Journey by Moonlight

VII

THE SCENE is the great Umbrian plain. In one corner, on its high table of rock, stands Perugia. In the other, propped against the vast hill of Subasio, Assisi gleams white, or, for a few days every year, is ablaze with flowers. Everywhere teeming fruit-trees filled the air with their annual jubilation: the strange, twisting-branched mulberries, the pale Italian-green olives, and those great lilac-coloured trees whose name Mihály could learn from no-one. By day one could go about in shirt-sleeves. The evenings were still rather cool, but not unpleasantly so.

Mihály went on foot from Spello to Assisi, and thence up to the town’s highest point, the Rocca. There he listened while a wise and beautiful Italian boy explained its history, sat on a wall of the old fortress, gazed for long hours across the Umbrian landscape, and was happy.

“Umbria is totally different from Tuscany,” he thought: “more rustic, more ancient, more holy, and perhaps a shade bleaker.

“The land of the Franciscans, and the true hilltop town. Back home, they always built down in the valleys, under the hills. But here they build up on the hills, above the plain. Did those early founders harbour some obscure race memory of enemy attack? What was the terror that drove them ever upwards to the protection of steep rocks? Wherever a hill rose up out of the plain they immediately built a town on it.

“And here every town is in fact a city. Spello, for example. Back home it would be a mean little village. Here it’s a real city, with a cathedral and a coffee-house, much more so than, say, Szolnok or Hatvan. And no doubt some great painter was born here, or some great battle took place nearby.

“The Italian landscape isn’t as simply friendly and merely pretty as I had imagined it. Certainly not here in Umbria. Here there is something desolate, something dark and rugged, like the bay-tree: that exactly epitomises the harsh attractiveness of Italy. Perhaps it’s the great barren hills that do it. I would never have thought there were so many barren and really high mountains. There are still patches of snow on Subasio.”

He broke off a branch of the tree whose name he did not know and, bedecked with flowers, cheerfully made his way down to the town. In the piazza, opposite the ancient temple of Minerva — the first ancient temple Goethe saw on his Italian travels — he sat down outside a little café, ordered vermouth, and asked the waitress the name of the tree.

“Salsify,” she lisped, after a slight hesitation. “Salsify,” she repeated, without conviction. “At least that’s what they call it back home, up in Milan. But here everything has a different name,” she added, with contempt.

“Like hell it’s salsify,” thought Mihály. “Salsify would be the house-leek. This must be the Judas tree.”

But this detail aside, he felt very content. The Umbrian landscape diffused a general happiness, an unassuming Franciscan happiness. He felt, as so often in his dreams, that the important things happened not here but elsewhere, up there in Milan perhaps, where the sad exile, the little lisping girl, came from, or where Erzsi was … but now he was filled with the happy feeling that he did not have to be where the important things happened, that he was somewhere entirely other, behind God’s back.

During his walk to Assisi the hope had occurred to him that he might perhaps meet Ervin. In their youth, when Ervin was dominant in the group, they had read everything they could about the great saint of Assisi. Ervin must surely have joined the Franciscan order. But Mihály did not meet him, nor could the Franciscan churches revive the religious fervour of his youth, not even Santa Maria degli Angeli, built around the Portiuncula where the saint died. He decided not to wait around there until nightfall, fearing that anyone looking for him might well find him in such an obvious venue for tourists. He moved on, and by evening reached Spoleto.

Here he dined, but did not enjoy the wine at all. These Italian reds sometimes end up smelling of methylated spirits, or onions, God knows why, when at other times they can be so unaccountably fine. He became even more depressed when he realised at the counter that, despite every economy, the money he had cashed in Perugia would soon run out, and he had no idea what he would then do. The outside world, which he had been so happy to forget in Perugia and its plain, began here to breathe once more down his neck.

He took a cheap room in a cheap albergo—there really wasn’t much choice in this tiny place — and then set off for one more little stroll before dinner round the back streets of Spoleto. Clouds veiled the moon. It was dark and the narrow lightless alleys of the sombre town closed around him, but not in the welcoming way the little pink streets had in Venice. Somehow he ended up in the sort of district where, with every step, the lanes grew darker and more menacing, the stairways led to ever more mysterious doors. He could see absolutely no-one about — he had quite lost his way — and then he suddenly felt sure that someone was following him.

He turned. Just at that moment the person loomed round the corner: a huge, dark-clad form. An unnameable fear seized him, and he stepped hurriedly into an alleyway that proved darker and narrower than any so far.

But the alley was blind. He could only turn back to where the stranger was already waiting at the narrow exit. Mihály began a few hesitant steps towards him, but, catching a better view of the man, he stopped in horror. The stranger wore a short, black, circular cape, of the sort common in the last century, and over it, a white silk scarf. On his ancient, soft, oddly crumpled face was a sort of indescribable smile. He spread his arms in a little gesture towards Mihály, and screeched in a thin, neutered voice, “Zacomo!”, or some such name.

“Not me,” said Mihály. The stranger considered this, and a hasty apology passed between them. Mihály could now see that the indefinable smile on the old man’s face was quite witless.

The fact that his escapade had arisen out of a purely irrational fear and had ended on this somewhat comic note, did nothing to reassure him. Rather, given his readiness to find symbolic significance, he concluded from this foolish episode that he was indeed being pursued, and that someone was indeed close on his tracks. In growing panic, he sought out the way back to his lodging, hurried up to his room, shut the door and blocked it with a chest. Even so, the room remained an alarming place. First of all, it was far too big for one person. Second, Mihály couldn’t bear that fact that in Italy the smaller hotels have tiled floors. He felt like a child who had been banished into the kitchen, a harsh enough punishment in itself (though one that in practice could never have happened to him). Third, the room was on the very edge of the hill town. Below the window the cliff fell sheer some two hundred metres, and, defying comprehension, a glass door had been cut beside it into the wall. Perhaps it had at one time opened onto a balcony, but the balcony had either been removed centuries before, or had collapsed from neglect. Only the door remained, opening into the sky two hundred metres up in the air. For any potential suicide this room would have been certain death. The door would have been irresistible. In addition to this, the vast wall was hung with a single picture, an illustration from some picture-book, of a hideously ugly woman dressed in the fashion of the last century, holding a revolver.

Mihály decided that he had slept in more reassuring places. What worried him even more was that his passport was downstairs with the grim-faced, but no less sly-looking, proprietor, who had resisted his cunning suggestion that he fill in the registration form himself on the pretext that his passport was written in an incomprehensible foreign tongue. The innkeeper insisted that the passport should remain in his keeping as long as Mihály continued on the premises. It seemed he had had some bad experiences. The inn was indeed just the sort to guarantee its owner his fair share of those. During the day, Mihály reckoned, probably only down-at-heel revellers frequented the place, while in the evening horse-thieving types guffawed over cards in the so-called sala da pranzo, an eating area pervaded with kitchen smells.

But in whoever’s hands, for whatever reason, the passport was a potential threat to him, betraying his name to his pursuers. Just to make off, leaving the passport behind, would have been as distressing as going out without his trousers on, as we do in our dreams. He lay on the questionably clean bed, feeling very tense. He slept little. A mixture of sleep, dozing and anxious wakefulness blended themselves together into the all-pervasive night-time feeling of being closely followed.

He rose at the crack of dawn, sneaked downstairs, roused the innkeeper after a long struggle, paid his bill, reclaimed his passport, and hurried off to the station. A half-awake woman made coffee for him at the bar counter. After a while, some sleepy labourers came in. Mihály’s anxiety would not leave him. He was in constant terror that someone would arrest him. The appearance of every soldier or policeman fuelled his suspicion, until, at last, the train pulled in. He began to breathe more freely and prepared to abandon his cigarette and climb on board.

Just then a very young and startlingly handsome little fascista stepped up to him and asked for a light before he threw down his cigarette.

“Ecco,” said Mihály, and offered him the cigarette. He was entirely off his guard. Especially now that the train had come.

“You’re a foreigner,” said the fascista. “I can tell from the way you said ‘ecco’. I’ve a sharp ear.”

“Bravo,” said Mihály.

“You’re Hungarian,” the little man beamed up at him.

“Si, si,” said Mihály, smiling.

In that instant the fascista seized him by the arm, with a strength he would never have thought possible in such a small person.

“Ah! You’re the man the whole of Italy is searching for! Ecco! This is your picture!” he added, producing a piece of paper. “Your wife is looking for you.”

Mihály jerked his arm away, pulled out a calling card, and quickly scribbled on it, “I am well. Don’t try to find me,” and gave it, with a ten lire note, to the little fascista.

“Ecco! Send this telegram to my wife. Arrivederci!”

Once again he tore himself away from the man, who had renewed his grip, jumped onto the moving train, and slammed the door behind him.

The little train went up to Norcia, in the hills. When he disembarked the Sibilline mountains stretched out before him with their two-thousand-metre peaks. To the right lay the Gran Sasso, Italy’s highest range.

It was fear that had driven him to the mountains, as it once had the builders of those towns. Up there, in the wilderness of ice and snow, they would not find him. He wasn’t thinking now of Erzsi. Indeed he felt that Erzsi, as an individual, had been disarmed by his telegram. But Erzsi was only one of many. It wasn’t so much people that were following him as whole institutions, and the whole dreaded terrorist army of the past.

For indeed, what had been his life during the past fifteen years? At home and abroad he had been schooled in mastery. Not self-mastery, but the mastery of his family, his father, the profession which did not interest him. Then he taken his place in the firm. He had really tried to learn the pleasures befitting a partner in the firm. He had learnt to play bridge, to ski, to drive a car. He had dutifully entangled himself in the sort of love affairs appropriate to a partner in the firm. And finally he had met Erzsi, who was sufficiently talked about in high society for the level of gossip to satisfy what was due to the young partner in a fashionable firm. And he had ended by marrying her, a beautiful, sensible, wealthy woman, notorious for her previous affairs, as a partner should. Who knows, perhaps it needed only another year and he would become a real partner: the attitudes were already hardening inside him like calluses. You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you’re just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.

He made his way on foot up into the hills and meandered around the villages. The natives remained peaceful, did not pursue him. They accepted him as just another crazy tourist. But a middle-class person meeting him on the third or fourth day of his wanderings would have taken him not for a tourist but a madman. He was unshaven, unwashed, and sleeping in his clothes: he was simply a man on the run. And inside, he was utterly in turmoil, up there among the harsh outline of pitiless mountains, the inhuman solitude, the utter abandonment. The faintest shadow of purpose never flickered across his consciousness. All he knew was that there was no going back. The whole horde of people and things pursuing him, the lost years and the entire middle-class establishment, fused in his visionary consciousness into a concrete, nightmarish shape. The very thought of his father’s firm was like a great steel bar raised to strike him. At the same time he could see that he was slowly ageing, his body was somehow caught up in slow but visible processes of change, as if his skin was shrivelling at the speed of a minute hand ticking round a clock. These were the first signs of a delirious fever of the nerves.

His doctors later agreed that the nervous fever was the result of exhaustion. It was little wonder. For fifteen years Mihály had systematically driven himself too hard. He had forced himself to become something other than what he was, to live never after his own inclination but as he was expected to. The latest and not least heroic of these exertions had been his marriage. Then the excitement of travel, and the wonderful series of unwindings and unfoldings which the Italian landscape had induced in him, together with the fact that throughout his honeymoon he had drunk practically non-stop and never taken enough sleep, all had contributed to the collapse. Essentially, it was a case of a man not realising how tired he is until he sits down. The accumulated exhaustion of fifteen years had begun to overwhelm him from that time in Terontola when he involuntarily, but not unintentionally, took the other train, the train that carried him ever further from Erzsi, towards solitude and himself.

One evening he arrived in one of the larger hill towns. By then he was in such a surreal state of mind that he never enquired after the name, being all the more reluctant to do so since he had realised, around midday, that he could not remember a single word of Italian — so we need not record the name of the town. In the main square stood a friendly-looking albergo, where he called in, and dined with a perfectly good, normal appetite on gnocchi in tomato sauce, the local goat’s cheese, oranges and white wine. But when the time came to pay he noticed the waitress looking at him suspiciously and whispering with two other people sitting in the room. He instantly rushed out, then roamed restlessly up and down on the scrubby macchia-covered hill above the town until, forced to leave by a howling wind, he let himself down a steep hillside.

He ended up in a deep, well-like valley where the wind was less fierce. But the place was so closed-in, so dark and desolate it would have seemed to him quite natural to come upon a few skeletons, with a royal crown amongst them, or some other bloody symbol of ancient dignity and tragedy. Even in his normal mind he was highly susceptible to the mood of place: now he was ten times so. He ran headlong out of the deep recess, then became exhausted. A pathway led him up a gentle hill. Arriving at the top he stopped at the base of a low wall. It was a friendly, inviting place. He jumped up on to the wall. So far as he could see, by the weak light of the stars, he was in a garden, in which fine cypress trees grew. A small mound beside his foot offered itself as a natural pillow. He lay down and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

Later the starlight grew much stronger. The stars became so bright it was as if some strange disturbance filled the sky with energy, and he awoke. He sat up, looked hesitantly around in the eerie luminosity. From behind a cypress tree, pale and melancholy, stepped Tamás.

“I must go back now,” Tamás said, “because I can’t sleep under this terrible starlight.” Then he moved away, and Mihály wanted to rush after him, but could not get onto his feet, however much he struggled.

