Portraits of a Marriage (10 page)

“That’s impossible,” he said, his voice cracking from excitement. “He’ll perish in the process.”

“Either way we perish,” I calmly replied. “The child died of it. I am practically a sleepwalker now. I know I’m moving toward the edge, to the border between life and death. Please don’t meddle, please don’t raise your voice, or I will fall. Help if you can. I joined my life to his because I loved him. I thought he loved me … For five years I have lived with a man who has never given me his whole heart. I’ve done all I can to make him mine. I struggled to understand him. I consoled myself with impossible explanations. He’s a man, I said. He’s proud. He’s a man of his class, a lonely man. But this was all lies. Then I tried to bind him to me with the strongest possible human tie, the child. I failed. Why? Can you tell me why? … Is it just fate? … Or is it something else? … You’re the writer, the clever man, the accomplice, the witness to Peter’s life … why are you quiet now? Sometimes I think you had a hand in all this, in all that has happened. You have power over Peter’s soul.”

“I had once,” he said, “but I had to share it with someone else. You should be prepared to share it too. That way everyone might survive,” he said, but he was uncertain and confused.

I had never seen this apparently confident but lonely man so uncertain. The Buddhist monk was now just an ordinary man who would happily have run away rather than answer such painful, dangerous questions. But I wouldn’t let him go.

“You know better than I do that there is no sharing in love,” I said.

“That’s a cliché,” he retorted in bad temper, and lit a cigarette. “You can share anything. Especially in love.”

“What remains of my life if I share?” I asked so passionately that I frightened myself. “A house? A social position? Somebody I dine with, at whose hands I receive the occasional gift of tenderness the way you give an invalid a spoonful of medicine? … Do you suppose there is anything more humiliating, more inhumane, than sharing this kind of half-life with somebody? When I want someone, I want all of him,” I said, almost loudly.

So I went on: despairing, a little theatrical perhaps. Passion always has a touch of theatricality.

Just then someone passed through the conservatory, someone in military uniform … He stopped, startled, looked back, and hurried on, shaking his head.

I felt ashamed. In a quieter, more apologetic tone, I repeated.

“A whole person, someone not to be shared with others. Is that so impossible?”

“No,” he said, examining the potted palm with great care. “It’s simply very dangerous.”

“And our lives, our life together, is that not dangerous the way it is? … What do you think? It’s deadly dangerous,” I declared, and now, having put it like that, I went pale, because I felt it was true.

“The nature of life,” he replied, now courteous and cool, like someone back in his element, leaving the world of passion, returning to the milder climate of precise thoughts and concepts, employing the appropriate formulations. “Deadly dangerous is what life is. But people live with danger in various ways. There are those who live as though they were proceeding along an eternally level plain, walking stick in hand. And there are those who are constantly wanting to leap headfirst into the Atlantic. Dangers are for surviving,” he said very seriously. “It is the most difficult thing, sometimes the most heroic thing, anyone can do.”

There was a small fountain in the conservatory, the water warm to the hand. We listened to its living music as well as the music inside, the music of worldly fashion, a primitive belching.

“I don’t even know,” I said after a while, “who it is I am supposed to share him with. A person or a memory?”

“That’s not important,” he said, shrugging. “It’s the memory of someone rather than a living being. There’s nothing the other one wants, it’s just …”

“Just that she exists,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered.

“In that case we have to get rid of her.” I stood and started looking for my gloves.

“Of whom? The person? …” he asked and slowly unwillingly stood up.

“The person, the memory, the life,” I said. “Can you conduct me to this person?”

“I won’t,” he said. We moved toward the dancers.

“Then I’ll find her by myself,” I said. “There are a million people in this city, several million in the country. I have no evidence to go on, only the lilac ribbon. I have never seen her photograph; I don’t know her name. And yet I am as certain as a water diviner of finding water on an endless plain. Or a prospector who can feel the ore beneath his feet … I am absolutely sure I will find her, this someone, this memory or flesh-and-blood being who is an obstacle to my happiness. Do you doubt me?”

