Portraits of a Marriage

Part II

See the pair just leaving, there by the revolving doors? That woman there. The blond one in the round hat? No, the tall one in the mink, yes, the tall brunette, without a hat. The one getting into a car. That stocky fellow is helping her into it, isn’t he? They were sitting at that table in the corner earlier. I spotted them as soon as we came in, but I didn’t want to say anything. They never even saw me. But now that they’ve gone I can tell you that that was the man with whom I had that stupid, embarrassing duel.

On account of the woman? … Well, of course because of her.

I’m not sure I’m putting that quite right. There was definitely someone I wanted to kill at the time. But maybe it wasn’t our stocky friend. He was nothing to do with it really. He was simply the nearest object.

Can I tell you who this woman was? … Oh, I can tell you all right, old man. That woman was my wife. Not the first, but the second. We’ve been divorced for three years. We divorced immediately after the duel.

Another bottle of wine? After midnight this place suddenly empties out and grows rather chilly. Last time I was here I was still an engineering student — it was at the time of the carnival. These famous old rooms were full of women then: colorful, glittering creatures of the night, laughing all the time. I didn’t come back for many years. Time passed; they dolled the place up, and the customers changed too. Nowadays it’s the cosmopolitan crew out for a night’s entertainment … you know, what they call cosmopolitan. I had no idea my wife was a regular here, of course.

Nice wine. As pale green as Lake Balaton before a storm. Cheers.

Will I tell you the story? If you like.

It might not be a bad thing if I did once actually tell it.

Did you know my first wife? No, I don’t think so, because you were in Peru then, building the railroad. You were lucky to find yourself in a big wild country straight after finishing the course, when we both got our diplomas. I must confess I envied you sometimes. If fate had taken me abroad I might have been happier than I am now. As it worked out I stayed at home, taking care of things … Well, one day I got tired of all that, so I’m not taking care of anything now. What was I taking care of? Was it the factory? A way of life? I really don’t know. I used to have a friend, Lázár, the writer, do you know him? You’ve never heard of him? Aren’t you the happy man! I knew him well. At one time I thought he was my friend. This man kept arguing that I was a rare representative of a vanishing form of life, the pick of my class, a model citizen. According to him, that was why I stayed at home. But I can’t even be sure of that.

It is only facts you can be sure of; they are what matter … All those explanations we give to account for the facts are pure, irredeemable fiction. Literature. I should tell you that I am no longer a great admirer of literature. I used to read a lot in the past, everything I could lay my hands on. I suspect it is bad literature that fills men’s and women’s hearts with lies and false feeling. It is the false teaching of dubious books we have to thank for most of the contrived tragedies of human life. Self-pity, false sentiment, all those artificial complications are, to a great extent, the direct consequence of fake, ignorant, or simply mischievous fiction. You find it under banner headlines in the press and in smaller articles on other pages: the seamstress who drinks lye because the joiner has left her, or the female representative involved in an accident after she’d taken Veronal, all because the famous actor failed to turn up for a date. The glorious fruits of literature! Why are you looking at me like that? Surprised? You want to know what I most despise? Literature? The tragic misunderstanding that goes under the name of love? People in general? That’s a hard question. I don’t despise anyone or anything, I have no right to. But in what remains of my life I intend giving myself over to a passion. A passion for truth, that is. I will not have people lying to me anymore, neither books nor women, and I will have no patience at all with the lies I tell myself.

You say I have suffered. That I’ve been hurt. That’s true. It might have been that woman you saw just now, my second wife, who hurt me. It might have been the first. Something went wrong in any case, and whatever it was it was a dreadful emotional experience. I’ve become quite solitary as a result. I am angry. I have no faith in women, in love, or in people. What a ridiculous, pathetic creature, you must be thinking. You’d like tactfully to remind me that there are plenty of people who are both happy and passionate; that there is love and patience and participation and forgiveness. You’d like to accuse me of lack of courage, of impatience with the people I happened to have met, of not having the guts, now that I am this solitary wild creature, to admit that it was all my fault. Look, old man, I have heard and considered all these charges. You could torture me and put me on the rack and I’d still think what I think, feel what I truly feel. I have examined the lives of people close to me, I have looked through the windows of other people’s lives; I have not been too shy or too reserved, I searched and listened. I myself thought the fault was mine, that it was in me. I explained it in terms of greed, selfishness, lust, social constraints, the ways of the world. Explained what? Failure. That well of loneliness into which everyone is eventually plunged, the way a traveler might stumble into a ditch at night. We are men: nobody is going to help us in this respect; we have to live alone and have to pay the full price of everything down to the last penny. We have to put up with loneliness, with being who we are, and we have to do so in silence. These are the laws of life as far as men are concerned.

And family? I can see you want to ask me about that. Don’t I think the family is, in abstract terms, the highest meaning in life, a superior kind of harmony? Life is not about happiness. Life is about supporting your family, bringing up your children as honorable people, and not expecting either gratitude or happiness in return. But I want to give you a straight answer, and my answer is, you are right. It’s just that I don’t believe family “makes you happy.” Nothing can “make” you happy. The family is a vast project, so enormous and important, both for us personally and for the world at large, that it’s worth putting up with all the incomprehensible cares of life, all that superfluous pain, for its sake. Nevertheless, I don’t believe in “happy” families. I have seen families where there was a certain harmony of purpose, a proper set of human relationships, families where each member’s life ran a little against the grain of the others, where every member of the family led a separate life, but where the whole, all the members of the clan, despite fighting each other tooth and nail, still lived for each other and somehow held together.

Family … a big word. Yes, one’s family might sometimes be the whole point of life.

But that doesn’t solve anything. And in any case I never had a family in quite that sense.

So I kept listening and paying attention. I listened to fashionable sermons about how loneliness was a middle-class disease, sermons with twisted ideas that kept referring to “society”—that magnificent thing, society — a society that embraces and elevates the individual so that suddenly he has a purpose in life, because he knows he is not living simply for a narrowly defined family but for the far better, all-but-superhuman concept of society. I listened very hard to such tirades. I thought about their application not just in theory but in the here and now, where I could properly grasp their implications, in life itself. I considered the lives of “the poor”—they, after all, constitute the largest element of society, are in themselves a society. Did they enjoy a fuller, richer, more vital kind of life for the knowledge that they were part of a union — the steelworkers’ union, for example — or of a self-employed workers’ pension scheme? Were they happier for the knowledge that they had representatives in parliament, people who could speak, and write articles, on their behalf? Surely it is just as vital to know that there are an infinite number of steelworkers and self-employed in the world who would like to lead better, more humane lives; that their worldly condition improves only in gradual stages, after bitter conflict, after countless unsatisfactory compromises under which their pay is no longer 180 pengő but 210. Looking down, everything seems bottomless. When you’re near the bottom, you’re very glad of anything that improves your horrible condition. But that’s not happiness. Nor did I find happiness among people whose employment or vocation placed them at the heart of social affairs. No, what I found there was resentment, sadness, dissatisfaction, rivalry, fury, struggle, resignation, and idiocy: the clever and foolish constantly at war with each other. I found people who believed in amelioration: that, very slowly, after many unpredictable twists and turns, given time, there would be some improvement in human life. It’s nice to believe this. But believing it, or even feeling assured of it, doesn’t make anyone less lonely. It’s not true that it is only the middle class who feel alone. A peasant on a distant farm can be as lonely as a dentist in Antwerp.

Then I went on to read, and believed for a while, that it was the mere fact of civilization that created loneliness.

The idea was that joy had somehow drained from life in the process, though now and then it might emit the odd spark. Deep in the human heart there lay the memory of a bright, sunlit, happy world where even duty was pleasure, where struggle was delight and everything was worthwhile. Maybe the Greeks were happy — for all that they slaughtered each other, murdered strangers, and put up with extraordinarily long and terrifyingly bloody wars, they were nevertheless radiant with a cheerful communal feeling. They were happy in a deeper, preliterary way; even the tinkers were happy tinkers … But we, according to the idea, don’t have a proper cultural life: our civilization is uniform, secretive, mechanical. Everyone has a share in it, but nobody is truly happy. Everyone can have a tubful of hot water to bathe in, everyone can gawk at pictures, listen to music, make long-distance telephone calls; our laws defend the rights and interests of the poor as well as of the rich — but just look at our faces. Wherever we live, whether it be in small communities or in wider society, our faces are troubled. How suspicious we look, how tense; how much unresolved insecurity and furious antagonism there is among us. It’s all the product of anxiety and loneliness. You can offer various explanations for loneliness, and every explanation would address some specific associated question, but not one of these answers would give you a convincing reason … I know mothers with six children who suffer loneliness, mothers whose faces wear the same furious antagonistic expressions, and I know middle-class bachelors who take off their gloves with an affected, careworn laboriousness, as though they were somehow forced to do so. As for politicians and prophets, they divide us into far more artificial groups and subgroups, and the more they try to educate children in the ways of this new world, the more unremitting the sense of essential loneliness becomes. You don’t believe me? I know. I could talk about this forever.

If I had the gift of eloquence, if I were a priest, or an artist, or a writer, so that people listened to me, I would beg them, encourage them, to look for joy. Let’s forget loneliness. Let it go. It may be no more than illusion. It’s not a question of society. It is a matter of something we learn in early childhood. It’s a matter of awakening. People just look glazed: it’s as if they were wandering about in a trance. Glazed and suspicious. It seems I have no gift of joy myself.

But once, just once, I did come across a face without that glazed look, a face that did not wear that intense, dissatisfied, suspicious, sickly pall of tension.

Yes, it’s the one you saw just now. But the face you saw was only a mask, a dramatic mask for a character in a play. When I first saw it, the face was open, full of expectation and patience, radiant and open, the kind of face that must have been there at the world’s beginning, before people had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, before they knew pain and fear. The face grew more solemn later, graver and more solemn. The eyes became more watchful; the lips, those open lips she forgot to close, did close, and hardened. Her name was Judit Áldozó. She was a peasant girl. She came to us when she was fifteen as my parents’ servant. We never had a relationship. Do you think that might have been the problem? I don’t think so. People say such things, but life is not very forgiving of incidental comment, of wisdom after the event. In all likelihood it is no accident that we never became lovers before I took her to wife.

But she was my second wife. You want me to tell you something about the first. Well, my friend, that first one was a splendid creature. Clever, honest, beautiful, cultured. You see, I am talking about her as though I were advertising her in some column. Or as though I were Othello when he set off to murder Desdemona, “so delicate with her needle … she will sing the savageness out of a bear …” Should I add that she loved music and nature? Because I can talk about her and remain perfectly calm. It’s the way retired head gamekeepers out in the country advertise their younger sisters in the local press, small physical imperfections included. But this one, my first wife, had no physical faults. She was young, beautiful, and sensitive … So what was the problem? Why couldn’t I live with her? What was lacking? Sensual pleasure? I’d be lying if I said that. I had as much pleasure with her in bed as with any other woman, including those with a vocation. I don’t believe in the Don Juan ideal; I don’t believe it is right to live with several women at the same time. Our task is to create a perfect musical instrument out of just one, the kind of instrument on which any song can be played … Sometimes I feel sorry for people, the way they snatch and grab at things so stupidly, so hopelessly … one sometimes wants to smack their hands and tell them: “Don’t snatch! Don’t grab! Sit down properly and have some manners. You’ll get what you want if you wait your turn!” Really, they are just like greedy children. They don’t know that contentment in life is sometimes simply a matter of patience, that the harmony they are so feverishly seeking and which they think of, wrongly, as happiness, depends entirely on one or two points of technique … Why don’t schools teach you about relationships between men and women? Why not? I’m not joking. It’s a perfectly serious question. Contentment depends as much on such things as on morals and grammar. It shouldn’t be treated as a frivolous subject … I mean, there should be intelligent people — poets, doctors — to introduce one to the ways of joy, to the various possibilities of coexistence between men and women before it’s too late. I don’t mean “sex education”: I mean joy, patience, modesty, and satisfaction. If I do feel a contempt for some people, it is chiefly on account of their lack of courage in such things — the lack of courage that leads them to conceal the secrets of their lives, not only from the outside world but from themselves.

Don’t misunderstand me. I myself am no fan of the “confession,” all that sickly, crippled displaying of oneself and the slobbering and frothing at the mouth that goes with it. But I do like truth. It is truth we most like to hear, of course, because superfluous self-revelation is the province of invalids, egotists, and people of an effeminate nature. Nevertheless, it is better to listen to the truth than to speak lies. Unfortunately, wherever I’ve looked in life, it was chiefly lies I heard.

You ask me what I mean by truth, by healing, by the ability to feel joy? I’ll tell you, old man. I’ll tell you in two words. Humility and self-knowledge. That’s all there is to it.

Maybe humility is too grand a concept. For humility you need grace too, and that is an exceptional state of being. In everyday life we can achieve what I am talking about by exercising a certain modesty and striving to discover our own true desires and inclinations. And by seeking a compromise between our desires and the world as it exists.

I see you are smiling. You are thinking that if everything is so simple, if there really is some universal template, why isn’t my life a success? Well, you see, in the end there happened to be these two women, and I tried to live first with one, then the other; I mean really live, as a matter of life and death. I can’t complain about them as people, as marvelous people in fact. All the same, I failed, failed with both, and here I am, alone. Self-knowledge, humility, all those great oaths and promises; it was all in vain. I failed, and now all I can do is sit here and sermonize … That’s what you are thinking. Am I right?

In that case I had better tell you what my first marriage was like and why it failed. My first wife was perfect. I can’t even say that I didn’t love her. She had but one small fault, and it wasn’t something she could do anything about. It wasn’t any kind of psychological problem — nothing of the sort. Her problem was that she was a middle-class girl, poor thing, a middle-class woman. Don’t misunderstand me: I myself am middle-class. I am conscious of being so, a conscientious member of that class, someone who knows its faults and limitations, content to shoulder the responsibilities of middle-class existence. I don’t like drawing-room revolutionaries. One should keep faith with those to whom one is tied by origin, education, interest, and communal memory. It is the middle class I have to thank for everything: my upbringing, my way of being, my desires, the very finest moments of my life, and that common culture which offers such a dignified entry to such moments … Because there are many who say this class has had its day, that it has grown feeble, that it has fulfilled its mission, that it can no longer take the leading role in human affairs the way it did in the past. I can’t speak about that. I don’t understand it. I have a feeling that the middle class is being buried a bit too enthusiastically, a little too impatiently; I think there may be some power left in it, that it might still have a role in the world. Perhaps the middle class will form the bridge on which the forces of revolution meet the forces of order … When I say my first wife was a middle-class woman, that is not a criticism; I am simply establishing a certain condition. I too am middle-class, quite hopelessly so. I keep faith with my class. I will defend it when it is attacked. But I won’t defend it blindly or from a prejudiced position. I want to see quite clearly what it was I received as my portion of social destiny. I have to know, in other words, what our faults were, and to discover whether we have been attacked by a kind of social virus that has drained us of vigor. Not that I ever talked about this with my wife.

So what was the problem? Wait a minute. Let me get my thoughts in order.

First and foremost, it was that I was a middle-class man, fully acquainted with the rituals of my class. I was rich. My wife’s family was relatively poor. Not that being middle-class is a matter of money. My experience is that it is precisely the poorest members of the class, those with the least financial security, who are most urgently preoccupied with maintaining middle-class standards and values. No one rich ever needs to cling so attentively, so desperately, to social customs, to points of etiquette, to respectable behavior, to all those things the poorest of our kind, the petite bourgeoisie, needs to underwrite its very existence at any given moments of life. There is the assistant manager in the office who watches everything like a hawk, careful that his accommodation, his wardrobe, and all the minute details of his life should keep firmly in step with his salary … The rich are always open to a kind of minor risk-taking. They are prepared to wear a false beard or to shinny down a drainpipe in order to escape, even if only for a little while, the prison of ennui that goes with property. I am secretly convinced that the rich spend every hour of the day being utterly bored of themselves. But the middling man, the middle-class citizen, who holds an office without a great salary or a reservoir of money, will perform acts of heroism fit for a knight errant simply to maintain his position in the existing hierarchy, which means preserving both his rank and his system of values. It is the petit bourgeois who upholds the sacred rituals. From the moment he is born to the moment he dies, he constantly has to be proving something.

My wife was well brought up. She was taught languages, she had the ability to make sharp distinctions, between good music and a sentimental tune, between literature and cheap hackwork. She could tell you precisely why a painting by Botticelli was beautiful and what Michelangelo had in mind with his Pietà. But wait — let me be accurate about this. She learned most of it from me — travel, reading, the art of intimate conversation. The education she received at home and at school, the culture she absorbed there, remained in her only as the memory of strict teaching. I tried to dissolve the tensions implicit in learning such things by rote; I wanted to transform school learning into warm, living experience. It wasn’t easy. She had remarkable powers of hearing in both the physical and the psychological human sense. She sensed that I was teaching her and was offended. People are offended by all sorts of things. It doesn’t take much. Say one man knows something because of his good fortune in being born who he is and has had the opportunity of inquiring into the mysteries that constitute real art, while the other has only learned it in class. That’s an offense. It happens. But it takes us a whole lifetime to learn this.

For the lower managerial class, culture is an inseparable part of the whole package: not experience but accomplishment. It is the top layer of the middle class that provides the artists, the creative types. I was a member of that group. That’s not a boast but an admission. Because, in the end, I did not create anything. Something was missing in me … what was it? Lázár called it the Holy Spirit. But he never explained what he meant by that.

But back to the problem with my first wife. What was it? Hypersensitivity and pride. It’s what lurks under every human frailty, every complaint, every mishap. We are afraid because pride prevents us accepting the gift of love. It takes great courage to allow oneself to be loved unconditionally. Courage is required, an all-but-heroic courage. Most people can neither give nor accept love, because they are cowardly and vain and afraid of failure. They are ashamed of giving themselves, and are even more ashamed of surrendering to someone else in case that means revealing a secret … the sad, human secret that one needs tenderness and cannot live without it. I believe that to be true. At least I did believe it, for a long time. I don’t argue it so much nowadays, because I’m getting old and have failed.

In what respect did I fail? I failed in precisely the respect I’m talking about. I lacked the courage to accept the tenderness of the woman who loved me. I resisted. I even looked down on her a little for it, because she was different from me—une petite bourgeoise with different tastes, wanting a different pace of life — and I was afraid I would eventually have to give in to some high-minded and extremely complex form of blackmail meant to drag the gift of love from me. I did not know then what I know now … I didn’t know that there was nothing positively shameful about anything in life. Cowardice is the one shameful thing, cowardice that prevents us giving and accepting the feelings of others. It’s practically a matter of honor. And I believe in honor. One can’t live in disgrace.

Your health! I like this wine, though there is a faint air of sweetness about the taste. I’ve got rather fond of it recently and tend to open a bottle most nights. Can I offer you a light, old man?

Briefly, then, the problem with my first wife was that our pace of life was different. There is something in the lower-middle-class soul that is always somewhat stiff, startled, artificial, horrified, overfond of pretense, and easily offended, especially once it is removed from its home and natural habitat. I can’t think of another class whose children creep through life in such a state of startled suspicion. As concerns that woman, the first one, she might have given me everything a woman can give a man if only she had been a little more fortunate in her birth, had she been born one rung up or one rung down: in other words, if she had been born into a state of greater psychological freedom. She was aware of everything, you know, and understood everything … She knew what flowers to display in the old Florentine vase in the spring and in the fall; she dressed correctly, with proper modesty; I never had the least reason to be embarrassed by her in society; she always answered and spoke precisely as she should; our household was exemplary; our servants went about their tasks without fuss, as she taught them to. We lived model lives. But there was another part of life, a more obscure corner of it, the corner that is reality, that is like a cataract or a jungle, that was less than perfect. I’m not thinking of the bedroom exclusively … though, naturally, I include it. The bedroom is a jungle too, after all. It contains the memory of an experience so primitive and absolute that its meaning and content is life itself. If we tend and weed this jungle, we produce a beautiful, cultivated, charming place, full of scented flowers, attractive trees and shrubs, and ringing, rainbow-colored fountains, but leave nothing of the jungle to which we desire to return but no longer can.

It’s quite a role to play, being a respectable citizen, a solid bourgeois, as they say. No one pays a higher price for culture than we do. It is a grand dramatic role, and as with every heroic part, you have to pay every penny of the cost. You need courage, the courage required for happiness. Art is an experience for an artist. For the solid citizen art is a miracle of training. You probably didn’t talk too much about this in Peru, where life is a matter of whatever bubbles up and displays itself as species. But I lived in Pest, in the exclusive suburb of Rózsadomb. People should take the climate into which they are born into account.

Then a lot of things happened I can’t talk about. The woman is still alive and lives alone. I see her sometimes. We don’t meet, because she still loves me. You know, she wasn’t the sort of woman from whom one separates, to whom you send alimony punctually on the first of the month, and a gift of furs or jewelry at Christmas or her birthday, and think you have done your duty by her. This sort of woman still loves you, nor will she ever love anyone else again. She is not angry with you, because her outlook is that once people have loved each other, there isn’t, nor can there ever be, real anger. Fury, the desire for vengeance, yes; but anger, that long-simmering, expectant sort of anger … no, that’s impossible. She may no longer be waiting for me. She is living and slowly dying. She will die in good taste, in properly refined fashion, as befits her class, quietly, and without fuss. She will die because there is no new way of lending meaning and content to her life, because she cannot live without feeling that she is needed by someone, by the one, special, individual being who has absolute need of her. She might not know this. She might think she has come to some sort of compromise. Some time ago, I ran into a woman with whom I had had an overnight fling, a friend from my first wife’s school days, who had recently returned from America. It was the night of the carnival: we met and, almost without being invited, she came back to my apartment. Some time in the morning she told me that Ilonka had spoken about me once. You know how diligent girlfriends can be … Well, she told me everything, as they all do. She told me, there in her friend’s ex-husband’s bed, the morning after just having met me, that she had always been jealous of Ilonka, that she had seen me once in a café in town, where she was sitting with my first wife, and I’d suddenly come in and bought some candied orange peel for my second wife, and that I took my money from a brown crocodile-skin wallet. That wallet was a gift from my first wife on my birthday. No, you can wipe that ironic, detective-like smile off your face, I really don’t use it anymore. So that’s how it was. And these two women, my first wife and her friend, had thoroughly discussed everything. What my wife said to her friend was that she loved me very much, had almost died when we parted, but then grew reconciled to it, because she had discovered I wasn’t her one, true, intended love; or, more precisely, that given all the other possibilities, I was one of the many who were not her true, intended loves; or, still more precisely, if greater precision is possible, that there was no such thing as the one, true, intended, real love. That’s what her friend told me in the morning, in my bed. I rather looked down on her because she knew all this and still leapt into my bed. When it comes to love I have my doubts about female solidarity, but just then I felt a little contemptuous of this woman, and subtly, politely, I threw her out. I thought I owed that much to my first wife. But I kept thinking about it. As time went by I started to feel that Ilonka was lying. It’s not true that one’s real love, the intended one, does not exist. That is, after all, what I was for her, that unique being. For me, on the other hand, there wasn’t anyone of such overwhelming importance, not her, not my second wife, nor the rest. But I didn’t know that at the time. We are such slow learners.

There’s nothing more I can tell you about my first wife.

That part no longer hurts, and I don’t feel guilty thinking about it. I know we killed the marriage: I myself, life, chance, the death of the child — all these played a part in killing it. That’s the way life kills. The stuff you read in the press is crude exaggeration, cheap muck. Life is more complicated, and prodigiously wasteful. It doesn’t care about this or that Ilonka … collectives and aggregates are what interest it: all the Ilonkas, all the Judits, all the Peters. What it wants to tell us, to articulate to us, concerns the lot of them, as a package. It’s no great revelation that this should be the case, but it takes a long time to learn it and reconcile oneself to it. I kept thinking, and eventually all feeling, all passion vanished. Nothing remained except responsibility. That’s all that ever remains for a man, whatever the experience. We move among the living and the dead, and are responsible … There’s nothing we can do to help. But I wanted to talk about my second wife. Yes, the one who has just left with the stocky gentleman.

Who was the second? No, that was not a middle-class woman, old chap. She was a prole. A working-class woman.

Do you want to know about her? Fine, I’ll tell you. And I want to be perfectly truthful with you.

