Portraits of a Marriage

Part III

What are you looking at, darling? Photographs? You carry on. At least you have something to do while I make the coffee.

Wait, let me put my housecoat on. What’s the time? Half-past three? I’ll just open the window for a moment. No, don’t get up, stay in bed. Look how bright the moon is. It’s quite full. The town is absolutely quiet at this time, fast asleep. In half an hour, at four, the trucks will start rumbling, bringing vegetables and milk and meat to market. But Rome is properly asleep now in the moonlight. I don’t tend to sleep at this time, because I have been waking at three with a pounding heart for a while now. What are you laughing at? I don’t mean a pounding heart as when we are making love. Stop laughing! The doctor says it is at this time the heart rate changes, you know, as when you change gear from first to second in the car. And another man — not a doctor — once told me that three in the morning is when the earth’s magnetic field changes. Have you any idea what that means? I don’t, either. He had read it in a Swiss book. Yes, it was him, the man whose photograph you are holding. He said it.

Don’t move, darling. If only you knew how beautiful you are when you lie in bed, your head propped on your arm, your hair falling over your eyes! You have to go to the museum to see men’s bodies as splendid as yours. And your face too, yes … what can I say? It’s the head of an artist. Why are you looking at me so suspiciously? You know I adore you. Because you are gorgeous. Because you’re an artist. Because you are my one and only. You’re a gift from God. Wait, don’t move, let me kiss you! No, just here, in the corner of your eye! And your brow! No, relax. You’re not cold? Shall I close the window? It’s mild out in the street, and those two orange trees under the window are shining in the moonlight. When you’re not here at night I often lean on the window-sill till dawn and watch the moonlit Via Liguria, this sweet and lovely street. See? There’s someone stealing along by the houses, just as in the Middle Ages. Do you know who it is? You mustn’t laugh at me. Just because I’m in love with you, just because I think you are the only one in the world for me forever, my dear, it doesn’t mean I’m silly. It’s old age slinking along the Via Liguria under my window, and not just here, but all over Rome and everywhere else, all over the world.

Old age is a thief and a murderer. One day he enters the room. He has blacked his face up with soot, like a burglar. With both hands he tears the mop of hair off your head, hits you across the face with his fist and knocks out your teeth, steals the light from your eyes, the sound from your ears, all the nice tastes in your stomach … No, all right, I won’t go on. Why the mocking laughter? I still have a perfect right to love you and, see, I am not being miserly with it, I am gorging myself on all the happiness you give me. One can never have enough of such sweetness and happiness. I’m not ashamed of it, I freely confess I couldn’t live without you now. But don’t worry, I won’t follow you on my broom to the Capitol! The day will come when I no longer have the right to love you, because I am aging. An old belly, wrinkled breasts. Don’t go comforting me. I know the script. By then all you could give me would be alms. Or like alms. Or the kind of extra people pay their employees as overtime. Why do you look at me like that from the corner of your eyes? You’ll see, that’s just how it will be. I’ve learned to go when it’s time to go … Would you like to know who taught me that lesson? Yes, the man whose photograph you are holding.

What are you asking? Wait, the early vegetable van is making such a racket. Was he my husband? No, my sweet, he was not my husband. It’s that other one there, the one in the fur coat, in the corner of the album, who was my husband. He was not my second husband, the one whose name I now bear, but the first. He was the true one, my intended. That’s if such a thing exists. The second simply married me. To put it more precisely, I paid to have him marry me, because by that time I had crossed the border and needed papers and passport. It’s a long time since I parted from the first. Where is the photograph of the second? I don’t know. I haven’t kept it, because later I didn’t even want to see him, not even in my dreams. Whenever I dreamt of him I suffered, as if I had dreamt something improper — women covered head to toe in hair, that kind of thing. What are you staring at? There’s no man anywhere whose life has not been touched by women. Some woman is bound to cross his path. And there are men … men whose lives are like one of those houses that form a through passage from one street to another. One woman simply passes his key on to the next woman. He was like that. It’s the same with women. Every woman has, at some time, had a man knocking at her door. There are modest men who tap gently and ask, “May I … just for a moment?” The sillier kind of woman starts screaming in outrage, declaring, “What nerve!” or “Why just a moment?” And then they slam the door. Ah, but later they regret having been so peevish. They start looking through the crack in the door, watching in case the presumptuous fellow should still be standing there, hat in hand. As soon as they see he has gone they are in a foul mood. And later — sometimes much later — they start shivering at night, because everything around them has gone cold, and they suspect it might have been a mistake sending the man on his way, since it wouldn’t be so bad to have a man in this cold room, in this cold bed, warming it up, close, within touching distance, and no matter if he lies, no matter if he is rude, as long as he’s there. Like you? Thank heaven you’re still here next to me. You were so brazen I couldn’t get rid of you. What are you grinning at? Thank heaven, I say. Don’t you go snorting like that, mocking and grinning, you bastard.

Enough of your sniggering. Do you or don’t you want me to go on?

Well, of course they came knocking at my door, a considerable number of them, I should say. But this, my second husband, he was only my husband on paper.

In ’48, you see, I arrived in Vienna with nothing but two suitcases, because I had had enough of democracy. The suitcases were all that remained of the good life, them and the jewels.

This man, my second husband, had been living in Vienna for some years by then. He made his living by getting married, then divorced. As soon as the war was over, he strolled into Vienna, because he was a smart guy, you know, clever enough to leave beautiful Hungary while the going was good. He had the right papers, though heaven knows how he got them. He married me, asking forty thousand for the privilege. And then he wanted another twenty thousand for the divorce. I paid it by selling jewels. But you know that. After all, there were some jewels left for you, weren’t there? There, you see. It’s good to economize. Everything was fine with him, the only problem being that one day he came to the hotel where I lived alone and insisted it wasn’t just a marriage of convenience, that he had connubial rights. I kicked him out, of course. They are so common nowadays, you know, these marriages of convenience: women marry to get hold of the papers they need abroad. There are some marriages of convenience in which three children quickly appear, one after the other. You have to be really careful. As I said, I kicked him out. By way of farewell he asked for the silver cigarette case he saw on the bedside table. I never saw him again. He went off looking for new brides.

My real husband? That’s the one in the fur coat, the one you’re looking at. What do you think of him? Do you reckon he looks like a proper gentleman? People certainly referred to him as a gentleman. It’s just that, you know, it’s hard to tell the difference between gentlemen and those who just pretend to be one and turn out to be fake. There are rich gentlemen with good manners, and there are less-rich gentlemen whose manners are nothing special, but still they’re gentlemen. There are a great many rich, well-turned-out men. But gentlemen are few. So few they’re hardly worth mentioning. They’re as rare as that peculiar creature I once saw in the London Zoo: the okapi. Sometimes I think that no one really rich could ever be a real gentleman. You might find a few among the poor, maybe. But they’re as rare as saints. Or okapi.

My husband? I told you, he was very much like a gentleman. But he wasn’t entirely, unquestionably a gentleman. You know why he wasn’t? Because he took offense. When he got to know me. I mean, when he really and truly got to know me. He took offense and divorced me. That’s how he failed the test of being a gentleman. It’s not that he was stupid. He himself knew that any man you can offend, or who takes offense, isn’t a proper gentleman. There are gentlemen even of my kind. Yes, they’re rare, because we were as poor as the field mice with which we slept and lived in my childhood, but they’re gentlemen.

My father harvested melons in the wet country, the Nyírség. He was what they call there a Canadaman. We were so poor we had to dig a shelter in the ditch and live there through winter, together with the field mice. But whenever I think of my father, you know, I picture him as a gentleman. Because you could never offend him. He had an inner calm. When he was angry, he struck out, of course, and his fist was hard as stone. Sometimes he was helpless with anger because the world despised him, because he was a beggar. At such times he kept silent and kept blinking. He could read, and could sign his name in his own fashion, but he rarely used book knowledge, or any knowledge. He just kept silent. I do believe he was thinking, but only briefly. Sometimes he’d get hold of liquor, cheap pálinka, and drink himself senseless. But when I put all the pieces together and think of him, this man, my father, who lived with my mother and their children in a ditch full of mice, I think of him as a gentleman. One winter, when he had no shoes, the postman gave him a pair of galoshes with holes in them, and he went about in them, wrapping his feet in rags. I can tell you, he never felt offended.

My first husband, my real husband, kept his shoes in a shoe cupboard, because he had so many fine shoes he needed to have a cupboard made for them. And he was always reading books, damned clever books. For a long time I thought it was impossible to offend a man so wealthy that he even had to have a shoe cupboard. It’s not for nothing I mention the shoe cupboard. When I first entered the service of my husband’s family, it was the shoe cupboard I liked best. I liked it but it scared me too. I didn’t have any shoes for a long time when I was a child. I was over ten years old when someone gave me a pair that fitted and actually belonged to me. It was a used pair given to the cook by the deputy sheriff’s wife. It was the kind people wore during the war, low-heeled shoes, the sort you buttoned up. They were too tight for the cook, and one winter morning when I was fetching milk for the house she took pity on me and gave me these marvelous shoes. Maybe that was why I was so glad to have this great trunk, the one I left back in Pest when I skipped the democracy after the Russian siege of Budapest. The trunk was still in one piece after the siege, complete with the shoes. I was so happy … Well, that’s enough about shoes.

Here’s the coffee. Wait, I’ll bring some cigarettes too. These sweet American cigarettes make me gag. Yes, I understand you need the cigarettes for your art. Night shifts in the local bar require cigarettes too. But careful of your heart, my angel. I couldn’t bear it if any harm befell you.

How did I come to be employed in that gentleman’s household? Well, it wasn’t a wife they were advertising for, you may be sure of that. It was only much later I became a wife there, a wife and a lady, with the full complement of old honorifics: “honorable” lady, “excellent” lady, “most excellent” lady … I was hired as a servant, a general maid.

What are you looking at? I’m not joking.

As I said, I was a servant. Not even a proper servant, just a scullery maid, essentially a cleaner. Because this was an elegant house, my sweet, a house proper for gentlefolk. I could tell you a great deal about it and what went on there, how they lived, their habits, their dinners, their conversations, their boredom. For years I went about on tiptoe there, hardly daring to breathe. I was scared. It took years, you know, before I was admitted into the inner rooms, because I knew nothing about what to do and how to behave in such refined company. I had to learn. At first I was only allowed to work in the bathroom and the toilet. They wouldn’t even let me near the food in the kitchen, I could only peel potatoes or help with the washing up … It was as if my hands were considered filthy. They had to be careful in case anything I touched got dirty. But maybe it wasn’t them: not them, not the master, not the cook or the serving man, no. It was me. I felt my hands were never clean enough for an elegant house like that. I felt like that for a long time. My hands were often red then, creased, hard, and full of sores. Not as soft and white as they are now. Not that they ever criticized my hands. It was just that I did not dare touch anything, because I feared I’d leave a mark. I certainly never dared touch their food. You know the way doctors put on a thin gauze mask when they are performing an operation, because they’re worried about infecting the patient. I held my breath when handling their things … the glass from which they drank, the pillows on which they slept. You, you may laugh, but even when I was cleaning the toilet bowl after them I was careful that the lovely white porcelain should not be dirtier for me having touched it. This fear, this anxiety, lasted for years. It was a very superior household.

I can see what you’re thinking! You think fear and anxiety were done with the day my luck turned and I became lady of the house, an “honorable” and “most excellent” so-and-so. No, little one, you’re wrong. It didn’t stop. That day certainly arrived, but I was just as anxious then as I had been those years before, when I was only a scullery maid. I was never at peace, never happy in that house.

Why not, when that house gave me everything? Everything good: everything bad. Every harm and every satisfaction.

That’s such a hard question, sweetheart. The question of satisfaction, I mean … Sometimes I think it’s the hardest question anyone can ask.

Pass me the photograph. It’s a long time since I last looked at it … Well, yes, that was my husband. The other? The one who looks like an artist? Who knows? Perhaps he was an artist. Not a real artist, though. Not an artist through and through — like you, for example. You can tell by looking at him. He was always looking at me so solemnly, so ironically, it seemed he couldn’t believe in anything, not a solitary thing; in nothing and no one, not in himself, not even in the idea of himself as an artist. He looks tired there, and had aged a little when I took the picture. He himself said he looked secondhand in it. You know, like those pictures in the papers showing before and after. I took it in the last year of the war between two bombing raids. He was sitting at the window, reading. He didn’t even know he was being photographed. He didn’t like pictures of himself, either photographs or drawings. He didn’t like being looked at while he was reading. He didn’t like being spoken to when he was quiet. He didn’t like … yes, he didn’t like it … when people loved him. What’s that? Did he love me? No, my dear, he didn’t love me, not even me. He just put up with me for a while, in the room a corner of which you see there. That bookcase and all those books there, they were destroyed soon after I took the picture. The room you see was wrecked. And the house, of which this is the fourth floor. We used to sit there between bombings. Everything you see in this picture has been destroyed.

Here’s the coffee. Go on, drink it. Here’s your cigarette. Now listen.

I’m always nervous when talking about this, so don’t be surprised if I sometimes show it, sweetheart. A lot of things happened to us. We, who lived in Pest throughout the siege and all that came before and after it. It was a mercy you were away from it in the provinces at the time. You are a wise man. So wonderful.

Well, I’m sure everything was better in Zala. But we who were rotting away in the cellars of Pest, waiting for bombs, we had a hard time. You were also wise to find your way to Pest no earlier than ’47, by which time there was a government in place and the bars were open. I believe you when you say they welcomed you with open arms. But don’t talk about that to anyone. There are a lot of bad people about, and some Jew, a survivor of the labor camps, might suggest you had some reason for lying low in Zala till ’47. All right, all right, I’ll shut up.

This man, the artistic one, once told me we had all gone mad, all of us who survived the siege. And that we’re all in the madhouse now.

Who was this artistic-looking gentleman? Well, he was not a drummer. There is only one drummer in the world that matters, darling, and that is you. He didn’t have an Italian work permit … the kind of work he did needed no permit. For a while he wrote books. Take that frown off your face, I know you don’t like reading. I can’t bear to look at you with your brow furrowed like that. Don’t rack your brains, you wouldn’t have heard of him anyway. What did he write? Lyrics? The kind of song lyrics your band plays in the bar? No, I don’t think that was his sort of thing. True, by the time I met him, he was playing with the idea of writing songs for café singers, and he might have if they’d asked him. That’s because, by that time, no other form of writing interested him. He might even have been willing to do some copywriting, he felt such contempt for the written word. He loathed his own writing too, not just the stuff others wrote, that anyone ever wrote. Why? I don’t really know, but I have my suspicions. He once told me he understood book burning because there has never been a single book that could help people.

Was he crazy? Well, you see, that had never occurred to me. What a clever man you are!

Do you want to know what went on there, in the elegant house where I served as a maid? All right, I’ll explain. But listen carefully to what I am about to tell you, because it’s no fairy tale: it’s what school textbooks call history. I know books and schools were never your style. Nevertheless, listen, because what I am about to tell you has vanished from the world. It’s as distant as those stories you hear about ancient Hungarians who went about the world on horseback and tenderized their steak by keeping it under the saddle. They wore helmets and armor, they lived and died in those things. My employers were historical characters, like them, like the great chieftain Árpád, father of the Hungarians, leader of the seven chieftains, as you might remember from your village school. Wait, I’ll sit down next to you on the bed. Give me a cigarette. Thanks. So it was like this.

I want to explain to you why I never felt comfortable in that lovely house. Because they treated me very well. The old man, His Excellency, treated me like an orphan, a poor little soul — you know, like a relative with a clubfoot from the poor side of the family forced to take shelter with the rich side. And the charitable family does everything possible not to make the newcomer self-conscious about the sad difference in status. It might have been the charity that was the most annoying thing. It made me so angry!

Mind you, I made my peace with the old master pretty soon. Do you know why? Because he was mean. He was the only one in the family who never tried to be kind to me. He never addressed me as “Judit, love.” He gave me no cheap gifts, no hand-me-down clothes from gentlefolk, like the old lady — Her Ladyship — who gave me her ragged winter coat, or the young master, the young master who later married me, who gave me the right to be called Her Ladyship. He himself had some office, such as lord of the City Council, but he didn’t care much for titles and never used it. He didn’t even like people calling him the usual “Your Excellency.” It was to be “Doctor” at all times. But I was already Her Ladyship by then. Not that he bothered with that, either. It amused him when the servants started addressing me as “Your Ladyship.” It was a slightly sarcastic sort of amusement at silly people who took such things too seriously.

The old master was different. He tolerated the “excellency” stuff because he was a practical man who knew that the great majority of people were not only grasping but vain and stupid too and that there was nothing you could do about it. The old man never asked. He ordered. If I made a mistake, he growled at me, and I was so frightened I would drop the tray or whatever I was holding. If he so much as looked at me, my palms would begin to sweat and I trembled. He looked like one of those bronze statues you see in Italian towns, in the square … you know, those early-century statues when merchants became proper subjects for bronze … potbellied little squirts in frock coats and rumpled trousers. In other words, patriots, patriots who did nothing but get up in the morning and play the patriot till it was time for bed again; the kind of people who earn a statue by founding the local horse abattoir, that kind of thing. And their pants were just as rumpled in real-life cloth as in bronze. The old man would look about him in the manner of those turn-of-the-century statues, giving us his statue look, much like the real merchants, the statues’ originals, I expect.

I might have been an insignificant puff of wind as far as he was concerned, not quite human. I was nothing. When I brought the orange juice to his room — they were strange like that, starting the day with orange juice, followed by gym and the punching bag, then a sugarless tea, with proper breakfast only later, a big breakfast enough for two in the morning room, as regularly as Easter mass in the village church at home — when I brought in the orange juice, I wouldn’t dare look at the old man as he lay in bed, reading by the bedside light. I was too frightened to look into his eyes.

The old man wasn’t, in fact, all that old at the time. Nor was I always nothing to him. I think I can tell you now that he’s gone, that sometimes — when I was helping him on with his coat in the dark hall — he went so far as to pinch my ass or pull my ear. In other words, he gave me unmistakable signs that he thought me attractive and that the only reason he wasn’t about to proposition me was that he was a man of taste who considered me below his rank. He was not the kind to have an affair with a servant. What I thought was: I’m just a servant in the house. If the old man wants to have his way, if he insists, let’s just put up with it and drop the idea of pleasure. I had no right to resist the wishes of such a powerful, stern figure. It was probably what he thought too. He would have been mightily surprised if I did resist.

But it never came to that. He was the master, that’s all, so whatever he wanted would have to be. He would never have thought of taking me for wife, not in his wildest dreams. Nor would he have wondered, not for a second, if it was right or wrong to have his way with me. That’s why I preferred serving on the old man. I was young, healthy, and vigorous, fully aware of my youth and health, and I loathed the idea of being ill. The old man still had a healthy, vigorous mind. His wife and his son — the one who later married me — were already ill. It’s not that I thought as much: I just knew it.

Everything in the elegant house was beset with danger. For a long time I just stared and gawked the way I did as a child when I was sick and found myself in hospital. The hospital was quite an experience for me, perhaps the greatest and most beautiful experience of my childhood. A dog had bitten me, here on the calf, and the district medical officer wouldn’t have me being tended in the ditch where we were living, bound up in rags, the way we always were whenever we cut ourselves. He sent a gendarme for me and had me carried to hospital by force.

The hospital in the nearby little town was just an old building, but to me it seemed a magical fairy-tale castle.

I was interested in everything and frightened of everything there. Even the smell, that country-hospital smell, was exciting! And attractive too, simply by virtue of being new, a smell different from the smell of the ditch, the burrow where I lived like an animal with my dad, my mother, and the rest of the family: polecat, field mouse, hamster, we were all these things. The hospital was treating me for rabies and gave me painful injections, but what did I care about injections or rabies! Night and day I watched the comings and goings of the world: the suicidal, the cancer-ridden, and the incontinent, all in a common ward. Later, in Paris, I saw a lovely engraving of an ancient French hospital at the time of the revolution, a vaulted hall where ragged people sat in beds. My hospital was just as unlikely a place for me to spend the best days of my childhood, the best being the days when I was in danger of contracting rabies.

But I didn’t get rabies. They cured me. At least I didn’t get it then, not the way they describe the disease in textbooks. But maybe something rabid remained in me. I sometimes wondered about it later. They say people with rabies are constantly thirsty while at the same time being frightened of water. I felt a bit like that myself whenever things were going well. I have been intensely thirsty all my life, but whenever I found a way of quenching my thirst I recoiled from it in disgust. Don’t worry, I won’t bite you.

It was this hospital I was reminded of — that and the rabies — when I landed up at the elegant house.

There wasn’t a large garden, but it was scented like a rural drugstore. They used to bring home strange herbs from abroad. Everything was from abroad there, you know, even the toilet paper! Don’t stare like that! They never went shopping like ordinary mortals, you know. They just rang the wholesaler, who brought them everything they needed — meat for the kitchen, shrubs for the garden, a new record for the record player, books, bath salts, scents, pomades whose smells were so dreamlike, so exciting, sweet, and tantalizing they made me dizzy and quite sick. I practically wept with emotion whenever I cleaned the bathroom after them and smelled their soap and cologne, every lingering smell and scent. And it was all on account.

The rich are strange, darling. As you know, I myself was pretty rich for a while. I had a maid to scrub my back in the morning. I even had a car, a convertible coupe, driven by a chauffeur. I had an open sports car, too, to race about in. And, believe it or not, I didn’t feel in the least embarrassed to be moving among them. I was not retiring or bashful. I made myself at home. There were moments I imagined I was really rich. But now I know that I wasn’t, not really, not for a second. I simply had jewels, money, and a bank account. I was granted these things by those who could afford them. Or I took it from them, when I had the opportunity. I was a clever little girl, you see. I learned in the ditch, in my childhood, not to be idle, to pick up whatever lay at hand, to smell it, take a bite of it, and to hide it — to hide everything that others threw away. An old enameled pot with a hole in it was just as valuable as a precious stone. I was just a slip of a girl when I learned that lesson. You can never be too industrious.

Now, these rainy days, that’s what I always ask myself. Have I been industrious? Have I given things proper attention? I don’t suffer from pangs of conscience. On the contrary, I worry in case I’ve forgotten to take anything I could have. Like you. For example, that ring of mine that you sold yesterday … you struck a really good deal, darling. I’m proud of you. I’m not just saying that — after all, no one knows better than you do how to sell jewelry. I don’t know where I’d be without you. I say “my” ring, but it was really the ring Her Old Ladyship used to wear. It was a present from the old man for their silver wedding anniversary. I found it by accident in a drawer after the old woman died. I was the lady of the house by then and felt entitled to it. I put the ring on and examined it. And I remembered how many years ago, after first coming to the house, I found a ring on the laundry table among other forgotten things while the old girl was happily splashing about in the bath: an old-fashioned, heavy ring with a fat gemstone in it. I put it on and examined it with such nervous excitement that I started trembling, threw the ring back onto the table, and ran to the toilet, because my whole body was seized with cramps, I felt so sick. It was all because of the ring. But this time, after Her Ladyship’s death, I said nothing to my husband. I just slipped it into my pocket. I didn’t steal it. It was mine by right, since after his mother’s death my husband gave me anything that even faintly sparkled. But it felt good just to take this one ring, the one she proudly wore on her finger, and to put it into my pocket without my husband knowing, without his permission. And I looked after it really well — that is, until yesterday, when you finally sold it.

What are you laughing at? Take it from me, that house was so particular even the toilet paper was imported from abroad. There were four bathrooms: the one for the old lady had pale green tiles, the young gentleman’s were yellow, the old boy’s dark blue. The fourth was used by the servants. All the bathrooms except ours had matching toilet paper, imported from America. There’s everything you want in America — vast industries and plenty of millionaires. I’d like to go there sometime. I heard my husband, the first one, the real one, went there after the war when he decided he wanted no more of the People’s Democracy. But I wouldn’t want to meet him now. Why? What would be the point? Sometimes it just happens that two people have said everything they could possibly say to each other and have nothing left to say.

Not that you can ever be sure of that. Some conversations go on forever. Wait, I haven’t finished!

. . .

It was a beautiful house and we servants had our own bathroom, but that just had ordinary white tiles. The paper we used was ordinary white too, a little rough, as I remember. It was a well-ordered house.

The old man was the mainspring of order. Everything went as smooth as clockwork, with the delicate precision of a fine lady’s watch bought not two weeks ago. The staff rose at six in the morning. The ritual of cleaning had to be as religiously attended to as mass at church. Brooms, brushes, dusters, rags, the window cloths, proper oils for parquet and furniture — the refined grease with which we treated the floorboards was like those highly expensive egg-based preparations beauty salons produce for the glamorous — and I mustn’t forget all the exciting machinery, like the vacuum cleaner, which did not merely suck the dirt from the rugs but brushed them too; the electric polisher that buffed the parquet so bright you could see your face in it. I used to stop sometimes and simply gaze at myself like those nymphs in the ancient Greek reliefs … yes, I’d lean over and examine my face, my eyes sparkling, just as absorbed, as startled as that half-boy, half-girl statue I once saw in the museum looking adoringly at his or her charming reflection.

We dressed for cleaning each morning like actors for a performance. We wore costumes. The manservant put on a vest which was like a man’s waistcoat turned inside out. Cook was like a nurse in an operating theater in her sterile white gown, her head covered in a white scarf, waiting for the surgeon and patient to turn up. I was like one of those peasant girls in the operetta chorus dressed for gathering berries at dawn in my traditional maid’s cap. I was obliged to understand that this dressing up wasn’t simply because it was pretty but because it was hygienic and clean, because they didn’t trust me, thinking I might be dirty, carrying a lot of germs. Not that they ever said as much to my face, of course! And they may not actually have thought it, not in so many words. It was just that they were wary, wary of everyone and everything. That was their nature. They were suspicious to an extraordinary degree. They protected themselves against germs, against thieves, against heat and cold, against dust and drafts. They protected themselves against wear and tear and tooth decay. They never stopped worrying, whether it was about their teeth or the state of the furniture, about their shares, their thoughts — the thoughts they adapted or borrowed from books. I was never consciously aware of this. But I understood that, from the moment I first stepped into the house, they wanted to be protected against me too, from whatever disease I carried.

Why should I be carrying a disease? I was young and fresh as a daisy. All the same, they had me examined by a doctor. It was a horrible examination; it was as if the doctor himself didn’t fancy doing it. Their local doctor was an elderly man, and he tried to joke his way through the minute, painstaking process. But as a doctor — indeed, the family doctor — he essentially approved of the exercise. After all, there was a young man in the house, still just a student, and it was not unlikely that sooner or later the young man would want to get familiar with the new scullery maid, who had, for all purposes, just been plucked out of the ditch. They worried in case he caught TB or the pox off me. I even suspected that the old doctor — an intelligent man — was faintly ashamed of this overscrupulous need for assurance, this just-in-case. Once there proved to be nothing wrong with me, they tolerated me in the house like a decently bred dog that would need no vaccinations. The young gentleman did not contract any infection from me, of course. It was just that — much later — he happened to marry me. That was the one danger they’d never thought to insure themselves against. Not even the family doctor could diagnose it. One has to be so careful, darling. I think the old gentleman, for one, would have had an apoplectic fit if it ever occurred to him that my disease might be transmitted by way of marriage.