He awoke at dawn, with cold and the first light, and looked sleepily around the garden. At the foot of the cypress trees, extending in all directions, stood crosses marking graves. He had slept in the town’s garden of rest, the cemetery. Nothing could have been more horrible. By day, and perhaps also by moonlight, the Italian cities of the dead were indeed perhaps more friendly and inviting than those of the living, but for Mihály the episode had a horrific symbolic meaning. Again he fled in terror, and from that moment one might properly date the onset of his illness. What happened to him afterwards he was unable to recall.

On the fourth, fifth or perhaps sixth day, on a narrow mountain path, he became aware of the sunset. The pink and gold hues of the setting sun were, to his fevered condition, quite overwhelming, even more so perhaps than when he was rational. In his saner moments he would have been ashamed to respond so strongly to the familiar, banal and utterly meaningless colours of the sky. But as the sun went down behind a mountain he suddenly clambered impulsively onto a rock, seized with the feverish notion that from its top he would be able to watch for a little longer. In his clumsiness he took a wrong hold and slithered down into the ditch beside the road, where he no longer had the strength to get up. There he remained prostrate.

Luckily, towards dawn some peddlers came by on mules, saw him lying in the moonlight, recognised the genteel foreigner and with respectful concern took him down to the village. From there the authorities sent him on, with many changes of transport, to the hospital at Foligno. But of this he knew nothing.

VIII

WHEN HE RECOVERED consciousness he was still unable to speak a word of Italian. In a weary, timorous voice, using Hungarian, he asked the nurse the usual questions: where was he, and how had he got there? The nurse being unable to reply, he worked out for himself — it was not very difficult — that he was in hospital. He even remembered the strange feeling he had experienced in the mountains, and grew calmer. All he wanted to know was, what was wrong with him? He felt no pain, just very weak and tired.

Luckily there was in the hospital a doctor who was half English, and who was called to his bed. Mihály had lived in England for many years and the language flowed in his veins, so much so that it did not desert him now, and they could communicate fully.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” said the doctor, “just horrendous exhaustion. What were you doing, to get yourself so tired?”

“Me?” he asked, meditatively. “Nothing. Just living.” And he fell asleep again.

When he woke again he felt a great deal better. The English doctor visited him again, examined him, and informed him there was nothing wrong and he would be able to get up in a few days.

The doctor was interested in Mihály and talked with him a great deal. He was keen to establish the cause of his extreme exhaustion. He gradually became aware how little comfort Mihály took in the thought that he would be well in a few days and would have to leave the hospital.

“Do you have business in Foligno or the area?”

“Not at all. I had no idea there was such a place as Foligno.”

“Where will you go? Back to Hungary?”

“No, no. I’d like to stay in Italy.”

“And what would you want to do here?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Do you have any relations?”

“No, no-one,” said Mihály, and, in his state of nervous debilitation, burst into tears. The tender-hearted doctor felt extremely sorry for this poor abandoned soul and began to treat him with even greater kindness. But Mihály had not wept because he had no relations, just the opposite — because he had so many — and he feared he would not long be able to preserve the solitude he so much enjoyed in the hospital.

He told the doctor that all his life he had longed to be in bed in a hospital. Of course not seriously ill or suffering, but as at present, just lying there in passive and involuntary exhaustion, being nursed, without purpose or desire, far from the normal business of men.

“It’s no use. Italy has everything I ever longed for,” he said.

It became apparent that the doctor shared his love of historical connections. By degrees he came to spend all his free time at Mihály’s bedside, in historical discussions that flitted about lethargically. Mihály learnt a great deal about Angela da Foligno, saint and mystic, the most famous daughter of the town, who was virtually unheard of in Foligno itself. And he came to know a lot about the doctor, since, as with all Englishmen, his family history proved rather colourful. His father had been a naval officer who had caught yellow fever in Singapore, was tormented in his delirium with terrible visions, and on his recovery turned Catholic, thinking that would be the only way he could escape the torments of the devil. His family, a religious one consisting for the most part of Anglican clergymen, rejected him, whereupon he became fiercely anti-British, left the Navy, joined the Italian merchant service, and later married an Italian woman. Richard Ellesley — that was the doctor’s name — had spent his childhood in Italy. From his Italian grandfather they inherited a considerable fortune, and his father had educated the young Ellesley at Harrow and Cambridge. During the war the old man went back into the British Navy, fell at the battle of Skagerrak, the fortune evaporated, and Ellesley had to earn his living as a doctor.

“The only thing I inherited from my father,” he said with a smile, “was the fear of damnation.”

Here the roles were reversed. Mihály lived in terror of a great number of things, but hell was certainly not among them. He had little feeling for the afterlife. So he undertook to cure the doctor. A cure was urgently needed. About every third day the little English doctor would be seized by terrible fear.

The terror was not induced by bad conscience. He was a virtuous and kindly soul, with no obvious cause for self-reproach.

“Then why should you think you’ll be damned?”

“My God, I’ve no idea why I should be damned. It won’t be because of what I am. They’ll just take me.”

“But devils have power only over the wicked.”

“That we can never know. Even the prayer says it. You know: ‘Saint Michael Archangel, defend us in our struggles; be our shield against the wickedness of Satan and his snares. As God commands you, so we humbly beseech you; and you who command the Heavenly Armies, with the strength of the Lord deliver unto eternal damnation Satan and all the evil spirits who lead us into danger’.”

The prayer reminded Mihály of his school chapel, and the horror its words had always conjured up inside him as an adolescent. But it was not Satan and damnation that disturbed him. It was the prayer with its bleak reminder of bygone days. He generally thought of Catholicism as a modern phenomenon, which indeed it is, but that one prayer seemed like a relic of buried ages.

Whenever the terror of Satan seized him, Ellesley would hurry off to priests and monks for absolution of his sins. But this was of little use. For one thing, because he did not feel himself to be in sin, the act of forgiveness did not help. Another problem was that his confessors, for the most part, were simple country priests who persisted in carefully and repeatedly drawing his attention to the horrific nature of Satan, which merely made his condition worse. But at least the amulets and other magic charms were a help. On one occasion a saintly old woman blessed him with a sacred incense, and that kept him calm for two whole months.

“But what about you?” he asked Mihály. “Aren’t you afraid? What do you think happens to the soul after death?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“And you have no hope of survival after death, and eternal life?”

“The names of great men live forever. I am not great.”

“And you can endure life on those terms?”

“That’s another question.”

“I don’t understand how anyone can believe that when a man dies he vanishes completely. There are a thousand proofs to the contrary. Every Italian can tell you that. And every Englishman. In all these two nations there isn’t a single person who hasn’t met with the dead, and these, after all, are the two most honest races. I had no idea Hungarians were so cynical.”

“Have you met with the dead?”

“Of course. More than once.”

“How?”

“I won’t describe it, it might just upset you. Although, one occasion was so straightforward it shouldn’t disturb you. I was a pupil at Harrow before the war. One day I was lying in my bed — with the ’flu — and staring out through the window. Suddenly I saw my father standing on the window sill in his naval uniform, saluting me. The only strange thing was that his officer’s cap had two wings, as in pictures of Mercury. I jumped up from the bed and opened the window. But he had gone. This was in the afternoon. That same morning my father was killed. That was the time it took for the spirit to get from Skagerrak to Harrow.”

“And the other occasion?”

“That was much more mysterious. It happened in Gubbio, not long ago. But that I really shouldn’t tell you about.”

“Gubbio? Why does that name seem so familiar?”

“Presumably from the legend of Saint Francis in The Little Flowers.”

“Of course, yes, the wolf of Gubbio … the one Saint Francis made a pact with, that he wouldn’t trouble the townspeople, and they in return provided him with food? … ”

“And every evening the wolf could be seen, with two baskets round his neck, going about the houses of Gubbio one after the other, collecting love-gifts.”

“Is this Gubbio still in existence?”

“Of course. It’s quite near here. You must visit it when you are better. It’s very interesting, not only for the wolf legend … ”

They talked a lot about England, Doctor Ellesley’s other home, which he greatly missed. Mihály too was very fond of England. He had spent two very serious, dreamy years there, before going on to Paris and home. In London he had wallowed in an orgy of solitude. Sometimes he went for weeks without speaking to anyone, just a few working men in suburban pubs, and then only a few words. He loved the appalling London weather, its foggy, watery softness, in which one can sink as low as the temperature in solitude and spleen.

“In London November isn’t a month,” he said, “it’s a state of mind.”

Ellesley readily agreed.

“You see,” Mihály continued, “now it comes back to me: in London one November I also experienced something which, with people like yourself, would no doubt have strengthened their belief that the dead somehow survive. In me it only strengthens the conviction that there is something wrong with my nervous system. Listen to this. One morning I was working down in the factory (as I said, this was in November) when I was called to the telephone. An unknown woman asked me to go without fail that afternoon, on important business, to such and such a place, and gave me an unfamiliar name and address. I protested that there must be some error. ‘Oh no,’ said this unknown female voice, ‘I’m trying to contact a Hungarian gentleman who works in the Boothroyd factory as a volunteer. Is there another one of that description?’ ‘No-one,’ I replied, ‘and you have my name correctly. But tell me, what is it about?’ She couldn’t say. We talked about it for some time and eventually I agreed to go.

“I went because I was curious. Is there any man who wouldn’t respond to the dulcet tones of an unknown woman on the telephone? If women really knew men they would ask us for everything over the telephone — in unfamiliar voices. The street, Roland Street, was in that rather forbidding bit of London behind Tottenham Court Road, just north of Soho, where the painters and prostitutes live who can’t afford Soho proper or Bloomsbury. I don’t know for certain, but I think it very likely that this is the part of London where you find the founders of new religions, Gnostics and the seedier kinds of spiritualist. The whole area gives off an aura of religious dereliction. Well, anyway, that’s where I had to go. You have to understand I am incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere of streets and places. As I made my way through the dark streets looking for Roland Street in the fog — it was mist rather than fog, a white, transparent, milky mist, typical of November — I was so overcome by this sense of spiritual abandonment I was almost seasick.

“I finally found the house, and a plate beside the door with the name given me by the strange voice on the telephone. I rang. After some time I could hear shuffling, and a sleepy slattern of a maid opened the door.

“‘What do you want?’ she asked.

“‘Well, I’ve no idea,’ I said, and felt rather embarrassed.

“Then someone shouted down, as from a long way off. The maid pondered this and for some time said nothing. Then she led me to a grubby little stairway and said, in the usual English way, ‘Just go straight up.’ She herself remained below.

“At the top of the stairs I found an open door and a room in semi-darkness. There was no-one in it. Just then the door opposite closed, as if someone had just that instant left the room. Remembering the maid’s instructions, I crossed the room and opened the door that had just closed. I found myself in another semi-dark, old-fashioned, dusty and tasteless room, with no-one in it, and again the door across the way closed, as if someone had just that instant gone out. Again I crossed the room and entered a third room, then a fourth. Always a door quietly closing before me, as if someone was walking ahead of me. Finally, in the fifth room … well, it’s an overstatement to say finally, because although there was no-one in that fifth room, there at least was no door closing before me. In this room there was only one door, the one I had come through. But whoever had been walking ahead of me was not in the room.

“There was a lamp burning in the room, but no furniture apart from two armchairs. On the walls pictures, rugs hanging everywhere, every sort of worthless old-fashioned lumber. I sat down rather hesitantly in one of the armchairs and prepared to wait. Meanwhile I kept glancing restlessly about me, because I was quite sure something very strange was happening.

“I don’t know how long I had been sitting like that, when suddenly my heart began to knock horribly, because I had realised what I had unconsciously been looking for. From the moment I entered this room I had had the feeling that I was being watched. Now I had found who it was. On one of the walls hung a Japanese rug, depicting various sorts of dragon and other fantastic animals, and the eyes of these animals were made of large coloured-glass buttons. I now saw that one of the animals had an eye that wasn’t glass, but a real eye, and was staring at me. Presumably someone was standing behind the rug looking at me.

“In any other circumstances it would have seemed to me like something out of a detective novel. You read so much about foreigners vanishing in London without trace, and this seemed just the sort of start you would imagine for such a story. I tell you, the natural thing would have been for me to panic, suspect criminal intent, and put myself in a defensive posture. But I didn’t. I just sat there, stock-still, frozen with terror. Because, you see, I recognised the eye.”

“What do you mean?”

“That eye was the eye of a friend of my youth, a certain Tamás Ulpius who died young in tragic, although rather unclear, circumstances. For a few moments my fear was suspended, and a sort of pallid ghostly happiness filled me, a sort of ghost of happiness. I called out, ‘Tamás,’ and wanted to rush over to him. But in that instant the eye vanished.”

“And then?”

“Properly speaking, that’s all there was. But what happened next is quite inexplicable. An old lady came into the room, a strange, old-fashioned, repulsive, large-eyed woman, and with a fairly expressionless face asked me something. I didn’t understand, because she wasn’t speaking English. I tried her in French, German, even Hungarian, but she just shook her head sadly. Then she said something in a strange tongue, with much greater expression, besieging me with more and more questions. I listened hard, if only to try and catch what language she was speaking. I have a good ear for languages, especially those I don’t speak. I decided that what she was talking was not Latinate, Germanic, or Slav. It was not even Finno-Ugric, because I had studied Finnish at one stage at university. And then suddenly I just knew that she was the only person in the whole world speaking that language. Where that idea came from, I really don’t know. But I was so horrified I jumped up, rushed out of the room and back home.”

“And how do you explain it all?” asked Ellesley.

“I can think of no other than that it was November. I had got into that house through some strange random mistake. Our lives are full of inexplicable coincidences … ”

“And the eye?”