She was a servant. She was fifteen when I first met her. She worked in our household, as a maid. I don’t want to bore you with adolescent love affairs. But I’ll tell you how it began and how it ended. As to what came between, I myself am not sure about that yet.

It began with the fact that no one in my family dared love anyone else in it. My father and mother lived a theoretically connubial existence; in other words, it was pretty abominable. They never raised their voices. It was all: “What would you like, my dear?” “What can I do for you, darling?” That was how they lived. I don’t even know whether it was a bad life. It’s just that it wasn’t a good life. My father was proud and vain. My mother was a respectable middle-class woman in every sense of the word. Responsibility and discretion. They lived, died, loved each other, gave birth to me, and brought me up as if they were both priest and congregation at some kind of superhuman sacrament. Everything was ritual with us; breakfast and supper, social life, the contact between parents and children — even the love between them, I believe, or what tends to be called that, took the form of an impersonal rite. It was as though they had constantly to be accountable for something. Our lives were strictly planned. There are new and powerful states that prepare four- and five-year plans they carry out, with a ruthless, furious devotion, not caring whether their citizens like it or not. Because what matters to them is not the happiness of this or that individual but the happiness, at the end of those four or five years, of the collective, the nation, the people. There are many recent examples of this. And that is the way it was with us at home, only not with four- or five-year plans, but with forty- or fifty-year ones, quite irrespective of each other’s and our own personal happiness. Because all those rituals, all that work, the engagements, even death itself, had a deeper meaning: the preserving of order in the ranks of both class and family.

When I consider my memories of childhood I sense an anxious, grim sense of directedness behind everything. We worked like robots, going about our rich, refined, ruthless, emotionless, robot work. There was something we had to save, something we had to prove, every day, in everything we did. We had to prove we were of a certain class. The middle class. The guardians. We were doing an important job. We had to embody the notions of rank and manners. We were to suppress the revolt of the instincts, of the plebeians; we were not to run scared, not to succumb to the desire for individual happiness. You ask whether this is a conscious project.… Well, I wouldn’t exactly say my father or mother sat down regularly at the dinner table every Sunday to announce that week’s program of action or make speeches in which they outlined the next fifty-year family plan. But I couldn’t exactly say that we merely accommodated ourselves to the idiotic demands of class and occasion, either. We knew perfectly well that life had singled us out for a difficult series of tests.

It was not only our home, our carefully wrought way of life, our dividends, and the factory we had to protect, but the spirit of resistance that constituted the imperatives and deeper meaning of our lives. We had to keep up our resistance to the attractive powers of the proletariat, the plebs who wanted to weaken our resolve by continually tempting us to take various kinds of liberties, whose tendency to revolt we had to overcome, not in the world, but also in ourselves. Everything was suspect: everything was dangerous. We, like others, were careful to make sure the delicate machinery of a persnickety and ruthless society should continue to work undisturbed. We did this at home, judging the world on appearances while suppressing our desires and regulating our inclinations. Being respectable requires constant exertion of effort. I am referring here to the creative, responsible layers of the middle class — in other words, not the pushy lower orders who simply want a more comfortable, more diverse kind of life. Our ambition was not to live in greater comfort, or more diversely. Under all our acts, manners, and forms of behavior there was an element of conscious self-denial. We experienced it as a kind of religious vocation, being entrusted with the mission of saving a worldly, pagan society from itself. The task of those who perform this role, under oath and in accordance with the rules of the order, is to maintain that order and to keep secret that which should remain secret when danger threatens the objects of their care. We dined with that responsibility in mind. Every week we dutifully went to a performance — to the Opera House or to the National Theater. We received our guests, other responsible people, in the same spirit: they came in their dark suits, they sat down in the drawing room, or at the candlelit dining table with its fine silver and porcelain, where we served good, carefully chosen food and made empty conversation about sterile subjects, and believe me, there was nothing more sterile than our conversation.

But these empty conversations had a function, a deeper purpose. It was like speaking Latin among the barbarians. Beyond the polite phrases, the banal, meaningless arguments and ramblings, there was always the deeper sense that we responsible middle-class people had come together to observe a ritual, to celebrate an honorable compact, and that the codes we were speaking in — because every conversation was about something else — were ways of keeping a vow, proof that we could keep secrets and compacts from those who would rise against us. That was our life. Even with each other, we were constantly having to prove something. By the time I was ten years old I was as self-conscious and quiet, as attentive and well behaved, as the president of a major bank.

I see you’re looking amazed. You didn’t know this world. You are a creative man, someone who makes things happen. You and your family have only just begun to learn this lesson. You are the first of your family to move up a class … You are ambitious. I had only memories, traditions, and duties. For all I know, you might not understand any of this. Please don’t be cross if you don’t. I’m doing the best I can.

The apartment was always a little on the dark side. It was a nice apartment, a proper house with a garden, always something being built and improved. I had my own room upstairs where I lived, my tutor or governess sleeping in the room next door. I don’t think I was ever completely alone, not in all my childhood. I was taught to be amenable both at home and at school. They tamed the wildness in me, the human part, so I should be a proper member of my class and put on a decent show. That may be why I so obstinately, so desperately, craved solitude. I have been living alone now, without even a single servant, for some time now. There’s just a woman who comes in occasionally when I am not at home, who tidies my room and generally disposes of the flotsam and jetsam of my life. At last there is no one breathing down my neck, checking on me, keeping an eye on me: no one to whom I am responsible … There are considerable joys and satisfactions in life. They often come late, in the wrong, unexpected forms. But they do come. When, having left the family house, after two marriages and divorces, I found myself alone, I felt — for the first time in my life — a kind of melancholy relief on having at last achieved something I actually wanted. It was like serving a life sentence in prison, then being released on account of good behavior … for the first time in decades you sleep without fearing the guard patrolling the night corridor who looks in on you through the peephole in the middle of the night. Life has its blessings, even blessings like this. You have to pay heavily for them, but in the end life hands them to you on a plate.

“Joy” is not quite the right word, of course. Comes the day, and suddenly life goes quiet. It is no longer joy you desire, but at least you no longer feel cheated and annihilated. When that day comes, you see quite clearly that you have seen it all and have had your punishments and rewards, both precisely in the proportion you have deserved. If you lacked the courage, or were simply not quite heroic enough to strive for something, you did not get it. End of story. So it’s not joy really, just resignation, acceptance, and calm. In due course it comes your way. It’s just that you have had to pay dearly for it.

As I was saying, back in the family house we were not only conscious of our class roles, but were prepared to play them. Whenever I think of childhood I see darkened rooms. The rooms are full of magnificent furniture, like in a museum. It’s a place in constant need of cleaning and tidying. Sometimes the cleaning makes a lot of noise and involves electrical equipment and open windows, at other times the process is silent and unseen, employing rented staff, but it always entails somebody, a servant or someone in the family, stepping into the room to tidy something away, to blow a speck of dust off the piano, to smooth something out, or to rearrange the folds of a curtain. The apartment was always being jealously tended, as if everything in it — the furniture, the curtains, the pictures, our very habits — were somehow objects on exhibit, artifacts in a museum that needed constant attention, repair, and cleaning, and we had to walk through the halls of this museum on tiptoe because it was inappropriate to walk and talk without restraint among exhibits that insist on a holy hush. There were so many curtains: even in the summer they soaked up the light. The chandeliers hung from the high ceilings, their eight-armed illumination somehow aimless in rooms where everything swam in an indistinct gloom.

Glazed cabinets lined the walls, full of relics that both staff and family passed in a state of awe, objects one never touched or picked up or examined closely. There were gilt-rimmed pieces of Alt Wien porcelain, Chinese vases, paintings on ivory, portraits of unknown men and women, ivory fans never used for fanning people, tiny items made of gold or silver or bronze; pitchers, animals, miniature dishes, none of which were ever used. One cabinet contained the “family silver” the way a casket might contain the bones of a saint. The silver dining service was hardly ever used, which was also the case with the damask tablecloths and the fine china; they were all there to be guarded according to the secret rules of the house, preserved for an incomprehensible, hard-to-imagine, special ritual when there would be twenty-four places at table. But the table never was laid for twenty-four. We had guests, of course, and then the silver service, the damask, the porcelain, and the glass exhibits would be brought out, and the dinner or supper would be conducted with such anxious, careworn ceremony you might have thought the company was far less concerned with eating than with conducting a terrifyingly complex operation in which no one should commit any kind of faux pas or break a plate or glass in the course of conversation.

The facts themselves will be familiar to you in your own life; I am talking about the feelings that constantly welled up in me when I was there, in the rooms of my parents’ house; feelings in childhood and even later, as an adult. Yes, there were guests for supper or simply calling by; we lived there and “used” the place, but under the practical, everyday aspect of living there, the house had a deeper meaning and purpose: that meaning and that purpose were locked in our hearts like a last line of defense.

I will always remember my father’s room. It was a long room, a real hall. The floors were covered with thick oriental rugs. There were a great many pictures on the walls, of all kinds: expensive paintings in gilt frames, paintings showing distant, never-seen forests, oriental ports, and unknown men of the last century, mostly with beards and dressed in black. An enormous writing desk stood in one corner of the room, the kind known as a diplomat table, over three yards long and some five feet wide, complete with a globe of the world, a copper candelabrum, a tin inkpot, an attaché case of Venetian leather, and a mass of ornaments and mementos. Then there was a collection of heavy leather armchairs gathered around a circular table. By the fireplace surround two bronze bulls were engaged in combat. The pediments of the bookcases displayed other bronze items, eagles and bronze horses, and a tiger half a yard in length, looking ready to spring. That too was made of bronze. And all along the walls a range of glazed bookcases. They contained a vast number of books, four, maybe five thousand, I don’t know exactly how many. Literature had its own bookcase, as did religion, philosophy, and social science, the works of English philosophers bound in blue buckram, and sets of all kinds bought from an agent. No one actually read these books. My father spent his time reading the newspapers and accounts of travel. My mother did read, but only German novels. Book dealers occasionally sent us their latest acquisitions and we got stuck with them, so the valet would have to ask Father for the keys and arrange the newly accumulated volumes in the cases. They were careful to lock the cases, of course, ostensibly so that the books should be protected. The truth is they were locked so as to prevent anyone ever taking a book out on a whim, which rash action might result in them being confronted by the secret and possibly dangerous material it might contain.

This room was referred to as Father’s “study.” No one in human memory had ever actually studied there, least of all my father. His study was the factory and the club he frequented in the afternoons with other manufacturers and financiers, where he would enjoy a quiet game of cards, read the papers, and debate matters of business and politics. My father was undoubtedly a clever man with a sound sense of the practical. It was he who had developed the factory from the workshop set up by my grandfather and expanded it into a major enterprise. It grew in his care until it became one of the country’s leading businesses. This required strength, art, foresight, and a deal of ruthlessness — in fact, everything required by any enterprise where one man sits in a room on the top floor deciding what should go on in all the other rooms of all the other floors on the basis of instinct and experience. My father had sat in that particular room of our factory for forty years. It was where he belonged, where he was honored and feared, his name being mentioned with respect throughout the business community. I have no doubt at all that my father’s commercial morals, his concepts of money, work, usefulness, and capital, were exactly those the world, his business partners, and his family would have expected of him. He was a creative sort of man: in other words, not one of those tightfisted, ugly capitalists who sit on their money and squeeze all they can out of their employees, but someone naturally bold and entrepreneurial who respected work and aptitude and paid talent better than he did mere mechanical ability. But all this — father, the factory, the club — was yet another form of association: that which was sacred and ritualistic at home was the same, only less refined and more secretive, at work and in the world at large. The social circle founded by my father among others would accept only millionaires as members, always just two hundred of them, no more. When a member died, the circle chose a replacement with the same care and delicacy as did the Académie Française its own members or the order of Tibetan monks the new Dalai Lama among the upper classes of Tibet. Everything — the selection process and the invitation — was carried out with the utmost secrecy. The select two hundred felt, despite title or rank, that they constituted a power in the state greater than even that of a governmental department. They were the alternative power, the invisible partner with which official power was obliged to parley and come to agreement. My father was one of them.

We knew this at home. I never entered the “study” without a sense of awe and self-consciousness. I’d stand before the diplomat table at which no one in human memory had ever been known to work, a desk that only the valet spent time at, every morning arranging and dusting the ornaments. I would gaze at the bearded, unknown men in the portraits, imagining that these dour people with their piercing eyes would, in their own day, have been a member of just such a solemn association of two hundred as my father and his friends at the club were; that they’d have ruled over mines and forests and factories, and that there existed some unwritten compact between life and time, a kind of eternal blood-brotherhood that meant they were stronger and more powerful than other men. The thought that my father was of their company filled me with a certain anxious pride. An anxious sense of ambition, I should say, because I did want to take my father’s place among them at some stage. It took fifty years for me to learn that I was not, nor was fitted to be, one of them; it was not until last year that I stepped out of their ranks, the ranks to which they had admitted me, so that I might “withdraw,” as they put it, from “any kind of business involvement,” though that was not something I could possibly have known back then. That was why I gazed so wide-eyed at Father’s “retreat,” why I pored over the titles of books no one read, why I began vaguely to suspect that something barely perceptible but significant, something perfectly unremitting, was being enacted behind these strict outward signs and appurtenances, and that this was how it had to be, how it was and always would be, and yet there was something not quite right about the whole thing, even if only because no one actually talked about it … For whenever conversation, whether at home or in company, turned to the subject of work, to money, to the factory, or to the society of two hundred, my father and his friends fell noticeably quiet, stared stonily into space, and began to speak of something else. There was a limit, you know, a border with an invisible barrier … but of course you know. I’m telling you this now because once I start I feel like telling you absolutely everything.

I couldn’t even say our lives were frigid or entirely without warmth. Our major family occasions were lovingly, punctiliously, commemorated. There were four or five “Christmases” each year. These occasions, which were not officially red-letter days, were more important in the family’s unwritten Gregorian calendar than Easter or Christmas itself, though the family did in fact have a properly kept written calendar where births, wedding anniversaries, and deaths were duly noted, noted so precisely and in such detail that even a registrar would have examined them with admiration. This book, the book of the clan, the golden book — call it what you will — was in the exclusive care of the head of the family. My great-grandfather had bought the book a hundred and twenty years ago, Great-Grandfather in his furs and braids, the founder of the dynasty, the first worthy begetter in the family, who had been a miller out on the Great Hungarian Plain. It was he who first inscribed the family name in the gilt-edged, black-leather-bound volume packed solid with ivory paper. “In nomine Dei.” He was “Johannes II” … miller and founder. It was he who was first given a state rank.

Once, and once only, did I write in that book, and that was when my son was born. I will never forget that day. It was a beautiful sunlit day in late February. I returned from the hospital in a helpless state of joy and pain, a state one experiences but once in life, when one’s son is born. My father was no longer alive. I went into my study, a room I used as infrequently as my father used his, looked out the locked book in the lowest drawer of the diplomat table, opened it, took out my fountain pen, and very carefully inscribed the letters “Matthias I” along with the date and time. It was a great moment, a symbolic moment. How much there is of vanity, of the second-rate, in the range of human feeling! This was the family marching on, I felt. Suddenly everything had a meaning: the factory, the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the money in the bank. My son would take my place in the house, in the factory, in the society of two hundred … But that was not to happen. I have thought long and hard about this. We can’t be sure that having a child, an heir, is the solution to the deeper crisis in any individual’s life. The law says it does, of course, but life is not a product of law.

That’s how we lived. That was my childhood. I know, there have been far worse. But this is all relative. It was Judit Áldozó I really wanted to talk about, but here we are talking about my childhood.

We celebrated all anniversaries, particularly the family ones. There were Father’s birthday, Mother’s name day, and others like these, all of them redder-than-red red-letter days, complete with gifts, music, dinner, toasts, and flickering candles. Our nurses would dress us up in little sailor’s costumes made of velvet, with lace collars — you know, à la milord. All these occasions were conducted in perfect order, according to unwritten military regulations. Father’s birthday was the grandest occasion, of course. We had to learn verses by heart. The entire household gathered in the parlor, everyone dressed to the nines, eyes sparkling, the servants shiftily, raptly, kissing my father’s hand and thanking him for something, I really don’t know what. Most likely for the fact that they were servants and my father was not. Who knows? They kissed his hand nonetheless. Then came a grand dinner or supper. The most precious plates and the best silver cutlery were fished out of the family vaults. Relatives arrived to celebrate the birthday of the illustrious head of the family with due deference and, naturally, seething envy. We were the head of the clan. Poorer relatives received a monthly donation from Father, a proper stipend or pension. None of them thought it enough in private. There was an old lady, a certain Auntie Maria, who so complained about Father’s meanness that she always refused to join us at the highly ornate celebratory dinner. “I’ll be just fine in the kitchen,” she said. “A small cup of coffee in the kitchen will do me.” That’s how poorly she thought of the money my father voluntarily gave her each month, even though there was absolutely no obligation that he should give her anything. We had to drag her into the dining room and give her the best place at the table. It is very hard striking a balance between the desires and demands of poor relatives. The fact is that it’s impossible. It requires great spirit, an exceptionally great spirit, to suffer the success of a close relative. Most people are incapable of it, and it would be a foolish man who would be angry to see the whole family turn against him, the successful one, in a spirit of wounded sensibility, or mockery, or hostility. Because there’s always someone in the family with money or reputation or influence, and the rest, the tribe, gather round this individual to hate and rob him. My father knew this, and he gave them as much as he thought right while indifferently tolerating their hostility. Father was a strong man. The possession of money made him feel neither sentimental nor guilty. He knew exactly how much each person should have and would not give more. Not in terms of feeling, either. His favorite sayings were “They’ll get that” and “They’ll not get that.” It was a carefully considered judgment every time. And once he had pronounced his verdict he stuck by it, as to a papal decree. There was no arguing with him. I am sure he too was lonely, and had to forgo many things he desired or that would have pleased him, in the interests of the family. But he suppressed such desires and stayed strong — firm on his feet. “They’re not getting that,” he said sometimes after a long silence when my mother or some other member of the family put a request to him, the party in question having already mentioned it several times and dropped various hints. No, Father was not tightfisted or hard-hearted. He simply knew people and understood money, and that’s all there was to it.

Cheers.

Excellent wine this, old man. What wit, what strength this wine has! It’s just the right age, six years old. Six is the best age for dogs and for wine. White wine is dead after seventeen years: it loses color and aroma, and is no more animated than the glass it’s stored in. I discovered this very recently, in Badacsony, from a vintner. You should not be impressed when snobs offer you very old wine. All this takes time to learn.

Where was I? Oh yes, the money.

Tell me, why are writers so slipshod when it comes to the question of money? They write about love, glory, fate, and society; it’s just money they never mention, as if it were some kind of second order of existence, a stage property they deposit in their characters’ pockets so that the action may proceed. In real life there is much more tension about money than we are willing to admit to ourselves. I am not talking about the economy now, or poverty: in other words, not about basic concepts, but about actual money, the everyday, infinitely dangerous and peculiar substance that, one way or another, is effectively more explosive than dynamite; I mean those few coins or fistfuls of banknotes that we manage to grasp or fail to grasp, that we give away or deny ourselves, or deny someone else … They don’t write about that. Nevertheless, the everyday anxieties and tensions of life are made up of a thousand such common conspiracies, misrepresentations, betrayals, tiny acts of bravado, surrender, and self-denial: tragedies can develop from the sacrifices involved in working to a tight budget, or else avoided, if life offers another way of resolving the situation. Literature treats economics as though it were a kind of conspiracy. That’s exactly what it is, of course, though in a deeper sense of the word — real money exists within the spaces of abstractions such as “the economy” and “poverty.” What really matters is people’s relationship to money, a character’s timidity or bravado concerning money: not Money with a capital M, but the everyday money we handle morning, afternoon, and evening. My father was rich: in other words, he respected money. He spent a dime with as much care as he would a million. He once spoke of not respecting someone because the individual was forty but had no money.

It shook me when he said this. I thought it heartless and unjust.

“He is poor,” I defended him. “He can’t help it.”

“That’s not true,” he sternly replied. “He can help it. After all, he is not an invalid, he’s not even ill. Whoever gets to forty without having made any money — and he, in his circumstances, could undoubtedly have made some — is a coward or lazy or simply a bum. I can’t respect such a man.”

Look here, I am over fifty now. I’m getting older. I sleep badly and lie on the bed half the night in the dark with my eyes wide open, like a beginner, like someone practicing to be dead. I am a realist. Why, after all, should I fool myself? I am no longer in debt and owe nothing to anyone. My only obligation is to be true to myself. I think my father was right. One doesn’t understand such things when one is young. When I was young I considered my father a ruthless, unbending man of finance whose god was money, and who judged people — unfairly — according to their capacity for making it. I despised the concept and felt it to be mean and inhumane. But time passed and I had to learn many things: romance, love, courage and fear, sincerity, and everything else — in other words, money too. And now I understand my father, and I can’t find it in myself to blame him for the severity of his judgment. I understand that he looked down on those who were neither ill nor invalid and had passed the age of forty but were too cowardly or lazy or shiftless to have made money. Naturally, I don’t mean a lot of money, since there is considerable luck involved in that: great guile, sheer greed, or blind chance. But the kind of money that lies within a person’s power to get — that is to say, given one’s opportunities or horizons in life — that is wasted only by those who are cowardly or weak. I don’t like refined, sensitive souls who, faced with this fact, immediately point to the world, to the wicked, heartless, greedy world that wouldn’t allow them to spend the twilight of their lives in a pretty little house with a watering can in their hands, tending their garden on a summer evening, with slippers on their feet and a straw boater on their heads, like any small investor who has happily retired from working life to rest on the rewards of industry and thrift. It’s a wicked world, wicked to everyone equally. Whatever it gives, it sooner or later takes away, or at least tries to take away. Real courage consists of the struggle to defend the interests of oneself and one’s dependents. I dislike the mawkish sensibility that blames everyone else: those ugly, greedy financiers, those ruthless investors, and the “terribly crude” idea of competition that prevented them turning their dreams into small change. Let them be stronger, more ruthless if they will. That was my father’s code. That’s why he had no time for the poor, by which I don’t mean the unfortunate masses, but those individuals who weren’t clever or strong enough to rise from their ranks.

That is a pretty heartless perspective, you say. It’s what I myself said for a long time.

I don’t say that now. I have absolutely no desire to pass judgment on anyone. I just go on living and thinking; it’s all I can do. The truth is, I have not made a single penny in all my life. I barely looked after that which my father and his fathers passed on to me. Mind you, that is no easy matter, either, looking after money, because there are vast powers out there constantly at war with the concept of private property. There were times I fought these powers — enemies both visible and invisible — as vigilantly and fiercely as my ancestors, the founders of our fortune. But the truth is that I was not myself a maker of fortune, because I was no longer really in touch with money. I was of the penultimate generation, whose only desire is to keep what they have been given out of a sense of honor.

My father would sometimes speak of “poor people’s money.” His respect for money was not based on mere accumulation. He told me that a man who is no more than a factory hand all his life but who, by the time he has finished, owns a small plot, a little house, and a few fruit trees, and can live there on what he has earned, is a more heroic figure than any general. He respected the miraculous willpower shown particularly by the poor — the healthy and the exceptional among them — who, through fierce, stubborn effort, succeeded in grabbing a share of the good things of the world. They had a patch of the earth they had the right to call theirs; there was a house they had bought with their own pittance: they had a roof over their heads. He admired these people. Apart from them he admired nothing and no one. “He was good for nothing,” he’d say sometimes and shrug when the fate of the weak and helpless was described to him. The conviction with which he pronounced “good for nothing” was itself a form of contempt.

As a matter of fact I myself am a miser and always have been. I am like anyone who is no longer capable of building and creating and is reduced simply to looking after that which he has inherited from his family. My father was not a miser, he simply had a respect for money: he made it, he accumulated it, and then, when the time was right, he calmly spent it with full confidence in his own judgment. I once saw him write out a check for a million, his hand assured as he put his simple signature to it, as if it were no more than a tip to a waiter. And when the factory burned down and the insurers weren’t paying because it had been caused by some kind of negligence, my father decided to rebuild it. He could have left it and shared the proceeds, then lived in comfort on the interest. He was no longer young by this time. He was over sixty. There would have been plenty of good reasons for not rebuilding. It was perfectly within his means to live an independent life, to spend his remaining days strolling about, reading books, and going to see things. But he didn’t hesitate a moment: he settled with the investors and the foreign engineers, then wrote out the check and handed it over to the engineer who would build up and head the new venture. And he was right. My father died two years after that, but the factory is still there, still productive, doing useful work. That’s as much as we can hope for in life, that we leave something useful behind us, something people value.

