and he finds me unattractive. She simply had to say something.

“Tell me, why didn’t your friend the pickpocket like me?”

Mihály broke into a smile.

“Come on, it wasn’t you he didn’t like. What upset him was the fact that you’re my wife.”

“Why?”

“He thinks it’s because of you that I’ve betrayed my youth, our common youth. That I’ve forgotten all those who … and built my life on new relationships. And well … And now you’ll tell me that I’ve obviously got some fine friends. To which I could reply that Szepetneki isn’t my friend, which is of course only avoiding the question. But … how can I put this? … people like that do exist. This watch-stealing was just a youthful rehearsal. Szepetneki later became a successful con-man. There was a time when he had a great deal of money and forced various sums onto me which I couldn’t pay back because I didn’t know where he was hanging out — he was in prison — and then he wrote to me from Baja to send him cash. And every now and then he turns up and always manages to say something really unpleasant. But as I say, people like him do exist. If you didn’t know that, at least now you’ve seen it. I say, could we buy a bottle of wine somewhere round here, to drink in our room? I’m tired of this public life we’re leading here in the piazza.”

“You can get one in the hotel. There’s a restaurant.”

“And won’t there be an awful fuss if we drink it in the room? Is it allowed?”

“Mihály, you’ll be the death of me. You’re so scared of waiters and hotel people.”

“I’ve already explained that. I told you, they’re the most grown-up people in the whole world. And, especially when I’m abroad, I do hate stepping out of line.”

“Fine. But why do you have to start drinking again?”

“I need a drink. Because I have to tell you who Tamás Ulpius was, and how he died.”

IV

“I HAVE TO TELL YOU about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you’ll forgive my saying so, you will always be to some extent a mere newcomer in my life.

“When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it’s the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I’ve never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets — or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.

“But best of all I loved the Castle Hill district of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen’s wife buried in the high tower of Deva.

“I’m putting this rather well, don’t you think? Perhaps it’s this excellent bottle of Sangiovese …

“I often saw Tamás Ulpius on Castle Hill, because he lived up there. This in itself made him a highly romantic figure. But what really charmed me was his pale face, his princely, delicate melancholy, and so much else about him. He was extravagantly polite, dressed soberly, and kept aloof from his classmates. And from me.

“But to get back to me. You’ve always known me as a thickset, well-built, mature young man, with a smooth calm face, what they call a ‘po-face’ in Budapest. And as you know I’ve always been rather dreamy. Let me tell you, when I was at school I was very different. I’ve shown you my picture from those days. You saw how thin and hungry, how restless my face was, ablaze with ecstasy. I suppose I must have been really ugly, but I still much prefer the way I looked then. And imagine, with all that, an adolescent body to match — a skinny, angular boy with a back rounded by growing too fast. And a corresponding lean and hungry character.

“So you can imagine I was pretty sick in mind and body. I was anaemic, and subject to fits of terrible depression. When I was sixteen, after a bout of pneumonia, I began to have hallucinations. When reading, I would often sense that someone was standing behind my back peering over my shoulder at the book. I had to turn round to convince myself that there was no-one there. Or in the night I would wake with the terrifying sensation that someone was standing beside my bed staring down at me. Of course there was no-one there. And I was permanently ashamed of myself. In time my position in the family became unbearable because of this constant sense of shame. During meals I kept blushing, and at one stage the least thing was enough to make me want to burst into tears. On these occasions I would run out of the room. You know how correct my parents are. You can imagine how disappointed and shocked they were, and how much my brothers and Edit teased me. It got to the point where I was forced to pretend I had a French lesson at school at two-thirty, and so was able to eat on my own, before the others did. Later I had my supper kept aside as well.

“Then on top of this came the worst symptom of all: the whirlpool. Yes, I really mean whirlpool. Every so often I would have the sensation that the ground was opening beside me, and I was standing on the brink of a terrifying vortex. You mustn’t take the whirlpool literally. I never actually saw it; it wasn’t a vision. I just knew there was a whirlpool there. At the same time I was aware that there wasn’t anything there, that I was just imagining it — you know how convoluted these things are. But the fact is, when this whirlpool sensation got hold of me I didn’t dare move, I couldn’t speak a word, and I really believed it was the end of everything.

“All the same, the feeling didn’t last very long, and the attacks weren’t frequent. There was a really bad one once, during a natural history lesson. Just as I was called on to answer a question, the ground opened beside me. I couldn’t move, I just stayed sitting in my place. The teacher kept on at me for a while, then when he saw that I wasn’t going to move, got up and came over to me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. Of course I didn’t reply. So he just looked at me for a while, then went back to his chair and asked someone else to answer. He was such a fine, priestly soul: he never said a word about the incident. But my classmates talked about it all the more. They thought I had refused to reply out of cheek, or stubbornness, and that the teacher was afraid of me. At a stroke, I had become a public character and enjoyed unprecedented popularity throughout the school. A week later, the same teacher called out János Szepetneki — the one you met today. Szepetneki put on his tough-guy face and stayed in his seat. The teacher got up, went over to him, and soundly boxed his ears. From that time on Szepetneki was convinced I had some special status.

“But to get onto Tamás Ulpius. One day the first snow fell. I could barely wait for school to finish. I gulped down my solitary lunch and ran straight to Castle Hill. Snow was a particular passion of mine. I loved the way it transformed the city, so that you could get lost even among streets you knew. I wandered for ages, then came to the battlements on the western side, and stood gazing out at the Buda hills. Suddenly the ground beside me opened again. The whirlpool was all the more believable because of the height. As so often before, I found myself not so much terrified by it as waiting with calm certainty for the ground to close again, and the effect vanish. So I waited there for a while, I couldn’t say how long, because in that state you lose your sense of time, as you do in a dream or in love-making. But of this I am sure: that whirlpool lasted much longer than the previous ones. Night was already falling and it was still there. ‘This one’s very stubborn,’ I thought to myself. And then to my horror I noticed it was growing in size, that just ten centimetres remained between me and the brink, and that slowly, slowly, it was approaching my foot. A few more minutes and I would be done for: I’d fall in. I clung grimly on to the safety railing.

“And then the whirlpool actually reached me. The ground opened under my feet and I hung there in space, gripping the iron bar. ‘If my hand gets tired,’ I thought, ‘I shall fall.’ And quietly, with resignation, I began to pray and prepare for death.

“Then I became aware that Tamás Ulpius was standing beside me.

“‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“In that instant the whirlpool vanished, and I would have collapsed with exhaustion if Tamás hadn’t caught me up. He helped me to a bench and waited while I rested. When I felt better I told him briefly about the whirlpool thing, the first time I had ever told anyone in my life. I don’t know how it was: within seconds he had become my best friend, the sort of friend you dream about, as an adolescent, with no less intensity, but more deeply and seriously than you do about your first love.

“After that we met every day. Tamás did not want to come to my house because, he said, he hated being introduced, but he soon invited me to his place. That’s how I got to know the Ulpius ménage.

“Tamás’s family lived in the upstairs part of a very old and run-down house. But only the outside was old and run-down: inside it was fine and comfortable, like these old Italian hotels. Although, in many ways, it was a bit creepy, with its large rooms and works of art, rather like a museum. Because Tamás’s father was an archaeologist and museum director. The grandfather had been a clockmaker — his shop had been in the house. Now he just tinkered for his own amusement with antique clocks and all sorts of weird clockwork toys of his own invention.

“Tamás’s mother was no longer alive. He and his younger sister Éva hated their father. They blamed him for driving their mother to her death with his cold gloominess when she was still a young woman. This was my first, rather shocking, experience of the Ulpius household at the start of my first visit. Éva said of her father that he had eyes like shoe-buttons (which, by the way, was very true), and Tamás added, in the most natural voice you can imagine, ‘because, you know, my father is a most thoroughly loathsome fellow,’ in which he too was right. As you know, I grew up in a close-knit family circle. I adored my parents and siblings, I worshipped my father and couldn’t begin to imagine that parents and children might not love one another, or that the children should criticise their parents’ conduct as if they were strangers. This was the first great primordial rebellion I had ever encountered in my life. And this rebellion seemed to me in some strange way endlessly appealing, although in my own mind there was never any question of revolt against my own father.

“Tamás couldn’t stand his father, but conversely, he loved his grandfather and sister all the more. He was so fond of his sister that that too seemed a form of rebellion. I too was fond of my brothers and sister. I never fought with them very much. I took the idea of family solidarity very seriously, as far as my withdrawn and abstracted nature would allow. But it wasn’t our way, as siblings, to make a show of mutual affection — any tenderness between us would have been considered a joke, or a sign of weakness. I’m sure most families are like that. We never exchanged Christmas presents. If one of us went out or came in, he wouldn’t greet the others. If we went away, we would just write a respectful letter to our parents and add as a postscript, ‘Greetings to Péter, Laci, Edit and Tivadar’. It was quite different in the Ulpius family. Tamás and Éva would speak to one another with extreme politeness, and when parting, even if only for an hour, would kiss one another lovingly. As I realised later, they were very jealous of each other, and this was the main reason why they had no friends.

“They were together night and day. By night, I tell you, because they shared a room. For me, this was the strangest thing. In our house, from the time Edit was twelve she was kept away from us boys, and thereafter a separate female ambience grew up around her. Girlfriends called on her, boyfriends too, people we didn’t know and whose pastimes we thoroughly scorned. My adolescent fantasy was thoroughly exercised by the fact that Éva and Tamás lived together. Because of it, the gender difference became somehow blurred, and each took on a rather androgynous character in my eyes. With Tamás I usually spoke in the gentle and refined way I always did with girls, but with Éva I never experienced the bored restlessness I felt with Éva’s girlfriends — with those officially proclaimed females.

“The grandfather I did have difficulty getting used to. He would shuffle into their room at the most unlikely hours, often in the middle of the night, and wearing the most outlandish clothes, cloaks and hats. They always accorded him a ceremonial ovation. At first I was bored by the old fellow’s stories, and couldn’t follow him very well since he spoke Old German with a trace of Rhineland accent, because he had come to Hungary from Cologne. But later on I acquired a taste for them. The old chap was a walking encyclopaedia of old Budapest. For me, with my passion for houses, he was a real godsend. He could tell the story of every house on the Hill, and its owners. So the Castle District houses, which up till then I had known only by sight, gradually became personal and intimate friends.

