Portraits of a Marriage (16 page)

After visiting Lázár I went home and said nothing about Judit Áldozó to my husband. By that time, poor man, he knew everything. It was only the most important fact he was missing. And I couldn’t tell him, because I didn’t know it myself then, and would not know it for some time afterwards … Only Lázár knew—yes, then, as I was saying good-bye, when he suddenly went strangely silent. It must have been what he was thinking of. But he said nothing himself, because the most important things are not the kind of things you can say to anyone. People have to learn it for themselves.

The most important thing? … Look, I don’t want to upset you. You are a little in love with that Swedish teacher, aren’t you? … Am I right? … Fine, I am not asking for confessions. But allow me to keep silent too. I wouldn’t want to ruin that lovely, sweeping emotion. I wouldn’t want to hurt you in any way.

I don’t know when my husband actually spoke with Lázár, the next day or weeks later, nor do I know what was said. But everything worked out the way Lázár said it would. My husband knew everything: he knew I had found the lilac ribbon, and that I knew who wore the locket. He knew I had spoken with Judit Áldozó, who did in fact resign from my mother-in-law’s service at the beginning of the next month. She disappeared for two years. My husband hired private detectives to find her, but grew tired of it and fell ill. He called the detectives off. Do you know what my husband did in the two years of her disappearance?

He waited.

I had no idea it was possible to wait like that. It was as if he had been sentenced to forced labor and set to breaking stones in a quarry. He broke the stones with such strength, with such discipline, with so much
devotion, in such despair … By that time not even I could help him, and if I had to tell the truth while lying on my deathbed, I would have to confess that I didn’t actually want to help him. My own heart was full of bitterness and despair then. I watched his terrible spiritual exertion for two years. This smiling, wordless, courteous, ever paler, ever more silent argument with somebody or something … You watch how some people rush for the morning mail: it’s as if they were a kind of drug addict. They put a hand into the mailbox, feel there is nothing there, and you see their hand emerge, hovering, empty … You watch someone’s head jerk to attention as the telephone rings. You see his shoulder tense when he hears the doorbell. His eyes flick hither and thither in the restaurant and the theater foyer, always searching, searching every corner of the universe. We spent two years like this. But there was no trace of Judit Áldozó. Later we discovered she had traveled abroad and worked as a maid in an English doctor’s house in London. Hungarian servants were in demand in England then.

Her family heard nothing from her, nor did my mother-in-law. I visited my mother-in-law pretty regularly in those two years. I spent whole afternoons there. Her health was deteriorating, poor thing: she had suffered a thrombosis and had to lie immobile for months on end. I used to sit at her bedside. I grew very fond of her. We sat, we read, we knitted and made conversation. It was almost as though we were weaving a tapestry, the way medieval women did while their husbands were away in the war. I knew that my husband’s part in the battle was likely to be dangerous. He could be killed any moment. My mother-in-law knew it too. But neither of us could help him now. That was
his
problem now … he was alone, his life in considerable danger, and he himself could do nothing but wait.

The two of us, my mother-in-law and I, walked about on tiptoe in the meantime; we lived and wove our tapestry around him. We were like nurses. We talked about other things, sometimes cheerfully, as if nothing had happened. It might have been a peculiar form of tact or just intense embarrassment, but eventually it got so that my mother-in-law never spoke about what had happened. That noon, when she sat down opposite us in the maid’s room and wept, we formed an unspoken pact to help each other, as far as possible, promising we would not talk unnecessarily or despairingly about the situation. If we talked about my
husband, it was as of a charming, amiable invalid who happened to be in a condition that concerned us but not in immediate danger of his life … Yes, as of someone who could still go on a long time … Our role was simply to adjust the pillow under his head, to open the odd jar of preserves, or to amuse him by chatting about events in the world at large. And indeed, throughout these two years, my husband and I led a calm and orderly life at home, without very much socializing. My husband had already begun to dismantle everything that might tie us to society and the world outside. Over two years he slowly, with the greatest tact and refinement, made his exit, walking away from his own life, but in such a manner as not to offend anyone. Little by little our acquaintances were cut off and we remained alone. Actually it wasn’t as bad as you might think. We spent five days out of the seven at home. We listened to music or read. Lázár never visited us again. He too went abroad, and lived in Rome for several months.