Ah yes, but none of this is of much consolation to the builder and maker, you think. I know — you are thinking of the loneliness. The deep, dense loneliness that is the lot of any creative spirit, a product of the restricted atmosphere in which he must move, the oxygen he must breathe. Well, yes. Busy people are lonely people. But we can’t be altogether certain that this loneliness is the cause of suffering. I have always suffered more from close human presence and social life than from genuine loneliness. There are times when we regard loneliness as a punishment: we are like children left alone in a dark room while the adults carry on chattering and enjoying themselves next door. But one day we too grow up to be adults and learn that loneliness — genuine, fully conscious solitude — is not a punishment, not a wounded, sickly retreat from life, not isolation, but the one and only truly fitting condition for man. And then it becomes less hard to suffer it. It is like breathing pure mountain air.

That’s what my father was like. That is what the world was like back then. Money, work, order: it was a solid bourgeois world. It was as if the house and the factory were ordained to us forever. The rituals associated with work and life were organized, as it were, from a position outside life. It was quiet at home. I learned that quiet early, the keeping silent. People who talk a great deal have something to hide. People who hold their peace are sure of something. That was another thing I learned from my father. As a child these lessons were a source of suffering for me. I felt something was missing from our lives. Love, you say … The love that is ready to sacrifice itself. Look, it’s far too easy to say that. Later I discovered that love, poorly articulated, clumsily demanded, kills more people than poison, car accidents, and lung cancer. People kill each other with love as with some invisible death ray. They want ever more love and demand constant acts of tenderness; they want it all, all to themselves. They want the whole heart; they want to suck the life energy from their surroundings and are as greedy for it as those enormous plants that drain water, scent, and light from other shrubs. Love is a monstrous selfishness. Is there anyone alive capable of surviving under that reign of terror called love? Look around you, look through the windows that you pass. Look into people’s eyes, listen to their complaints, and you will discover everywhere the same despairing anxiety. They can’t live with the demands that love imposes on them. They put up with it for a while, they bargain with it, but eventually it exhausts them. Then follow stomach upsets, gastric ulcers. Diabetes. Heart murmurs. And death.

You have seen peace and harmony? Once, in Peru, you say … Well, yes, it may be possible, in Peru. But here, in our more temperate climate, the miraculous flower is not allowed to bloom. It may put out a few petals now and then, but it quickly languishes. Maybe the climate of civilization is too much for it. Lázár once told me that civilizations based on the machine must churn out loneliness like a conveyor belt. He also told me the abbot Paphnucius was less lonely in the desert, on top of his column, with guano in his hair, than a million citizens of the great metropolis crowded into cafés and movie palaces on a Sunday afternoon. He was lonely too, but conscientiously so, like a monk in a monastery. The one time anyone got close to him he quickly ran off. I suspect I know this better than he does, or the person who got close to him. But these are private matters, other people’s affairs, and I have no right to speak of them. Back home, a lofty, solemn, sacramental kind of loneliness pervaded everything. The loneliness of my childhood sometimes comes back to me like the memory of a sad, frightening dream … you know, the kind full of anxiety, the sort one dreams before a test. My childhood was a matter of eternal preparation for some desperately important, dangerous exam. It was an examination in responsible citizenship. We were forever studying. We crammed. We learned by rote. Each day there was a new exam paper to face. We were constantly tense: our acts, our words, even our dreams were fraught with tension. We were walled in by a loneliness so dense even the servants and those who only dropped in at the house for a few minutes — mailmen, delivery boys — they all felt it. Childhood and adolescence were spent waiting in dim, curtained rooms. By the time I got to eighteen the loneliness, anxiety, and waiting had exhausted me. I longed to try something I hadn’t tried before, something not entirely within the rules. But I had to wait a good while before that happened.

That was when Judit Áldozó entered my fortress of loneliness.

Here, have a light. How do you get on with the tobacco habit? It’s a struggle, isn’t it? Myself, I couldn’t go on — not with the smoking but with the struggle. There’ll be a day when that too has to be faced. One adds up the facts and decides whether to live five or ten years longer by not smoking, or to surrender to this petty, shameful passion that no doubt kills but, until it does so, offers you such a peculiar calming yet exciting experience. After fifty years it becomes one of life’s major questions. My answer to that question was angina and the decision to carry on exactly as before until I die. I’ll not stop poisoning myself with this bitter weed, because it’s not worth it. You say it’s not so difficult to give up? Of course it’s not that difficult. I’ve done it before, more than once, while it was worth it. The trouble was, I’d spend the whole day “not smoking.” That’s something else I’ll have to face one day. People should resign themselves to certain weaknesses, to their need for a soporific of some sort, and be prepared to pay the price. It’s so much simpler that way. Yes, but then they say: “You should have more courage.” My answer to them is: “I may not be the bravest of men, but I am courageous enough to live with my desires.”

That’s what I think, anyway.

You’re looking at me very skeptically. I see, you want to ask whether I always had the courage to follow my desires? As regards Judit Áldozó, for instance? Indeed I had, old man. And I proved it. I paid my whack, as they say on the street. It cost me my peace of mind for the rest of my life, and someone else’s peace of mind too. It may be that one can’t do much more than that. And now you want to know whether it was worth it? That is what you call a rhetorical question. You can’t judge the great decisive moments of life by the standards of a commercial transaction. It’s not about whether something was or was not worth it: sometimes people have to do things just because it is their fate to do so, or because that is the given situation, or because their blood pressure demands it, or because their entire body insists on it. It’s bound to be some combination of all those factors at work … Whatever the case, the result is that they don’t act like cowards, they just go ahead and do it. Because nothing else matters. The rest is theory.

So I did it.

Let me tell you what it was like the morning when Judit Áldozó first appeared at the door of our dingy yet magnificent abode. She was like the poor girl in the fairy tales — she arrived carrying nothing more than a small bundle of possessions. Folk tales are generally pretty reliable. I had just returned from the tennis courts, had stepped into the hall, thrown the racket onto a chair, and stood there flushed, about to pull off my sleeveless knit sweater, the kind people wear for exercise. That was the moment I noticed that there was a strange woman standing in the gloom beside the Gothic chest. I asked her what she wanted.

She didn’t answer. She was clearly confused. I thought at the time she must have been disoriented by the unfamiliar setting, and put her silence down to a simple case of embarrassment not uncommon with servants. Later I found out it wasn’t the unfamiliar setting or the arrival of the young master that confused her but something else. It was the encounter. The fact of our meeting, and that I had looked at her and something happened. I too knew that, of course, knew something had happened that moment, but not as deeply as she did. Women, strong, instinctive women, and she was one, know precisely what is important or decisive the moment it happens, while men, such as ourselves, are always likely to misunderstand events or explain them away. This woman immediately knew, the moment she met me, that our fates were inextricably linked. I knew it too, but I chose to talk about something else.

But not straightaway, because she hadn’t answered my question and I felt a little insulted, inclined to be high-handed. We stood dumbly in the hall for a few moments, facing and staring at each other.

We gazed at each other the way people do when coming across something rare and strange. What I was gazing at that moment was nothing like a new servant. I was gazing at a woman who, in some way, for completely mysterious reasons, because of certain impossible factors, would play a major role in my life. Do people realize when this happens? I’m sure they do. Not intellectually but with their whole being. And at the same time they go on thinking other things in an absentminded sort of way. Consider for a moment how unlikely a situation this was. Imagine that, in those moments, someone had come up to me and told me that this was the woman I would one day marry, but that much would have to happen before that came about; that I would first marry someone else, another woman, who would bear me a child, and that the woman standing opposite me then in the dingy hall would go abroad, vanish for years, then return, at which point I would divorce my wife and marry her instead; that I, the persnickety bourgeois boy, the rich, polished gentleman, would marry this insignificant servant girl clutching her bundle while anxiously staring at me just the way I was staring at her … scrutinizing her as if I were seeing something I had never seen before, something I really had to take into account … Well, all this seemed most unlikely back then. If anyone had predicted it, I would have laughed at him and dismissed the very idea. But now, afterwards, from the distance of a few years, I’d like to answer my own question as to whether I knew how it would work out. And also the issue of whether we know when we meet someone that the meeting is of vital importance, a turning point in our lives … Is there a moment when someone steps into the room and we know, yes, this is the one? The one intended, just for us, exactly as in novels?

I don’t know the answer. I can only close my eyes and recall the moment. And as I do so, I see that, yes, something happened back then. An electric charge? A form of radiation? A secret intuition? These are just words. But of course people don’t communicate their thoughts and feelings through words only. There are other forms of communication between people, other ways of conveying a message. The term people tend to use now is “shortwave.” Apparently human intuition is no more than a form of shortwave transmission. I don’t know … I have no desire to con you, nor indeed myself. For that reason the best I can say is that the moment I first saw Judit Áldozó I was transfixed, and however impossible the situation, I stood there facing this unknown servant figure quite unable to move. So we carried on gazing at each other for quite some time.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

She told me. It sounded faintly familiar. “Áldozó” is much like the word áldozat, meaning sacrifice, so there was something ceremonial in it. Even her given name, Judit, had a biblical ring. It was as if she had stepped out of history, out of some biblical condition of solid simple materiality: like eternal life, real life. It was as if she had arrived not from a village but from some deeper level of existence. I was not much concerned with the propriety of my actions. I stepped over to the door and turned on the light so I could see her more clearly. Even my sudden movement failed to disturb her. Readily and obediently, not like a servant now, but in the manner of a woman acceding to the desires of the one man entitled to demand anything of her, she turned to one side toward the light so I might examine her more closely. She stood there in the lamplight. It was as if she were saying: “There you are, take a good look. This is me. I know I am beautiful. Look as hard as you want, take your time. You will remember this face even on your deathbed.” So she stood there calm, immobile, her bundle in her hand, like an artist’s model, silent and willing.

And I carried on gazing at her.

I don’t know whether you got a decent look at her just now. I alerted you too late. You only saw her body. She is as tall as I am. Her height is in perfect proportion to the rest of her. She is neither fat nor thin, but exactly as she was at the age of fifteen. She has never put on weight, nor ever lost any. You know, there are powerful inner laws that govern the way these things balance out. It was as though her metabolism burned at a constant, steady flame. I looked into her face and found myself blinking at the beauty of it, like someone who had lived for many years in a fog and suddenly found himself in bright sunlight. You couldn’t see her face just now. But she has been wearing a mask for a long time anyway, a cosmopolitan mask made up of mascara, paints, and powders, false eyes emphasized with eye shadow and a false mouth drawn on with lipstick. But then, in that first startled moment, her face was still new and unscarred, untouched, direct from the Maker’s hand. The touch of her Creator was still fresh on her cheeks. Her face was heart shaped, beautifully proportioned. Each part of it echoed the other to perfection. Her eyes were black, a special kind of black, you know, as if there were a touch of dark blue in it. Her hair was blue-black, too. And one could immediately tell her body was as well proportioned and quite certain of itself. That was why she could stand in front of me with such poise. She had emerged out of anonymity, out of the depths, out of the vast crowd, arriving with something extraordinary: proportion, assurance, and beauty. Of course I was only faintly aware of all this. She was no longer a child, but was not quite a woman yet, either. Her body had developed but her soul was just waking. I have never met a woman since so absolutely certain of her own body, of the power of her body, as Judit Áldozó was then.

She was wearing cheap city clothes, black shoes with low heels. Everything about her was so consciously and modestly assembled. She was like a peasant girl who had dressed for town and didn’t want to be put to shame by city girls. I looked at her hands. I was hoping to find something unattractive in them. I hoped to find stubby fingers and palms rough and red from agricultural work. But her hands were white, her fingers long and graceful. Those hands had not been broken by labor. Later I discovered she had been spoiled at home, that her mother never put her to hard manual work.

There she stood, content to have me gaze at her under the bright lights. She looked directly into my eyes with a simple curiosity. There was nothing flirtatious about her, neither her eyes nor her posture. There was no invitation. She was not a little tart who finds herself in the big city and makes eyes at young gentlemen hoping to ingratiate herself to them. No, she was a woman willing to look a man in the eye because she thinks she might have something in common with him. But she didn’t overdo it, not then nor later. The relationship between us was never a fixed one of necessity for her. When I could no longer eat, sleep, and work without her, when she had got under my skin and penetrated my reflexes like a fatal poison, she remained calm and perfectly self-possessed, irrespective of whether she came or went. You think she didn’t love me? … I too thought so for a while. But I don’t want to judge her too harshly. She loved me, but in a different way, in a more cautious, more practical, more grounded sort of way. That, after all, was what the situation allowed. That’s what made her a working woman, and me a middle-class boy. That’s what I wanted to tell you.

And then what happened? Nothing, old man. Phenomena like my time under the spell of Judit Áldozó are not to be explained in terms of “events,” the way things happen in novels or plays. The key events of our lives take place in time, in other words, over a period, very slowly. They hardly appear to be events at all. People go on living … that is the nature of events, of any act of importance to us. I can’t tell you that Judit Áldozó appeared in our house one day and that the next day, or six months later, this or that other thing happened. I can’t even claim that as soon as I saw her that first time I was immediately consumed by a passion that deprived me of both sleep and appetite, that left me dreaming of a stranger, a peasant girl, who now lived in close proximity to me, who entered my room on a daily basis, whose conduct was ever the same, who answered any question I put to her, who lived and matured the way a tree does, who conveyed any information of importance in her own characteristically simple and surprising manner, who trod the same earth and breathed the same air as I did … Yes, it was all as I describe it, but none of these conditions constitutes an event. In fact, for a long time, there were simply no events.

Nevertheless I recall that initial period in keen detail. The girl did not hold a particularly important position in our household and I rarely saw her. My mother trained her to be a housemaid, but she was not to serve us at the table, because she knew nothing of our family rituals. She tended to trail after the servant as he was cleaning, like a clown in a circus imitating the main act. I would occasionally bump into her on the stairs or in the drawing room; sometimes she even came to my room and greeted me, stopping on the threshold to deliver some message. I should have said that I was thirty-two years old when Judit Áldozó joined us. Thirty-two years old, and an independent adult in many respects. I was a partner in the factory, and my father, albeit carefully, was training me to stand on my own feet. I had a substantial income, but I did not move out of the family home. I lived on a separate floor, in two rooms. I had my own personal door. In the evenings, if I had no other business, I would dine with my parents. I tell you all this to show I had few opportunities to meet the girl. And yet, from the moment she first entered the house and I spotted her in the hall, a certain tension existed between us, a quite unambiguous tension.

She always looked me straight in the eye. It was as if she were always asking me a question. She was not some house-trained domestic kitten, not an innocent fresh from the village, the kind who lowers her eyes when meeting the young master of the house. She did not blush or preen. Whenever we met, she would stand a moment as if someone had touched her. Just like the moment when I turned on the light to see her better that first time, where she obediently turned her face so I could see it better. She looked straight into my eyes, but in such a strange way … not in a challenging manner, nor inviting, but seriously, quite solemnly, her eyes wide open as if she had asked me something. She was always looking at me with those wide-open, questioning eyes. It was always the same question. There is a fundamental question in all of creation, said Lázár, a question that lies at the very root of consciousness: it is the question “Why?” It was the same question Judit Áldozó was asking me. Why am I living; what is the meaning of it all? … It did sort of come down to this. The only odd thing was that it happened to be me that she was putting the question to.

And because she was terrifyingly beautiful, full of dignity, and utterly complete in her virginal fierceness, like a masterpiece of creation, a unique, perfect specimen of which only a single design and prototype existed, her beauty did, of course, exercise an influence in our house, in our lives, constituting an insistent, silent, uninterrupted music. Beauty is probably a form of energy, the way heat, or light, or sheer willpower are forms of energy. Nowadays I am starting to think there is something constructed about it — not in terms of cosmetics, of course, since I have no great respect for beauty artificially arrived at, something pinched and poked into existence, the way people pamper animals. No, there is something behind beauty, which is, after all, compounded of fragile, mortal matter that suggests a fierce will. It takes the heart and all the other organs, intelligence and instinct, bearing and clothing, to bind together the fortunate, miraculous formula that makes up the compound that ultimately leads to and has the effect of beauty. As I said, I was thirty-two years old.

I can tell from your expression that you are asking the age-old, worldly-wise male question “What was the problem?” Isn’t it the simplest thing for a man to follow his instincts and inclinations? A thirty-two-year-old man is, after all, aware of the facts of life. He knows that there is no woman he may not bed providing she is free, that there is no other man in her heart and thoughts, that there is no physical issue or matter of culture between them, and that they have the opportunity of meeting and getting to know each other. It’s true. I myself knew it was true, and frequently put that knowledge to use. Like any man of my age whose appearance is not altogether repulsive and is, on top of that, possessed of means, I met many women who made themselves available to me, nor did I refuse their offers. A man of promise is as much the center of attention as an attractive woman. It’s not a matter of personality: women too get lonely, have desires, and want affection and entertainment: every European capital has a surplus of women, and, well, I was neither ugly nor stupid. I lived a life of refined gentility, and it was generally known that I was rich. What with all this, I did exactly as any other man in my position would. I am sure that, following the preoccupations and confusions of the first few weeks, one kind word would have tamed her and inclined her affections to me. But I never did say that kind word. From my point of view, this familiarity, if the presence of a young servant in one’s parental home might be regarded as familiarity, roused my suspicions, and presented a danger. It became mysterious and exciting only once I realized that it was not as a lover I desired her, not as someone to bed, like all the others before, that I was not interested in purchasing and consuming fifty kilos of human flesh. No. So what did I want? It took me some time to find out. I didn’t bother her, because I was hoping for something from her. Expecting something. Not a brief thrill. But what, then? The answer to a question I had been asking all my life, that’s what.

In the meantime we carried on in our usual ways, as befitted us. Naturally, I even considered removing this girl from our family circle, educating her, establishing a healthier relationship with her, buying her an apartment, taking her as a lover, and going on like that as best we could. Mind you, I have to tell you that this occurred to me only much later — years after, in fact. And it was too late then — by that time the woman was aware of her power, was highly capable and altogether stronger. That’s when I fled from her. In the first few years I simply felt something stirring at home. I’d return in the evening to a deep silence, silence and order, as in a monastery. I’d go up to my apartment, where the servant had prepared everything perfectly for the night, some cold orange juice in a thermos flask, my reading matter, and cigarettes. I had always had a big vase of flowers on my writing desk. My clothes, my books, my ornaments, everything was just where it ought to be. I’d stand still and listen. The room was warm. I wasn’t always thinking of the girl, of course; I didn’t always feel compelled to consider that she was nearby, sleeping somewhere in the servants’ quarters. A year passed, and then another: I simply felt there was some meaning to the house. All I knew was that Judit Áldozó lived there and that she was very beautiful. Everyone recognized that. The servant later had to be dismissed, as did the cook, a lonely, older woman, because she had fallen in love with Judit and had no other way of expressing her love but by grumbling and quarreling. Not that anyone ever said as much. Maybe only my mother knew the truth, but if so, she kept it to herself. Afterwards I puzzled for ages about her silence. My mother was an intuitive woman and had plenty of experience: she knew everything without having to say it. No one else in the household knew about the secret passion of the servant and the cook, only my mother, who, I am sure, had no special experience of love, nor understood such perverse and hopeless desires as the old cook had for Judit; maybe she never even read about such things. But she understood reality: she recognized truth. She herself was an older woman by then: she knew everything and marveled at nothing. She even knew that Judit presented a danger in the house, danger not only to the servant and the cook … She knew she presented a danger to everyone who lived in the house. Not my father, though, because Father was old and sick by then, and in any case they did not love each other. My mother did, however, love me, and later I wondered why, when she knew everything, she hadn’t got rid of the source of danger in time. A whole life had gone by, or almost vanished, before I finally understood.

Lean closer. Just between us, the truth is, my mother welcomed this danger. She might well have feared that I faced a danger that was greater still. Can you guess what danger that might be? Not a clue? The danger of loneliness, of the terrifying loneliness that constituted our lives, the lives of my mother and father, the loneliness of the whole triumphant, successful, ritual-observing class we belonged to. There is a certain human process that is more to be feared, that is worse than anything … It’s the process whereby we become cut off from each other, when we become little more than machines. We live according to stern domestic codes, work to an even stricter code of duty, surrounded by a social order governed by a thoroughgoing strictness that produces orderly forms of amusements, preferences, and affections, so our entire lives become predictable, knowing what time to dress, to take breakfast, to go to work, to make love, to be entertained, to engage in social refinements. There is order everywhere, a mad order. And in the grip of that order life freezes about us, as around an expedition that is prepared for a long journey to lush shores, but finds both sea and land icebound, so that eventually there is no plan, no desire, just cold and immobility. And cold and immobility are the definition of death. It’s a slow, irresistible process. One day a family’s entire life turns to consommé. Everything becomes important, every least detail, but they can’t see anything of the whole and lose contact with life itself … They take such care in dressing in the morning and for the evening you’d think they were preparing for some dangerous ceremony like going to a funeral or a wedding, or to a court to be sentenced. They maintain their social contacts, have guests over, but behind it all looms the specter of loneliness. And while there is a sense of waiting or expectation behind the loneliness, something for heart and soul to hold on to, life remains tolerable and they go on living … not well, not as human beings should, but there is at least a reason to wind up the mechanism of one’s life in the morning and to let it tick on into night.

Because hope persists for a long time. People are very reluctant to resign themselves to lack of hope, to the thought of being alone; mortally, hopelessly alone. Very few can live with the knowledge that there is no end to loneliness. They carry on hoping, snatching at things, taking refuge in relationships to which they bring no genuine passion, to which they cannot surrender and so take recourse to distractions, to giving themselves artificial tasks, feverishly working or traveling with grand itineraries, or investing in big houses, buying the affections of women with whom they have nothing in common, becoming collectors of ornamental fans, or precious stones, or rare beetles. But none of this is of the least help. And they know perfectly well, even as they are doing these things, that they don’t help. And yet they carry on hoping. By that time, they themselves have no idea what it is they have invested their hopes in. They are fully aware that more money, a more complete collection of beetles, a new lover, an interesting circle of friends, and garden parties even more splendid than your neighbors’, none of them help … That is why, first and foremost, in the midst of their suffering and confusion, they are desperate to maintain order. Their every waking moment is spent in ordering their lives. They are continually “making arrangements”—seeing to some contract or attending some social event, or making a sexual assignation … As long as they are not alone, not for a second! As long as they never have to catch a glimpse of their own loneliness! Quick, bring on company! Fetch the dogs! Hang those tapestries! Buy those shares, or those antiques! Get a new lover! Quick, before the loneliness has to be faced.

That’s how they live. It’s how we lived. We took a great deal of trouble dressing. By the time he was fifty my father dressed with as much care as a church elder or a Catholic priest preparing for mass. His servant knew his habits to a T and by dawn had prepared his suit, his shoes, and his tie as if he were a sacristan. It was all because my father — by no means a vain man and never too particular about his appearance before — resolved to be dignified in his old age and, from that moment on, decided to pay minute attention to his clothes, with not a speck of dust on his sleeve, not one unwonted crease in his trousers, not one stain or crinkle on his shirt or his collar, his tie perfectly knotted … yes, just like a priest dressed for mass, as careful as that. And then, having dressed, the second ritual of the day began: breakfast. Then the car waiting to take him somewhere, the reading of the papers, the mail, the office, the efficient and respectful clerks rendering accounts, the meetings with business contacts, the club and the social round … and all this conducted with such constant close attention to detail, such anxious care, it was as if there were someone watching all this, someone to whom he himself had to render accounts of every part of his sacred duties. That is what my mother feared. Because behind all this ritual, this dressing up, this tapestry collecting and club calling, behind the socializing and entertaining, the terror of loneliness had raised its head like an iceberg in a warming sea. Loneliness, you know, tends to appear in certain modes of individual and social life like an illness in an exhausted body. It’s the kind of condition that doesn’t suddenly leap to attention. The real crises — sickness, breakups, the terminal things — don’t just turn up to be announced or established or noticed at any particular hour of any particular day. By the time we have noticed them, those decisive moments of our lives, they are usually already past, and there is nothing left for us to do but accept them and send for the lawyer or the doctor or the priest. Loneliness is a form of sickness. Or, more precisely, not a form of sickness, but a condition in which whoever is fated to suffer it finds himself displayed in a cage like a stuffed animal. No: sickness is the process that precedes loneliness, a process I’d compare to slowly freezing over. My mother wanted to save me from that.

