Journey by Moonlight (26 page)

“Perhaps you’re quite mistaken. Perhaps the thought never entered his brain.”

It struck her that if the Persian didn’t come, that would be every bit as insulting as if he did.

If he came … Perhaps it wouldn’t be so insulting and
humiliating
. He knew perfectly well that Erzsi admired him. She
herself had issued the invitation to come. He was not coming as to a slave-girl in his harem, but to a woman who loved him, and whom he loved, after carefully removing every obstacle in the way. Had she been sold? Indeed, she had. But properly speaking, the fact that men laid out vast sums for her need not really be so humiliating. On the contrary, it was very flattering, for people spend money only on the things they value … She began suddenly to undress.

She stood in front of the mirror, and for a few moments studied her shoulders and arms with satisfaction, as a sample of the whole item “for which men laid out vast sums of money”. The thought was now decidedly pleasurable. Well, was she worth it? If she was worth it to them …

Before this, under the lamp downstairs, she had longed for the Persian’s embraces. Not perhaps with the most single-minded
passion
: there was more curiosity in it, a yearning for the exotic. For she had not thought at the time that it might become reality. But now, such a short while later, she was going to feel, with her whole body, the volcanic glow she sensed in the Persian. How strange and fearful was the preparation and the waiting!

She was filled with trembling excitement. This would be the supreme night of her life. The goal, the great fulfilment, towards which her road had always led. Now, now at last she was putting behind her every petty-bourgeois convention, everything that was still Budapest in her, and somewhere in the depths of France, that night, in an ancient château, she would give herself to a man who had purchased her, would give herself to an exotic wild animal and lose forever her genteel character, like some Eastern whore in the Bible or the
Thousand and One Nights
. Always this same
wish-image
had lurked at the base of her fantasies, not least when she was deceiving Zoltán with Mihály … And her instinct had chosen correctly, for the road taken with Mihály had really led all along to this.

And now here was the man who would perhaps prove final. The real tiger. The exotic one. The man of passion. A few minutes, and she would know. A shiver went through her. Of cold? No, a shiver of fear.

Quickly she pulled her blouse back on. She stood at the door
that opened on to the corridor, and pressed her hand against her heart, with the naïve, artless gesture she had so often seen in the cinema.

In her imagination she was confronting the great secret:
formless
, headless, terrifying, the secret of the East, the secret of men, the secret of love. With what appalling, tormenting, lacerating movements and actions would he approach her, this stranger, this man with the tiger-strangeness. And might he not annihilate her, as the gods once annihilated mortal women in their arms? What unspoken, mysterious horrors? …

Suddenly it all enfolded her once again: her good upbringing, her character as genteel lady, as model pupil, her thrift,
everything
she had once fled. No, no, she did not dare … Fear lent her strength and cunning. Within seconds she had piled up every bit of furniture against the unlocked door. She even seized hold of the massive bed and, sobbing, gulping down her tears, dragged that too up to the door. Then she collapsed on to it, exhausted.

Just in time. From the neighbouring room she could hear the soft steps of the Persian. He was standing outside the door. He listened, then turned the handle.

The door, with every piece of furniture in the room leaning against it, stood firm. The Persian did not try to force it.

“Elizabeth,” he said quietly.

She did not answer. Again he tried to open the door, this time, it seemed, with the weight of his shoulder. The pile of furniture gave a little.

“Don’t come in!” Erzsi cried.

The Persian stopped, and for a short while there was complete silence.

“Elizabeth, open the door,” he said more loudly.

She did not reply.

He hissed something, and applied his full strength to the door.

“Don’t come in!” she screamed.

The Persian released the door.

“Elizabeth,” he said again, but his voice seemed distant, and dying away.

Then, after another pause, he said “Good night,” and went back to his room.

She lay on the bed, fully dressed, her teeth chattering. She was sobbing, and horribly tired. This was the moment of truth, when a person sees the whole pattern of their life. She did not prettify the incident to herself. She knew that she had denied the Persian not because she was bothered by the humiliating circumstances, not even because she was a respectable woman, but because she was a coward. She had come up against the mystery she had sought again and again, and she had fled before it. All her life she had been a petty-bourgeoise, and that was what she would remain.

Oh, if only the Persian were to return, now she would let him in … Of course she wouldn’t die, nothing truly horrible could happen. Oh how stupid had been her childish fear! If the Persian came back this terrible exhaustion would fall away from her, as would everything else, everything …

But the Persian did not return. Erzsi undressed, lay down and slept.

She managed to sleep for an hour or two. When she woke it was already becoming light outside. It was half past three. She leapt out of bed, washed her face and hands, dressed, and stole out into the corridor. Without even thinking about it she knew she must get away. She knew she could never see the Persian again. She was ashamed, and rejoiced to have escaped with her skin intact. Her spirits were high, and when she finally managed to prise open the main door of the house, which was bolted but not locked, and made it through the garden to the main road without being observed, she was filled with adolescent bravado and felt that, despite all her cowardice, she was the victor, the one who had triumphed.