“But I, too, hated their father. I don’t recall ever once speaking with him. Whenever he saw me he would just mutter something and turn away. The two of them went through agonies when they had to dine with him. They ate in an enormous room. During the meal they spoke not a word to each other. Afterwards, Tamás and Éva would sit while their father walked up and down the enormous room, which was lit only by a standard lamp. When he reached the far end of the room his form would disappear into the gloom. If they spoke to one another he came up and aggressively demanded, ‘What’s that? What are you talking about?’ But luckily he was rarely at home. He got drunk alone in bars, on brandy, like a thoroughly bad sort.

“Just at the time we got to know each other, Tamás was working on a study of religious history. The study was to do with his childhood games. But he approached it with the method of a comparative religious historian. It was a really strange thesis, half parody of religious history, half deadly serious study of Tamás himself.

“Tamás was just as crazy about old things as I was. In his case it was hardly surprising. Partly it was inherited from his father, and partly it was because their house was like a museum. For Tamás what was old was natural, and what was modern was strange and foreign. He constantly yearned for Italy, where everything was old and right for him. And, well, here am I sitting here, and he never made it. My passion for antiquity is more of a passive enjoyment, an intellectual hankering. His was the active involvement of the whole imagination.

“He was forever acting out bits of history.

“You have to understand that life for these two in the Ulpius house was non-stop theatre, a perpetual commedia dell’arte. The slightest thing was enough to set them off on some dramatisation, or rather, they acted things out as they talked. The grandfather would tell some story about a local countess who had fallen in love with her coachman, and instantly Éva was the countess and Tamás the coachman. Or, he would tell how the state judge Majláth was murdered by his Wallachian footman, so Éva became the judge and Tamás the footman. Or they would develop some historical melodrama, much longer and more involved, as an ongoing serial. Naturally these plays sketched the events only in broad strokes, like the commedia dell’arte. With one or two items of clothing, usually from the grandfather’s inexhaustible and amazing wardrobe, they would suggest costume. Then would ensue some dialogue, not very long, but highly baroque and convoluted, followed by the murder or suicide. Because, as I think back now, these little improvisations always culminated in scenes of violent death. Day after day, Tamás and Éva strangled, poisoned, stabbed or boiled one another in oil.

“They could imagine no future for themselves, if they ever did think about one, outside the theatre. Tamás was preparing to be a playwright, Éva a great actress. But to call it ‘preparation’ is a bit inaccurate, because he never wrote any plays, and it never occurred to Éva in her dreamworld that she would have to go to drama school. But they were all the more passionate in their theatre-going. But only to the National: Tamás despised the popular stage in exactly the same way he despised modern architecture. He preferred the classical repertoire, with its wealth of murder and suicide.

“But going to the theatre requires cash, and their father, I am sure, never gave them pocket money. One small source of income was their cook, the slovenly old family housekeeper, who set aside a few pennies for the two youngsters from her housekeeping money. And the grandfather, who from a secret cornucopia donated a few crowns now and again. I think he must have earned them on the side. But of course none of this was enough to satisfy their passion for the theatre.

“It was Éva’s job to think about money. The word was not to be uttered in front of Tamás. Éva took charge. In such matters she was highly inventive. She could find a good price for anything they possessed which might sell. From time to time she would sell off some priceless museum-piece from the house, but this was very risky because of their father, and also Tamás took it badly if some familiar antique went missing. Sometimes she made really surprising loans — from the greengrocer, in the confectionery, in the pharmacy, even from the man collecting the electricity money. And if none of this worked, then she stole. She stole from the cook, she stole with death-defying courage from her father, taking advantage of his drunkenness. This was the surest and in some respects the least reprehensible source of income. But on one occasion she managed to lift ten crowns from the confectioner’s till. She was very proud of that. And no doubt there were other episodes she didn’t mention. She even stole from me. Then, when I found out, and bitterly remonstrated with her, instead of stealing she imposed a regular levy on me. I had to pay a certain sum into the family kitty every week. Tamás was of course never allowed to know of this.”

Erzsi butted in: “Moral insanity.”

“Yes, of course,” continued Mihály. “It’s very comforting to use expressions like that. And to a certain extent it absolves one. ‘Not a thief, but mentally ill’. But Éva was not mentally ill, and not a thief. Only, she lacked moral awareness when it came to money. The pair of them were so cut off from the real world, from the economic and social order, they simply had no idea what were the permitted and what the forbidden ways to raise money. Money for them did not exist. All they knew was the certainty that without those pretty bits of paper and bronze crowns they couldn’t go to the theatre. Money has its own great abstract mythology, the basis of modern man’s religious and moral sensibility. The religious rites of the money-god, honest toil, thrift, profitability and suchlike, were quite unknown to them. Ideas like these everyone is born with but they weren’t; or we learn them at home, as I did. But all they ever learnt at home was what their grandfather taught them about the history of the neighbourhood houses.

“You can’t begin to imagine how out of touch they were, how they shrank from every practical reality. They never held a newspaper in their hands, they had no idea what was happening in the world. There was a world war going on at the time — it didn’t interest them. At school it became obvious once during questions that Tamás had never heard of István Tisza. When Przemysl fell, he thought it was something to do with a Russian general, and politely expressed his pleasure. They nearly thrashed him. Later, when the more intelligent boys discovered Ady and Babits, he thought they were talking about generals, and he actually believed for ages that Ady was a general. The clever boys thought Tamás was stupid, as did his teachers. His real genius, his knowledge of history, went totally unnoticed in the school, which he for his part didn’t mind in the least.

“In every other sense too, they stood outside the common order of life. It would occur to Éva at two in the morning that the week before she had left her French exercise book on Sváb Hill, so they would both get up, get dressed, go to Sváb Hill and wander there till morning. The next day Tamás, with lordly indifference, would absent himself from school. Éva would forge an absence note for him over the signature of the older Ulpius. Éva cut school regularly, and had absolutely nothing to do, but she was as happy as a cat on her own.

“One could call on them at any time. Visitors never bothered them. They just carried on with their own lives as if no-one else was present. Even at night you were made welcome. But while I was still at school I couldn’t visit them at night because of family rules: at the very most, after the theatre and then very briefly, and I dreamed constantly about how wonderful it would be to sleep at their house. Once I’d left school, I often spent the night there.

“Later I read in a famous English essay that the chief characteristic of the Celts was rebellion against the tyranny of facts. Well, in this respect the two of them were true Celts. In fact, as I recall, both Tamás and I were crazy about the Celts, the world of Parsifal and the Holy Grail. Probably the reason why I felt so at home with them was that they were so much like Celts. With them I found my real self. I remember why I always felt so ashamed of myself, so much an outsider, in my parents’ house. Because there, facts were supreme. At the Ulpius house, I was at home. I went there every day, and spent all my free time with them.

“The moment I came into the atmosphere of the Ulpius house my chronic sense of shame vanished, as did my nervous symptoms. When Tamás pulled me from the whirlpool, that was the last time it afflicted me. Nobody peered over my shoulder again, or stared at me in the darkness of night. I slept peacefully, and life granted what I expected of it. Physically I knitted together, and my face became unlined. This was the happiest time of my life, and if some smell or effect of the light stirs up the memory of it, I still experience the same rapturous, deceptive, elusive happiness, the first happiness I ever knew.

“This happiness was not of course without a price. In order to belong to the Ulpius house I had to renounce the objective world. Or rather, it became impossible to lead a double life. I gave up reading newspapers, broke off with my more intelligent friends. Gradually they came to think I was as stupid as Tamás. This really hurt, because I was proud, and I knew I was clever. But it couldn’t be helped. I severed all links with the family at home. To my parents and siblings I spoke with the measured formality I had learnt from Tamás. The rift that this brought between us I have never been able to repair, however hard I try, and ever since I’ve felt guilty towards my family. Later on I laboured to remove this sense of estrangement by being extremely compliant, but that’s another story.

“My parents were deeply dismayed by my transformation. The family sat in anxious council, with all my uncles, and they decided that I needed a girl. My uncle put this to me, much embarrassed, and with many symbolic expressions. I listened with polite interest, but showed little inclination to agree, the less so because at that time Tamás, Ervin, János Szepetneki and I had undertaken never to touch any woman since we were the new Knights of the Grail. However with time the girl idea faded, and my parents came to accept that I was as I was. My mother, I am sure, to this day carefully warns our domestics and new acquaintances when they come to the house, to be on their guard, because I am not a normal sort of person. And yet, for how many years now, there hasn’t been the slightest thing about me to suggest that I am other than perfectly normal.

“I really couldn’t say what caused this change which my parents noted with such alarm. It’s true that Tamás and Éva demanded absolutely that one should fit in with them, and I heartily, even happily, went along with this. I ceased to be a good student. I revised my opinions and came to despise a whole lot of things which up till then I had liked — soldiers and military glory, my classmates, native Hungarian cooking — everything that would have been described in school terms as ‘cool’ and ‘good fun’. I gave up football, which until then I had followed passionately. Fencing was the only permissible sport, and the three of us trained for it with all the more intensity. I read voraciously to keep up with Tamás, although this wasn’t difficult for me. My interest in religious history dates from this time. Later, I gave it up, like so many other things, when I became more serious.

“Despite all this, I still felt guilty towards Tamás and Éva. I felt like a fraud. Because what for them was natural freedom was for me a difficult, dogged sort of rebellion. I was just too petty-bourgeois. At home they had brought me up too much that way, as you know. I had to take a deep breath and reach a major decision before dropping my cigarette ash on the floor. Tamás and Éva couldn’t imagine doing anything else. When I summoned up the courage every so often to cut school with Tamás, I’d have stomach cramps for a whole day. My nature was such that I would wake early in the morning and be sleepy at night, I’d be hungriest at midday and dinner-time, I’d prefer to eat from a dish and not begin with the sweet. I like order, and am mortally afraid of policemen. These sides to my nature, my whole order-loving, dutiful bourgeois soul, I had to conceal when I was with them. But they knew. They took exactly the same view, and they were very good about it. They said nothing. If my love of order or thrift somehow betrayed itself, they magnanimously looked the other way.