Life, you know, becomes increasingly mechanical. Things chill down. The rooms are as well heated as ever they were, your temperature remains normal, your blood pressure is exactly as it was, you still have money in the bank or in your business. Once a week you go to the opera or to the theater, preferably where they are playing something cheerful. You eat light meals at the restaurant; you mix your wine with sparkling water because you have taken note of all the healthy advice. Life presents no problems. Your local doctor — that is if he is only a good doctor not a true one; the two are not the same — shakes your hand after the half-yearly checkup and says you’re fine. But if he is a true doctor — that is to say, a doctor bred in the bone, in the way a pelican is nothing but a pelican and a general is a general even when he is not engaged in a battle and is simply trimming his hedge or doing the crossword — if he is a doctor of this sort, he will not be satisfied with shaking your hand after the half-yearly examination, because despite the fact that your heart, your lungs, your kidneys and liver are all in perfect working order, he recognizes your life is not so, and can sense the chill of loneliness as it works through you, exactly the way a ship’s delicate instruments can detect the mortal danger of the approaching iceberg even in warm waters. I can’t think of another analogy, that’s why I return to the iceberg. But maybe I could just add that the chill is of the kind you feel in the summer, in houses emptied of occupants who have departed for their holidays, having sprinkled camphor here and there and wrapped their furs and carpets up in newspapers, while outside it is summer, scorching hot summer, and behind the closed shutters the lonely furniture and the shadowed walls have soaked up all the cold and loneliness that even inanimate objects register, that everyone feels is there, that all who are lonely, objects as well as people, breathe in and radiate.

People remain alone because they are proud and will not dare accept love’s slightly jealous offerings; because they are fulfilling a role that seems more important than love; because they are vain; because every proper member of the bourgeoisie, everyone who is truly bourgeois — that is to say, a solid respectable citizen — is vain. I don’t mean the petit bourgeois, people who regard themselves as respectable because they have money or because somehow or other they find themselves socially elevated to some position of rank. They are just churls in bourgeois dress. I mean the creative guardians of that proper and respectable class, the truly solid bourgeoisie.

There comes a time when loneliness begins to crystallize around them. They begin to feel the cold. Then they turn ceremonial, become artifacts like Chinese vases or Renaissance tables. They turn to ceremony, start to collect stupid, pointless titles and distinctions, do everything they possibly can to achieve dignity and grace, filling their days with all kinds of complicated affairs in order to earn a medal or ribbon or a new title, such as vice president, or president, or honorary president, of this, that, or the other. That is what loneliness means, the being there. Happy people have no history, we are taught; happy people have neither rank nor title, no superfluous role in the world.

That’s why mother feared for me. Maybe that is why she tolerated Judit Áldozó in the house even after she noticed the danger her whole being radiated. As I said, nothing “happened” … I might qualify that by saying, “regrettably” nothing happened. It was just that three years went by. Then one evening, at Christmas, I was on my way home from work and decided to call in on my then lover, a singer, who was alone at home that afternoon in the lovely, warm, and boring apartment I had fitted out for her, and I gave her a present that was as lovely and as boring as she, the singer, was, and indeed as all the other lovers and apartments and presents that I had frittered away my time with had been. But as I was saying, I came home, because the family was to dine at my place that evening. And then it happened. I entered the drawing room. The Christmas tree was on the piano, fully decorated and sparkling, otherwise the light was dim, and there was Judit Áldozó kneeling in front of the fire.

It was Christmas, the afternoon, and being in my parents’ place, in the hours before the Christmas Eve dinner, I felt tense and alone. I also knew that this is how it would always be from now on, for the rest of my life, unless something miraculous happened. At Christmas, you know, one always tends to entertain a faint belief in miracles, not just you and I, but the whole world, all humanity as they say, for that, after all, is why we have festivals, because without miracles we cannot live. This afternoon had, of course, been preceded by many other such afternoons and evenings and mornings, days when I had seen Judit Áldozó without feeling anything unusual. If you live by the sea you are not always thinking that you could sail to India, or that you could drown yourself in it. Most of the time you just live there, read, and go in for a swim. But that afternoon I stood in the dimly lit room and gazed at Judit. She was wearing her black housemaid’s uniform, just as I was wearing my gray industrialist’s suit, preparing to go to my room and put on my black dinner suit evening uniform. That afternoon I stood in the twilit room, looked at the Christmas tree, the kneeling female figure, and suddenly understood all that had happened in the last three years. I understood that the decisive events of our lives are moments of stillness and silence, and that behind the visible, sensible events there lies another level, where something lazy is slumbering, a sleeping monster lodged under the sea or deep in the forest, in the heart of man, a dozy monster, some primeval creature, that rarely shifts itself, that yawns and stretches but rarely reaches for anything, and that this too is you, this monster, this otherness. And that there is a kind of order under the commonplace events in life, the kind you find in music or mathematics … a slightly romantic kind of order. Is that so hard to understand? It’s how I felt. As I said before, I am an artist without a medium, a musician without an instrument.

The girl was arranging the kindling in the grate and felt me standing behind her, watching her, but she did not move. She did not turn to face me. She knelt and bent forward, a position that registers, that means something emotionally. A woman kneeling and bending forward, even when she is working, cannot but register as a sentimental phenomenon. I couldn’t help laughing. But it wasn’t a frivolous laughter, simply good-natured, like someone rejoicing that even in those overwhelming, decisive, crucial moments we can’t forget that there remains in us and in our relationships with each other a kind of vulgar humanity, a sort of stumbling awkwardness associated with grand passions and feelings of pathos brought on by certain movements of the body, such as, for example, those of that woman kneeling in that dimly lit room. I know it’s regrettable. Ridiculous. But great and powerful feelings that are part of the world’s self-renewing energy, to whose workings every living being is a slave or a cog in the machine, must always be combined with the ridiculous in order to become the dazzling phenomena they are. That was another thought that occurred to me in that moment. And, naturally, I recognized not only the feeling that I desired this body, but also the tension and apprehension of the fact that this was fated to be, that while there was something low and contemptible in this fact, it was, nevertheless, a fact: that the truth was that I desired her. It was no less true that it wasn’t her body alone I desired, the body that was just now displaying itself in this almost buffoonish manner, but that which lay beneath the body, her condition, her feelings, her secrets. And because, like many wealthy and relatively idle young men now, I had spent a great deal of my time among women, I was also aware that there are no permanent or long-lasting sentimental arrangements between men and women; that sentimental moments renew themselves from within and when they vanish, they vanish into thin air due to habitual proximity and indifference. I understood that this lovely body, that solid rump, that slender waist, the broad yet proportionate shoulders, that charming, slightly bent neck with its chestnut-colored down, and those fleshy, pleasantly formed legs, this female body, was not the most beautiful in the world, and that I myself had known, taken possession of, and carried into bed, bodies better proportioned, lovelier, and more exciting than hers — but that this wasn’t the point. I understood equally well that the ebb and flow of desire and satisfaction, of longing and nausea, were constantly at work in people, attracting and repelling them, and that there was no answer to it, no peace to be found. I understood all this, though not as clearly or with as much certainty as I do now, being older. It may be that I maintained some hope, some hope at the bottom of my heart, that there would be a body, one single, unique body, that would move in perfect harmony with mine, that would succeed in quenching the thirst of desire and the nausea of satisfaction and result in a condition of relative peace, in an idyll that people generally refer to as happiness. But I wasn’t to know at that age that there’s no such thing in real life.

In real life it does happen, though rarely, that the tension of desire and the succeeding nausea is not followed by an equivalent dose of inward self-monitoring, the depression of satisfaction. There are also people who are like pigs, to whom it’s all the same: desire and satisfaction all occur on some indifferent plane of being for them. Maybe they are the satisfied ones. I do not desire that kind of satisfaction. As I say, I didn’t know all this for certain back then: I might have hoped a little, and I certainly looked down on myself a little, laughed at the whole situation and the feelings associated with it, the feelings that were so strongly associated with that ridiculous situation. There was much I didn’t know then, and I had no inkling that there was little ridiculous about situations where our physical and psychological conditions yield to a relationship with another person. I had no idea about that.

I addressed the girl. I can’t remember what I said now, but I can see the whole scene as clearly as if someone had filmed it all on 16mm for a family movie, the kind of record that sentimental people make of a honeymoon, or the first steps of a toddler …

This is what I see: Judit slowly gets to her feet, draws a handkerchief from the pocket of her apron, and wipes her hands clear of ashes and wood dust. I see this with pinpoint clarity. Then we immediately start talking, in low voices, quickly, as if afraid that someone might step into the room. We are conspirators, thief and accomplice.

There’s something I have to say to you now. I’d like to tell it, honestly, exactly as it was, and as I am sure you will understand, this won’t be easy. Because what I am about tell you is not a dirty story, old man, not the story of a seduction — oh, no. My story is somewhat darker than that, and is only mine insofar as I am the chief actor in it. The fact is, there were greater powers exerting pressure on us, greater powers pressing through us.

As I was saying, our voices were low. That’s quite natural when you think about it: I was the master, she the servant, and our conversation was confidential in a house where she was part of the staff. What we were talking about was private and of great importance, and someone really could have walked in at any moment — my mother, or perhaps the servant who wanted Judit for himself. Both the situation and my natural tact dictated that we should talk in low voices. She too felt this, of course, and knew she had to whisper.

But I felt something else too. I felt it from the moment we started talking. I felt there was something else going on here. This wasn’t just a case of a man talking to a woman he finds attractive, someone from whom he wants something, someone he wants to possess for his pleasure. It wasn’t even that I was in love with this firm-bodied, beautiful young woman, or that I was crazy for her, dripping with lust; that the blood had so rushed to my head that I would have tried anything, including force, to get her, to possess her, to make her mine. All this is pretty tedious, I know. It happens in every man’s life, and not just once. Sexual hunger can, as you know, be as agonizing and as relentless as the hunger for food. No, there was another reason for all this whispering. I had never before felt the need to be so on my guard, you know. Because I wasn’t speaking only about my own affairs; it was a direct encounter with another person, as a person. It was why I had to keep my voice down. It was serious stuff, more serious than a romantic tale about a young gentleman and some pretty young domestic. Because when the woman stood up and, without the least sign of having been flustered, started wiping her hands down and looking me in the eye with deep attention, with those big round eyes of hers — she was already in her evening uniform, in a black dress with white apron and white cap, and looked just like the housemaid in an operetta, laughably so — I felt that the relationship I was offering was based, not only on desire, but, first and foremost, on a kind of conspiracy against somebody or something. And she too felt it. We immediately started speaking about what concerned us. There was no preamble, no beating about the bush. We spoke, almost exactly, as you might expect two conspirators to speak in a palace or some important office where valuable documents and secret papers are stored. One is an employee of the office, the other a visitor, and now, at last, they have finally found a couple of minutes to discuss their joint venture. They talk in whispers, as though they were talking about something else. They are both very excited, but one still behaves as though she were simply going about her work while the other behaves as though he just happened to be passing through the room and had hesitated for a word. They don’t have much time. At any moment the boss or some nosy official might enter, and if seen together, both might immediately arouse curiosity and their plot be discovered. That’s why we went straight to the point, and why Judit Áldozó stole the occasional glance at the fire, because the larger bits of wood were damp and did not immediately catch light. So she knelt before the fire again and I knelt down by her side and helped her adjust the yellow copper andirons and made sure the fire was properly lit. But all the time I was talking.

What did I say to her? Wait a moment, I need a cigarette. No, I won’t bother. I don’t tend to count my cigarettes this time of day. In any case a lot of this is not particularly important.

But then, it seemed to me, everything was distinctly important, everything I said, and everything that might result from it. I had no time to court her or woo her. It was all beside the point, anyway. I simply said I would like to live with her. My declaration did not surprise her. She calmly heard me out, then looked directly at me with a solemn look on her face, without any sense of astonishment. Afterwards I felt she was weighing me up, as if wanting to calculate my strength, the way a peasant girl will size up a local lad showing off in front of her, telling her he can lift this or that heavy object, a full sack of wheat, that sort of thing. It was not my muscles she was weighing up, but my soul. As I say, now, in retrospect, I feel there may have been something mocking in her examination of me, a silent, gentle mocking, as if she were saying: “You’re not all that strong. You’ll need greater strength if you want to live with me. I’d break your back.” That’s what I read in her look. I felt it, so I spoke a little faster and still more quietly. I told her that it would be very difficult, because the situation was impossible, my father would never agree to the marriage, and there were likely to be all sorts of other problems too. For example, I said, it was likely that such a marriage would lead to serious tensions between myself and my family as well as the world beyond, and that, if we were being honest, we could not entirely ignore the world of which we were a part, the world that had made us what we were. And it was likely that such tensions, starting, as it were, from such a point of weakness, would sooner or later have a bad effect on the relationship between us, too. I told her I had seen this kind of thing before. I had known people of my own social rank who had married below them, and that these marriages always turned out for the worse. I spouted rubbish like that. Of course I meant it seriously, speaking not out of fear, just wanting to be straight with her. And, understanding that I was being honest, she looked at me earnestly and made a gesture to let me know she thought as I did. It was as if she were encouraging me to look for more reasons that would immediately make it clear how impossible, how hopeless the idea was: she wanted me to go on arguing as convincingly as possible that it was quite insane. And I, for my part, carried on finding such reasons. She did not say a word, not a single word, or, to be precise, she only spoke once I had finished, and even then very briefly. She let me speak. I myself don’t understand how, but I spoke for an hour and a half, there by the fireplace, while all the time she remained in that kneeling position, me sitting beside her in the low armchair, the English leather one. I stared into the fire while talking: no one came in, no one disturbed us. There is a kind of hidden order in life, the way a situation arises in a man’s life just at the point when something has to be decided or done, so circumstance conspires to bring it about: places, objects, the people closest to hand, all unconsciously combine to produce the moment. No one disturbed us. It was already evening. My father had arrived home, and they would certainly have been looking for Judit to arrange the dishes and cutlery in preparation for supper. We were all used to dressing for the evening meal, but no one disturbed us. Later I understood that this was not as extraordinary as you might think. Life arranges everything to perfection when it wants to put on a show.

In that hour and a half, for the first time in my life, I felt as though I were speaking frankly and directly to someone. I told her I wanted to live with her; that I suspected, but did not know for sure, that I couldn’t marry her. The vital thing, I said, was to live together. I asked her if she remembered meeting me the first time she entered our house. She said nothing, only nodded to indicate that she did. She looked extraordinarily beautiful in the low-lit room as she knelt by the fire in the flickering red light, her hair sparkling, her head bent slightly to one side on that slender neck as she listened to me, poker in hand. She was very beautiful, very much part of my life. I told her she should leave the house, resign, give some excuse, then go home and wait for me somewhere, and that in a few days I’d settle what business I had in hand, then we could go off to Italy together, and stay there, maybe for years. I asked her if she wanted to see Italy … She didn’t say anything, but silently indicated that she did not. Quite likely she didn’t understand the question: it was as if I had asked her whether she wanted to see Henry IV. She didn’t understand. But she did listen very closely. She kept her eyes on the fire, kneeling straight-backed, like a penitent, so close to me I had only to stretch out my hand to touch her. I did in fact take her hand, but she withdrew it, not in a flirtatious manner, not as though she were offended, just as a perfectly natural, simple form of rejection, with the slightest movement, as if wishing to correct something I had said. I saw for the first time then that she was, in her own way, an aristocrat through and through, that her natural nobility was part of the fabric. It surprised me, but at the same time I immediately accepted it. By that time I knew it was not rank, not the privilege of birth that divided people, but character and intelligence. She knelt in front of the fireplace in the pale red light, like a princess, willowy, at ease, not haughty but not humble either, without betraying a trace of confusion, without the merest tremor of her eyelids, as though this conversation were the most natural thing in the world. And there above her rose the Christmas tree. Well, you know, when I thought about this later I couldn’t help laughing, though it was a rather dry laugh, I can tell you … Judit beneath the Christmas tree, like some strange, incomprehensible gift.

And because she said nothing all this time, I myself eventually fell silent. She hadn’t answered me when I asked her if she wanted to live with me, nor when I asked if she wanted to come to Italy with me and stay, perhaps for years. And because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and because, when it came down to it, having spoken to her and tried everything, like a buyer putting an offer to a stubborn vendor, making a low offer first, then, on seeing the other is resolute and seeing the deal stalling, offering the entire asking price, I asked her if she would be my wife.

She did answer this.

Not immediately, true. Her first response was unexpected. She looked at me angrily, almost with hatred. I could see some great emotion passing through her entire body like a terrible cramp. She began to shake: she was kneeling in front of me, shaking. She hung the poker back on its hook next to the bellows. She crossed her arms across her chest. She looked like a young novice ordered to kneel by some severe teacher. She stared into the fire with a fierce solemnity, her expression clearly tortured. Then she stood up, smoothed her front, and said simply:

“No.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you are a coward,” she said, and gave me a long look, examining me head to foot. Then she left the room.

Your very good health!

So that’s how it began. Then I went out. The shops were already closing, people were hurrying home with Christmas parcels under their arms. I stopped at a little jeweler’s selling cheap little trinkets. I bought a gold locket — you know, one of these cheap bits of tat in which women keep the pictures of their dead or current lovers. I found an identity card with a photo in my wallet, a season ticket of some sort that had just expired, tore off the photo, put it in the locket, and asked the man to wrap it up exactly like a normal present. When I got home, Judit opened the door. I pressed the parcel into her hand. Soon after that I went away, not returning home for years, and it was only much later I found out she had been wearing the locket round her neck on a piece of lilac ribbon ever since then, never removing it, only when washing or when she needed a new ribbon.

After that, everything went on as though nothing had happened that fateful Christmas afternoon, as if we had never had such a conversation. Judit served us at table that evening, together with the servant, as usual. Naturally I knew by then that I had been in a delirious state that afternoon. I knew it in exactly the same way madmen know when they are in a fury, beating their heads against the wall, wrestling with their nurses, or removing their own teeth at night with a rusted nail: they know as they are doing these things that even as they are frothing at the mouth and doing them, they are engaged in shameful acts deeply unworthy of themselves and of society. They know this not only after the event, when the fury has left them, but in the very act of doing those crazy, hurtful things. I too knew it even as I was sitting by the fire that afternoon, knew that what I was saying and planning was sheer madness for a man in my position. Later I always thought of it as a kind of fit, losing control and willpower, my nerves and all the organs of sense, working autonomously. The critical and moderating faculties go numb at moments like that. I am absolutely sure that what I experienced that Christmas Day afternoon under the Christmas tree was a nervous breakdown, the only serious nervous breakdown of my entire life. Judit knew it too; that was why she listened so intently, as if she were one member of the family noticing the signs of breakdown in another. Of course she knew something else too: she knew and understood the cause of the breakdown. If any member of the family had been listening to me that afternoon — it needn’t have been a member of the family, a stranger would have done — they would immediately have sent for the doctor.

All this came as a surprise to me, because I normally gave everything proper consideration. Maybe a little too much consideration. Maybe that is what had been missing in my way of life: the ability to make sudden decisions, or spontaneity, as they call it. I never did anything just because an idea had occurred to me; never acted on the spur of the moment simply because of a rush of feeling, because an opportunity presented itself or because someone demanded it of me. In the factory and the office I was known as a man of considered judgment, someone who’d think things over slowly and carefully before making an important decision. So I was more surprised than anyone else that I was having this breakdown, because I knew, even as I was talking, that I was talking nonsense, and that nothing would be as I planned it, that I should have done it all differently, been subtler, more careful, or more forceful. You know, till that moment, I had pursued love according to the law of cash-and-carry, like the Americans in wartime: you pay, you take away … That was how I thought it was supposed to go. It wasn’t the most high-minded kind of thinking, but it was, if nothing else, healthily selfish. This time, though, I had neither paid for nor taken away the thing I desired, but had allowed myself to plead and prevaricate, in a quite hopeless fashion, in a situation that was undoubtedly humiliating for me.

There’s no explaining delirium. Everyone is seized by it at least once in life … and it may be that life is much poorer if it never once grips us and batters us like a storm, if our foundations are never once shaken by it, so the earth does not shake and the roof tiles all stay on, if its howling fury never once blows away everything that reason and character had kept in order. That’s what happened to me … You ask me if I regret it? No, I answer, I don’t regret it. But I wouldn’t exactly say it gave meaning to my life. It was just something that happened, like a bout of sickness, and once someone gets over a heavy bout of it, it is best to send him abroad to recover. That’s exactly what I did. Such traveling is, of course, a form of escape. But before I went away I wanted to be sure of something, so I asked my friend Lázár, the writer, to invite her over just once, so that he could see her and talk with her, and prevailed on Judit to accept the invitation. I know now that she was right, that I was a coward, and that that is why I did what I did. It was like sending her to the doctor, you see, so that he might examine her and declare her healthy … After all, she was in some ways like someone I might pick up in the street and include in my field of operations, as they have it in the military. She heard me out, disapprovingly, but did as I asked, without protest. She was sullen and certainly insulted. It was as if she had said: “Fine, I’ll go to the doctor if you insist and subject myself to an examination.” But go she did.

Yes, Lázár. It was a strange relationship between us.

We were contemporaries, school friends. He was already thirty-five by the time fame caught up with him: before that he was practically unknown. He used to write odd little articles for hopeless magazines in a tone that made me think he was laughing at his readers, that he had an endless contempt for the whole enterprise, for writing, for publication, for the reader, and for criticism. You could never work out what he really thought about anything. What did he write about? About the sea, about some old book, about some character, everything brief, no more than two or three pages in some magazine that appeared in an edition of no more than a few hundred, a thousand at most. These pieces were so personal you might have thought they were written in the private language of some strange tribe observing the world or what lay behind the world. This tribe — or so I felt when I first read his writing — was one of those vanishing tribes of which only a few members remained to speak the language, the mother tongue of Lázár’s articles. Apart from that he spoke and wrote a calm, passionless, beautiful Hungarian, pure and regular. He used to say to me that he read the works of the great nineteenth-century poet János Arany first thing at morning and last thing at night, the way a man might brush his teeth. But what he wrote was a kind of news from his other country.

And then, suddenly, he was famous. Why? It was impossible to explain. Hands reached out for him, he was in demand, first in literary salons, then on platforms in public debates, then in the press — you saw his name everywhere. People started imitating him: papers and journals were full of Lázár-style books and articles, none of them written by him and yet of all of which he was the hidden author. Then, even more surprisingly, the general public too began to take an interest in him, which was something no one understood, since his writing contained nothing that might amuse or console or delight people: he never seemed to be trying to establish any contact with his readers. But they forgave him that too. Within a few years he occupied the leading position in the peculiar competition that constitutes the worldly side of intellectual existence: his work was constantly discussed, his texts analyzed and picked over as though they were ancient Oriental manuscripts, subjects for high scholarship. None of this changed him. Once, at one particularly successful moment, I asked him what he felt. Didn’t the sheer noise around him offend his ears? For, naturally enough, there were critical voices too, jealous voices screaming at him, full of hatred and false accusation. But all this cry and countercry merged into a single sea of sound, out of which his name rose, sharp and clear, like the sound of the first violin in the orchestra. He heard my question through and turned it over in his mind. Then he replied most solemnly: “It’s the revenge of the writer.” That was all he said.