The old woman was different. She worried about other things. Not about her husband, not about her son, but about the fortune. She was worried about every detail of it. She regarded the family, the factory, the palatial home, the entire miraculous edifice of it, as a kind of rare antique of which there could only be this one unique example. It was like a Chinese jar to her, one that was worth — how should I know? — millions, perhaps. Once broken, it could never be replaced. She watched over everything, over their whole lives … who they were and how they lived. It was her masterpiece, so she worried about it. I sometimes think this worry of hers wasn’t entirely groundless — something did break there, and it won’t be replaced.

What’s that? Are you asking me if she was mad? Well, of course, they were all mad, the lot of them. Only the old man was not mad. And we, the rest of us who lived in the house, the staff — I almost said “the nurses”—were slowly infected by their lunacy. You know, the way the nursing staff in the madhouse, the assistant medics, the head doctor, the director, all are slowly infected by the refined, invisible, concentrated poison of madness. It’s what spreads and germinates in the wards where the lunatics are kept … you can’t detect it under a microscope, but it remains infectious. Anyone healthy who finds himself surrounded by mad people slowly goes as mad as they are. We ourselves were far from normal, we who served, fed, and cleaned them. The manservant, the cook, the chauffeur, and myself: we were the inner circle, the first to catch the madness bug. We aped their manners, partly to mock them, but at the same time we took them seriously and fell under their spell. We tried to live, to dress, to behave like them. We too made a show of offering the food round at the table and talked pretty, making fancy gestures, the way we saw them doing in the grand dining room. When we broke a plate we would say the kind of things they said, like “It’s my nerves. I have a terrible migraine!” My poor mother gave birth to six children in a ditch, but I never once heard her complain of a terrible migraine. That’s probably because she had never heard of migraine, and as far as she knew it might be some kind of food or drink. But I was soon suffering from migraine myself, simply because I was quick at picking things up. Whenever I broke a dish in the kitchen I put my hand on my brow, put on a pained expression, and complained to Cook, “Wind’s in the south, I feel a migraine coming on.” And we didn’t grin at each other, Cook and I; we didn’t stand there splitting our sides laughing, because by now we had both permitted ourselves the luxury of migraines. I was always a quick learner. It wasn’t simply that my hands grew pale, like theirs: I was growing pale within. When my mother saw me one day — after three years in service — she burst into tears. Not tears of joy. She wept out of fear. It was as if I’d grown an extra nose.

They were all barking mad, but mad in a way that meant they could talk to each other politely during the day, to fulfill their official obligations in the time allowed, to smile charmingly and do everything that was required of them according to the best fashion. At the same time I felt they might just as easily, at any moment, say something rude or stab the doctor in the chest with the nearest pair of scissors.

Do you know what betrayed the fact that they were mad? I think it might have been their stiffness. The way they moved, their very language, was stiff. There was no sign of flexibility, softness, nothing natural or healthy in their movement. They laughed and smiled the way actors do after much practice: they adjusted their smiles to fit the occasion. They spoke quietly, particularly when they were most furious. Sometimes they spoke so quietly they hardly moved their mouths, merely whispered. I never once heard a voice raised; never once witnessed an argument in that house. The old man grumbled and rumbled sometimes, but he was infected too, because straight after he would practically bite his own tongue off. He hated any spontaneous fit of cursing or rage.

They performed to each other all the time, even when simply sitting, as if they were trapeze artists in a circus, hanging off the bar, acknowledging applause.

At dinner they’d make such a show of offering each other food you’d think they were guests in their own house. “Here you are, my dear,” “Do have a taste of this, darling” … so it went on. It took some time to get used to it, but eventually I did.

The knocking. That was another thing to get used to. You know, they never stepped into each other’s rooms without first knocking. They all lived under the one roof, but they lived their lives a long way from each other: it was as if there were great tracts of land between them with invisible borders that they had to cross to get from one bedroom to another … The old woman slept on the ground floor. The old man on the first. The young gentleman, my husband-to-be, slept on the second under the mansard. They even had a special set of stairs built for him so that he might have privacy in his own domain — just as he had his own car and, later, his own servant. They took enormous pains not to disturb each other. That was one of the reasons I first thought they were mad. But when we copied their manners in the kitchen, it was by no means mockery. There was a moment, in the first year or two, when I seemed to wake from the trance and suddenly started to laugh. But when I saw how cross the older servants were — the manservant and the cook, I mean — I regretted it. I had broken some sacred rule and ridiculed all that was most holy. I quickly snapped to and felt ashamed of myself. I understood that there was nothing here to be laughed at. Madness is never a thing to be laughed at.

But it was more than madness pure and simple. It took me some time to realize what it was, what it was they were so desperately trying to preserve; what this never-ending round of frantic cleaning, these hospital rules, and all these manners, with their “if you please” and “May I offer you this or that” was about. It wasn’t their money they were protecting, or not simply their money. Because, when it came to money, they were — once again — different from normal people, people not born into money. It wasn’t money but something else they were protecting: it was that they were determined to guard, not just the money. It took me some time to cotton on. I might never have if I hadn’t met the man whose photograph you were looking at just now. Yes, the one that looked like an artist. He explained it to me.

What did he say? Well, one day he told me that the lives of people like that were dedicated not to preserving, but to resisting. That’s all he said. I see you don’t understand. But I do — now.

Perhaps if I tell you the whole story, you might understand it too. But I won’t mind if you fall asleep in the meantime.

I was just saying that everything in the house smelled of hospitals, the hospital where they treated me for rabies, the one that was the greatest, most marvelous experience of my childhood. What can I say about the cleanliness there? It was unnaturally clean. I mean, all that wax we rubbed into everything — the floorboards, the furniture, the parquet — and then the various creams and liquids we applied to windows, to carpets, to the silver and the copper, the stuff we cleaned and polished until it shone … it was all unnatural. Whoever stepped into the house, and especially someone coming from a place like mine, immediately started sniffing the air and choking in the artificial atmosphere. The hospital was drowning in the smell of carbolic and disinfectant: here it was detergents, the creams and liquids. And then there were the cigars, the foreign cigars, the lingering smoke of Egyptian cigarettes, the expensive liqueurs, the perfumes and scents worn by the guests. All these had long soaked into the furniture, the bed linen, and the curtains; they had eaten and wormed their way into everything.

The old woman had a mania for cleaning. Despite the servant with his tidying and me with my work, she would call in contract cleaners once a month, people who arrived like the fire brigade, complete with ladders and strange machines, who washed and scraped and fumigated just about everything. We also had a regular window cleaner whose one job was to wash and wipe the windows that we, the resident staff, had already washed. The smell of the laundry room was like an operating theater where they destroy the germs by radiating the place with blue lamps. You’ve never seen such a superior laundry room! You might have taken it for an expensive, upper-class funeral parlor. I never entered it without a sense of faint religious awe. I was only allowed in when Her Ladyship told me to help the laundress, who washed, ironed, and folded linen. She reminded me of those women back home that wash the dead and sort out dead men’s clothes. The family wasn’t about to trust me, you can be sure of that! I was a slattern by comparison with the delicate professional summoned to perform the great annual wash! … This special laundress used to be summoned by Her Ladyship with an open postcard announcing the joyful news that the dirty washing was waiting for her! … And of course she came immediately, delighted to be of use. My help was limited to helping her run the finest shirts, underwear, and damask tablecloths through the mangle. On no account would they trust me with the washing itself! There came a day when the laundress did not appear to summons. Instead there was a postcard written by her daughter. I remember every word of it, since I was the one who took the mail upstairs and, naturally, I read whatever was not in an envelope. This was what the laundress’s daughter wrote: “Dear Madam, I regret to inform Your Kind Ladyship that my mother can’t come to do the washing because she is dead.” She signed it: “Your humble servant, Ilonka.” I remember the way Her Ladyship wrinkled her brow as she read the card. She looked cross and shook her head. But she didn’t say anything. At that point I stepped forward and volunteered to do the work, and for a while they let me do it, at least until a new laundress was found, one who was a laundress by calling and had the advantage of still being alive.

Everything important in that household was done by qualified tradesmen. “Qualified” was one of their favorite words. If the doorbell broke, it wasn’t the manservant who fixed it but a qualified tradesman called in for the occasion. They trusted no one but qualified tradesmen. There was one fellow who came regularly, a man with a ceremonial air, wearing a bowler. He looked like a university professor called out to a council meeting in the provinces. His job was to trim corns. But he wasn’t just any old trimmer of corns, the kind people like us sometimes visit in town, slipping off our shoes and extending our feet so they can slice the corn or an extra growth of hard skin away. Heaven forfend! He wasn’t even the usual kind of home chiropodist — we would never have allowed one of those in the house. No, this man had a proper business card and you could find his telephone number in the directory. What it said on the card was “Swedish Pedicure.” We had a Swedish pedicurist come to the house once a month. He always wore black and handed over his hat and gloves with such ceremony when he entered that I felt quite overcome with awe: I almost kissed his hand. My own feet were frostbitten, on account, as you know, of those damp winters in the ditch, and I had corns and bunions and ingrown toenails that were so painful I could hardly walk sometimes. But I would never have dreamt of asking this foot artist to touch my foot. He brought a bag with him, like a doctor. He put on a white gown, carefully washed his hands in the bathroom, as if preparing himself for the operation, then took an electric gadget from his bag, something like a small dentist’s drill, sat himself down by Her Ladyship or the old man, or my husband, and set to work, shaving away the hardened parts of their ineffable skin. So that’s our corn cutter. I must say, darling, one of the high points of my life was when I was lady of that refined house and ordered the maid to call the “Swedish pedicurist.” I desired to have my refined corns treated. Everything comes to you if you wait long enough. As did this.

There was also the reading. The reading started the moment I brought the old man his orange juice. He lay in bed with the bedside light on and read an English newspaper. The Hungarian papers, of which there were a great many in the house, were only read by us servants, in the kitchen or in the toilet when we were bored. The old woman read the German press; the old man the English, but mostly only those pages that were full of long columns of numbers, the daily updates on foreign stock markets, because while he wasn’t a great reader of English, the numbers did interest him … As for the young gentleman, he read now the German, now the French papers, but as far as I could see he only read the headlines. I expect they thought these papers were better informed than ours, made a louder noise, and could tell bigger, more whopping lies. I liked reading the papers myself. I’d gather up whole bedsheets full of foreign papers in the various rooms and read them, nervous and awestruck.

There were many qualified tradesmen to see. After the orange juice, if it wasn’t the Swedish pedicurist, it was the masseuse. She wore a lorgnette and was quite rude. I knew she stole the bathroom creams and cosmetics. But she pinched cakes too, and the exotic fruits left in the parlor from the day before. She’d quickly stuff her face with two mouthfuls, not because she was hungry but just to deprive the house of something. She simply had what we called sticky fingers. Then she’d enter Her Ladyship’s room and give her a thorough pounding.

The gentlemen got massages too, administered by a man they referred to as “the Swedish gymnastics instructor.” They went through a few exercises in swimming shorts with him, then the instructor prepared a bath and stripped down so he could splash my husband and the old man with alternate cups of hot and cold water.

I can see you have no idea why he should do this. You have a great deal to learn, sweetheart.

The idea behind the instructor switching between hot and cold water was to improve their circulation. They couldn’t have set about their day with the necessary energy required without it. Everything in the house was approached with an eye to order and to scientific rigor. It took me a long time to understand how all these rituals related to each other.

In summer the coach would come three times a week before breakfast to play tennis with them in the garden. The coach was an older man, silver haired, very elegant, like the picture of the English thinker on that old copper engraving in the museum. I’d sneak a surreptitious look at them playing from the window of the servants’ quarters. It touched me to see this deeply moving spectacle of two old gentlemen, master and coach, engaged in a courteous game of tennis, discoursing with ball, as it were, rather than with words. My employer, the old man, was a powerful, sun-bronzed figure … he kept his tan even in the winter, because every afternoon after lunch he took a siesta under the sunlamp. Perhaps he needed a tanned face to inspire greater respect at work. I don’t know, it’s just a guess. At his advanced age he was still playing tennis, like the king of Sweden. The white trousers and the bright knit sleeveless jumper really suited him! After tennis they’d take a shower. There was a special set of showers for tennis, down in the basement in a gym with wooden floors, where there were all kinds of gymnastic equipment, including wall bars and some idiotic rowing boat — you know, the kind that has only a seat and oars on springs. They practiced rowing on it when the weather was bad and they couldn’t go down to the clubhouse to take a canoe down the Danube. So the Swedish pedicure man left, then the masseur-cum-gym-instructor then the tennis coach … or whoever came next. Then they got dressed.

I watched all this from the servants’ window, peeking out at them like a village maiden watching those brightly painted, ugly, but moving icons on the wagons of a passing religious fair: there was a mysterious, sanctified feeling about it, something faintly supernatural, not quite human. I often felt like that as I watched the family in my first few years with them.

Unfortunately, it was quite some time before I was allowed in to breakfast, since this was one of the major family rituals. I had to serve my time before I was permitted to minister to them. Of course they never sat down to it uncombed or unwashed, in their night things. They dressed for it with as much care as they would for a wedding. By that time they would have exercised, showered, and bathed, and the manservant would have shaved both my husband-to-be and the old man. They had already leafed through the English, French, and German papers. They listened to the radio while shaving, but not to the news, because they were afraid they might hear something that might spoil their morning appetites … They listened to simple, stirring dance music, a kind of jollifying that lifted their spirits and prepared them to face the rigors of the day ahead.

They dressed with great care. The old man had a dressing room with built-in wardrobes. Her Ladyship had something similar, as did my husband. They stored clothes for all seasons there, in slipcases hung with camphor, as if ready for mass. But they had ordinary wardrobes too, where everyday items were kept, stuff they wanted quickly to hand. Even as I’m speaking the smell of those wardrobes comes back to me, making my nose twitch. They had something brought over from England that looked like a cube of sugar but which, when you put your nose to it, filled the room with the smell of autumn haystacks. Her Ladyship liked the artificial scent of hay in her cupboards and linen chests.

But there weren’t just chests and wardrobes, there were shoe cupboards too … oh, heavens! It was the high point of my life, you know, as good as a Sunday off, when, at last, they let me loose on the shoe cupboard. There was so much cleaning material there — leather-care cream, a range of polishes — and I set about those shoes without using spit or saliva, using only those marvelous greasy ointments, the alcoholic liquid polish, the soft brushes, the rags! And believe me, I polished every one of those shoes and boots — the old man’s, my husband’s — until you could see your face in them! But it wasn’t just the clothes and shoes that had their own wardrobes and cupboards; so did the linen. The linen chest was divided into compartments according to material and quality, the shirts separated from the underpants! And, my God, what shirts, what underpants! … I think it was while ironing my husband’s “lawn underpants” that I first fell in love with him! He had his monogram even on his pants, heaven knows why. It was near where his belly button would be, and above the monogram there was the royal crest. The old man was, besides everything else, an adviser at the royal court, not just the head of a city council like his son … there was a difference in rank there, a step up on the ladder between baron and count. As I said, it took time for me to come to grips with all this.

But I forget the glove cupboard, where a variety of gloves lay in some mind-numbingly complex order, like preserved herring in a tin box. There were gloves to wear in the street, in town, for hunting, for driving; gray ones, yellow ones, white ones; gloves made of fawn leather, gloves lined with fur for the winter. There was a special drawer full of kid gloves for ceremonial occasions, and another with black mourning gloves for funerals, those grand occasions whenever someone important kicked the bucket. And soft gloves of pigeon gray to wear with the frock coat and top hat, though they never actually put those on, but carried them the way the king carries a scepter. Ah, those gloves! And then there were the jackets and vests of every kind, jackets with or without sleeves, long and short, thick and thin, in every color, of every quality, neat little tweed jackets and the like. There were times in the fall when they dressed for the evening, without a dressing gown, a little sportily, and sat down in front of the fire to smoke. The manservant would put dried pine twigs onto the embers so that everything should be just so, the way it was in the advertisements for brandy in English picture magazines, where you see the lord graciously puffing at his pipe by the hearth, replete with his daily intake of alcohol. And there he is, faintly smirking in his tweed jacket.

There were other jackets too: cream-colored ones they wore for grouse hunting, along with narrow-brimmed Tyrolean hats, complete with chamois feather. My husband had knit cardigans for spring and summer. And of course all kinds of colors and weights for winter sports. But the list is endless.

And to top it all, that smell of must and hay. The first time I lay down in my husband’s bed my gorge rose at the smell, this cunning, perverse male smell I remembered from all those years ironing his underpants and tidying his linen cupboard. When I was so happy, so excited by the smell and the memory, I was actually sick. My husband’s body smelled the same. It was the kind of soap he used too, you know. That, and the alcoholic cologne with which the servant treated his face after shaving, and the water he washed his hair in: it was all that same autumnal haystack smell … hardly perceptible, a mere breath. And somehow it wasn’t a human smell, but a haystack, yes, in very early fall, in a French painting of the last century … Maybe that was why I started heaving when I first lay down in bed and he embraced me. Because by that time I was his wife. The other one, the first, had gone. Why? Maybe she couldn’t bear the smell, either? Or the man? I don’t know. There’s no one clever enough to explain why a man and woman are attracted to each other and then why they part. All I knew was that the first night I spent in my husband’s bed, it was not like sleeping with someone human but with some strange, artificial being. The strangeness of it made me so excited that I was sick. Then I got used to it. After a while I stopped feeling sick whenever he called me to him or we embraced; my stomach was no longer heaving. People can get used to anything, even happiness and wealth.

But I can’t really tell you much about being rich, not the real truth, though I can see your eyes have lit up, and you’re interested to know what I learned and saw while I was with them. Well, it was certainly interesting. It was like a fantastic journey in a foreign country where they live differently, eat and drink differently, are born and die differently.

I like it better here with you, in this hotel. I feel I know you better. Everything about you is familiar … Yes, I even feel more comfortable with your smell. Some people say that living in a stinking machine age — what they call civilization — we are bound to lose our sense of smell, that it will simply wither away … But I was born with animals around me, a poor child born among animals, like baby Jesus … so I had the gift of smell that rich people have forgotten. My husband’s family didn’t even recognize their own smell. That was why I didn’t like them. I was simply their servant, first in the kitchen, later in the drawing room and in bed. I was always catering to them. But I love you because I know your smell. Give me a kiss. Thank you.

No, I can’t tell you everything about being rich, because it would take all night — not just one night, but a thousand nights, and then another thousand, just as in the fairy story, I could talk for a thousand nights, for years on end. So I won’t go on to list everything there was in their cupboards, their chests of drawers, how many outfits and accessories they had, but, believe me, it was like a vast theatrical wardrobe, something to fit every occasion, each part, every second of life! It’s just impossible to go through all that! I’d rather tell you what they were like inside, in themselves. That’s if you’re interested. I know you are. So you just lie there and listen.

You see, it became clear to me after a while that all that great pile of things — the treasures and trinkets with which they packed their rooms and cupboards — weren’t really necessary. They didn’t need them. Certainly, they pushed things to this or that side but really they weren’t concerned whether anything could actually be used, and if so, for what. The old man had a store of clothes to suit an aging character actor. But he, you see, slept in a nightshirt, wore braces, emerged from the bathroom with his mustache tied up, and he even had a little brilliantined mustache brush with a tiny mirror on top … He liked to walk around his room in a worn old dressing gown whose elbows had worn through even though he had a half a dozen silk ones hanging in his wardrobe, stuff he had been given as birthday or name-day presents by Her Ladyship.

The old man grumbled a bit but was generally pleased that most things were shipshape. He looked after the money and the factory and adapted well to the role he partly created, partly inherited, though secretly he would have preferred to drink spritzers and play skittles in the afternoon at a nearby inn. But he was smart and knew that whatever a man produces in some ways produces him. It was that man who told me that once, the artistic one, that everything turns against you, and that you’re never free, because you are always captive to the thing you created. Well, the old man had created the factory and the money and was resigned to the fact that he was bound to these things and could never escape them. That’s why he didn’t go to play skittles in Pasarét in the afternoon, but played bridge instead at a millionaires’ club somewhere in the center of town, no doubt with a wry expression on his face.

There was a kind of bitter, ironic wisdom in the old man that I can’t forget. When I brought him his orange juice on a silver tray in the morning, he looked up from his English newspaper that he had been scanning for stock-market news, pushed his glasses up on his brow, and put his hand out for the glass in his shortsighted way … but there was a bitter smile playing about his lips under the mustache, the kind people pull when taking some medicine in which they have no faith … He dressed with the same expression. And there was something about that mustache. His mustache was cut like Franz Joseph’s — Uncle Joe, you know — it was one of those k und k jobs, proper empire. It was as if the whole man was a leftover from another world, from a time of real peace, where masters were really masters and servants were really servants, when great industrialists thought in terms of fifty million people at a time, when they manufactured a new steam engine or a modern pancake-maker to order. That was the world the old man sprang from, and it was clear that he found the new mini-world too small, too narrow. There was, of course, the small matter of the war.

He had this mocking smile under his mustache, a mixture of self-contempt and general disdain. The whole world was ridiculous to him. That was how he dressed, how he played tennis, sat down to breakfast, kissed Her Ladyship’s hand, whenever he was being delicate and courteous … it was all somehow contemptible, fit for ridicule. I liked that about him.

I grew to realize that all the stuff they packed the house with was not for use as far as they were concerned: it was just a form of mania. You know how it is when people suffer a breakdown and have to keep repeating certain obsessive acts, like washing their hands fifty times a day and so on? That’s the way these people bought clothes, linen, gloves, and ties. I remember ties particularly because I had a lot of trouble with them. It was my job to keep my husband’s and the old man’s ties in order. Enough to say they had quite a few ties between them. There is no color in the rainbow that was not covered among those ties: bow ties, dress ties, ready-tied ties all hanging in their wardrobes, arranged in color order. I don’t suppose it’s impossible that there might even have been ties in shades beyond ultraviolet. Who knows?

On the other hand, no one dressed more simply, more soberly than my husband. He never once wore anything conspicuous. You’d never catch him with a loud or vulgar tie. God forbid! He dressed in what they call “best bourgeois taste.” I once heard the old man quietly say to his son: “Look at that ridiculous man there, dressing like gentry.” He was pointing at someone wearing a short fur coat with a drawstring and a hunter’s cap. They avoided anyone that was not of their class, the class that, according to them, constituted civil society. Being respectable members of society, they owed nothing either to those below or above them.

My husband somehow always succeeded in wearing the same clothes: a suit made of heavy charcoal-gray material. And a plain, dark, neat tie to go with it. Of course he changed his outfits with the seasons and according to the customs of the house, society, and universal taste. But when I think of him now … he rarely comes to mind, occasionally in dreams, and he’s always looking at me as if he’s cross about something. I don’t understand why! I always see him in a dark suit, a solemn, double-breasted gray suit, like a kind of uniform. The old man was similar. He always seemed to be in an old-fashioned suit with a frock coat that generously covered his paunch. That’s what I always imagined him in, anyway, and I think it actually was like that! They took great care that their environment, their very lifestyle, should always be discreet, retiring, colorless. They knew what money meant; even their grandparents were rich, Grandfather being a highly placed bureaucrat and wine grower. They didn’t have to learn to be wealthy the way some Johnny-come-lately bumpkins do now, the kind who love nothing better than wearing a silk top hat as they climb into their brand-new American cars. Everything about the house was quiet, like the color of their ties. It was just that, deep down, secretly, they always wanted more. Things just had to be perfect. That was their obsession. That’s why the wardrobes were overflowing, why they could never get enough of shoes, linen, and ties. My husband took no notice of fashion: he just knew what was necessary and what was superfluous. It was in his blood. But the old man was still not completely confident in all the ways of high society. I’ll give you an example. In one of his wardrobes, on the inside of the door, he had a printed English-language table of what color clothes and what sort of tie it was appropriate to wear on what occasion. On a rainy Tuesday in April, for example, the drill might be to wear a dark-blue suit with a pale-blue striped tie, and so on.

It’s really hard being rich.

So I mugged up on it — wealth, that is. I studied with them for years, drinking it all in. I studied wealth as religiously as children study catechism at the village school.

It was only after a while I understood that it wasn’t a matter of this or that outfit, this or that tie, not really, but something else. They wanted to be perfect. That was what they were obsessed with: perfection. That’s why they were crazy. Perfection seems to be the rich man’s plague. It’s not a set of clothes they want, it’s a clothes store. Nor is one store enough. If there is more than one wealthy person in the house, it takes several stores. Not because they need or use them: just so they should have them available.

Another example. One day I discovered that there was a locked room on the third story of the villa just by the big balcony, a room with a small balcony of its own. It was a room they never used, that had been the nursery. It had been my husband’s room when he was a child. For years on end no one entered it except the staff, and even we only went in once a year to clean. It was here that everything associated with my husband’s early years slumbered on behind drawn blinds and a locked door. It was like a museum in there, the toys all in place like the paraphernalia and costumes of a bygone age. The first time I went in there, I felt a deep pang of pity. It was early one spring and they sent me to clean it. There was still the sour, sharp smell of the disinfectant they used on everything in the room, especially on the linoleum-covered floor: it was a hygienic sty, somewhere a child had once lived and played and complained of stomachaches. An artist had painted images of animals, fairy tales, dwarfs and Snow White on the white walls. The furniture was pale green, in faded oil colors. There was a beautifully made wooden cot with a net canopy, a marvelous set of scales to weigh the child on, and then, on the shelves, splendid games, teddy bears, building blocks, electric trains, picture books … all in exemplary order, as if on exhibition.

It was that pang of pity that did it for me. I hurried to open the window and raise the blinds. I was desperate for air. I still don’t quite know how to describe what I felt on first entering that room where my husband was a child. I swear it wasn’t the ditch I was thinking of, the ditch where I grew up. Believe me, life wasn’t so bad in that ditch. True, it wasn’t that good, either; it was simply different, the way everything is in reality. The ditch was reality for me. Poverty is not what adults imagine it is for children, I mean adults who were never poor. For a child poverty is fun as well as misery … Poor children like the dirt in which they can roll about and play. And you don’t need to wash your hands when you’re poor. What would be the point? Poverty is only bad for adults, very bad, worse than anything. It’s like the mange or stomach cramps. Poverty is the worst thing … And yet, when I stepped into the room, I did not envy my husband. I felt sorry for him instead, for having spent his childhood there, in that operating theater of a nursery. I felt someone brought up like this, in a place like this, could never be a whole person. They could only be a copy of a person, something that resembles a human being.

The nursery was as perfect as the rest of the house. It could not be more perfect. It was like their wardrobes and their shoe cupboards. It was as if everything had to be a place for storing things. Apart from their store of clothes and shoes they also needed their special store of books and pictures. It was like a factory store, really. There was a separate locked room in the attic that served as the official lumber room — another store. And all these stores were not there only to contain clothes and shoes and books and pictures, but were a form of perfection in themselves, the same obsessive perfection.

I expect there was a kind of store deep in their souls, too, where the obsession was nurtured, mothballed, and kept in proper order. They certainly had more of everything than they ever needed: two cars, two gramophones, two ice-cream-making machines, several radios, and several pairs of binoculars: the kind of opera glasses that people take to the theater, enameled and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, carried in pretty cases; the sort they took to the races for watching the horses; another for hanging round their necks on board ships so they could admire the sunset. I can’t be certain, but for all I know they might have had different ones for looking at cliffs, for watching the sun rise, for sunsets, for observing birds in flight, and so on. Everything they bought was intended to make the perfect more perfect.

