Journey by Moonlight (24 page)

They were standing outside Erzsi’s hotel. Taking his leave of her, Mihály looked again at Erzsi. Yes, she had changed a great deal. For better or worse, who could say? She was no longer the fine presence she had been: there was something broken in her, some inner coarsening of texture that showed in the way she dressed and spoke, and overpainted her face in the Parisian
fashion
. Erzsi had become somehow more common, was somehow surrounded by the ambience of some stranger, some mysterious
and enviable stranger. Or perhaps of János, his arch-rival … This element of newness in the woman he had so long known was inexpressibly seductive and disturbing.

“What will you do now, Mihály?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to go home, for a thousand and one reasons, and I really don’t want to be alone.”

For an instant their eyes met, in the conspiratorial glance
developed
by the year they had spent together, then, without another word, they hurried up to Erzsi’s room.

The passion that had driven them so painfully together when Erzsi was still Zoltán’s wife now rose again in both of them. During those months they had both tried to fend off their desire, but the desire had been stronger and opposition only made it more savage. Now again they met in the teeth of a major obstacle. All that had happened between them, the seemingly irreparable grievances driving them so violently apart, served only to intensify the passion that threw them into one another’s arms. With the miraculous joy of recognition Mihály discovered it all again: Erzsi’s body which, physically, he desired more than the body of any other woman, Erzsi’s gentleness, Erzsi’s wildness, Erzsi’s whole night-time being which was utterly unlike the Erzsi who was revealed in the words and deeds of daylight, the passionate, loving Erzsi, so wise in the ways of love. And Erzsi revelled in her capacity to strip Mihály of the lethargic indifference in which he spent so much of his days.

Later, all conflict resolved, they gazed delightedly at one another, exhausted and fulfilled, with eyes of wonder. Only now did it occur to them what had happened. Erzsi began to laugh.

“Well, would you have believed this, this morning?”

“Not me. Would you?”

“Me neither. Or, I don’t know. I did come to do you a favour.”

“Erzsi! You’re the most wonderful woman in the whole world.”

He really thought that. He had been stunned by the womanly warmth in which she bathed him, and was gratefully, childishly happy.

“Yes, Mihály, I must always be good to you. That’s what I feel. No-one should ever hurt you.”

“Tell me … shouldn’t we give our marriage one more try?”

Erzsi grew serious. She had of course expected this question,
if only because her sexual vanity required it … but could it be a realistic proposition? … For a long time she gazed at Mihály, hesitant and questioning.

“We should have another try,” he said. “Our bodies understand each other so well. And they are usually right. Nature’s voice, don’t you think? … What we mess up with our minds our bodies can still put right. We must have another go at living together.”

“Why did you leave me there if … if that’s the case?”

“Nostalgia, Erzsi. But now it’s as if I’ve been released from a kind of spell. True, I was a most willing slave and victim. But now I feel healthy and strong. I must stay with you, it’s quite clear. But of course I’m being selfish. The question is, what would be best for you?”

“I don’t know, Mihály. I love you so much more than you love me, and it frightens me how much suffering you cause me. And … I don’t know where you stand with the other woman.”

“With Éva? But did you think I had spoken to her? I just yearned after her. A spiritual illness. I’m going to be cured of it.”

“First get yourself cured, then we can discuss it.”

“Fine. You’ll see, we’ll talk about it soon enough. Sleep well, my dear, dear one.”

But during the night he woke, and reached out for Éva. Grasping the hand that lay on the blanket he remembered it was Erzsi’s and, overcome with guilt, released it. Then he thought, wryly, sadly, wearily, how very different Éva was after all. From time to time he might feel an intense desire for Erzsi, but even this desire played itself out, and after it nothing remained but the sober and
boring
acknowledgement of facts. Erzsi was desirable and good and clever and everything, but she lacked mystery.

Consummatum
est
. Erzsi was the last connection with the world of humanity. Now there was only the one who wasn’t: Éva, Éva … And when Éva went, only death would remain.

And towards dawn Erzsi woke and thought:

“Mihály hasn’t changed, but I have. Once he stood for the great adventure, rebellion, the stranger, the man of mystery. I now know he just passively lets outside forces carry him along. He’s no tiger. Or at least, there are people far more remarkable than he is. János Szepetneki. And the ones I haven’t yet met. Mihály returns
my love at the moment simply because he’s looking to me for bourgeois order and security, and everything I actually ran to him to escape from. No, it doesn’t make sense. I’m cured of him.”

She rose, washed, and began to dress. Mihály also woke. Somehow he immediately took in the situation and also got dressed, and they breakfasted with barely a word. He escorted Erzsi to the train and waved her goodbye. Both knew it was now finally over between them.

T
HE DAYS
that followed Erzsi’s departure were dreadful. Shortly afterwards Waldheim left too, for Oxford, and Mihály was completely on his own. He had no interest in anything. He did not move out of the house, but lay all day long on his bed, fully dressed.

