Portraits of a Marriage (47 page)

His name? Well, it was a name people recognized once. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t read any of his books before. When we first met I thought he was toying with me, as he did with everything and everybody. Then I got angry and sat down to read one of his books. Did I understand it? Yes, pretty well. He used simple words, the kind people actually use in conversation. He wrote about bread, and wine, about how people should eat, how they should walk, and what they should think about when walking. It was as if he were writing a textbook for simpletons who hadn’t the least idea how to live a meaningful life. That seemed to be the subject of the book. But it was a sly book, because under all the apparent naturalness of those big simple, idiotic things, under the kind-teacher tone, there was something else, a kind of grimace of indifference. It was as if behind everything—behind the book, behind the fact that he was a man writing a book, behind his idea of the reader holding the book in his hand, a reader now charmed, now solemn, now sentimental, a reader struggling to understand the book’s
contents—there was a wicked adolescent watching and grinning with delight. That’s what I felt as I was reading it. I understood it line by line, but not the thing as a whole. I didn’t really get what he was after. I didn’t understand why he was writing books when he believed in neither literature nor readers. No reader, however carefully he studied this book, could ever discover what he actually thought. The more I read of his book, the angrier I grew. In fact I didn’t finish it, but threw it across the room.

Later, when I lived near him, I told him what I’d done. He heard me through with due seriousness, as if he were a priest or a tutor. He nodded. He pushed his glasses up to his forehead. And he agreed, utterly in sympathy:

“Disgraceful,” he said, and made a gesture, as if he himself would have thrown it, and all his other books, across the room. “I quite agree—it was disgraceful, quite disgusting.”

He gave a sad sigh, but he didn’t explain what exactly was the disgrace. Literature at large? The fact that I hadn’t understood his book? Or something that could not be written down? I didn’t dare ask him what it was. Because he treated words the way druggists treat poison. When I asked him the meaning of a word, he would look at me full of suspicion, the way a chemist might look at a hysterical woman who walks in with her hair all over the place and asks for a sleeping potion. Or the way a grocer looks when a weepy servant asks him for lye. He thought words were poison, that they contained something bitterly poisonous. You could only take them in very weak doses.

What did we talk about, you ask? Wait a minute. I’ll try to remember the kind of things he used to say. There isn’t much. Hardly a cent’s worth.

There was one occasion—during a bombing raid, when the entire population of the city was cowering in cellars, sweating and waiting for death—when he said humanity and the earth were of one fabric, and he quoted the fact that earth was thirty-five percent solid matter and sixty-five percent liquid. He had learned this from a Swiss book. He was very pleased with the fact. He talked about it as though it meant everything was going to be all right. Houses were collapsing around us, but he was not interested in bombed houses or in people cowering and sniveling in cellars. He started speaking about a German who lived a long time ago,
a hundred years back or more—there’s a small café here in Rome where you and I have been a few times, it’s called the Greco, and that’s where he used to sit, that German, a hundred or more years ago. No, don’t bother racking your brains, I can’t remember his name either. What the bald man told me was that the German believed that plants and animals and the entire earth were of one fabric … do you understand? He was reading so intensely, in such a fevered way, throughout the weeks of bombing, it was as if he had failed to do something very important, as if his whole life had been occupied by something else. He’d been remiss and now there was no time to learn all he wanted to learn—stuff like how the world works and so on. I’d sit quietly in a corner looking at him, making fun of him. But he took no notice of me, the way he took no notice of the bombs that were falling around us.