It was the servant who shaved them, but my husband’s bathroom contained half a dozen shaving sets, the latest on the market. There were also half a dozen cutthroat razors in a deerskin case — Swedish, American, and English blades — though he never once touched his face with one of them. It was the same with lighters. My husband bought every lighter going, then threw them into drawers to rust along with other pretty gadgets, because he actually preferred to use a common match. One day he brought home an electric shaver in a leather case but never used it. If he was thinking of buying records to play on the gramophone, he always bought a complete set — the complete works of this or that composer all at once: the complete Wagner, the complete Bach, all the different recordings. There was nothing more important to him than having every single piece of Bach in the collection, every single damn piece — the full set, you understand?

As for books, the book dealer no longer waited for them to decide which book to buy but sent them every new book that came in, anything they might possibly pick up and read sometime. It was the servant’s job to cut the pages and then arrange them on the shelves in their cut, but mostly unread, condition. They did read, of course. They read plenty. The old man read books about trade, and liked travelogues. My husband was an extraordinarily cultivated man: he even liked poetry. But all those books the dealers showered us with in the name of courtesy — well, no mortal could ever have read them all, one life just wasn’t enough. Not that they sent the books back; no, they didn’t feel justified in doing that, because one had, after all, to support literature. And on top of that there was all the worry and tension in case the marvelous novel they had just bought was not the best possible novel, or indeed, God forbid, that there might be a novel somewhere else more perfect than the one they had asked to be sent over last week from Berlin! They were terrified in case some book, some implement, some object that was not part of a set, something substandard and of no value — in other words, something imperfect — found its way into the house.

So everything was perfect there — kitchen, parlor, all the things in all the stores — everything perfect and shipshape. It was only their lives that fell short of perfection.

What was missing in them? Peace. These people had not a moment of peace. That’s despite living according to a strict timetable, despite the deep silence of the house and their lives. No voice was ever raised. Nothing ever took them by surprise. It was all calculated, foreseen: the financial crash, diphtheria, every twist and turn in life, right down to death. But still they were not at peace. Maybe they would have found peace if they once committed themselves, if they hadn’t been so circumspect. But they didn’t have the heart or guts for that. You need courage to live in a more headlong way, without a timetable, hour by hour, day by day, moment by moment, not expecting anything, not hoping for anything, just being. But they were incapable of that, they couldn’t just be. They could get up in the morning all right, in royal fashion, like kings, brushing their teeth in the presence of their courtiers. They could take breakfast with as much ceremony as the pope says mass here in Rome in that special chapel of his that some old man covered with a lot of naked figures. I was there once. And it was my old employers’ breakfast the chapel brought to mind.

Breakfast was a ritual to them. Then they went off to lead useful lives. All day they manufactured marvelous machines and sold whatever it was they produced. Then they invented new machines. The times in between they spent socializing. And at night they returned to rest, because they had spent all day being useful, cultivated, orderly, and well behaved. It is very tiring living like that! You’re an artist, so you wouldn’t know how tiring it is when, first thing in the morning, someone knows exactly what they’ll do the rest of the day, right till midnight. You live only as your wonderfully artistic soul commands you to live, and you don’t know in advance what idea might come into your head while you’re drumming, how the rhythm of the music might take you so you throw your drumsticks into the air, or respond to a blast from the saxophone player with a burst of drumming. You are an artist. Spontaneous. My employers were utterly different. They fought tooth and nail to keep things as they were. And it wasn’t only in the factory they manufactured stuff, but at breakfast and over dinner too. They were busily making the stuff they called culture, which meant discretion: smiling discreetly, blowing your nose discreetly. It was vital for them to preserve whatever culture they produced through work and manners: it was their entire life. The preserving of it was more important to them than the making of it.

Really, it was as if they were living several lives at once. As if they were living their fathers’ and sons’ lives too. As if they weren’t individual, simple, once-and-once-only personal beings, but a move in a long game, which is not any individual’s game but the family’s, the family of a certain class. That’s why they took such care, such anxious care, of those family photographs and family groups. It was like a museum protecting beautifully painted portraits of the famous and long-dead: “Grandfather and Grandmother on the occasion of their engagement.” “Father and Mother’s marriage.” The photograph of a bankrupt uncle in his frock coat or wearing a boater. The picture of a happy or unhappy great-aunt smiling from beneath a veil while holding a parasol. That was them, all of them, together, a slowly evolving, slowly decaying composite person, a prosperous family. It was all utterly alien to me. For me, family was a necessity, a need. For them it was a project.

So that’s what they were like. And because they always took the long view and made careful calculations, they could never really feel at peace. The only people capable of being at peace are people who live in the moment. It’s the same with the fear of death. Atheists don’t fear death, because they don’t believe in God. Are you a believer? What’s that you’re muttering? Yes, I see you nodding to say yes, you are, but how much? I have only ever seen one man who, I was certain, had no fear of death. It was the artist man, that’s right — him. He didn’t believe in God, so he was afraid of nothing, neither of death nor life. Believers are frightened of death because they cling to everything religion promises them; they believe there is life after death, but also judgment. Our artist friend didn’t believe any of that. He said that if there was a God he could not be so cruel as to land people with eternal life. You see how crazy they all are, these artistic types? But respectable families — they fear death as much as they fear life. That’s why this family was religious, and prudent, and virtuous … Because they were afraid.

I can see you don’t understand. They themselves could probably understand it on an intellectual level, they being such cultivated people, but not in their hearts or their guts. Their hearts and guts never had a moment of peace. They were afraid that all the calculations, all the planning, all that keeping things tidy, weren’t worth anything: that one day it would all be over. But what did they really think would be over? The family? The factory? The money? No, these people knew that what they were afraid of was nowhere near so simple. What they were afraid of was that one day they’d have no energy left and be too tired to hold things together. You know that Eytie mechanic, the one we took that ancient jalopy of a car to the other day, to see what was the matter with it? Remember how he told us the engine was still running and that there were no cracks in it, but that the whole thing had metal fatigue? It was as if my employers were frightened of developing metal fatigue; that everything they had scraped together would fall apart, and then their “culture” would be done for.

That’s enough about them. I could go on forever. Just think of all the secrets stored in their drawers and in those safes that were built into the walls, where they kept deeds and shares and documents and jewels. What are you shrugging for? But my darling, my one and only, these things are not as we proles imagine! The rich are really strange. Maybe there is some dark crevice in their souls where they are hiding something else. It was the key to this safe, hidden in this crevice, that I wanted to steal from them. I wanted to discover what was locked deep in their hearts.

But the rich remain rich even when dispossessed. I saw them after the siege, clambering out of their cellars, chiefly the Christians but then the Jews too, people who had somehow managed to survive, every one of them robbed and dispossessed to the extent that you couldn’t imagine having less. Nevertheless — robbed of everything, their houses bombed flat, their businesses in ruins because of the war and what followed it, not to mention the great change you could sense in the air even before it happened, the surprise the Commies were preparing for them — these rich Christians and Jews, the rich, were back in their villas within two years, and the women with their neat little earrings and silver-fox collars were back in the Café Gerbeaud. How did they do it? I don’t know. But I’m quite sure that their lives straight after the war were not different from before and during. They were just as fussy about their food and clothes. When the first train set off for abroad and they had received their first travel permit from the Russian high command in Budapest, they were already complaining about having to spend the night in the upper berth of their sleeping car to the shops in Zurich or Paris. You see what I mean? Being rich must be a condition, much like sickness or health. Say you are rich, you might, in some mysterious way, be rich forever, but however much money you have, you never feel properly rich. Maybe you need to believe in your wealth in order to be properly rich — I mean, the way saints and revolutionaries believe that they are different. And you can’t afford to feel guilty if you are rich: if you felt guilty for a second you’d be finished. The not-truly-rich, those who have visions of the poor while indulging in a beefsteak and drinking Champagne, will eventually lose out, because they are insincere in their wealth. They’re not rich out of conviction, they are only pretending, cowardly, sneakily, to be rich. You have to be very disciplined to be rich. You can perform a few charitable acts, but only as a kind of a fig leaf. Listen, darling. I hope one day, when I am no longer around and you meet someone who has more jewelry left than I have, you will not be too sensitive about such things. Don’t be cross. I’m just telling you what I think. There! Give me your lovely artistic hand, let me clutch it to my heart. Can you feel it beating? It’s beating for a proper prole, you see. Well, there you are. That’s me all over.

Enough to say I was a clever little girl and quickly learned all there was to know about wealth. I served them for a long time and learned their secrets. But one day I left them, because I’d grown tired of waiting. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for my husband to desire and miss me. What are you looking at? I waited just as I should under the circumstances. I was strong. I had a plan.

. . .

Have another look at his photograph, take a good look. I kept it because I paid the photographer good money for it, when I was still a maid, because he was still with his first wife.

Let me adjust the bolster under your head. Go on, relax, stretch out. You should always relax when you’re with me, darling. I want you to feel good when you are with me. It’s exhausting enough for you working all night in that bar with the band. When you are here in bed with me, you should do nothing except love me, then relax.

Is that something I said to my husband too? No, sweetheart. I did not mean for him to feel good when he was in bed with me. And that was the trouble, really. Somehow I couldn’t resolve in myself to make him feel good with me, though he did everything to please me, poor man, undertook every kind of sacrifice for my sake. He broke with his family, with society, with all his usual ways. When he came to me it was really like emigrating, the way some bankrupt man-about-town sets out on a sea voyage to a faraway land. Maybe that was exactly why I could never reconcile myself to him; he just wasn’t at home with me. All the time he was with me it was as if he had run away to an exciting, spicy, hot country like Brazil and married some local woman. Does such a person ever wonder how he got there? And when he is with that local woman, even at the most intimate moments, isn’t his mind elsewhere? Isn’t he thinking of home? Perhaps. It made me nervous. That was why I didn’t want him to feel too good when we were together, at table or in bed.

What was that home he was thinking about? Where was it? Was it his first wife? I don’t think so. Home, real home, is not to be found on maps, you know. But home stands for a great deal, not just good and lovely things, but hateful, contrary things too. We are learning that lesson ourselves now, aren’t we, now that we no longer have a home? Don’t imagine we’ll get it back by paying the odd home visit. There’ll be good-byes and tears, some will feel heartbroken, some will strut about proudly waving their new foreign passports while paying a bill with their traveler’s check … But the home we think about when we’re abroad, that has gone for good. Do you still dream of your home in Zala? I do sometimes dream of the wetlands in the Nyírség, but whenever I do I wake with a headache. It seems home is not just a region, a town, a house, or people but a feeling. What’s that? Are there eternal feelings? No, dear, I don’t think so. You know very well I adore you, but if one day I stopped adoring you because you have cheated on me or gone off with someone — but that’s all impossible, isn’t it? Should it ever happen, should I ever have to say good-bye to you, please don’t think my heart will break. We’ll carry on having charming conversations, if you like … but there will be one thing we won’t talk about, because that will have been over, vanished into thin air. There’s no time for mourning. There is only ever one home in your life, like love, the one true love. And it passes like love, like true love. And it’s right it should be like that; otherwise it would all be too much for us to bear.

That first woman, my husband’s first wife — she was a refined lady. Very beautiful, very self-controlled. It was her self-control I most envied. That seems to be one of those things you can’t learn or buy with money. It’s something you’re born with. It may be that the stuff these strange people, the rich, are so busy cultivating all the time is nothing more than a kind of self-discipline. Their blood cells, their very glands, are all precisely under control. I hated this capacity in them, and my husband knew I hated it. It was precisely because his first wife was cultured and self-controlled that my husband left her one day. He had grown tired of self-control. I was more than just a woman to him: I was a trial, a rehearsal, an adventure, both hunt and prey, a form of fraud, a sacrilege — like when someone in polite society suddenly spits on the carpet. The devil knows what these things mean. I’ll fetch a cognac, a three-star bottle, all right? I’ve grown thirsty with all this talking.

Drink, my dear. There — you see how I drink? I put my lips to where your lips have touched the glass … what surprising, tender, marvelous ideas you have! I could weep when something like this occurs to you. I have no idea how you do it. I’m not saying the idea is entirely original, it might be other lovers in the past have thought of it … but it’s still a wonderful gift.

There — now I have drunk after you. You see my husband never made tender gestures like this. We never once drank from the same glass while looking into each other’s eyes as we are doing now. If he wanted to please me, he would buy me a ring — yes, that nice ring with the turquoise stone, the one you were looking at just now with such fascination: that too was a present from him. What’s that, darling? Fine, you can take it, have the ring valued as you did the others, at that first-rate man of yours. You shall have whatever you want.

Shall I tell you more about the rich? There is no way of telling anyone everything about them. I mean, I lived among them for years, but it was like walking in my sleep, in a deep sleep filled with dread. I always worried about saying the wrong thing when I talked to them. I worried in case I listened wrong or touched things in the wrong way. They never shouted or cursed at me, certainly not! They trained and educated me instead, sensitively, patiently, the way the Italian organ grinder out in the street trains his monkey, showing him how to perch on his shoulder and how to preen himself. But they also taught me the way one might teach a cripple, someone incapable of walking, of doing anything the way it ought to be done. Because that is what I was when I first went to them: a cripple. I couldn’t do anything properly. I couldn’t walk, not as they understood walking, couldn’t say hello, couldn’t speak … and as for eating? I hadn’t the foggiest notion how to eat! Even listening was beyond me — listening properly, that is, listening with purpose: in other words, with evil intent. I listened and gawped. I was a fish out of water. But little by little I learned everything they had to teach me. I worked at it and got on. It surprised them how much and how quickly I learned. It was I who left them gawping in the end. I’m not boasting, but I do believe they were quite astonished when they saw how much I learned.

I knew about the family vault, for example. The mausoleum. Oh, lord, that mausoleum! You know how it was back then, when I was still a maid in their house. I saw how everyone was robbing them. The cook made a bit on the side, the servant took backhanders from the salesmen who inflated the prices for brandy, wine, and the best cigars, the chauffeur stole and sold the gas in their cars. All this was to be expected. My employers were perfectly aware of it: it was part of the household budget. I didn’t steal anything myself, since I only cleaned the bathroom, where there was nothing to steal. But later, once I had become “Her Ladyship,” I couldn’t help thinking of everything I had seen in the cellar and the kitchen, and the mausoleum was too much of a temptation. I couldn’t resist it.

You see there came a day when my husband — a proper gentleman — suddenly felt his life was incomplete without a family vault in the Buda graveyard. His parents, the old gentleman and the old lady, were old-fashioned in their death, turning to dust under simple marble tombstones without a proper mausoleum. My husband grew quite morose when this omission occurred to him. But he soon recovered and set to work to remedy the fault. He asked me to negotiate with the designer and the clerk-of-works to create the perfect mausoleum. By that time we had more than one car, a summer house in Zebegény and a permanent winter residence on exclusive Rózsadomb, not to mention a mansion in Transdanubia, near Lake Balaton, on an estate that my husband found himself lumbered with as the result of some deal. We certainly couldn’t complain we had nowhere to live.

But a mausoleum we did not have. We hastened to correct this oversight. Naturally we couldn’t trust any ordinary builder with the job. My husband took great pains to discover the leading funerary expert in the city. We had plans brought over from England and Italy, whole books, their pages printed on heavy burnished paper … you have no idea the amount people have written on the subject of funerary monuments. I mean, after all, to just go and die, that’s nothing special — people scrape out a bit of earth and shove you in, end of story. But gentlefolk lead different lives, and, naturally, their deaths are different too. So we employed an expert to help us choose a model, and had a beautiful, spacious, dry mausoleum built, complete with cupola. I wept when I first saw the mausoleum from within, the sheer glory of it, because, for just a moment, it made me think of the sandy ditch we lived in out on the wetlands. I mean, the vault was bigger than the ditch. With careful foresight they had left enough space at the center for six graves, I have no idea for whom. Maybe they were expecting guests, the visiting dead, just in case someone dropped in and needed somewhere to stretch out. I looked at the three spare places and told my husband I would sooner be buried by dogs than lie in this crypt of theirs! You should have seen him laugh when I said it!

And so we were prepared for all eventualities. Naturally the mausoleum was equipped with electric lights, lights in two colors, blue and white. When everything was ready we called the priest to consecrate this house of dead pleasure. Everything you could possibly think of was provided, darling — gilt letters above the entrance, and, on the elevation, modestly small, the aristocratic family crest, the crest they wore on their underpants. Then there was a forecourt where they planted flowers, with columns at the entrance leading to a sort of marbled waiting room for visitors should they fancy taking a breather before they died. You then passed from the zinc hall, through the wrought-iron gates, into the parlor, where the elders were arranged. It was a proper mausoleum, set up for eternity, as if the dead interred there were not to be thrown out after thirty to fifty years. There they were, including the most illustrious among them, for eternity, until the last trumpet called them forth in their distinguished pajamas and privileged dressing gowns.

I earned an eight-thousand-pengő commission doing the mausoleum, the builder wouldn’t give me more. I had an account in a bank and one day, stupidly, I deposited this little extra cash. My husband came across the statement quite by chance, the statement revealing how my little-here and little-there had started to amount to a reasonable sum. He didn’t say anything — of course he didn’t say anything, what a crazy idea! — but I could see it upset him. He thought a member of the family shouldn’t be making a profit on his parents’ family vault. Can you credit that? I couldn’t understand it myself, not to this day. I only tell you the story to show you how strange the rich are.

There’s something else. I got used to everything, I bore it all silently. But they had one habit I really couldn’t stand. Even today I have to take a deep breath because I feel sick just thinking about it. It was that one step too far! I have learned a few things in my time, and there is never an end to learning. But I can bear it all; I am resigned to it. You never know, perhaps I might even get used to the idea of getting older. Silently. But that habit of theirs I couldn’t bear. I redden when I remember it, red with helpless fury, like a turkey.

You mean bed? Yes, but not the way you think. It was related to bed, but in another way. I mean their nightgowns and their pajamas.

You don’t understand. Well, I agree it’s hard to explain. What I mean is that I looked around me, amazed at everything in the house: I felt an almost religious awe, the way you do when you see a giraffe in the zoo. There was the colored toilet paper, the Swedish chiropodist, the lot. I understood that such unusual people could not live by ordinary, everyday rules. They had to have food served a different way, the beds made a different way, like no ordinary mortal being.

Naturally, their food had to be cooked differently because their digestive system had to be quite different, like the kangaroo’s. I’m not absolutely sure how it was with their intestines, but they certainly digested their food in a way no ordinary mortal does. Not naturally, in the regular way, but in a way that forced them to use peculiar laxatives, strange enemas … the whole thing was a great secret.

So I looked on while they did all this, gazing in wonder, mouth open, often with goose pimples. High culture, it seems, is not just a matter of museums but something you find in people’s bathrooms and the kitchens where others cook for them. Their way of life did not change, not a bit, not even during the siege, would you believe it? While everyone else was eating beans or peas, they were still opening tins of delicacies from abroad, goose liver from Strasbourg and such things. There was a woman in the cellar, who spent three weeks there, the wife of an ex — minister of state whose husband had fled west to escape the Russians, who stayed here because she had some other man … and believe it or not, this woman was on a diet, a diet she maintained even as bombs were falling. She was looking after her figure, cooking some tasty something on a spirit flame using only olive oil because she feared that the fat in the beans and the gristle that everyone stuffed themselves with out of fear and anxiety might lead her to put on weight! Whenever I get to thinking about it, I marvel what a strange thing this thing called culture is.

Here in Rome there are all these wonderful statues and paintings and grand tapestries, like the castoffs of a lost world, the kind we get in junk shops back home. But maybe all the masterworks of Rome offer just one view of culture. It might be that culture is also what happens when people cook for the rich, with butter or oil, with complicated recipes prescribed by the doctor — as if it were not only their teeth and guts that required nourishment but they had to have a special soup for the liver, a different cut of meat for the heart, a particular blend of salads for the gall bladder, and a rare form of pastry with raisins for the pancreas. And having eaten all this, the rich withdraw into solitude so that their mysterious organs of digestion can get on with digesting. That’s culture too! I understood it all, admired it, and full-heartedly approved of it. It was just their way with nightshirts and pajamas I failed to understand. I could never reconcile myself to it. Damn the God that invented such things!

Have patience, I’m about to tell you. After making the bed I had to lay the nightshirt on top of it facedown, folding the bottom end of it back and over, spreading the sleeves. See what I mean? Looked at this way, the nightshirt or pajamas looked faintly Arabic, like some Eastern pilgrim at prayer, stomach to the ground, his arms spread over the sand. Why did they insist on this? I have no idea. Maybe because it’s more convenient that way, because it involves one movement less, because you just need to pull it on from the back and there you are, ready for bed, without having to struggle into it and tire yourself out before going to sleep. But I hated this kind of calculation, absolutely loathed it. I simply couldn’t tolerate this affectation of theirs. My whole nervous system rebelled against it. My hands shook with fury whenever I made their beds, folding and adjusting their nightgowns, pajama jackets, and trousers the way the manservant taught me. Why?

People are peculiar, you see. They are born that way, even when they’re not rich. Everyone is annoyed or driven mad by something. Even the poor who tolerate everything for a while, who resign themselves to everything and bear the weight of the world on their backs with a certain awe and helplessness, accepting whatever comes their way. There comes a moment for them, one that came for me each evening when I was making the bed, putting out their nightwear in the required manner. That was when I understood that soon people would no longer put up with the world as it was. I mean individuals as well as nations. Someone would scream out loud that they had had enough, that things had to change. And that when this happened, people would take to the streets and go on the rampage, smashing and breaking things. Though that’s only the circus part, a sideshow. Revolution, I mean real revolution, is that which has already happened inside people. Don’t stare at me like an idiot, gorgeous.

I might be talking rubbish, but not everything runs according to the laws of normal logic, not everything people say or do has to make sense. Do you think it’s rational or logical that I should be lying with you in this bed? Don’t you get it, sweetheart? Never mind. Just keep your mouth shut and carry on loving me. Our logic makes no sense — but here we are.

So that’s the nightwear business. I loathed this habit of theirs. But eventually I resigned myself to that too. They were so much stronger, after all. It is possible to hate dominant forms of life just as it is possible to admire them, but you cannot deny them. I grew to hate them. I hated them to the extent that I joined them and became rich myself; wore their clothes, lay down in their beds, started to watch my figure, and, eventually, got to taking laxatives before I went to bed, just like the rich. I didn’t hate them because they were rich and I was poor, no, please don’t misunderstand me. It would be nice if someone finally understood the true state of affairs.

Newspapers and parliaments are constantly going on about this now. Even the movies are full of it, or so I understood watching a newsreel the other day. Everyone is talking about it. I wonder what has got into people. I can’t imagine it’s good for people to be talking so crudely, so generally about rich and poor, about Americans and Russians. I don’t understand it. They even say there is bound to be a great revolution and the Russians will come out on top, along with the poor, by and large. But a very refined man once told me in a bar — a South American, I think, a drug dealer, so I heard, who supposedly kept a stash of heroin in his dentures — that that was not how it was going to be, that it would be the Americans who’d win out in the end, because they had more money.

I thought a good deal about this. The saxophonist said the same thing. He said the Americans would drill a great hole in the ground and pack it with atom bombs, and then this little guy in glasses, the man who was currently the president over the ocean, would get down on his hands and knees, carrying a burning match, and crawl over to the hole, light the fuse of the atom bomb, and then — whoosh! — the whole caboodle would go up. I thought it a load of nonsense at first. But I can’t bring myself to laugh anymore. I have seen a great deal that seemed just as ridiculous but soon became reality. My experience is that, generally, the more stupid the idea, the more certain that, one day, it will be turned into fact.

I’ll never forget the gossip in Budapest near the end of the war. One day, for example, the Germans ranged cannons along the embankment on the Buda side of the city. Enormous cannons they were, properly dug in by the bridgeheads. They broke up the pavements and placed machine-gun nests all the way along the lovely chestnut-lined shore. People looked at them anxiously, but there were some smart people who declared there would not be a siege of Budapest because all those terrifying weapons, the heavy artillery by the bridges, the bundles of explosives on the bridges themselves, were all a confidence trick. It was a trick to pull the wool over the Russians’ eyes. They didn’t really want a battle. That’s what they were saying. But it was no trick: at least it didn’t fool the Russians. The Russians arrived at the river one day and shot everything to pieces, including the cannons. So I have no idea if what the South American said will come true, but I suspect that, in the end, it will work out exactly as he said, if only because it sounded so ridiculous at first hearing.

I also thought a lot about what this very refined man said about how the Americans would win because they were rich. The rich — now there is something I do understand. My experience was that you had to be very careful with the rich because they are extraordinarily crafty. They possess enormous resilience … though heaven alone knows where the resilience comes from. One thing is certain — they are subtle, and it is never easy dealing with them. What I said about their nightwear is evidence of that. People who have you prepare their pajamas the way I was told to prepare them are not ordinary people. Such people know exactly what they want, day and night, and a poor man should cross himself when coming into their presence. Of course I mean only the genuinely rich, not those who just happen to have money. Those are less dangerous. They flash their money around the way a child blows bubbles. And it all ends as it does with soap bubbles: the bubble just bursts in their hands.

My husband was genuinely rich. That might be why he was always so tired.

Pour me another glass, just one finger. No, darling, no, I won’t drink from your glass this time. Inspired ideas are not to be repeated. They quickly wear out and lose their magic. Don’t take it the wrong way.

Don’t rush me, I can only tell it in its proper order.

He was offended, yes, he was terminally offended. That was something I never understood, because I was born poor. There is a strange similarity between the really poor and the really rich … you can’t offend either of them. My father, who was a barefoot fruit picker in the wetlands, was as impossible to offend as the prince of the Rákóczis. My husband was embarrassed by his wealth: far from him to flash it about! He would have worn any disguise to avoid his wealth being pointed out. His manners were so refined, so quiet, so fearfully courteous that you couldn’t offend him with words, with manners, or with acts, since it all washed off his refinement like water off a leaf. They left no scar. No, the only person capable of offending him was himself. And the tendency to offend himself grew in him like some wicked, sickly passion.

Later, when he began to suspect that there was something wrong with him, he started to panic. He was like someone dangerously ill who suddenly loses faith in the famous physician, in the whole range of science and medicine, and turns instead to the woman selling herbal cures because she might be able to help. That was how he came to me one day, leaving his wife and his old life behind. He thought I could offer a kind of herbal cure for him. But I was no herbalist.

Pass me that photo, let me have another look at him. Yes, that’s what he was like fifteen years ago.

Have I said I wore this picture round my neck a long time? In a small locket, on a lilac ribbon? Do you know why? Because I’d paid for it. I was just a servant then and bought it out of my wages: that was why I looked after it. My husband never knew what an important matter it was for someone like me to pay money for something for which there is no pressing need, I mean real money, like the change from my wages or a tip. Later I spent money like water — his money — I threw thousands around the way I sent dust flying with my feather duster on mornings when I was still a servant. It wasn’t real money to me. But my heart was in my mouth when I bought this photograph, because I was poor and felt it a sin to spend money on things that were not absolutely essential. That photograph was a sin for me, mere vanity. I bought it all the same, sneaking a visit to the famous, highly fashionable photographer in the city center, ready to pay the full price without bargaining. The photographer laughed and sold it to me at cut price. Buying his photograph was the only sacrifice I ever made for that man.

He was reasonably tall, a couple of inches taller than me. His weight was steady. He controlled his body the way he controlled his words and manners. He put on a few pounds in winter, but lost them again in May and remained at that weight till Christmas. Don’t think for a moment that he dieted. Forget diets. It was just that he treated his body the way he might treat one of his employees. His body was required to work for him.