He shrugged. He looked at me carefully, with his sad, searching eyes.

“Maybe,” he said. “I generally believe in people who let their instincts have free rein. I believe in all their miracles and mischief … I believe you will find someone among all those millions, who will answer your call the way one shortwave radio station responds to another. There’s nothing mysterious in this. Powerful feelings reach out to each other … But what do you think will happen then, when you have succeeded?”

“Then?” I asked uncertainly. “Everything will be clearer then. I have to look her in the face, take stock of her … And if it is indeed she …”

“She?” he asked impatiently.

“Just she,” I retorted, just as impatient. “The other one, the enemy … If it is indeed she who prevents my husband’s happiness, if she is the reason why my husband cannot be entirely mine, because of some desire that ties him to her, some memory, some sentimental misunderstanding, whatever it is … well, then, I’ll leave them to their fates.”

“Even if it means the end of Peter? …”

“Too bad. If that’s what finishes him off, let him lump it,” I angrily replied.

We were already in the doorway of the great hall.

“He has done everything possible. You have no idea how much
effort it has been for him these past years. You could move mountains with the strength he has spent in denying that memory. I think I know everything there is to know about it. I marveled at it sometimes. He tried to do the most difficult thing in the world. Do you know what he was doing? He was consciously trying to alienate himself from his feelings. It was like someone talking and reasoning with a stick of dynamite, persuading it not to go off.”

“I don’t believe you,” I answered in confusion. “That’s impossible.”

“Almost impossible,” he solemnly replied. “And yet he tried. Why? … To save his soul. To save his self-respect, without which no man can live. And he did it for you too; and when the child came along, he did it for the child, straining every nerve and sinew … Because he loves you. I hope you understand that?”

“I know,” I said. “I wouldn’t be fighting for him if he didn’t … But he doesn’t love me completely, unconditionally. There’s someone between us. Either that other person goes or I go. No doubt this person in the lilac ribbon is powerful, and terrifying? …”

“Should you find her,” he said, blinking and looking into the far distance, “you will be amazed. You will be amazed how much simpler the truth is than you imagine, how much closer to hand, more ordinary, and at the same time more grotesque and dangerous.”

“And on no condition will you tell me her name?”

He said nothing. I could tell from his eyes and voice that he was uneasy, unable to decide.

“Do you like going to your mother-in-law’s house?” he suddenly asked.

“My mother-in-law?” I asked, astonished. “Of course, delighted to. But what has that to do with anything?”

“All I am saying is that Peter feels at home at his mother’s house too,” he mumbled. “When people are looking for something, they always look at home first … Life sometimes arranges things as artfully, as arbitrarily, as in detective fiction … You know how it is: the police are feverishly looking for clues here and there, sticking pins into the wall, while the letter they are looking for is lying in front of them, on the victim’s desk. But nobody thinks to look there.”

“Should I be seeking help in finding the woman with the lilac ribbon from Peter’s mother?” I asked, ever more confused.

“All I can say,” he answered cautiously, not looking at me, “is that before you set off into the wide world to look for Peter’s secret, you should look round Peter’s other home, his mother’s. I am sure you’ll find something there to help you. The parental home is always, to some extent, the scene of the crime. You’ll find everything you need to know about a man there.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Tomorrow morning I will visit her and have a look around … Only I don’t understand what I am supposed to be looking for.”

“It’s the way you wanted it,” he said, as if disclaiming all responsibility.

The music began to howl. We entered the hall among the dancers. Men talked to me; then, after a while, my husband took my arm and led me away. We went straight home. This all happened on the fifteenth of April, on Monday evening, in the fifth year of our marriage.

I slept deeply that night. I was like a burned-out element. The electricity sometimes runs through things and burns the resistance away. The soul darkens. When I woke and went into the garden—it was early spring and the mornings were warm with a touch of the sirocco, so some days I had breakfast set in the garden—my husband had already gone. I breakfasted alone, sipping bitter tea, not feeling hungry.