“The eye was surely in my imagination, an effect of the situation I was in and the London November. Because I am unshaken in my belief that the dead are dead.”

IX

HIS TIME was up. Mihály was well again and due to leave the hospital. No thief released after twenty years’ prison could have felt more cut off from everything, or more devoid of purpose, than Mihály did when, with his little suitcase (his only possessions were the few frugal purchases he had put together on the day of his escape) he made his solitary way between the low-roofed houses of Foligno.

He was in no mood to go home. It would have been impossible to appear among his family after his desertion, which he would be unable and unwilling to explain. And he could not bear the thought of returning to Pest, going in to the office, involving himself in the firm’s business, and relaxing over bridge and small talk.

He still had so many Italian cities to see. They would surely have so much for him to discover. He decided to write home and ask for money.

But he put off the business of writing the letter from one day to the next. He had so far remained in Foligno to be near Dr Ellesley, the only person with whom he had any connection, however slight. He took a room, where he lived quietly, read the English novels the doctor lent him, and enjoyed his lunches and dinners. Food was the only thing that tied him to reality in those blank days. He loved the undisguised sentimentality of Italian cooking. Conventional French-European cuisine approves only subtle, subdued, qualified flavours, like the colours of men’s suits. The Italian loves intense sweetness, extreme tartness, strongly distinctive aromas. Even the huge servings of pasta could be seen as an expression of this sentimentality.

One evening he was sitting with Ellesley outside the main coffee-house of the town. As usual they were speaking English. Suddenly a young girl approached, addressed them in an American accent and joined them at the table.

“Please excuse my troubling you,” she said, “but I’ve spent the whole day wandering around this godforsaken town and found no-one I could communicate with. Can you please explain something? It’s the reason I came here. It’s very important.”

“We are at your disposal.”

“You see, I’m studying art history at Cambridge.”

“Ah, Cambridge?” cried Ellesley with delight.

“Oh yes, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Why? Did you graduate there?”

“No. I was at Cambridge, England. But how can we be of service?”

“Well, I’m studying art history and I came to Italy because, as you probably know, there are lots of great pictures here they don’t have anywhere else. And I’ve seen everything.”

She took out a little notebook, and continued:

“I’ve been to Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice, and a whole lot of other places whose names I can’t read just now, the light’s so bad here. The last place was Per … Perugia. Did I say that right?”

“Yes.”

“In the museum there I met a French gentleman. He was French, that’s why he was so kind. He explained everything beautifully, and then told me that I absolutely must go to Foligno, because there is a very famous picture there, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, you know, the guy who did the Last Supper. So I came here. And I looked for this picture the whole day and didn’t find it. And nobody in this revolting little bird’s nest can direct me to it. Would you please tell me where they hide this painting?”

Mihály and the doctor looked at one another.

“A Leonardo? There’s never been one in Foligno,” replied the doctor.

“That’s impossible,” said the girl, somewhat offended. “The French gentleman said there was. He said there’s a wonderful cow in it, with a goose and a duck.”

Mihály burst out laughing.

“My dear lady, it’s very simple. The French gentleman was having you on. There is no Leonardo in Foligno. And although I’m no expert, I have the feeling that there is no such picture by Leonardo, with a cow, a goose and a duck.”

“But why did he say there was?”

“Probably because cynical Europeans tend to liken women to these animals. Only European women, of course.”

“I don’t get it. You’re not telling me the French gentleman was playing a trick on me?” she asked, red-faced.

“You could see it that way, I’m sorry to say.”

The girl thought deeply. Then she asked Mihály:

“You aren’t French?”

“No, no. Hungarian.”

Her hand made a gesture of indifference. Then she turned to Ellesley:

“But you’re English.”

“Yes. Partly.”

“And do you agree with your friend?”

“Yes,” said Ellesley, nodding sadly.

The girl again thought for a while, then clenched her fist.

“But he was so kind to me! I just wish I knew the bastard’s name.”

Her eyes filled with tears. Ellesley consoled her:

“But there’s no great harm done. Now you can write in your notebook that you’ve been to Foligno.”

“I already did,” she said with a sniffle.

“Well, there you are,” said Mihály. “Tomorrow you’ll go happily back to Perugia and continue your studies. I’ll take you to the train. I’ve already had the experience of getting on the wrong one.”

“That’s not the point. The shame of it, the shame of it! To treat a poor defenceless girl like that! Everyone told me not to trust Europeans. But I’m such a straightforward person myself. Can you get whisky here?”

And they sat together until midnight.

The girl’s presence had a lively effect on Mihály. He too drank whisky, and became talkative, although mostly it was the girl who spoke. The little doctor became very quiet, being naturally shy, and finding her rather attractive.

The girl, whose name was Millicent Ingram, was quite wonderful. Especially as an art historian. She knew of Luca della Robbia that it was a city on the Arno, and claimed that she had been with Watteau in his Paris studio. “A very kind old man,” she insisted, “but his hands were dirty, and I didn’t like the way he kissed my neck in the hallway.” That aside, she talked about art history, passionately and pompously, without stopping.

It gradually emerged that she was the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia parents who enjoyed considerable influence in high society, at least as she saw it, but that some Rousseauistic tendency in her drove her towards solitude and nature, which from her point of view meant Europe. She had attended study semesters in Paris, Vienna and other fine places, but none of it had had any effect. Her soul had preserved its American innocence.

And yet, as Mihály walked home and prepared for bed, he hummed cheerfully to himself, and his apathy slipped away. “Millicent,” he said. “There’s someone in the world actually called Millicent! Millicent.”

Millicent Ingram was not the mind-boggling, soppily-named, beautiful American girl to be seen in Paris in the years after the war, when everything else in the world was so drab. It was only in the second of those contexts that Millicent could be classed as an American beauty. The basis of this beauty, though the word is perhaps an overstatement, was that her face was quite devoid of expression. But in any event she was very good-looking, with a little nose, a wholesome mouth that was large (and painted larger) and a fine athletic figure. Her muscles seemed as elastic as rubber.

And she was American. Indisputably of that class of wonderful creatures exported to Paris in Mihály’s youth. The ‘foreign woman’ is an element of young manhood, of footloose youth. What remains in later years is the undying nostalgia, for in the footloose years we are still gauche and timid, and let slip the better opportunities. Mihály had now lived for so long in Budapest that his lovers had all been from that city. The ‘foreign woman’ now rather denoted his youth. And liberation: after Erzsi, after the serious marriage, after so many serious years. An adventure, at last: something coming unexpectedly and moving towards an unforeseen conclusion.

Even Millicent’s stupidity was attractive. In the deepest stupidity there is a kind of dizzying, whirlpool attraction, like death: the pull of the vacuum.

It so happened that the next day, when he had escorted her to the station, and they were about to buy the ticket, he said:

“Why are you going back to Perugia? Foligno is a city too. Why not stay here?”

Millicent looked at him with her stupidly serious eyes, and said:

“You’re right.”

And she stayed. That day was rather hot. They spent the whole of it eating ice-cream and talking. Mihály had the skill that makes English diplomats so feared in their profession: he knew how to be extremely dim when the need arose. Millicent noticed nothing of the intellectual distance between them. Indeed, she felt herself at an advantage because of her art history studies, and this rather flattered her.

“You are the first European I’ve met who really understood me intellectually,” she said. “The others were so dull, and took no interest in art.”

He had won her complete confidence. By evening he had gleaned everything there was to know about her, not that there was anything worth knowing.

That evening they met Ellesley at the café. The doctor was quite surprised that the girl was still in Foligno.

“You know, I decided I can’t always be thinking about problems of art,” she told him. “A doctor friend of mine said that prolonged intensive study is bad for the skin. Isn’t that so? Anyway I decided to switch myself off for a bit. I’m giving myself an intellectual holiday. Your friend has such a calming influence on me. Such a kindly, simple, harmonious soul, don’t you think?”

Ellesley noted with resignation that his patient was courting the American girl, and grew even quieter. For he was still very attracted to Millicent. She was so different from Italian women. Only the Anglo-Saxon type can be so clean, so innocent. Millicent — innocent: what a splendid rhyme that would have been, if he had been a poet. But no matter. The main thing was that this heaven-sent delight was doing visible good to his dear Hungarian patient.

The next day Mihály and the girl went for a long walk. They ate their fill of pasta in a modest village tavern, then lay down in a classical-looking wood and slept. When they awoke, Millicent observed:

“There’s an Italian painter who painted trees just like these. What was his name?”

“Botticelli,” replied Mihály, and kissed her.

“Ooooh,” she said, with horror on her face. Then she kissed him back.

Now that he held the girl between his arms, Mihály decided happily that she did not disappoint. Her body was as elastic as rubber. Oh the ‘foreign woman’ made flesh — how much she means to the man whose passion pursues fantasy and not physiological fact! The pleasure of the preliminary and quite innocent kiss suggested that every detail of Millicent’s body would prove foreign, other, wonderful. Her healthy mouth was entirely American (Oh, the prairies!), the little hairs on her neck were foreign, the caresses of her large strong hands, the transcendent cleanliness of her well-scrubbed body (Oh Missouri-Mississippi, North against South, and the blue Pacific Ocean!) …

“Geography is my most potent aphrodisiac,” he thought to himself.

But in the evening a letter was waiting for Millicent at the post-office, forwarded from Perugia. It was from a Miss Rebecca Dwarf, Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Cambridge (Mass.), Millicent’s tutor and chief spiritual adviser. Over dinner Millicent tearfully explained that Miss Dwarf was very satisfied with her previous letter in which she had spoken about the progress of her studies, but deemed it absolutely essential that she should now travel forthwith to Siena, to see the famous Primitives.

“But it was so good to be with you, Mike,” she sniffled, and put her hand in his.

“So you must go without fail to Siena?”

“Of course. If Miss Dwarf says in her letter … ”

“To hell with the old cow,” Mihály broke in. “Look, Millicent, listen to me. Don’t go and see the Siena Primitives. The Siena Primitives are probably almost identical to the Umbrian Primitives you saw in Perugia. And anyway, does it really matter whether you see ten pictures more or less?”

Millicent looked at him in astonishment and withdrew her hand. “But Mike, how can you talk like that? I really thought you felt so strongly about painting, for a European.” And she turned away.

Mihály saw that he had struck the wrong note. He was obliged to go back to the stupid type of voice. But he could not think of stupid arguments with which to reason with her. He tried sentimentality.

“But I shall miss you terribly if you go now. Perhaps we’ll never meet again in this life.”

“Sure,” said Millicent. “I’ll miss you horribly too. And I’ve already written to Philadelphia, to Doris and Ann Mary, telling them how wonderfully well you understand me. And now we have to part.”

“But stay here.”

“That isn’t possible. But you come with me to Siena. You’re not really doing anything here.”

“That’s true. I could leave what I’m doing here.”

“Then why not come?”

After some hesitation, he confessed:

“Because I haven’t any money.”

Which was true. By now his money was almost entirely spent. It had gone on the few decent items of clothing he had bought the day before, out of respect for Millicent, and on buying her meals, which were very substantial and extremely well-chosen. True, it would be gone in a day or two even if he stayed in Foligno … but if you stay in one place you don’t feel the lack of money as much as when you are travelling.

“You’ve no money?” she asked. “How’s that?”

“It’s run out,” he said with a smile.

“And your parents don’t send you any?”

“Oh yes. They’ll send some. When I write to them.”

“Now look. Until then I’ll make you a loan.” And she took out her cheque book. “How much do you need? Will five hundred dollars be enough?”

The amount shocked Mihály, as did the offer itself. Every bourgeois scruple in him, and indeed every quiver of romantic sensibility, protested against borrowing from the object of an amour, from the heaven-sent stranger, whom he had kissed for the very first time that day. But Millicent, with charming innocence, insisted on the offer. She was always lending money to her boyfriends and girlfriends, she said. In America it was quite natural. And besides, Mihály would pay her back soon. They finally left it that Mihály would think about it overnight.

Mihály very much wanted to go to Siena, even without considering Millicent. Foligno by now bored him to death, and he really longed to go to Siena because, now that his apathy had lifted, the Italian cities once again began to press their sweet, terrible claim, that he should see every one of them and experience their secrets before it was too late. As at the start of his honeymoon, he again carried inside him the mystery Italy stood for, like a great delicate treasure he might at any moment let slip from his hands. Moreover, ever since he had kissed her, Millicent had become much more desirable, and it is in the nature of such adventures that a man likes to see them through.

But could a serious adult, a partner in a well-known Budapest firm, actually borrow money from a young girl? No, a grown-up, serious partner could not. Of that there could be no doubt. But was that what he still was? Or had he, with his desertion, his exile, returned to that earlier level, that way of life in which money was just paper and bits of silver? To put it plainly, had he reverted to the ethics of the Ulpius household?

Mihály was appalled at the thought. No, he couldn’t. It would mean that the paradise of youth had succumbed to the reality it had always denied, the reality whose chief manifestation was money.

But the conscience is easily placated when we really want something. Of course it was just a matter of a very short-term loan, a small sum. He wouldn’t take five hundred dollars: one hundred would be enough. Or, let’s say, two. Perhaps after all we should say three hundred … He would write home straightaway, and pay the money back very shortly.

He sat down and finally penned the letter. He wrote not to his father, but to his youngest brother, Tivadar. Tivadar was the bon viveur and prodigal of the family, a friend of the turf, reputed to have had a liaison with an actress. He perhaps would understand and take a tolerant view of the case.