He treated his eyes and his mouth the same way. His eyes and mouth laughed separately, as and when they were required. They never laughed at the same time. Not the way you did, my precious, so freely, so sweetly, both eyes and mouth smiling at once, yesterday when you truly excelled yourself and sold that ring — and came home to me with the good news.

That was something he could never do. I lived with him, I was his wife and, before that, his servant. Needless to say, I felt much closer to him as a servant than when I was merely his wife. Even so, I never saw him give a full-hearted laugh the way you do.

He was far more likely to smile. When I met that hunk of a Greek in London, the man who taught me a great many things — don’t go bothering me with what he taught me, I couldn’t tell you everything, we’d be here till dawn — he warned me never to laugh in company when in England because it was considered vulgar. I should just smile and keep smiling. I tell you this because I want you to know everything you might find useful sometime.

My husband could smile like nobody’s business. I was so jealous of it sometimes I felt quite sick just thinking about his smile. It was as if he had learned a high art at some mysterious university where the rich go to get their education and smiling is a compulsory subject. He even smiled when he was being cheated. I tried it on with him sometimes. I cheated him and watched. I cheated him in bed and watched to see what he’d do. There were moments when that was dangerous. You never know how someone will react when they’re cheated in bed.

The danger was a deathly thrill to me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one day he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed me in the stomach — like a pig at slaughter time. It was only a dream, of course: wish fulfillment. I learned the term from a doctor I consulted for a while because I wanted to be fashionable like the others, because I was rich and could indulge myself with a few psychological problems. The doctor got fifty pengő for an hour’s work. This fee entitled me to lie on a sofa in his surgery and to regale him with my dreams as well as all the rude talk I could muster. There are people who pay to have a woman lie on a sofa and talk filth. But it was I who did the paying, learning terms like “repression” and “wish fulfillment.” I certainly learned a great deal. It wasn’t easy living with the gentry.

But smiling was something I never learned. It seems you need something else for that. Maybe you have to have a history of ancestors smiling before you. I hated it as much as I did the fuss about the pajamas … I hated their smiles. I cheated my husband in bed by pretending to enjoy it when I didn’t really. I’m sure he knew it, but did he draw a knife and stab me? No, he smiled. He sat in the huge French bed, his hair tousled, his muscles well toned, a man in top condition, smelling faintly of hay. He fixed me with a glassy look and smiled. I wanted to cry at such moments. I was helpless with grief and fury. I am sure that later, when he saw his bombed-out house, or still later, when they kicked him out of the factory and expropriated him, he was smiling the same smile in exactly the same way.

It is one of the foulest of human sins, that serene, superior smile. It is the true crime of the rich. It is the one thing that can never be forgiven. Because I can understand people beating or killing each other when they have been hurt. But if they merely smile and say nothing, I have no idea what to do with them. Sometimes I felt no punishment was enough for it. There was nothing I, a woman who had clambered out of the ditch to find myself in his life, could do against him. The world could not harm him, whatever it did to him, to his wealth, to his lands, or to anything that mattered to him. It was the smile that had to be wiped out. Don’t those famous revolutionaries know this?

Because shares and precious stones may vanish, but the trace of these things, a kind of residual bloom, will hang around the rich even after they have lost everything. When you take the really rich and strip them to their bare skin, they still retain the aura of wealth, an aura no earthly power can drag from them. The fact is that when you have someone truly rich, someone with fifty thousand acres, say, or a factory with two thousand workers, and they lose it all, they still remain richer than my kind, however well we happen to be doing.

How they do it? I don’t know. Look, I was there when wealthy people were having a particularly bad time back home. All the odds were stacked against them. Everyone hated them. Little by little, step by methodical step, they were deprived of everything, all their visible goods, and later, with supreme skill, of their invisible goods too. And yet these people remained as serene as before.

I stood there gaping. I wasn’t angry. I did not feel in the least like mocking. I don’t want to make a big song and dance about money to you, or to go on forever about the rich and the poor. Don’t get me wrong, I know it would sound good if I started shouting at dawn about how much I hated the rich, about their money, their power. I hated them, yes I did, but it wasn’t their wealth I hated. It was more that I was afraid of them, or rather that I was in awe of them the way primitive man feared thunder and lightning. I was angry with them the way people used to be angry with the gods. You know about the little gods, those tubby ones, those of human proportions, who talk big, screw around, and are real rogues, those who interfere with the mess of ordinary people’s lives, who worm their way into others’ beds, into women’s lives, who steal the food off the table, gods who behave much as people do. They are not gods like that; they are middling, helpful gods of human size.

That’s how I felt when I thought of the rich. It wasn’t their money, their mansions, their precious stones that made me hate them. I was not a revolutionary proletarian, not a worker with a proper consciousness, nothing like that.

Why not? It was because of the depths from which I’d risen. I knew more than street-corner orators did; I knew that under it all, right at the bottom of things, there isn’t, nor has there ever been, justice; that when you end one injustice, it is immediately replaced by another. More than that, I was a woman, a beautiful woman at that, and I wanted my own place in the sun. Is that a crime? Maybe the revolutionaries — those who thrive by promising that everything will be fine providing we kick out whatever exists and is bad and do something that in other circumstances we would consider bad — maybe they would despise me for it. But I want to be honest with you. I want to give you everything I have, that I still have, not just the jewels. That’s why I must tell you that the reason I hated the rich was because it was only money I could take from them. But the rest, the secret and meaning of wealth, that sense of otherness which cast a more frightening spell over me than money did, that they did not give me. They hid it so well that no revolutionary could take it from them. They stowed it away more securely than valuables in the safes of foreign banks, than the pieces of gold buried in their gardens.

I couldn’t work out the way they could suddenly change subject and simply talk about something else the very moment when the subject seemed most exciting and painfully relevant. There were moments I was so furious my heart beat in my mouth. I was furious when in love, furious when I had been hurt, furious when I saw injustice, when someone was suffering — sometimes I felt like screaming out in righteous indignation. But they — they stayed quiet and smiled at such moments. It’s beyond words as far as I am concerned. Words are never really enough, not when anything really matters, matters as much as birth or death. Words don’t do those occasions any real justice. Maybe music can do it, I don’t know. Or when we feel desire and touch someone, like this. Don’t move. There was a good reason that other friend of mine hid the dictionaries in the end. He was looking for a word. But he couldn’t find it.

So don’t be surprised. I’m no good at explaining myself. I’m just talking … How far off the point talking is when you really want to say something!

Give me the photograph again. Yes, that’s what he looked like when I met him. Later, when I last saw him — after the siege — he was just the same. He had changed only the way a well-made object changes with use … a little more shiny, a little smoother, a little more burnished if you like. He was aging like a good razor or cigarette holder.

Heaven knows. Maybe I should make an effort to tell you what happened. You know what — I’ll start at the end. Maybe that way it will be clearer, leaving out the beginning.

His problem was that he was bourgeois. What’s bourgeois? The pictures in Red propaganda show us evil, potbellied figures who spend the entire day studying share prices while driving their workers to exhaustion. That’s the way I pictured them, too, before I found myself among them. But later I understood that the whole business of the bourgeois and the class war was different from what we proles were told.

These people were sure they had a role in the world; I don’t mean just in business, copying those people who had had great power when they themselves had little power. What they believed was that when it came down to it, they were putting the world into some sort of order, that with them in charge, the lords of the world would not be such great lords as they had been, and the proles would not remain in abject poverty, as we once were. They thought the whole world would eventually accept their values; that even while one group moved down and another one up, they, the bourgeois, would keep their position — even in a world where everything was being turned upside down.

Then one day he asked to speak to me. He said he wanted to marry me — me, the maid! I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but at that moment I hated him so much I could have spat at him. It was Christmas and I was squatting by the fire, preparing to light it. I thought it was the greatest insult I’d ever received. He wanted to buy me like he would some fancy breed of dog — that’s what I felt. I told him to get out of my way. I didn’t even want to look at him.

So he didn’t make me his wife then. After a while time passed and he got married. He married a proper lady. They had a child but the child died. The old man died too, and I was sorry about that. When he died the house was like a museum where people only dropped by to take a look. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a bunch of schoolchildren turned up one Sunday morning, rang the bell, and said it was an educational visit. By that time my husband was living in a different house, with his wife. They did a lot of traveling. I’d stayed with the old gentleman. The old woman wasn’t daft. I was scared of her, but I loved her too. There was some knowledge flickering in her, some age-old female wisdom. She had cures for liver and kidney ailments. She knew about washing and how to listen to music. She knew about us too, about the boy’s rebellion, without saying a word … she recognized the long-standing tension between us the way only women know, as if by a kind of radar. Women can sniff out the secrets of any man in their vicinity.

So she knew her son was hopelessly lonely because the world into which he’d been born, to which he belonged heart and soul — in his memories, in his dreams, even when he was wide awake — could no longer protect him. It couldn’t protect him because it was falling apart, disintegrating like an old piece of cloth, beyond use even as a decorative throw or a rag for wiping. She knew her son was no longer moving forward, no longer on the attack: he was on the back foot, merely defending. She knew that people who stop moving forward and spend their lives on the back foot are no longer alive: they merely exist. The old woman sensed this danger: her ancient female weaving-and-spinning instincts told her as much. She was aware of this secret the way families are aware of a sinister genetic weakness that is not to be spoken of because considerable interests are at stake. No one should know or speak about the fact that anemia or madness had ravaged the family in the past.

What are you looking at? Yes, I am just as neurotic as the rich. And it wasn’t being among the rich that gave me my neurosis. I was neurotic in my own way in the ditch back home … that is to say if I ever had anything of the kind people call “home.” Whenever I say the word “family” or “home,” I see nothing, I only smell things: earth, mud, mice, human smells. Then, beyond all that, another smell, one hovering over my half-animal, half-human childhood, over the pale blue sky, the mushroom-smelling wood wet with rain, the taste of sunlight, a smell like metal when you touch it with your tongue. I was a neurotic child too, why deny it? It’s not just the rich that have secrets.

But it’s the end I want to tell you about, the very last time I saw my husband. Because, sitting with you here at dawn in this hotel in Rome, I feel I know for certain that that was the last time.

Wait, let’s not drink any more. A black coffee instead … Give me your hand. Put it to my heart. Yes, it’s pounding. That’s how it pounds every dawn. It’s not the black coffee or the cigarettes, it’s not even being with you that does it. It pounds because I remember that moment — the moment I last saw him.

Please don’t think it is desire that makes my heart pound like this. There is no cheap movie scene involved in that pounding. I have already told you that I never loved him. There was a time when I was in love with him, of course, but that’s only because I hadn’t yet lived with him. Love and being in love don’t go together, you know.

I was foolish and in love, and everything happened just as I had planned. The old woman died and I went to London. Show me that second photograph! Yes, that was my virile Greek, dearest. He taught singing in London, in Soho. He was a real Greek, down to his fingernails, and could flash those beautiful, fiery, dark eyes of his. He could whisper and swear and, when roused, show as much of the whites of his eyes as that Neapolitan tenor we saw at the concert the other day.

I felt very lonely in London. London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there. The English have become connoisseurs of boredom: they know how to deal with it. I went there as a maid and quickly found employment. At that time foreign maids were in demand the way African slaves once were. There is a city in England called Liverpool that, they say, is built on the skulls of black men — not that I know that for certain. I couldn’t stand being a maid in London for long, because the job was quite different in London than it had been in Budapest. It was better in some ways and worse in others. It wasn’t the work so much. The fact that I had to work was no bother. I could barely speak the language, which was a serious concern, but what was worse was that I didn’t really feel like a maid in the house, more just a component. A component, that is, not in an English household with an English family, but in some kind of big business dealing with imports. I was an imported article. On top of that it wasn’t a real English family I had joined but a rich German Jewish family living in London. The head of the family had fled Hitler to England, bringing his family with him, and was producing warm woolen underwear for the army. He was a thoroughly German Jew — that is to say, as much German as Jewish. He wore his hair close-cropped, and I think — though I don’t know this for certain, it’s not impossible — had had a surgeon apply some dueling scars to his face, hoping he’d pass for someone who had been a proper card-playing German student. That’s what I kept thinking when I occasionally looked at his picture.

They were good people, though, and played at being English with more enthusiasm than the English themselves then wanted or had means to do. The house was lovely. It was in a green outer suburb of London. There were four in the family, plus a staff of five and a daily charwoman. I was on the door, responsible for letting people in. The staff included a cook and a manservant as back at home, a kitchen maid, and a driver. I thought this was all perfectly proper. Very few of the grand old English families were employing such specialized staff by this time. They’d sold the great family houses, or had them rebuilt, maintaining the obligatory minimum staff in the few grand households where people still preserved old customs.

We all looked out for ourselves. The kitchen maid would not lift a finger to help me in my duties. The manservant would sooner have cut off his hand than help the cook. We were all simply components to keep the machine ticking over. Do you know what made me nervous in all this? It was that I never understood the machine we were serving. We were all components, both masters and servants, but was the machine an accurate Swiss watch or a timed explosive device? There was something unsettling about this quiet, refined, ultra-English mode of life. You know, the way everyone kept smiling, like in English detective fiction, where murderer and victim continue to smile even as they are politely discussing who is to kill who.

And it was boring. I wasn’t good at putting up with this fully heated, fully laundered, dry-cleaned, English form of boredom. I never knew when it was proper to laugh. In the parlor, of course, I could only laugh inwardly because I had no right to laugh when my anglicized employers told each other jokes. But it was the same with laughter in the kitchen. I was never sure when it was safe. They liked their jokes. The manservant subscribed to a comic journal and over dinner would read out the incomprehensible, and to my mind idiotic, English jokes. Everyone burst into loud laughter: the cook, the chauffeur, the kitchen maid, and the manservant, all of them. And, as they did so, they craftily watched me with one eye to check whether I understood their marvelous English sense of humor.

Most of the time I only understood enough of the charade to know it was beyond me, and that it wasn’t really the joke they were laughing at, but me. The English, you know, are almost as hard to understand as the rich. You have to be very careful with them, because they are always smiling, even when they are thinking the most terrible things. And they can look at you so stupidly you’d think they couldn’t count to two. But they are not stupid, and they are remarkably good at counting, particularly when they want to put one over on you. But of course they carry on smiling even then, even as they are cheating you.

The English servants regarded me, the foreigner, of course, as a kind of white Negro, a lower life-form. But even so, I suspect they didn’t look down on me quite as much as they looked down on my immigrant employers, the rich German Jews. They looked at me with pity. Maybe they felt a little sorry for me because I couldn’t fully appreciate the sparkling humor in Punch.

I lived with them as best I could. And waited … what else could I do?

What was I waiting for? For my knight in shining armor, my Lohengrin, who would one day leave home and hearth and rescue me? For the rich man who was still living with his rich wife? I knew my time would come, that I just had to wait.

But I also knew that that man would never make a move by himself. I would eventually have to go for him, to grab him by the hair and drag him away from his life. It would be like saving someone from drowning in quicksand. That’s how I imagined it.

One Sunday afternoon I met the Greek in Soho. I never found out what his real occupation was. He told me he was a businessman. He had rather too much money and even a car, a car being a much rarer sight then than it is now. He spent the night in clubs playing cards. I think his only real occupation was being Levantine. The English were not surprised that someone could make a living simply by being a Levantine. Smiling and courteous, humming and nodding, the English knew everything about us foreigners. They didn’t say anything, just hissed a little when someone offended against their code of good manners. It was, of course, impossible to discover what the code actually was.

My Greek friend was always up to something just off center. He was never jailed, but when I was with him in a pub or a classy restaurant he would take the odd glance at the door as though he were expecting a raid. He kept his ears open. Oh, do put that photograph back with the other one where it belongs. What did I learn from him? I told you: I learned to sing. He discovered I had a voice. Yes, you’re right, that wasn’t the only thing I learned. What a donkey you are! I told you he was Levantine: forget the Greek part.

Don’t interrupt. I just want to get to the end of the story. Tell you what about the end? That it was all in vain, that secretly I never stopped hating my husband. But I loved him too, loved him to distraction.

I understood that the moment I was walking over the bridge after the siege and met him coming the other way. How simple it sounds when put like that … There, you see? I’ve said it and nothing has happened. Here you are in a bed in Rome, in a hotel room, puffing away at an American cigarette with the scent of coffee from the Turkish copper pot wafting around you, it’s almost dawn, your head is propped on one arm, and you’re looking at me like that. Your lovely shiny hair is tumbling over your brow. And you’re waiting for me to go on. Isn’t life extraordinary with all its changes? Well, there I was crossing the bridge and suddenly who should I see walking toward me but my husband.

Is that all? Was it as simple as that?

Saying it now, I myself am astonished how much can fit into a single sentence. For example, just saying something like “after the siege.” One just says it, right? But there was nothing simple about the siege. You will know that at the end of February the big guns were still booming away in some parts of the country. Towns and villages were burning, people were being killed. But in Pest and Buda by that time we were — in some ways — living like people in great cities normally live. But at the same time, we had another life. We were like nomads before time began. We were wandering Gypsies. By mid-February the last Nazis had been defeated in Buda and Pest and gradually, with the ever-fainter sound of thunder, like real thunder, the front moved on, each day a little farther away. People started emerging from cellars.

You, of course, were out in Zala County, where there was no fighting: if you could have seen how things were in Pest, you’d have thought we had all gone mad. And you would have been right if you judged by appearances alone in those weeks and months after the siege. It was everything you could possibly imagine. Appearances won’t tell you what people feel, how people talk when crawling out of the rubble, when they’re still humiliated and terrified. You can’t smell the foul stench they’ve had to get used to: the dirt, the lack of washing, the lack of water. We were emerging from filth, from close human contact. I think I’m remembering this all topsy-turvy now, the way it is lodged in my memory. A lot of things get confused when I think back to this time. It’s like when the reel breaks in a movie, you know … suddenly you lose the thread of the story, dazzled by the flashing gray patterns on the screen.

The houses were still smoking. Buda with all its pretty detail, the Bastion, and the old quarter, were one great dying fire. I happened to be in Buda then. I didn’t spend the siege in the cellar of the house I’d been living in, because that had been bombed in the summer. I’d moved to a hotel. Then, once the Russian army had surrounded the city, I moved in with a friend. Which friend? You’ll find out in a minute.

It wasn’t difficult finding accommodation in Pest then. People usually spent the night elsewhere, anywhere but at home — I mean people who could easily have stayed at home, who didn’t have to hide — but everyone was caught up in a great tide of emotion. We were like mythical creatures left over at the end of some festival. People felt they had to hide because it wasn’t impossible that some dark force should be out looking for them, pursuing them — the Russians, the Communists — who knows? It was as if everyone was in disguise, guests at a macabre masked ball to which everyone was invited. Persian soothsayers and master chefs, complete with false beards … the cast list was uncanny.

But that wasn’t the whole story. At first sight it seemed everyone was dizzy with the drink the Nazis had stored in the cellars of hotels and restaurants and had no time to drink on their stampede to the west. You’ve heard the stories survivors tell of major airplane disasters or shipwrecks, how they find themselves marooned on some mountaintop, then, after three or four days, the supplies run out? Soon everybody — all those ladies and gentlemen with proper manners — is sizing each other up, speculating on each other’s edibility. You know the film The Gold Rush, where that little funny man with the toothbrush mustache — Chaplin, I mean — is being chased round and round the cabin in Alaska by that enormous prospector because the big man wants to eat the little man? There was that kind of madness in people’s eyes, the way they looked at things, the way they talked about there being a bit of food here or there. That was because they had made up their minds, like the survivors of a shipwreck, that one way or the other they would stay alive, even if it meant eating other people. They stowed away whatever could be stowed, wherever they found it.

I had a glimpse of reality after the siege. It was like having a cataract peeled away with a penknife. It took my breath away for a moment, it was all so fascinating.

The Bastion was still alight when we staggered from the cellar. Women were dressed like crones, in rags, covered in soot, hoping to escape the attentions of the Russian soldiers that way. The smell of death, the corpse smell of cellars, rose from our clothes, from our very bodies. Everywhere you went, however near or far, great fat bombs lay by the sidewalks, belching smoke. I walked down the wide avenue past corpses, fallen masonry, and useless, abandoned armored cars. I saw the frail skeletons of wingless Rata planes. I made my way through Krisztinaváros toward the green at the Vérmező. I wasn’t quite steady on my feet, because I was dizzy with fresh air, with winter sunlight, with simply being alive … But I plodded on like ten or twenty thousand others, because there was already an improvised bridge over the Danube. It was a hump of a bridge, a camel’s back. The Russian military police had rounded up a group of workers to build the bridge in under two weeks, under the direction of Russian engineers. At last, we could move between Buda and Pest again. Like everyone else I rushed to cross the bridge to Pest, because I had to get to Pest at any price. I could not stand being where I was anymore, not the way things were.

What was it I couldn’t stand? Was I desperate to see my old house? Of course not. I’ll tell you what.

The first morning the bridge was up, I rushed to Pest because I wanted to buy nail-polish remover at my favorite old drugstore in the city center. No, I’m not mad. It was just as I told you. Buda was still in flames. The tenement blocks of Pest were full of gaping holes. I had spent two weeks rotting in a cellar in Buda, along with a crowd of men, women, and children, with people starving and screaming around me, where one old man died of fright, and where everyone was filthy because we had no water. But in all of that, in all those two weeks, nothing tortured me so much as the thought that I had forgotten to bring my nail-polish remover into the shelter. When the last air-raid warning sounded and the siege began, I moved into the cellar with my nails painted bright red. And there I stayed with scarlet nails for two weeks, while Buda was falling around me. My scarlet nails had gone quite black with dirt.

You should know that even back then I had scarlet nails. I was a proper girl-about-town. I know men don’t understand this, but what I was most worried about during the siege was not being able to hurry over to my favorite old drugstore in Pest where they sold good peacetime-quality nail-polish remover.

The psychiatrist who charged me fifty pengő per visit for the privilege of lying on a couch in his surgery three times a week and talking dirt — I did it simply because I did everything befitting a middle-class lady — he would most certainly have explained to me that it wasn’t filthy nail polish I wanted to wash away, but uncleanness of another sort, the dirtiness of my prewar life. Well, maybe, but all I knew was that my nails were black, not scarlet, and that I had to do something about it. That’s why I hurried over the bridge at the earliest possible opportunity.

Once I reached the street where we used to live, a familiar figure hurried past me. It was the plumber, born and bred in the district, a decent older man. Like many others at the time, he had grown a gray beard so that he might look like a proper granddad, someone on his last legs, hoping this might prevent him being carted off to forced labor in Russia, as far as Ekaterinburg. He was carrying a big parcel. I was delighted to recognize him as he was passing. Then suddenly I heard him shout to the locksmith who was living in a bombed-out house on the other side of the street:

“Jenő, run down to the Central Market Hall, they still have stuff there!”

And the other man, the lanky locksmith, shouted back, croaky with enthusiasm:

“Glad you told me. I’ll get straight down!”

I stood at the edge of the grass of the Vérmező for a while, gazing after them. I saw the old Bulgarian wino who used to supply the richer houses with firewood for the winter. He emerged from another bombed property and carefully, almost ceremonially, lifted up a gold-rimmed mirror the way the priest raises the host when we celebrate the resurrection. The mirror flashed in the sparkling late-winter light. The old man was proceeding along reverentially, raising the mirror in such awe, you’d think the good fairy had given him the finest present of his life, the thing he had secretly longed for ever since he was a child. It was obvious he had just stolen it. He walked through the ruins in perfect peace, the one great winner in the lottery of life, spotted in the very moment the prize was announced. His stolen mirror made him the luckiest Bulgarian in the world.

I rubbed my eyes for a second, then an instinct took me over to the ruined building he had just left. The door was still there, but instead of the stairs a pile of rubble rose toward the next level. Later I heard that this old Buda house had been hit by over thirty bombs, shells, and grenades. I knew some people who lived there — a seamstress who occasionally worked for me, a vet who looked after my dog, and, on the first floor, a retired high-court judge with his wife, with whom we had sometimes had tea in the Auguszt, the old Buda patisserie. Krisztinaváros, unlike the other Budapest districts, was always more like a small provincial Austrian town than a suburb. People spent years there in cozy security or moved there in search of cozy security. Once there, they made their quiet, gentle vows — vows without any ulterior motive or even meaning — to be respectable members of the class of pensioners and middle-class families who had struggled their way to this haven of modest prosperity. Those who found their way here from below adopted the restrained, respectful manners of the older residents, including the plumber and the locksmith … Krisztinaváros was one big law-abiding, well-spoken, middle-class family.

The people who lived in that house, the house from whose ruins the Bulgarian emerged clutching his stolen mirror, were like that. He hurried from there, just as the plumber and locksmith had done. They were all encouraging each other to get busy, because the party wouldn’t last forever, because, for now, Buda was in flames and there was no police, no order. And somewhere down at the Central Market Hall there might still be something that hadn’t been pinched by the Russians or the rabble.

“Glad you told me. I’ll get straight down!” The words rang in my ear. It was like a song, like the voice of a street urchin or a cry from some seething underworld. I entered the familiar house, climbed the pile of rubble to the next level, and found myself in the apartment where the judge and his wife had lived, in the middle room, the parlor. I recognized the room because my husband and I had once been invited by the old couple for tea there. The ceiling was gone, a bomb having fallen through the roof, dragging the upstairs apartment’s parlor with it. It was an utter mess — roof beams, tiles, fragments of window frames, a door from the apartment above, bricks and plaster … then pieces of furniture, the leg of an Empire table, the front of a cupboard from the Maria Theresa period, a sideboard, lamps, all swimming in a shallow dirty liquid.

It was like a historical cesspool. Under it all I spotted the fringes of an Oriental carpet and a photograph of the judge, the photograph framed in silver, the old man posing in his frock coat, his hair pomaded. I stared at it in awe. It was like being confronted by a religious icon. There was something saintly about the old stiff figure, something dynastic. But I soon grew tired of looking and pushed the photograph aside with my foot. The bomb had wrecked more than one apartment here. Something had turned the flotsam of history into a heap of garbage. The tenants hadn’t yet emerged from their cellar. They might have died there. I was about to go back down when I realized I was not alone.

Through the open door linking this room with one of the neighbor’s rooms, I saw a man crawling on all fours. He had a box of silver cutlery under his arm. He greeted me without embarrassment, perfectly politely, as if he were merely visiting. The room next door was the judge’s dining room: it was from there he emerged. I recognized him as an office worker, someone I knew by sight because he was local too, one of the honest burghers of Krisztinaváros. “Ah, the books!” he sighed in sympathy. “What a shame about the books!” … We climbed down together to ground level, me helping him to carry the silverware. We talked freely. He told me he had really come for the books, because the old judge had a substantial library full of literature and legal textbooks, all nicely bound … and he so loved books. He thought he’d try to save the library, but the books were beyond saving, he told me with real regret, because the ceiling next door had also fallen in and the books were so badly soaked they had practically turned to pulp, the kind used in paper mills. He said nothing about the silver cutlery. He had picked that up almost as an afterthought, instead of the books.

We chatted on while we clambered down the pile of rubble on all fours. The office worker gallantly showed me the route down, every so often holding on to my elbow and guiding me round the more dangerous, gravelly edges. We rested a moment in the doorway and said good-bye. He ambled down the street with the box of silverware under his arm, the perfect, respectable neighbor.