I knew something about him that others didn’t know: I knew he loved to play. Everything was play to him: people, situations, books, the mysterious phenomenon generally referred to as literature. Once, when I accused him of this, he shrugged and said that the deep secret at the core of art, in the artist himself, was the embodying of an instinct for play. And literature? I asked. Literature is, after all, more than that, literature offers answers and moral values … He heard me through as seriously and courteously as ever, and replied that this was true enough, but that the instinct that fuels human behavior is the instinct for play and that, in any case, the ultimate meaning of literature, as of religion, and, indeed, of all the arts, is form. He avoided my question. The mass of readers and critics naturally cannot know that a person can play just as solemnly with a kitten chasing a ball of wool in the sunshine as with a problem of knowledge or ethics, engaging with both with an equal inner detachment, concentrating entirely on the phenomenon or thought before him, giving his heart to neither. He was a player in that sense. People didn’t know this about him … And he was the witness, the observer in my life: it was something we often discussed, perfectly openly. Every man, you know, has someone who fulfills the role of defense lawyer, custodian, and judge, and at the same time his accomplice, in the mysterious and terrifying trial that is his life. That figure is his witness. He is someone who sees and understands perfectly. Everything you do is done partly with him in mind, so when you succeed at some venture you ask yourself: “Would he be convinced by it?” This witness hovers in the background throughout our entire life. He is not a comfortable playfellow in that sense. But there is nothing you can do to free yourself of him, and maybe you don’t even want to try.

Lázár, the writer, fulfilled that role in my life: it was with him I played the strange games of youth and adulthood, games that would have been incomprehensible to anyone else. He was the only one who knew, and of whom I alone knew, that it didn’t matter that the world regarded us as adults, as a serious industrialist, as a famous writer; that it was beside the point that women regarded us as excitable or melancholy or passionate examples of manhood … what really mattered was this capricious, brave, ruthless desire to play, which distorted and yet at the same time, at least for ourselves, lent beauty to the hollow, ritual theater of life.

Whenever we found ourselves together in society we were like two evil conspirators, understanding each other without secret signals, immediately engaging in our game.

There was a variety of games. We had our “Mr. Smith” game. Shall I explain it so you understand how it was with us? The rules of this game were that we had to go straight into it, without any warning, when we were in company — that is to say, in the company of various Mr. and Mrs. Smiths — so they should not suspect anything. So we would meet somewhere with others present, and immediately get started. What does one Mr. Smith say to the other Mr. Smith should they be speaking in company about, say, the recent collapse of the government, or the Danube flood that swept through entire neighborhoods, or the divorce of the famous actress, or the well-known politician caught with his hands in the public purse, or how the fellow caught up in that scandal shot himself at a well-known beauty spot? Mr. Smith would hem and haw and say, “Well, fancy that,” then go on to add some thumping commonplace, such as “Wet stuff, water!” or “If people will insist on putting their feet into water, they must expect to get wet!” Or something like “Well, it takes all sorts.” It’s what the Smiths have been saying since the dawn of time. When the train arrives they say, “It’s arrived.” Should the train stop in Füzesabony, they solemnly announce, “Ah, Füzesabony!” And they are always right. And maybe that is why the world is so hopeless, so dreadful beyond comprehension: it is because the clichés are always true, and only an artist or a genius has the gall to rap a cliché over the knuckles, to expose what is dead and against life in them, to show that, behind the truisms beloved of our respectable and matter-of-fact Mr. Smith, there lurks another truth, an eternal truth that stands the world on its head and sticks its tongue out at Füzesabony and is not a bit surprised when the morally bankrupt high official is discovered in a pink nightie by the security police, his body dangling from a window … If the subject happened to be a political debate, Lázár or I would answer Mr. Smith without hesitation, saying: “Well, as ever, one of them is right, but the other is not altogether wrong. Let’s give everyone a chance.” Lázár and I perfected the Mr. Smith game so that all the real-life Mr. Smiths never once noticed and carried on precisely as before.

Then there was the “In our day …” game, and that was pretty good too. Back in our day, you should know, everything was better: sugar was sweeter, water more fluid, the air more like proper air; women didn’t run around flinging themselves into men’s arms but spent the day paddling and bathing in the river, right till sunset, and even after the sun set they’d stay there paddling in the river. And when men saw a pile of banknotes in front of them, they didn’t try to grab it but pushed it away, declaring: “Go on, take it away, give it to the poor. Yes, sir, that’s what men and women were like in our day.” We played a lot of games like that …

This was the man to whom I sent Judit Áldozó so that he might give her the once-over. As I said, it was just like sending her to the doctor.

Judit called on Lázár in the afternoon. I met him in the evening. “Look,” he said. “What’s the point? The matter is already settled.” I listened to him with suspicion. I was afraid he was just playing another game. We were sitting in a city-center café, like the one we’re in now. He kept turning his cigarette holder — he always used long cigarette holders when smoking, because he was constantly suffering from nicotine poisoning, forever contemplating complex plans and inventions that would help humankind escape the painful consequences of this particular poison — gazing at me so earnestly, studying me with such attention, that I grew ever more suspicious. I wondered if this was another of his straight-faced jokes, a new game in which he was only pretending that this affair was deadly serious, and that soon enough he would laugh aloud at me, as he so often did, and go on to prove that there was nothing important or deadly serious about it, and that it was just another of those Mr. Smith games. After all, it is only the lower orders who believe the universe revolves around them and that the stars carefully arrange themselves with their fate in mind. I know he considered me a bourgeois — not in the contemptuous sense of the word that is so fashionable now; no, he recognized that it takes considerable effort to maintain a bourgeois existence, and would not look down on my origins, my manner, or my values, because he too had a high opinion of the middle classes. It was just that he considered me a hopeless case. He felt there was something hopeless in my situation. The bourgeois is always trying to escape, he said. But he didn’t want to say any more about Judit Áldozó. Courteously but firmly he changed the subject.

Afterwards I often thought back to this conversation the way a sick man remembers learning the real name and nature of his disease when he first visited the famous doctor. The great doctor goes about his examination in a thorough, careful manner, using every kind of instrument, then airily begins to talk of something else, inquiring whether we did not fancy a voyage, or have seen the latest fashionable play, or been in touch with some mutual acquaintance. The only subject he does not touch upon is the one we are most anxious to hear about. That is, after all, why we are there, why we have suffered the tension and discomfort of the examination: it is because we wanted to be certain of something, because we ourselves do not know whether our condition is unusual, whether it is a general malaise or just a collection of insignificant symptoms, since we have been aware for some time that our anxious and troubled state is a sign of something wrong in our constitution, in the very rhythm of our life, all the while hoping that it could all be put right at a stroke, faintly but unambiguously suspecting that the great man knows the truth but isn’t telling us. So there’s nothing to do but wait until we discover for ourselves the truth the doctor kept from us, discover it through the development of further symptoms, through various other signs of danger, and through the manner of our treatment. In the meantime everyone really knows the score: the sick man knows he is very sick; the doctor knows not only that he is very sick but that the patient himself suspects as much and, furthermore, that the patient is quite aware that the doctor is keeping something from him. But there is nothing anyone can do about this; all both can do is to wait until the sickness takes some particular course. Then a cure of some sort may be attempted.

That’s how it was with Lázár the evening after Judit’s visit. He talked about all kinds of things — about Rome, about new books, about the relationship between literature and the seasons. Then he stood up, shook my hand, and said good-bye. That was when I felt it had not been a game. My heart was thumping with tension. I felt he had left me to my fate, that I had to deal with things by myself from then on. That was the moment I first began to respect the woman who had had such an effect on Lázár. I respected her and feared her. A few days later I went away.

A long time passed. I have only vague memories of it. It was, you might say, the development section of the drama. I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details of that.

I traveled for four years, all over Europe. My father had no real notion of the reason for my absence. My mother might have known, but she kept quiet about it. For a long time I noticed nothing unusual. I was young and the world, as they say, was mine.

There was peace then … though not proper peace, not really. We were between two wars. The borders were never completely open, but the trains did not stop too long at the variously colored international barriers. People asked each other for loans, not only people but countries, as if nothing had happened, going about their lives with miraculous confidence. And, what was still more miraculous, they received the loans — long-term loans — and they built houses, big ones, small ones, and generally behaved as though they had seen the back of painful, terrible times forever, as though it were an entirely new era, so that now everything was as it should be: they could plan far ahead, bring up their children, and give themselves over to individual pleasures that were not only delightful but even a touch superfluous. That was the world in which I started traveling — the world between two wars. I can’t say that the feeling I set out with, and which I experienced at various stopping places on my journey, was one of absolute security. We behaved like people who had, to their surprise, been robbed of everything: our whole lives were tinged with suspicion during the brief period between two wars in Europe: we, all of us, individuals and nations, made enthusiastic efforts to be generous and great-hearted, but — secretly, at any rate — we carried revolvers in our pockets and would occasionally reach, in a panic, for our wallets in the pocket above our hearts. Not just for our wallets, probably, but for our hearts and minds too, because we feared for them also. Nevertheless, one could at least travel again.

Everywhere people were building new houses, new estates, new towns, and, yes, new nations too. I headed north first, then south, then west. Eventually I spent several years in the cities of the West. The things I loved and in which I most earnestly believed were most directly to hand there. It was like when we learn a language at school and then travel to the country where the book language is the mother tongue of real people. In the West I lived among the members of a truly civil society, people who clearly did not regard membership of their class as a form of acting or sloganeering, nor a chore, but simply lived in the manner befitting those who had inherited the house they lived in from their ancestors, a house slightly too small, a little too dark and old-fashioned perhaps, but the house they best knew, one not worth demolishing in order to build another. Their way of life was as it was, needing the odd spot of repair and upkeep. We, at home, were still busy building that house, a home worthy of the civic being; between palaces and cottages we were constructing a wider, more compendious way of life in which everyone might feel at home: Judit Áldozó, myself, both of us.

Judit was only a shadow in my thoughts during those years. At first she was primarily the memory of a fierce, fevered condition. Yes, I had been ill and beside myself, ranting. My eyes were not clear. I had become deeply conscious of my loneliness; a freezing wave of loneliness had swept into my life. Fearing loneliness, I fled from it to a person whose being, whose energy, and whose smile suggested that this loneliness might be shared. That was what I remembered. But then the whole world opened up and it proved very interesting. I saw all kinds of statues, gas turbines, and other forms of loneliness; I saw people who felt joy hearing the music of a single line of verse; I saw economic systems that promised dignity and generosity; I saw vast cities, mountaintops, beautiful medieval wells, little German towns, their main squares surrounded by sycamores; cathedral towers, beaches with golden sand and dark blue oceans; women bathing naked on the shore. I saw the world. The memory of Judit Áldozó couldn’t compete with the wonders of the world. She was less than a shadow compared to this new reality. Life showed me, and promised me, everything in those years. It offered me liberation from the narrow confines and melancholy clutter of our house. It stripped me of the clothes I had to wear in order to perform my parts back home, and let me lose myself in the traffic of the world. It offered me women too, an army of women, the women of the entire world, from Flemish brunettes with hot-dreamy looks, through bright-eyed French women, to meek German girls … all kinds of women. I moved in the world. Women revolved around me as they do around every man, sending messages, calling: the respectable who promised me their entire lives; the flirtatious who offered lives of simple, sensuous, wild abandon — nothing permanent, but something long enough, something more mysterious than a quick fly-by-night affair.

“Women.” Have you noticed the wary, uncertain way in which men pronounce the word? It is as if they were speaking of a not completely enchained, ever rebellious, conquered but unbroken tribe of discontents. And, really, what does the everyday concept “women” signify in the hurly-burly of existence? What do we expect of them? … Children? Help? Peace? Delight? Everything? Nothing? A few moments of pleasure?

We carry on living, desiring, meeting, and falling in love, and then we marry, and, with that one woman, we experience love, childbirth, and death, all the time allowing our heads to be turned by a neatly formed ankle, and ready to face ruin for the sake of a hairdo or the hot breath emanating from another’s lips. We lie with them in middle-class beds, or on sofas with broken springs, in cheap no-questions-asked hotels, down filthy side streets, and feel a very brief satisfaction. Or we grow drunk on high-flown sentiment with a woman, weepy and full of vows. We promise to face the world together, to assist each other, to live on a mountaintop, or in the heart of some great city … But then time passes, a year, or three years, or two weeks — have you noticed how love, like death, has nothing to do with clocks or calendars? — and the grand plan to which both the woman and the man have agreed is not carried through, or only partially carried through, not quite as either had imagined. And so the man and woman part, with anger or with indifference, and once again they set out, full of hope, ready to start again with someone new. Alternatively, they might stay together out of sheer exhaustion, draining the lifeblood from each other, and so sicken, killing each other little by little before dying. But then, in that very last moment, just as they are closing their eyes, what is it they understand? What had they wanted from each other? They seem to have done nothing except conform to an old, blind law, the law of love, at whose bidding the world must constantly renew itself, because the world requires the lust of men and women to perpetuate the species. So was that all? What, poor things, had they been hoping for? What have they given each other? What have they received? What a terrifying, secret audit! Is the instinct that draws one man to one woman personal? Isn’t it just desire, always, eternally, simply desire, that occasionally, for some brief interval, is incarnated in a particular body? And this strange, artificial excitement, the fever in which we live: might that not have been nature’s fully conscious way of preventing men and women feeling utterly alone?

Look around you. There’s no escape from sexual tension: it’s there in literature, in paintings, on the stage, and out in the street … Go into a theater. There are men and women sitting in the auditorium watching men and women conspiring onstage, chatting, making promises, and taking vows. The audience coughs and croaks and is clearly bored … but let the words “I love you” be spoken by the actors, or “I want you,” or anything that refers to love, possession, parting, and to the happiness or misery associated with them, the auditorium immediately falls deathly silent: thousands upon thousands, all over the world, are holding their breath. Writers spend their lives cooking such things up: they use the emotion to blackmail the audience. And wherever you go, this whipped-up excitement continues unabated: perfumes, bright dresses, expensive furs, half-naked bodies, skin-colored stockings. It’s the same desire at work — the desire to show off a silk-stockinged knee or, in the summer, on the beach, to go practically naked, because this way the feminine presence becomes more teasing, more exciting, not to mention the makeup, the scarlet basque, the blue eye shadow, the blond highlights, all the cheap rubbish they apply and pamper themselves with — it’s all so unhealthy.

I was almost fifty before I understood The Kreutzer Sonata. It seems to be about jealousy, but that is not the true subject. Tolstoy’s masterpiece talks about jealousy presumably because Tolstoy himself was painfully sensitive and had a jealous nature. But jealousy is nothing more than vanity. Jealousy is pitiful and contemptible. Oh, yes, I know the feeling quite well … all too well. I almost died of it. But I am no longer jealous. Do you understand me? Do you believe me? Look at me. No, old man, I am no longer jealous, because — at considerable cost — I overcame that vanity. Tolstoy still believed in some kind of balm for it, so he assigned to women a role that is half animal; they should give birth and dress in sackcloth. But that is the sickness, not the cure. The alternative, of course, is no better. It proposes women as bits of décor, masterpieces of emotion. How can I respect, how can I give my heart and mind to, someone who, from the moment of rising to the hour of lying down, does nothing but dress and preen herself as if to say, “Here I am …” Someone who apparently wishes to make herself attractive to me by means of feather, fur, and scent. But that is too simple. It’s more complicated than that. She wants to be attractive to everyone, you see; she wants to lodge the spore of desire in the whole world’s nervous system. Movies, theaters, the street, the café, the restaurant, the baths, the hills: everywhere it’s the same unhealthy excitement. Do you think nature really needs all this? No, dear boy! Not at all. Only one social arrangement, one mode of production, requires it: it’s the one in which women regard themselves as items for sale.

Of course you’re right, I don’t myself have a better answer, a better system of production and social exchange … all the alternatives have failed. I have to admit that in our system, a woman constantly feels obliged to sell herself, sometimes consciously, more often subconsciously. I don’t say every woman is conscious of being a commercial object … but I daren’t believe that exceptions don’t prove the rule. I don’t blame women: it’s not their fault. This presentation of the self as something “on offer” can feel like death, especially the foolishness, the haughtiness, that ironically flirtatious performance of giving herself airs when a woman feels under pressure because she is surrounded by others more beautiful, less expensive, and more exciting. What is a woman to do with her life, both as woman and as a human being, when, as today, women outnumber men in every part of Europe, when competition has assumed a terrifying intensity? They offer themselves, some virtuously, with downcast eyes, like tremulous, highly delicate bouquets who continue trembling in private in case time passes and no one carries them away; others more consciously, setting out each day like Roman legionaries fully aware of their imperial mission to vanquish the barbarian … No, my friend, we have no right to condemn women. The only right we may have is to pity them, and perhaps not even them, but ourselves, we men, who are incapable of solving this long, painful crisis in the great free market of civilization. It is constant anxiety. Wherever you go, wherever you look. And it is money that is behind all the human misery — not all the time, maybe, but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. That is the subject the saintly, wise author of The Kreutzer Sonata never mentions, not once, in his furious indictment …

The story is about jealousy. Tolstoy cursed women, fashion, music — all the bewitchments of social life. The one thing he fails to mention is that inner peace is not to be achieved by changes in social order, or by changing the means of production, but by ourselves alone. How? By overcoming vanity and desire. Is that possible? … It’s all but impossible. Maybe later, at some stage in the future, it may happen. Time does not diminish desire; but fury, jealousy, greed, the hopeless excitement and disgust that are key elements in desire and its satisfaction, might gradually fall away or wear away. One simply grows tired, you see. There are times even now when I am glad to feel old age knocking at the door. What I sometimes desire now are rainy days when I can sit by the fire with a glass of red wine and an old book that speaks of past desires and disappointments.

But back then I was still young. I spent four years traveling. I woke in women’s arms, with my own hair tangled and matted, in the rooms of other cities. I learned my craft to the best of my ability. I was lost in the beauty of the world. I didn’t think about Judit Áldozó. At least not often, not consciously, only the way one thinks, when abroad, of streets back home, of rooms, of people one has left behind; people who emerge from the golden glow of memory in a state so refined they’re practically dead. There was, I reflected, one hour of madness when I, a lonely, middle-class young man, met a wild, beautiful young woman and we fell to talking in the midst of that loneliness … then I forgot it all. I traveled. The years of wandering passed, then I went home. Nothing happened.

It was just that, in the meantime, Judit Áldozó was back there, waiting for me.

She did not say as much, of course, when I got home and we met once more. She took my coat, my hat, and my gloves and gave me a polite, reserved smile such as is due to the young master of the house when he returns after an absence: it was the official smile a servant gives. I addressed her correctly, smiling and unflustered. I stopped just short of patting her cheek in good-humored paternal fashion … The family was waiting for me. Judit went off with the servant to prepare the dinner that was to welcome the lost prodigal. Everyone was effusive with delight, as indeed was I, glad to be finally at home.

My father had retired that year, and I took over the factory. I moved away from home, rented a villa on a hillside near the city. I saw less of my family now — weeks went by without meeting Judit. After another two years my father died. My mother left the big house and let the old staff go. Judit was the only one she kept with her, she being housekeeper in all but name by then. I visited Mother once a week, for dinner on Sunday, and saw Judit on those occasions, though we never talked to each other. Our relationship was warm and courteous. I occasionally addressed her in a more familiar way as “Juditka,” “Judi,” in a spirit of kindly, slightly patronizing benevolence. It was the way one might talk to a still-young but rapidly aging spinster. Yes, there was a moment, back in the long-distant past, one mad occasion, on which we had talked of all kinds of things, the kind of things a person can, later, only smile about. It was youth and foolishness. That’s what I thought each time I recalled it: it was the way I chose to view it. It was very comfortable. False but comfortable. Everything was in its proper place: everything was as it should be. And so I got married.

It was a polite and pleasant existence with my wife, though later, after my son died, I felt cheated. Loneliness was eating me away, infecting everything around me. I was becoming seriously ill with it. My mother suspected as much but didn’t say anything. Years passed. Lázár became ever less of a presence. We met occasionally, but we no longer played our old games. We must have grown up, I suppose. To grow up is to become lonely. Lonely people either fail and become resentful, or come to some good-natured accommodation with the world. Since I was lonely within a marriage, within a family, it wasn’t easy coming to a good-natured accommodation. I gave my time to work, to society, and to travel. My wife did everything she could for the sake of a happy and contented life together. She labored feverishly at it, the way a man labors at breaking stones: there was even an air of desperation about her efforts. I was unable to help her. Once, a long time ago, I tried the experiment of taking her away to Merano. It was on the way there I discovered it was hopeless, that there would not be an accommodation. My life — what I had made of it — was certainly tolerable but almost entirely without meaning. A great artist might be able to cope with such loneliness. He’d pay a terrible price for it, but his work might offer him some compensation. No one else could do his work for him, after all. His work would offer something simple and lasting: people would regard it as something miraculous. That’s what they say. It was what I imagined. I spoke to Lázár about it once and he was of a different opinion. He said that the sense of loneliness is bound to lead to premature defeat. There was no escape. Those were the rules. Do you imagine that is so? I myself don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t an artist, so I felt all the more alone, both in my life and in my work. My work was of no vital importance to humanity. I was a manufacturer of utilitarian goods, my job being to provide certain necessities of a civilized life on a production line. Production was a perfectly honorable enterprise, but it was machines, not I myself, that produced the goods: it was what my workforce was employed to do; what they were tamed, taught, and disciplined to achieve; it was their purpose. What was it I did in this factory my father had built up and which his engineers had constructed? … I’d go in at nine like most senior management, chiefly because I had to set an example. I read through the mail. My secretary informed me who had tried to contact me by phone and who else wished to speak to me. After that, the engineers and salesmen arrived, told me how things stood, and asked me for my opinion concerning the possibility of manufacturing some new line. The brilliant, hand-picked engineers and clerks — mostly handpicked by my father — were always ready with new plans. I heard them through, raised some minor problems, suggested modifications. Most of the time I simply agreed and approved. The factory went on producing what it produced morning, noon, and into the evening; the salesmen made sales and demanded their commission; I spent the entire day in my office. All this amounted to a moderately useful, necessary, honest activity. We did not cheat ourselves, our customers, the state, or the world at large. The only person being cheated was I myself.

That was because I believed that work was an inevitable, unconditional part of my life. “It is my working life,” as people say. I observed the faces of those near to me. I listened to what they said, and I tried to answer the central question as to whether work was fulfilling for them, or whether they secretly felt exploited; that the best part of them, their very essence, was being drained out of them. From time to time there were those less satisfied with their working conditions, people who tried to do everything better or simply differently, not that doing things “differently” always meant a better or more appropriate way. But at least they wanted to do something different. They wanted to change the world in some way. They wanted to find new meaning in their work. And that is the point, I think. It’s not enough for people to earn a living, to support their family, and to do an honest job … no, people want more than that. They want to realize their ideas, bring their plans to fruition. It’s not just bread and jobs; it is a vocation they want. Without that, life has no meaning. They want to feel needed, not just because they supply the necessary manpower in a factory or fulfill an office to other people’s general satisfaction … they want to achieve something, something others could not achieve. Of course it is only the talented who really want this. Most people are lazy. Maybe, in even their souls there flickers the vague thought that life is not entirely about wages, that God had some other purpose for them … but that was all so long ago! And they — this remainder who can remember no sense of purpose — are in the majority. And they hate the talented. They regard those who want to live and work differently from them, those who don’t rush from the robotic life of the workplace to the robotic life of the home as soon as the bell rings, as ambitious, as creeps. They find all kinds of refined, convoluted ways of crushing talented people’s enthusiasm for solitary work. They mock, they tease, they raise obstacles and spread rumors about them.

I witnessed all this in my office whenever my workers, engineers, and business contacts came to see me.

And I? What did I do? I was the boss. I sat there like a sentry. I took great trouble to be dignified, humane, and just. At the same time, of course, I also made sure that the factory and my staff provided me with what befitted, and was required by, my position. I was very punctilious in working the proper hours at the factory: to put it more precisely, I worked as hard as those I employed. I strove to serve capital and profit in the appropriate manner. But I felt absolutely hollow inside. What was my sphere of action in the factory? I was free to accept or reject ideas, I was free to change working practice, I was free to seek new markets for our products. Did I take pleasure in the handsome profits? “Pleasure” is the wrong word. I took satisfaction at having fulfilled my public obligations, and the money enabled me to live a blameless, fashionable, generous, and disinterested kind of life. At the factory, and in business generally, people regarded me as the very model of a respectable businessman. I could afford to be liberal, to offer a living wage, and more than a living wage, to a good many … It’s nice being able to give. It was just I myself who took no real joy in it. I lived in comfort, but my days were spent doing honest work. My hands were not idle; at least the world did not regard me as either indolent or a waste of space. I was the good boss: that’s what they said in the factory.