There were newspapers lying on the table. For lack of anything else to do, I read one of the headlines. A small state had just disappeared off the map. I tried to imagine how the people in that foreign country might feel, waking up at dawn to discover that their lives, their customs, everything they believed or had sworn by, had disappeared from one day to the next, had ceased to matter, and that they were now on the threshold of something entirely new—maybe better, maybe worse, but something that, at any rate, was utterly different from the country they knew, which might just as well have sunk beneath the waves, and that was where they had to live thenceforth, under entirely new conditions, underwater. I thought about it, and also about myself, and what I wanted … What divine commandment had I received, what was the message from heaven? What was the meaning of this continuous excitement in my heart? What was my anxiety, my humiliation, my sorrow
compared to the anxiety and sorrow of those millions upon millions of people who were waking this morning to find they had lost what was most precious to them, that had been the center of their lives, the sweet, secret, familiar order of their homeland? … But I kept leafing distractedly through the papers, unable to give world affairs my full attention. I asked myself what right I had in a world like this to worry so intensely about myself, to be so obsessed by what would happen to me and whether I had any right to care so much about my own life … With so many millions of people living in fear and misery, should I really be worrying about whether I really owned every last little bit of my husband’s heart? What was my husband’s secret, or my personal happiness, compared to the world’s secrets, the world’s misery? What was I doing playing detective in a world that is savage enough, frightening and mysterious enough, already? … But these were pseudo-questions, you know, pretenses … One woman’s feelings don’t amount to an entire world. Then I thought back to what the old priest had said, and wondered if he was right. Maybe I didn’t have enough faith, enough humility … Perhaps there was something arrogant about me, something unworthy of a Christian, a woman, indeed of a human being; something arrogant about this crazy project, this amateur-detective attempt to scrape away the surface of a private world and reveal my husband’s secret; something unworthy about trying to find that certain mysterious person with her lilac ribbon. Perhaps … but I was so overwrought at the time I can no longer explain my feelings clearly.

I sat in the garden, the tea got cold, the sun was shining. The birds were already restless, chattering away. Spring was coming on. I thought how Lázár didn’t like the spring: all that fecundity, all those emissions, he said, affect the gastric juices and upset the balance between feeling and reason … That’s what he said. And then I remembered all we had talked about just a few hours ago at night, with the music in the background, beside the fountain, in that rich, cold, grand house, in the suffocating jungle smells of the conservatory. I remembered, and now it seemed as though it were all just something I’d read.

Do you know the feeling you get when you are beyond pain and despair, beyond the most tragic events, and suddenly become very sober, indifferent, almost cheerful? For example, when the person you loved best is being buried, and you suddenly remember that you have
left the refrigerator door open back home and the dog is probably eating the cold meat you had saved for the wake? … And the very moment when everyone is singing and standing around the coffin, you start arranging things, whispering, as calm as you like, something about the refrigerator? … Because we are quite capable of that: we live between such infinitely divided shores, in a world of such vast distances. I sat in the sunlight and it was as if I were contemplating someone else’s bad luck, thinking quite coldly and rationally about all that had happened. I recalled what Lázár had said, word for word, but his words did not strike me now with the force they had then. The tension of the previous day had dissolved. I recalled sitting in the conservatory with the writer but it was as if it hadn’t been me. I thought of the lilac ribbon the way you might of a piece of society gossip. By the end, the content and nature of my life might have been summed up by others over tea or supper as follows: “Do you know the Xes? … Yes, the industrialist and his wife. They live on the hill at Rózsadomb. Things aren’t going well for them. The wife has discovered that her husband is in love with someone else. Just imagine, she found a piece of lilac ribbon in his wallet, then it all came out … Yes, they’re separating.” That would have been a way of putting it, what had happened to me, to us. How often had I heard this kind of thing about other couples, stray remarks overheard in company, and not even bothered with it … Could it be that one day we too would become subject to society gossip, my husband and I and the woman with the lilac ribbon?