Portraits of a Marriage (12 page)

There was also a framed group photograph on the bedside table. Two little girls, two spry adolescent boys, one of them in uniform, and a startled-looking older couple, a man and a woman, in ceremonial dress. In other words, the family, somewhere in Transdanubia. Next to them, fresh catkins in a glass of water.

A tangle of undarned stockings lay in a sewing basket on the table beside an out-of-date tourist brochure whose brightly colored cover showed children playing on the sandy beach of a faintly ruffled sea. The brochure looked worn, its corners turned down: you could see it had been read over and over again. And on the door there hung a maid’s black working dress with a white pinafore. That was the total sum of the room’s contents.

These commonplace objects implied a conscious self-discipline. You could tell from them that whoever lived here did not need to be taught order, that the order sprang from within, that she was quite capable of teaching herself. Do you know enough about servants’ rooms to know what they are stuffed with? Extraordinary objects, all those things their inner lives require: fancy hearts made of candy; brightly colored postcards; ancient, long-discarded cushions; cheap little china figurines; things thrown away by that other world, the world of their social superiors … I once had a chambermaid who collected boxes of the rice powder I had finished with and my empty perfume bottles; she collected this stuff the way wealthy connoisseurs collect snuffboxes, Gothic carvings, or works by the French impressionists. In the world they inhabit, these objects represent what we consider beautiful, as works of art. Because no one can live with just the bare necessities in the real world … we need a little superfluity in our lives, something dazzling, something that sparkles, something lovely, however cheap or worthless. Few people can live without the dream of beauty. There has to be something—a postcard, all red and gold, showing a sunset, or dawn in a forest. We’re like that. The poor are no different.

But what I was confronted with, in that room behind the locked door, was not like that.

The woman who occupied this room had quite deliberately stripped away all elements of comfort, bric-a-brac, and cheap glitter. You could
see she had strictly, ruthlessly, denied herself anything the world might cast away or regard as luxury. It was a severe room. It was as though the woman had undertaken certain vows to live here. But the vows, the woman, the room—none of it was welcoming. That’s why it frightened me.

This was not the room of some kittenish little flirt who inherits her mistress’s silk stockings and discarded clothes, secretly sprays herself with Madam’s French perfume, and makes eyes at the master of the house. The woman facing me was not the normal household demon, the lower-orders lover, the alluring siren of an ailing, decadent, bourgeois home. This woman was not my husband’s
sweetheart
, not even if she kept his portrait in a locket suspended on a lilac ribbon around her neck. Do you know what this woman was like? I’ll tell you what I felt: I felt she was hostile but my equal. She was a woman just as passionate, sensitive, strong, worthy, vulnerable, and full of suffering as I was, as is everyone who is conscious of her rank. I sat in the chair, the lilac ribbon in my hand, unable to utter a word.

Nor did she say anything. She was not agitated. She stood up straight, as I do. She had powerful shoulders—not slender, certainly not slim, but very well proportioned. If she had walked into the house we were at last night, among all those famous men and beautiful women, people would have looked at her and asked: “Who is that woman?” … And everyone would have felt she was someone who mattered … Her figure, her bearing, was what people call regal. I have seen a princess or two in my time, but none of them had that regal bearing. This woman had it. And there was something in her eyes, in her face, something about her, in her things, in the look and feel of the room, that—as I say—frightened me. I’m reminded of the phrase I used before: conscious, voluntary resignation … But beneath the resignation there was a tense alertness. A readiness. Something that demanded all or nothing. A prowling, untiring instinct, instilled over years, over decades. A close attention that would never relax. Nor was the resignation humble or selfless, but proud—even haughty. Why do people jabber on about the aristocracy being proud, puffed up with self-importance? I have met a great many countesses and princesses, and not one was proud in that sense. On the contrary, they were, if anything, hesitant and a little shamefaced, like all aristocrats … But this Transdanubian peasant girl,
whose eyes met mine so boldly, was neither humble nor shamefaced. Her gaze was cold and glittering. It was like a hunter’s knife. She was self-controlled and had a clear conscience. She said nothing, she made no move, she didn’t even blink. She was a woman fully aware that this was the crowning moment of her life. Her whole body, her soul, and her sense of destiny were living that experience.