The reality-content of Erzsi’s news had run through his whole system like a poison. He thought endlessly, and with ever-
increasing
anxiety, about his father, whom his own behaviour and the impending financial crisis had surely reduced to a dreadful state of mind. He could see the old man before him: presiding
disconsolately
over the family dinner, twirling his moustache or rubbing his knee in his distress, struggling to act as if nothing was wrong, his forced jollity making the others even more depressed, and
everyone
ignoring his sallies, becoming gradually more silent, eating at double speed to get away as fast as possible from the miseries of the family gathering.

And if Mihály did occasionally manage to forget his father, his thoughts turned to Éva. That Éva would leave for an
impossibly
distant country, perhaps for ever, was worse than anything. Because, dreadful as it was that she had no desire to know about him, life was nonetheless bearable so long as one knew she was living in the same city, and that they might chance to meet, or at least she might be glimpsed from afar … But if she went away to India, there was nothing left for him. Nothing.

One afternoon a letter arrived from Foligno, from Ellesley.

The day was appallingly hot. In the afternoon Mihály walked in a daze round the Borghese gardens, went to bed early, fell asleep in his exhaustion, and later woke again.

In a half-dream he saw before him a wild, precipitous
landscape
. The prospect seemed somehow familiar and, still in his dream, he wondered where he could possibly have known that narrow valley, those storm-tossed trees, those seemingly stylised ruins. Perhaps he had seen them from the train, in that
wonderful
stretch of country between Bologna and Florence, perhaps in his wanderings above Spoleto, or in a painting by Salvator Rosa in some museum. The mood of the landscape was ominous and heavy with mortality. Mortality hung over the tiny figure, the traveller, who, leaning on his stick, made his way across the landscape under a brilliant moon. He knew that the traveller had been journeying through that increasingly abandoned landscape, between tumultuous trees and stylised ruins, terrified by tempests and wolves, for an immense period of time, and that he, and
no-one
else in all the world, would roam abroad on such a night, so utterly alone.

The bell rang. Mihály switched on the light and looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Who could it be? Surely no-one could have rung. He turned on his other side.

The bell sounded again. Troubled, he got up, put something on, and went out. At the door stood Éva.

In his embarrassment he forgot even to greet her.

That’s how it is. You yearn for someone, maniacally, mortally, to the verges of hell and death. You look for them everywhere, pursue them, to no avail, and your life wastes away in nostalgia. Since
coming
to Rome Mihály had never stopped waiting for this moment, had prepared for it, and had only just come to believe that never again would he speak with Éva. And then suddenly she appears, just at the moment when you’ve pulled on a pair of cheap pyjamas, are ashamed to be so unkempt and unshaven, ashamed to death of your lodgings, and you’d actually rather this person, for whom you’ve yearned so inexpressibly, were simply not there.

But Éva paid no attention to any of that. Without greeting or
invitation
she stepped quickly into his room, sat down in an armchair, and stared stiffly in front of her.

Mihály shuffled in after her.

She had not changed in the slightest. Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages. In love’s eye she is always seventeen, her dishevelled hair and light summer frock tousled for the rest of time by the same friendly breeze that blew in the first fatal moment.

Mihály was so discomposed all he could ask was:

“How did you find my address?”

Éva motioned restlessly with her hand.

“I telephoned your brother, in Pest. Mihály, Ervin’s dead.”

“I know,” he said.

“How did you know?”

“Ellesley, the doctor, wrote to me. I know you also met him once, in Gubbio, in the house where the door of the dead was open.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“He nursed Ervin in his last hours, in the Foligno hospital. Here’s his letter.”

Éva read the letter and fell into a reverie.

“Do you remember his enormous grey coat,” she said, after a while, “and how he always turned the collar up as he walked along, with his head bowed? … ”

“And somehow his head always went in front of him, and he
came after it, like those big snakes that throw their head
forward
and their bodies slither along behind … And how much he smoked! No matter how many cigarettes I put in front of him, they all went.”

“And how sweet he was, when he was in good humour, or tipsy … ”

Father Severinus vanished. In the dead man of Foligno only Ervin had died, the remarkable boy and dear friend and the finest memory of their youth.

“I knew he was very ill,” said Mihály. “I tried to persuade him to get himself seen to. Do you think I should perhaps have tried a bit harder? Perhaps I should have stayed in Gubbio and not left until something was done about getting him well?”

“I think our concern, our tenderness, our anxiety would never have got through to him—to Father Severinus. For him the
illness
wasn’t as it would be for other people—not a misfortune but rather a gift. What do we know about that? And how easy it would have been for him to die.”

“He was so used to the ways of death. In the last few years I think he dealt with nothing else.”

“All the same, it might well have been horrible for him to die. There are very few people who die their own, proper death, like … like Tamás.”