So that’s how we lived. All three of us were waiting for something: my mother-in-law for death, my husband for Judit Áldozó, and I for the moment that either death or the return of Judit Áldozó, or some other unforeseen, unavoidable event, should make it clear what I should do with my life and where I belonged … You were asking why I did not leave my husband. How could I live with someone who is waiting for someone else, who springs to attention each time the door opens, who has grown pale, is avoiding people, cuts himself off from the world, is sick unto death with some disease of the emotions, who is eaten away with simply waiting? Well, it wasn’t easy, not at all. It is not the most pleasant of situations. But I was his wife and couldn’t leave him, because he was in trouble and in danger. I was his wife and had made a sacred vow to remain with him and suffer with him, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, as long as he wanted me, as long as he had need of me. Well, he needed me now. He would have wasted away if left alone those two years. We carried on, waiting for some earthly or heavenly sign. We were waiting for Judit Áldozó.

Because the moment he discovered that the woman had left town and gone to England—it was just that no one knew her address in England, neither her family nor her friends—my husband became genuinely ill with waiting, and there is probably no greater suffering than waiting. I know the feeling … Later, once we were divorced, I was
waiting for him much the same way, for about a year. You know how it is: you wake up in the morning like an asthmatic, gasping for air. You put a hand out in the dark seeking another hand. You can’t understand how the other person is no longer there, nearby, in the next house or the next street. You walk down the street but the other person is not there to meet you. There’s no point in having a telephone; the papers are full of news that means nothing to you—items of no consequence, such as that a world war has broken out, or that in a capital city of some one million inhabitants whole rows of streets have been destroyed … You hear out the news politely, as it goes in one ear and out the other, and say things like: “Really? … Imagine! … How interesting!” or “How sad!” But you don’t feel anything. There is a lovely, wise, sad Spanish book—I’ve forgotten the author’s name; it was the kind of name a toreador might have, a very long name—in which I read that in this sleepy, feverish, magical state, the state experienced by those who wait or are absent from those they love, there is something of the self-induced trance; even their eyes are like the eyes of sick people when they wake from sleep, exhausted, far away, their eyelids slow to rise. People like that see nothing of the world, they just see a face, the one face; nor do they hear anything, just the one name.

But one day they wake.

Take me, for example.

They look around and rub their eyes. They can see rather more than one face now … or to be precise, they still see the face but it’s as if through a haze. They see a church spire, a copse of trees, a picture, a book, other people’s faces: they see the infinite variety of the world. It is an extraordinary feeling. What was unbearably painful and raw to the touch one day no longer hurts. You sit on a bench and feel calm. You think thoughts like “Chicken stew” or
“Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.”
Or “I should buy a new bulb for the table lamp.” All this constitutes reality, each part as important as the rest. Yesterday all this seemed impossible, pointless and uncertain: yesterday was a different reality. Yesterday you still yearned for revenge or deliverance, you wanted him to ring you or to need you, you wanted him to be carted off to jail and executed. While you still feel this, the other person is out of reach and laughing. While you still feel it, you are in his power. As long as you are crying out for vengeance, he is gleefully rubbing his hands together,
because vengeance is desire too: vengeance is dependency. But there comes a day when you wake, rub your eyes, give a yawn, and suddenly discover you don’t want anything. You could bump into him in the street and it wouldn’t matter to you. Should he ring, you’d pick it up if you felt like it. Should he want to see you and insist you must meet, well, why not? And you know what? All this time, you are relaxed, at ease with yourself … there is no tension, no pain, nothing trancelike in it. What happened? You don’t understand. Now you no longer want vengeance, no vengeance at all … and you discover what real vengeance is, the only, perfect form of vengeance, which is that there is nothing you want from him, you wish him no harm but no good either, he cannot hurt you anymore. Men in bygone days used to write letters to their lovers at such times, addressing them as “Dear madam …” And that said everything, you know. What it said was: “There is no more pain to be got out of me.” That was the point a wise woman started sobbing. Or not. A wise man may then send a magnificent gift, a bunch of roses or a life annuity … why not? You can do anything, now it no longer hurts.

