Portraits of a Marriage (25 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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