All these people — the Bulgarian, the plumber, the locksmith, the clerk — were busily going about their work. They were the kinds of people who would later be described as “the private sector,” self-employed maszeks. They thought there was time enough, if they hurried, to save whatever hadn’t already been stolen by the Nazis, our local fascists, the Russians, or such Communists as had managed to make their way home from abroad. They felt it their patriotic duty to lay their hands on anything still possible to lay hands on, and so they set about their work of “salvaging.” It wasn’t just their own effects they were salvaging, but other people’s too, stowing them away before everything disappeared into Russian soldiers’ packs or the Communists’ pockets. There were not that many salvagers but they were remarkable for their industriousness. As for the rest, those nine million or more others in the country — you know, those they call “the people” now — they — that is to say we, were still paralyzed and looked on passively while the properly interested parties went about stealing in the name of “the people.” The fascist Arrow Cross had been robbing us for weeks already. Salvaging was like a highly infectious plague. The Jews were completely stripped of their property: first of their apartments, then their lands, their businesses, their factories, their drugstores, their offices, and, finally, their lives. This was not private sector maszek work but the state itself. Then came the Russians. They too went about looting for days and nights on end, going from house to house, from apartment to apartment. Then, when they left, came the Moscow-trained Commies with their handcarts. Now they had really been taught how to bleed the people dry.

The people! Do you know what that is? Who they were? Were you and I “the people”? Because today, everyone is heartily sick of them claiming to do everything in the name of “the people”: “the people,” “the masses,” “the proletariat.” I remember how surprised I was when one summer, a long time ago, at harvest time, my husband and I were staying on an estate and the landlord’s boy, a little boy with blond curls, rushed in at dinner and enthusiastically bellowed: “Mama, Mama! One of the proletariat has just had an accident — the harvester has chopped off one of his fingers!” Out of the mouths of babes, we said patronizingly. Now, everyone is a part of the masses — the proletariat, the gentry, even people like us.

Mind you, we were never so united, “the people” and the rest, as in those few weeks when the Commies first arrived, because the Commies were the experts. When they stole, it wasn’t theft but restitution. Do you know what “restitution” means? “The people” had no idea. When the progressives brought in laws that told them “What’s yours isn’t really yours: it belongs to the state,” they simply stared. There seemed to be nothing that was not the state’s. It was hard to get your head around that.

The people felt less contempt for the looting Russkies than they did for those enthusiastic purveyors of social justice who one day “saved” a painting by a famous English artist from a foreigner’s apartment and next day took possession of an old family’s collection of lace, or some class-alien grandpa’s gold teeth. When they set about stealing in the name of “the people,” everyone just stared. Or spat out of the side of their mouths. The Russians went about ransacking with po-faced indifference. We expected that. They had been through all this once back home, on a really large scale. Russkies didn’t argue about restitution or social justice: they just robbed and stripped.

Ah, you see! I am all hot and bothered just thinking about it. Pass me the cologne, I want to splash some on my brow.

You were lying low in the provinces, so you couldn’t know what life was like in Budapest. Nothing had happened, and yet, as if by magic, at a whistle from some fairy or demon, the city came alive, just like in those tales where the wicked wizard vanishes in a puff of smoke and the enchanted, apparently dead leap to their feet. The hands of the clock start moving round again, the clock ticks, the spring bubbles up. That war drifted away like a wicked demon: it tramped off westward. And now, whatever remained of the city, of society, sprang to life with such passion, fury, and sheer willpower, with such strength and stamina and cunning, it seemed nothing had happened. The weeks when there was not a single bridge, not even a pontoon bridge, over the Danube, we crossed by boat, as people used to do two hundred years ago. But out on the boulevard there were suddenly stalls in gateways, selling all kinds of nice food and luxury items: clothes, shoes, everything you could imagine, not to mention gold napoleons, morphine, and pork lard. The Jews who remained staggered from their yellow-star houses, and within a week or two you could see them bargaining, surrounded as they were by the corpses of men and horses. People were quibbling over prices for warm British cloth, French perfumes, Dutch brandy, and Swiss watches among the rubble. Everything was up for grabs, for offer, for a quick deal. The Jews were trading with Russian truck drivers; goods and food were moving from one part of the country to another. The Christians too emerged. And soon the migrations began. Vienna and Bratislava had fallen. People rushed to Vienna, getting lifts from Russians with cargoes of lard and cigarettes, returning with cars.

We were still deaf from the half-dead shells they’d been dropping on us, and those big smoke-belching bombs of theirs, but cafés in Pest quickly opened up again. There were places you could get strong, fiercely poisonous coffee. Russian sailors were dancing at tea dances with girls from Józsefváros to the sound of wind-up record players. Not everyone’s relatives were yet buried, and you could see the feet of corpses protruding from improvised roadside graves. But there were women in fashionable clothes, fully made up, hurrying over the Danube in boats to meet young men at some wrecked apartment block. Well-dressed middle-class people were taking leisurely strolls to a café that, just two weeks after the siege, was serving veal paprika. And there was gossip — and manicure.

I can’t tell you what it felt like. Here was the occupied, burnt-out town still reeking with smoke, full of Russian burglars and criminal sailors who robbed people in crowded streets, and there was I, in a shop on the boulevard, bargaining with the shopgirls for French perfume or nail-polish remover, just two weeks after the siege.

Later — even now — I feel there isn’t anyone out there who can understand what happened to us. It was like returning from the far shore of the underworld. Everything from the past had collapsed and rotted. Everything was gone — that at least is what we thought. Now something new would have to begin.

That’s what we thought those first few weeks.

Those first few weeks — the weeks immediately after the siege — were worth living through. But that time passed. Just imagine! For those few weeks there was no law, no nothing. Countesses sat on the sidewalk selling cheap, greasy lángos. A Jewish woman I knew had gone half-mad. She walked the streets all day with crazy, glassy eyes, searching for her daughter, stopping everyone until she found out her daughter had been killed by our own fascists and thrown into the Danube. She didn’t want to believe it. Everyone went around believing they were living new lives and that it would all be somehow different from before. The idea of something “different” gave people hope, a hope you could see sparkling in people’s eyes. It was as if they were lovers, or drug addicts — people living on the crest of some huge elation. And indeed, pretty soon everything was “different.” But not in a way we recognized.

What had I imagined? Did I imagine we would be better people, more human? No, I didn’t: nothing of the kind.

What we did hope for in those days — because we did hope, myself included, and everyone I talked to was equally hopeful — was that the fear, the suffering, the dread and loathing, all that fire and brimstone, might have purged something from us. Perhaps I hoped we might forget certain passions, some bad habits. Or … No, wait, I’d like to tell you just as it was, quite straight.

Maybe there were some reasonable things to hope for. We might have hoped for an end to the great sense of chaos, the sense that everything would be in a mess forever and ever. Maybe some things might simply vanish: the gendarmerie, ostentatious display, the state dog pound, the habit of addressing people by old-fashioned honorifics, that this-is-mine-and-that-is-yours and yours-forever-mine-forever attitude. What would replace it? Oh, we’d have a great party, an enormous, strident nothing where humankind could stroll down the streets, munching lángos, avoiding piles of rubble, and throw out everything that constituted a habitual tie: houses, contracts, manners. No one dared speak about this. We were busy having heaven and hell at the same time. It was how people lived in Eden before the Fall. We had a few weeks of it in Budapest. It was after the Fall. It was the strangest time of my life.

Then one day we woke up, yawned, shivered with cold, our skin covered in goose pimples, and discovered nothing had changed. We understood that there wasn’t any such thing as “different.” You are dragged down to the pit of hell, roasted a while, then, if one day some miraculous power should pull you out again, you blink a few times, you adjust to reality and go on precisely as before.

I was very busy, because the days were packed with nothing — whatever you needed to survive, you had to provide with your own bare hands. There was no ringing the chambermaid and asking for this, that, or the other, the way the powerful and wealthy used to ring for me, or indeed the way I myself had rung, impudently, out of a spirit of revenge, when the time came for me to be one of the rich. And, what’s more, there wasn’t even a place to live — in other words, no room, no maid, no bell, not even the electricity to make bells work. The taps did occasionally produce water, but that was not the general expectation. You’ll never guess how exciting it was when we finally had water! There was no water on the upper floors, and water for washing had to be carried upstairs from the cellar in a bucket, right to the fourth floor: we used it for washing and cooking. We didn’t know which was more important. Proper ladies — and I thought of myself as one by then — ladies who had raged and fumed because there were no French bath salts to be had in the wartime city-center drugstore, suddenly discovered that cleanliness was not quite as important as they had always assumed. They understood, for instance, that in order to wash, you needed water of some sort in a bucket, and that water was just the same suspicious-looking stuff in which people boiled potatoes. And since each and every bucket carried upstairs had to be carried up there personally, they suddenly understood that water was a highly valuable commodity; so valuable it was too important to waste on washing hands after dirty work. We wore lipstick, but we weren’t washing our necks and other parts with such obsessive care as we had some weeks before. We survived, of course, and it occurred to me then that back in the days of the old French kings, nobody washed properly. Not even the king. Instead of washing, people doused themselves head to foot with perfumes of one sort or another. There were no deodorants then. I know that for certain, I read it in a book sometime. The great were still the great, the refined were still the refined, washing or no washing. It was just that they stank. So that’s how we lived then. We were like the Bourbons: stinking but refined.

And still I hoped. My neck and my shoes were dirty, and though I had spent quite enough of my girlhood in service, it never occurred to me to become my own servant! I hated carrying that bucket of water up all those stairs. I’d pop over to girlfriends’ who had kitchens with running water instead and use theirs. And there I dibbed and dabbed a bit and called it washing. Secretly, I enjoyed it. I suspect others enjoyed it too, particularly those who complained most about the lack of washing facilities. It was like being children again, rolling about in the dirt. It was fun. Having emerged from weeks of stewing in the pit of hell we enjoyed the mess, the filth; the way we could sleep in other people’s kitchens; the way we didn’t have to wash or dress to perfection.

Nothing happens in life without a reason. We suffered the siege as punishment for our sins, but our reward for all that suffering was the freedom, for a few weeks anyway, to stink without guilt, innocent as Adam and Eve in Paradise, who must also have stunk, since they never washed. It was good not having to eat regularly too. Everyone ate whatever was to hand, wherever they found themselves. For a couple of days I ate nothing but potato peelings. Another day I ate tinned crab, a side of pork fried in lard, with a cube of sugar from a smart café as sweet course. I didn’t put on weight. There were days when I hardly ate anything, of course.

Then suddenly the shops were full of food and I immediately put on four kilos. I rediscovered the joys of digestion and began to think of the future. Now was the time to be chasing after passports. It was then I knew it was all hopeless.

Love, you say? You’re such a nice boy. A proper angel. No, darling, I don’t think love is a great help to anyone. Neither romantic love nor brotherly love. My artistic friend explained the confusion to me, how dictionaries mixed up the two kinds of love. He believed in neither. He believed in only two things: passion and pity. But they don’t help, either, because both are only momentary feelings — now here, now gone.

What’s that? It’s not worth living in that case? You want me not to shrug like that? Look, darling, if you came where I come from … You don’t understand me, because you are an artist. You still believe in something — in art, am I right? Yes, you’re quite right, you are the best drummer in Europe. I hardly dare think there can be a better drummer than you in the whole world. Don’t believe those shady saxophonists when they tell you about drummers in bands in America, drummers with the strength of four ordinary mortals, who drum Bach and Handel — they are only jealous of you and your talent and want to take you down a peg or two. I’m sure you are the only drummer anywhere worth listening to. Give me your hand, let me kiss those delicate fingers that scatter syncopation around the world the way Cleopatra scattered pearls. So! Wait a moment, let me dry my eyes. I am so sentimental. Looking at your hands always makes me want to cry.

So there he was, opposite me, on the bridge, all because suddenly we had a bridge again. Not many, just one bridge. Ah, but what a bridge! You weren’t there when they built it, so you can’t know how much it meant to us when we heard that Budapest, that great metropolis, had a bridge over the Danube once more! It was constructed at lightning speed, and by the time winter was over we were crossing the river on foot again! They used the remaining iron pillars of one of the bridges and patched together a bridge for emergencies. It was a slightly humped bridge, but it could carry trucks too. And the weight of those hundreds of thousands of people, that undulating wave of humanity snaking across in one direction or the other, from early morning when the bridge was opened right to the end of the day, standing in queues by the bridgehead on both shores.

You couldn’t simply go and cross the bridge, of course. The queues wound through Pest and Buda like conveyor belts, the crowd moving evenly and slowly. We prepared for the crossing the way we prepared for weddings before the war. It was quite an honor crossing the bridge: it was something we could boast of. Later they built other bridges, strong bridges, made of iron, and pontoon bridges. A year later taxis were speeding both ways across them. But I remember the first bridge, the camel’s hump, the queuing, our slow progress as we tramped over it, a hundred thousand of us with haversacks on our backs, our hearts weighed down with crimes and memories, crossing from one bank to another, on that first bridge. Later, when émigré Hungarians arrived from abroad, from America, and glided across the iron bridges in their splendid cars, I always felt a little sad and had a bitter taste in my mouth, sickened by the way these foreigners simply cruised over the river, turning up their noses and shrugging at our bridges; just using them, as if they meant nothing. They had come a long way, these people, they had only had a sniff of war, watching it from a distance as if it were a movie. Very nice, they said. Very sweet the way we live here and can drive our cars over these new bridges.

My heart ached when I listened to them. What do they know about it? I thought. I understood how they felt, the people who didn’t live here, who weren’t with us, who didn’t know how a million others felt when they saw their lovely bridges blown into the air above the Danube, bridges that had been a hundred years in the building. And I knew what we felt on the day we could cross the river on foot again: breathless, like the Kuruc or the Labanc or the Turkish invaders so many centuries ago. Nobody can understand us if they’ve never lived with us! Why should I care how long the bridges are in America? Our bridge was made of rotting wood and scrap iron and I crossed it before most people did. To be precise, I was among the first, pulled along by the long queue of which I was one part, shuffling along with the rest, when I saw my husband on the other side, crossing from Pest toward the Buda bank.

I sprang from the queue and rushed over to him. I embraced his neck with both my arms. Everyone was shouting at me and eventually a policeman dragged me away because I was obstructing the human conveyor belt.

Wait, let me blow my nose. How sweet you are! You’re not laughing at me: you are really listening. You are listening as intently as a child waiting for the end of a fairy tale.

But this was no fairy tale, my pet: there was neither true beginning nor true end. Life billowed around and within us then, those of us who lived in Budapest. Our lives had no firm boundary, no proper frame. It was as if something had washed away the boundaries. Everything just happened, unframed, without edges. Now, much later, I still don’t know where I am, where things started or ended in my life.

It’s enough to say that that is exactly how I felt when I ran from one side of the bridge to the other. It wasn’t a calculated, conscious dash, since just a few moments before I had no idea whether the man with whom I had — but it was so long ago, it was before time began, in that period we call history — if the man who had been my husband was still alive. That time seemed an eternity away. People don’t measure their lives with clocks or calendars, not personal time, the time that is genuinely theirs. No one knew whether other people had survived: their lovers, the people they had shared a house with. Mothers didn’t know whether their children were alive or dead. Couples met by accident in the street. We seemed to be living in a time without history; in prehistoric time, before there were land registries, house numbers, directories. Everyone lived and lodged wherever they could find, wherever it occurred to them to live. And there was about this chaos — this Gypsy life — a peculiar domesticity. It might have been how people lived in the dim, distant past, when no one had a home and there were only wandering hordes and tribes, Gypsies with carts and unwashed children, journeying without destination. It wasn’t a bad life. It was familiar somehow. Under all our accumulated garbage we seem to carry some memory of a different, less fixed time.

But that’s not why I rushed over to him, not why I hugged him in front of thousands and thousands of people.

At that moment — please don’t laugh — something broke in me. Believe me, I had been carrying on as normal. I put on my bra and survived the siege and what preceded it, with dignity: the Nazi monstrosities, the bombing, the terrors. Mind you, I wasn’t entirely alone at that time. When the war turned deadly, desperately serious, I spent months with my artistic friend. I don’t mean I lived with him; please don’t misunderstand me. He might have been impotent for all I know. We never spoke about such things, but whenever a man and woman live together in the same apartment there is always some air of romance hanging about the place. There was no such air in those empty rooms. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had rushed into my room one night and strangled me with his bare hands. I slept at his place sometimes because there were air-raid warnings every night and I couldn’t always get home past the anti-aircraft posts. And now, much later, now that the man is no longer alive, I almost feel that I have slept with him, or with someone like him, someone who had decided to wean himself off the world, to give up everything people thought most important. It was like being on aversion therapy for him: he wanted to give up an exciting yet repellent obsession, one as addictive as drink, drugs, vanity … everything. My role in his life was to be his nurse — his dry nurse.

It’s quite true that it was me who first sneaked into his apartment and then into his life. Just as there are cat burglars, you know, people who sneak into property, there are cat women who sneak into a man’s life at an unguarded moment and, once there, make off with anything they find: memories, impressions, the lot. Later they grow bored of these things and sell them — sell everything they managed to stow away. Not that I ever sold anything I got from him, and I am only telling you this much because I want you to know everything about me before you leave me — or I leave you. He simply tolerated me being near him at any time, morning, afternoon, or night … The one rule was I was not to disturb him. I was forbidden to talk to him when he was reading. Often he just sat with a book and said nothing. Otherwise I could come and go as I pleased in the apartment, to do whatever I felt like. Bombs were falling all the time, and everyone lived for the moment, making no plans from one minute to the next.

It must have been a terrible time, you say? Wait, let me think about that. I think it was a time of discovery. Questions we never really consider, that we wave away with a gesture, became all too real. What kinds of things? Well, the fact that life is without meaning or purpose, for example — but much else too. We quickly got used to the fear: you can sweat fear out the way you do a fever. It was just that everything changed. The family was no longer the family; a job no longer counted for anything. Lovers made love in a hurry, like children gobbling their food, keen to grab as many sweets as they can, stuffing their cheeks with them when the adults aren’t looking … then the children skip off to go play in the street, out in the chaos. Everything broke down: apartments, relationships. There were moments we could still believe our homes, our jobs, people at large had something to do with us, if only in a psychological way, but come the first bombing raid we suddenly discovered we had nothing at all to do with whatever was important before.

But it wasn’t just the bombing raids. Everyone felt that beyond the air-raid sirens, the yellow cars rushing to and fro, the dispossessed, the armored patrol vehicles packed with booty, the soldiers making their way home from the front, the fugitives in covered peasant wagons, beyond the multitudes drifting around like Gypsies in caravans, something else was happening. There was no distinct war zone anymore: the war was happening in whatever remained of civilian life, in our kitchens, in our bedrooms, in our selves. A bomb had gone off in us, and everything that had previously held society together — even if it was no more than indifference or laziness — was blown away. Something blew up in me, too, when I saw my husband on that new humpbacked bridge over the Danube. It blew up like a bloody great bomb left at the side of the road by a Russkie or a Nazi.

It blew up the entire movie-style affair between us — a movie as dumb and trashy as those Hollywood productions where the managing director marries the stenographer. What I understood in that moment was that it was not each other we had been seeking in life, that the affair for him was about something else: the terrible guilt he felt under the skin, a guilt that had eaten its way into his flesh. He wanted to transfer to me the thing he couldn’t lay to rest. What was it? Wealth? The fact that he wanted to know why there were rich and poor in the world? Everything the writers, the politicians, and the demagogues say on this subject is worse than useless. Forget the bald professors with their horn-rimmed glasses, forget the sweet-talking preachers and the hairy, bellowing revolutionaries. The truth is more terrifying than anything they tell you. The truth is that there is no justice on earth. Maybe that is what that man, my husband, was after: justice. Is that why he married me? If it was only my skin or flesh he wanted, he didn’t have to marry me — he could have had that cheaper. Maybe he wanted to rebel against the world he grew up in, the way the sons of the rich rebel and become refined, faintly scented revolutionaries. Who knows why? Because they can’t bear being who they are; because they are too lucky; because sport and perversity is not enough for them, and they must go and play on the barricades. Well, he could have gone for another form of rebellion, not the backbreaking torture of living with me. You and I, people who have risen from the depths, from the wetlands, or from Zala, don’t understand such things, my dear. The one sure thing is that he was a gentleman. Not the way most of the titled nobility were. He was not like Sir This or Baron That, people who elbowed their way to a coat of arms. He was a decent sort of man, made of finer stuff than most bastards of his class.

He was the sort of man whose ancestors took land by conquest. They marched with axes across their shoulders, entered primeval forests in unknown territory, bellowed out anthems, and chopped down trees as well as the locals, while still singing. One of his ancestors was among the Protestants who migrated to America shortly after the initial voyage. He took nothing with him on the journey, just his prayer book and his axe. My husband was prouder of him than of anything else the family later achieved, such as the factory, the money, and a sackful of distinctions.

He was reliable because he was in command of his body and his nerves. He could even control money, which is harder. But the one thing he could never control was his sense of guilt. And what the guilty want is revenge. He was a Christian, but not in the way people tend to think of it now — it wasn’t a business opportunity for him, not a certificate to flash at the Nazis so that he could get a rake-off, make a deal, and grab some of the spoils. He felt bad for being a Christian then. And yet, somewhere deep in his guts he was a Christian the way some people are doomed to be artists or alcoholics: he couldn’t help it.

But he knew that thirst for revenge was a sin. All revenge is a sin, and there is no such thing as justified revenge. The only right a man has is to justice and to act justly. No one has the right to revenge. And because he was rich and Christian, and because he couldn’t give up being either of these things, he was sinking under the weight of guilt. Why are you looking at me as if I were crazy?

It’s him I’m talking about, my husband. The man who suddenly appeared on the newly constructed bridge walking toward me. And then, in front of thousands and thousands of people, I embraced him.

He stepped out of the queue but didn’t move. He didn’t try to push me away. Don’t worry, he didn’t bow to kiss my hand in front of that ragged, shivering crowd of beggars. He was too well brought up for that. He just stood and waited for the painful scene to be over. He was calm, his eyes closed, and I could see his face through my tears, the way women see the baby’s face when the child is still inside them. You don’t need eyes to see what is yours.

But then, as I was clinging to him for all I was worth, something happened. I smelled him. I smelled my husband and the smell struck me … Now listen carefully.

The moment I smelled him I started to tremble. My knees shook, I felt my stomach cramp, as if I were tortured by some peculiar illness. The point was that the man walking toward me on the bridge did not smell the way others did. I know that won’t make any sense to you, but it meant something important then. What I mean is that he didn’t have the corpse smell on him. Because even if, by some miracle, there happened to be a bar of soap or perfume in the cellar, the overpowering closeness, the lack of air, the stench of body functions, the blend of different foods and all those people with their chattering teeth and with the fear of death on them — all this had soaked into our very skin. Those who had never stunk before now stank in a different way from those who had. They covered themselves in cologne and patchouli: a different, artificial patchouli that smells far worse than the natural kind. It was positively sickening.

Not that my husband smelled of patchouli. I could smell him through my tears, with my eyes closed, and suddenly I started trembling.

Why? What was it he smelled of? He smelled of damp straw, if you want to know. Just as he had years ago, before we separated. As he did that first night when I lay in his bed and that sour, privileged, masculine smell made me retch. He was exactly as he had been — flesh, clothes, smell — exactly as before.

I let go of his neck and wiped my tears with the back of my hand. I felt dizzy. I took a compact from my bag, opened the little mirror, and applied some lipstick. Neither of us said a word. He stood and waited until I repaired my tearful, smeary makeup. I only dared look up at him once I had checked in the mirror that my face was fit to be seen.

I could hardly believe my eyes that he should be standing in front of me, on that improvised bridge, among queues that stretched into the far distance — some ten or twenty thousand people in the smoky, sooty town where there were few houses left unmarked by shell or bullet holes. There was hardly an unbroken window anywhere. There was no traffic, no policeman, no law, nothing: it was a place where people dressed like beggars even when there was no need to, deliberately looking wretched, ancient, and penniless, growing wild beards, stumbling about in rags to avoid trouble or to rouse others to pity. Even grand ladies carried sacks. Everyone had a backpack. We were like village brats, or travelers. And there was my husband, standing right in front me. It was the same man I hurt seven years ago. Nothing had changed. He was the man who when he understood that I was not his lover, not even his wife, but his enemy, came to me one afternoon, smiled, and quietly said:

“I think it might be best for us to separate.”

He always started sentences that way when he wanted to say something very important: “I think” or “I imagine.” He never spoke his mind directly, never hit you in the eye with it. When my father could take no more, he would exclaim: “Goddammit!” And then he would hit me. But my husband, whenever he couldn’t bear something, courteously opened a little door each time, as if what he was saying were merely something to consider, a by-the-way thought, in the course of which the meaning, the damage in what he said, could slip by you. He learned this in England, in the school where he studied. Another favorite phrase of his was “I’m afraid.” One evening, for example, he turned to me and said, “I’m afraid my mother is dying.” She did in fact die, the old woman, at seven o’clock the same evening. She had turned quite blue by that time, and the doctor told my husband there was no hope. “I’m afraid” was a phrase that neutralized extremes of feeling and provided a kind of analgesic for the pain. Other people say, “My mother is dying.” But he was always careful to speak politely, to say sad or unpleasant things without offense. That’s the kind of people they are, and that’s all there is to it.

He was being careful even now. Seven years after the war between us had finished, after the siege in the real war was over, there he was, at the bridgehead. He looked at me and said:

“I’m afraid we’re in the way.”

He said it quietly and gave me a smile. He didn’t ask how I was, how I had survived the siege, or whether I needed anything. He just advised me that we might possibly be in the way. He pointed in the direction of a road near Mount Gellért where we might talk. Once we reached a place where there were no people, he stopped, looked round, and said:

“I think this might be the best place to sit.”

He was right: it was the “best” place to sit. There was an intact pilot’s seat in the wrecked Rata plane nearby, so there was just enough room for two people in the useless machine. I didn’t say anything but obediently took my seat in the pilot’s seat. He sat down beside me. But first he swept away the dirt with his hand. Then he took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands with it. We sat silently next to each other for a while, neither of us speaking. I remember the sun was shining. The place was very quiet, just wrecked planes, cars, and artillery.

Any ordinary person would imagine that a man and a woman might exchange a few words on meeting by the Danube, among the ruins of Budapest, after the siege. They might, for example, start by establishing the fact that both are still alive, don’t you think? “I’m afraid” or “I think”—one could imagine that. But my husband’s mind was elsewhere, so we just sat in front of the cave opposite the mineral springs and stared at each other.

I stared pretty hard, as you can imagine. I started trembling again. It was like being in a dream: dream and reality at once.

You know I’m not any kind of fool, darling. Nor am I a sentimental little tramp who turns on the tears whenever she feels on edge or when she has to say good-bye. The reason I was trembling was because the man sitting beside me, opposite the vast tomb that the whole city had become, was not a human being, but a ghost.

Some people only persist in dreams. Only dreams, dreams more effective than formaldehyde, can preserve apparitions like my husband as he seemed to me at that moment. Just imagine — his clothes were not ragged! I can’t remember precisely what he was wearing, but I think it was the same charcoal-gray double-breasted suit I last saw him in, the one he wore when he said, “I think it might be best for us to separate.” I couldn’t be absolutely sure about the suit, because he had many others like it — two or three, single-breasted, double-breasted — but in any case the same cut, the same material, and by the very same tailor who made his father’s suits.