That’s how it is. I’ve been through it. One day I woke and started to live again. I got on my feet and walked.

But my husband, poor soul, did not wake. I don’t know whether he is cured even now. Sometimes I pray for him.

So two years passed. How did we spend our time? We carried on living. My husband said good-bye to the world, quit his social circle, stopped seeing people—all without saying a word, like a swindler who is secretly planning to skip the country but keeps working, apparently conscientiously. The other person—his real wife—was abroad. We waited for her. It wasn’t a bad life: the fact is, we got on quite well those two years. Sometimes, at table or reading a book, I stole a glance at his face, the way a relative might steal a glance at the face of someone sick, and while they are inwardly horrified at the other’s sickly pallor, they smile sweetly and pass a cheerful remark, such as “You’re looking much better today.” We were waiting for Judit Áldozó, who had vanished from town, the monster … Because she knew that was the worst thing she could do. You don’t believe me? You think she might not have been a monster? You think she too paid a price, she too fought, she too is a woman, maybe, she too felt something? Am I right? … Go on, comfort
me, because I would really like to think so myself. She had sat around for twelve years and then she charged off to England. There she learned English, she learned how to eat in polite company, she got to see the sea. Then one day she came home with seventy pounds in her purse, wearing a tartan skirt and cologne by Atkinson. That was the point at which we divorced.

It broke my heart, of course. For a whole year I thought I might die of it. But then one day I woke up and learned something … yes, the most important thing a person can learn by herself.

Shall I tell you what that is?

I won’t hurt you?

You can bear it?

Well, yes, I bore it. But I am reluctant to tell just anyone, I don’t want to take away people’s illusions by telling them they have invested all that faith in a false idol, one that begets so much suffering and so much that is wonderful: heroic deeds, works of art, extraordinary human endeavors. I know you are in that condition at the moment. You still want me to tell you? …

All right, since you ask. But you mustn’t be angry with me afterwards. Look, darling, God has punished—and rewarded—me by allowing me to suffer and not die in the process. What was it I discovered? … Well, my dear, it was this: that there isn’t a real wife; not a real anything.

One day I woke, sat up in bed, and smiled. I felt no pain at all. Suddenly I understood that none of this was real. That there is no real anything on earth or in heaven. No real wife, no intended, that’s for certain. There are only people, and there isn’t that certain one-and-only, wonderful, single being, the one fated to make you happy. There are only people, and people have something of everything in them: sugar, salt, the sweet and the bitter, the lot … Lázár knew that when we stood in the door and parted, but he said nothing, only smiled, because I had told him that I was going away and would find my husband’s intended, his real life. He knew she was nowhere to be found … But he didn’t say anything, then went off to Rome and wrote a book. That’s what all writers do in the end.

My husband, poor soul, was not a writer: he was a solid citizen, an artist without an art. That’s why he suffered so much. Then, when one day Judit Áldozó returned, the woman he believed to be his real wife,
wearing cologne from Atkinson, saying “Hello” on the phone like an Englishwoman—well, that was when we divorced. It was a difficult divorce, even if I say so myself. I insisted on the piano.

He didn’t marry her straightaway, only a year later. How do they get on? Just fine, I think. You saw him a little while ago, buying candied orange peel for her.

It’s just that he’s aged. Not a lot, but in a melancholy sort of way. Do you think he knows by now? … I fear it may be too late by the time he finds out, that life will have passed him by.

Now look, they really are closing the shop.

I’m sorry? … What did you say? Why I started weeping when I saw him just now? Why, if there is no such thing as “the intended”—the chosen one, the real wife—and one is completely over it all, why I should have started powdering my nose when I saw he was still using that crocodile-skin wallet? Wait, let me think. I think I have the answer. The reason I felt embarrassed and started powdering my nose was because while there is no such thing as the one-and-only, special intended, and while I have no more illusions, I still happen to love him. Which is different. When we love someone, we can’t help our hearts beating a little faster every time someone talks about them, or whenever we see them. What I mean is: everything passes, but love does not. It’s just that it no longer has any practical significance.