“The hardest thing was that I had to take part in their plays. I don’t have the slightest instinct for acting. I am incurably self-conscious, and at first I thought I would die when they gave me their grandfather’s red waistcoat so that I could become Pope Alexander the Sixth in a long-running Borgia serial. In time I did get the hang of it. But I never managed to improvise the rich baroque tapestries they did. On the other hand, I made an excellent sacrificial victim. I was perhaps best at being poisoned and boiled in oil. Often I was just the mob butchered in the atrocities of Ivan the Terrible, and had to rattle my throat and expire twenty-five times in a row, in varying styles. My throat-rattling technique was particularly admired.

“And this I have to tell you, though it’s difficult for me to talk about it, even after so much wine, but my wife must know everything: I really enjoyed being the sacrificial victim. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up, and I looked forward to it the whole day long, yes … ”

“Why did you enjoy being the victim?” asked Erzsi.

“Hmmm … well, for erotic reasons, if you follow me. I think … yes. After a while, I would dig up these stories myself, so I could be the victim according to my taste. For example: Éva would be an Apache girl (the cinema had already begun to channel her fantasy — there were films about them at the time) and would lure me into her camp. She would get me drunk, then they would rob me and murder me. Or, the same thing done historically, say, Judith and Holofernes. That story I really adored. Or I would be a Russian general, Éva a spy. She puts me to sleep and steals the plan of campaign. Tamás is the heroic assistant. He chases after Éva, recovers the secret plans. But Éva frequently neutralises him, and the Russians suffer horrific losses. That sort of story would take shape as the game developed. It’s interesting that Tamás and Éva really enjoyed these games. It’s only me that’s still embarrassed by them, and even now I speak of them with some shame. They never did. Éva loved to be the woman who cheats, betrays and murders men, Tamás and I loved to be the man she cheats, betrays, murders, or utterly humiliates … ”

Mihály stopped talking and sipped his wine. After a while Erzsi asked:

“Tell me, were you in love with Éva Ulpius?”

“No, I don’t think so. If you really must know if I was in love with anyone, then it was more like Tamás. Tamás was my ideal. Éva was just a bonus, and the erotic catalyst in these games. But I wouldn’t really agree that I was in love with him, because the phrase is misleading, and you would continue to think there was some unhealthy homo-erotic bond between us, which simply wasn’t the case. He was my best friend, using the word in a very adolescent sense, and what was unhealthy in the affair was, as I said before, something quite different and of a deeper nature.”

“But tell me, Mihály … this is rather difficult to believe … you were with her for years on end, and there was never any question of an innocent flirtation between you and Éva Ulpius?”

“No, none.”

“How was that?”

“How? … in fact … probably, that we were so intimate that it wasn’t possible to flirt or fall in love with one another. For love, there has to be a distance across which the lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity. Two lovers are the two oppositely charged poles of the universe.”

“This is all very deep, for so late at night. I don’t get the full picture. Perhaps the girl was ugly?”

“Ugly? She was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. No, that isn’t quite right. She was the one beautiful woman against whom I have since measured all others. All my later loves were like her in some particular. With one, it would be the legs, with another, the way she lifted her head, with a third, her voice on the telephone.”

“Myself included?”

“You included … yes.”

“In what way am I like her?”

Mihály blushed and fell silent.

“Tell me. I insist.”

“How can I put it? … Stand up, would you, and come over here beside me.”

Erzsi stood beside his chair. He put his arm around her waist and looked up at her. She smiled.

“Now … that’s it,” said Mihály. “When you smile down at me like that. That’s how Éva smiled when I was the victim.”

Erzsi disengaged herself and sat down again.

“Very interesting,” she said, somewhat crestfallen. “You’re certainly holding something back. Never mind. I don’t consider it necessary that you should tell me everything. I don’t feel any pangs of conscience about the fact that I’ve not told you about my adolescence. I don’t think it very important. But tell me — you were in love with this girl. It’s just a matter of words. Where I come from it was what you would call love.”

“No. I tell you I wasn’t in love with her. Just the others.”

“What others?”

“I’m about to explain. For years there was no other visitor at the Ulpius house but me. When we were eighteen the situation changed. Then we were joined by Ervin and János Szepetneki. They came to see Éva, not Tamás, as I did. What happened was that around that time the school put on a drama festival, as it did every year, and as we were the final year group we did the main item of the whole event. Any chance to do a play was good news. The only trouble was that there was a large female role in it. To fill it, the boys brought along their fantasy-heroines from the skating rink and the dancing school, but the teacher producing the play, an extremely clever young priest who hated women, didn’t find any of them suitable. I somehow mentioned the fact in Éva’s hearing. From that moment she would not rest. She felt that this was her chance to begin her career as an actress. Tamás of course wouldn’t hear of it. He thought it grotesque and degrading that she should begin in the context of school, such an intimate, almost family setting. But Éva positively terrorised me until I took the matter up with the teacher in question. He was very fond of me, and told me to bring her along. This I did. She had barely opened her mouth before he declared, ‘You must have the part, you and no-one else.’ Éva plucked up the nerve to raise the subject with her puritanical, theatre-hating father and pleaded with him for half-an-hour until at last he consented.

“Of course I don’t want to talk about the performance itself just now. I’ll just observe in passing that Éva, generally speaking, was not a success. The assembled parents, my mother included, found her too forward, insufficiently feminine, a little common — in a word, somehow not quite the thing. Or rather, they sensed the rebellion latent in her, and even though there was nothing objectionable in her acting, her costume, or her general behaviour, they took exception to her morals. But this didn’t make her a success with the boys either, despite the fact that she was so much more beautiful than the heroines of the skating-rink and the dancing school. They conceded she was very attractive, ‘but somehow …’ they said, and shrugged their shoulders. These young bourgeois types already carried the germ of their parents’ attitude to the unconventional. Only Ervin and János recognised the enchanted princess in her. Because they too were rebels by this time.

“János Szepetneki you saw today. He’s always been like that. He was the best verse-reader in the class. In particular he was a great hit in the literary and debating society as Cyrano. He carried a revolver about with him and every week shot burglars dead in the middle of the night, trying to steal secret documents from his widowed mother. While the other lads were still laboriously treading on their dancing partners’ toes, he was having wild adventures. Every summer he went off to the battlefront and took up the rank of second lieutenant. His new clothes would be torn within minutes — he always seemed to fall off something. His greatest ambition was to prove to me that he was my superior. I think it all started when we were thirteen. One of our teachers took up phrenology and decided from the bumps on my head that I was gifted, whereas János’s skull showed he wasn’t very bright. He never got over this. Years after we’d left school he was still going on about it. He had to be better than me at everything — football, study, intellectual things. When later on I gave up all three he was really at a loss and didn’t know where to turn. So then he fell in love with Éva, because he thought that Éva was in love with me. Yes, that was János Szepetneki.”

“And who is this Ervin?”

“Ervin was a Jewish boy who’d converted to Catholicism, perhaps under the influence of the priests who taught us, but more probably I think following his own inner promptings. Earlier, at sixteen, he’d been the brightest of all the clever and conceited boys: Jewish boys tend to mature early. Tamás really hated him for his cleverness, and became thoroughly anti-Semitic whenever he was mentioned.

“It was from Ervin that we first heard about Freud, Socialism, the March Circle. He was the first of us to be influenced by the strange world of what later became the Károlyi revolution. He wrote wonderful poetry. In the style of Ady.

“Then, practically from one day to the next, he changed completely. He shut himself off from his classmates. I was the only one he communicated with. But as for his poetry, to my mind, I just didn’t understand it, and I didn’t like the fact that he started writing long lines without any rhyme. He became a recluse, read books, played the piano — we knew very little about him. Then one day in Chapel we noticed him going up to the altar, with the other boys, for the sacrament. That was how we knew he had converted.

“Why did he become a Catholic? Ostensibly, because he was drawn to the strange beauty of the religion. He was also attracted by the dogma and the harshness of its moral code. I do believe there was something in him that craved austerity the way other people crave pleasure. In a word, all the usual reasons why outsiders convert … And he became a model Catholic. But there was another side to it too, which I didn’t see so clearly at the time. Ervin, like everyone else in the Ulpius house except me, was a role-player by nature. When I think back now, even as a younger pupil he was always playing at being something. He played the intellectual and the revolutionary. He was never relaxed and natural, the way a boy should be, not by a long way. Every word and gesture was studied. He used archaic words, he was always aloof, always wanting the biggest role for himself. But his acting wasn’t like Tamás’s and Éva’s. They would just walk away from their part the moment it was over and look for something new. He wanted a role to fill with his whole being, and in the Catholic religion he finally found the hugely demanding role he could respect. After that he never altered his posture again. The part just grew deeper and deeper.

“He was a really devout Catholic, as Jewish converts often are. Their centuries of tradition haven’t been eroded the way they have for us. He wasn’t like his pious and impoverished schoolmates who worshipped every day, went to mass, and trained for a career in the church. Their Catholicism was a matter of conformity, his a form of rebellion, a challenge to the whole unbelieving and uncaring world. He took the Catholic line on everything — books, the war, his classmates, the mid-morning buttered roll. He was much more inflexible and dogmatic than even the most severe of our religious teachers. ‘No man, having put his hand to the plough, should look behind him’. That text was his motto. He cut out of his life everything that was not purely Catholic. He guarded his soul’s salvation with a revolver.

“The only vice he retained from his former life was smoking. I cannot recall ever seeing him without a cigarette.

“But he still had his share of life’s temptations. Ervin had adored women. With his comical single-mindedness he’d been the great lover of the class, the way János Szepetneki had been its great liar. The whole form knew about his loves, because he would walk his sweetheart for the whole afternoon on Gellért Hill, and write verses to her. The boys respected Ervin’s attachments because they felt the intensity and the poetic quality. But when he became a Catholic he naturally renounced love. At that time the lads were beginning to visit brothels. Ervin turned away from them in horror. They, I am quite sure, went to those women for a lark, or out of bravado. Ervin was the only one who really knew the meaning of physical desire.

“Then he met Éva. Of course Éva set her cap at him. Because Ervin was beautiful, with his ivory face, his high forehead, his blazing eyes. And he radiated differentness, stubbornness, rebellion. And with it he was gentle and refined. I only came to appreciate him after he and János turned up at the Ulpius house.

“That first afternoon was horrible. Tamás was aloof and aristocratic, contributing only the occasional totally irrelevant remark, pour épater les bourgeois. But Ervin and János were not épatés because they weren’t bourgeois. János talked the entire afternoon about his whale-hunting experiences and the plans of some big company to harvest coconuts. Ervin listened, smoked, and gazed at Éva. Éva was quite unlike her usual self. She simpered, she put on airs, she was womanish. I was utterly miserable. I felt like a dog discovering that two other dogs have come to share his privileged place under the family table. I growled, but really I wanted to howl with misery.