Even on a morning like this he was wearing a clean shirt, a pale-cream lawn shirt, and a dark gray tie. His shoes were black and double-soled. They looked brand-new, though I have no idea how he could have crossed that dusty bridge without a speck of dust sticking to his shoes. I was, of course, perfectly aware that the shoes were not new and that they only looked that way because they’d hardly been worn — after all, he had a dozen like them in his shoe cupboard. I had seen enough of his shoes on the hall seat when it was my job to clean those fine leather objects. Now there he was, wearing them.

They talk about something being “brand-new,” fresh from the box the shop provides for you. Budapest was not so much a box as a mass grave out of which people were still climbing. It was the same mass grave he himself had emerged from. There was not a crease on the suit. His light-beige gabardine raincoat—“Made in England”—was casually draped across his arm, a very roomy coat, almost obscenely comfortable, as I remember. I was the one who unwrapped the package from London when it arrived. Much later, I was to pass the shop in London the coat had been bought from. It was there in the window among other things. He carried the coat in an almost careless fashion, thrown across his arm because it was a mild end-of-winter afternoon.

He wore no gloves, of course, because he only wore gloves in the very depths of winter when it was freezing. So I looked at his hands too. They were white and clean, his nails so unobtrusively manicured you’d think they’d never seen a pair of scissors. But that was him all over.

You know what was the strangest thing? When you put him up against that filthy, muddy, ragged crowd creeping over the bridge, his presence should have been practically incendiary. And yet he was almost invisible. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone from among the crowd came over, took him by the lapels, and shook and poked him, just to check that he was real. Imagine what would happen in the French Revolution, in those months of the Terror, when aristocrats were being hunted all over Paris the way children hunt sparrows with catapults, if an elderly nobleman appeared on the street in lilac frock coat and powdered wig, amiably waving at carts filled with fellow counts and earls on their way to the scaffold. There would be nothing to choose between him and my husband, each as spectacular as the other. He was mysteriously different from the toiling throng around him, as if he had emerged not from one of the many bombed-out houses but from an invisible theater, a piece of period drama for which he was appropriately fitted by the dresser. It was an old part in an old play, the kind that’s never going to be put on now.

So this man appears on the smoking stage set of the city, a man who has not changed, who is untouched by siege or suffering. I worried for him. The mood was for revenge: you annoyed people at your peril, and once people were annoyed, there was nothing to stop them doing something. Guilt was at the bottom of it: it was guilt behind the fury and the desire for revenge, behind all those glowing eyes and lips spitting hatred. People spent whole days rushing around to grab what they could: a spoonful of lard, a handful of flour, one solitary gram of gold. Everyone kept a crafty eye on everyone else. No one was free of suspicion. Why? Because we were all criminals, all guilty one way or another? Because we had survived when others hadn’t?

Now here was my husband calmly sitting beside me, as if he were the one innocent among us all. I couldn’t understand it.

I closed my eyes. I had no idea what to do. Should I call a policeman to take him away? He hadn’t done anything wrong. He hadn’t taken part in any of the terrible things that had gone on, not then or before, all over the country. He hadn’t killed any Jews, he hadn’t gone after those who thought differently from him, he hadn’t ransacked the apartments of people who had been dragged away to death or exile: he hadn’t harmed anybody. Nobody could point a finger at him. He hadn’t so much as stolen a crumb from anyone. I never heard anything bad about him, not even much later. He hadn’t gone looting like the rest, far from it! In fact he was one of those who were robbed of almost everything. When I met him on the bridge at the Buda end, he was, for all purposes, a beggar like everyone else. Later I discovered there was nothing left of the family fortune, just a suitcase of clothes and his engineering diploma. That’s all he took with him when he went to America, or so they say. For all I know he is working on some factory floor there. He had given me the family jewels long before, when we separated. You see how good it is that the jewelry survived. I know my jewels are the last thing on your mind, darling. You are just helping me to sell them out of the kindness of your dear heart. Don’t look like that at me. You see, I have come over all tearful now. Wait till I dry my eyes.

What’s that? Yes, it’s getting on for dawn. The first greengrocers’ trucks are out delivering. It’s gone five o’clock. They’re going toward the river, to the market.

Are you sure you’re not cold? Let me cover you up. It’s getting chilly.

What’s that? No, I’m not cold. Not at all; in fact I feel a bit hot. Excuse me, darling, I’ll just close the window.

As I was saying, I was looking at him, and what I saw gave me a cold shiver that ran through my knees right down to my toes. My hands were sweating, and it was all because this refined, familiar gentleman, my ex-husband, was smiling at me.

Please don’t think it was a mocking or superior smile. It was just a smile, a polite smile of the kind people give when hearing a joke that is neither funny nor dirty … the kind someone well brought up smiles at all the same. He was pretty pale, no doubt about it. When you really looked, you could see he too had spent time in the cellar. But his pallor was the kind you have if you’ve been ill for a few weeks and then got out for the first time. He was pale about the eyes. His lips looked bloodless. Otherwise he was exactly as always, as he had been his whole life … let’s say after ten in the morning, after shaving. Maybe even more so. But maybe I just got that impression because of everything around us, because he stood out from it the way an object in a museum stands out when they take it from its glass case and put it in a grimy working-class apartment. Imagine if that statue of Moses we were looking at yesterday in the dimly lit church were to be displayed in the home of some local mayor, between two cabinets. “My dear sir, this is not a masterpiece like that statue of Moses.” But he was simply being himself that moment, a museum object that had found its way onto the street. Smiling.

I’m very hot now! Just look how red my cheeks are — all the blood has rushed to my head. That’s because I have never spoken to anyone about this. Maybe it has been preying on my mind without my knowing it. And now I get a hot flush as I am talking about it.

There was no need to wash this man’s feet, my dear; he washed them by himself in the morning, in the cellar, you may be sure. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that something had changed — he needed no sedative, no consolation. From start to finish he insisted that life had only one meaning, one point. It was courtesy. Good manners meant invulnerability. It was as if he had guts of marble. And this marble-inside, flesh-and-blood-outside figure, dressed in touch-me-not armor, would not come an inch closer to me. The recent earthquake that had shaken and shifted whole countries had no effect at all on his stony constitution. I felt he would sooner die than say a single word other than “I think” or “I’m afraid.” Had he actually inquired how I was, or if I needed anything, I would have told him, and he would, I’m sure, have done anything to help: he’d immediately have taken off his coat or given me the wristwatch some Russian had absentmindedly forgotten to steal, and he’d have smiled just to show me he was no longer angry with me.

Now listen. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. It is not true that people are invariably greedy and feral. Sometimes they are very willing to help each other. But doing people favors is nothing to do with goodness or empathy. The bald man was probably right when he said that people are sometimes good because there are too many obstacles to them being bad. The best we can say is that we are good simply because we’re afraid of being bad. That’s what the bald man said. I’ve never said it to anyone myself. Only to you now, my darling, my dearest love.

We couldn’t sit at the cave entrance, opposite the natural springs, forever. After a while my husband coughed, cleared his throat, and said “he thought” it might be best if we stood up and, seeing it was nice weather, walked about the ruined villas of Mount Gellért for a while. And, yes, “he was afraid” that he would not have many more opportunities to talk to me in the near future. He thought we should use the time left to us. He didn’t say it quite like that, but there was no need to, as I myself knew this would be our last conversation. And so we set off on our walk up Mount Gellért, along the steep roads, among ruins and dead animals. It was a sunny winter’s day.

We strolled about for roughly an hour. I have no idea what he was thinking as I walked the slopes beside him for the last time. He spoke calmly, without apparent feeling. I asked him tactfully how he had got here and what had happened to him, and wasn’t the world extraordinary and topsy-turvy? He replied very politely that everything was fine just as it was. It was all as it should be. What he meant was that he was utterly ruined, had nothing left, and was preparing to go abroad to make his living doing manual work. I stopped on one of the bends of the winding road and very carefully asked him — I did not dare look directly at him — what he thought might happen, how the world would turn out.

He stopped too, looked at me solemnly, and thought for a while. It seemed he took a deep breath before answering. He tipped his head to one side, gazed sadly, first at me, then at the bombed house in whose gateway we were standing, and said:

“I’m afraid there may be too many people in the world.”

Having said this, it was as if he had answered any possible further questions. He set off for the bridge. I hurried to keep step with him, because I didn’t understand what he meant. Quite enough people had died needless deaths at that time. Hadn’t they always? Why should he be worried about there being too many people? But he didn’t elaborate, just walked on like a man in a hurry, too busy to answer. I suspected he was joking or playing a trick on me. I remembered the two of them, my ex-husband and his bald friend, and how they used to play games where they pretended to be dull people saying the most obvious things. There are people who insist on calling a spade a spade and nothing else, people who when it’s hot and everyone is dripping with perspiration, when the very dogs are dropping dead in the street, frown and point to the sky and pronounce in stern, magisterial tones: “It’s hot!” And, having pronounced this, they look inordinately proud, the way everyone does when they have said something particularly obvious and stupid. That was a game they played. So now, having declared that there were too many people, I wondered if he was mocking me. He was right in the sense that the crowd on the bridge had the look of a natural disaster, that they looked like Colorado beetles in a potato field. The thought startled me and I changed the subject. “But really, what will you do?” I asked him.

I always used the impersonal vous form of “you” with him, maga, not te. He, on the other hand, addressed me familiarly, as te. I never dared address him that way. For other people he always used the more formal, impersonal manner, even for his first wife, his parents, and his friends. He never liked the stupid, overfamiliar way people of the same class and same type went straight to te in the hope of demonstrating their mutuality, as if to prove they were members of the same important club. But he always addressed me as te. It wasn’t anything we talked about; it was just the way things worked between us.

He took off his glasses, drew a clean handkerchief from his cigar pocket, and carefully cleaned the lenses. Once he had put them back, he looked over to the bridge, where the queue was growing ever longer. Quite calmly, he said, “I’m leaving, because I’m superfluous: it is me that is the one too many.”

His gray eyes gazed steadily ahead. He didn’t blink, not once.

There was no pride in his voice. He spoke in matter-of-fact tones, like a doctor diagnosing an illness. I didn’t ask him anything else, because I knew he’d not say anything, not even under torture. We walked on toward the bridge. Once there, we bid each other a silent farewell. He carried on along the embankment toward Krisztinaváros. As for me, I took my place in the slow, winding queue and shuffled my way toward the steps leading onto the bridge. I saw him just once more, hatless, his raincoat over his arm, slowly but deliberately making his way, the way people do when they are absolutely certain where they are going — that’s to say, to their own annihilation. I knew I’d never see him again. There is something about knowing such things that seems the first step to madness.

What did he mean? Maybe that a man is only alive as long as he has a role to play. Beyond that, he is no longer alive: he merely exists. You won’t understand this, because you do have a role in the world: your role is to love me.

There! I’ve said it. Don’t look at me so archly. It’s getting toward dawn, you’ve just come back from the bar, and here I am, your Roman odalisque, fussing over you in a hotel. If anyone could hear our conversation, someone suspicious by nature, someone who could observe and listen to us, they’d think we were a pair of conspirators. They’d see a common woman who once found herself among the lords of the world, gossiping with her pretty lover about all she has seen there, betraying their secrets, and there you are, drinking it all in, because you want to know what tricks the rich get up to. It’s a wicked world, he’d think. Don’t go frowning and wrinkling that lovely brow. Go on, laugh. After all, we know the truth about each other. You’re not just a pretty boy, you’re an artist through and through, my one and only benefactor, the man I adore, who is helping me through what remains of the farce of my life. You help by selling the jewels my wicked husband left me. You help because you are kind and soft-hearted. And I am not really a common woman, nor ever was, not even when I took money from my husband the only way I knew, not because I needed the cash but because I needed justice. What are you grinning at? It’s a secret between the two of us.

So yes, my husband was quite a peculiar man. I watched him leave and suddenly felt curious. I would love to have known what the man lived for, why he felt superfluous now, and why he was going away to be a house painter in Australia or an odd-job man in America. Wasn’t the stuff he believed in so firmly, the role he was playing, just a ridiculous charade? I don’t read the papers. I glance at the headlines when some bigwig gets murdered or a movie star is divorced; that’s all I read, nothing else. All I know of politics is that no one trusts anyone, and everyone thinks he knows better than the next man. As I watched him walk away I saw a troop of Russian soldiers march past, rifles slung over their shoulders, bayonets fixed, big strapping lads who were in Hungary, whose presence meant everything would be different from now on, different from the time when my husband thought he had a role in the world.

I shuffled along in the queue, over the bridge, over the yellow, dirty, end-of-winter Danube. The river was high. There were planks, blasted remains of ships and corpses washed along the tide. No one paid any attention to the corpses; everyone looked straight ahead, carrying things in backpacks, bowed under the weight. It was as if all humanity had set out on a long, penitential march. So we wound over the bridge, hordes of us, each of us laden down by our own guilt. And, suddenly, I no longer felt myself to be important, no longer in a hurry to get to Király utca to trade my tattered paper money for nail-polish remover. Suddenly I saw no point in going anywhere at all. The meeting had upset me. Although I never loved the man, I was horrified by the idea that I didn’t resent him, either, not really, not the way you are supposed to hate your enemy. The thought hit me hard: it was like losing something valuable. There comes a time, you know, when people realize it’s not worth being angry. That is, let me tell you, a very sad moment.

It’s almost dawn. The light suddenly becomes so hot, so effervescent! In Rome there seems to be no transition between night and dawn. Wait, let me raise the blinds. Look at those two orange trees outside the window. They’ve produced two oranges each, all four wrinkled and withered — the kind you only get in this town. Those two trees are like old people: the wrinkled oranges are the feelings they have struggled to produce.

Doesn’t the light hurt your eyes? Myself, I like these Roman mornings, this sultriness. The light comes on so suddenly and so bright it’s like a young woman throwing off her nightgown and going over to the window naked. There’s nothing immodest about her then: she’s simply naked.

What’s that mocking laughter about? Am I being too poetical for you? Yes, I know I tend to talk in comparisons. I see you must be thinking I got this from the bald man. Versifiers and scribblers, you think. We women are always imitating the men that interest us.

No point in leafing through the album. You won’t find anything. I don’t have a picture of him.

I see the light is bothering you. I’ll let the blinds down halfway. Is that better? The street is still deserted. Have you noticed how empty our little Via Liguria is even during the day? He lived here, you know. Who? Him — the bald man. Move over, I want to lie down. Pass me the small cushion. And the ashtray. You want to sleep? I’m not sleepy, either. Let’s lie here quietly for a while. I like just lying still at daybreak, not moving at all but staring at the ceiling in this old house in Rome. When I wake up at three in the morning and you are still out at the bar, I lie like this for a long time.

What? Did the bald man stay in this very room? I don’t know. Don’t go on about it. Run down to the hotel desk and ask the porter if you want to know.

Yes, he might have stayed here.

So what! That I was following him? Mad, quite mad — what on earth are you thinking of? He’d been dead two months by the time I left home.

It’s not true — you’re talking rubbish. No, it was not his grave I was looking for in the Protestant cemetery. It was the grave of a poet, a poor English writer. The only part that’s true is that the bald man once told me something about these famous graves. He himself is not buried there, though: his grave is in the cemetery on the outskirts, in a cheaper plot. In any case he wasn’t Protestant like the English poet. No, he was not a Jew. What was he? I have no idea. All I know is that he wasn’t religious.

I see from your look that you suspect something. You think I was secretly his lover after all and followed him here, to Rome? Nothing so sensational. There was nothing between us. Everything was very simple as far as he was concerned. God didn’t make him an interesting, artistic figure like you, my darling. No, he was more like a clerk or a retired schoolteacher.

There was nothing glamorous about him at all, nor around him. No woman ever killed herself for him. His name never appeared in the papers; there was no juicy gossip for him to be involved with. A long time ago, I once heard, he did have some kind of reputation. But by the time the war had ended he was quite forgotten. He was dead as a doornail as far as society was concerned.

Believe me, there is nothing at all interesting I can tell you about him. I don’t even have a photo of him. He didn’t like being photographed. Sometimes he behaved as if he were a dangerous criminal in hiding, afraid that someone might find his fingerprint on a glass he drank from. He was like a thief living under an assumed name. Well, yes, he was interesting, perhaps, but only in that he fought tooth and nail against the idea of being thought interesting. He’s not worth talking about.

Don’t blackmail me. I can’t stand it when you do that, begging and threatening at once. Do you want me to give him to you as well? Like the ring, and the U.S. dollars? Am I to give everything away? Do you want to leave me with nothing? Well, all right, I’ll give you this, too. Once you leave me, of course, I’ll be left utterly empty-handed. I’ll have nothing at all of my own. Is that what you want?

Fine, I’ll tell you. But don’t imagine it means you’ve outsmarted me or that you’re stronger than I am. It’s not that you’re stronger: it’s just me being weak.

It’s a hard thing to talk about. It’s as if I wanted to talk about something that wasn’t quite there. I can only talk about tangible things — I mean, what exists in the simpler kind of everyday life. But there are people who live not only in the everyday but in another reality, on some other plane. Such people might be able to tell you about what isn’t there, and make it sound as interesting as a detective story. What this man told me was that everything was reality — not only tangible things you can actually grasp, but concepts too. If nothingness was a concept, he was interested in it. He’d hold nothingness in his hands, turn it about a bit, and look at it from every side, just as if it were an object. Don’t blink at me like that; I can see you don’t understand. I didn’t understand, either, but then, somehow or other, I did start to see my way through to it. Being in his company, I saw how in his hands, and in his mind, even the idea of nothingness was developing a reality; that it was growing and filling up with meaning. It was a trick he had … Don’t you bother with it, it’s too airy-fairy for people like us.

His name? Well, it was a name people recognized once. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t read any of his books before. When we first met I thought he was toying with me, as he did with everything and everybody. Then I got angry and sat down to read one of his books. Did I understand it? Yes, pretty well. He used simple words, the kind people actually use in conversation. He wrote about bread, and wine, about how people should eat, how they should walk, and what they should think about when walking. It was as if he were writing a textbook for simpletons who hadn’t the least idea how to live a meaningful life. That seemed to be the subject of the book. But it was a sly book, because under all the apparent naturalness of those big simple, idiotic things, under the kind-teacher tone, there was something else, a kind of grimace of indifference. It was as if behind everything — behind the book, behind the fact that he was a man writing a book, behind his idea of the reader holding the book in his hand, a reader now charmed, now solemn, now sentimental, a reader struggling to understand the book’s contents — there was a wicked adolescent watching and grinning with delight. That’s what I felt as I was reading it. I understood it line by line, but not the thing as a whole. I didn’t really get what he was after. I didn’t understand why he was writing books when he believed in neither literature nor readers. No reader, however carefully he studied this book, could ever discover what he actually thought. The more I read of his book, the angrier I grew. In fact I didn’t finish it, but threw it across the room.

Later, when I lived near him, I told him what I’d done. He heard me through with due seriousness, as if he were a priest or a tutor. He nodded. He pushed his glasses up to his forehead. And he agreed, utterly in sympathy:

“Disgraceful,” he said, and made a gesture, as if he himself would have thrown it, and all his other books, across the room. “I quite agree — it was disgraceful, quite disgusting.”

He gave a sad sigh, but he didn’t explain what exactly was the disgrace. Literature at large? The fact that I hadn’t understood his book? Or something that could not be written down? I didn’t dare ask him what it was. Because he treated words the way druggists treat poison. When I asked him the meaning of a word, he would look at me full of suspicion, the way a chemist might look at a hysterical woman who walks in with her hair all over the place and asks for a sleeping potion. Or the way a grocer looks when a weepy servant asks him for lye. He thought words were poison, that they contained something bitterly poisonous. You could only take them in very weak doses.

What did we talk about, you ask? Wait a minute. I’ll try to remember the kind of things he used to say. There isn’t much. Hardly a cent’s worth.

There was one occasion — during a bombing raid, when the entire population of the city was cowering in cellars, sweating and waiting for death — when he said humanity and the earth were of one fabric, and he quoted the fact that earth was thirty-five percent solid matter and sixty-five percent liquid. He had learned this from a Swiss book. He was very pleased with the fact. He talked about it as though it meant everything was going to be all right. Houses were collapsing around us, but he was not interested in bombed houses or in people cowering and sniveling in cellars. He started speaking about a German who lived a long time ago, a hundred years back or more — there’s a small café here in Rome where you and I have been a few times, it’s called the Greco, and that’s where he used to sit, that German, a hundred or more years ago. No, don’t bother racking your brains, I can’t remember his name either. What the bald man told me was that the German believed that plants and animals and the entire earth were of one fabric … do you understand? He was reading so intensely, in such a fevered way, throughout the weeks of bombing, it was as if he had failed to do something very important, as if his whole life had been occupied by something else. He’d been remiss and now there was no time to learn all he wanted to learn — stuff like how the world works and so on. I’d sit quietly in a corner looking at him, making fun of him. But he took no notice of me, the way he took no notice of the bombs that were falling around us.

This man always addressed me formally. Maga. He was the only man of my husband’s class, a gentleman, who never used te, not even in intimate circumstances. What’s that? Then he can’t have been a proper gentleman? That he was just a writer, not a gentleman? How perceptive you are! He might not have been a gentleman precisely because he always talked to me in the most respectful terms. When I was still a maid, my husband-to-be sent me over to him so he could have a look at me. It was his way of checking me over. I went obediently, like a lamb to slaughter. The way he sent me was exactly the way his family sent me to the dermatologist: to check that the new member of staff wasn’t carrying any infectious disease. For my husband, the bald man was the equivalent of the dermatologist: in this case, though, it wasn’t a matter of my skin but of what lay underneath. The writer accepted the request to examine me, but he was clearly not looking forward to it. He looked down on it in some way, on my confused husband’s bright idea and the whole stupid notion of getting my soul attended to. He hemmed and hawed as he opened the door. He asked me to sit down but didn’t ask very much, simply looked at me without meeting my eyes, as if he had a bad conscience. But suddenly his eyes lit up and I felt the man was looking at me as a person. There was real power in his gaze then. It’s how the Commies conduct their interrogations, they say. There was no avoiding that gaze, no crafty way of ducking out of it into something more measured or pretending to be indifferent. He looked at me as though I belonged to him, as if he were free to touch me. He was like a doctor leaning over a frightened patient on the operating table, hygienically masked, scalpel in hand, so the patient sees nothing but that ruthless knife and those searching eyes that probe the patient’s body, seeking the truth about the womb or the kidney. It was rare for him to have this look, nor did it last long. It seems he couldn’t keep it up: his internal battery lacked the power. But that was how he looked at me then for that long moment. I was the embodiment of his friend’s obsession; then he turned from me and the light in his eyes went out.

“Judit Áldozó, you may go,” he said.

I went. I didn’t see him again, not for another ten years. He was no longer my husband’s regular companion.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect he had something to do with my husband’s first wife. When they separated, she went abroad. She lived here in Rome for a while. Then she returned to Pest and led a very quiet life. No one heard from her. She died a few months before war broke out, suddenly, of a thrombosis. She simply dropped dead. Later there was all kinds of gossip, as is normally the case now when someone dies young, someone who seems to have nothing wrong with them. Some said it was suicide. But no one knew why a wealthy young woman like her should have committed suicide. She had a lovely apartment, she traveled, she rarely ventured into society, her conduct was irreproachable. I asked around a little, as is fitting when one woman is associated with another woman’s husband. But I couldn’t get to the bottom of the gossip.

I do know something about the fear of sudden death. I am not a great believer in doctors; it’s just that I scream and rush off to the surgery whenever there’s something wrong with me — if I cut my little finger, for instance, or have a sore throat. Nevertheless I don’t really believe in them, because there is something the sick know that a doctor never knows. I know that sudden death — that is to say, death without any warning, when someone is in full health — is not impossible. My peculiar friend, the writer and quack, knew something about this. Whenever I met him, you see, I’d feel quite strange myself sometimes. I felt I could die any moment, that it could be over there and then. I met him unexpectedly in Buda once, in a shelter, at about six in the evening. The shelter was a cave with many thousand people squeezed into it.

It was like being caught up in a plague. Everyone was preparing to die, sheltering in caves, shoving, and praying. The bald man recognized me and waved me over to sit on the little bench with him. So I sat down and listened to the distant, dull sound of explosions. It only slowly dawned on me that this was the man my husband had trusted to check me over. After a while he asked me to stand up and follow him.

The all clear had not been sounded yet, and the slopes of Buda were deserted. We walked through streets in deathly silence. It was like the city was a crypt. We passed the old café in the castle district — you know, that centuries-old cukrászda with the beautiful furniture. The air raid was still going on, but we went in.

It was all very ghostly: a rendezvous in the afterworld. The owners of the cukrászda had lived on the Castle Hill for generations — much like the saleslady who worked there — and like everyone else, they had rushed for the shelters. We were alone with all the mahogany furniture, the glass cases full of organdy-covered war-standard sweet pastries dusted with sugar, rancid cream tarts and dried meringues, and the bottles of vanilla liqueur on the glass shelves. There was no one in the shop, no one to greet us.

We sat down and waited. We still hadn’t said a word. In the distance, on the far side of the Danube, anti-aircraft guns were booming while the American bombs dropped with a dull thud. A cloud of dark smoke was rising over the castle, because the planes had hit and ignited an oil reservoir on the far bank. But we took no notice of it.

Without asking or being asked, the bald man graciously set to playing the host. He filled two glasses with liqueur, took a plate, and put out one cream cake and a walnut slice. He was so comfortable moving around the old cukrászda he looked like a regular there. He offered me a sweet and I asked him whether he was familiar with the place and had he come here often.

“I?” He looked at me astonished, the liqueur glasses still in his hand. “By no means. Maybe thirty years ago, when I was a student. No,” he added, looking round and shaking his head. “I can’t remember exactly when I was last here.”

We clinked glasses, nibbled the pastries, and chatted. When the all clear was sounded and the female owner, the serving lady, and an old woman emerged from the cellar, where they had rushed in terror, our conversation was in full flow.

It was a second start to our acquaintanceship.

The easy manner did not surprise me. Nothing about him ever surprised me when I was with him. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had stripped naked and started singing, the way religious maniacs do in the street. If, one day, he appeared with a beard, saying he had just come down from Mount Sinai, where he had been talking with God, it wouldn’t have surprised me. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he asked me to play a game of Bobo, then to learn Spanish or to master the art of knife throwing. Nothing would have surprised me.

So it didn’t surprise me when he didn’t introduce himself or ask me my name or inquire after my husband. There we were in that haunted cukrászda and he talked as if all that was superfluous, because people could get to the heart of things without them, as if nothing could be more tedious than explaining to each other who we were and what we were. There was no need to discuss a subject we were both familiar with, or to swap stories about the woman who had died. There was no need to remind ourselves that I was once a servant girl and that my husband-to-be sent me over to him — he, the keen surgeon of souls — so that he might check me out for social scrofula or leprosy. We talked as if we could talk for eternity, an eternity in which death was merely a brief interruption.

He didn’t ask me how I was nowadays, where I lived, or who I lived with. He was more interested in asking whether I had tasted olives stuffed with pimiento.

What a crazy question! I looked him in the eye and continued looking, watching those gray-green, searching eyes of his, a worryingly serious pair of eyes. The way he looked at me in that quiet cukrászda, among the falling bombs, you’d have thought both our lives depended on the answer.

I thought about it, because I didn’t want to lie to him. Yes, I answered, I had tasted them; naturally I had tasted them; I had eaten them in Soho once, in London, in the Italian quarter, in a small restaurant the Greek had taken me to. But I didn’t mention the Greek. Why mention the Greek as well as the olives? I thought.

“Ah, that’s good,” he said, relieved.