He told Tivadar that, as he no doubt already knew, he and Erzsi had separated, but quite amicably, and that as a gentleman he would soon put everything to rights. Just why they had separated, he should say straight out, was too complicated to put in a letter. The reason he had not written earlier was that he had been lying in hospital, very ill, in Foligno. Now he was well again, but the doctors absolutely advised rest, and he would like to spend the period of convalescence here in Italy. So he really had to ask Tivadar to send him some money. In fact, as soon as possible, and as much as possible. His money had run out, and he had had to borrow three hundred dollars from a local friend, which he would like to repay as soon as possible. The money should be sent direct to his friend, at Dr Richard Ellesley’s address. He hoped everyone was well at home, and that they would see each other again soon. Any letters should be sent to the Ellesley address in Foligno, because he was moving on but did not yet know where he would be spending any length of time.

The next morning he sent the letter by airmail, and hurried off to Millicent’s room.

“So you thought it through and you’re coming, Mike?” she asked, radiantly.

Mihály nodded and with furious blushes accepted the cheque. Then he went to the bank, and to buy himself a good suitcase. The two of them bade farewell to Ellesley and set off.

They were alone in the first-class compartment and exchanged uninhibited kisses, the way the French do. For both, this was a legacy of their student years in Paris. A little later on a somewhat patrician old gentleman joined them, but by then they were past caring, and exercised the privilege of barbaric foreigners.

By evening they had reached Siena.

“Will the signore and signora require a room?” was the obliging inquiry of the porter of the hotel outside which their hansom-cab had stopped. Mihály nodded in affirmation. Millicent, unaware of the significance of the exchange, simply went up, but registered no protest on arrival.

It may perhaps seem from a distance that Millicent was not quite as innocent as Doctor Ellesley had imagined. But for just that reason she was, in her amorous mode, every bit as fresh-tasting and quietly awe-struck as at other times. Mihály found that his journey to Siena had been most worthwhile.

X

SIENA was the most beautiful Italian city Mihály had ever seen. It was more beautiful than Venice, finer than aristocratic Florence, lovelier even than dear Bologna with its arcades. Perhaps an element in this was that he was there not with Erzsi, officially, but with Millicent, and on the loose.

The whole city with its steep, pink streets undulated over several hills in the shape of a happy-go-lucky star. On the faces of its people you could see that they were very poor, but very happy — happy in their inimitable Latin way. The city had the quality of a fairytale, a happy fairytale, lent it by the fact that from everywhere you could see, at its highest point, the cathedral hovering over it like a towered Zeppelin, in the livery of a pantomime zebra.

One of the walls of the cathedral stood away from the main mass of the building, a good two hundred metres distant, as a grotesque and wonderful spatial symbol of the failure of the most grandiose human plans. Mihály loved the feckless way the old Italians set about building their cathedrals. “If Florence has one, then we must have one, and as large as possible,” they said, and then built the longest wall in existence in order to fill the Florentines with panic about the intended size of their project. Then the money ran out, the builders naturally downed tools and lost all interest in the cathedral. “Yes, yes,” thought Mihály, “that’s the way to go about a church. If the Ulpius set were ever to go about building a church, that is exactly how they would do it.”

They went down to the Campo, the main square, the scallop shape of which was like the city’s smile. He could not tear himself away, but Millicent overruled him:

“Miss Dwarf said nothing about it,” she argued, “and it isn’t Primitive.”

In the afternoon they worked their way round the sequence of city gates. They stopped before each one, and Mihály inhaled the view, the sparse sweetness of the Tuscan landscape.

“This is the landscape of humanity,” he told Millicent. “Here a hill is exactly the size a hill should be. Here everything is to scale, tailored to the human form.”

Millicent thought about this.

“How would you know exactly what size a hill should be?” she asked.

Over one gate was an inscription which read: Cor magis tibi Sena pandit—Siena opens its heart to you. “Here,” Mihály thought, “the gates still utter wisdom and truth: ‘Siena opens its heart’ so that life can be filled with the simple delirium of yearning, in harmony with the veiled beauty of the season.”

The following day he woke at dawn, rose and stared out of the window. The window looked out from the city towards the hills. Slight, lilac-coloured clouds were sailing over the Tuscan landscape, and a tinge of gold slowly and timidly prepared for dawn. And nothing existed but lilac and the gold of first light over distant hills.

“If this landscape is reality,” he thought, “if this beauty really exists, then everything I have done in my life has been a lie. But this landscape is reality.”

And he loudly declaimed Rilke’s verses:

Denn da is keine Stelle,

Die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

Then he turned in alarm towards Millicent, who was still sleeping peacefully. And it occurred to him that there was no reality in Millicent. Millicent was no more than a simile, a random phenomenon of the mind. And she was nothing. Nothing.

Cor magis tibi Sena pandit. Suddenly he was seized by a mortal yearning, the kind of yearning he had felt only as a young child. But this was both more specific and more urgent. He now yearned for that same childhood emotion, with such intensity that he had had to shout his feelings aloud.

Now he saw that his little adventure, his return to the vagabond years, was merely a transition, a step leading him downwards, and backwards, into the past, into his private history. The ‘foreign woman’ remained a foreigner, just as his years of wandering had been a time merely of pointless locomotion, before he had had to turn home, back to those who were not strangers. But then they … were already long dead, and the stray winds blowing round the four corners of the world had swept them away.

Millicent was awakened by the sensation of Mihály sinking his head on her shoulder and sobbing. She sat up in the bed, and asked in horror: “What’s the matter? Mike, for God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “I dreamed that I was a little boy, and a huge dog came and ate my bread and butter.”

He embraced her and drew her towards him.

That day they could find nothing to say to each other. He left the girl to study the Siena Primitives on her own, and, at noon, listened with only half an ear to her charming stupidities on the subject of her experiences.

He did not leave the room all afternoon, but simply lay on the bed, fully-dressed.

“ … My God, what is the whole civilisation coming to if they have forgotten what even the modern Negroes know: summon up the dead.”

This was how Millicent found him.

“Have you a fever?” she asked, and put her large lovely hand on his brow. At her touch, Mihály turned slightly towards her.

“Come for a walk, Mike. It’s such a beautiful evening. And everyone’s out in the streets, and they’ve all got children with such marvellous names, like Emerita and Assunta. Such a tiny little girl and she’s called Annunziata.”

With the greatest difficulty he struggled to his feet and went out. He walked heavily and uncertainly. It was as if he was seeing everything through a veil, and listening to the sounds of the Italian evening through ears filled with wax. His feet were heavy as lead. “When have I felt this way before?” he wondered.

They went down to the Campo, and he stared at the, Torre del Mangia the huge tower of the city hall that rose over a hundred metres, like a needle piercing the evening sky. His gaze slowly followed the tower upwards to its dizzy height. And the tower itself seemed to go on and on, soaring into the reverberating dark-blue sky.

Then it happened. The ground opened up around a deep well, and again he stood before the whirlpool. It must have lasted only a moment, then vanished. Everything was back in its place. The Torre del Mangia was again merely an extremely tall tower. Millicent had noticed nothing.

But that evening, when their sated bodies finally turned away from each other, and he was alone in that profound solitude that a man feels after he has embraced a woman with whom he has nothing in common, the whirlpool opened again (or was he just remembering it?) and this time it remained. He knew he had only to stretch out his hand to feel the presence of the other person, the comforting reality of the friendly body. But he could not bring himself to reach out, and he lay in solitary distress, by choice, for endless hours.

The next morning his head ached and his eyes were horribly red from sleeplessness.

“I’m ill, Millicent,” he told her. “The problem has come back, the one that kept me in bed in Foligno.”

“What sort of illness is it?” she asked suspiciously.

“I can’t exactly say. Some sort of sporadic cataleptic apodictitis,” he declared nonsensically.

“I see.”

“I must get back to Foligno, to the good Doctor Ellesley. Perhaps he can do something. At least I know him. What will you do, Millicent?”

“Well naturally I’ll go with you, if you’re sick. I won’t just leave you on your own. In any case I’ve seen all the Siena Primitives.”

He kissed her hand with emotion. They reached Foligno late that afternoon.

They took separate rooms, at his suggestion. “On the whole, it’s better that Ellesley shouldn’t know,” he explained.

Ellesley called on Mihály towards evening. He listened thoughtfully to his complaints, and made humming noises over the whirlpool sensation.

“It’s a kind of agoraphobia. For the time being, simply rest. Then we’ll see.”

He spent several days in bed. The whirlpool did not recur, but he had no desire to get up. He felt that if he did it would return. He slept as much as possible. He took every tranquilliser and mild sedative Ellesley brought him. If he slept, he might manage to dream of Tamás and Éva.

“I know what’s wrong with me,” he told the doctor. “Acute nostalgia. I want to be young again. Is there a cure for that?”

“Hmmm,” said Ellesley. “Certainly, but not one I can tell you about. Think of Faust. Don’t hanker after youth. God gave you manhood and old age too.”

Millicent visited him regularly and dutifully, though she seemed rather bored. She would call in on Ellesley towards evening, and they would also leave together after the visit.

“Tell me honestly,” the doctor asked one day, in her absence, as he sat on Mihály’s bed. “Tell me honestly, is there some dead person who is very dear to you?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think about them nowadays?”

“I do.”

From that point onwards his methods became less medically orthodox. On one occasion he brought a Bible with him, on another a garland of roses, then a Virgin Mary from Lourdes. Once Mihály became aware as he was talking with Millicent that Ellesley was drawing crosses on his door. And one fine day he produced a string of garlic.

“Tie this round your neck when you go to sleep. The smell of garlic is very good for the nerves.”

Mihály burst out laughing.

“Doctor, even I have read Dracula. I know what garlic is supposed to do: keep the vampire at bay, who sucks human blood in the night.”

“That’s right. I’m glad you understand. Because there’s no point in your insisting that the dead don’t exist in some form or other. They are what is making you ill. They visit you and suck your life out. Medical science can’t help you with that.”

“Then take your garlic back home. My dead can’t be kept away by that sort of thing. They’re inside me.”

“Naturally. Nowadays they work with psychological instruments. But their nature hasn’t changed in the least. It’s just that you have to be on your guard against them.”

“Leave me in peace,” said Mihály, with mild exasperation. “Tell me that I have cerebral anaemia and prescribe iron tonic and bromide for my nerves. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“Of course it is. I can’t do anything more for you. Medicine can’t help against the dead. But there are stronger, supernatural weapons … ”

“You know I’m not superstitious. Superstition only works if you believe in it … ”

“That’s a very outmoded point of view. At any rate, why not try it? You’ve nothing to lose.”

“Of course not. Just my self-respect, my pride, my integrity as a rational being.”

“Those are long meaningless words. You really should try. You should go to Gubbio. There is a monk up there, in the Sant’ Ubaldo monastery, who works miracles.”

“Gubbio? You spoke to me about it once before. If I remember rightly, you said that you had some supernatural experience there.”

“Yes. And now I will tell you about it, because the story might persuade you. It’s about that very monk.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“You know how I was a city doctor in Gubbio before I came to the hospital here. One day I was called out to a patient who seemed to be suffering from some deep-seated nervous condition. She lived in the Via dei Consoli, one of those completely medieval streets, in a dark old house. She was a young woman, not from Gubbio, not even Italian, I don’t know in fact what her nationality could have been, but she spoke excellent English. A very good-looking woman. The people of the house, where she lived as a paying guest, explained after a while that she was suffering from hallucinations. She had the fixed idea that at night the door of the dead was open.”

“The what?”

“The door of the dead. You see, these old houses in Gubbio had two doorways, the usual one for the living, and next to it a second one, rather narrower, for the dead. This door is opened only when a corpse is taken out of the house. Then they wall it up again, so that the dead won’t return. Because they know that the dead can only come back in the way they went out. The door isn’t on the same level as the paving, but about a metre higher, so you can pass a coffin out to people standing in the street. The woman I mentioned lived in one of these houses. One night she was woken by the realisation that the door of the dead was open, and someone was coming in, someone she greatly loved, who had been dead a long time. And from then on the dead person came every night.”

“But it would be easy to cure that. She would simply have to move house.”

“That’s what we said, but she didn’t want to move. She was very happy to be visited by the dead person. She just slept all day, as you do, and waited for the night. Meanwhile she was rapidly losing weight, and the people of the house were very worried about her. And they weren’t exactly pleased about a dead man calling at the house every night. It was a rather patrician family with strict moral views. The truth was, they had sent for me so that I would use my authority as a doctor to make her leave.”

“And what did you do?”

“I tried to explain to her that she was having hallucinations, and that she should seek a cure. But she laughed at me. “How could I be having hallucinations,” she asked, “when he’s here every night, truly, beyond all doubt, just as you are now? If you don’t believe me, stay here tonight.”

“This was not exactly what I would have wanted, because I am perhaps a little too impressionable in these matters, but I really had no alternative than to stay, out of my duty as a doctor. The waiting was not otherwise unpleasant. The woman was neither terrified or crazed. She was remarkably calm, indeed rather cheerful. In fact, though I don’t wish to seem boastful, her behaviour was frankly quite flirtatious towards me … I almost forgot why I was there, and that midnight was approaching. Just before midnight she suddenly seized my hand, took a night-light in the other, and led me down to the ground floor room, the one into which the door of the dead opened.