“I began to visit less often. I arranged to call when Ervin and János weren’t there. Besides, we were approaching our school-leaving exams. I had to take them seriously. What’s more, I made a huge effort to drill the essential information into Tamás. Somehow we got by, Tamás on the strength of my cramming him — mostly he didn’t even want to get out of bed. And after that there began a whole new phase of life at the Ulpius house.

“Now everything changed for the better. Tamás and Éva emerged as the stronger personalities. They completely assimilated Ervin and János into their way of life. Ervin relaxed his morbid severity. He adopted a terribly kind, if somewhat affected, manner, speaking always as if in quotation marks to dissociate himself in some way from what he was saying or doing. János was more quiet and sentimental.

“In time we got back to the play-acting, but the plays were now much more crafted, enriched by János’s escapades and Ervin’s poetical fantasy. János naturally proved a great actor. His declamation and sobbing were always over the top (because what he really wanted to play was unrequited passion). We had to stop in mid-scene for him to calm down. Ervin’s favourite role was a wild animal. He did a wonderful bison, slain by Ursus (me), and an extremely accomplished unicorn. With his single mighty horn he shredded every obstacle — curtains, sheets, and the rest of us put together.

“During that period our horizons gradually opened out. We began to go for long walks among the Buda hills. We even went bathing. And then we took up drinking. The idea came from János. For years he’d told us stories about his exploits in bars. Apart from him, the best drinker among us was Éva — it was so hard to tell whether she was drunk or just her normal self. Ervin took to drinking with the same passion as with his smoking. I don’t like to confirm a prejudice, but you know how strange it is when a Jew hits the bottle. Ervin’s drinking was every bit as odd as his Catholicism. A sort of embittered plunging headlong into it, as if he wasn’t simply getting drunk on Hungarian wine but on some vicious substance like hashish or cocaine. And with it, it was always as if he was saying goodbye, as if he was about to drink for the very last time, and generally doing everything as if for the last time in this world. I soon got used to the wine. I came to depend on the feeling of dissolution and the shedding of inhibition it produced in me. But at home the next day I would feel horribly ashamed of my hangovers, and always swore I’d never drink again. And then when I did drink again, the knowledge of my own weakness grew, as did the sense of death, which was my overwhelming feeling during these years of the second phase at the Ulpius house. I felt I was ‘rushing headlong towards ruin’, especially at those times when I was drinking. I felt I was irretrievably falling outside the regular life of respectable people, and everything my father expected of me. This feeling, despite the horrible agonies of remorse, I really enjoyed. By this stage I was virtually in hiding from my father.

“Tamás drank very little, and grew steadily more taciturn.

“Then Ervin’s religiosity began to affect us. We had by now started to look at the world, at the reality we’d always shied away from, and it terrified us. We believed that man was degraded by his material needs, and we listened reverently to Ervin who told us we must never follow that path. We too began to pass judgement on the whole modern world with the same severity and dogmatism as Ervin himself, and for a while he became the dominant influence in the group. We deferred to him in everything. János and I strove to outdo each other in pious deeds. Every day we searched out new poor unfortunates in need of assistance, and even newer immortally great Catholic authors requiring to be rescued by us from undeserved obscurity. St Thomas and Jacques Maritain, Chesterton and St Anselm of Canterbury buzzed in our conversation like flies. We went to mass, and János of course had visions. Once St Dominic appeared at the window before dawn, with the gesture of the raised finger, and pronounced: ‘We watch over you individually and completely.’ I guess János and I in this pose must have been irresistibly comic. Tamás and Éva took little part in this Catholicism of ours.

“This period lasted for perhaps a year. Then things began to disintegrate. I couldn’t say exactly what began the process, but somehow common reality began to flow back. And with it, it brought decay. The Ulpius grandfather died. He suffered for weeks. He struggled for air, his throat rattled. Éva nursed him with surprising patience, staying up whole nights at his bedside. I remarked to her later how good it was of her. She smiled absent-mindedly and said how interesting it was to watch someone die.

“At that point their father decided that things really couldn’t carry on as they were. Something would have to be done about his children. He wanted to marry Éva off as a matter of urgency. He bundled her off to a rich old aunt in the country, who took a large house where she could go to county balls and Lord knows what else. Éva of course returned after a week, with some marvellous stories, and submitted phlegmatically to her father’s chastisement. Tamás did not share his sister’s easy nature. His father put him in an office. It’s horrible to think … even now it brings tears to my eyes when I think how he suffered in that office. He worked in the city hall, with conventional petty-bourgeois types who regarded him as mentally unsound. They gave him the most stupid, most dully routine work possible, because they reckoned he wouldn’t be able to cope with anything requiring a little thought or initiative. And perhaps they were right. The worst of the many humiliations he received at their hands amounted to this: not that they insulted him, but that they pitied and cosseted him. Tamás never complained to us, just occasionally to Éva. That’s how I know. He just went pale and became very withdrawn whenever the office was mentioned.

“Then came his second suicide attempt.”

“The second?”

“The second. I should have mentioned the first one earlier. That was actually much more serious and horrific. It happened when we were sixteen, just at the start of our friendship. I called there one day as usual and found Éva alone, doing some drawing with rather unusual concentration. She said Tamás had gone up to the attic, and I should wait, he would soon be down. Around that time he often went up to the attic to explore. He turned up countless treasures in the old trunks, which fed his antiquarian fantasies and were used in our plays. In an old house like that the attic is a specially romantic sort of place, so I wasn’t really surprised, and I waited patiently. Éva, as I said, was unusually quiet.

“Suddenly she turned pale, leapt to her feet, and screamed at me that we should go up to the attic to see what was wrong with Tamás. I had no idea what this was all about, but her fear ran through me. In the attic it was as black as could be. I tell you, it was a vast ancient place, full of nooks and crannies, with the doors of mysterious bureaux open everywhere, and trunks and desks blocking the main passage at intervals. I bumped my head on low-hanging beams. There were unexpected steps to go up and down. But Éva ran through the darkness without hesitation, as if she already knew where he might be. At the far end of the corridor there was a low and very long niche, and at the end of that the light of a small round window could be seen. Éva came to a sudden stop, and with a scream grabbed hold of me. My teeth were also chattering, but even at that age I was the sort of person who finds unexpected courage in moments of greatest fear. I went into the darkness of the niche, dragging Éva along, still clinging to me.

“Tamás was dangling beside the little round window, about a metre off the floor. He had hanged himself. Éva shrieked, ‘He’s still alive, he’s still alive,’ and pressed a knife into my hand. It seems she had known perfectly well what he intended. There was a trunk next to him. He’d obviously stood on it to attach the noose to the strength of the joist. I jumped up on the trunk, cut the cord, supported Tamás with the other hand and slowly lowered him down to Éva, who untied the noose from his neck.

“Tamás quickly regained consciousness. He must have been hanging only a minute or two, and no damage was done.

“‘Why did you give me away?’ he asked Éva. She was covered in shame and didn’t reply.

“In due course I asked, rather guardedly, why he had done it.

“‘I just wanted to see …’ he replied, with indifference.

“‘And what was it like?’ asked Éva, wide-eyed with curiosity.

“‘It was wonderful.’

“‘Are you sorry I cut you down?’ I asked. Now I too felt a little guilty.

“‘Not really. I’ve plenty of time. Some other time will do.’

“Tamás wasn’t able at the time to explain what it was really all about. But he didn’t have to. I knew all the same. I knew from our games. In the tragedies we played we were always killing and dying. That’s all they were ever about. Tamás was always preoccupied with dying. But try to understand, if it’s at all possible: not death, annihilation, oblivion, but the act of dying. There are people who commit murder again and again from an ‘irresistible urge’, to savour the heady excitement of killing. The same irresistible urge drew Tamás towards the supreme ecstasy of his own final passing away. Probably I can’t ever explain this to you, Erzsi. Things like this just can’t be explained, just as you can’t describe music to someone who is tone-deaf. I understood him completely. For years we never said another word about what happened. We just knew that each understood the other.

“The second attempt came when we were twenty. I actually took part in it. Don’t worry, you can see I’m still alive.

“At that time I was in utter despair, mainly because of my father. When I matriculated I enrolled as a philosophy student at the university. My father asked me several times what I wanted to be, and I told him a religious historian. ‘And how do you propose to earn your living?’ he would ask. I couldn’t answer that, and I didn’t want to think about it. I knew he wanted me to work in the firm. He had no real objection to my university studies because he thought it would simply give status to the firm if one of the partners had a doctorate. For my part, I looked on university, in the last analysis, as a few years’ delay. To gain a bit of time, before becoming an adult.

“Joie de vivre wasn’t my strong point during that time. The feeling of mortality, of transience, grew stronger in me, and by then my Catholicism was no longer a consolation. In fact it increased my sense of weakness. I wasn’t a role-player by nature, and by that stage I could clearly see that my life and being fell hopelessly short of the Catholic ideal.

“I was the first of us to abandon our shared Catholicism. One of my many acts of betrayal.

“But to be brief. One afternoon I called at the Ulpius house and invited Tamás to come for a walk. It was a fine afternoon in spring. We went as far as Old Buda and sat in an empty little bar under the statue of St Flórián. I had a lot to drink, and moaned about my father, my prospects, the whole horrible misery of youth.

“‘Why do you drink so much?’ he asked.

“‘Well, it’s fun.’

“‘You like the dizzy feeling?’

“‘Of course.’

“‘And the loss of consciousness?’

“‘Of course. It’s the one thing I really do like.’

“‘Well then, I really don’t understand you. Imagine how much better it would be to die properly.’

I conceded this. We think much more logically when we are drunk. The only problem was, I have a horror of any form of pain or violence. I had no wish to hang or stab myself or jump into the freezing Danube.

“‘No need,’ said Tamás. ‘I’ve got thirty centigrams of morphine here. I reckon it would do for the two of us, though it’s really just enough for one. The fact is, the time has come. I’m going to do it in the next few days. If you come with me then so much the better. Naturally I don’t want to influence you. It’s just as I say: only if you feel like it.’

“‘How did you get the morphine?’

“‘From Éva. She got it from the doctor — said she could not sleep.’