In a slightly timid voice — I never dared speak to him as I really wanted to — I asked him why it should be particularly good news that I had eaten olives stuffed with pimiento.

He heard out the question in full seriousness.

“Because you can no longer get them,” he briskly replied. “You can’t get olives at all in Budapest now. You used to be able to buy them in the city center at a reputable delicatessen—” and he mentioned a name—“but it has never been our way here to stuff olives with pimientos. That’s because when Napoleon came this way with his army, he only got as far as Győr, in the north.”

He lit a cigarette and gave a nod as if there was nothing further to say on the subject. An old Viennese pendulum clock hung above our heads. I heard it tick. And there were still those distant explosions that sounded like a well-fed animal breaking wind. It was all very dreamlike. It wasn’t a happy dream; nevertheless, I felt a curious calm, as I did later whenever I was with him. I can’t explain it to you. I was never happy in his company — sometimes I hated him, and he often drove me to fury. But it was never dull being with him. I wasn’t impatient or restless. It was as if I had taken off my shoes or bra in company, as if I could strip completely and divest myself of everything I had been taught. I was simply at peace with him. The most violent weeks of the war were to follow, but I was never so calm, so at peace with myself as in those weeks.

Sometimes I found myself thinking it was a pity I was not his lover. Not that I felt any particular desire for him or that I was desperate to creep into his bed. He had aged, and his teeth were yellow: there were bags under his eyes. I was half-hoping he was impotent and that that was why he did not look at me as a woman should be looked at. Or maybe he preferred boys and wasn’t interested in women? That’s what I hoped. All I could see was that he was unconcerned about me.

He would often clean his glasses with great care, the way a diamond cutter works at the rough stone. He was never careless in his clothes, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what he wore. And yet I can remember all my husband’s suits! I haven’t retained a single thing about this man’s external appearance, clothes and all.

And then he returned to the subject of olives, saying:

“It was always impossible getting genuine pimiento-filled olives in Budapest. Not even in peacetime, a long while ago. All you could get were those dry little olive buds without any filling. That’s if you were lucky. Mind you, stuffed olives were pretty rare, even in Italy.”

He raised his finger and pushed his glasses up to his brow.

“It’s strange,” he mused. “Soft, sourish, pimiento-filled olives were only obtainable in Paris, in the Ternes quarter, on the corner of the street named after Saint Ferdinand, from a grocer of Italian descent, near the end of the twenties.”

Having said this, having finally brought to my attention every possible fact it was possible, at this stage of human evolution, to know regarding olives stuffed with pimientos, he gazed straight ahead with a look of utmost satisfaction and stroked his bald pate with one hand.

Well, he has definitely gone mad, I thought. I looked at him in astonishment. Here I was, sitting at a table on Castle Hill while the city was being bombed below us, in the company of a madman who was once a friend of my husband’s. But it didn’t feel bad. It never did when I was with him.

Gently, as if talking to a madman, I asked why he thought that olives, of the kind I had actually eaten some time in the past in a small Italian restaurant in that part of London known as Soho, were destined to play such an important part in my current and possibly future life. He listened to me carefully, his head slightly tipped to one side, and looked, as he always did when he was thinking, into the distance.

“Because that culture is over,” he said in a friendly, patient manner. “Everything we considered to be culture is done for. The olive was just one small element of the many flavors that made up that culture. All these little sparks of flavor, these individual delights and wonders, worked together to produce the marvelous feast we call taste. Taste is an aspect of culture,” he said, and raised his hand, like a conductor in a concert waving in some crescendo of destruction. “And it’s all vanishing. It will vanish even if elements of it remain. They may still be selling olives stuffed with pimientos somewhere in the future, but the class that cultivated the taste for it and understood what it meant will have vanished. There will remain only the knowing about it, which is not the same thing. Culture is experience, I say,” he intoned like a priest, his hand raised. “It is living experience, timeless as sunshine. To know about things is to know merely secondhand. It is like wearing secondhand clothes.” He shrugged, then added courteously, “Which is why I am glad that you did at least have the opportunity of tasting olives.” And as he finished the sentence, a shell burst nearby, like a precisely placed period, shaking the building.

“It’s time to pay,” he said, and stood up, as if the explosion had reminded him that it was all very well announcing the death of culture, but there were things to be done. He opened the door for me like a proper gentleman and we walked down the deserted Zerge Steps in silence. That is how our true relationship began.

We went straight to his place. On the way we crossed the beautiful bridge that within a few months would be mere wreckage in the water. Bundles of explosives were already dangling off it, the Germans having made meticulous preparations to blow it up. He gazed calmly, almost approvingly, at the neat arrangement.

“This too is doomed to destruction,” he said as we crossed it, and pointed to the vast iron arches that suspended and counterbalanced the weight of the great bridge. “It will be blown to pieces. Do you want to know why? Well,” he spoke quickly, as if answering himself in a complex debate, “because whenever people have given so much serious thought and applied so much expertise to preparing a plan, that plan will eventually be carried out. The Germans are brilliant at blowing things up,” he said. “No one knows better how to blow things up than the Germans. So this suspension bridge, our Chain Bridge, will be destroyed as will, one after the other, the rest of the bridges, just the way they destroyed Warsaw and Stalingrad. They do these things to perfection.” Having said this, he stopped in the middle of the bridge with his arm raised as if to declare the significance of the German capacity for destruction.

“But this is terrible,” I cried out in despair. “All these beautiful bridges …”

“Terrible?” he inquired in a thin voice, his head tipped to one side as he looked at me. “Why terrible?” He was tall, a head, at least, taller than I am. Gulls were swooping between the arches of the great bridge. There were very few people to be seen. Dusk was a dangerous time to be out.

How strange he should ask me why I thought it terrible that all these marvelous bridges should be destroyed. He seemed to be surprised at my agitation.

“Why?!” I repeated angrily. “Wouldn’t you regret the loss of such bridges? The loss of life? All those innocent lives?”

“Me?” he asked, still in that thin, surprised voice, as if I had accused him of not having given war and human suffering proper thought.

“But of course!” he declared, waving his hat. He was suddenly full of life and passion. “You think I don’t care about bridges and people! For heaven’s sake! Me?” he clicked his tongue, grimacing at the ridiculousness of the idea, its sheer stupidity. “Never — never, you understand.” He turned to me, his face close to mine, staring into my eyes like a hypnotist. “I’ve thought of practically nothing else. There is nothing I’ve sorrowed over more than the destruction of bridges and humanity!”

He was finding it difficult to breathe. He looked hurt, as if he was holding back tears. He’s an actor, I suddenly thought. A clown, a comedian! But I looked into his eyes and was shocked to see those gray-green eyes clouding over. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There was no doubt about it, the man was crying. Tears were rolling down his face. Nor was he ashamed of his tears. He didn’t care. His eyes seemed to have a will of their own.

“Poor bridge,” he muttered, as if I weren’t there. “Poor, lovely bridge! And poor people! Poor humanity!”

We stood perfectly still. Then he brushed away his tears, wiped his hands on his coat, and dried them, sniffling a little. He gazed at the bundles of explosives and shook his head, as at a scene of desperate neglect, as if the charges were a disorderly mass of rogue humanity, a bunch of useless adolescents that he, the writer, was helpless to address, having neither the words nor the power to bring them to their senses.

“Yes, all this will go,” he said, and sighed. But I thought I detected a note of satisfaction in that sigh. Perhaps he felt everything was going to plan, that somebody had worked all this out on paper, done his sums and demonstrated how certain human instincts were bound to produce certain consequences. So, while he was full of tears and lamentation at the prospect, some part of him was pleased that his calculations had proved right.

“All right,” he said simply. “Let’s go home.”

He tended to talk in the plural like that—“Let’s,” “Let us”—as if we had agreed on everything. And you know the strangest thing? I really did feel we had discussed and agreed on everything, talked things over at great length: everything important, that is, everything that mattered most to us both. What had we agreed? It might have been that I would become his lover some time in the future or that he might employ me as a servant. Without saying anything more we set off “home,” the pair of us, over the doomed bridge. He walked fast, and I had to scurry after him not to be left behind. He didn’t look at me on the way. For all I knew he had forgotten I was there, following him like a dog. Or like a member of his household staff who had accompanied her master on some errand. I kept a tight hold on the satchel in which I had stowed my lipstick, my powder, and my ration cards, the way I had guarded the little luggage I had once carried to Budapest when looking for a job. I was his servant, running after him.

And as we went along on our way I suddenly felt calm. By that time I had spent some years as a lady. I could blow my nose as delicately as I would at a garden party at Buckingham Palace, though I occasionally recalled that my father never used a handkerchief, because he simply didn’t have one. He had no idea what a handkerchief was. He sneezed by pinching his nose between his fingers then wiping his fingers on his trouser leg. When I was a maid I blew my nose the way I learned from him. But now, jogging along beside this man I felt the kind of relief you feel at having finished some tiring, pointless task so you can finally rest. I knew that if we got to the statue of Széchenyi and I felt an urge to sneeze I was free to pinch my nose, then wipe my fingers on the skirt of my fine shantung-silk dress without him even noticing. Or if he did happen to glance at me that moment, he would feel no contempt and would not look down on me but simply observe how a woman in expensive clothes was blowing her nose like an ordinary peasant. He’d observe my habits the way he would the habits of some domesticated animal. And there was something reassuring about this.

We arrived at his apartment. I was as calm as if I were going home. When he opened the front door and let me into the dark, camphor-smelling hall, I felt at peace the way I did when I first left home and came to Budapest to find employment as maid-of-all-work for my future husband’s parents. I was at peace because I knew that I had finally found somewhere to shelter myself from the wild, dangerous world outside.

And I stayed, already determined to spend the night. I fell asleep immediately. I woke at dawn feeling I was about to die.

It wasn’t a heart attack, darling, or rather, it was that, but something else too. I felt no pain. I wasn’t even afraid. A delicious calm spread through my whole body: a deathly silence. I felt my body had stopped functioning, that my heart was no longer beating, that its mechanism had run down. My heart had simply got bored and given up, I thought.

When I opened my eyes I saw him standing next to me, beside the couch. He was holding my wrist, touching my pulse.

But he didn’t hold it the way doctors do. It was more the way a musician touches strings, or the way a sculptor taps at the stone, he was using all his fingers. His fingers were holding a conversation with my skin and blood, and through these, with my heart. He touched me as though he could see something in the darkness, like blind people who see with their hands, or the deaf who hear with their eyes.

He was still wearing the clothes he had worn in the street. He hadn’t undressed. He didn’t ask me anything. The hair that remained on his bald head was tousled round his brow and on his nape. The desk lamp was burning in the neighboring room. I understood that he had been sitting, reading, while I slept and suddenly woke to find myself dying. He stood beside me on the couch where I had made up a bed, and set about making himself busy. He brought a lemon, mixed some sugar in with the lemon juice, and made me drink the bittersweet mixture. Then he made coffee in a little red copper pot, a cup of Turkish coffee strong as poison. He took a medicine bottle and put twenty drops into a glass, diluted it with water and poured it down my throat.

It was well past midnight and the sirens were sounding again, but we didn’t listen to their frantic howling. He only took shelter if he happened to be outside at the time and a policeman ushered him into one or another cellar. Otherwise he’d remain in his apartment and read. He liked reading at such times, he said, because finally the town was quiet. Indeed, there was an otherworldly silence … There were neither trams nor cars, just the thud of anti-aircraft guns and bombs. But that didn’t disturb him.

He sat by the couch, occasionally feeling my pulse. I lay with my eyes closed. There was heavy bombing that night, but I had never felt as calm, as secure, as protected and hidden. Why? Maybe because I was aware of human care. That’s not at all a common feeling with people, and it’s no more common with doctors. This man was not a doctor, but he could help. Artists are the people who can really help you in times of trouble, the only people, it seems … Yes, you, my darling, you and all artists. He once happened to mention that a long time ago the artist, the priest, and the doctor were all one man. Anyone who knew anything was an artist. That is what I somehow felt, and that’s why I was so much at peace — at peace and almost happy.

After a time I felt my heart beating regularly again. I could feel the whole mechanism working, the way I saw in the panopticum at Nyíregyháza when I was a girl. They had an image of a dying pope there, made of wax. A machine was working his heart. That was the way I felt when my heart started beating again.

I looked up at him, and I wanted him to say something, not having the strength to speak myself. But he already knew the danger was past.

“Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?” he asked in a friendly manner.

The question didn’t scare me, didn’t even offend me. It sounded perfectly natural, like everything he said. I made a gesture to say that I hadn’t, knowing it was pointless telling him a lie as he would immediately see through it. Then he asked me how many cigarettes I smoked in a day. But, you know, I wasn’t smoking back then, or at least not continually, the way I do nowadays in Rome. It’s only here I started smoking recklessly, puffing away at that acrid American tobacco. Back then I only lit up after a meal now and then. I told him that too.

“What caused this?” I asked, putting my hand on my breast in the region of my heart. I felt very weak. “What was it? I have never felt anything like it before.”

He gave me a careful look. “It is the shock of the body remembering,” he said.

But he didn’t say what it was the body was remembering. He carried on looking at me for a while, then stood up and, with slow faltering steps, as if limping, went into the other room and closed the door behind him. I was left alone.

. . .

There were times later when he would leave me alone like that, morning or evening, at any time, because after a while, without any formal arrangement, I moved in. He gave me a key without thinking twice about it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. There was a woman who came to clean for him, sometimes even cook. But she didn’t have to tidy after him. Everything was perfectly accommodating … even the apartment, those handsome, well-proportioned rooms with their old Viennese furniture. There was nothing particularly grand about the place: it was just three rooms on the fifth floor of a relatively new block. One of the rooms was filled with books.

When I first arrived he treated me as a guest. He would produce delicious tidbits out of some invisible pantry, such as tinned sea crab. While everyone else was living off beans he treated me to tinned pineapples. He even offered me vintage brandy. He never drank any himself, but he did store wine. He had a personal collection of the great wines of France, of Germany, of Burgundy, of the Rhine, and all the best Hungarian regions, the bottles covered in cobwebs. He collected rare wines the way other people did postage stamps or fine porcelain. And when he opened one of these bottles, he would examine it with rapt attention, tasting the wine like a pagan priest preparing for sacrifice. He would offer me a glass now and then — a little resentfully, I thought, as if he didn’t think me quite worthy of the wine. He preferred to pour me brandy. Wine was not a woman’s drink, he said.

He could surprise me with his opinions. He was generally a little fixed in his views, like an old person who no longer wants to argue about things.

I was also surprised at how tidy his personal things were. I mean his cupboards, his drawers, and the shelves where he kept his manuscripts and books. It wasn’t the cleaning woman who was responsible for that, but he himself. He positively radiated order: he was quite obsessive about it. He wouldn’t let ashes or cigarette butts pile up in the ashtray. Every half hour he would empty it into a bronze bucket that he himself would tip into the general waste in the evening. His writing desk was as neat as a draftsman’s in an engineer’s office. I never once saw him move furniture about, but whenever I got there it looked as if the cleaning woman had just left. The order was within him, in his person and in his life. But that was something I understood only later, and even now I don’t know whether I really understood it. It was an artificial, not a living, order, if you know what I mean. It was precisely because the world outside was falling to pieces that he was so determined to maintain his own internal sense of order. It was a last line of defense against external chaos, a little personal revolt. As I said, I don’t really understand it even now. I’m just telling you.

I slept that night with a proper, regular heart. He was right: the body was remembering something. But what? I didn’t know then, but I can explain it now … He reminded me of my husband. I hadn’t thought of him in a very long time, not having seen him for years, never having wanted to see him. I imagined I had forgotten him. But my skin, my organs, and indeed my heart had not forgotten. And when I entered the life of this bald man who had been my husband’s close friend, my body instantly started remembering. Everything about him reminded me of my husband. There was something about the way this bald, silent figure had appeared out of nothing. He was like an ill-tempered, indifferent magician who is no longer interested in magic or tricks. It took me some time to understand why I was drawn to him, and what it was I remembered.

It was like a dream then, everything strangely dreamlike. People were being rounded up like dogs. Rounded up and murdered. Houses were collapsing. The churches were as crowded as the beaches had been.

Very few people remained in their homes, so there was nothing particularly odd about me going in and out of another person’s apartment, but I knew I had to be careful and not make any mistakes or else he’d throw me out. Or he would disappear at the very worst moment of the war and leave me there alone. I knew that if I tried to seduce him or made myself too agreeable, he would simply open the door, and who knows where I’d finish up. I also knew there was nothing I could do to help him, simply because he didn’t need anything. He was one of those unfortunates who can tolerate anything, any kind of deprivation or humiliation, who can put up with anything except the idea of being helped.

What’s that? Was he a snob? Of course he was, among other things, a snob. He couldn’t stand being helped because he was solitary and a snob. Later I understood that there was something under this snobbish manner of his. He was protecting something — not himself, no; he was trying to preserve a culture. It’s not funny. I expect you’re thinking of those olives. That’s why you’re laughing? We proles, we don’t really get the idea of “culture,” sweetheart. We think it’s a matter of being able to quote things, of being fussy, of not spitting on the floor or belching when we’re eating, that kind of thing. But that’s not culture; it’s not a matter of reading up and learning facts. It’s not even a matter of learning how to behave. It’s something else. It was this other idea of culture he was wanting to protect. He didn’t want me to help him, because he no longer believed in people.

For a while I thought it was his work he wanted to protect. It’s a lousy enough world to protect your work against. But when I got to know him, I was astonished to discover that he had completely stopped working.

So what did he do? you ask. He just read and walked. It might be hard for you to understand this, you being a born artist, a proper professional drummer. You can’t imagine life without drumming. But he was a writer, a writer who no longer wanted to write because he no longer believed that writing could change human nature. It’s not that he was a revolutionary: he didn’t want to change the world in that way, because he didn’t believe human nature could be changed by revolutions. One time he happened to mention that it wasn’t worth changing society because people would be exactly the same after as before. It was something else he wanted. It was himself he wanted to change.

You don’t get it — of course you don’t get it. I myself didn’t get it for a long time; I didn’t believe him. I just trod carefully around him, happy that he was willing to tolerate me. The place was full of people leading secret lives, men and women, and Jews most of all. People hiding from the militia … Okay, okay, relax. I believe you, you had no idea what was going on in Budapest. You couldn’t possibly know how people lived there, how they lived like insects, in silence. A lot of them slept in their wardrobes, the way moths do in the summer, with the smell of naphthalene all around them. It was the way I set up camp in his apartment too. I tried not to make any noise, to give no signs of life.

He paid no attention to me. Sometimes he sat up and, as if noticing I was there, he’d smile and ask me some commonplace question, politely, cheerfully, but always as though we had already spent years in conversation.

Once I arrived at seven in the evening. There was already an autumnal smell in the air, and the days were closing in. I entered and saw his bald head as he sat by the window in the half-light. He wasn’t reading, just sitting there, his arms folded, staring out of the window. He heard my footsteps but didn’t turn round.

“Do you know Chinese numbers?” he asked over his shoulder.

There were times I thought he was genuinely mad. But I had learned by then how to deal with that. The trick was to enter the conversation without any intervening talk, picking up exactly where he left off. He liked me to answer briefly in a word or two, just a yes or a no. So I obediently answered him. I said “no.”

“I don’t know, either,” he calmly answered. “I don’t understand the writing at all, because they use concepts, not letters. I don’t have any idea about their numbers. I only know they don’t use Arabic numerals. Nor the older Greek ones. So we may suppose”—this being one of his favorite expressions, and he would always raise his long forefinger at this point, like a teacher when explaining something to a particularly dense class—“that they have numbers unlike any other Western or Eastern ones. And that precisely,” he declared, “is why they have no technology. Because technology begins with Arab numerals.”

He looked tired sitting there, gazing out into the damp gray evening. The thought that Chinese numbers were not like the Arabic clearly bothered him. I simply stared and said nothing, because all I knew about the Chinese was that there were a lot of them, that their skins were yellow, and that they were constantly smiling. I’d read that in a picture magazine.

“So technology begins with Arabic numbers?” I asked nervously.

There was a great explosion that moment somewhere near the bottom of Castle Hill, the sound of an anti-aircraft gun being fired.

He looked over in that direction and, with a great deal of satisfaction, answered, “Yes,” nodding as if delighted that his argument should be so vividly illustrated. “You heard that explosion? That’s technology. It is one of the reasons we need Arabic numerals. It’s much harder to multiply and divide with Greek or Roman numbers. Just consider how much time it would have taken for someone to work out how to write down two hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and twelve in the Greek system. It is impossible, madam, quite impossible in Greek numerals.”

He seemed satisfied with this. However uneducated I was, I understood his every word. It was just what the words added up to, the man as a whole, I didn’t understand. You know — what he was. Who he really was. Was he a comedian? Was he mocking me? He looked excited, as though standing in front of a newfangled device, like someone holding a new kind of lock or a calculating machine. I didn’t know how to get through to him. Should I give him a kiss? Slap him? He might kiss me back. But he might just put up with the kiss or slap and calmly make some kind of reply. He might say something like: did I know that with each step a giraffe takes it advances by fifteen feet? He did once say just that in the middle of conversation for no reason at all. He said giraffes were angels of the animal world out in the wild, because there was something angelic about their very being. Even their names suggested angels, their original name being “seraph.”

We were walking through woods in the fall toward the end of the war. He was speaking loudly about giraffes, in ecstasies about how much vegetation they needed to consume in order to survive, so that they should be able to maintain those long necks and tiny heads, that great chest and those enormous hooves … it was as if he were reciting a poem, some incomprehensible hymn. He got quite carried away by his recitation, by the fact that he was alive and that such things as giraffes should exist in the world. I felt uneasy when he talked about giraffes or the Chinese like that. But in time I grew less afraid; it was as if I too could get drunk on his words. I closed my eyes and listened to his breaking voice … It wasn’t what he was saying that affected me, but the strange, irrational loss of control — the way he was shy and jubilant at the same time. It was as if the world were one big festival and he the priest, bellowing like a dervish, chanting and proclaiming the meaning of the festival to the world at large … whether the festival was giraffes or Arabic numerals.

Do you know what else lay behind it? Lust.

Not as the world knows it or as people generally feel it. Lust as perhaps plants, huge ferns, scented lianas, or giraffes or seraphs know it. Maybe it is the kind of lust writers possess too. It took me some time to understand that he wasn’t crazy, simply full of lust. It was the world that brought on his lust, the fabric of it; word and flesh, voices and stones, everything that exists is tangible and, at the same time, impossible to grasp in its meaning and essence. When he talked like that, he was as serious as people are in bed after an orgasm, when they lie there with their eyes closed. Yes, darling … Like that.

But it wasn’t a dumb silence, not like he had nothing in his head. I mean, you too can listen beautifully when you’re with the band, next to the bass sax, and you look round the bar so seriously, with that Greek-god profile of yours … But however majestic you look in your white dinner jacket, I can see on your face that you are simply listening, not thinking of something else. He listened like he had heard something about something else. And he could listen with great concentration. He could listen the way others shout. He was a sad man.

I never tired of listening to him. It felt pleasantly dizzy, like hearing music. But I did tire of his own listening. Because one had to listen with him and pay close attention to whatever it was he was not saying.

I could never guess what he was thinking of at such times. The times when he suddenly started speaking of giraffes or something like that and suddenly fell silent, I felt the true meaning of what he wanted to say was about to be revealed. But when he started listening he was simply far away from me.

It surprised me and frightened me a little. He was like the man in the fairy tale who has a cap made of fog and suddenly becomes invisible. He disappeared inside his listening. One moment he was there with me, muttering something in a cracked voice, about something I didn’t understand, then he was gone, just like that, as if he were far away. He wasn’t rude about it. I never once felt affronted because he stopped talking to me. Not at all! I felt he was paying me a compliment by being willing to share his silence with me.

You want to know what it was he was so good at keeping quiet about? So intensely, so logically? Oh, my dear, you do ask such difficult questions!

I didn’t imagine, not for a moment, that I could pry into his silence.

But there were occasional signs that something was happening in him, and I began to understand. The time I met him he was setting out to strangle the writer in him. He had made thorough, systematic preparations for it. He was like a murderer preparing to commit a murder or a conspirator who would sooner take poison than betray his secret. Or, let’s say, a missionary terrified in case he gave away some sacred formula to hostile savages. He would sooner die than do that.

I’ll try to tell you how I slowly grew to understand him.

“Sin is the art form of the petit bourgeois,” he once said in passing.

As usual, whenever he said something like this, he stroked his bald head the way a conjurer does when he produces doves from his top hat. Later he tried to explain his peculiar opinion. What he said was that sin, to the petit bourgeois — a pleb, in other words — was what vision and creation were to an artist. But an artist is after more than a plebeian. He wants to articulate some hidden message, then to say it, or paint it, or compose it in music: something that enriches life.

These things are beyond us, my dear.

He told me how bizarre ideas are realized in the mind of a sinner, how a sinner weighs up possibilities — a murderer, a general, a statesman, no matter which — and then, like an artist at the moment of inspiration, how he realizes his idea, quick as lightning, with breathtaking skill and ingenuity. How he commits the crime that is his dreadful masterpiece. There is a Russian writer — don’t frown, darling, it ruins your magnificent marble brow, and his name doesn’t matter in any case; I myself have forgotten it. I see how grumpy, how ill-tempered you become when I start talking about writers. You really don’t like the type. But anyway, said my bald friend, there was a Russian writer who wrote a book about murder. And, so my friend went on, it is not impossible that this Russian might actually have wanted to commit a murder. But he didn’t commit one, because he wasn’t a pleb but a writer. He wrote about it instead.

He didn’t want to write anymore. I never once saw him writing. I never even saw his handwriting. He did have a fountain pen, I did see that. It lay there on his writing desk next to the small portable typewriter. But he never opened the typewriter case, not once.

For a long time I didn’t know what his problem was. I thought he had dried up, that he no longer had the energy either for sex or for writing. Instead, he was playing out some comic part, pretending to be hurt, putting on a dumb show because he no longer felt able to exercise his miraculous, unique gift, the gift only a “master,” a vain, deluded, aging writer, possessed. The world would have to do without him. That’s what I thought. I thought he’d realized he’d come to the end of his talent. No longer capable of making love to a woman, he’d set out to play the celibate, someone who has had more than enough of success in bed and was simply bored. The game was no longer worth the candle. Resentment had turned him into a hermit. But eventually I understood why he had stopped — what this long preparation was all about.

The man didn’t want to write anymore because he was afraid that every word he committed to paper would fall into the hands of traitors and barbarians. He felt the new world would be one where everything an artist produced, whether in words, paint, or music, would be falsified, betrayed, sold down the river. Don’t look so surprised. I can see you don’t believe me. You think I am imagining it, making it all up! You couldn’t possibly understand this, my darling, because you are a heart-and-soul, fully committed artist, an artist through and through. You can’t imagine throwing away your drumsticks the way that man locked his manuscripts up in his drawer and let his pen gather dust. Am I right? I can’t imagine it, either, because you are the sort of man who will go on practicing his art as long as he lives. Drum till you die. But this poor unfortunate was a different kind of artist, darling.

This poor unfortunate was afraid of becoming a collaborator, a kind of traitor, by writing anything at all, because he was convinced that in the days to come, everything writers ever wrote would be falsified. He feared his words would be misinterpreted. He was like a priest who is terrified that excerpts from his sermons should help sell mouthwash or provide a text for a political rant on some street corner. So he stopped writing.

