Portraits of a Marriage (2 page)

There was a conversation we had over breakfast once. “Those mauve covers in the dining room are a little tiring,” he said. “They are quite crude and loud, like people who are always shouting at each other. Take a look round town, my dear, and find some different covers in time for fall.”

Twelve chairs needed recovering in some less “tiring” color.

I looked at him in confusion. I thought he was joking. But it was no joke—he carried on reading the papers with a perfectly serious expression. I could see that he had clearly thought through what he had just said, that the mauve color—a little common, I must admit—really did irritate him. My mother had chosen it. It was brand-new. I cried when he left. I’m not completely stupid; I understood perfectly what he meant … What he wanted to say was something that could never be said directly, in plain, simple words: that there was a gulf in culture between us, that his world was not mine; that though I knew everything and had learned all there was to learn, that though I was middle-class, just as he was, my circumstances were—in tiny but vital details—different from those he had loved and had gotten used to. The middle classes are far more sensitive to such subtle distinctions than the aristocracy are. Those in the middle are forever having to secure and display their status. The upper class have no such need: their positions are assured from birth. Those in the middle are always aspiring to some position or protecting it. My husband was no longer of the aspiring generation: he had in fact surpassed even those who had something to protect. He talked about this once. He was reading a German book, saying how he had discovered the answer to the great questions of life in it, including questions of the self. I don’t like such “great questions”—my view is that life consists of a million little questions and that it is always only the totality of those that really matters. So I asked, a little mockingly:

“Do you really think you have finally come to know yourself?”

“Of course,” he answered. And he looked at me from under his glasses with such childlike seriousness and goodwill that I regretted asking
the question. “I am an artist,” he continued. “It is the only thing I have any gift for. It’s not uncommon in my class. That’s how families eventually come a cropper.”

He never talked about it again.

I didn’t understand it then. He never wrote, never painted, never played any musical instrument. He despised “art lovers.” But he did read a lot, “systematically”—his favorite word—a little too systematically for my taste. I read passionately, according to mood. He read as though he were carrying out one of life’s important duties. Once he had begun a book he wouldn’t leave it until it was finished—not even when it annoyed or bored him. Reading was a religious obligation for him: he valued letters as highly as priests do relics. But he was like that with pictures too, and with museums, theaters, and concerts. Everything interested him, literally everything. But the only thing I was “interested in” was him.

It was just that he did not practice any art. He ran the factory, traveled a lot, employed artists, and made a point of paying them particularly well. But he was very careful that he should not impose his tastes, which were far different from those of the majority of his employees and advisers, on his colleagues. He never raised his voice. He spoke gently and courteously, as if he had constantly to be apologizing for something; as if he were at a loss in some matter and required help. At the same time he knew when to stick to his principles in important matters—and in business.

Do you know what my husband was? He was that rarest of all beings in creation. He was a man. He was manly.

I don’t mean in the romantic, theatrical sense of the word. Not the way a champion boxer might be said to be manly. It was his spirit that was manly: inquiring, logical, restless, adventurous, and suspicious. That was another thing about him I didn’t know at the time. Discovering such things is one of life’s hardest lessons.

It’s not what we learned at school, is it, you and I?

Perhaps I should begin at the point when he introduced me to one of his friends, the writer, Lázár. Do you know him? … Have you read his books? … I’ve read everything he has written now. I have burrowed my way through his books, thinking there must be some secret hidden in them, as if they might solve the enigma of my own life. But no. There
are no answers to enigmas like that. It is life itself that provides the answers, sometimes quite surprising ones. I hadn’t read a single line of his before. Yes, I knew him by name, but had no idea my husband knew him personally—that they were friends. I came home one evening in the third year of my marriage and found him with my husband. This was the beginning of my other education. It was the first time I realized I knew nothing about my husband. I’d been living with a man yet knew nothing about him. Sometimes now I think, or rather I know, indeed am all too aware of the fact, that I had no idea what he really liked, the kind of things he preferred, and was utterly ignorant of his desires. Do you know what the two of them were doing that evening, Lázár and my husband? …

They were playing.

It was a strange, unsettling kind of game.

It wasn’t a game of rummy: nothing like it. In any case, my husband hated and despised all formal recreation, and that included cards. They were playing, but in a grotesque kind of way, a little frighteningly, so I simply couldn’t understand it at first but was frightened and nervous as they talked, as if I had blundered into some lunatic conversation. I couldn’t recognize the man engaged with that stranger as my husband. As I said, we had been married three years. The stranger leapt to his feet, glanced at my husband, and, very politely, said:

“Welcome, Ilonka. I hope you don’t mind me bringing Peter home?”

And he pointed to my husband, who stood up awkwardly and gave me an apologetic look. I thought they’d gone mad. But they didn’t really pay me much attention after that. The stranger slapped my husband on the back and said:

“We met on Arena utca. Imagine, he didn’t want to stop, the idiot—he just said hello and went on. I wasn’t going to let him do that, of course. I said, ‘Peter, you old fool, you’re not cross with me? …’ Then I took his arm and brought him home. So, my dears,” he said and spread his arms, “give each other a hug. I will even allow you a kiss.”

You may imagine how I stood there. Gloves in hand, my handbag on my arm, still wearing my hat, I stood in the middle of the room like some donkey, wide-eyed and staring. My first thought was to run to the telephone and ring the doctor or the ambulance. Or the police. But my husband took my hand and kissed it, saying:

“Let’s put this behind us, Ilonka. I am so pleased you are happy together.”