“For both of us it was fatally significant that the poison came from Éva. This was all part of the world of our dramatics, those sick little plays which we had had to change so much after Ervin and János arrived. The thrill was always in the fact that we died for Éva, or because of her. The fact that she had provided the poison finally convinced me that I should take it. And that’s what happened.

“I can’t begin to describe how simple and natural it was just then to commit suicide. I was drunk, and at that age drink always produced the feeling in me that nothing mattered. And that afternoon it freed in me the chained demon that lures a man towards death, the demon that sleeps, I believe, in the depths of everyone’s consciousness. Just think, dying is so much more easy and natural than staying alive … ”

“Do get on with the story,” said Erzsi impatiently.

“We paid for our wine and went for a walk, in a blaze of happy emotion. We declared how much we loved each other, and how our friendship was the finest thing in the world. We sat for a while beside the Danube, somewhere in Old Buda, beside the tramlines. Dusk was falling on the river. And we waited for it to take effect. At first I felt absolutely nothing.

“Suddenly I experienced an overwhelming sense of grief that I was leaving Éva. Tamás at first didn’t want to hear about it, but then he too succumbed to his feelings for her. We took a tram, then ran up the little stairway to Castle Hill.

“I realise now that the moment I wanted to see Éva I had already betrayed Tamás and his suicide attempt. I had unconsciously calculated that if we went back among people they would somehow rescue us. Subconsciously I had no real wish to die. I was weary to death, as weary as only a twenty-year-old can be, and indeed I yearned for the secret of death, longed for the dark delirium. But when the feeling of mortality inspired by the wine began to wear off, I didn’t actually want to die.

“In the Ulpius house we found Ervin and János in their usual chairs. I gaily announced the fact that we had each taken fifteen centigrams of morphine and would soon be dead, but first we wanted to say goodbye. Tamás was already white as a sheet and staggering. I just looked as if I had had a glass too many, and I had the thick speech of a drunk. János instantly rushed out and phoned Casualty to tell them there were two youths who had each taken fifteen centigrams of morphine.

“‘Are they still alive?’ he was asked.

“When he said we were they told him to take us there immediately. He and Ervin shoved us into a taxi and took us to Markó Street. I still couldn’t feel anything.

“I felt a lot more when the doctor brutally pumped out my stomach, and removed any desire I had for suicide. Otherwise, I can’t help the suspicion that what we had taken wasn’t morphine. Either Éva had deceived Tamás, or the doctor had deceived her. His illness could have been auto-suggestion.

“Éva and the boys had to stay up with us the whole night to watch that we didn’t fall asleep, because the Casualty people had said that if we did it would be impossible to wake us again. That was a strange night. We were somewhat embarrassed in each other’s company. I was thrilled because I had committed suicide — what a great feeling! — and happy to be still alive. I felt a delicious fatigue. We all loved one another deeply. The staying awake was a great self-sacrificing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in long Dostoyevskian conversations, and drank one black coffee after another. It was the sort of night typical of youth, the sort you can only look back on with shame and embarrassment once you’ve grown up. But God knows, it seems I must have grown up already by then, because I don’t feel the slightest embarrassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.

“Only Tamás said nothing. He just let them pour icy water over him and pinch him to keep him awake. He really was ill, and besides, he was tortured by the knowledge that once again he had failed. If I spoke to him he would turn away and not answer. He regarded me as a traitor. From then on we were never really friends. He never spoke about it again. He was just as kind and courteous as before, but I know he never forgave me. When he did die, he made sure I had nothing to do with it.”

Here Mihály fell silent and buried his head in his hands. After a while he got up and stared out of the window into the darkness. Then he came back, and, with an absent smile, stroked Erzsi’s hand.

“Does it still hurt so much?” she asked softly.

“I never had a friend again,” he said.

Again they were silent. Erzsi wondered whether he was simply feeling sorry for himself because of the maudlin effect of the wine, or whether the events in the Ulpius house had really damaged something in him, which might explain why he was so remote and alienated from people.

“And what became of Éva?” she finally asked.

“Éva by then was in love with Ervin.”

“And the rest of you weren’t jealous?”

“No, we thought it natural. Ervin was the leader. We thought him the most remarkable person among us, so it seemed right and proper that Éva should love him. I certainly wasn’t in love with Éva, though you couldn’t be so sure about János. By that stage the group was beginning to drift apart. Ervin and Éva were increasingly sufficient for one another and kept looking for opportunities to be alone together. I was becoming genuinely interested in the university and my study of religious history. I was filled with ambition to be an academic. My first encounter with real scholarship was as heady as falling in love.

“But to get back to Ervin and Éva. Éva now became much quieter. She went to church and to the English Ladies’ College, where she’d once been a pupil. I’ve already mentioned that Ervin had an exceptionally loving nature: being in love was as essential to him as wild adventures were to Szepetneki. I could well understand that even Éva couldn’t remain cold in his presence.

“It was a touching affair, very poetic, a passion permeated with the ambience of Buda Castle and being twenty years old — you know how it is — so that when they went along the street I almost expected the crowd to part reverentially in front of them, as if before the Sacrament. At least, that was the sort of respect, the boundless respect, we had for their love. Somehow it seemed the fulfilment of the whole meaning of the group. And what a short time it lasted! I never knew exactly what happened between them. It seems Ervin asked for her hand in marriage and old Ulpius threw him out. János believed he actually struck him. But Éva simply loved Ervin all the more. She would willingly have become his mistress, I have no doubt. But for Ervin the sixth commandment was absolute. He became even paler and quieter than before, and never went to the Ulpius house. I saw him less and less. And in Éva the big change must have finally happened around this time, the one I personally found so hard to understand later. Then one fine day Ervin simply vanished. I learnt from Tamás that he had become a monk. Tamás destroyed the letter in which Ervin told him of his decision. Whether he knew Ervin’s religious name, or where he was, and in which Order, was a secret that went with Tamás to the grave. Perhaps he revealed it only to Éva.

“Ervin certainly did not become a monk just because he couldn’t marry Éva. We had in the past talked a great deal about the monastic life, and I know that Ervin’s religion went too deep — he would never have become a monk merely out of despair and romantic sensibility, without any definite sign of an inner calling. Certainly he saw it as a sign from above that he couldn’t marry Éva. But the fact that he left so hastily, virtually fled, could have been largely to do with the fact that he wanted to escape from Éva and the temptation she represented for him. So although he ran away, perhaps a bit like Joseph, he nonetheless accomplished what we had dreamed about so much at that time. He offered up his youth as a willing sacrifice to God.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Erzsi. “If, as you say, he was so loving by nature, why offer that up as a sacrifice?”

“Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It’s not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That’s why the Church won’t allow eunuchs to become priests.”

“And what did Éva have to say to all this?”

“Éva remained unattached, and from this point on she was impossible to put up with. By this time Budapest was in the hands of the currency sharks and the officers of the Entente. Éva somehow or other got herself into the officers’ set. She knew various languages and her manner was somehow not typically Hungarian but more cosmopolitan. I know she was very much in demand. She went, from one day to the next, from a little adolescent girl to a stunning woman. This was when, in place of the earlier friendly and open expression, her eye took on that other quality: that look, as if she were listening to some far off, murmuring sound.

“Earlier on, Tamás and Ervin had dominated the group. Now it was János’s turn. Éva needed money so that she could make her exquisite appearance among the exquisite people. She was very clever at sewing herself elegant things out of nothing, but even that nothing costs a little something. That was where János came in. He’d always been able to get hold of money for Éva. Where from, he alone knew. Often he swindled the very same Entente officers she danced with. ‘I’ve been realising the group assets,’ he would say cynically. But by then we all talked cynically, because we always adapted ourselves to the leadership style.

“I didn’t like János’s methods very much. They were pretty unscrupulous. I didn’t like it, for example, when he called one day on Mr Reich, an old book-keeper in my father’s firm and, with a horribly convoluted story about my gambling debts and proposed suicide, lifted a fairly serious sum of money from him. Of course I then had to agree that I had incurred a debt at cards, though I never had a card in my hand in all my life.

“And what I particularly didn’t like was his stealing my gold watch. It happened on the occasion of a grand ‘do’ out of doors somewhere, in a then fashionable summer inn, I no longer remember the name. There were several of us present—Éva’s friends, two or three foreign officers, some young inflation-millionaires, some strange women, remarkably daring for those times in their dress and general behaviour. My usual sense of impermanence was made worse by the fact that Tamás and I were mixing with people not our own, people we had nothing in common with, and by the same old feeling that nothing mattered. But then I wasn’t the only one with this sense of impermanence. The whole city had it, it was in the air. People had a lot of money and they knew that it made no difference: it might vanish from one day to the next. The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier.

“They were apocalyptic times. I don’t know if we were still sober when we sat down to drink. As I recall, it’s as if I became drunk in the first few moments. Tamás drank little, but the universal feeling that the world was going to end was so much in accord with his state of mind that he moved with unaccustomed ease among all those people, even the gypsies. I talked with him a lot that night. Not perhaps so much in words, but the words we did speak had a profoundly sinister resonance. And once again, marvellously, we understood each other — understood each other in our impermanence. And we shared this sympathy with the strange women: at least, I felt that my modest religious-historical thesis about the Celts and the Islands of the Dead found an echo in the drama student sitting near me. Then I got into a tête-à-tête with Éva. I courted her as if I hadn’t known her since her skinny, big-eyed adolescence and she received my courtship with a complete womanly seriousness, talking in half-finished sentences and staring into the distance, in the full glitter of her pose of that time.

“By the time it started to become light I felt really ill. Then, when I’d sobered up a bit, I realised my gold watch had disappeared. I was really shocked. My despair verged on hysteria. You have to understand: the mere loss of a gold watch is not in itself such a misfortune, not even when you are twenty and have nothing else of value in the world, nothing but your gold watch. But when you are twenty, and you sober up in the light of dawn to find your gold watch has actually been stolen, then you begin to see a symbolic importance in the loss. I had it from my father, who is not by nature a great giver of gifts. I tell you, it was my only object of value, the only one worth mentioning — admittedly a bulky, commonplace thing, whose pretentious, petty-bourgeois quality stood for everything I disliked. But its loss, now that it appeared to me in its full symbolic significance, filled me with panic. It was the feeling that I was now irrevocably damned: that they had stolen the very possibility that I might one day sober up and get back to the bourgeois world.