What’s that? You want to know what a writer is? A bum? Someone of less consequence than a mechanic or a lawyer? Yes, if that’s the way you think, a writer is indeed a bum. And we don’t need writers anymore … just as we don’t need anyone without money or power? A waste of space, as my ex-husband put it?

Calm down, no need to shout. Yes, you’re right, he was a bum. But what was he like close up? Not a lord or a minister of state. Nor a party secretary. Take money, for example; he was peculiar in that way. Believe it or not, he did have money. He was the kind of bum who secretly thought of everything, even money. Don’t go thinking he was a crazy hermit, the kind that wears animal skins, lives on locusts he catches in the desert, and slurps water from tree bark the way bears do. He did have money, but he didn’t deposit it in an account. No, he preferred to keep it in the left-hand pocket of his coat. When paying, he would draw out a wad and hand it over. It was a negligent sort of gesture since decent people keep their money in a bank account — the way you do ours, am I right, darling? When I saw him hand over money negligently, like that, I knew he was not a man you could cheat or steal from, because he would know precisely how much money he had, right down to the last dime.

But he had more than the worthless currency of our homeland. He had dollars, thirty ten-dollar notes. And French gold napoleons too. I remember he kept his gold in an old tin cigarette case that once contained Egyptian cigarettes. He had thirty-four gold napoleons. He counted them in front of me once, very anxiously. His spectacles were glittering at the end of his nose as he examined them and put the gold pieces to his nose to smell them. He put his teeth to each one and tried it in his hand. He gave each a thorough look and held it to the light. He was like a picture of one of those old money dealers, going about his business with ruthless, even malicious, efficiency.

But I never saw him earn a penny. When he was brought a bill he would study it with deep concern without saying anything, with great solemnity. Then he paid and added a handsome tip to the person bringing the bill. I do believe that, deep down, the truth was that he was miserly. One time, round about dawn, when he had drunk his wine, he started talking about how one had to respect money and gold because they had some magical property. He didn’t explain what he meant by that. Knowing how much he respected money, it was surprising how extraordinarily grand his tips were. He threw tips around, not like the rich — I have known a number of rich men, my husband included, but never found one who handed out tips the way this bum of a writer did.

I believe the truth is that he was poor. But he was so proud he didn’t think it worthwhile denying his poverty. Please don’t imagine I could tell you what he was really like. I just observed him with a pained fascination. But never, not for one moment, did I myself imagine I knew what the man was like inside.

You asked me what a writer is. Good question. What is he, after all? A big nobody! He has neither rank nor power. A fashionable black bandleader earns more than he does, a police officer has more power, the commander of a fire brigade has a higher rank. He knew all that. He warned me that society has no official way of recognizing a writer — that’s the kind of nobody a writer is. Sometimes they put up statues of writers or throw them in jail. But really a writer means nothing in society. He is just a scribbler. You could address a writer as “Mr. Editor” or “Dear Genius.” But he wasn’t an editor, because he wasn’t editing anything, and he couldn’t be a genius, because geniuses had long hair and an imposing appearance, or so they say. He was bald, and by the time I met him he wasn’t doing anything. Nobody addressed him as “Dear Writer,” because it seemed to make no sense. Somebody was either a proper person or a writer. One couldn’t be both. It’s pretty complicated.

Sometimes I wondered — though I could never quite tell — whether he really believed what he said. Because whatever he happened to be saying, I felt the opposite was also true. And when he looked into my eyes, it was as if it were not me he was speaking to. For example, once — this was a long time ago and I haven’t thought of it since, but it suddenly seems clear now — I was sitting in his room between two air raids with my back to the writing desk. I didn’t think he was paying me any attention, because he was reading a dictionary at the time. I took my compact out of my handbag and started powdering my nose. Suddenly I heard him say, “Best be careful!”

I was startled and stared at him, openmouthed. He rose from the table and stood in front of me, his arms folded.

“What should I be careful of?”

He looked at me with his head to one side and gave a soft whistle.

“Best be careful, because you’re beautiful!” he said in an accusing tone. But he spoke with concern, apparently seriously.

I laughed. “What should I be careful of? Russkies?”

He shrugged.

“Them? They just want to give you a hug. Then they’ll be off. But there will come others … people who’ll want to strip the very flesh off your face. Because you’re beautiful.”

He peered at me shortsightedly. He pushed his glasses up to the top of his nose. It was as if he had just noticed I wasn’t plain, that I had a pretty face; as if he had never really looked at me the way people should look at a woman. So, finally, he was looking at me. But it was appraisingly, the way a hunter looks at a well-bred dog.

“Strip the flesh off me?” I laughed again, but my throat was dry. “Who? Sex maniacs?”

He spoke sternly, like a priest preaching.

“Tomorrow, everyone who is beautiful will come under suspicion. As will those with talent and those with character.” His voice was hoarse. “Don’t you understand? To be called beautiful will be an insult; talent will be called a provocation, and character an outrage. Because it’s their turn now, and they will appear everywhere, from everywhere, emerging in their hundreds of millions and more. Everywhere. The ugly ones, the talentless, those without any character. And they’ll throw vitriol in the face of beauty. They will tar and slander talent. They will stab through the heart anyone with character. They’re here already … And there’ll be more of them. Be careful!”

He sat back down at his desk and covered his face with both hands. He didn’t say anything for a time. Then, perfectly charmingly, without any transition from one mood to another, he asked if he should put some coffee on.

That’s what he was like.

But that’s not all. He was aging, but sometimes it seemed as if, behind his hand, he was laughing vengefully at the process of aging. There are men, you know, who think old age is the time for revenge. Women at that age go mad, take hormones, put on more makeup, or take young lovers … But men when they age often go about smiling. And it is precisely this smiling kind of older man that is most dangerous as far as women are concerned: they are like a conquering army. At this stage of the great, boring duel between men and women — of which it is impossible to get bored — it is men who are the stronger, because they are no longer driven to fury by desire. They are no longer ruled by the body: they are in charge. And women can scent this the way a feral creature can scent a hunter. We can only rule over you men as long as we can hurt you. While we can carefully feed men with a few tidbits, a little give-and-take of power, then immediately deny them the merest taste of it and watch them shouting and screaming, writing letters, and uttering dire threats, we can relax, because we know the power is still ours. But when men are old it is they who have the power. Not for long, it’s true. Being old is not the same as being ancient. Because the next stage is approaching, the time of dotage, when men become children and they need women again.

Go on, laugh. I’m only chattering on, being amusing, because the sky is almost light. See, you are so beautiful when you smile proudly, like that.

This man was sly and vengeful in his aging. Occasionally he’d remember he was getting old, and the thought would cheer him up, his eyes sparkling behind his glasses, and he’d look at me with delight and satisfaction. He was practically rubbing his hands together, happy because there I was in his room and he was aging and I could no longer hurt him. I would cheerfully have hit him then, torn the glasses from his nose, thrown them on the floor, and stamped on them. Why? Just so I should hear him cry out. So he would shake me by the arm or hit me, or … Well, yes. But there was nothing I could do, because he was aging. And I was afraid of him.

He was the only man I was ever afraid of. I had always believed I understood men. I thought they were eight parts vanity and two of something else. Don’t grunt like that; I’m not talking about you — you are an exception. But I thought I knew them, knew how to talk their language. Because nine out of ten men thought that if I looked at them from under my brow as if looking up to them, I must be admiring their beauty or intelligence! I could lisp and simper with them, play pussycat, admiring their terrifying intellect, which I, a poor little nobody of a girl, an ignorant, innocent shrinking violet, couldn’t properly grasp, of course, and certainly not understand. It was enough for me to worship at their wise, masculine feet, listening spellbound to their brilliant observations, especially since they were kind enough to permit me, silly woman that I am, to tell them how brilliant, how superior, they were at work, how one of them managed to put one over on those Turkish salesmen when he palmed them off with low-quality leather rather than top grade, or how another courted the powerful so faithfully that they eventually rewarded him with a Nobel Prize or a knighthood. That was the kind of thing they used to brag about. As I said, you are an exception. You don’t speak, you just keep drumming. And when you don’t speak, I know for certain that there is nothing you are trying to keep silent about. It’s marvelous.

But the others are not like you, darling. The others are vain, vain in bed, in restaurants, while they are just walking along or putting on their morning coats to flatter the latest celebrity, or loudly summoning the waiter in a coffee house … everything about them declares vanity, as if vanity were the one true incurable human disease. Eight parts vanity, I said? Maybe nine. I was reading in the Sunday supplement of one of the papers that our planet is mostly water and that only a little of it is dry land. That’s how it is with men; they’re nothing but vanity supported by a few fixed ideas.

This one was vain in a different way. He was proud of having killed everything in him that might have been a product of vanity. He treated his body as if it were an employee. He ate little; his manners moderate and disciplined. When he drank wine, he shut himself away in his room as if he wanted to be alone with some perverse figure who suffered from an evil obsession. He didn’t care whether I was in the apartment at all when he was drinking. He’d set me up with a bottle of French brandy, a few nice nibbles on a tray, and a box of Egyptian cigarettes, then retire to his room to drink. It was as if he didn’t think highly enough of women to let one watch him drinking.

He drank rare wines and went about it seriously. He chose a bottle from his collection the way a pasha might choose one or another odalisque from his harem to spend the night with. When he filled his last glass, he would loudly declare, “To Hungary!” I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t laughing when he raised his glass. He wasn’t clowning. The last glass was always drained in honor of the country.

Was he patriotic? I don’t know. He tended to be suspicious of patriotic talk. To him the country meant only the language. It wasn’t by chance he was reading dictionaries at this time — nothing but dictionaries. He spent the night leafing through Spanish-Italian and French-German dictionaries. He did the same while drinking, or in the morning, as the air-raid warnings sounded, as if he hoped that in the middle of this terrible cacophony of destruction he might finally find a word that would serve as an answer. But most of the time it was Hungarian dictionaries and lexicons he read with a spellbound, adoring expression, as if he were in the grip of an ecstasy, enjoying a kind of mystical vision in church.

He would take the odd Hungarian word from the dictionary, stare at the ceiling, then pronounce the word, letting it flutter above him like a butterfly … yes, I remember, he once actually pronounced the word “butterfly,” then watched it fluttering around him as though the word were the thing itself in the powdery golden sunlight, flitting this way and that, hovering, catching the sun on its lightly dusted wings, as he followed its angelic choreography, a Hungarian word doing its dance of the spirit, and suddenly he was happy and gentle because this was the greatest and loveliest experience left to him in life. In his heart, it seemed, he had already given up the bridges, the fields, the people. It was only the Hungarian language he believed in by then: that was his home.

One night when he was drinking he allowed me in. I sat down opposite him at the end of the big divan, lit a cigarette, and watched him. He paid no attention to me; he was mildly drunk. He walked up and down the room, shouting out individual words.

“Sword!” he cried.

He took a few faltering steps forward, then stopped as though he had tripped over something. He stared at the floor.

“Pearl!” he said to the carpet.

Then he gave a cry, put his hand to his brow as if it hurt.

“Swan!” he said.

He looked at me as though he were confused, as if he had only just noticed I was in the room with him. Believe it or not, I lowered my eyes and didn’t look back at him. I was ashamed. I felt I was witnessing an immoral act, a lapse of taste, in which I was Peeping Tom, a voyeur, watching the sufferings of a sick man through a crack in the wall. It was like watching a shoe fetishist, someone who thinks the part more important than the whole. He recognized my presence through the fog of wine, and blinked once or twice in acknowledgment. He gave an embarrassed, guilty smile, as though he had been caught doing something faintly disgraceful. He spread out his arms by way of excuse, as if to plead he couldn’t help it, the obsession being stronger than prudence or good manners.

“Cat’s tail!” he stuttered. “Barberry!”

Then he sat down beside me on the divan, took my hand, and covered his eyes with his other hand. He sat there a long time without saying anything.

I didn’t dare speak. But I understood that what I had just seen was part of the act of dying. He wasn’t sacrificing his life thinking the world would submit itself to his mind. He was forced to concede that the mind was powerless. You won’t understand this, my dearest, because you are an artist, a real, genuine artist, the kind that has little to do with the mind, because drumming requires no meaning. Don’t get cross now! What you do is far more important. There, you see? But this man was a writer, and for a long time he believed in meaning. He believed the mind was a power, like any other power that is capable of changing the world: like light, like electricity, like magnetism. And he, being a human being, might control the world through his mind without the use of any other instrument — you know, like the hero of the very long Greek poem, the one they named a travel agency after not so long ago, remember? What was he called? Ah, yes, Ulysses. You wouldn’t need instruments, you wouldn’t need technology, you wouldn’t need Arabic numerals. I think that’s how he imagined it.

But then he had to learn that reason — the mind — is worthless, because the instincts are stronger. Fury is greater than reason. And once fury has instruments at its disposal, it whistles at reason. Fury and instrument launch their own wild dance.

So he no longer expected anything of words. He no longer believed that words put into rational order could help the world or humankind. Words, when they get twisted — as they have in our time, he said, meaning the everyday words spoken between us, person to person — are superfluous, useless gravestones. The truth, he felt, was that words, the human voice itself, had become one continuous boom. Voices change when loudspeakers start screaming and crackling.

He no longer believed in words, but he always liked them, tasted them, gulped them down. At night, when the whole city was dark, he could get drunk on a few words of Hungarian. He savored words the way you were savoring your Grand Napoleon the other day, when the South American dealer offered you smuggled hash. You drank the precious stuff with your eyes closed, with genuine appreciation, exactly the way he pronounced “Pearl!” or “Barberry!” Words were solid chunks of consumable matter to him, flesh and blood. And when he was in their grip, he’d spout nonsense like any drunk or madman. One time, I remember, he was grunting and shouting the words of some Asian language. I heard him and felt like running away. I thought I was witnessing some extraordinary Eastern rite, or had lost my way in this crazy world and was, for the first time, seeing an alien people, or what remained of them. I had blundered onto a strange man speaking strange words. The words came from far away, miles and miles away. It was the first time I had ever been aware of being specifically Hungarian. But that’s what I am, God knows — all my ancestors Hungarians from the old Cumanian region. I even have a mole on my back — they call it a birthmark — that is often regarded as the signature of the tribe. It’s called “the Mark of the Cumans.” What? You want to see it again? Fine, later.

I remember my husband once telling about some famous Hungarian who was a count, then became prime minister. He was named after a river — Count Danube or Tisza, I forget which. This count fell in love with a woman my husband knew. He had heard from the woman that when this bearded count was prime minister, he would sometimes go to a special room at the Hotel Hungaria with a few friends and invite little Berkes, the Gypsy fiddler, to join them. Then they’d close the door and listen silently to the Gypsy playing. They drank little. Then, at dawn, this grave, stern nobleman, our prime minister, who wore a frock coat most of the time, would stand in the middle of the room and begin dancing to a slow tune while the rest solemnly gazed on. Strangely enough, nobody laughed at the idea of a man — a prime minister — dancing alone, at dawn, moving very slowly to Gypsy music. And this is what occurred to me that dawn, when I heard my friend shouting and waving his arms about in a room that contained only his books and me.

Oh, those books! So many books! I never counted them, because I knew he couldn’t bear for me to be moving his books around. Only by squinting, out of the corner of my eye, could I size up the shelves. The room was filled floor to ceiling with them, the shelves bowing under the weight of the books, hanging at angles, sagging like a pregnant mare’s belly. The city library has more books, of course, maybe a hundred thousand or even a million; not that I know why people need all those books. I’ve been perfectly happy with the Bible and a paperback novel, one with a lovely colored cover showing a count kneeling before a countess. I was given the novel by a magistrate in Nyíregyháza when I was just an apprentice maid; he fancied me and invited me into his office to give it to me. I have looked after these two books. The rest I just read as and when they came along. I mean, I read them when I was being a proper lady. Don’t look at me like that! Believe me, I was obliged to read books, take baths, have my toenails polished, and say things like “Bartók liberated the soul of the people’s music.” But I grew pretty bored of that, because I knew something about the people myself, and a bit about music too. It wasn’t anything I could say to ladies and gentlemen, of course.

All those books! After the siege, I sneaked in there again. He had already immigrated to Rome. I found only the shell of a bombed building, the books just damp pulp. The neighbors said the house had received several hits. The bombs had made a soup of the books. They were lying in piles and swamps in the middle of the room, which, it seemed, the owner had only just left. One neighbor, a dentist, told me that the writer hadn’t bothered to save a single book. He didn’t search among the wet piles … when he came up from the cellar, he just stood among the books and gazed at what was left of them, his arms folded. The neighbors waited beside him, curious, keen to see him pale-faced, bewailing his bad luck. But much to their surprise, he seemed to look on the wreckage with satisfaction. Isn’t that strange? The dentist swore he was almost cheerful, nodding away as if something had worked out according to plan, as if some great fraud or slander had finally come to light. He seemed to have been expecting it. The writer stood in the midst of the havoc, among his damp and soggy books, stroking his bald head, murmuring, “At last!”

As the dentist recalled it, some people there felt affronted by this. But he didn’t care whether they heard him or not. He simply shrugged and left. He spent some time wandering round town as many others did. But no one ever saw him near his old apartment again. It seemed he must have put a firm period to something the moment he stood among the piles of soaked books. The dentist suspected the writer was just playing the fool, putting on a show to prove he was not hurt by what he’d lost. Others wondered whether behind the sigh of relief there might not lie the realization of failure involving a secret political allegiance — the writer might have been a fascist, a Communist, or an anarchist, so that’s why he said “At last!” But they couldn’t be certain of anything. The books remained on the pile of rubbish in the bombed house and rotted away. It’s interesting — people were stealing all kinds of things in Budapest at the time, anything from cracked bedpans to Persian carpets and dentures, whatever they could lay their hands on. But nobody stole books. It was as if books had been taboo. It was bad luck to touch them.

He disappeared soon after the Russians entered the city. Someone said he’d been seen on the back of a Russian truck on the way to Vienna. No doubt he paid with his hoarded gold napoleons or with dollars. They said they saw him with a few salvaged goods on top of a pile of raw leather, his head uncovered, his glasses on his nose, reading some book. Maybe it was a Hungarian dictionary. What do you think? I don’t know. In any case he vanished from the city.

But we can’t be too sure of that, either. There’s something about this that doesn’t fit into the picture as I remember him. I prefer to think he would have traveled by sleeper car, on the first sleeper that left the city. He would have put his gloves on when getting on the train, bought a few newspapers at the station, and when the train started he wouldn’t have looked out, but drawn the curtains of the compartment so he shouldn’t see the ruins of the bombed town. He hated mess.

That’s how I imagine him. I prefer it like this. It’s odd, really, now, when there’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that is that he is dead … There is nothing else I know about him for certain.

In any case, he was, for me, the last representative of the old prewar world … that other world, the world of my husband, I mean the world of the gentry. Not that he had any truck with the gentry. After all, he wasn’t rich, he had neither title nor rank … He belonged in a different way.

You know how the rich kept all kinds of tatty things “in storage”? He too kept something stored away. It was culture, or taste — call it what you will … it was that which he believed to be culture. Because, my one and only, it’s important to recognize that culture is not what we proles imagine … It’s not the splendid apartment, the books on the shelf, polite conversation, and colored toilet paper. There’s something else, something the rulers don’t pass on to the ruled, not even now, when everything is different from before, when the rich have understood that they can remain rich only so long as they shower us proles with all the trifles that only yesterday were the height of desirability … But there is something they won’t be passing on. Because there’s still a kind of conspiracy among the rulers, even now, though it’s different from before … It’s not gold, not libraries, not galleries, not fine clothes, not ready cash, not shares, not jewelry, not delicate manners they are hiding away, but something more difficult to take from them. Quite likely the writer would have regarded some of these so-called important things with contempt too. He said to me, one time, that he could live on apples, wine, potatoes, bacon, bread, black coffee, and cigarettes — nothing else. Nothing else was necessary in life. Add a change of clothes, a few items of underwear, plus the well-worn raincoat he always wore, winter and summer. He wasn’t just saying this: listening to him, I knew it was the truth. Because, after a while, it wasn’t only him who could be silent a long time. I quickly learned it from him. I learned he had to be listened to.

I think I listened pretty closely. I solved him like a crossword puzzle. Not with my brain, but with my lower body, the way we women feel and learn. I eventually came to the conclusion that nothing that was of importance to everyone else was of any importance to him. All he needed was bread, bacon, apples, and wine. Some dictionaries.

And, ultimately, a few tasty, luscious Hungarian words that melt in the mouth. He would leave everything that was important to others without a moment’s hesitation.

All he loved by then was the sun, wine, and words, words without associations, just words in themselves. It was fall, the town was being bombed, civilians and soldiers both huddled in cellars — funny to think the soldiers were more afraid of the bombs than civilians were! — while he was sitting in the autumnal sunlight, having pushed an armchair over to the window. He had bags under his eyes. He was smiling, his mouth half-open, hungrily drinking in the late-fall sunlight in the deathly silence of war.

It seemed he was happy at last, but I knew he wouldn’t live much longer, that this was a form of dying.

Because, however he rejected everything culture considered important, however he wrapped himself in his faded old raincoat, he still belonged to the world that was crumbling and vanishing around him. What was this world? The world of the rich and celebrated? My husband’s world? No, the rich were just the dregs of something that would once have been regarded as culture. See — even as I pronounce the word I am blushing as though I had said something improper. It’s as if he or his spirit were here, listening to what I’m saying, sitting on the edge of the bed in the hotel in Rome, and when I pronounce the word “culture” he suddenly looked at me with that awful gaze of his, looking right into my guts, and asked, “What was that, madam? Culture? That’s a big word! Do you know, madam”—and I can see him raising his forefinger as he looks at me seriously like a conscientious teacher—“do you have any idea what culture is? You paint your toenails red, I believe … And you like reading a decent book in the morning or before going to sleep … and you sometimes drift off pleasantly to music, am I right?” Because he liked talking like that, in a slightly mocking, old-fashioned way, like some character out of a nineteenth-century novel. “No, madam,” I can hear him now. “That’s not culture. Culture, madam, yes, culture, is a reflex!”

I can see him now as clear as if he were sitting here. Don’t disturb me. I can practically hear his voice. The things he said.

So many people are talking about class war, saying that now we’ve got rid of the old rulers, we will run things our way — everything will be ours because we are the people. I’m not sure what that means, but I have a bad feeling that’s not quite how it will work out. There’ll be something the old lot will have kept that they won’t be passing on. And it won’t be anything you can take by force, either … Nor can you steal it by getting a grant and lazing about at a university … As I said, it isn’t something I understand. But I feel there is something the bourgeois have hidden away from us. What is it? Just thinking of it fills my mouth with saliva. My whole body cramps and I curl up inside. The bald man said it was a reflex. What’s a reflex, for God’s sake?

Let go of my hand. It’s just nerves: that’s why I’m trembling. I’m fine now.

I never understood him straightaway when he said something, not that first moment, and yet I understood him, understood him as a person, so to speak. Some time later I asked a doctor what a reflex was. He told me reflex was when you tap someone’s knee with a little rubber hammer and the knee kicks … that’s reflex. But he meant a different kind of kicking, another sort of reaction.

Once he had vanished and I was looking for him in vain up and down the city, I felt that he himself was a sort of reflex, just as he was, raincoat and all. The man as whole, do you see? Not his writing. The thing you scratch out with your pen, that can’t be so important; after all, there are so many books in the world, in shops and in libraries … Sometimes it seems there are so many books that all thought must have been squeezed out of them, all those words have left no room for thought, just words endlessly crowding and pressing on the page. No, whatever he wrote was certainly not that important. And he no longer thought about having written books — if anything, he was a little ashamed of it. When the subject came up in conversation, he’d give an embarrassed smile, as I remember once when, carefully but clumsily, I started talking about his books. It was as if I had reminded him of some youthful folly. I felt sorry for him then. There must have been some vast fury, desire, passion, or sadness raging in him. Mentioning his books was like sprinkling salt on a frog in the spirit of scientific inquiry, just to see how the electricity worked — you could practically see him jerking. His mouth twisted this way and that, and he wouldn’t know where to look. It was dropping salt on a naked mind.

It’s as if the great statues, the famous paintings, and the clever books were not things in themselves; as if he were a tiny living atom of everything that was being destroyed. He was being destroyed with the whole of which he was a part. Now it seems the statues and books will be around for a long time yet, even while the thing they call culture vanishes.

God only knows how this works.

I watched him and, as the bombs were falling, thought how stupid I’d been in my childhood — in the ditch, and later in the maid’s room in that highly refined household, and then in London when the Greek taught me all kinds of airs and graces — when I thought the rich were cultured. Now I know that the rich just peck at culture, indulge in it a little, dipping in this or that dish of it, and chatter about it. That’s something one learns very slowly and at great cost. Learns what? That culture is what happens when a person or a people overflow with some great joy! They say the Greeks were cultured because the whole nation rejoiced. Even the tinkers who made cheap little statuettes, and the traders in oil, and the military, the populace at large, and all the wise men who stood in the agora arguing about beauty or wisdom. Try to imagine a people that can experience joy. That joy is culture. But that generation vanished, and in their place came people who still spoke Greek, but couldn’t feel or think as they did.

Do you fancy reading a book about the Greeks? Apparently there is a library here, where the pope lives … Don’t look so insulted! The saxophonist told me he goes there in secret, to read. Of course, darling, he is just boasting when he says that. The truth is he really only reads detective stories. All the same, it is not impossible that there should be libraries here in Rome where they look after books and where we could find out how Greece came to an end. I mean, the thing people call culture. Because now, you see, there are only experts. But experts can’t reproduce the joy that culture did. Is this boring you? Fine, I won’t go on about it. I only want you to be cheerful and satisfied. I won’t bother you with such foolish thoughts again.

You’re looking askance at me. I can tell by your nose you don’t believe me. You are thinking it is not Greek culture that interests me, and I simply want to know why this man died.

How sharp you are! Yes, I confess, I’d like to read a book that explained culture: what it is and how it can begin to fall apart one day. How it can come to pieces in the figure of a single man: the way his nervous system withers away, the nerves that contained so much life, that carried all the stuff people thought a long time ago, and which other people recall with longing, so that, for a moment or two, they feel they are better than the common run of animals. It seems to me that a man like that does not die alone — a great many things die with him. You don’t believe me? I don’t really know, myself, but I’d like to read such a book.

They say Rome was once a cultured city. Even those who couldn’t read or write — the people in market stalls — even they were cultured. They might have been dirty, but they went to the public baths and, once there, argued there about what was wrong or right. Do you think the fool came here for that reason? Because he wanted to die here? Because he believed that everything that people once called culture, that gave them joy, was gone? That he came here, where everything was turning into one vast heap of rubbish but there were still a few monuments of culture remaining — that remained the way that you could still see feet sticking out from beneath the soil in Buda, in the Vérmező, after the siege: the yellow feet of the dead buried under twelve inches of soil? Is that why he came here? To this town, to this hotel? Because he wanted the smell of culture round him when he died?

Yes, he died in this room. I asked the desk clerk. Are you happy now, knowing that? There, I’ve given you this too. I don’t have anything left. You’ve put the jewels in a safe place, haven’t you? You are my guardian angel, darling.

Listen — believe me, when he died, it was in this bed, so the desk clerk told me. Yes, the very bed you are lying in, gorgeous. And I am sure he was thinking: “Now, at last!” And he will have smiled. These madmen, these peculiar people, always smile at the end.

Wait, let me cover you.

Are you asleep, darling?

Posillipo, 1949–Salerno, 1978