She ran blithely down the main road, and soon reached a small village. As luck would have it, there was even a railway station nearby, and indeed a dawn market train leaving for Paris. It was still early morning when she reached the capital.

Back in her hotel room, she lay down and slept deeply, and
perhaps
contentedly, until the afternoon. When she woke she felt as if she had truly awakened after some enduring, beautiful and
terrifying
dream. She hurried off to Sári in a taxi, though she could have done it quite comfortably by bus or Métro. Now that she was truly awake her economising days were over.

She told Sári the whole story, with the cynical candour women use when talking amongst themselves about their love lives. Sári spiced the narrative with little exclamations and truisms.

“And what will you do now?” she finally asked, in a gentle,
consoling
tone.

“What will I do? But don’t you see? I’ll go back to Zoltán. That’s why I came here.”

“You’ll go back to Zoltán? So, is that why you walked out on him? And you think it’ll be any better now? Because it can’t be said you’ve any great love for him. I don’t understand you … But you’re quite right. You’re absolutely right. I would do the same in your position. After all, certainty is certainty, and you weren’t born to live like a student in Paris for the rest of your life, and keep changing your lovers as if you lived off them.”

“And I certainly wasn’t born for that! And just because … Excuse me, but I’ve just realised what was the basis of my fear yesterday. I started thinking where all this would lead. After the Persian there would be a Venezuelan, then a Japanese, and
perhaps
a Negro … I reckoned that once a girl starts off down that road there’s no going back: what the devil is there to stop you? And that’s not all. It could be that I really am like that, yes? That’s what I was frightened of—myself, and everything I might be capable of, and everything that could still happen to me. But no, it’s not that either. There has to be something to hold a woman back. And in that case, better Zoltán.”

“What’s this ‘better’? He’s wonderful. A rich man, a good man, he worships you, I can’t understand how you ever left him. Now, this minute, write to him, pack up your things, and go. My Erzsi … How nice for you. And how I shall miss you.”

“No, I shan’t write to him. You shall.”

“Are you afraid he won’t want you after all?”

“No, my dear, truly I’m not afraid of that. But I don’t want to write to him, because he must never know that I’m going to him as a refugee. He mustn’t know that he’s the only answer. Let him think I felt sorry for him. Otherwise, he’d be so full of himself!”

“How right you are!”

“Write and tell him that you’ve tried hard to reason with me to go back to him, and you think I would be willing, only my pride won’t
let me admit it; that it would be better if he came to Paris and tried to talk with me. You’ll prepare the way. Write a good letter, my Sárika. You can be sure Zoltán will be very gallant towards you.”

“Splendid. I’ll write straight away, here, right here, right now. Now, Erzsi, when you’re in Pest, and Zoltán’s wife again, you can send me a really nice pair of shoes. You know, they’re so much cheaper and better in Pest, and they last so much longer.”

F
OIED VINOM PIPAFO, CRA CAREFO
. Enjoy the wine today, tomorrow there’ll be none. The wine had run out: the
mysterious
inner spring that wakes a man day after day and sustains him with the illusion that life is worth getting up for, had run dry. And as the spring, like the wine, ran dry, it had been replaced from below by waters rising from the dark sea, the inner lake, connected through its depths to the great ocean, the Other Wish,
antagonistic
to life and more powerful than it.

The legacy of Tamás that had lain within him like a seed had now grown to reality. This growth—his own, special death—had burgeoned inside him, had fed itself on his sap, had thought with his thoughts and reasoned with his reasons, drunk in all the fine sights for its own purposes, until it reached wholeness, and now the time had come for it to move out into the world as a reality.

He wrote to Éva with the exact time: Saturday night. She replied: “I’ll be there”.

That was all. Éva’s curt, matter-of-fact reply filled him with dismay. Was that all he got? Such a routine attitude towards death! It was terrifying.

He felt a kind of chill beginning to spread through him, a strange sickly chill, like a limb going progressively numb under local
anaesthetic
, when your own body becomes alien and frightening. And so whatever it was inside him that stood for Éva slowly died. Mihály was well acquainted with love’s pauses, its blank intermissions, when, between the more ardent periods of passion, we become suddenly quite indifferent to the beloved, and look into the
beautiful
unfamiliar face wondering whether this actually is the woman … this was one of those pauses, but more pronounced than any he had known before. Éva had gone cold.

But then what would become of the Tamás-like sweetness of his final moments?

An odd, untimely humour put strength into him, and he acknowledged that the great act had got off to a decidedly poor start.