Did I say a guest room in a convent? … Well, yes, that too. But it was also a cage, the cage of a wild animal. For sixteen years she had stalked up and down in her cage, brushing against its bars, or in another cage exactly like this. She was a refined wild animal embodying passion and patience. I had stepped into her cage and now we were watching each other. This woman wouldn’t be paid off with cheap little knickknacks. She wanted it all, life entire, destiny with all its dangers. And she could wait. She was good at waiting, I admitted to myself, and shuddered.

The locket and ribbon were still lying in my lap. I sat there, paralyzed.

“Would you please give me back the picture,” she finally said.

When I made no move, she continued:

“I’ll let you keep one of them, the one taken last year, if you like. But the other one is mine.”

It was her property. She said it as if she were pronouncing judgment. Yes, the other picture had been taken sixteen years ago, before I had met Peter. But she already knew him then, probably better than I ever did. I took one more look at the pictures, then, without speaking, I handed her the locket.

She too looked at the pictures, checking them over attentively as if to make sure no harm had befallen them. She went over to the window and, from under the bed, brought out an old battered traveling case, found a tiny key in her bedside drawer, opened the worn case, and stowed the locket away. She did all this slowly, deliberately, without the least sign of excitement, as if she had all the time in the world. I watched her carefully and registered, as it were in passing, that just now, when she addressed me and asked for the photographs, she did not use the normal class honorifics, no “miss,” no “ma’am.”

There was something else I felt in those few moments. It’s many years ago now and I see it all more precisely. This feeling all but overwhelmed
me, telling me that everything that was happening just then was nothing out of the ordinary. It was as if I’d seen it all before. I was, of course, astonished by how right Lázár had been the previous night when he told me directly that the woman with the lilac ribbon, the finding of whom was a matter of life or death to me, would be so close, merely a few streets away, at my mother-in-law’s apartment. I was astonished that she was someone I had often met and had even talked to. When I set out that morning, like a woman obsessed, to find my one and only enemy in life, I did not expect my very first venture would lead straight to her … No doubt about it, if someone had predicted this yesterday, I would politely have asked them to change the subject, as I don’t like to joke about serious matters. But now that it had happened, I was no longer astonished. I was surprised by neither the person nor the room. All I knew about Judit before was that she had been a “splendid support” to my mother-in-law, that she was regarded as practically a member of the family, miraculous evidence of what proper training could achieve. But now I felt I knew much more about her: that I knew everything. Not in words, not intellectually. I mean by instinct, as part of my destiny: I knew everything about her, and myself, despite never having spoken to her in all these years other than bidding her good day, asking whether anyone was home or if I could have a glass of water. I must have been scared of her: her face. There was simply this woman on the other side of the tracks, going about her business, waiting and aging, as I was … and there I was on my side, not knowing why my life lacked something, why it was unbearable, or what to make of the feeling that haunted my days and nights, those feelings that worked their way into my bones like some wicked, mysterious radiation, the sense that things were not quite right … I knew nothing about my husband or Judit. But there are moments in life when we understand that the most unlikely, the most impossible, most incomprehensible things are actually the simplest and closest to hand. Suddenly life’s mechanism is laid bare before us: those we considered important vanish as through a trapdoor and out of the background step figures about whom we know little that is certain but for whom—we suddenly understand—we have been waiting, as they, with their own burden of fate, have been waiting for us, for this precise moment …

And it was all exactly as Lázár said it would be: right on my doorstep.

The situation was that a peasant girl had been keeping my husband’s photographs in a locket hanging round her neck. She was fifteen when she moved from her village into town, to work for this upper-middle-class family. Naturally, she falls in love with the young master of the house. In the meantime the young master grows up and gets married. The maid and the young master see each other occasionally but are no longer close. The class difference proves ever more a chasm between them. And time ticks on for them both. The man ages. The girl is practically an old maid. She has never married. Why has she not married? …

It was as if I had been thinking aloud. She answered me.