“I have to admit I did not see the dead man. But that was my fault. I was too scared to wait. I just felt that it was getting horribly cold, and the flame from the wick was guttering in the draught. And I felt — somehow I felt this with my whole body — that there was someone else in the room. And I tell you sincerely, this was more than I could bear. I rushed out of the room, all the way home, shut the door, and buried my head in the eiderdown. Of course you will tell me that I had succumbed to her powers of suggestion. It could be … ”

“And what happened to her?”

“Ah, I was just coming to that. When they realised that a doctor, or rather my sort of doctor, was no use, they called in Father Severinus, from the Sant’ Ubaldo monastery. This Father Severinus was a very special and holy person. He had turned up in Gubbio from some faraway country, no-one could discover which. He was rarely seen in the town. Apart from major festivals or funerals he never left the mountain, where he lived his life of strict self-denial. However he was now somehow prevailed upon to come down and visit the disturbed woman. The meeting between them, they say, was harrowing and dramatic. When she caught sight of him she screamed and collapsed. Father Severinus himself turned pale and staggered on his feet. It seems he realised what a difficult case it would be. But he did succeed in the end.”

“How?”

“That I don’t know. It seems he exorcised the ghost. After he’d talked with her for a full hour in some strange tongue, he went back up the mountain. She calmed down and left Gubbio. And after that nobody ever saw her again, or the ghost.”

“Very interesting. But tell me,” asked Mihály, giving way to a sudden suspicion, “this Father Severinus, did he really come from some foreign country? Do you honestly not know where he was from?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t. Nobody does.”

“What sort of person, I mean, in outward appearance?”

“Quite tall, rather gaunt. As monks usually are.”

“And he is still up there, in the monastery?”

“Yes. You should go and see him. Only he can help someone in your condition.”

Mihály thought profoundly. Life was full of inexplicable coincidences. This Father Severinus could be Ervin, and the woman Éva, haunted by the memory of Tamás …

“You know what, doctor? Tomorrow I’ll go to Gubbio. For your sake, because you are such a kind person. And because, as an amateur of religious history, I am curious about these doors of the dead.”

Ellesley was delighted with this outcome.

The next day Mihály packed his things. When Millicent arrived to visit him he told her: “I have to travel to Gubbio. The doctor says that only there will I get better.”

“Truly? Then I’m afraid it means we shall have to part. I’m staying on here for a time in Foligno. I really love this place. And at first I was so angry with that Frenchman, who tricked me into coming here, do you remember? But now I don’t mind. And the doctor is such a nice man.”

“Millicent, I am sorry, I still owe you money. I feel really bad about it, but you know, back home it has to be channelled abroad through the National Bank, and the banking machinery is very complicated. Do please bear with me. Truly, it should come in the next few days.”

“Don’t mention it. And if you see any good pictures, do write to me.”

XI

GUBBIO is reached by the narrow-gauge motor-train that runs between Fossato di Vico and Arezzo. Despite the shortness of the distance, it is a tedious journey. It was also hot, and Mihály was exhausted by the time he arrived. But the city, as it came into view a little way up the road from the station, filled him, from the very first glance, with delight.

It cowered on the side of a huge, barren, typically Italian hill, as if it had collapsed while fleeing upwards in terror. As you looked at it, not a single house seemed less than hundreds of years old.

At the centre of a topsy-turvy tangle of streets, there towered an incredibly high building. Quite why it had been erected in the centre of this godforsaken place, and by whom, he could not imagine: a vast, gloomy medieval skyscraper. It was the Palazzo dei Consoli, from which the consuls ruled the little community of Gubbio until the fifteenth century, when it came under the sway of the Montefeltri, princes of Urbino. And above the town, almost at the peak of the Monte Ingino, stood a long, vast white block of a building, the monastery of Sant’ Ubaldo.

Meanwhile down below, on the road leading up from the station, Mihály found an inn that appeared to be of the better sort. He took a room, had lunch, rested a little, then set out to explore Gubbio. He inspected the interior of the cavernous Palazzo dei Consoli, which reminded him somewhat of a vast studio, with its extremely ancient tavole eugubine—bronze tablets dating from pre-Roman times and preserving the sacred texts of the Umbrian people. He also looked round the old cathedral. There was not much else to see. The main sight here was the city itself.

In most of the towns in this part of Italy (as in so many ancient cities elsewhere) the houses give an impression of dilapidation, of being within a few short years of total ruin. This is because where the Italians built with local stone it was not the practice to plaster the outer walls. Consequently an observer from Middle Europe concludes that the plaster has fallen off and the house, and indeed the entire city, been left to desolation and ruin. Gubbio was even more unplastered, even more tumble-down, than other towns in Italy. It was absolutely desolate. It was off the beaten tourist track. There was scarcely any industry or commerce. It was a mystery how the few thousand people hemmed within its walls could make a living.

Mihály came out of the cathedral and turned into the Via dei Consoli. “This is the street Ellesley talked about,” he thought. It was a street to make the imagination riot: medieval houses, blackened by age, with a bleak, penniless dignity, and, one suspected, inhabitants to match, people living off bread and water in the shadow of a glorious past that had vanished centuries before.

And straightaway, in the third house along, there actually was a door of the dead: next to the usual door, about a metre above the ground, a narrow gothic door-opening, bricked up. There was one in almost every house along the Via dei Consoli, but almost nowhere else in the town; and, strangely, there was no-one about.

He went down a narrow back-alley to the street running parallel behind. This was no less ancient, only a little more gloomily patrician, but it did seem that living beings might reside there. And also, it seemed, dead ones. For outside one particular house a group of people met his astonished eye. Had he not immediately realised what was happening he would have thought it was a vision. People were standing outside the house holding candles, their faces covered with hoods. A funeral was taking place, and here, still following the ancient Italian ritual, members of the family, a hooded fraternity, were taking out the dead.

Mihály removed his hat and edged closer for a better view of the ceremony. The door of the dead stood open. Through it he could see into the house, into a dark room containing the bier. Priests and their assistants stood around the coffin, chanting and swinging censers. After a few minutes they lifted it up and passed it through the door of the dead into the street, where the hooded relatives hoisted it on to their shoulders.

Then in the gothic doorway a priest appeared in flowing robes. His pale ivory face, with its sombre, all-unseeing eyes, glanced at the heavens. Then with bowed head he placed his hands together in an ancient gesture of inexpressible gentleness.

Mihály did not rush up to him. For he was now a priest, a pale, serious monk performing a religious duty … No, one couldn’t just run up to him, like a schoolboy, like a little boy …

The pallbearers set off with the coffin, followed closely by the priest and the procession of mourners. Mihály joined it at the rear, and trod slowly with hat in hand towards the camposanto, up on the hill side. His heart was beating so hard he had to keep pausing for rest. Would they have anything to say to each other, after so many years, journeying along such widely divergent paths?

He asked one of the people in the procession what the priest was called.

“That’s Father Severinus,” said the Italian. “A very holy man.”

They reached the burial ground. The coffin was lowered into the grave, the funeral came to an end, and people began to move away. Father Severinus set off for the town with a companion.

Mihály still could not make up his mind whether to approach him. He felt that Ervin, now that he had become such a holy person, would surely be ashamed of his worldly youth, and, like St Augustine, would look back upon it with lofty disdain. Surely he would see it all quite differently, and had doubtless dismissed him, not wanting even to think about him. Perhaps it would be better to leave straightaway, and be content with the miracle of simply having seen him.

Just then Father Severinus left his companions and turned back. He was coming straight towards him. Every adult response deserted Mihály, and he ran towards him.

“Mishy!” shouted Ervin, and embraced him. Then he offered the right and the left sides of his face to Mihály’s cheeks, with the kindliness of a priest.

“I saw you at the graveside,” he said quietly. “How did you get here, where no bird flies?”

But this was mere cordiality. It was clear from his tone that he was not in the least surprised. Rather, it was as if he had long anticipated this meeting.

Mihály was unable to say a word. He simply gazed at Ervin’s face, now so long and so thin, and his eyes, in which the youthful fire still blazed. Beneath the happiness of the moment he could see in that face the same profound sombreness he had found in the old Gubbio houses. He could think of only one word, ‘monk’. It was borne in upon him that Ervin really was a monk, and his eyes filled with tears. He turned his face away.

“Don’t cry,” said Ervin. “You have changed too, since those days. Oh Mishy, Mishy, I’ve thought about you so much!”

Mihály was filled with a sudden impatience. He must tell Ervin everything, everything, things he couldn’t tell Erzsi … Ervin would know a balm for everything, now that he was bathed in the glory and the radiance of another world …

“I knew you would have to come into Gubbio, so I came here. Tell me when I can talk with you, and where. Can you come with me right now, to the hotel? Can we have dinner together?”

Ervin smiled at his naïveté.

“That really isn’t possible. I’m sorry, even at this moment I’m not free, my Mihály. I’m busy all evening. I have to be off straight away.”

“Have you so much to do?”

“Terrible. You lay people can’t imagine how much. I’ve still got a pile of prayers to get through.”

“But then, when will you have time? And where can we meet?”

“There’s only one way, Mishy, but I’m afraid it’ll be rather uncomfortable for you.”

“Ervin! Do you think comfort matters to me, if it’s a question of talking with you?”

“Because you’ll have to come up to the monastery. We are never allowed out, except on pastoral duty, like the funeral today, for example. And up in the monastery every hour of the day has its tasks. There’s only one way we could speak together without interruption. You know we go to church at midnight to say psalms. At nine we usually go to bed and sleep till midnight. But this sleep isn’t obligatory. The period isn’t governed by regulation, and silence is not prescribed. That’s when we could talk together. The wisest thing would be for you to come up to the monastery after dinner. Come as a pilgrim. We’re always receiving pilgrims. Bring a small gift for Sant’ Ubaldo, to please the brothers. A few candles perhaps, that’s the usual thing. And ask the brother at the gate to put you into the pilgrims’ room for the night. You realise it’ll be pretty uncomfortable compared with what you’re used to — but I won’t say anything more. Because, if you left at midnight to go back to the town, I’d be very worried. For that you would have to know your way about the hill. If you aren’t familiar with it, it can be a very unfriendly place. Hire a boy to bring you up. Will that be good?”

“It will be good, Ervin, very good.”

“So, until then, God be with you. I must hurry, I’m already late. See you tonight. God be with you.”

And he set off with rapid strides.

Mihály wandered back to the town. Beside the cathedral he found a shop and bought some rather fine candles for Sant’ Ubaldo. Then went back to his hotel, dined, and tried to think what sort of accessories to take with him in his guise of pilgrim. He eventually made a neat little package of the candles, his pyjamas and toothbrush, to all appearances the bundle of a genuine pilgrim. Then he commissioned the waiter to find him a guide. The waiter soon returned with a young lad, and they took to the road.

On the way he enquired after the local sights. He asked what had happened to the wolf Saint Francis had befriended, and the bargain it had made with the town.

“That must have been a long time ago,” the boy replied thoughtfully, “even before Mussolini. There certainly haven’t been any wolves since he became Duce.” But he did seem to recall, as something he had heard, that the wolf’s head was buried in some faraway church.

“Is it usual for pilgrims to go up to the monastery?”

“Of course, often. Sant’ Ubaldo is said to be very good for knee and back pains. Perhaps you have a bad back yourself, sir?”

“Not so much my back … ”

“But he’s very good for anaemia and bad nerves. The numbers are specially large on May 16th. That’s the Saint’s day. On that day they carry up the Ceri—figures made of wax — in a procession from the cathedral up to the monastery. But that’s not such a big procession as Corpus Christi or Resurrection Sunday. When they parade the Ceri they have to run.”

“What do the Ceri represent?”

“That nobody knows. They’re very old.”

The religious historian in Mihály was aroused. He would have to see these later. It was most interesting that they ran with them up to the monastery … like the Bacchantes running up the hill at the festival of Dionysos, in Thrace. This Gubbio was really remarkably old: the Umbrian tablets, the doors of the dead. Perhaps even the wolf tamed by St Francis was some old Italian deity, related to the she-wolf that mothered Romulus and Remus, living on in the legend. How very strange that Ervin should have come to just this place …

After an hour of strenuous climbing they reached the monastery. A mighty stone wall led them round the building to a little door cut into it, which was shut. They rang. After a long wait a tiny window in the door was pushed open, and a bearded monk peered out. The helpful lad explained that the gentleman was a pilgrim and wished to pay his respects to Sant’ Ubaldo. The door opened. Mihály paid the guide and stepped into the courtyard.

The gate-brother was gazing up and down in amazement at his clothes.

“The signore is from abroad?”

“Yes.”

“No matter. There is a father here who is also from abroad and who understands foreign languages. I shall tell him you’ve come.”

He led Mihály into one of the buildings where lights were still burning. A few minutes later Ervin arrived, no longer in his flowing robes but his brown Franciscan cowl. It now struck Mihály how thoroughly Franciscan Ervin had become. The tonsure gave quite a different look to the face, as if its owner had expunged from his nature every worldliness, every conceivable worldliness, and elevated himself into the air of the Giottos and Fra Angelicos. And yet, Mihály felt, this was Ervin’s true face. From the very first he had been growing towards this face. The tonsure had always been there on his crown. It had simply been hidden by his bushy black hair … There could be no doubt that, however alarming the result, Ervin had found himself. And before he realised what he was doing he had greeted him the way they had greeted the religious teachers in school:

“Laudetur Jesus Christus.”

“In aeternum,” was the reply. “But how did you find me here, where no bird flies? Come, I’ll take you to the reception room. We’re not allowed visitors in our cells. That’s a rule we enforce very strictly.”