But all this meant nothing; it was just a tiresome, careful, conscientious way of filling time. Life remains hollow if you don’t fill it up with something exciting, some project with a hint of danger. That project can only be work, of course. It is the other kind of work, the invisible work of the soul, the intelligence and talent, whose productions enrich and humanize the world and lend it the air of truth. I read a great deal. But you know how it is with reading too … you only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work. One day I noticed that the books I read had ceased to have anything properly to do with me. I read as I might in some foreign city, to fill the time, the way you go to visit a museum, gazing at the exhibits with a kind of courteous disinterest. I read as if I were fulfilling an obligation: a new book appeared that everyone was talking about, so I read it. Or there was some old classic I had missed reading and so felt my education was incomplete, that something was missing. That was the way I read … There had been a time when reading was an experience. I grabbed new books by well-known authors with my heart in my mouth; a new book was like meeting someone new, an encounter fraught with risk, that might result in happiness and general benefit, but was also potentially threatening: it might produce unwelcome consequences. By now I was reading the way I worked in the factory, the way I went to social occasions two or three times a week, the way I went to the theater, the way I lived at home with my wife, courteously, considerately, with the ever more pressing, ever more upsetting, ever louder, ever more urgently demanding questions pounding at my heart that led me to wonder if I was seriously ill, in great danger, sick unto death, or the subject of some developing plot or cabal, certain of nothing, fearing that one day I might wake to find everything I had worked for, this whole painstaking, careful, orderly enterprise — the respectability, the good manners, and the culminating masterpiece, our polite coexistence — collapsing around me … That was the fraught emotional state I was constantly living in at the time. And one day I discovered in my wallet, the brown crocodile-skin wallet I had been given by my wife, a faded lilac ribbon. That was when I realized that Judit Áldozó had been waiting for me all these years. She had been waiting for me to stop being a coward. But many years had passed since our conversation that Christmas.

As for the lilac ribbon — I don’t have it anymore, it vanished along with the wallet and everything else in life, like the people who had once worn such significant objects of superstition — I found it in the deepest pocket of the wallet, where I kept nothing except a lock of my little dead son’s hair. It took me some time to understand what the lilac ribbon was doing there, how I had come into possession of it, and when Judit might have smuggled it into the wallet. My wife had gone away to a spa, leaving me alone in the house, and my mother had sent Judit down to oversee the spring cleaning. I must have been in the bathroom when she slipped into my bedroom and hid the ribbon in my wallet, the wallet having been left lying on the table. At least, that is what she told me later.

What did she mean by it? Nothing. All women are superstitious when it comes to love. What she wanted was for me to have something of hers permanently about my person, something she herself had worn on her body. That was her way of binding me, communicating with me. Bearing in mind her position and our relationship, this was an act of genuine subversion. She undertook it because she was prepared to wait.

When I understood this — the lilac ribbon did communicate something of it in its own eloquent way — I felt strangely irritated. I was annoyed by this minor act of sabotage. You know what it’s like when a man discovers that all he has planned has come to nothing, that everything has been knocked sideways. Now I discovered that this woman, who lived just a few blocks away, had been waiting ten years for me. But beyond the irritation I also felt a certain calm. I wouldn’t want to make too much of the feeling. I hadn’t in fact made plans, nor did I prepare new ones. I didn’t say to myself: “You see, that was what you’ve been covering up all these years, the thing you weren’t prepared to admit, that there is somebody or something more important than your normal way of life, your role in society, your work, and your family: some twisted passion you have been denying … but the passion remains and is waiting for you and won’t let you go. And that’s all right. Now the tension is over. Your life and work were not entirely meaningless after all. Life still wants something of you.”

No, I couldn’t say I thought this, but the fact is that the moment I found the ribbon the tension was gone. Where to locate these vital psychological processes: in the nerves, in our minds? My mind had long forgotten the episode, but my nerves still recalled it. And now, when she sent me that signal, such a well-mannered, servantlike signal — women are like servants in love; all of them would prefer their love letters on paper decorated with motifs of brightly colored roses, entwined hands, or pairs of amorous doves, and would, ideally, stuff the pockets of their intended with locks of hair, handkerchiefs, and other superstitious mementos! — now, finally, I was at peace. It was as if everything had suddenly been endowed with a mysterious purpose: my work, my life, and yes, even my marriage … Does this make sense?

I do understand now. The thing is, there are some things that simply have to happen in life: everything has to find its place. But that is a very slow process. Decisions, ideals, intentions are of little help here. Have you noticed how difficult it is to arrange the furniture in a room so it is perfect, so you never want to move it again? It takes years, and you think everything is just where it should be, while all the time you have the vague, uncomfortable feeling that it is not quite right after all, that maybe the armchairs are not in their proper places and perhaps there should be a table just where that chair is now. And then, eventually, after ten or twenty years have passed, years in which you have never felt fully comfortable, when the furniture and the space available for it seem to have been at odds for ages, you suddenly see how it should be, you spot the mistake, you understand the secret inner dimensions of the room, push the furniture a little this way or that and find, or so you think, that everything has finally found its place. And for a few more years you feel convinced that the room is finally perfect, a complete success. But then — say, after ten more years — you grow dissatisfied again, if only because you change, as we all do, as does our spatial awareness, so that there never can be perfect, final order. That’s how life is: we develop strategies to tackle it, and for a long time we believe the strategies are the appropriate ones, so we go to work in the morning, take a walk in the afternoon, and engage in cultural activities in the evening. Then, one day, we discover the only way we can continue to bear or make sense of it is by turning the whole thing on its head, and we can’t begin to understand how we could have tolerated the idiotic system as it was. That’s how things change around us and in us. And it is all temporary, even the new order, the inner peace, because it is part of the process of change and works according to its laws, so eventually it too stops working … And why? Maybe because we ourselves come to a stop sometime. As does everything that is of any consequence to us.

No, this was not what they call a “grand passion.” It was simply that someone brought me to understand that she lived nearby and was waiting for me. It was a cheap way of doing it. A servant’s way. It was like a pair of eyes gazing at me in the darkness. It was my secret, and the secret lent a certain bearing, a certain tension to my life. I didn’t want to betray the secret; I didn’t want to be faced with painful, idiotic, murky situations. I simply felt a little calmer after that.

That is until, one day, Judit Áldozó disappeared from my mother’s household.

The story I am telling you extends over years, and much of it has grown indistinct and lost importance … It’s the woman I want to talk about now, this proletarian creature. I want to concentrate on the important parts and ignore the parts involving the police, if you don’t mind. All such stories involve the police or a magistrate somewhere along the line. Life punishes one a little, as you may be aware … Lázár told me that once and I took it as an insult at the time, the idea of it, but later, once proceedings started, I understood. Because we are not innocents in the eyes of life, and one day we find ourselves on trial. Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent.

As I said, she disappeared, disappeared as completely as if she had been sewn into a sack and thrown into the Danube.

They hid her disappearance from me for a while. My mother had been living alone for ages and Judit had looked after her. One afternoon I went to visit my mother and a strange person opened the door. That’s how I knew.

I understood that this was her only way of telling me. After all, she had no contact with me and had no legal hold on me. You can’t resolve a matter of decades in one dramatic scene or with a loud argument. Something eventually has to be done one way or another. Maybe something had happened in the meanwhile and I didn’t know about it. The three women in my life — my mother, my wife, and Judit — said nothing about it. I was their common interest, something they could arrange between them in some fashion; I just needed to be informed of the result. The upshot was that Judit left my mother’s household and traveled abroad. But even this I only found out later, once a policeman friend of mine had made a few inquiries at the passport office. She had gone to England. I also found out that this was no spur-of-the-moment, snap decision, but a course she had been considering for some time.

The three women had kept their silence. One of them went away. Another — my mother — said nothing, simply suffered. The third — my wife — waited and watched. By that time she knew everything, or almost everything. She acted in a circumspect manner, the way her culture, condition, and intelligence dictated. I can’t tell you how remarkably tactful she was! What should a refined, cultivated woman do when she discovers her husband is in deep trouble, and that the trouble is long-standing, that he has become detached from her; that, in effect, he is detached from everyone, that he is lonely, hopelessly drifting, and that perhaps, just perhaps, there is a woman somewhere with whom he might share this oppressive loneliness for the brief span of his life? Naturally, she fights. She waits, watches, and lives in hope. She does everything possible to enjoy the best possible relationship with her husband. Then she grows tired. Then she begins to lose self-control. There are moments when any woman turns feral … her very soul screams out in wounded pride and sheer animal passion. Then she calms down, grows resigned, if only because there is nothing she can do.

No, hang on a moment; I suspect she never does grow resigned … But these are merely details, shreds of emotion. In the end there is nothing to be done. One day she lets the husband go.

Judit vanished and no one spoke of her anymore. As I told you, it was as though she had been stitched into a sack. The silence about her, about a woman who had, after all, spent most of her life in my mother’s house, was so conspicuous it was as though they had dismissed a lazy tradesman. Now she was here, now she was gone. Servants come and go. What is it that moaning housewives say? “I tell you, they are all well-paid snakes-in-the-grass. Isn’t it strange how they have everything they need, but nothing is enough for them?” True, nothing was enough for Judit. One day she woke, recalled the something that had happened, and she wanted it all, everything. That’s why she left.

I fell ill. Not immediately, only some six months after her departure. It wasn’t a devastating illness, only a life-threatening one. The doctor could do nothing; no one could do anything. By that time I felt even I could do nothing. What ailed me? It’s hard to say. Of course the simplest thing would be to claim that the moment this woman left — a woman whose youth had been spent in my vicinity and whose body and soul constituted a kind of personal invitation to me — my suppressed feelings for her ignited like a fire down a mine. All the combustible material was there, stored in the pit of my soul … That sounds all very pretty. But it’s not entirely true … Should I say that, beyond my astonishment, beyond the alienating shock, I also felt a subtle, somewhat surprising sense of relief? That too is part of the truth, even if not the whole truth, as it is also true that at first it was my vanity that felt most bruised. I knew for a fact that she had gone abroad because of me, and secretly I was relieved: it was like having some wild animal hidden in the house and discovering one day that the beast had chosen to kick over the traces, that it had escaped and returned to the jungle. But at the same time I felt offended, because I thought she had no right to leave. It was as if some personal possession had decided to defy me. Yes, I was vain. But time passed.

One day I woke to find that I missed her.

That is the most miserable feeling. Missing someone. You look around and you don’t understand. You reach out a hesitant hand for a glass of water or a book. Everything is in its place, your life is in order — objects, people, the well-known routine, the world — and you go on as before. It’s just that there is something missing. You rearrange your room … was that the problem? No. You go away. The city you have long wanted to see is waiting for you in all its pomp, its rich solemnity. You wake early in a strange town, hurry down to the street equipped with street map and guidebook, locate the famous altarpiece at the famous church, admire the arches of the famous bridge; the waiter at the restaurant, full of local pride, brings you the famous local dish. There is a wonderful local wine that goes straight to your head. Great artists who once lived here have left a generous profusion of masterpieces for the city of their birth. You stroll past windows, doorways, under arches whose beauty and majesty has been the subject of world-famous scholarly books. Day and night the streets jostle with beautiful women and girls with lovely eyes. Those who live here are proud, proud of their beauty and refinement. You are the subject of their glances — some friendly, some gently mocking your loneliness, and inviting — meaningful feminine glances, eyes that sparkle. In the evening there’s the sound of music by the river, people singing by the light of paper lanterns, couples dancing and sipping wine. And in the midst of this rich mosaic of song and flattering light, there is a table set for you too, and a woman who makes charming conversation. Like a conscientious student, you take care to see everything and make the best of your time: as soon as the sun rises, you set out on your daily walk, your guidebook in your hand, furiously concentrating, anxious to be fully occupied as if you were afraid of missing something. Your sense of time is quite transformed. You are meticulous in your portioning of time, waking at the precise moment you intended. It is as if someone were waiting for you. And clearly, that is the point, though you dare not confess it to yourself for a long time: you really do believe that there is someone waiting. That is why you are so meticulous. And if you are observant and precise enough, if you get up early enough and go to bed late enough, if you see enough people, if you take trips here and there or visit particular places, you may just meet the person waiting for you. Of course you know that hoping so is childish. There’s nothing left for you but to trust in an infinitesimal chance. All the police know is that she has gone away, to somewhere in England. The British embassy are no better informed. Either that or they are not letting on. A mysterious universal screen, which stretches across the whole world, obscures her from your view. There are forty-seven million people in England, and London is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Where to look for her? And if you did find her, what would you say to her? But you continue waiting.

Do you fancy another glass? A good clean wine, this, leaves you fresh and clear in the morning, no headache. I know it well. Waiter, another bottle, please!

This place is so cold, so full of smoke. But that is when I feel happiest here. There are only the all-nighters left now. The lonely and the wise, the hopeless and the despairing, those to whom nothing much matters as long as they can be somewhere where the lamps are lit and there are strangers sitting close by, where they can stay lonely until they have to go home. It’s hard going home at a certain age, after certain experiences. The best thing is to be in a place like this, among strangers, alone, with no ties. Gardens and friendship, said Epicurus: there is no other way. I think he was right. But one doesn’t need too much garden, either — a few potted plants on a café terrace. And friends: one or two are enough.

Waiter! Ice, please. Drink up.

Where was I?

Ah, yes, that time. Waiting time.

The only thing of which I was aware was that people had started watching me. First my wife. Then people in the factory. Then people at the club, in the world at large. My wife was seeing little of me by that time: occasionally at dinner and less in the evening. We hadn’t had guests for a long time. At first I was nervous about turning down invitations, but then it became a habit, and I couldn’t bear to have guests over. It seemed so painful, so unreal … being home, keeping house, you know what I mean. Everything was lovely and orderly, just as it should be: the rooms, the treasured paintings, the ornaments, the servant and the chambermaid, the porcelain, the silver, the fine food, the fine drink … it was just that I didn’t feel I was the master of my own household. I didn’t even feel at home. I couldn’t believe, not for one moment, that this was my real home, a home where I could receive visitors. It was like being in a play, my wife and I constantly proving something to our guests, that this was a real home, a proper place. But it wasn’t! Why? There’s no arguing with facts. On the other hand, there’s no point explaining them, either, not when they are as simple and as undeniable.

We were being left to ourselves. The world has keen ears. All it needs is a few signs, a few gestures, and the delicate spy network of envy, curiosity, and malice soon begins to suspect something. It’s enough to turn down a few invitations or not return an invitation early enough, an invitation you once had accepted, and the whole social fabric is abuzz with coded communications to indicate that someone is about to desert the ruling hierarchy, aware that such-and-such a family or couple is “having problems.” This “having problems” affects the disintegrating family as it might an invalid quarantined on account of his infection; it’s as if the local doctor had pinned a notice in red letters on the front door of the house. The affected family is treated with a little more delicacy, with a touch of mockery and reserve. What people are hoping for is scandal, of course. There’s nothing they long for more keenly when it comes to others than the prospect of complete collapse. They are positively in fever for it, a fever that is a form of plague. You step into a café or a restaurant alone and they are whispering: “Have you heard? They’re having problems. They’re getting divorced. The man seduced his wife’s best friend.” This is what they are hoping for. And should you go somewhere with your wife, they still have their eyes on you, as they huddle together, muttering in a knowing way: “They still go around together, but it doesn’t mean anything. They’re just keeping up appearances.” And slowly you realize that they’re right, even if they don’t know the truth, even if every part of the evidence is based on ignorance and lies. In matters of importance, of human interest, society possesses a mysteriously reliable awareness. Lázár once told me, half-jokingly, that there’s nothing as true as calumny. Generally, people have no secrets from each other. They pick each other’s secrets up on a kind of shortwave, he said, a shortwave that penetrates the deepest recesses of our hearts, and their words and actions are merely consequences of this. I believe he was right. That was precisely how we lived. A gentle disintegration followed. It was as if I had been preparing myself for emigration, you understand. You go around thinking that your workplace, your family, suspect nothing, but the truth is that everyone knows you have already been to the embassy to apply for a visa and a ticket. Your family carries on talking to you as patiently and as warily as they would with a madman or a criminal, as someone worthy of pity, but the fact is that the police and the ambulance have already been put on alert, that these are the conditions under which you must live.

One can’t help knowing this and becoming suspicious. One acts with circumspection, weighing every word. There is nothing more difficult than deconstructing a situation that has taken time to construct. It is as complex as trying to demolish a cathedral. One can be sorry for so many things … but of course there is no greater sin against one’s partners and oneself than allowing one’s emotions free range in a crisis.

It takes a long time to understand your rights in life: to understand to what degree your life is your own, to what degree you have given that life over to feeling and memory. You see how hopelessly I am a prisoner of my own class? For me the whole thing was like a complex legal matter entailing a separation. It was a quiet act of rebellion against my family and my worldly situation. And indeed it was a legal matter, not only concerning the divorce and the alimony. There are other laws people are bound to. At such times you spend whole nights asking yourself: What have I received? What have I given? What do I owe? And it’s not just at night you ask yourself such questions, but in broad daylight, in crowds, out in the street. Terrible questions. It took me years until I understood that beneath all one’s obligations, there existed a right, a right according to an unwritten law not made by man, but by the Creator, which was the right to die alone. Do you see?

It is an important and substantial right. Everything else is a form of debt. You owe a debt to your family and to society, from which you have received considerable benefits; you owe something to your feelings, to your memories. But there comes the point when your soul overflows with the desire for solitude, when all you want is, quietly, with a proper human dignity, to prepare yourself for the end, for the last human task of all: for death. When you get to that point you must be careful not to cheat, because if you do, you lose your right to act. As long as you are acting out of selfishness, out of a desire for comfort or a sense of grievance; as long as desiring solitude is a form of vanity, you are still in hock to the world and to all those who represent the world for you. But there comes a day when the soul completely fills with desire for solitude, when you want nothing but to cast from your soul everything superfluous, false, or secondary. When a man sets out on a long, dangerous journey, he is very careful what he packs. He examines every item from every possible point of view. He measures and judges the worth of everything, and only then does he find a place for it in his modest pack. Only when he is sure he is certain to need it. Chinese hermits, who leave their families when they reach roughly sixty, take leave of them like this. All they take is one small pack. They leave the house at dawn, silently, with a smile. It is not a change that they want; no, they are heading for the mountains to find solitude and death. It’s the last human journey. That is what you have a right to. The pack you take with you for such a journey must be light — something you can carry with one hand. It will contain nothing unnecessary, not a single item of vanity. It is a very powerful desire at a certain age. Once you hear the lapping sound of loneliness you immediately recognize it as something familiar. It is as if you had been born by the sea, then spent the rest of your life in noisy cities; but one night you hear it again in your dreams: the sea. And you want to live alone, to live without a purpose, to render up everything to those who have a right to it, and then to leave; to wash your soul clear and wait.

Solitude is hard at first: it’s like being sentenced. There are times when you find it unbearable. And perhaps that severe sentence might seem lighter if you could, after all, share it with someone, it doesn’t matter who: with rough companions, anonymous women. There are such times, times of weakness. But they pass, because slowly the loneliness enfolds you, takes personal possession of you, like a mysterious force of life — like time, time in which everything happens. Suddenly you understand that everything that has happened has happened according to its own timetable. First came curiosity, then desire, then work, and finally, here comes loneliness. There’s nothing you want now: you have no hope of consolation in a new woman, no hope of a friend whose wise counsel might heal your soul. You find all human talk vanity, even the wisest. There is so much selfishness in every human feeling. It’s all empty promises, refined forms of blackmail: all helpless, hopeless attachment! Once you know this, you no longer hope for anything from people; you don’t expect women to be of help, you recognize the price and terrifying consequences of money, power, and success, and you no longer want anything of life but to huddle up in some mean corner, without companionship, assistance, and comfort, and listen to the silence that slowly begins to lap at your soul as it does at the shores of time … Then, and only then, you have the right to leave: because leaving is something you do have a perfect right to.

Every man has the right to prepare himself for his own leave-taking, for a solitary death in his own sepulchral silence; to void his soul for the last time, to turn his soul into as empty and hallowed a place as it was at the beginning of time, in childhood. That was the way Lázár one day took the road to Rome. I myself have only now arrived at the point of loneliness. I too had a long road to travel. I must admit I had hoped for another way. But there isn’t another way. In the end, or shortly before the end, one must be alone.

But first I married Judit Áldozó. That’s just how things worked out.

One day, at four in the afternoon, the telephone rang in my room. My wife picked it up. By that time she knew everything: knew that I was sick with the delirium of waiting. She treated me like a helpless invalid, ready to sacrifice everything for my sake. But when it came to herself, to her own condition, she was quite incapable of genuine sacrifice: she fought it to the bitter end. She wanted to keep me. But by that time the other woman had proved stronger, and I went away with her.

She picked up the receiver and asked something. I was sitting with my books with my back to the phone, reading. I could tell from the shakiness of her voice that something important was happening, that this was the moment at which the waiting and the tension had come to an end, the moment we had all been preparing for all those years. She came over to me with the phone in her hand, silently put it down on the table, and left the room.

“Hello,” said a familiar voice, Judit’s voice. She said it in English, as if she had forgotten Hungarian.

Then silence. I asked her where she was. She gave me the address of a hotel near the railway station. I put the phone down, found my hat and gloves, and went down the stairs, my head full of all kinds of thoughts, except the thought that this would be the last time I would go down these particular stairs. I still had a car then, the car always parked in front of the house. I drove over to the slightly shady, third-class hotel. Judit was waiting in the lounge among her luggage. She was wearing a checkered skirt, a pale-blue woolen jumper, expensive gloves, and a traveling hat. She sat so comfortably in the lounge of that third-class establishment it seemed the whole situation — her departure and homecoming — was part of some long-discussed mutual arrangement. She extended her hand to me, quite the lady now.

“Should I stay here?” she asked, looking round, indicating the hotel, uncertainly, as if she had decided to let me make all the decisions.

I slipped the porter some money and told him to put her luggage in my car. She followed me without a word, sat beside me in the passenger seat. Her luggage was nice — leather cases, English manufacture, complete with the labels of not entirely familiar foreign hotels. I remember how, in those first few moments, this handsome luggage filled me with a sort of monstrous satisfaction. I was happy because I had no need to feel embarrassed by Judit’s luggage. I headed for the grand hotel on the island and booked a room for her. I myself took a room on the Danube embankment and phoned home from there, asking to have my clothes and suitcases sent on. I never entered our house again. For six months we managed like this, my wife at home, Judit at the island hotel, I at the hotel on the embankment. Then the divorce came through, and I married Judit the next day.

I had no contact with the world at all during those six months. I broke all those contacts I had been so careful to maintain not so long ago. It was like breaking with a family. I went about my business at the factory, but as for the rest, the social circle, and that turbulent form of the world we call society, I saw neither hide nor hair of them. I continued to receive invitations for a while, invitations issued in a spirit of false generosity, of barely hidden schadenfreude and curiosity. Everyone wanted to see the rebel, the man who had kicked over the traces. They wanted to drag me through salons where the conversation was always of something else but where they kept a wary ironic eye on you as though you were some sort of madman who might any moment say or do something shocking: such guests are a little frightening but can entertain the company. People who called themselves my friends sought me out with an air of mysterious solemnity: they seemed to have made a grave promise to “save” me. They wrote me letters, visited me in my office, and talked to me soul-to-soul. Eventually they all took offense and left me to my fate. In no time at all people talked of me as if I had committed fraud or some other crime.

Nevertheless, these six months were a calm oasis in my life. The truth is always simple and calming. Judit lived on the island, and we dined together every evening. She was patient and prepared to wait. She was in no hurry. Sometimes people understand something and know it’s not worth hassling or panicking, because everything will happen in due course anyway. We observed each other like opponents before a duel. At that time we still thought this duel would be the chief concern of our lives … a life-or-death affair, and that at the end of it, however scarred and patched by then, we would declare an armistice, a gentlemen’s agreement. I had surrendered my social rank, my class loyalty, my family, and indeed the woman who loved me, for her. She had not given up anything for me, but she was perfectly prepared to sacrifice everything. She had made the move. She had acted. One day it happens: expectation turns to action.