This was Saturday afternoon. He submitted himself, in these
his last remaining hours, to some searching questions. What does a man do when nothing has meaning any longer? “The last hours of a suicide”: the phrase, so applicable to his situation, dismayed him even more than his earlier decision that he was “mad with love” or that “he could live no longer without her”. How
distressing
that the most sublime moments and stages of our lives can be approached only with the most banal expressions; and that, probably, these are indeed our most banal moments. At such times we are no different from anyone else. Mihály was now “preparing himself for death” just as any other man would do who knew he would soon have to die.

Yes, there was nothing else for it. He could not escape the law by which, even in his last moments, he was compelled to conform. He too would write a farewell note, as convention required. It would not be right to leave his father and mother without a
farewell
. He would write them a letter.

That was the first real moment of pain, when this idea struck him. Until then he had felt nothing more than a weary, dull
depression
, a fog, through which filtered the mysterious green glitter of the awaited climax of his last moments, and his thoughts of Tamás. But as he began to consider his parents he felt a sharp pang, a sharp, bright pang: the fog cleared, and he began to pity them, and to pity himself, stupidly, sentimentally, absurdly. Feeling ashamed, he took out his pen. With exemplary discipline and detachment, but therefore in words warm with feeling, he would announce his deed, calmly, masterfully, as one experienced in death.

As he sat there with the pen in his hand, waiting for the words of exemplary discipline to enter his head, there was a sudden knocking at the door. Mihály started violently. A week could go by and no-one called on him. Who could this be, just now? For a moment nameless suspicions flitted through his head. The lady of the house was not at home. No, he wouldn’t open the door. There was truly no reason now why he should. He had no business with anyone now.

But the knocking became increasingly vigorous and impatient. Mihály shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: “What are they doing, making all this commotion?” and he went out. As he did so he experienced a subtle sense of relief.

At the door he found, to his immense surprise, Vannina and another Italian girl. They were dressed very festively, with black silk scarves on their heads, and had apparently washed with more than usual thoroughness.

“Oh,” said Mihály, “I am delighted,” and began one of his longer stammerings, since he utterly failed to grasp the situation but had insufficient Italian to cover his embarrassment.

“Well then, are you coming,
signore
?” Vannina enquired.

“Me? Where to?”

“To the christening, of course.”

“What christening?”

“Why, the christening of my cousin’s baby. Perhaps you didn’t get my letter?”

“I didn’t get it. Did you write to me? How did you know my name and my address?”

“Your friend told me. Here it is, written down.”

She took out a crumpled note. He recognised Szepetneki’s writing. It read: “The Rotund Cabbage,” followed by Mihály’s address.

“Did you write to this name?” he asked.

“Yes. Funny name. You didn’t get my letter?”

“No, absolutely not, I can’t think why. But do come in.”

They went into the room. Vannina looked round, and asked:

“Is the
signora
not at home?”

“No, there is no
signora
.”

“Really? It would be so nice to sit here a while … But we still have to christen the
bambino
. Come along, come quickly. People are already starting to arrive, and we can’t keep the priest waiting.”

“But my dear … and … I never did get your letter. I’m so sorry about that, but really I wasn’t prepared, today … ”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. You aren’t doing anything. Foreigners never have anything to do. Get your hat and come.
Avanti
.”

“But just at the moment I’ve a lot to do … An awful lot, and very important.”

And he became quite serious. It all came home to him, and he saw the familiar ghastliness of the situation. In the middle of
composing his suicide note they were pestering him to go to a christening. They burst in on him with their precious stupid
business
, the way people always burst in on him with their precious stupid business when life was sublime and terrible. And sublime and terrible things always happened to him when life was
stupid
and precious. Life was not an art-form, or rather, it was an extremely mixed genre.

Vannina got up, came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

“What is this important business?”

“Er, well … I have letters to write. Very important letters.”

She gazed into his face, and he turned away in
embarrassment
.

“It would be better for you if you came now,” she said. “After the christening there’s a big celebration dinner at our place. Have some wine, and after that you can write those letters, if you still want to.”

Mihály looked at her in amazement. He remembered her gift of prophecy. He had the distinct feeling that the girl could see into him and had understood the situation. He suddenly felt ashamed, like a schoolboy caught red-handed. Now he saw nothing sublime in his wish to die. The elevated gave way to the mundane, as always
happened
. One really couldn’t keep the priest waiting … He put some money in his wallet, took his hat, and they set off.

But as he let the two women go on ahead down the darkened stairwell, and stood there alone, it suddenly struck him what unqualified stupidity it was, going off to a christening with these Italian proles he didn’t know from Adam. That sort of thing could happen only to him. He was on the point of running back and locking the door behind him, but the girl, as if sensing this, locked her arm in his and pulled him into the street. She hauled him along towards the Trastevere like a calf. Mihály felt that
wonderful
feeling of old, from the adolescent games, when he had been the sacrifice.