This man always addressed me formally.
Maga
. He was the only man of my husband’s class, a gentleman, who never used
te
, not even in intimate circumstances. What’s that? Then he can’t have been a proper gentleman? That he was just a writer, not a gentleman? How perceptive you are! He might not have been a gentleman precisely because he always talked to me in the most respectful terms. When I was still a maid, my husband-to-be sent me over to him so he could have a look at me. It was his way of checking me over. I went obediently, like a lamb to slaughter. The way he sent me was exactly the way his family sent me to the dermatologist: to check that the new member of staff wasn’t carrying any infectious disease. For my husband, the bald man was the equivalent of the dermatologist: in this case, though, it wasn’t a matter of my skin but of what lay underneath. The writer accepted the request to examine me, but he was clearly not looking forward to it. He looked down on it in some way, on my confused husband’s bright idea and the whole stupid notion of getting my soul attended to. He hemmed and hawed as he opened the door. He asked me to sit down but didn’t ask very much, simply looked at me without meeting my eyes, as if he had a bad conscience. But suddenly his eyes lit up and I felt the man was looking at me as a person. There was real power in his gaze then. It’s how the Commies conduct their interrogations, they say. There was no avoiding that gaze, no crafty way of ducking out of it into something more measured or pretending to be indifferent. He looked at me as though I belonged to him, as if he were free to touch me. He was like a
doctor leaning over a frightened patient on the operating table, hygienically masked, scalpel in hand, so the patient sees nothing but that ruthless knife and those searching eyes that probe the patient’s body, seeking the truth about the womb or the kidney. It was rare for him to have this look, nor did it last long. It seems he couldn’t keep it up: his internal battery lacked the power. But that was how he looked at me then for that long moment. I was the embodiment of his friend’s obsession; then he turned from me and the light in his eyes went out.

“Judit Áldozó, you may go,” he said.

I went. I didn’t see him again, not for another ten years. He was no longer my husband’s regular companion.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect he had something to do with my husband’s first wife. When they separated, she went abroad. She lived here in Rome for a while. Then she returned to Pest and led a very quiet life. No one heard from her. She died a few months before war broke out, suddenly, of a thrombosis. She simply dropped dead. Later there was all kinds of gossip, as is normally the case now when someone dies young, someone who seems to have nothing wrong with them. Some said it was suicide. But no one knew why a wealthy young woman like her should have committed suicide. She had a lovely apartment, she traveled, she rarely ventured into society, her conduct was irreproachable. I asked around a little, as is fitting when one woman is associated with another woman’s husband. But I couldn’t get to the bottom of the gossip.

I do know something about the fear of sudden death. I am not a great believer in doctors; it’s just that I scream and rush off to the surgery whenever there’s something wrong with me—if I cut my little finger, for instance, or have a sore throat. Nevertheless I don’t really believe in them, because there is something the sick know that a doctor never knows. I know that sudden death—that is to say, death without any warning, when someone is in full health—is not impossible. My peculiar friend, the writer and quack, knew something about this. Whenever I met him, you see, I’d feel quite strange myself sometimes. I felt I could die any moment, that it could be over there and then. I met him unexpectedly in Buda once, in a shelter, at about six in the evening. The shelter was a cave with many thousand people squeezed into it.

It was like being caught up in a plague. Everyone was preparing to die, sheltering in caves, shoving, and praying. The bald man recognized
me and waved me over to sit on the little bench with him. So I sat down and listened to the distant, dull sound of explosions. It only slowly dawned on me that this was the man my husband had trusted to check me over. After a while he asked me to stand up and follow him.

The all clear had not been sounded yet, and the slopes of Buda were deserted. We walked through streets in deathly silence. It was like the city was a crypt. We passed the old café in the castle district—you know, that centuries-old
cukrászda
with the beautiful furniture. The air raid was still going on, but we went in.

It was all very ghostly: a rendezvous in the afterworld. The owners of the
cukrászda
had lived on the Castle Hill for generations—much like the saleslady who worked there—and like everyone else, they had rushed for the shelters. We were alone with all the mahogany furniture, the glass cases full of organdy-covered war-standard sweet pastries dusted with sugar, rancid cream tarts and dried meringues, and the bottles of vanilla liqueur on the glass shelves. There was no one in the shop, no one to greet us.

We sat down and waited. We still hadn’t said a word. In the distance, on the far side of the Danube, anti-aircraft guns were booming while the American bombs dropped with a dull thud. A cloud of dark smoke was rising over the castle, because the planes had hit and ignited an oil reservoir on the far bank. But we took no notice of it.