It took me a long time to understand what the true state of affairs between us was. It took her a long time too. There was nobody near us, around us, who might have warned us. Lázár was living abroad by that time like a person who had been offended in some way and had chosen to die. And then, one day, he actually did die, in Rome, at the age of fifty-two. There wasn’t anyone left to act as a witness to my life, to watch over me or constrain me.

From the moment we met in that third-class hotel near the station, we lived like émigrés, émigrés who had arrived in an utterly alien country in which they tried to emulate its manners, to assimilate, to blend in with the great mass of people, doing everything possible not to stand out, and if possible not to give in to sentimentality, not to think of the homes they had left and those they had loved. Neither of us spoke about it, but we both knew that whatever lives we had lived before were now finished, quite over. We waited and watched.

Should I tell you the story just as it happened? I’m not boring you? I’ll stick to the essentials as far as I know them. After the initial shock when I was left alone in my embankment hotel and my baggage had been brought over, I fell asleep. I slept a long time, exhausted. It was late in the evening when I woke. The telephone had not rung, not once; neither Judit nor my wife called. What could they have been doing in those hours when one of them finally knew for certain that she had lost me and the other had cause to believe that she had won this small, silent war that had started so long ago? They sat at opposite ends of town, each in her room, thinking, naturally, not of me but of each other. They knew there never was a complete end to things, that their own duel was just approaching its most difficult period. I slept as if drugged. It was evening before I woke and rang Judit. She answered calmly. I asked her to wait, told her that I was on my way, that I wanted to speak to her.

It was that evening I first began to really know this extraordinary woman. We went to a restaurant in the city center, somewhere I was unlikely to bump into anyone I knew. We sat down at the set table, the waiter brought the menu. I ordered the food and we talked in hushed voices of ordinary things. Throughout the meal I was watching Judit’s movements. She knew I was watching her, and occasionally broke into a mocking smile. She never quite lost that mocking smile. It was like saying: “I know you are watching me. Well, watch closely. I have learned what there is to learn.”

And indeed she had learned to perfection, maybe even a little too well. This woman, if you please, had made herself study, in a few bare years, everything that people regard as correct behavior, good manners, and social graces — all that we had received as a given and had learned by simply being creatures of our environment and education: properly trained animals. She knew how to enter, how to greet people, how not to look at the waiter, how not to take notice of the service, while at the same time understanding how one should be served by maintaining an air of studied superiority. Her manner of eating was correct to a fault. She handled her knife, her fork, her napkin, everything, like someone who had never dined any other way or used different cutlery, under different circumstances. I marveled at her dress sense too, not just that first night but the rest of the time. Not that I am an expert in women’s fashions; it is just that, like any other man, I know whether the woman I am stepping out with looks right in her clothes or has made an error of taste, given way to some personal quirk. She, in her black dress and black hat, was so beautiful, so simply and terrifyingly lovely, that even the waiters gawked at her. The way she moved, the way she took her place at the table, drew off her gloves, and listened, smiling and nodding over her shoulder, as I read her the menu, agreeing on the choice of food, then immediately changed the subject of conversation, charmingly leaning toward me: all this was one hideously difficult test, a test she passed that first night, like the brilliant student she was, with flying colors.

I, for my part, was full of anxiety, inwardly willing her on, and once she passed I was wild with joy, satisfied and relieved. It was, you know, as when we understand that nothing happens without a reason. Everything that had happened between us had happened for a reason, and what it showed was that this woman was a truly extraordinary being. I immediately felt ashamed on account of my earlier anxiety. She herself sensed this, and sometimes — slightly mockingly, as I have already said — she smiled at me. She behaved like a lady in the restaurant, like a woman of the highest rank who had spent her life in places like this. No, wait — she behaved much better than that. Upper-class ladies don’t eat as faultlessly as she did, cannot hold their knives and forks with such refinement or maintain such firm discipline of gesture and posture. People born into a rank tend to rebel a little against the constraints of rank. Judit was taking her exam, not so as you’d notice, of course, but she was following all the rules.

It began that evening and so it continued all the days after, over months and years — every evening, every morning, in company or alone, at table or in society, and later in bed, in every possible situation — the terrifying, hopeless, endless exam that Judit passed each day with flying colors. In theory it was wonderful: it was just that we both failed the practical examination.

I made mistakes too. We watched each other like tigers and trainers in the middle of a performance. Never, not once, did I utter a single word of criticism of Judit; I never asked her to wear something else, to behave or speak in the least differently. I never “educated” her. I received her soul in its maturity, as a gift, the way it was created, and then as whatever life had made of it. I didn’t expect anything out of the usual of her. It wasn’t a “lady” or a glittering socialite I yearned for. I hoped for a woman with whom I might share a lonely life. But she was terrifyingly ambitious, as ambitious as a young, newly appointed officer in the army wanting to conquer and take occupation of the world, one who spends all day mugging up, practicing, training for the part. She wasn’t scared of anything or anyone. There was only one thing she feared: her own hypersensitivity to offense, some mortal wound to the pride glowing in the depths of her life, her very being. That is what she was afraid of, and everything she did by word, silence, and deed was a form of defense against it. It was something I could never understand.

So we dined at the restaurant. What did we talk about? Well, London, naturally. How did the conversation go? She answered questions exactly as though she were sitting an exam. The answers came pat: “London is a great city. It has a vast population. The poor cook with mutton fat. The English think and act with deliberation.” And then, among the clichés, suddenly something to the point: “The English know it is necessary to survive.” When she said this — it might have been the first personal observation she had ever addressed to me, the first truth she had discovered for herself and revealed for my benefit — the light in her eyes suddenly flashed, then went out. It was as if she couldn’t contain herself and had voiced an opinion, but immediately regretted it, as if she had given something of herself away, unveiled a secret, demonstrated that she too had a view of the world, of herself, of me, and of the English, and that she had been forced to speak out about it. People don’t talk about their experiences in the presence of enemies. I sensed something strange in that moment, but I couldn’t have said what … She fell silent for a moment. Then she was back with the clichés again. The exam clock was running. “Yes, the English have a sense of humor. They love Dickens and music.” Judit had read David Copperfield. And what else? She answered calmly. She had brought along the latest Huxley as travel reading. Point Counter Point was the title. She was reading it on the way and was still reading it … she could lend it to me if I liked.

So that’s how things were. There I was, sitting with Judit Áldozó in a city restaurant, eating crab and asparagus with a heavy red wine, chatting about the latest novel by Aldous Huxley. Her handkerchief, open before me on the table, had a heavy, pleasant scent. I asked her what scent she used. She mentioned the name of an American beauty product, her English pronunciation perfect. She said she preferred American scents to French ones because the French were a little overpowering. I gave her a skeptical look. Was she teasing me? But no, it was no joke, it was serious, that was her honest opinion. She gave her opinion the way some people pin down facts based on experience. I didn’t dare ask her how a Transdanubian peasant girl came by such experiences, how she could be so certain that French perfumes were “a little overpowering.” And in any case, what else did she do in London apart from being a maid in an English family home? I knew London a little, and had some experience of English households, and I knew that being a servant in London was not a lofty station. Judit looked steadily back at me, expecting more questions. And even then, on that first evening, I noticed something I was to keep noticing right to the end, every evening.

You won’t guess what it was.

She would accept any suggestion I made. Shall we go here? Shall we go there? She simply nodded: Fine, let’s go. But then, once we were in the car and on our way, she would quietly say: “But maybe we could …” And we would finish up not at the restaurant I had chosen but at another that was by no means better or finer. And if I chose something from the menu, they would bring the dish, she’d taste it, push it aside, and say, “Maybe it might be better if …” And then the willing waiters would bring some other dish and different wine. She always wanted something different. And she always wanted to go somewhere different. I thought it might be fear and confusion that caused these sudden changes of mind, but slowly I realized the true problem was that the sweet was never sweet enough, the salty never salty enough for her. She would suddenly push aside the roast chicken roasted by the best chef in the best restaurant and declare quietly but firmly, “It’s not quite right. Bring me something else.” Cream wasn’t creamy enough for her, the coffee never strong enough, never, at any place.

I thought she might be capricious. Never mind, just observe and keep observing, I thought. So I observed. I even found it amusing, this caprice, this volatility of hers.

But then I discovered the volatility had deep roots, so deep I could shed no light on it. Poverty was somewhere at the bottom of it. Judit was struggling with her memories. I was sometimes moved by the sheer intensity of her desire to be stronger, more disciplined than her memories. But now that the barriers were down, the barriers raised between her and the world by poverty, some tide had burst its banks in her. It wasn’t that she wanted more, something better and more glamorous than what I offered: what she wanted was something different. Do you understand? She was like an invalid who imagines she might feel better in another room; or that there might be a different doctor, wiser than her own, that she might consult; or that there was a medicine on sale somewhere that was more potent, more effective than the medicines she had so far taken. It was always something else she wanted: always something different. Occasionally she apologized for it. She didn’t really say anything, just looked at me. It was at these moments I felt closest to her proud, wounded soul. She would look at me all but helplessly, as if she could not help her poverty and her memories. And then a voice started speaking inside her that was louder than this silent pleading. The voice wanted something else. It started straightaway, that first evening.

What did she want? Revenge and all that goes with it. In what form? She herself did not know. She probably hadn’t worked out her battle plan. It does no good shaking the foundations of the sagging, sunken, inert structure into which people are born. Occasionally there is an accident, some particular human contact, some chance encounter or event: we wake, take a look round the world, and are suddenly surprised to find we have no home to go to. We don’t even know what to look for or how to limit our desires; what it is we actually desire. We can no longer see the horizon: the image we had has been blown out of shape. All at once nothing satisfies, nothing will do. Yesterday we were happy with a bar of chocolate, a brightly colored ribbon, or any simple pleasure such as sunshine or health. We drank clean water from a damaged old cup, happy that the water was cold and quenched our thirst. In the evening we might have leaned on the rails of a corridor in the tenement courtyard listening in the dark to music playing in the distance and been almost happy. We might have looked at a flower and smiled. The world offered wonderful satisfactions now and then. But then comes an accident and the soul loses its inner peace.

What did Judit do? She instigated, in her own fashion, a kind of class war against me.

Maybe it was not against me, not personally. It was just that I embodied a world for which she felt an infinite longing, a world she so desperately, so feverishly envied, and tried, in a cold fury, with such unfortunate results, to enter, so that when at last she found a repository for these longings — that is to say, in me — she quite lost her equilibrium. At first she was anxious and fussy. She sent back her food. Then, to my quiet surprise, she started changing hotel rooms. She exchanged the little en suite apartment overlooking the park for a bigger one that had a view of the river, with separate bedroom and dressing room. “It’s quieter here,” she said, like a fussy traveling diva. I listened to her complaints with a smile. Naturally I paid her bills and said nothing. I gave her a checkbook and asked her to pay for everything herself. After only three months, the bank informed me — with surprising speed — that the sizable account I had opened for Judit had nothing left in it. How, and on what, had she spent the money, which for her would have represented a substantial sum, a small fortune? It wasn’t a question I ever addressed to her, of course: quite likely she would not have been able to answer. The harness of her soul had snapped, that’s all. Her wardrobe overflowed with expensive clothes selected, surprisingly, according to the best of taste, mostly entirely superfluous feminine fripperies. She shopped in the best stores, without a thought, paying by check: hats, dresses, furs, fashionable novelties, first smaller, then bigger items of jewelry. She craved these things with an extraordinary hunger, a hunger somewhat unnatural in her position. Most of the things she never wore. She was like a starved creature set in front of a laid table, who doesn’t care that nature very quickly sets a limit to our desires or that surfeit might lead to sickness.

Nothing was good enough. Nothing was colorful, sweet, salty, hot, or cold enough. Her soul was excitedly seeking something to quench her thirst as quickly as possible. She spent the morning exploring the most expensive central stores, desperately concerned that the shop not overcharge her for the item she desired. What item? Another fur? Another colorful, fashionable trinket of the season? Yes, all this; and then there were the impossible, crazy things, things bordering on the outrageous. One day I was forced to say something. It stopped her dead in her tracks, like someone arrested in the middle of a riot. She looked around as if waking from a dream and began to cry. She cried for days. Then, for a long time, she bought nothing.

But then she went through another strange period of silence, as if looking far into the distance, remembering. I was moved by her silence. She was with me whenever I wanted her. She was like a thief caught in the act: ashamed, obedient, on her best behavior. I decided not to mention it again, not to warn her. Money was of little importance, after all: I was still rich at the time, and knew by then that it was pointless saving money if by doing so I lost mysef. Because I too lived dangerously in those months; all three of us did, Judit, my wife, and I. We were in mortal danger in the strict sense of the word: everything to which we had clung had collapsed; our lives had turned into a floodplain, a tide of dirty water washing everywhere, drowning our memories, our security, our homes. Now and then we could raise our heads above the water and look around for the nearest shore. But there was no shore to be seen anywhere. Everything has to adopt a form at some stage, even rebellion. Eventually everything is reduced to cliché. Of what value was money in this quiet earthquake? Let the money be washed away with the tide along with the rest; with calm, with desire, with self-respect, with vanity. There comes a day when everything suddenly seems very simple. So I said nothing to Judit, but let her do whatever she wanted. I gave her everything, just like that. For a while she resisted the shopping plague, moderated it, stared at me in panic, exactly like a servant accused of greed, infidelity, or extravagance; and then she set out on her mad dash round town again: dressmakers, antiques dealers, fashion stores.

Hang on a minute, I’ve got a headache. Waiter, a glass of water! And an aspirin. Thank you.

Talking about it now, I feel the same dizziness as I did then. It was like leaning over a huge waterfall. And there is no safety barrier anywhere, not a hand to reach out for. Only the water roaring and the call of the deep, and you suddenly feel that profound, frightening urge … suddenly you know you need every ounce of your strength to turn around and walk away again. You can still do something. You just have to take a step backwards, to say a word, to write a letter, to do something. Down there waits the roaring water. That’s how it feels.

That’s just what I was thinking of when I got this headache. Today I can see all this clearly, at least a few moments of it. For example, when she told me that she had a lover in London, a Greek teacher of singing. That was near the end, once she had decided to come home. But first she wanted clothes: shoes, decent luggage. The Greek music master bought her everything she wanted. Then she came home, took a room near the station, picked up the phone, and rang me, saying “Hello” in English, as though she had forgotten Hungarian.

What effect did this news have on me? I’d like to be honest with you, so I am trying to recall, to look into my heart, to check my recollection, and can only answer in a single word: none. It is hard for people to understand the true significance of actions and relationships. Someone dies, for example. You don’t understand it. The person is already buried, and you still feel nothing. You go about in mourning with a ceremonial solemnity, you look straight ahead of you when you are in society, but then, when you’re at home, alone, you yawn, you scratch your nose, you read a book and think of everything except the dead man you are supposedly mourning. On the outside you behave one way, properly somber and funereal; but inside, you are astonished to note, you feel absolutely nothing, at most a kind of guilty satisfaction and relief. And indifference: a deep indifference. This lasts a while, for days, perhaps for months. You cheat the world: you are indifferent on the sly. Then one day, much later, maybe after a year, when the dead one has long decomposed, you are just walking along and suddenly you feel dizzy and have to lean against the wall because the event has finally gotten through to you: the feeling that had tied you to the dead one. The meaning of death. The fact, the reality of it, the knowledge that it is useless to scrape away the earth with your fingers and uncover what is left of him: you will never again see that smile, and all the wisdom and power in the world is incapable of raising the dead man to make him walk down the street toward you with a smile on his face. You can lead an army and occupy every corner of the globe, but it’s still useless. And then you cry out. Or maybe not even that. You just stand in the street, pale, aware of a loss so great it seems the world has lost all meaning. It is as if you were left totally alone, the only man on earth.

And jealousy. What does that mean? What is there behind it? Vanity, of course. Seventy percent of our body is made up of fluids; only the remaining thirty percent is constituted of the solid matter that makes up a human being. In the same way, human character is comprised of seventy percent vanity, the rest made up of desire, generosity, fear of death, and a sense of honor. When a man in love walks down the street with bloodshot eyes because a woman — just as vain as he is, just as needy, just as lonely, just as desperate for happiness, just as unfortunate a creature as everyone else — has found brief solace in another man’s arms somewhere in town, it is not that he wants to save the woman’s body or soul from some imagined danger or humiliation: it’s his own vanity that he wishes to preserve from harm. Judit told me she had a Greek music master for a lover. I nodded politely, as if to say “Yes, I see,” and changed the subject. And indeed, right at that moment, I felt nothing. It was much later, once we had divorced, once I knew that other people loved her too, once I was alone, that I remembered the Greek music master, and groaned in fury and despair. Well, then, I thought, I would kill them both, both Judit and the Greek music master, if I ever laid hands on them. I suffered like a wounded creature, a wild animal shot in the thigh, all because a woman with whom I had nothing more to do, whose society I avoided because we had failed each other in every respect, had at some time in the past an affair with a man whom she, Judit, would only faintly remember now, the way one remembers a dead man one hardly knew. But then, at the moment she actually confessed to the affair, I felt nothing. I carried on peeling an apple with a polite, agreeable expression on my face, as if this were precisely what I expected to hear and I were content to get the anticipated news.

That was how we got to know each other.

Then, eventually, Judit had had enough of all that my money could buy her. She had bolted her food like a greedy child, and now she was sick. Disappointment and indifference followed. She woke up one day offended — not by me, not by the world at large, but by the realization that no one can pursue their desires for long without due punishment. I found out that back in her childhood at home, on the farm, they were as unspeakably, as impossibly, as shamefully poor as sociological studies sometimes describe. They had a little house and a few acres of land, but debt and the size of the family meant they had to sell. After this there remained nothing but a shack and a yard. And that’s where they lived, her father, her mother, and her paralyzed sister. The children were scattered about the world: they were engaged in service. She spoke about her childhood without emotion, in a matter-of-fact way, but it took her a long time to speak about poverty. She never tried to make me feel guilty; she was too much of a real woman for that — in other words, she was wise and practical in the essential things. People don’t blame fate for death, sickness, and poverty, they accept and bear it: she simply stated things. She told me how in winter they lived underground, she and the family. Judit would have been six when famine drove them from their home to another part of the country, where they took jobs harvesting melons. She didn’t mean “living underground” in a figurative sense: she meant really underground, digging a deep ditch in the earth, covering it with reeds, and spending the entire winter there. She also told me, in great detail — and I could see this childhood memory meant a lot to her — that there were dreadful frosts that year, so the meadow mice had to scamper all over them and take refuge with them in the ditch. It was very unpleasant, Judit recalled, in a faraway voice but without complaint.

So you see, there was this beautiful woman sitting opposite me with expensive furs round her neck, her fingers glittering with jewels in the dazzling restaurant, so not a man could pass by without running a brief glance up and down her, and all the while she was quietly telling me how unpleasant it had been living underground in the great frost with thousands of mice running over their makeshift beds. At times like this I sat in silence beside her, looking at her, listening to her. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had slapped me across the face sometimes, not for any particular reason but simply because she happened to remember something. But Judit simply continued talking, as matter-of-fact as ever. She knew more about poverty, the world, and living with others than all the sociological textbooks put together. She never blamed anything or anyone; she simply remembered and observed.

But as I say, one day she had had enough of her new life. She was sick of it. Maybe she had recalled something. Maybe she understood that she couldn’t be compensated for all that had happened to her and the others, to countless millions of people, by rushing round the shops: that there was no solution to be found on the individual level. Great matters are not settled by personal means. The personal is hopeless, superfluous. There is no personal recompense for what has happened and goes on happening to people at large, for what happens now and has happened for a thousand years. And all those who break free for a moment, emerge from the shadows, and bathe in the light: even in their happiest moments they harbor the guilty memory of their betrayal. It is as if they had committed their souls for eternity to those left behind. Did she know all this? She never talked about it. People don’t talk about the reasons for their poverty. She remembered poverty as one of the natural world’s natural phenomena. She never blamed the rich. If anything, she blamed the poor, recalling them and everything that constituted poverty in slightly mocking fashion. As if the poor could somehow help it. As if poverty were a form of sickness, and all those who suffered with it might have somehow avoided it. Maybe they didn’t look after themselves properly; maybe they overate or didn’t wear the right clothes in the evening when it was cold. It was the accusing way close family speak of the chronically sick, as if the dying man suffering from acute anemia with only weeks to live might have done something about it. “He should have started taking his medicine earlier,” “He should have let someone open the window,” “He shouldn’t have stuffed himself with poppy-seed cake!” If only the poor man had done all this, he might have escaped the anemia that was killing him! That was something like the way Judit regarded the poor and poverty. It was as if she had said: “Someone should have done something about it.” But she never blamed the rich. She was too worldly-wise for that.

She was more worldly-wise than is wise, and now, when the goods of the world were laid out before her, she suddenly felt sick, because she had tried to cram in too much of it. But it was her memories that did it, really. Memories are more potent than indulgence. They are always more potent.

She wasn’t a delicate creature, but her memories still got the better of her. I could see her struggling against her weakness. Ever since the world began, there have been healthy and sick, rich and poor. We can alleviate poverty, we can strive for greater equality, we can put limits on our greed, our profiteering, our rapacity, but we can’t turn a dullard into a genius by education, can’t teach the cloth-eared the heavenly beauties of music, nor can we teach temperance to the overfed. Judit never talked in terms of justice: she was too worldly-wise for that. The sun rises and sets, she thought, and you will always find the poor somewhere. She had risen from the ranks of the poor simply because she was beautiful, a woman, and because I desired her. But she was growing wise to me too. For her, it was like emerging from a trance. She started looking round. She started to listen.

Apart from our first meeting she had rarely looked directly at me. People don’t gaze into the eyes of an idea, into the eyes of supernatural beings that determine their fates. There must have been a certain glow, a kind of dazzling luminosity, around me in those early years that meant she had to blink and squint when she raised her eyes to meet mine. The effect wasn’t due to my personality or social rank, nor to the fact that I was a man or that I was in any way a special being. To her I had been a secret code that she dare not crack because such codes are the key to happiness and misery. I was, for her, the condition to which a person might aspire her entire life. But when the possibility of that condition arose and was achieved, she recoiled, was disappointed, and became vengeful. Lázár was very fond of one of Strindberg’s plays, the one called A Dream Play. Do you know it? … I have never seen it. He would often quote lines from it and recall particular scenes. He said there was a character whose one wish was that life should present him with “a green tackle box”: you know the kind of green box in which a fisherman keeps his hooks, lines, and bait. Well, this character grows old, life passes him by, and eventually the gods take pity on him and send him the box. The character looks at the box he has longed for all his life, moves to the front of the stage, examines the box more closely, and, with deep sadness, declares, “It’s not green enough …” Lázár quoted this sometimes when talking about human desire. And as Judit and I slowly grew more familiar I began to feel that I was “not green enough” for her. For a long time she did not dare see me as I was. People are always scared of seeing on an ordinary human scale things they have intensely desired or have raised into an ideal. We were living together by this time, and the intolerable tension that had infected our earlier, more feverish years had gone: now we perceived each other as people, as man and woman, complete with physical weaknesses demanding simple human cures … and yet she still liked to regard me in a way I never saw myself. It was as if I were the priest of a strange religion or the scion of some aristocratic family. I saw myself merely as a lonely man nursing a few hopes.

The café is almost empty. There’s this cold smoke everywhere. We can go too, if you like. But I’ll just get to the end of the story first. Give me a light. Thanks. Having started, I might as well finish — if I don’t bore you. I was talking about hope, and I should say how I discovered the truth and how I could live with it. Shall I go on?

All right, then, listen. I’m listening too. I am looking deep into my soul as I speak. I am all ears. I said I wanted to tell you the truth, so that is what I am obliged to do.

You see, dear boy, I was hoping for a miracle. What kind of miracle? Well, simply that love might prove to be eternal; that its mysterious, superhuman power might overcome loneliness, dissolve the distance between two people, and break down any artificial barriers that society had erected in the form of education, money, history, and memory. I felt in mortal danger and was looking for a hand to grasp. I longed for reassurance that there really was such a thing as empathy, as companionship: that all this was still humanly possible. So I reached out for Judit.

Once the first phase of confusion, tension, and anxious waiting had passed, we naturally turned to each other for love. I married her and waited for the miracle.