“I staggered over to Tamás, told him that my watch had been stolen, said that I would telephone the police and tell the innkeeper to lock the gate. They would have to search every guest. Tamás calmed me down in his own special way:

“‘It’s not worth it. Let it go. Of course it was stolen. They’ll steal everything you’ve got. You’ll always be the victim. It’s what you really want.’

“I stared at him in amazement. But in fact I never said a word to anyone about the disappearance of the watch. As I gazed at Tamás I suddenly understood that only János Szepetneki could have stolen it. In the course of the evening there had been a game of exchanging clothes. Szepetneki and I had swapped coats and ties. Probably when I got my coat back the watch had already gone. I started to look for János to confront him, but he’d already left. I didn’t see him the next day, or the day after that.

“And on the fourth day I still hadn’t been able to challenge him about it. I was sure that only he could have taken it, and that he had done so because Éva needed money. In all probability he had taken it with her full knowledge. She had set up the whole clothes-swapping game — and that was the point of the scene when I sat alone with her. Perhaps its whole purpose was so that I wouldn’t immediately notice that it had gone. When I stumbled on this possibility I was able to accept what had happened. If it happened because of Éva, it was all right. It was all part of the game, the old games in the Ulpius house.

“From that moment I was in love with Éva.”

“But then why have you so strenuously denied all along that you were ever in love with her?” Erzsi interjected.

“Of course. I was quite right to. It’s only for want of a better word that I call what I felt for her, love. That feeling wasn’t in the least like the feeling I have for you, and had, if you’ll forgive me, for one or two of your predecessors. In a way it was quite the reverse. I love you because you’re part of me. I loved Éva because she wasn’t. That’s to say, loving you gives me confidence and strength, but when I loved her, it humiliated and annihilated me … Of course these expressions are merely antithetical. When it happened, I felt that the truth of the old plays was supreme, and I was being slowly destroyed in the great climax. I was being destroyed because of Éva, through Éva, just as we had played it in our adolescence.”

Mihály got up and walked restlessly round the room. It had at last begun to worry him that he had so given himself away. To Erzsi, a stranger …

Erzsi remarked:

“Before that, you said something about … that you couldn’t possibly be in love with her, because you knew each other too well, there wasn’t the necessary distance between you for you to fall in love.”

(“Good — she hasn’t understood,” he thought. “She’s taking in only as much as her basic jealousy can grasp.”)

“It’s good that you mention that,” he continued, calmly. “Until that memorable night there was no distance. Then I discovered, as the two of us sat there, like a lady with her gentleman, that she had become a totally different woman, a strange, splendid, stunning woman, whereas the old Éva would have carried within her, ineradicably, the old dark, sick sweetness of my youth.

“But generally Éva didn’t give a damn for me. I rarely managed to see her and when I did she showed no interest in me. Her restlessness was somehow pathological. Especially after the serious suitor appeared — a wealthy, famous, not-exactly-young collector of antiques, who had turned up once or twice at the Ulpius house with the old man, caught the odd glimpse of her, and had long busied himself with plans to make her his wife. The old Ulpius informed Éva he would hear not a word of protest: she had lived off him quite long enough. She would marry, or go to hell. Éva asked for two months’ delay. The old man consented, at the fiancé’s request.

“The more she neglected me, the stronger was my feeling of what I called, for want of a better word, love. It seems I had a real bent at that time for hopeless gestures: standing around by her gate at night to spy on her as she came home with her laughing and noisy crowd of admirers; neglecting my studies; spending all my money on stupid presents which she didn’t even acknowledge; being cravenly sentimental and creating unmanly scenes if I met her. That was my style. Then I was truly alive. No joy I ever experienced afterwards ever ran as deep as the pain, the exulting humiliation, of knowing I was lost for love of her and that she didn’t care for me. Is that what you call love?”

(“Why am I saying all this? Why? … Once again I’ve drunk too much. But I had to tell her at some stage, and she isn’t really taking it in … ”)

“Meanwhile the delay Éva had been granted was coming to its end. Old Ulpius would occasionally burst into her room and make terrible scenes. In those days he was never sober. The fiancé himself appeared, with his greying hair and apologetic smile. Éva asked for one more week. So that she could go away with Tamás, in a calm atmosphere, so they could take their leave of one another. Somehow money was found for the journey.

“Off they went, to Hallstatt. It was late autumn. There wasn’t a soul there besides them. There’s nothing more funereal than an old historical watering place like that. A castle or cathedral might be ancient, past its time, crumbling away here and there. It’s natural, that’s its function. But when that sort of place, a coffee-house or a promenade, designed for the pleasures of the moment, when that shows its impermanence — there’s nothing more ghastly.”

“Yes, yes,” said Erzsi, “just get on with it. What happened to Tamás and Éva?”

“My dear, if I beat about the bush and philosophise, it’s because from that point on I don’t know what happened to them. I never saw them again. In Hallstatt Tamás Ulpius poisoned himself. This time he made no mistake.”

“And Éva?”

“You mean, what part did she have in Tamás’s death? Perhaps none. I’ve no way of knowing. She never returned. It was said that after he died some high-ranking foreign officer came and took her away.

“Perhaps I might have been able to meet her. Once or twice in the following years there might have been a chance. From time to time János would pitch up out of the blue, make obscure reference to the fact that he could possibly arrange for me to see her, and would be happy to do so I if I would reward his services. But by then I had no desire to meet Éva. That’s why János said earlier tonight that it was my fault, because I walked out on the friends of my youth, when all I had to do was hold out my hand … He was right. When Tamás died I believe I went out of my mind. And then I decided I would change, I would tear myself away from the spell. I didn’t want to go the way he went. I would become a respectable person. I left the university, trained for my father’s profession, went abroad to get a better grasp of things, then went home and worked hard to become just like everyone else.

“As regards the Ulpius house, my sense of impermanence was not misplaced. Everything was destroyed. Nothing was left. Old Ulpius didn’t live long after. He was beaten to death while making his way home drunk from a bar on the outskirts of town. The house had earlier been bought by a rich fellow called Munk, a business friend of my father’s. I visited there once. It was awful. They’d fitted it out wonderfully, as if it were much older than it really was. There’s now a genuine Florentine well in the courtyard. The grandfather’s room became an Altdeutsch dining-room with oak panelling. And our rooms! My God, they turned them into some sort of old Hungarian guest house or God knows what, with painted chests, jugs and knick-knacks. Tamás’s room! Talk about impermanence … Holy God, it’s so late! Sorry, love, but I had to tell you all this at some time, no matter how stupid it might sound from the outside … Now, I’m off to bed.”

“Mihály … you promised to tell me how Tamás Ulpius died. And you haven’t told me why he died.”

“I haven’t told you how he died because I don’t know. And why he died? Hmmm. Perhaps he was bored to death. Life can be really boring, no?”

“No. But let’s get some sleep. It’s very late.”

V

IN FLORENCE their luck ran out. It rained the whole time they were there. As they stood outside the Cathedral in their raincoats Mihály suddenly burst into laughter. He had just understood the complete tragedy of the building. There it rose in its unparalleled beauty, and no-one took it seriously. For tourists and art-historians it had become a landmark, and no-one gave it a second thought. No-one believed in it, or that its purpose there was to proclaim the glory of God and the city.

They went up to Fiesole, and watched a storm hurrying with busy speed over the hills to overtake them. They retreated inside the monastery and viewed the copious oriental bric-a-brac which the pious brothers had brought back from their missions over the centuries. Mihály stood in wonder for some time over a series of pictures from China. It took him several minutes to work out what they represented. In the upper part of each an alarmingly ferocious Chinaman sat enthroned, with a large book before him. What gave the face its special ferocity was the hair flaring upwards from the temples on either side. In the lower half, all sorts of gruesome events were taking place: people being tossed with pitchforks into some ghastly liquid; some having their legs sawn off; someone whose intestines were being drawn out, very carefully, like a rope; and in one a contraption like an automobile, driven by a monster with flying hair, attacking a crowd of people and chopping them up with blades attached to its snout.

It suddenly struck him that this was the Last Judgement, as seen by a Chinese Christian. What craftsmanship, and what objectivity!

He began to feel faint and went out into the square. The landscape, so magical when viewed from the train between Bologna and Florence, was now damp and hostile, like the face of a weeping woman with the make-up peeling off.

When they arrived back in Florence Mihály went to the main Post Office. Since Venice, their mail had been directed there. On one of the envelopes addressed to him he recognised the hand of Zoltán Pataki, Erzsi’s previous husband. Thinking it might contain something better not seen by her, he sat down with it outside a café. “There’s male solidarity for you,” he thought, with a smile.

The letter ran as follows:

Dear Mihály,

I know it’s a bit much, my writing you a long and friendly letter after you ‘seduced and ran off with’ my wife, but you never were a conventional sort of chap, and so perhaps you won’t be shocked if I too disregard convention just this once, even though you’ve always branded me an old conformist. I’m writing to you because I won’t be at rest until I do. I’m writing to you because, quite honestly, I don’t see why I shouldn’t, since we are both perfectly aware that I’m not angry with you. We only keep up the appearance because it’s better for Erzsi’s self-esteem to have the romantic situation where we are locked into deadly enmity over her. But between ourselves, my dear Mihály, you are well aware that I always thought highly of you, and this hasn’t changed simply because you ‘seduced and ran off with’ my wife. Not as if this ‘crime’ of yours hasn’t left me absolutely distraught. I needn’t deny — this of course is strictly between us — how much I still adore her. But I realise you aren’t responsible for that. As a general fact — don’t take this amiss — I don’t believe you’re responsible for anything I can think of in the whole world.

It’s precisely for this reason that I am writing to you. To be honest, I’m rather anxious about Erzsi. You see, after all these years I’ve got used to looking after her, always making a careful note of things so that I could provide her with everything she needed (and often with things she didn’t), making sure she was dressed warmly enough when she went out in the evening, and I can’t just give up all that concern, from one day to the next. This concern is what binds me so strongly to her. I must tell you, a few nights ago I had a silly dream. I dreamed that Erzsi was leaning far out of a window, and that if I hadn’t caught her she would have fallen. Then it occurred to me that you wouldn’t have noticed if she was leaning too far out the window, you’re such an absent-minded and introverted fellow. And so, I thought, I’ll make a few requests, so you can take special care of her, and I wrote them down in note form, as they came to me. Don’t be offended, but we can’t get away from the fact that I’ve known her so much longer than you have, and that does give me certain rights.