The relatives and friends, some fifteen or twenty strong, were already gathered in the tavern. They talked a very great deal, to him as well, but he understood nothing as they spoke in the Trastevere dialect, and besides he was not really paying attention.

Only when the young mother appeared with the
bambino
in her arms did he feel the full horror. The skinny, sickly ugliness of the mother and the yellowness of the baby terrified him. He had never liked children, whether new-born or in their later stages. He detested and feared them, and had always felt uncomfortable with their mothers. But this mother and this new-born babe were loathsome in a quite special way. In the ugly mother’s tenderness and the ugly babe’s defencelessness he sensed some kind of satanic parody of the Madonna, some malicious uglification of European man’s greatest symbol. It was such an apocalyptic kind of thing … as if the last mother had given birth to the last child, and none of those present had any idea that they were the last people alive, the excremental deposit of history, the dying Time-god’s final and absolute gesture of self-mockery.

From then on he lived through everything that happened from the grotesque, melancholy perspective of the last day and night on earth. Remembering how they had crowded through the
narrow
Trastevere streets, shouting out here and there to their
teeming
friends as they swarmed along to the little church, their every movement so strangely nimble and busily diminutive, he saw with ever greater clarity: “They’re rats. These people are rats, living here among the ruins. That’s why they’re so nimble and ugly, and why they breed so fast.”

Meanwhile he mechanically performed his function as godfather, with Vannina standing at his side directing him. At the conclusion of the service he gave the mother two hundred lire, and with enormous effort managed to kiss his godson, who now bore the name Michele.

(“Saint Michael Archangel, defend us in our struggles; be our shield against the wickedness of Satan and his snares. As God commands you, so we humbly beseech you; and you who command the Heavenly Armies, with the strength of the Lord deliver unto eternal damnation Satan and all the evil spirits who lead us into danger
.”)

The service dragged on for ages. After it they all went back to the little tavern. Dinner had already been laid out in the
courtyard
. As usual, Mihály was hungry. He knew he had now done his duty sufficiently, and ought to be going home to write those letters. But it was no use. He was seduced by his deep culinary curiosity
about the celebratory meal, what it would consist of, what
interesting
traditional dishes would be served. Would anyone else at such a point in his life, he wondered, feel so hungry and so curious about his pasta?

The meal was good. The unusual green pasta they served,
pleasantly
aromatic with vegetables, was a real speciality and well repaid his curiosity. The hosts were no less proud of the meat, a rare dish in the Trastevere, but Mihály was not so taken with it, viewing the cheese with much greater favour. It was a type he had never encountered before and a real experience, as is any new cheese. Meanwhile he drank a great deal, all the more because Vannina beside him kept generously topping him up, and since he could follow nothing of what was being said, he hoped by that means at least to participate in the general conviviality.

But the wine did not make him any merrier, merely more
uncertain
, incalculably less certain. It was now evening, Éva would be arriving soon at his lodgings … He really should get up and go back. There was now nothing to prevent it, only that the Italian girl would not let him. But by this time it was all extremely distant, Éva and his resolution and the desire itself, it was all very far away, drifting, an island drifting down the Tiber by night, and Mihály felt as impersonal and vegetable as the mulberry tree in the
courtyard
, and he too dandled his branches in this last night, no longer merely his own last night but the last night of all humanity.

It was now quite dark, and Italian stars loitered above the
courtyard
. He stood up, and felt utterly drunk. He had no idea how it had happened, because he did not remember—or perhaps he had simply not noticed—what a huge amount he was drinking, and he had at no time felt the crescendo of desire which usually overtakes drunkenness. From one minute to the next he was
completely
intoxicated.

He took a few steps in the courtyard, then staggered and fell. And that was very pleasant. He stroked the ground, and was happy. “Oh how lovely,” he thought, “this is where I’ll stay. Now I can’t fall down.”

He became aware that the Italians were lifting him up, and, with a tremendous chattering, were taking him into the house, while he modestly and apologetically protested he really had no wish to be
a burden to anybody: the wonderful celebration that was so full of promise should just carry on, should just carry on …

Then he was lying on a bed, and instantly fell asleep.

When he woke it was pitch-black. His head ached, but
otherwise
he felt sober enough, only his heart was palpitating violently and he was very restless. Why had he got so drunk? It must surely have had a lot to do with the state of mind he had been in when he had sat down to drink: his resistance was so much reduced. Really, there hadn’t been any resistance in him: the Italian girl had done what she wanted with him. Why would she want him to get so very drunk?

His restlessness became intense. He thought of that night when he had wandered the streets of Rome until dawn and then found himself outside this same little house, when his imagination conjured up all the mysterious and criminal things that went on behind its silent walls. This was the house where the murders took place. And here he was, inside the house. The walls were
alarmingly
silent. Here he lay delivered over to the darkness, as he had wanted.