Then we sat down to supper. The writer sat in Peter’s place, took charge, and issued his instructions as if he were master of the house. He addressed me using the informal
te
. Naturally, the maid thought we had all gone mad and was so frightened she dropped the salad dish. They didn’t explain the game to me that evening and that, in fact, was the point of the game. I should be told nothing. They had planned it, the pair of them, while waiting for me, and they acted it out perfectly, like professional actors. The game was based on the idea that I had divorced Peter some years ago and had moved in with the writer, my husband’s friend. Peter was so upset by this—in the game, that is—that he had left everything to us: the house, the furniture, the lot. In other words the writer was now my husband. Peter, so went the game, had met the writer in the street and the writer had taken him by the arm—by “him” I mean my offended, divorced husband—and said: “Look, let’s have no more of this. What’s happened has happened, come and have supper with us.” And Peter had accepted the invitation. And now we were together, all three of us, in the house where I had “previously” lived with Peter, having a friendly supper, the writer now “being” my husband, sleeping in Peter’s bed, taking his place in my life … You understand? That was the mad game they were playing.

But the game had some subtle refinements.

Peter pretended he was on edge, tortured by his memories. The writer pretended that he was rather
too
free and easy, a little too relaxed about it, because, after all, the strange situation was not entirely without stress for him either, since he would have felt guilty with Peter there, and that, precisely, was why he was being so loud and jovial. I “pretended” … but no, I wasn’t pretending, I just sat with them and stared, now at one, now at the other of these two grown, intelligent men who, for some reason I couldn’t begin to guess, were playing the idiot. I did slowly begin to understand the more subtle “rules of the game.” But I understood something else that evening too.

I understood that my husband, whom I had previously believed to be entirely mine—every last inch of him, as they say, right down to the recesses of his soul—was not at all mine but a stranger with secrets. It was like discovering something shocking about him: that he had served
time in jail or that he had perverse passions, something that didn’t fit the picture I had of him—I mean the picture I had been painting of him in my own soul. I understood that my husband was only tied to me in certain specific ways, but that in others he remained a mysterious, unfamiliar figure, someone just as strange as the writer who had stopped him in the street and “brought him here.” I understood that what was going on was in some way against me but above my head; that, more than comrades, they were accomplices.

I understood that my husband inhabited worlds other than the one I knew. I understood that this other man, the writer, exercised a certain power over my husband’s soul.

Tell me—what do you think power is? … Because there is so much written and said about it. What is political power, what’s the cause of it, how does it happen that a man can exert his will over millions? And what does our power, women’s power, consist of? Love, you say. Well, maybe it
is
love. Myself, I have occasional doubts about the word nowadays. I don’t deny love, not by any means. It is the greatest earthly power. And yet sometimes I feel that men, when they love us, do so because they have no choice, and that they even look down on love—on us—a little. In every real man there is a kind of reserve, as if he had closed off some part of his soul, kept it away from women, and said, “You can come so far, darling, but no farther. Here is my seventh room. Here, I want to be alone.” It drives the more stupid kind of woman quite mad. They lose their tempers. The wiser sort are first sad and curious, then resign themselves to it.

But what kind of power can one person have over another’s soul? Why did this unhappy, restless, clever, frightening, and at the same time foolish, wounded person—this writer—exercise his power over my husband’s soul?

Because power he had, as I was to find out: a dangerous, even fatal power. One time, much later, my husband said that the role of this man was to be “a witness” to his life. He tried very hard to explain this. The way he put it was that there existed a witness figure of some kind in everyone’s life: someone we meet in youth, someone we recognize and consider stronger than we are, so that everything we do afterward is an
attempt to hide whatever we are ashamed of from this witness-turned-merciless-judge. The witness-judge doesn’t readily believe us. He knows something about us that no one else does. We might become important people—we might be ministers of state, we might be awarded the Nobel Prize—but the witness simply stands by and smiles as if to say, “Do you really take yourself so seriously?” …

And he went on to explain that everything we did was, to some extent, done for this witness: it was he who had to be convinced, it was to him we had to prove something. Our careers, the great struggles of our individual lives, were all, first and foremost, for the witness’s benefit. You know that awkward moment when a young husband first introduces his wife to “the” friend, the great companion of his childhood, then stands by, anxiously watching to see if the friend approves his choice of partner and finds her attractive? … Naturally the friend is courteous and thoughtful, but secretly he is jealous, because, whatever he thinks of her, he is the figure the woman is replacing in a sentimental relationship. So, you see, that was the way they were both weighing me up that evening. The trouble was, they already knew a great deal, the two of them, much more than I could begin to guess.

Because another thing I understood from their conversation that evening was that these two accomplices, my husband and the writer, had their own thoughts about men and women and about human relationships in general, thoughts my husband had never discussed with me. This hurt, because it suggested that I was not worth talking to about such things—about things in general.

When the stranger left some time after midnight, I confronted my husband and asked him directly:

“Tell me honestly, do you look down on me, just a little?”

He gazed at me through cigar smoke, tired, his eyes screwed up, as though he were suffering a hangover after an orgy, and considered my question carefully. To tell you the truth, by the time this evening was over, by the time my husband had finished playing this peculiar game with the writer he’d brought home, I felt worse than if he’d been at a real orgy. We were both exhausted. Strange, bitter feelings were stirring in me.

“No,” he replied solemnly. “I don’t look down on you, not at all.
Why should you think that? You are an intelligent woman with powerful instincts,” he added.

It sounded convincing but I didn’t quite trust him. I sat down opposite him at the cleared table—we had been sitting at the table the whole evening, not moving to the comfort of the parlor, because the guest preferred sitting and chatting among a heap of cigarette butts and empty bottles of wine.

“Yes, I am intelligent and have powerful instincts,” I answered, then hesitated. “But what do you think of my character, my soul?”

I was aware the question sounded a little pathetic. My husband gave me his full attention, but did not answer me.

It was as if he were saying: “That must remain my secret. Let it be enough that I acknowledge your intelligence and the power of your instincts.”