1 Make sure she eats enough. Erzsi (perhaps you’ve already noticed) is terrified of putting on weight. This fear sometimes gets her in a panic, when she will starve for days, and then she has attacks of hyper-acidity, which in turn are bad for her nerves. It occurred to me that perhaps the fact that you (touch wood!) have such a good appetite might encourage her to eat. I myself, sorry to say, am just an old man with a weak stomach, and could never set her a good example.

2 Take special care over her manicurists. If she requires their services while you are travelling, make it your personal business and use only the best establishments. Ask the hotel porter for details. Erzsi is extremely sensitive, and it has happened more than once that her fingers have gone septic because of an unskilled practitioner. Which you certainly wouldn’t want.

3 Don’t let her get up too early. I know that on one’s travels there is strong temptation to do that sort of thing. When we were last in Italy I made this mistake myself, because in Italy the inter-city coaches leave at the crack of dawn. To hell with the coaches. Erzsi goes to bed late and gets up late. Early rising does her no good — she takes days to get over it.

4 Don’t let her eat scampi, frutti di mare, or any other disgusting sea creature — they give her a rash.

5 A rather delicate matter. I don’t know how to put this. Perhaps I should just assume you’re aware of it, but I really don’t know if such an absentminded, philosophical sort of person is aware of such things as the incredible frailty of women, and how much they are at the mercy of certain physical functions. But I beg you to take careful note of Erzsi’s times of the month. A week before the onset you must be patient and tolerant in the extreme. At such times she is not fully responsible. She will pick quarrels. The wisest course is to stand your ground. It gives her an outlet for her irritation. But you mustn’t quarrel in earnest. Remember, it’s just a physiological function you’re dealing with. Don’t get carried away, and don’t say anything you might later regret. Above all, don’t let Erzsi say anything that she might later regret, as that’s no good for her nerves.

Now, don’t be offended. There are a thousand things I should write about — a thousand little details for you to attend to — these are just the most important — but I can’t at this moment think of them. I really lack imagination. All the same, still in confidence, I am extremely worried, not only because I know Erzsi, but, more to the point, because I know you. Now please don’t get me wrong. If I were a woman, and had to choose between the two of us, I too would have chosen you without hesitation, and Erzsi surely loves you for being just the sort of person you are — so utterly withdrawn and abstracted that you have no real relationship with anybody or anything, like someone from another planet, a Martian on Earth, someone who never really notices anything, who cannot feel real anger about anything, who never pays proper attention when others speak, who often seems to act out of vague goodwill and politeness as if just playing at being human. Now, this is all very well, and I too would appreciate it if I were a woman. The only problem is, you are now Erzsi’s husband. And Erzsi is used to a husband who looks after her in every detail, shielding her from the very wind, leaving her nothing to think of but her mind, her inner life, and, by no means least, care of her person. Erzsi is by nature a lady of leisure. That’s how they brought her up at home, and I respected it — and I don’t know if, being with you, she will now have to face up to the realities her father and I carefully protected her from.

There is another delicate matter I have to touch upon. I realise that you (or rather your father whose firm you work for) are well off, and your wife will lack for nothing. But I do sometimes worry, because I know how pampered Erzsi has been, and I fear that someone as absent-minded as you might not take proper account of her needs. Your own nature is that of an amiable bohemian, undemanding, always bound up in your own solid existence, on a rather different level to what Erzsi is accustomed to. Now one of you is going to have to adapt to the other’s standard. If she adapts to yours, that will sooner or later create trouble, because she is going to feel herself déclassée the moment she comes into contact with the old set. For example, in Italy you might meet one of her girlfriends, who pulls a face when she hears you’re staying at a hotel that isn’t exactly top notch. The alternative is that you move up to Erzsi’s level, and this, sooner or later, will have material consequences because — if you will forgive me — I probably know the strength of the firm better than you do, you being such an abstracted sort of fellow — not to mention that you are four brothers, and your respected father a somewhat conservative, rather puritanical old gentleman who believes in saving rather than using his income … in a word, to be brief, you are hardly in a position to maintain Erzsi’s standard of living on your own account. And since it is a matter close to my heart that she should never want for anything, I beg you not to take it amiss when I tell you that should the need ever arise I am absolutely at your disposal, should you ever ask for help in the form of a long-term loan. Quite frankly, I would much prefer to pay you a regular monthly sum, but I know that would be an impertinence. But in any event this much I have to tell you: if ever you are in need, just turn to me.

Now please don’t be angry with me. I’m a simple businessman with nothing better to do than to make money, and that, thank God, I do pretty well. I think it’s only fair that I should be able to give it away to whoever I choose, if I want to, no?

Well, once again, nichts für ungut. Keep well and happy.

With affectionate greetings and true respect,

Zoltán.

The letter left Mihály very angry. He felt nauseated by Pataki’s effete ‘decency’, which, properly speaking, was not ‘decency’ but unmanliness, or, if it was genuine, then hardly more acceptable because he had rather a low opinion of that quality. And such obsequiousness! It was no good. Pataki, for all his acquired wealth, still had the soul of a shop-assistant.

If Zoltán Pataki was still in love with Erzsi after she had treated him so truly shamefully, then that was his affair, and his problem. But it wasn’t that that made Mihály angry. It was those parts of the letter that bore on himself and Erzsi.

First of all, the financial considerations. Mihály had an extreme respect for ‘economic necessity.’ Perhaps precisely because he had so little talent for it. If someone said to him, “material considerations compel you to this or that course of action,” he would immediately fall silent, and see the justification for every form of baseness. For just that reason, this aspect of the matter made him particularly uneasy. It had arisen as an issue long before the present, but Erzsi had always treated it as a joke. From a materialistic point of view she had made a very poor choice in him. Previously married to a man of substance, now the wife of a modest bourgeois — this sooner or later was bound to make itself felt, as the cool-headed and worldly Zoltán Pataki had already seen so clearly.

There rushed into his mind a host of details which, even on their honeymoon, had sharply exposed the difference in their living standards. One needed to look no further than the hotel where they were staying. Having discovered in Venice and Ravenna that Erzsi’s Italian was so much better than his own, and that she dealt so much more competently with hotel staff, of whom he had a particular horror, Mihály had in Florence delegated the hotel and all other practical considerations to her. Whereupon Erzsi, without further ado, had taken a room overlooking the river, in an old but extremely expensive little hotel, on the grounds that if one is in Florence one simply must lodge on the banks of the Arno. The cost of the room, Mihály felt vaguely, because he was too lazy to work it out, was generally out of scale with the amount they had set aside for their Italian accommodation. It was much more expensive than their room in Venice, and that for a moment had shocked his habitual thriftiness. But then he had driven the mean thought from him in disgust, telling himself, “after all, we’re on our honeymoon,” and thinking no more about it. Now, having read Pataki’s letter, it rose before him as a sign.

But the greatest problem was not financial but moral. When after six months of agonised deliberation he had finally decided to detach Erzsi, with whom he had been having an affair for a full year, from her husband, and take her as his wife, he had taken that momentous step in order to ‘atone for everything’, and indeed, through a serious marriage, to enter at last into man’s estate and become a serious person on the same level as, for example, Zoltán Pataki. So he had pledged to try with all his might to be a good husband. He wanted to make Erzsi forget what a fine spouse she had left on his account, and in particular he wanted to ‘make amends’ retrospectively for his adolescence. Pataki’s letter had now shown him the hopelessness of this undertaking. He could never become as good a husband as this man, who could look after a wife, so unfaithful and now so distant, with more care and skill than he, who was actually with her, but so unused to the role of protector that he had already had to load her with the responsibility of their hotel and other practical arrangements on that most transparent of pretexts, that she spoke better Italian.

“Perhaps it’s true what Pataki says,” he thought. “I am so abstracted and introverted by nature. Of course that’s a simplification — no-one can ever be so neatly categorised — but this much is certain, that I am singularly useless and incompetent in all practical matters, and generally not the man in whose calm superiority a woman can trust. And Erzsi is precisely the sort of woman who loves to entrust herself to someone, who likes to know that she belongs completely to someone. She isn’t one of those motherly types (perhaps that’s why she has no children) but one of those who really want to be their lover’s child. My God, how deceived she is going to be in me, sooner or later. I could more easily become a Major-General than play the role of father. That’s one human quality I completely lack, amongst others. I can’t bear it when people depend on me, not even servants. That’s why I did everything on my own, as a boy. I hate responsibility and I always come to despise people who expect things from me.

“The whole thing’s crazy: crazy from Erzsi’s point of view. She would have been better off with ninety-nine men out of a hundred than she is with me. Any average, normal fellow would have made a better husband than me. Now I can see it not from my own point of view, but purely from hers. Why didn’t I think of all this before I got married? Or rather: why didn’t Erzsi, who is so wise, think it through more carefully?”

But of course Erzsi couldn’t have thought it through, because she was in love with Mihály, and, when it came to him, was not wise, had not recognised his shortcomings, and still, it seems, did not recognise them. It was just a game of feelings. Erzsi with raw, uninhibited appetite was seeking the happiness in love she had never found with Pataki. But perhaps once she had had her fill, because such passionate feeling does not usually last very long …

By the time he got back to the hotel, after a long rambling walk, it seemed inevitable to him that she would, one day, leave him, and do so after horrible crises and sufferings, after squalid affairs with other men, her name ‘dragged through the mud’, as the saying goes. To a certain extent he took comfort in the inevitable, and when they sat down to dinner he could already, a little, look upon her as a lovely fragment of his past, and he was filled with solemn emotion. Past and present always played special games inside Mihály, lending each other colour and flavour. He loved to relocate himself in his past, at one precise point, and from that perspective re-assemble his present life: for example, “What would I have made of Florence if I had come here at sixteen?” and this reordering would always give the present moment a richer charge of feeling. But it could also be done the other way round, converting the present into a past: “What fine memories will I have, ten years from now, of once having been in Florence with Erzsi … what will such memories hold, what associations of feeling, which I cannot guess at at this moment?”

