Portraits of a Marriage (45 page)

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.