He lit a taper and led Mihály through vast, totally empty whitewashed halls, corridors and smaller rooms, with no sign of a living soul: nothing but their echoing footsteps.

“Tell me, how many people live in the monastery?” Mihály asked.

“Six. Plenty of room for us, as you can see.”

It was most eerie. Six people in a building where two hundred would not have been a crowd. And where once there certainly had been that many.

“Don’t you get scared here?”

Ervin smiled and ignored the childish question.

And so they reached the reception room, a huge, arched, empty hall, in one corner of which stood a table and a few rickety wooden chairs. On the table was a pitcher of red wine and a glass.

“Thanks to the goodness of Pater Prior we are in the happy situation of being able to offer a little wine,” said Ervin. Mihály was struck by the peculiar way he spoke. No doubt he hadn’t spoken Hungarian for so many years … “Now for a drink. I’ll pour you some straight away. It’ll do you good to take something after the long walk.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I never drink. Since I joined the order … ”

“Ervin … perhaps you no longer smoke?”

“No.”

Mihály’s eyes again filled with tears. No, this was beyond imagining. He could have believed anything of Ervin — that he wore a spiked hairshirt under his clothing, that he would receive the stigmata before his death — but his not smoking!

“We’ve rather more important things to talk about,” said Ervin, to divert attention from this sacrifice. “But have a drink, and do smoke if you want to.”

Mihály downed a glass of the red wine. There are great myths about the wines stored by monks in cobwebbed bottles for the entertainment of their rare guests. This was not one of those but an ordinary, if very clean-tasting, country wine, its bouquet wonderfully suited to the simplicity of the empty whitewashed hall.

“I don’t know if it’s any good,” said Ervin. “We don’t have a cellar of our own. We are a begging order, and you have to take that rather literally. Now, tell me your story.”

“Look, Ervin, of our two lives yours is the more remarkable. My curiosity is by rights stronger than yours. You must tell me your story first … ”

“What is there to tell, my dear Mishy? We have no personal story. The life of any one monk is the same as any other, and you can read the sum of those lives in the history of the church.”

“But tell me, at any rate, how you came here to Gubbio.”

“At first I remained back home, in Hungary. I was a novice in Gyöngyös, then for a long time at the monastery in Eger. Then the Hungarian branch of the Order had to send a father to Rome on some business, and I was chosen because I had been learning Italian. Then, some time after I had dealt with that, I was called to Rome again, because they had taken a great liking to me, though I certainly didn’t deserve it, and they wanted to keep me there to work with the Pater Prior. But I was concerned that this might lead, in due course, to my making a career, purely in the Franciscan context, naturally — becoming the head of a house somewhere, or filling some rank at Head Office. And that I didn’t want. So I asked Pater Prior to place me here in Gubbio.”

“Why here, exactly?”

“I really couldn’t say. Perhaps because of the old legend, the one about the wolf of Gubbio we were so fond of at school, you remember. Because of the legend I came here once on a visit from Assisi and fell in love with the monastery. This is the place, you know, where no bird flies … ”

“And you’re happy here?”

“Very. As the years go by I feel a greater sense of peace … but I mustn’t patter on” (a strange little smile put quotation marks around the phrase) “because I know that you didn’t come here to see Pater Severinus, but the person who used to be Ervin, not so?”

“I really don’t know … tell me … these are difficult questions to ask … isn’t it rather monotonous here?”

“Not in the least. Our lives have the same pleasures and pains as those outside, only the terms are different, and the emphasis is on other things.”

“Why don’t you want a career in the Order? Is that from humility?”

“Not because of that. The kind of office I could attain would be consistent with the ideal of humility, or rather, would give the opportunity to overcome pride. No, I refused a career for quite other reasons. Really, because any advancement would not have been due to my being a good monk but for the sort of qualities I brought with me from the outside world, and in fact from my ancestors — my ability with languages and the fact that I can sometimes deal with matters more quickly and effectively than some of my fellow monks. In a word, my Jewish qualities. And I didn’t want that.”

“Tell me, Ervin, how do your fellow monks look on the fact that you were Jewish? Hasn’t that been a disadvantage?”

“Not at all. It worked only to my benefit. I did run into individual fellow-monks who made it clear how much they disliked my race, but that just presented opportunities to practise meekness and self-control. And then in Hungary, when I was a country pastor, the fact always somehow got about, and the good village faithful saw me as some sort of oddity and paid much greater attention to what I said. Here in Italy nobody bothers about it. I hardly ever think about it myself.”

“Tell me, Ervin … what do you actually do all day? What work is there for you?”

“A great deal. Chiefly prayers and spiritual exercises.”

“You don’t write any more? … ”

Again Ervin smiled.

“No, not for a long time now. You see, it is true that when I first joined the Order I imagined that I would serve the Church with my pen, I would be a Catholic poet … But later … ”

“What? Your inspiration left you?”

“Not at all. I left it. I realised it was all really beside the point.”

Mihály thought deeply. He was beginning to understand what sort of worlds separated him from Father Severinus, who had been Ervin … “How long have you been in Gubbio?” he asked eventually.

“Wait a moment … it must be … six years. But it could be seven.”

“Tell me, Ervin, I used to think about this a lot, if you remember. Do you monks also have the feeling that time goes forward, and that every little bit of it has a special truth? Do you have a sense of history? If you recall some event, can you say if it happened in 1932 or in 1933?”

“No. It is one of the blessings of our lot that God lifts us out of time.”

Ervin began to cough violently. Mihály realised only then that he had been coughing for some time, a dry, ugly cough.

“Tell me, Ervin, isn’t there something wrong with your lungs?”

“Well, they’re certainly not in perfect order … in fact you could say they’re in a pretty bad way. You know, we Hungarians are really pampered. Houses in Hungary are so well-heated. These Italian buildings really wear you down, always in unheated cells and cold churches … and in sandals on the stone floor … and this cowl doesn’t warm you very much.”

“Ervin, you’re ill … aren’t they treating you?”

“You’re very good, Mihály, but you mustn’t grieve about it,” he said, coughing. “You see, it’s simply a blessing for me, being ill. Because of it they agreed that I could leave Rome to come here to Gubbio, where the air is so healthy. Perhaps I really will get better. Then again, physical suffering is part of our monastic system. Others have to mortify the body — in my case the body takes care of this itself … But let’s leave all this. You came here to talk about yourself. We shouldn’t be wasting precious time on things neither you nor I can do anything about.”

“But Ervin, it’s not as if … you shouldn’t live like that, and you should go somewhere where they looked after you, and made you drink your milk, and lie in the sun.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mihály. Perhaps the time for that will come. Even monks have to guard against death, because if we simply allow the illness to take us over it would be a form of suicide. If the problem gets serious, I really will see a doctor … but we’re still a long way from that, believe me. And now you must talk. Tell me everything that’s happened to you since I last saw you. And first of all, tell me how you found me.”

“János Szepetneki said you were somewhere in Umbria, he didn’t know where precisely. And some unusual chance happenings, some really strong indications, made me suspect that you were in Gubbio, and indeed the famous Father Severinus.”

“Well, I am Father Severinus. And now tell me about yourself. I’m all attention.”

He rested his head in his hand in the classical pose of the father-confessor, and Mihály began to speak, haltingly at first, and with difficulty, though Ervin’s questions were a wonderful help. “But that long experience of the confessional is quite wasted on me,” Mihály thought to himself, for he could never have withheld the outpouring that was just waiting to burst from him. As he spoke it all came to the surface — everything that since his escape had lived inside him like a repressed instinct: how deeply he felt a failure in his adult, or quasi-adult life, his marriage, his desperation to know where he might start again, what he could expect from the future, how he could get back to his true self. And above all, how he was tortured by nostalgia for his youth and the friends of his youth.

When he reached this point the strength of his emotion overwhelmed him and his voice broke. He was filled with self-pity, and at the same time ashamed of his own sentimentality before Ervin, before Ervin’s mountain-peak serenity. Then he suddenly burst out in shocked amazement:

“And you? How can you bear it? Doesn’t it upset you too? Don’t you miss them? How do you manage it?”

The faint smile again passed over Ervin’s face, then he bent his head, and made no answer.

“Answer me, Ervin, answer, I beg of you. Don’t you miss them?”

“No,” he said in a toneless voice, with a wild look on his face. “I miss nothing.”

There was a long silence between them. Mihály was trying to understand Ervin. It couldn’t be otherwise. He must have purged everything from himself. Since he had had to tear himself away from everyone, he had dug up from his soul the very roots of anything that might flower into those feelings that bind people together. Now there was no pain, but he lived on in this fallow, this barren, land, on the bare mountain … Mihály shuddered to think of it.

Then a sudden thought struck him:

“I heard a story about you … how you exorcised a woman who was visited by the dead, here, in some mansion in the Via dei Consoli. Tell me, Ervin: that was Éva, wasn’t it?”

Ervin nodded.

Mihály jumped up in excitement, and gulped down the remaining wine.

“Oh, Ervin, tell me … how was … what was she like, Éva?”

What was Éva like? Ervin considered this. “Well, how should she be? She was very beautiful. She was, as always … ”

“How? She hadn’t changed?”

“No. Or rather, I didn’t notice any change in her.”

“And what is she doing?”

“I’m not very sure. She spoke a lot about how lucky she’d been, and how much she’d moved about in the West.”

Had anything flared up in Ervin when they met? He dared not ask.

“You don’t know what she’s doing now?”

“How should I know. It’s a few years, I believe, since she was here in Gubbio. But I have to say, my sense of time is pretty unreliable.”

“And tell me … if you can … how did it happen that … how did you get the dead Tamás to leave?”

Mihály’s voice sounded with the fear that filled him whenever he thought of it. Ervin again smiled that little smile.

“It wasn’t difficult. The old house made her see ghosts. Those doors of the dead have affected others in the same way. I merely had to persuade her to move out. Then again, I believe she played the whole thing up a little. Well, you know Éva … I’m afraid she never actually saw Tamás. She wasn’t having visions. Although it is possible that she was. I can’t say. You know, I’ve had to deal with so many apparitions and ghosts over the years, especially here in Gubbio with its doors of the dead, I’ve become rather sceptical in this respect … ”

“But then … you did cure her?”

“Not at all. As usually happens in these cases. I spoke to her very seriously, prayed with her a little, and she calmed down. She came to see that the place of the living is with the living.”

“Are you sure of that, Ervin?”

“Absolutely sure,” he replied with great seriousness. “Unless you choose what I chose. Especially among the living. But why am I preaching this to you? Even you know this.”

“She said nothing at all about how Tamás died?”

Ervin did not answer.

“Tell me, would you be able to exorcise the memory of Tamás, and Éva, and all of you, out of me?”

Ervin thought deeply.

“Very difficult. Very difficult. And I don’t know if it would be a good thing, because what would you be left with then? Really, it’s very hard to counsel you, Mihály. Pilgrims as desperate for help and so hard to help don’t often come to Sant’ Ubaldo. What I could advise, what my duty should advise, you wouldn’t accept. The store of mercy opens only for those who want to share in it.”

“But what will become of me? What shall I do tomorrow, and the day after? I expected a miraculous answer from you. I superstitiously believed that you would give me advice. Should I go back to Budapest, like the Prodigal Son, or start a new life, as a worker? Because I have done an apprenticeship. I’ve got a trade. It would be possible. Don’t leave me to myself. I’m so alone already. What shall I do?”

Ervin fished out a large peasant’s watch from the depths of his cowl.

“Right now, go and sleep. It’s almost midnight. I have to go to chapel. Go and sleep. I’ll take you to the room. And during my matutine I’ll think about you. Perhaps it’ll become clear … it’s happened before. Perhaps I’ll be able to tell you something tomorrow morning. Now go and sleep. Come.”

He led Mihály to the hospice. Given the deep state of distress that gripped him there seemed a fitness in the semi-darkened hall in which pilgrims down the centuries had dreamed of miraculous cures for their sufferings, yearnings and dearest hopes. Almost all the bunks were empty, though two or three pilgrims were asleep at the further end.

“Lie down, Mihály, and sleep well. Have a good, peaceful night,” said Ervin.

He made the sign of the cross over him, and hurried away.

For a long time Mihály sat on the side of the hard bed, his hands crossed on his lap. He was not in the least bit drowsy, and he was very depressed. Would anyone be able to help him? Would his road ever lead anywhere?

He knelt and prayed, for the first time in years.

Then he lay down. It was difficult to sleep on the hard bed, in unfamiliar surroundings. The pilgrims stirred restlessly on their bunks, sighed, moaned in their sleep. One of them kept calling for aid on Saints Joseph and Catharine and Agatha. When Mihály finally drifted off day was already breaking.

He woke in the morning with the exquisite feeling that he had dreamed of Éva. He did not remember the dream, but his whole body registered the silky euphoria that only that dream could give, or waking passion on very rare occasions. In the context of this bleak, ascetic sleeping-place, this mellow feeling took on a strange, paradoxical, sickly-sweet quality.

He rose, washed himself, an act of no little self-mortification in the antiquated washing-place, and went out into the courtyard. It was a bright, cool, breezy morning. The bell was just tolling for Mass, and brothers, lay people, monastery servants and pilgrims were hurrying from all directions into the chapel. Mihály joined them, and attended devoutly to the timeless Latin of the service. He was filled with a festive, happy feeling. Ervin would surely tell him what to do. Perhaps he would have to do penance. Yes, he would become a simple workman, earning his bread with the labour of his hands … He had the feeling that something new was beginning in him. It was for him that voices rose in song, for him rang out the crisp and mellow tones of the spring bells. For his special soul.