This sense of occasion he expressed by ordering a huge festive meal and calling for the most expensive wine. Erzsi knew Mihály. She knew that the fine meal signified a special mood, and she did her best to rise to the occasion. She skilfully directed the conversation, putting one or two questions bearing on the history of Florence, prodding him to think about such matters, because she knew that historical associations, together with wine, drew him out of his solemnity, and were in fact the only thing that could overcome his apathy. Mihály poured out enthusiastic, colourful, factually unreliable explanations, then with shining eyes tried to analyse the meaning for him, the wonder, the ecstasy of the mere word: Tuscany. “Because there is no part of this land that hasn’t been trodden by the armies of history. The Caesars, the gorgeously apparelled troops of the French kings, all passed this way. Here every pathway leads to some important site and one street in Florence holds more history than seven counties back home.”

Erzsi listened with delight. The actual history of Tuscany did not for one minute interest her, but she adored him when he came alive like this. She loved the way that at these moments, in his historical day-dreams, precisely when he reached the furthest point from actual living people and the present world, his remoteness left him and he became a normal person. Her sympathy soon merged with more powerful feelings, and she thought with pleasure of the expected sequel later that night, all the more because the night before he had been in a bad mood, and fell asleep, or pretended to, the moment he lay down.

She knew that Mihály’s exalted mood could easily be diverted from history towards herself. It was enough to put her hand in his and gaze deep into his eyes. He forgot Tuscany, and his face, flushed as it was with wine, grew pale with sudden desire. Then he began to woo and flatter her, as if trying to win her love for the very first time.

“How strange,” Erzsi thought. “After a year of intimacy he still woos me with that voice, with that diffidence, as if totally unsure of success. In fact the more he wants me, the more distant and fastidious his manner becomes, as if to embellish his desire, to give it the proper respect — and the greatest intimacy, physical intimacy, doesn’t bring him any closer. He can only feel passion when he senses a distance between us.”

So it was. Mihály’s desire spoke to her across a distance, in the knowledge that she would leave him. Already she had become for him a sort of beautiful memory. He drank heavily to sustain this mood, to make himself believe that he wasn’t with Erzsi but with the memory of Erzsi. With Erzsi as history.

But meanwhile Erzsi drank too, and on her wine always had a strong effect. She became loud, jolly and extremely impatient. This Erzsi was rather new to him. Before their marriage she had had little opportunity for unguarded behaviour when with him in public. He found this new Erzsi extremely attractive, and they went up to the bedroom with equal haste.

That night, when she was at once the new Erzsi and the Erzsi of history, Erzsi-as-memory, when Zoltán Pataki’s letter, with its implicit reminder of the Ulpius days, had so deeply shaken him, Mihály forgot his long-standing resolution and admitted elements into his married life which he had always wanted to keep away from Erzsi. There is a kind of lovemaking fashionable among certain adolescent boys and still-virgin girls, which lets them seek pleasure in a roundabout way, avoiding all responsibility. And there are people, like Mihály, who actually prefer this irresponsible form of pleasure to the serious, adult, and, as it were, officially approved variety. But Mihály, in his heart, would have been thoroughly ashamed to acknowledge this inclination, being fully aware of its adolescent nature, of its adolescent limitations. Once he had arrived at a truly serious adult relationship with Erzsi he had determined it would express itself only along the ‘officially approved lines’, as befitting two serious-minded adult lovers.

That night in Florence was the first and only derogation. Erzsi was filled with wonder, but she accepted him willingly and reciprocated his unaccustomed gentleness. She did not understand what was happening, nor did she understand afterwards his terrible depression and shame.

“Why?” she asked. “It was so good that way, and anyhow I love you.”

And she fell asleep. Now he was the one who lay awake for hours. He felt that finally, definitively, he was facing the bankruptcy and collapse of his marriage. He had to acknowledge that here too he had failed as an adult, and, what was even worse, he had to concede that Erzsi had never before given him so much pleasure as now, when he made love to her not as a partner in adult passion but as an immature girl, a flirtation on a springtime outing.

He climbed out of bed. As soon as he was sure she was still asleep he went to the dressing table where her reticule lay. He rummaged in it for the cheques (Erzsi was their cashier). He found the two National Bank lire cheques, each for the same amount, one in his name, the other in hers. He withdrew his own, and in its place smuggled in a sheet of paper of similar size. Then, very carefully, he put it in his wallet, and went back to bed.

VI

THE NEXT MORNING they continued on their way to Rome. The train pulled out of Florence into the Tuscan landscape, between hillsides green with spring. It made slow progress, stopping for ten minutes at every station, where the passengers disembarked until it was ready to leave, then drifted back, chattering and laughing, at the comfortable pace of the South.

“Just look,” observed Mihály. “You see so much more from the window of a train, here in Italy, than you can in any other country. I don’t know how they do it. The horizon is wider here, or the objects smaller, but I bet you can see five times as much in the way of villages, towns, forests, rivers, clouds and sky here, than you would from a train window in, say, Austria.”

“Indeed,” said Erzsi. She felt sleepy, and his worship of all things Italian was beginning to irritate. “All the same, Austria’s more beautiful. We should have gone there.”

“To Austria?!” cried Mihály. He was so offended he couldn’t continue.

“Put your passport away,” said Erzsi. “Once again you’ve left it out on the table.”

The train stopped at Cortona. When he saw the little hilltop town Mihály had the feeling that once, long ago, he had known many such places and was now savouring the pleasure of renewing old acquaintance.

“Tell me, why do I feel as if I spent part of my youth among these hilltop towns?”

But Erzsi had nothing to say on the subject.

“I’m bored with all this travelling,” she remarked. “I wish I was already in Capri. I’ll have a good rest when we get there.”

“What, Capri! It would be so much more interesting to get off here in Cortona. Or anywhere. Somewhere unplanned. For example, the next stop, Arezzo. Arezzo! It’s just incredible that there really is a place called Arezzo, that Dante didn’t make it up when he compared their gymnasts to devils because they used their backsides as trumpets. Come on, let’s get off at Arezzo.”

“I see. We’re getting off at Arezzo because Dante wrote that sort of rubbish. Arezzo will be just another dusty little bird’s nest, doubtless with a thirteenth-century cathedral, a Palazzo Communale, a bust of the Duce on every street-corner, with the usual patriotic inscriptions, several cafés, and a hotel called the Stella d’Italia. I really am not very interested. I’m bored. I just wish I was already in Capri.”

“That’s interesting. Perhaps you no longer swoon at the sight of a Fra Angelico or a Bel Paese because you’ve been to Italy so often. But I still feel I am committing a mortal sin at every station where we don’t get off. There’s nothing more frivolous than travelling by train. One should go on foot, or rather in a mail-coach, like Goethe. Take me, for example. I’ve been to Tuscany, but I haven’t really been there. Oh yes, I travelled past Arezzo, and Siena was somewhere nearby, and I never went there. Who knows if I will ever get to Siena if I don’t go there now?”

“Tell me: when you were at home you never showed what a snob you are. What does it matter if you don’t get to see the Siena Primitives?”

“Who wants to see the Siena Primitives?”

“What else would you want to do there?”

“What do I know? If I knew, perhaps it wouldn’t be so exciting. But just to say the name Siena gives me the feeling that I might stumble across something there that would make everything all right.”

“You’re daft. That’s the problem.”

“Perhaps. And I’m hungry. Have you got anything to eat?”

“Mihály, it’s appalling how much you’ve been eating since we came to Italy. And you’ve only just had breakfast.”

The train pulled in to a station called Terontola.

“I’ll get out here and have a coffee.”

“Don’t get off. You’re not an Italian. The train might start at any moment.”

“Of course it won’t. It always stands for a quarter-of-an-hour at every station. Cheers. God bless.”

“Bye, silly monkey. Do write to me.”

Mihály left the train, ordered a coffee, and, while the espresso machine coaxed the marvellous steaming liquid out of itself, drop by drop, he began to chat with a local about the sights of Perugia. Finally he drank the coffee.

“Come, quickly,” said the Italian, “the train’s going.”

By the time they got there the train was half way out of the station. Mihály just managed to clamber onto the last coach. This was an old-fashioned third-class carriage, with no corridor. Every compartment was a separate world.

“Never mind,” he thought. “I’ll move up to the front at the next station.”

“Will this be your first visit to Perugia?” asked the friendly native.

“To Perugia? I’m not going to Perugia, unfortunately.”

“Then you must be going on to Ancona. That’s not a good idea. Stop off at Perugia. It is a very old city.”

“But I’m heading for Rome.”

“For Roma? You are joking.”

“I’m what?” asked Mihály, thinking he must have misheard the word in Italian.

“Joking,” shouted the Italian. “This train doesn’t go to Roma. My, what a witty fellow!” (using the appropriate idiom).

“And why shouldn’t this train go to Rome? I got on at Florence with my wife. It said Rome on it.”

“But that wasn’t this train,” the Italian replied with glee, as if this was the greatest joke of his life. “The train to Roma went earlier. This is the Perugia-Ancona train. The line forks at Terontola. Wonderful! And the signora is happily on her way to Roma.”

“Terrific,” replied Mihály, and stared helplessly out of the window at Lake Trasimene, as if an answer might come paddling across it towards him.

When he had taken his cheque and passport the night before he had thought — of course, not really seriously — that they might perhaps find themselves separated during the journey. When he got off at Terontola it had again flitted across his mind that he might leave Erzsi to continue on the train. But now that it had really happened he was amazed and disturbed. But at all events — it had happened!

“And what will you do now?” urged the Italian.

“I shall get off at the next station.”

“But this is an express. It doesn’t stop before Perugia.”

“Then I’ll get off at Perugia.”

“Didn’t I just say you were going to Perugia? You’ll get there, no problem. A very old city. And you must visit the surrounding countryside.”

“Great,” thought Mihály. “I’m on my way to Perugia. But what will Erzsi do? Probably go on to Rome and wait there for the following train. But she might also get off at the next station. Perhaps she’ll go back to Terontola. And she won’t find me there. It won’t be easy for her to work out that I left on the Perugia train.

“Yes, that’ll fox her. So if I now get off at Perugia, it’ll certainly be a day or two before anybody finds me. It will take even longer if she doesn’t stop in Perugia but carries on from there on God knows what line.

“Lucky that I’ve got my passport with me. Luggage? I’ll buy myself a shirt and whatnot — underwear is good and cheap in Italy. I was going to buy some anyway. And money … how are we off for money?”

He took out his wallet and in it discovered his National Bank lire cheque.

“Of course, last night! … I’ll change it in Perugia, there must be a bank there that will take it.”

He snuggled into his corner and fell deeply asleep. The friendly Italian woke him when they reached Perugia.