Without asking or being asked, the bald man graciously set to playing the host. He filled two glasses with liqueur, took a plate, and put out one cream cake and a walnut slice. He was so comfortable moving around the old
cukrászda
he looked like a regular there. He offered me a sweet and I asked him whether he was familiar with the place and had he come here often.

“I?” He looked at me astonished, the liqueur glasses still in his hand. “By no means. Maybe thirty years ago, when I was a student. No,” he added, looking round and shaking his head. “I can’t remember exactly when I was last here.”

We clinked glasses, nibbled the pastries, and chatted. When the all clear was sounded and the female owner, the serving lady, and an old woman emerged from the cellar, where they had rushed in terror, our conversation was in full flow.

It was a second start to our acquaintanceship.

The easy manner did not surprise me. Nothing about him ever surprised me when I was with him. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had stripped naked and started singing, the way religious maniacs do in the street. If, one day, he appeared with a beard, saying he had just come down from Mount Sinai, where he had been talking with God, it wouldn’t have surprised me. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he asked me to play a game of Bobo, then to learn Spanish or to master the art of knife throwing. Nothing would have surprised me.

So it didn’t surprise me when he didn’t introduce himself or ask me my name or inquire after my husband. There we were in that haunted
cukrászda
and he talked as if all that was superfluous, because people could get to the heart of things without them, as if nothing could be more tedious than explaining to each other who we were and what we were. There was no need to discuss a subject we were both familiar with, or to swap stories about the woman who had died. There was no need to remind ourselves that I was once a servant girl and that my husband-to-be sent me over to him—he, the keen surgeon of souls—so that he might check me out for social scrofula or leprosy. We talked as if we could talk for eternity, an eternity in which death was merely a brief interruption.

He didn’t ask me how I was nowadays, where I lived, or who I lived with. He was more interested in asking whether I had tasted olives stuffed with pimiento.

What a crazy question! I looked him in the eye and continued looking, watching those gray-green, searching eyes of his, a worryingly serious pair of eyes. The way he looked at me in that quiet
cukrászda
, among the falling bombs, you’d have thought both our lives depended on the answer.

I thought about it, because I didn’t want to lie to him. Yes, I answered, I had tasted them; naturally I had tasted them; I had eaten them in Soho once, in London, in the Italian quarter, in a small restaurant the Greek had taken me to. But I didn’t mention the Greek. Why mention the Greek as well as the olives? I thought.

“Ah, that’s good,” he said, relieved.

In a slightly timid voice—I never dared speak to him as I really wanted to—I asked him why it should be particularly good news that I had eaten olives stuffed with pimiento.

He heard out the question in full seriousness.

“Because you can no longer get them,” he briskly replied. “You can’t get olives at all in Budapest now. You used to be able to buy them in the city center at a reputable delicatessen—” and he mentioned a name—“but it has never been our way here to stuff olives with pimientos. That’s because when Napoleon came this way with his army, he only got as far as Győr, in the north.”

He lit a cigarette and gave a nod as if there was nothing further to say on the subject. An old Viennese pendulum clock hung above our heads. I heard it tick. And there were still those distant explosions that sounded like a well-fed animal breaking wind. It was all very dreamlike. It wasn’t a happy dream; nevertheless, I felt a curious calm, as I did later whenever I was with him. I can’t explain it to you. I was never happy in his company—sometimes I hated him, and he often drove me to fury. But it was never dull being with him. I wasn’t impatient or restless. It was as if I had taken off my shoes or bra in company, as if I could strip completely and divest myself of everything I had been taught. I was simply at peace with him. The most violent weeks of the war were to follow, but I was never so calm, so at peace with myself as in those weeks.

Sometimes I found myself thinking it was a pity I was not his lover. Not that I felt any particular desire for him or that I was desperate to creep into his bed. He had aged, and his teeth were yellow: there were bags under his eyes. I was half-hoping he was impotent and that that was why he did not look at me as a woman should be looked at. Or maybe he preferred boys and wasn’t interested in women? That’s what I hoped. All I could see was that he was unconcerned about me.