When Mass was over he went out into the courtyard. Ervin came up to him, smiling:

“How did you sleep?”

“Well, very well. I feel quite different from last night, I have no idea why.”

He looked at Ervin, full of expectation; then, when he said nothing, asked:

“Have you thought about what I should do?”

“Yes, Mihály,” Ervin said quietly. “I think you should go to Rome.”

“To Rome?” he blurted out in astonishment. “Why? How did you arrive at that?”

“Last night in the choir… I can’t really explain this to you, you’re not familiar with this type of meditation … I do know that you must go to Rome.”

“But why, Ervin, why?”

“So many pilgrims, exiles, refugees have gone to Rome, over the course of centuries, and so much has happened there … really, everything has always happened in Rome. That’s why they say, ‘All roads lead to Rome.’ Go to Rome, Mihály, and you’ll see. I can’t say anything more at present.”

“But what shall I do in Rome?”

“What you do doesn’t matter. Perhaps visit the four great basilicas of Christendom. Go to the catacombs. Whatever you feel like. It’s impossible to be bored in Rome. And above all, do nothing. Trust yourself to chance. Surrender yourself completely, don’t plan things … Can you do that?”

“Yes, Ervin, if you say so.”

“Then go immediately. Today you don’t have that hunted look on your face that you had yesterday. Use this auspicious day for your setting forth. Go. God be with you.”

Without waiting for a reply he embraced Mihály, offered the priestly left cheek and right cheek, and hurried away. Mihály stood for a while in astonishment, then gathered up his pilgrim’s bundle and set off down the mountain.

XII

WHEN ERZSI received the telegram Mihály had sent via the little fascista she did not linger in Rome. She had no wish to return home, not knowing how to explain the story of her marriage to people in Budapest. Following a certain geographical pull, she travelled to Paris, as people often do when they have no hopes or plans but wish to start a new life.

In Paris she looked up her childhood friend Sári Tolnai. Even as a young girl Sári had been notorious for her somewhat unfeminine character and practical capability. She had never married, not having the time for it. It always happened that there was some burning need for her services in the company, the business or the newspaper where she was working. Her love life was conducted on the move, as it were, like a commercial traveller’s. In due course, having become bored with everything, she emigrated to Paris to begin a new life, and continued in just the same way, but in French companies, businesses and newspapers. At the time when Erzsi arrived in Paris, she was working as the secretary of a large commercial film studio. She was the statuary sole unattractive woman in the house, the pillar of stone who remained untouched by the general erotic ambience of the profession, whose common-sense and impartiality could always be relied upon, who worked so much harder, and expected so much less, than everyone else. Meanwhile, her hair had turned grey. Cut very short, it gave the head on her delicate girlish body the distinction of a military bishop. People would turn to stare at her, of which she was very proud.

“What will you live on?” she asked, after Erzsi had briefly outlined the history of her marriage, softening the tale with a few Budapest witticisms. “How will you live? You’ve always had so much money.”

“Well you know, this business of my money is all rather tricky. When we broke up Zoltán gave back my dowry, and my father’s legacy, which by the way was a great deal less than people think. I put most of it into Mihály’s family firm, and the rest into the bank in case I should ever need it. That’s what I should be living on, only it’s very hard to get at. The bank money can’t be sent here through legal channels. So I have to depend on what my ex-father-in-law sends me. And that’s not a simple matter either. When it comes to paying out money from his own pocket my father-in-law is usually a very difficult person. And we have no proper arrangement about it.”

“Hm. You’re going to have to get your money out of their business, that’s the first thing.”

“Yes, but to do that I should have to divorce Mihály.”

“Well of course you must divorce Mihály.”

“It’s not quite so ‘of course’.”

“What, after all he’s done?”

“Yes. But Mihály isn’t like other people. That’s why I chose him.”

“And that was a fine move. I really dislike the sort of people who aren’t like other people. It’s true other people are so boring. But so are the ones who aren’t like them.”

“Very good, Sári. Can we just leave this? Really I can’t do Mihály the favour of divorcing him just for this.”

“But why the devil don’t you go back to Budapest, where your money is?”

“I don’t want to go back until all this is cleared up. What would people say at home? Can you imagine what my cousin Julie would say?”

“They’ll talk anyway, you can be sure of that.”

“But at least here I don’t have to listen. And then … no, no, I can’t go back, because of Zoltán.”

“Because of your ex-husband?”

“Because of him. He’d be waiting at the station with bunches of flowers.”

“You don’t say. He isn’t angry with you, after the callous way you walked out on him?”

“He’s not the least bit angry. I believe what he says. He’s waiting in all humility for me to go back to him some day. And as a penance he’s definitely broken off with the entire typing pool and living a celibate life. If I went back he’d be round my neck all the time. I couldn’t bear that. I can put up with anything, but not goodness and forgivingness. Especially not from Zoltán.”

“You know what, for once you’re dead right. I hate it when men are all good and forgiving.”

Erzsi took a room in the same hotel as Sári: a modern hotel, free from smells and aromas, behind the Jardin des Plantes. From it you could see the great cedar of Lebanon, with foreign, oriental dignity stretching out its many-handed branches to the unruly Parisian spring. The cedar was not very good for Erzsi. Its foreignness always made her think of some exotic and wonderful life whose advent she longed for in vain.

Initially she had her own room, then they moved in together because it was cheaper. In defiance of hotel regulations they took things up to their room and made supper together. It became apparent that Sári was as skilled at preparing dinners as she was at everything else. They had to lunch separately because Sári ate in town, coffee and sandwiches, taken standing up before hurrying straight back to the office. Erzsi at first tried various of the better restaurants, but became aware that these places mercilessly overcharged foreigners, so she took instead to visiting little crémeries, where “you can buy the identical thing, but so much cheaper.” Likewise, at first she would always drink black coffee after lunch because she adored the fine Parisian café noir, but then she came to realise that it was not absolutely essential for survival and gave it up, except that once a week, every Monday, she went to the Maison de Café on the Grand Boulevard to regale herself with a cup of the famous beverage.

The day after her arrival she had bought herself a splendid reticule in a very genteel shop near the Madeleine, but this was her sole luxury purchase. She discovered that goods identical to those retailed to foreigners at such high prices in the more fashionable areas could be found in simple shops and flea-markets in the side streets, the rue de Rivoli or the rue de Rennes, and very much cheaper. But her final insight was that not to buy was in fact cheapest of all, and from then on she took a special pleasure in objects she thought she would have liked to purchase, but did not. Following this, she discovered a hotel two streets further along which, while not quite so modern as the one they were living in, did have hot and cold running water in the rooms, and after all they might just as well live there as where they were, only it was so much less expensive, nearly a third. She persuaded Sári, and they moved.

By degrees the saving of money became her chief preoccupation. She realised she had always had a strong inclination to save. As a child, chocolate bonbons given to her as presents would usually be stored away until they went mouldy. She hid her best clothes, any length of silk, pair of fine stockings or expensive gloves, and the maids would find them in the most surprising places, grubby and ruined. Her later life did not permit any expression of this economising passion. As a young girl she had to be on show beside her father, and conspicuous extravagance was required if she was to do him credit. And as Zoltán’s wife she could not possibly have dreamed of saving money. If she declined an expensive pair of shoes, Zoltán would surprise her the following day with three even more expensive pairs. Zoltán was a ‘generous’ man. He patronised art and artists (female), and made an absolute point of showering largesse on their husbands, partly to ease his sense of guilt. And in all this Erzsi’s ruling passion, the saving of money, remained unexpressed.

Now, in Paris, this repressed yearning erupted in her with overwhelming force. It was helped by the French ambience, the French way of life, which promotes the urge for economy in the most feckless breasts. It was reinforced by subtler factors. Her neglected love, her failed marriage, the aimlessness of her life, all these somehow sought compensation in the saving of money. Then, when Erzsi gave up her daily bath because she had realised the hotel was grossly overcharging for it, Sári could not let it go on without saying something:

“Tell me, why the devil are you so worried about spending money? I can let you have some, on an I O U of course, as a formality … ”

“Thank you, you’re very kind, but I do have enough. I had three thousand francs from Mihály’s father yesterday.”

“Three thousand francs! My God, that is a lot of money. I hate it when a woman skimps and saves the way you are. There’s something not right about it. It’s like when a woman spends the whole day cleaning and then goes hunting for leftover dust, or spends the whole day washing her hands and carries a special cloth around with her so that when guests arrive they can wipe their hands on that. Women can be stupid in so many ways. And while I’m on the subject, just tell me: what do you do all day while I’m at the office?”

It became clear that Erzsi had little idea how she spent her time. All she knew was that she saved money. She hadn’t gone here, and she hadn’t gone there, and she hadn’t done this, and she hadn’t done that, so that she wouldn’t have to spend money. But what she had actually done apart from that was mysterious, dreamlike …

“Madness!” cried Sári. “I always thought you had some man and spent all your time with him, and it turns out that you stare in front of you the whole day, in a daydream, like these half-mad women (they at least are on the right road). And meanwhile of course you put on weight however little you eat, so of course you’re getting fat. You should be ashamed of yourself. Well, it can’t go on like this. You must get out among people, and you must take an interest in something. Damn, damn, damn! If only I had enough time for things in this god-awful life … ”

“Hey, tonight we’re going out,” she announced radiantly a few days later. “There’s a Hungarian gent who wants to put some shady outfit in touch with the studio. He’s buttering me up because he knows I’ve got the boss’s ear. Now he’s asked me out to dinner. He says he wants to introduce me to his rich friend, the one he’s representing. I told him I’m not interested in the ugly rich, I meet quite enough dowdy characters at the office. He said, ‘He really isn’t dowdy, he’s a very handsome chap, a Persian.’ ‘Well, alright,’ I said, ‘then I’ll come, but I’m bringing my girlfriend with me.’ He said that was splendid. He was just about to suggest it himself, so I wouldn’t be the only woman in the party.”

“My dear Sári, you know I can’t go. What an idea! I really don’t want to, and I haven’t got a thing to wear, just my rubbishy Budapest things.”

“Don’t worry about a thing. You look wonderful in them. Listen, compared to these scrawny Paris women, you’re the real thing … and the Hungarian will certainly like you because you’re from home.”

“There’s no question of my going. What’s this Hungarian’s name?”

“János Szepetneki. At least that’s what he said.”

“János Szepetneki … my God, I know him! Do you know, he’s a pickpocket!”

“A pickpocket? Could be. I see him more as a burglar, myself. Would you believe it, that’s how everyone starts off in the film business. But apart from that, he’s very good-looking. Well, are you coming or not?”

“Yes, I’m coming.”

The little auberge where they went to dine was of the type classified as Old French: check curtains and table-cloths, very few tables, excellent and hugely expensive food. During her earlier visit with Zoltán, Erzsi had often eaten in such places, or better. Now, coming to it from the depths of her penny-pinching, she was strongly affected as she caught the first whiff of the familiar atmosphere of wealth. But this emotion lasted only a moment before the arrival of the greater sensation, János Szepetneki. Not recognising Erzsi, he kissed her hand with elaborate courtesy and formality, complimented Sári on her excellent choice of friends, and led the ladies to the table where his friend was waiting for them.

“Monsieur Suratgar Lutphali,” he announced. From behind an aquiline nose two fiercely intense eyes met Erzsi’s, causing her to shudder. Sári too was shocked by the penetrating stare. Their first feeling was that they had sat down at table with a somewhat imperfectly tamed tiger.

Erzsi did not know whom to fear the more: Szepetneki the pickpocket, with his rather too good Parisian accent and the studied nonchalance with which he selected their perfectly judged menu, as only a dangerous swindler could (she remembered Zoltán’s timidity before the waiters of these elite Parisian restaurants and how stupid this fear made him in their eyes), or on the other hand the Persian, who sat there in silence, a benign European smile on his face, as quick and inappropriate as a pre-knotted tie. But the hors d’oeuvre and first glass of wine loosened his tongue, and from then on he directed the conversation, in a strange staccato French sounding from deep within his chest.

He knew how to captivate an audience with his speech. A kind of romantic eagerness flowed out from him, something medieval, a more instinctive and authentic humanity, pre-industrial. This man lived not by francs and forints, but by the values of the rose, the mountain crag and the eagle. And yet the feeling remained that they were sitting at table with an imperfectly tamed tiger — the impression created by those burning eyes.

It emerged that back home in Persia he owned rose-gardens and mines and, most important, poppy-plantations, and his main business was the manufacture of opium. He had a very low opinion of the League of Nations, which had banned international traffic in opium and was causing him severe financial difficulties. He was obliged to maintain a gang of bandits up on the Turkestan border to smuggle his opium through to China.

“But that, sir, makes you a public enemy,” declared Sári. “You’re peddling white poison. You’re destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of destitute Chinese. And then you’re surprised that all thinking people are united against you.”

“Ma chère,” said the Persian with unexpected anger, “you shouldn’t talk of things you know nothing about. You’ve been taken in by the stupid humanitarian platitudes of the European newspapers. How could this opium harm the ‘destitute’ Chinese? Do you think those people have money for opium? They’re glad of a bellyful of rice. In China only the very rich smoke opium, because it is expensive and the prerogative of the wealthy, like all the other good things of this world. It’s as if I were to start worrying about the excessive amounts of champagne consumed by the working classes of Paris. And if they don’t stop the Parisian rich drinking champagne when they want to, by what right do they meddle with the Chinese?”