The warm orange glow from the lampshade fell on Éva’s face and it became much more like the face she had shown in those years in the Ulpius house when … when they played their games and Tamás and Mihály died for her, or at her hands. What kind of fantasy, or memory, might now be stirring in her? He clutched his hand to his aching, pounding heart, and a thousand things flitted through his head: memories of the sick pleasure of the old games, the Etruscan statues in the Villa Giulia, Waldheims’s
explanations
, the Other Wish and the death-hetaira.

“Éva, you killed Tamás,” he said.

Éva gave a start, her facial expression changed totally, and she clapped her hand to her forehead.

“It’s not true! Not true! How could you think it?”

“Éva, you killed Tamás.”

“No, Mihály, I swear I didn’t. It wasn’t me that killed him … you
can’t see it like that. Tamás committed suicide. I told Ervin, and Ervin gave me absolution, as a priest.”

“Then tell me too.”

“Yes, I’ll tell you. Listen. I’ll tell you how Tamás died.”

Éva’s hand in Mihály’s was cold as ice. He too felt shivers of
horror
running through him, and his heart grew unspeakably heavy. Relentlessly they descended into the mines, the passageways, the pits, through brackish underground lakes until they reached the cave where, amid the blackness at the very centre of things, lurked the secret, and the spectre.

“You remember, don’t you, how it was. That suitor of mine, and how violent my father was, and how I asked him if I could travel with Tamás for a few days before I got married.”

“I remember.”

“We went to Hallstatt. The place was Tamás’s idea. The moment I arrived there I understood. I really can’t describe it … an ancient, black town, beside a dead, black lake. You see these hill towns in Italy too, but this was much darker, much more chilling, the sort of place where all you can do is die. Tamás had already told me on the way there that he was going to die soon. You remember, don’t you, the office … and how he couldn’t bear being torn away from me … and in particular, you remember, how he always longed for death, and you know, too, how he didn’t want to die in some random way, but prepared for, carefully …

“I know that anyone else would have reasoned with him, or sent off telegrams right and left, called for help from his friends and the police and the emergency services and whatever else one does. That was my first feeling too, that I ought to do something, I ought to call for help. I didn’t, and I watched his preparations with despair. But then suddenly it dawned on me that Tamás was right. How I knew this I can’t say … but you remember how close we always were, how I always knew what was going on inside him—and now I knew that he was beyond help. If it didn’t happen now, then some other time, soon; and if I wasn’t there then he would die alone, and that would be terrible, for both of us.

“Tamás realised I had become resigned to the idea and he told me the day when it would happen. That day we went boating on the dead lake, but in the afternoon the rain came down and we
went into our room. There was never such an autumn since the world began, Mihály.

“Tamás wrote a farewell note, in meaningless phrases, giving no reasons. Then he asked me to prepare the poison, and to give it to him …

“Why did I have to do it? … and why did I do it? … you see, this is something perhaps only you can understand, Mihály. You played and acted with us, in those years.

“I’ve never felt any pangs of remorse. Tamás wanted to die, and there was no way I could have prevented it. And I didn’t even want to, because I knew it was better for him this way. I carried out his last wishes. I did the right thing. I’ve never regretted it. Perhaps if I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t given him the poison, he wouldn’t have had the strength of mind, he would have struggled with himself for hours and then taken it after all, and gone to his death ashamed of his lack of courage, shamefaced. But this way he killed himself bravely, without hesitation, because it was
play-acting
, he played at being killed by me, he was performing a scene we had rehearsed so many times at home.

“Afterwards he lay down calmly and I sat on the edge of the bed. When the drowsiness of death drew near, I pulled him to me and kissed him. And I carried on kissing him until his arm fell away from me. Those weren’t the kisses of a brother and sister, Mihály, it’s true. We were no longer brother and sister but someone who would live on and someone who was dying … then at last he was free, as I believe.”

For a long time they sat in silence.

“Éva, why did you send me that message not to look for you?” Mihály finally asked. “Why don’t you want to see me?”

“Oh, but don’t you see, Mihály, don’t you see, it’s impossible? … When we’re together it’s not just the two of us … At any moment Tamás might appear. And now Ervin too … I can’t be with you, Mihály, I can’t.”

She rose.

“Just sit down for one more minute,” he said, as softly as a man speaking in extreme anger. “Is it true you’re going to India?” he asked. “For a very long time?”

Éva nodded.

He wrung his hands.

“You really are going, and I shan’t see you any more?”

“That’s true. What will become of you?”

“There’s only one thing for me: to die my own, proper death. Like … like Tamás.”

They were silent.

“Do you seriously think so?” Éva asked eventually.

“Absolutely seriously. There’s no point in my staying in Rome. And there’s even less point in my going home. There’s no point in my doing anything.”

“Could I possibly be of help?” she asked, without enthusiasm.

“No. Or rather, there is a way, after all. Could you do something for me, Éva?”

“Well?”

“I’m afraid to ask, it’s so difficult.”

“Ask away.”

“Éva … be at my side, when I die … like you were with Tamás, Éva.”

Éva considered.

“Would you do it? Would you do it? Éva, this is all I ask of you, and after it, nothing ever again, till the end of the world.”

“All right.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”