“I’ll leave the house. I am sorry for the old lady, but I have to go.”

“Where will you go, Juditka?” I asked, using the familiar form of her name, which seemed to come easily to me now.

“I’ll go into service,” she said. “In the country.”

“Can’t you go home?” I asked, glancing at the photograph.

“They’re poor,” she said without expression, quite matter-of-fact.

The word echoed in the room like a cracked bell. It was as if, ultimately, this was the reality that underlay everything we could discuss from then on. It was as if some object had flown through the room and we had both followed its path, I out of curiosity, she indifferently, without comment. The word was familiar to her.

“I don’t think that will help,” I said after a while. “Why should you leave? No one has harmed you and no one will. If you want to go now, why did you stay so long in the first place? Don’t you see,” I said, as if arguing with her, as if hitting on an important point, “that now that you have stayed so long, you might as well stay on. Nothing new has happened.”

“No,” she said. “I’m going.”

We spoke quietly, two women together, in brief half-sentences.

“Why?”

“Because it’s out in the open now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he knows.”

“My husband?”

“Yes.”

“Did he not know till now?”

“He knew,” she answered. “But he has forgotten.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And who is there to tell him seeing he has forgotten?” I asked her.

“You, ma’am,” she stated quite simply.

I put my hand to my heart.

“Look here, my girl,” I said. “What are you talking about? That is your fevered imagination talking. Why do you think I would tell him? What could I possibly say?”

By now we were staring at each other with undisguised curiosity, looking into each other’s eyes so keenly, so greedily, we were like people who had lived together for years with our eyes closed. Now that our eyes were open, we could not get enough of what we saw. And at the same time we knew for the first time that all these years we had never been brave or honest enough to let our eyes meet. We always looked away and talked of something else. We lived in our respective spaces. It was just that both of us carried a secret, and this secret was the meaning of both our lives. And now we had admitted it.

What did she look like? Maybe I could describe her for you.

But first a glass of water, is that all right? My throat is dry. Miss, just a moment, a glass of water, please. Thank you. Look, they have started putting the lights out already … But there isn’t much more. Would you like another cigarette?

Well, she had a wide brow, a pale, open face; her hair was a bluish black. It was pinned up in a bun, parted in the middle. She had a snub, Slavic nose. Her face was quite smooth, with fine, clearly defined features, like the face of Mary in mourning in one of those village altarpieces painted by some anonymous, traveling artist. It was a proud face, so pale it was almost white. The blue-black hair framed that white like … but I’m not good at comparisons. What can I say? I leave that kind of thing to Lázár. Not that he would say anything: he’d only smile, because he thinks comparisons are below him. It is facts he wants, simple sentences.

So I’ll stick to plain facts, if you’re not bored.

It was a beautiful, proud peasant face. In what way peasant? It just
was. It lacked the patently obvious complexity of expression you invariably find on middle-class faces, that tense, vulnerable air of sourness. This face was smooth, implacable. You couldn’t charm it into a smile with cheap compliments and niceties. It was a face alive with memories, memories of ages long since vanished, memories that were probably not even personal. Tribal memories. The eyes and the lips led independent lives. Her eyes were blue-black like her hair. I once saw a puma at the Dresden Zoo. Her eyes were like that.

Those eyes were staring at me now the way a drowning man might stare at someone on the shore, possibly a murderer, or a potential rescuer. My eyes are feline too, a warm light brown … I know my eyes were glittering too that moment, searching her face the way beams search when an army is expecting an assault. But it was her lips that were most terrifying. Soft, pouting lips. It was the mouth of a big beast that was no longer carnivorous. Her teeth were a brilliant white, strong and straight. She was clearly a powerful woman, muscular and well proportioned. And now it was as if a shadow had fallen across that white face. But she made no complaint. She answered me quietly and confidentially, in the voice not of a servant but of a woman like myself.