“The comparison doesn’t hold. Opium is much more harmful than champagne.”

“That’s such a European idea. It’s true that when a European takes up opium smoking he doesn’t know when to stop. Because Europeans take everything to excess — gluttony, house-building, violence, all equally. But we know how to preserve the golden mean. Do you think opium has done me any harm? I smoke it regularly, and I eat it.”

He puffed out his powerful chest, then displayed his biceps, somewhat in the circus manner, and was about to raise a leg when Sári intervened: “Slow down. You’d better leave something for next time.”

“Excuse me … Alcohol is another thing Europeans take to excess. What a horrible feeling it is when you’ve too much wine in your stomach and know that sooner or later you’re going to be sick. The effect of the wine gets steadily stronger until you suddenly collapse. It doesn’t produce the steady, controlled ecstasy that opium does. There is no greater pleasure on earth … Really, what do people in Europe know about it? You should consider the circumstances before you meddle in the affairs of other countries.”

“This is why we want to make this educational propaganda film with you,” said Szepetneki, turning to Sári.

“What? A propaganda film about opium smoking?” said Erzsi. Up to this point she had found the Persian’s point of view somewhat attractive. Now she was horrified.

“Not to promote opium smoking, but the free movement of the product and human rights in general. The film is dedicated as a great individualist statement against every form of oppression.”

“What’s the story-line?” asked Erzsi.

“The opening shots,” replied Szepetneki, “take you into a family living peacefully on a simple, kind-hearted, traditional opium farm in Persia. For reasons of social rank they can only marry their daughter (the heroine) to the young man she loves if they can find a buyer for the year’s harvest. Whereupon the bad guy, who is also in love with the girl, but is a wicked communist prepared to do anything, betrays the father to the authorities and, in a night ambush, seizes the entire stock. This bit will be very exciting, with car chases and sirens blowing. But later the girl’s innocence and nobility of soul so impresses the hard-nosed general that he returns the seized opium, which sets off merrily for China, in tinkling wagons. That would be the outline of the story … ”

Erzsi had no idea whether Szepetneki was joking or not. The Persian listened solemnly, with an air of naïve pride. Doubtless the story was his idea.

After the meal they went to a fashionable dancing-place. Here they were joined by some other acquaintances. They sat round a large table and made conversation, in so far as the general din allowed. Erzsi kept her distance from the Persian. János Szepetneki asked her to join him, and they began to dance.

“How do you like him?” he asked as they stepped out. “A very interesting character, don’t you agree? A complete romantic.”

“Do you know, every time I look at him I think of the words of an old English nonsense poem,” said Erzsi, visited suddenly by a flash of her former intellectuality: “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night … ”

Szepetneki looked at her amazed, and Erzsi felt embarrassed.

“A tiger perhaps,” said Szepetneki, “but he’s come a terribly hard road. And yet he’s so naïve, so unsure and cautious in business matters. Even the film people can’t take him in. But it isn’t for commercial reasons that he wants to make the film. It’s for the message. And the other main reason, as I see it, is so that he can make a harem out of the female extras. Now, when did you leave Italy?”

“So you recognised me?”

“Of course. Not just now, a few days ago, in the street, when you were with Sári. I’ve a pretty sharp eye. I actually arranged this evening so that I could talk to you … Tell me, where did you leave my good friend Mihály?”

“Your good friend is probably still in Italy. We don’t write.”

“Sensational. You separated on your honeymoon?”

Erzsi nodded.

“Great. That’s really great. That’s Mihály’s style. The old boy hasn’t changed one little bit. All his life he’s always given up. No stamina for anything. For example, he was the best centre-half, not just in the school but, I dare say, of any school in the whole country. And then one fine day … ”

“How do you know that he left me and not the other way around?”

“Forgive me. I shouldn’t have asked. But of course. You left him. I get it. You couldn’t put up with someone like him. I can imagine how difficult it must have been living with such a cold fish … someone who never gets angry, who … ”

“Yes. He left me.”

“I see. My very first thought, by the way. In Ravenna, you remember. You know, I say this in all seriousness, Mihály isn’t cut out for a husband. He’s … how do I put this?… a seeker … All his life he’s been looking for something, something different. The sort of thing this Persian no doubt knows a lot more about than we do. Perhaps Mihály should be taking opium. Yes, that’s absolutely right — that’s what he should do. I must tell you quite frankly, I never understood that man.”

And he made a gesture of hopelessness.

But Erzsi sensed that this casual dismissal was simply a pose, and that Szepetneki was dying to know exactly what had passed between her and Mihály. He stuck very closely by her side.

They sat down together. Szepetneki was letting no-one near her. Sári was now receiving the attentions of a distinguished elderly Frenchman, and the Persian with the burning eyes was seated between two actress-types.

Erzsi was thinking: “It’s interesting how different, and contradictory, things appear from close up.” On her first visit to Paris she had been full of the superstitious prejudices acquired in her schooldays. She had thought of Paris as an evil metropolis full of perverts, and the Dôme and the Rotonde in Montparnasse, two harmless coffee-houses for painters and émigrés, had been for her the two gleaming fangs in the devil’s gullet. And now here she sat, among people who no doubt actually were evil and perverted, and it all seemed perfectly natural.

But she had little time for these reflections because she was listening intently to Szepetneki. He clearly hoped to learn something important about Mihály from her. He chatted happily away about their years together, though of course everything was slanted to fit his point of view, and he painted rather a different picture from Mihály’s. Only Tamás remained wonderful: princely, death-marked, a young man who was too good for this world. He had left it young before he had to compromise with it. According to Szepetneki, Tamás was so sensitive he couldn’t sleep if someone was moving about three rooms away and a strong smell would have completely finished him off. The only problem was, he was in love with his sister. They had become lovers, and, when Éva fell pregnant, Tamás killed himself from remorse. In fact, everyone was in love with Éva. Ervin had become a monk because of his hopeless passion for her. Mihály too was hopelessly in love with her. He followed her around like a puppy. It was comical. And how she treated him! She took all his money. And she stole his gold watch. Because of course it was Éva, not himself, who stole it, but he didn’t want to say that to Mihály out of delicacy. But she was in love with neither of them. Only with him, János Szepetneki.

“And what has happened to Éva since? Have you seen her?”

“Me? Of course! We still get on very well. She’s made a splendid career; not entirely without my help. She’s a very great lady.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well now, she always has the most aristocratic patrons possible — cheese barons, petroleum kings, actual heirs to thrones, not to mention the great writers and painters she takes on for the publicity.”

“And what of her at present?”

“Right now she’s in Italy. If she can, she always goes to Italy. It’s her passion. And she collects antiques, as her father did.”

“Why didn’t you tell Mihály that she was in Italy? And while we’re on the subject, how did you get to Ravenna that time?”

“Me? I was passing through Budapest and I heard there that Mihály was married and on his honeymoon in Venice. I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to see the old boy and his wife, so I made a detour through Venice on my way back to Paris. I went to Ravenna when I heard that you had gone there.”

“And why didn’t you mention Éva?”

“I had it in mind. So that he could go looking for her?”

“He wouldn’t have gone looking for her — he was with his wife, on honeymoon.”

“Forgive me, but I don’t believe that would have restrained him.”

“Come on. For twenty years he hadn’t thought of looking for her.”

“Because he never knew where she was. And besides Mihály is so passive. But if he actually knew … ”

“And what harm would it do you if Mihály did meet Éva Ulpius? Are you jealous? Are you still in love with her?”

“Me? Not at all. I never was. She was in love with me. But I didn’t want to cause any trouble in Mihály’s marriage.”

“Are you such an angelic little boy, or what?”

“No. Just that I instantly found you so attractive.”

“Wonderful. In Ravenna you said exactly the opposite. I was pretty offended.”

“Yes, I only said that to see if Mihály would slap my face. But Mihály doesn’t slap anyone’s face. That’s what’s wrong with him. He always turns the other cheek. But to get back to the point: from the first moment you had an enormous effect on me.”

“Amazing. So now I should feel myself honoured? Tell me, can’t you seduce me with a little more wit?”

“I don’t know how to seduce wittily. That’s for weaklings. If a woman attracts me, all I think is that I want her to know it. Then she responds or she doesn’t. But women usually respond.”

“I’m not ‘women’.”

But she was fully aware that she really did attract János Szepetneki: that he desired her body, in a hungry, adolescent way, devoid of adult restraint, single-mindedly, obscenely. And this so delighted her that through her whole being the blood moved faster under the skin, as if she had been drinking. She wasn’t used to this raw instinctuality. Men generally approached her with love and fine words. Their addresses were always to the well-born, well-educated daughter of a good family. And then Szepetneki had come along, that time in Ravenna, and deeply offended her female vanity. Perhaps that had been the start of the collapse of her marriage, and she had ever since carried inside her the sting of Szepetneki’s words. Now here was her remedy, her satisfaction. She behaved so coquettishly towards him that she actually ceased to believe what she really knew: that she was at last taking revenge for the insult at Ravenna, a revenge all the colder for the delay.

But above all she responded to Szepetneki’s advances because she felt with her woman’s instinct that he was treating her essentially as Mihály’s wife. She knew what a strange relationship Szepetneki had with Mihály, how he always, by whatever means, wanted to prove that he was the better of the two; and this was why he now wished to seduce Mihály’s wife. Erzsi bathed in Szepetneki’s desire with a sickly, widow-like need for consolation, and she felt that now, with this desire, this awakening, she was becoming Mihály’s authentic wife, she was entering the magic circle, the old Ulpius circle, Mihály’s true reality.

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said, but under their table their knees caressed sensuously. “What are you actually doing in Paris?”

“I make links between large companies. Only very large companies,” he said, and began to stroke her thigh. “My finest connections are with the Third Empire. You might say that in some respects I am their local commercial representative. And besides I’m trying to bring together this Lutphali business and the Martini-Alvaert film studio, because I need pocket money. But tell me, why are we talking so much? Come and dance.”

They went on till three in the morning. Then the Persian piled the two film studio girls he had been entertaining into a car, invited the others for Sunday afternoon at his villa in Auteuil, and took his leave. The others made their way home. Sári was escorted by the French gentleman, Erzsi by Szepetneki.

“I’m coming up with you,” Szepetneki announced when they reached the door.

“How charming. Especially as I share with Sári.”

“Damnation. Then come to my place.”

“It’s clear, Szepetneki, you’ve been a long time away from Budapest. Otherwise there’s no other way to explain how you could so little understand the sort of woman I am. You’ve ruined everything.”

And without a word of parting, she went off in great triumph.

“Hey, what was all that flirting with this Szepetneki?” asked Sári when they had settled into their beds. “Just be careful, that’s all.”

“It’s already over. Can you imagine: he wanted to come up with me.”

“Did he now? You’re behaving as if you had never left Pest. ‘My child, never forget that Budapest is the most moral city in Europe.’ That’s not how they take these things here.”

“But Sári, the first evening … So all it needs for a woman’s dignity is … ”

“Of course. But then you should never even talk to men … Here that’s the only way a woman can ‘defend her dignity’. Just as I do. But tell me, why should a woman defend her dignity? Just tell me why. Do you think I wouldn’t have happily gone with that Persian if he had asked me? But did he ask me? It was in his mind. What a wonderful man! Otherwise, you did well not to get involved with this Szepetneki. He’s very good-looking, I won’t deny, and very much the man, but I have the feeling … look, what I’m trying to say, but you know this already, he’s a crook. He’ll end up taking your money. ‘Take very great care, my child.’ He once stole five hundred francs from me on a similar occasion. So, night night.”

“A crook,” Erzsi thought to herself, as she lay without sleeping. “That’s just what he is.” All her life she had been the model of a good girl, adored by her nannies and fräuleins, her father’s pride and joy, the best pupil in the form, sent abroad to academic competitions. Her whole life had been sheltered and ordered, the good bourgeois life consecrated to a sternly supervised moral order. In due course she married a wealthy man, dressed elegantly, took on a grand house and presided over it as a model housewife. She always wore the identical hat sported by every other woman of the same rank in society. She took her summer holidays where fashion dictated, held the same opinions about theatrical productions, uttered the turns of phrase currently de rigueur. In everything she was a conformist, as Mihály would say. Then she began to get bored. The boredom developed into a full neurosis, and then she chose Mihály for herself, because she felt that he was not entirely conformist, that in him there was something utterly alien to the conventions of bourgeois existence. She believed that through him she too could get beyond the walls, into the badlands, the wide flood-plain and what lay there in the unknown distances. But Mihály was simply trying, through her, to become a conformist himself, using her as a means to become a regular bourgeois, only stealing out into the badlands, into the bushes, furtively and alone, until conformity no longer bored him and he was used to it. Now if János Szepetneki, who had no wish to conform, who lived more or less as a professional bandit beyond the walls, who was so much more untamed and vigorous than Mihály … if he … “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright/In the forests of the night … ”

The Sunday afternoon at Auteuil was elegant and dull. The actress-types were not there this time, and the company entirely mondain and well-heeled, typical of the French grande bourgeoisie. But this world did not interest Erzsi, being even more conformist and devoid of tigers than its Budapest equivalent. She began to breathe freely only when, on the way home, they called to take János Szepetneki out to dinner, and then went on to dance. János was demonic. He drank, showed off, recited poetry, wept and was at times extremely manly. But all this was really quite superfluous. He was thoroughly overdoing his part because, not to put too fine a point on it, Erzsi was without doubt already disposed to spend the night with him, following the inner logic of events, and in quest of the burning tiger.