I imagined the miracle to be quite simple. I thought the differences between us might dissolve in the great melting pot of love. I lay down in bed with her as if I had finally arrived home after a long exile, at the end of a voyage. Home is much simpler, but more mysterious and more important, than abroad, because not even the most exotic foreign place can offer the experiences a few familiar rooms can. I mean childhood. It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives. It’s what we recall when, much later, we see the Niagara Falls or Lake Michigan. We see the light and hear the sound of surprises, joys, hopes, and fears locked away in childhood. That is what we love, what we are forever seeking. And for an adult, perhaps only love can conjure something of that tremulous hopeful sense of waiting … love — in other words, not just bed and all that bed entails, but those moments of searching, waiting, and hoping that throw two people together.

Judit and I lay down in bed and made love. We made love passionately, expectantly, in wonder and hope. We were probably hoping that what the world and mankind had ruined might be put right by the two of us eye-to-eye in this other, purer, more ancient realm, in that eternal country without and beyond borders. I mean in bed. Any love preceded by an extended period of waiting — though maybe it’s not exactly romantic love when just a few cinders remain unconsumed by the purgatorial fires of waiting — hopes for a miracle from both the other and itself. Neither Judit nor I was exactly a youngster by then, but we were not old, just man and woman, in the complete, most basic sense of those words. We reach an age when it is not purely sexual satisfaction we desire of each other, not full-blown happiness or release, but a simple and solemn truth that vanity and falsehood had previously hidden from us, hidden from us even when we were in love: it is the truth that we are human beings, we men and women, and that we share a common enterprise or responsibility on earth, a responsibility that may not be quite as personal as we think. Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it.

Once people are old enough, it is the truth they want, and they want it in bed, too, in the sheer physical underworld of it. It isn’t beauty we most want — after a while we stop noticing the beauty, anyway. It’s not that the other should be wonderful, exciting, wise, experienced, curious, lusty, and responsive. So what is it that matters so much? It is the truth. In other words, it is exactly the same thing as matters in literature and in all human affairs. This truth is a compound of spontaneity, readiness, and the willingness to be surprised by the miraculous gift of joy that arrives unplanned, unintended. Even when we are being selfish, wanting only to receive, it is the ability to give, to give in an almost distracted, vaguely conscious way, as it were, without planning, without mad ambition. It’s what I think of as “bed truth.” No, old man, there is no Soviet-style pyatiletka, no Five-Year Plan, nor Four-Year Plan, either. The feeling that drives two people together can have no plan.

Bed is jungle, wilderness, a place full of surprises, teeming with the unexpected; there is the same unbearable dank heat, the same extraordinary flowers and lianas with their deathly scent and their ability to twine around you; the same glowing eyes of the same beasts of prey watching you in the half-light, the heraldic beasts of desire and obsession, ever ready to pounce. Jungle and half-light, strange cries in the distance — you can’t tell whether it is a man screaming by a well, his throat ripped open by some predator, or nature itself screaming, nature, which is human, animal, inhuman at once — bed entails all that. This woman knew all there was to be known. She had the secret knowledge: she knew the body. She knew self-control and loss of self-control. Love for her was not a series of occasional meetings but a constant return to a familiar childhood base: a blend of homecoming and festival; the dark-brown light over a field at dusk, the taste of certain familiar foods, the excitement and anticipation, and, under it all, the confidence that once evening came, there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk. She was like a child tired of playing, making her way home because the light in the window was calling her to a hot dinner and a clean bed. That was love as far as Judit was concerned.

As I said, I was hopeful.

To hope is to fear what you desire, the things in which you neither trust nor genuinely believe. You don’t place your hopes in what you already have: what is possessed simply exists, as if by default.

We traveled for a while. Then we came home and rented an out-of-town property. It was Judit, not I, who arranged all this. The next natural step would be to introduce her to “society,” if she wanted it. I was looking to bring home intelligent people who were not snobs, who might regard what had happened as more than food for gossip. “Society,” that strange world of which, only a little while ago, I had been a perfectly respectable member — the world in which Judit had only recently been a servant — followed our lives with keen interest and, in its own way, accepted what had happened. People always need something to spice up their lives. When it comes, they immediately sit up, their eyes begin to sparkle, and soon they’re on the phone from morn till night … It wouldn’t have surprised anyone in society if the papers had discussed “the affair” in their leading articles: they brought up the subject, they talked about it, they analyzed it in the minutest detail as if it were a crime of some sort. And who knows? They might have been right according to the rules on which society depends. People don’t tolerate the agonizing boredom of cohabitation for nothing; it’s not for nothing they continue squirming in the sharp-jawed snares of a relationship that has long ago lost interest; and, surely, something must lead them to accept the necessary self-denials involved in the social contract. Nobody, they feel, has the right to seek satisfaction, peace, and joy as an individual while they, the majority, a great many of them, have agreed to censor their feelings and desires in the interest of the grand sum of censorship — civilization. That is why they snort and grunt and set up kangaroo courts and advertise their verdicts in the form of gossip each time they hear someone has dared to rebel, seeking individual recourse against loneliness. But now that I am alone, I sometimes wonder whether they are so wrong in censuring people who venture outside the rules.

I’m just raising the question, you know. Just between the two of us, now it’s past midnight.

Women don’t understand this. Only men understand that there is something else beside happiness. This difference may be that great hopeless gulf in understanding between men and women, the gulf that’s always there, each and every time. Women — real women — have only one true home: the place occupied by the man to whom they are attached. For men there is another home: the great, eternal, impersonal, and tragic place symbolized by flags and borders. I don’t mean to say that women feel no loyalty to the community into which they are born, to the language in which they take oaths, lie, and shop, to the land where they grew up; nor do I say that loyalty, fidelity, the readiness for self-sacrifice, sometimes even for downright heroism on behalf of the man’s other realm, lie beyond them. But women never really die for a country: they die for a man. Every time. Joan of Arc and the others are the exceptions, masculine women. There are ever more of these now. Women’s patriotism is much quieter than men’s. They have fewer slogans. They agree with Goethe, who said that when a peasant cottage burns down, that is a genuine tragedy, but when one’s homeland is devastated, that is, on the whole, a symbolic loss. Home, for women, is always that peasant cottage. That’s the home they jealously guard, the home they live and work for, the home for which they are ready to perform every sacrifice. In that cottage there is a bed, a table, a man, and any number of children. That is woman’s true home.

As I was saying, we loved each other. And now I want to tell you something, in case you didn’t know: love, true love, is always fatal. What I mean is, it does not aim at happiness, at an idyll, at a hand-in-hand eternity of sentimental walks under flowering lime trees, with a gentle light burning on the veranda behind, the house swimming in cool scents. Life can be that, but not love. Love burns with a fierce, more dangerous flame. One day you discover a desire in yourself to encounter this all-consuming passion. It is when you no longer want to keep anything for yourself, when you don’t want love to offer you a healthier, calmer, more fulfilled kind of life, but you just want to be; you know, to exist in a total sense, even at the cost of perishing in the process. This desire comes late in life: some never feel it, never encounter it. They are too cautious, but I don’t envy them that. Then there are the gluttons, the curious, who have to sample everything and can’t pass any opportunity by. They are genuinely to be pitied. There are also the obsessed, the desperate: love’s pickpockets, who, quick as lightning, dip their hands into your heart to steal a feeling, discover some secret physical susceptibility there, then immediately vanish into the darkness, melt into the crowd, snickering with malicious delight. Nor must we forget the cowards, the calculating, who even in love work out everything strategically, as if love were a matter of economics and production deadlines, people who live according to a precise agenda. Most folk are like this: they are true wretches. And then there comes a day when someone really understands what life desires of love, why life has given us sensibility. Does life mean well? Nature is not benign. Do you think it means to make you happy with this feeling? Nature has no need of human pipe dreams. All nature wants is to beget and destroy: that is its business. It is ruthless because its plan is indifferent to the human predicament, beyond the human. Nature has gifted us with passion, but it insists that the passion be unconditional.

In all true life there comes a moment when a man is so deep in passion, it is as if he had cast himself into the waters of Niagara without a life belt. I don’t believe in love that begins like a picnic, a holiday excursion complete with rucksack and singing and sunbeams breaking through the boughs … You know, that flood of spring-is-here feeling most people experience at the start of a relationship … I am deeply suspicious of it. Passion does not celebrate holidays! It’s a dark force that builds and destroys worlds and waits on no answer from those it has touched, nor does it ask them whether they feel good as a result. Frankly, it doesn’t care either way. It gives everything and demands everything: it is that unconditional passion of which the deepest stratum is nothing less than life-and-death. There is no other way of experiencing passion … and how few make it that far! People comfort and cosset each other in bed, tell whopping lies, and pretend to feel all kinds of things, selfishly robbing the other of what they fancy, possibly throwing some superfluous tidbit of joy the other’s way in return … But they have no idea that this is not passion. It is no accident that history has regarded great lovers with the same awe and veneration as heroes, as brave pioneers who have risked all by voluntarily embarking on a hopeless but extraordinary human enterprise. Yes, true lovers run every kind of risk, literally, in every possible sense. It is a joint enterprise, in which the woman is as much the guiding force as the man, just as heroic, just as full of valor as a knight setting out to seek the Holy Grail, that being the whole point of the crusade, of the battles, of the wounds received, of the final vanquishing … What else should lovers want? What other purpose has that ultimate, unconditional sacrifice toward which fatal passion drives all those it has touched? Life articulates itself through this power, then immediately turns away from those it has sacrificed, completely indifferent to them. All ages and all religions honor lovers for this reason. Lovers bind themselves to the stake when they are in each other’s arms. The true lovers, I mean. The courageous, the few, the chosen. The rest simply hope to find a woman the way they might a beast of burden, or to spend a few hours in sweetly pale and comforting arms, either to flatter their male or female vanity, or to satisfy the legal demands of a biological urge … But that’s not love. Behind each lover’s embrace stands the figure of Death, whose shadows are no less powerful than those wild flashes of joy. Behind every kiss looms the secret desire for annihilation, for an ultimate happiness that is no longer in the mood for argument but knows that to be happy is to cease entirely and surrender to feeling.

Love is feeling without an end in view. Maybe that is why lovers have always been honored by old religions, by ancient epic poems, and in song … Deep in unconscious memory people recall how love was great once, when it was not just a form of social commerce or a way of whiling away time, a game or an amusement to be compared with bridge or a society ball. They recall that there was once a frightening task all living beings had to accomplish, that task being to love, love being the full articulation of life, the most complete experience of existence and of its natural consequence, nonexistence. But people don’t learn this till very late. And how unimportant are the virtues or moral standing or beauty or fine qualities of the partner in this enterprise! To love is to know joy as completely as it can be known and then to perish. But all those people, those hundreds of millions of people, carry on, hoping for help, waiting for their lovers to perform some act of charity on their behalf, a show of tenderness, patience, forgiveness, comfort. And they have no idea that what they receive in this way is unimportant: it is they themselves who must give, only they, give unconditionally — that is the meaning of the game.

That’s how we set out on love, Judit Áldozó and I, when we started life in the house just outside town.

That, at least, is how I set out. That was the kind of thing I felt. And I hoped. I still went into the office, but I felt so detached from everything I was like a crook who knows he must be discovered one day, and that when that day comes, he will have to leave his job and all that goes with it … What did I discover? I discovered I no longer had anything to do with the part I played in the world, but I kept proper hours and followed the rules as strictly as ever. I was first to arrive at the factory, and the last to leave, at six, when there was only the doorman left in the place, and I carried on walking across town, just as before. I used to visit the old cukrászda and would sometimes see my wife there—“my first wife,” I almost said, my real wife. Because I never once felt that Judit was my wife. She was the other woman.

What did I feel when I saw the first, my real wife? I didn’t feel sentimental. But the blood always drained from my face. I gave her an embarrassed greeting and firmly looked away. Because the body remembers, you know, it never forgets. It’s like a sea and a shore that once belonged together.

But that isn’t what I wanted to talk about now, now that I have told you almost everything. The end of this story is as stupid as anything you will hear from the most stupid or ordinary man. Shall I tell you anyway? Well, of course, now I have started you will want me to finish.

Look, old man, we lived for a year under these highly unlikely physical and psychological circumstances. I lived for a year as if I were living in the jungle among wild beasts and poisonous plants, with snakes beneath each stone or bush. That year might well have been worth it. Worth what had preceded it and what was to come.

As to what preceded it, you know most of that now. What happened next took even me a little by surprise. I can see you are thinking that one day I discovered that Judit had been cheating on me. No, old man, I wasn’t to know that until much later. She only betrayed me once she had no other choice.

It took me a year to discover that Judit Áldozó was stealing from me.

Don’t look at me with that incredulous expression. I don’t mean it figuratively. It wasn’t my feelings she was robbing me of, it was the money in my wallet. I mean in the usual sense of the word, the way the police report it in their notebooks.

When did she start stealing? Oh, immediately, from the very first moment. No, wait. Let me think. No, it wasn’t at the very beginning. At that stage she was merely deceiving me. I told you how, at the beginning of the relationship, when we were still living in the hotel, I opened an account for her at my bank and provided her with a checkbook. The account was very soon overdrawn. It was almost impossible to understand this flood of spending, this waste. Yes, she bought a great many things, furs, accessories, but I never looked to see what she was doing. I never cared about the quantity or quality of her shopping, only about her feverish acquisitiveness. It was the pathological fury of the over-compensation that worried me. To put it bluntly, a letter arrived from the bank one day to inform me that her account was exhausted. Naturally, I deposited more money in it, but somewhat less this time. A few weeks later the account was drained again. At that point I warned her, but only in a light, joking manner, not seriously, that she had no idea of our material circumstances. Her ideas of money and property had changed in England: here, at home, we were more modest, less steeped in wealth than she imagined. She dutifully heard the sermon through. She did not ask for more money. Then we moved into the house with the garden and I gave her a monthly allowance that was far more than necessary for housekeeping and her own requirements. We never spoke of money again.

But one day I opened a letter in which the bank informed Judit that, on such and such a date, they had credited her account with twenty-six thousand pengő. I kept looking at the letter and rubbing my eyes. In those first few moments I felt a rush of blood to the head: I was jealous! I imagined Judit must have brought the money with her from England, where she had had a lover of some sort — not the Greek music master about whom she had told me, but someone else, God knows whom, a milord who had paid her handsomely for her services. This feeling, this idea, hurt so much that I beat my fist against the desk. Then I set off for the bank. There I discovered that Judit had not brought this sum with her from England, but had paid it in, in small installments. She had made her first deposit the day I presented her with the checkbook.

“Women!” you say, and smile. Yes, that’s what I myself said at first, and gave a smile of relief. It now seemed certain — and the order and date of the deposits showed as much — that Judit had asked me for the money but had secretly stowed it away so I shouldn’t know. I thought she was busy with her shopping sprees, carelessly throwing money about everywhere. Indeed, she did throw it about, but not entirely carelessly. As I later discovered, she drove a very hard bargain when she was shopping, and had the receipts made out for bigger sums than she actually paid. Women of the street do this to their dim, happy-go-lucky admirers. When I understood that it was my money that Judit was hoarding, I smiled in relief.

I put the bank statement back in the envelope, stuck down the flap, and left it for Judit. I said nothing about my discovery. But then a new kind of jealousy grew in me. I was living with a woman who kept secrets. She kept secrets the way false women do, the kind that dine with their husbands and families, full of airy charm, but even while happily chatting to those who believe in them, accepting sacrifices and gifts from the man who trusts them, are by the end of the afternoon date already plotting how to sneak into a strange man’s house and shamelessly spend several hours insulting every decent human feeling, betraying those who trust them and take care of them. Please understand that I am an old-fashioned man and have nothing but the deepest contempt for women who break up marriages. My contempt is so deep that I can’t find any fashionable excuse. No one has a right to the sort of sly, filthy, cheap affair such women call happiness, not at the price of secretly or openly wounding other people’s feelings. I have been both the sufferer and the instigator of such repulsive affairs, and if there is one thing in my life I utterly regret and feel ashamed of it is the breakup of my own marriage. I have sympathy for every kind of sexual misadventure, for those caught in the terrifying currents of physical desire: I even understand the most extreme, twisted forms of it. Desire speaks to us in a thousand voices. I understand all that. But only unattached people are free to cast themselves into those deep waters. Anything else is deception and treachery, worse than conscious cruelty.

People who feel something for each other can’t live with secrets in their hearts. That’s what cheating means. The rest is almost coincidental … a purely physical matter, usually on some melancholy impulse, nothing much. But these calculated affairs, in carefully chosen hours, in carefully chosen places, lacking all spontaneity … how sad, how cheap they all are. And behind it all there is this wretched little secret. It stinks out the relationship. It’s as if there were a corpse rotting somewhere in one of the rooms, under a couch.

That’s how it was the day I discovered the bank statement. Judit had a secret. And she did a good job of keeping it from me.

She did a good job though I watched her like a hawk. I couldn’t have watched her more closely if I had hired a team of private detectives to observe her. We lived graciously, intimately, according to the rules of male-female cohabitation, and we lied to each other. She lied that she had no secrets from me; I lied by pretending to believe her. I watched her and kept thinking. At one stage I even thought to change my tactics, to surprise her and corner her, force her to confess. Such a confession might clear the air, the way an opportune summer storm clears away days of stifling heat. But I might also have feared a confession. That this woman, with whom I was sharing my fate, was keeping something from me was a genuinely frightening thought. Twenty-six thousand pengő for a woman who had spent her childhood in a ditch with mice scrambling all over her, a servant, was more than a lot of money: it was a fortune. And the money grew and multiplied. If it were only a matter of the ancient, nagging female practice of artfully putting aside some money from the housekeeping to use as pocket money, of filtering off a small sum from joint expenses … well, that might have been something to smile at. All women do this, because all women are worried that their husbands don’t really understand the necessities of life: their instinct is that men can only earn, not save. All women prepare for a rainy day. The women who do this are as honest as the day is long in other respects, but when it comes to money, they cheat their husbands, stealing from them like domestic magpies or petty thieves. They know that the greatest secret in life is to preserve: jam, people, money — anything important enough to keep. And so they cheat and filch. It’s the female version of the heroic exploit: a petty but tenacious wisdom. But it wasn’t pennies and dimes that Judit was stowing away. Quietly, regularly, sweetly, Judit was robbing me, showing me fake bills, hoarding away money.

We lived graciously and quietly. Judit stole and I watched her. It was the beginning of the end.

One day I found out it wasn’t just money she was robbing me of but the secret something that is a basic condition of anyone’s life: self-respect. Look, I know this idea of self-respect is really little more than vanity. It’s a male word. Women shrug when they hear it said. Women, in case you didn’t know, do not “respect” themselves. They may respect the man they are with, their social or family rank, or their reputation. All this is transference, formality. But when it comes to themselves, and that strange phenomenon compounded of character and self-knowledge crudely glued together that we refer to as “I,” women regard it with a generous, slightly condescending cynicism.

I discovered that this woman was consciously, systematically robbing me — that’s to say she did everything to carve out for herself as large a slice of the loaf we shared as she could inconspicuously manage. I mean the loaf I thought was there for the both of us, and what is more, a loaf made of the finest bread she’d ever eaten. But I learned this not in the bank that regularly, and with the best of intentions, continued informing Judit of the very happy state of her account. No, old man, it was in bed I learned it. And that was so painful … well, indeed, this is the thing we men mean when we say we cannot live without self-respect.

It was in bed I learned it. I had been observing her for a while by then. I thought she was stowing the money away for her family. She had an extensive family, men and women, people at the back of beyond, trawling about in the depths of something very like history, at a depth I could comprehend with my mind but not in my heart, since my heart lacked the courage to explore secrets that lay that deep. I thought it might have been this mysterious, subterranean confederacy of relatives that had put Judit up to robbing me. Maybe they were all in debt. Maybe they were desperate to buy land … But you want to know why she never said anything? I asked myself that question. My immediate answer was that the reason she said nothing was because she was embarrassed by her poverty, because poverty, you know, is a kind of conspiracy, a secret society, an eternal, silently taken vow. It is not only a better life that the poor want: they want self-esteem too, the knowledge that they are the victims of a grave injustice and that the world honors them for that the way it honors heroes. And indeed they are heroes: now that I am getting old I can see that they are the only real heroes. All other forms of heroism are of the moment, or constrained, or come down to vanity. But sixty years of poverty, quietly fulfilling all the obligations family and society imposes on you while remaining human, dignified, perhaps even cheerful and gracious: that is true heroism.

I thought she was stealing for her family. But no, Judit wasn’t sentimental. She stole for herself, with no particular purpose, with the solemn diligence and circumspection of a thousand-year-old wisdom that tells you that seven fat years are not long, that masters are not to be relied on, that fortune’s wheel is forever turning, and if clownish good fortune has happily deposited you in the top seat at the table, it’s best to dig in, since you never know when the lean years will come calling. She stole for prudence’s sake, not out of generosity or compassion. If she had wanted to help her family, she had only to say the word to me. She knew that perfectly well. But Judit had an instinctive fear of the family, particularly now that she had set her foot elsewhere, on the master’s territory. Her embattled, acquisitive nature knew nothing of compassion.

And in the meantime she was watching me, her husband. What was I doing? Am I not getting bored of it all? Am I going to send her away? If I do, she must certainly stow away as much as she can, as quickly as she can. She watched me at table and she watched me in bed. And when I first noticed it, I blushed in embarrassment. The room was dark, and that might have been lucky for Judit. People don’t know their own limits. If I hadn’t kept a grip on myself I might have killed her. Might have. Pointless to talk about it.

It was a mere glance, all of it, in a tender, intimate moment, when I had closed my eyes and suddenly opened them again. I saw a face in the dim light, a familiar, doomed face that was very carefully, very subtly, smiling at me in mockery. Then I knew that this woman, with whom, now and at other times, before, I believed I was sharing moments of unconditional giving, for whom I had exiled myself from the realm of human and social contracts, this woman was actually watching me, just at such moments, with gentle but unmistakable mockery. It was as if she were observing me, examining me, saying: “What is the young gentleman up to now?” and “Ah, he’s gentry.” And then she served me. I realized that Judit, both in and out of bed, did not love me: she served me. Exactly as she did when she was a maid fresh to the household, cleaning my clothes and polishing my shoes. Exactly the way she later served me my food when I occasionally went to my mother’s for dinner. She served me because that was her role in respect of me, and one can’t change these great, fixed, human relationships by force. And when embarked on her strange battle against my wife and me, she never once believed, not for a moment, that this relationship, this role in life that drew us together yet kept us from each other, could really be dissolved or changed from within. She did not believe that she would ever have any other role in my life than to serve, to be the servant, to play the maid. And because she knew all this, not just in her mind but with her entire body, in her nerves, in her dreams, in her past, in her very genes, she never argued much, but simply did as the laws of her life dictated. I understand this now.

Did it hurt? you ask.

Terribly.

But I did not send her away. Not immediately. I was too vain. I didn’t want to acknowledge the pain she caused me. I let her serve me for a while, in bed and at table; I allowed her to carry on stealing. I never told her, not even later, that I knew about her sad, shady little dealings, nor did I mention that, in unguarded moments, I had caught her mocking, superior, curious eyes looking at me in bed.

There are certain affairs that must be seen right through to the end, right to the end when there is nothing else left — to the point of annihilation. I saw it through. Then, after a while, when I discovered something else, I quietly told her to leave. She went without complaint. There was no scene, no argument. She took her belongings — there were a considerable number of belongings by then, including the house and a great deal of jewelry — and left. She left as silently, as without comment, as she had arrived at the age of fifteen. She looked back from the threshold with the same silent, interrogatory, indifferent look she gave me that very first time in the hall.

The most beautiful thing about her was her eyes. Sometimes I still see them in my dreams.

Yes, that stocky fellow took her. I even fought a duel with him … these are such pathetic things, but sometimes there’s no other way.

Look here, old man, they want to throw us out.

Bill, please, waiter. It says … but no, don’t even think of it! This was my treat, if you please. No buts. You were my guest.

No, I don’t fancy going to Peru with you. Once somebody has grown as solitary as I have, what’s the point of going to Peru or anywhere else? You see, one day I realized that no one can help me. It is love people want … but there’s no one who can help with it, never. Once a man understands this, he becomes strong and solitary.

So this is what happened while you were in Peru.