Portraits of a Marriage (31 page)

And jealousy. What does that mean? What is there behind it? Vanity, of course. Seventy percent of our body is made up of fluids; only the remaining thirty percent is constituted of the solid matter that makes up a human being. In the same way, human character is comprised of seventy percent vanity, the rest made up of desire, generosity, fear of death, and a sense of honor. When a man in love walks down the street with bloodshot eyes because a woman—just as vain as he is, just as needy, just as lonely, just as desperate for happiness, just as unfortunate a creature as everyone else—has found brief solace in another man’s arms somewhere in town, it is not that he wants to save the woman’s body or soul from some imagined danger or humiliation: it’s his own vanity that he wishes to preserve from harm. Judit told me she had a Greek music master for a lover. I nodded politely, as if to say “Yes, I see,” and changed the subject. And indeed, right at that moment, I felt nothing. It was much later, once we had divorced, once I knew that other people loved her too, once I was alone, that I remembered the Greek music master, and groaned in fury and despair. Well, then, I thought, I would kill them both, both Judit and the Greek music master, if I ever laid hands on them. I suffered like a wounded creature, a wild animal shot in the thigh, all because a woman with whom I had nothing more to do, whose society I avoided because we had failed each other in every respect, had at some time in the past an affair with a man whom she, Judit, would only faintly remember now, the way one remembers a dead man one hardly knew. But then, at the moment she actually confessed to the affair, I felt nothing. I carried on peeling an apple with a polite, agreeable expression on my face, as if this were precisely what I expected to hear and I were content to get the anticipated news.

That was how we got to know each other.

Then, eventually, Judit had had enough of all that my money could buy her. She had bolted her food like a greedy child, and now she was sick. Disappointment and indifference followed. She woke up one day offended—not by me, not by the world at large, but by the realization
that no one can pursue their desires for long without due punishment. I found out that back in her childhood at home, on the farm, they were as unspeakably, as impossibly, as shamefully poor as sociological studies sometimes describe. They had a little house and a few acres of land, but debt and the size of the family meant they had to sell. After this there remained nothing but a shack and a yard. And that’s where they lived, her father, her mother, and her paralyzed sister. The children were scattered about the world: they were engaged in service. She spoke about her childhood without emotion, in a matter-of-fact way, but it took her a long time to speak about poverty. She never tried to make me feel guilty; she was too much of a real woman for that—in other words, she was wise and practical in the essential things. People don’t blame fate for death, sickness, and poverty, they accept and bear it: she simply stated things. She told me how in winter they lived underground, she and the family. Judit would have been six when famine drove them from their home to another part of the country, where they took jobs harvesting melons. She didn’t mean “living underground” in a figurative sense: she meant really underground, digging a deep ditch in the earth, covering it with reeds, and spending the entire winter there. She also told me, in great detail—and I could see this childhood memory meant a lot to her—that there were dreadful frosts that year, so the meadow mice had to scamper all over them and take refuge with them in the ditch. It was very unpleasant, Judit recalled, in a faraway voice but without complaint.

So you see, there was this beautiful woman sitting opposite me with expensive furs round her neck, her fingers glittering with jewels in the dazzling restaurant, so not a man could pass by without running a brief glance up and down her, and all the while she was quietly telling me how unpleasant it had been living underground in the great frost with thousands of mice running over their makeshift beds. At times like this I sat in silence beside her, looking at her, listening to her. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had slapped me across the face sometimes, not for any particular reason but simply because she happened to remember something. But Judit simply continued talking, as matter-of-fact as ever. She knew more about poverty, the world, and living with others than all the sociological textbooks put together. She never blamed anything or anyone; she simply remembered and observed.

But as I say, one day she had had enough of her new life. She was sick of it. Maybe she had recalled something. Maybe she understood that she couldn’t be compensated for all that had happened to her and the others, to countless millions of people, by rushing round the shops: that there was no solution to be found on the individual level. Great matters are not settled by personal means. The personal is hopeless, superfluous. There is no personal recompense for what has happened and goes on happening to people at large, for what happens now and has happened for a thousand years. And all those who break free for a moment, emerge from the shadows, and bathe in the light: even in their happiest moments they harbor the guilty memory of their betrayal. It is as if they had committed their souls for eternity to those left behind. Did she know all this? She never talked about it. People don’t talk about the reasons for their poverty. She remembered poverty as one of the natural world’s natural phenomena. She never blamed the rich. If anything, she blamed the poor, recalling them and everything that constituted poverty in slightly mocking fashion. As if the poor could somehow help it. As if poverty were a form of sickness, and all those who suffered with it might have somehow avoided it. Maybe they didn’t look after themselves properly; maybe they overate or didn’t wear the right clothes in the evening when it was cold. It was the accusing way close family speak of the chronically sick, as if the dying man suffering from acute anemia with only weeks to live might have done something about it. “He should have started taking his medicine earlier,” “He should have let someone open the window,” “He shouldn’t have stuffed himself with poppy-seed cake!” If only the poor man had done all this, he might have escaped the anemia that was killing him! That was something like the way Judit regarded the poor and poverty. It was as if she had said: “Someone should have done something about it.” But she never blamed the rich. She was too worldly-wise for that.

She was more worldly-wise than is wise, and now, when the goods of the world were laid out before her, she suddenly felt sick, because she had tried to cram in too much of it. But it was her memories that did it, really. Memories are more potent than indulgence. They are always more potent.

She wasn’t a delicate creature, but her memories still got the better of her. I could see her struggling against her weakness. Ever since the
world began, there have been healthy and sick, rich and poor. We can alleviate poverty, we can strive for greater equality, we can put limits on our greed, our profiteering, our rapacity, but we can’t turn a dullard into a genius by education, can’t teach the cloth-eared the heavenly beauties of music, nor can we teach temperance to the overfed. Judit never talked in terms of justice: she was too worldly-wise for that. The sun rises and sets, she thought, and you will always find the poor somewhere. She had risen from the ranks of the poor simply because she was beautiful, a woman, and because I desired her. But she was growing wise to me too. For her, it was like emerging from a trance. She started looking round. She started to listen.

Apart from our first meeting she had rarely looked directly at me. People don’t gaze into the eyes of an idea, into the eyes of supernatural beings that determine their fates. There must have been a certain glow, a kind of dazzling luminosity, around me in those early years that meant she had to blink and squint when she raised her eyes to meet mine. The effect wasn’t due to my personality or social rank, nor to the fact that I was a man or that I was in any way a special being. To her I had been a secret code that she dare not crack because such codes are the key to happiness and misery. I was, for her, the condition to which a person might aspire her entire life. But when the possibility of that condition arose and was achieved, she recoiled, was disappointed, and became vengeful. Lázár was very fond of one of Strindberg’s plays, the one called
A Dream Play
. Do you know it? … I have never seen it. He would often quote lines from it and recall particular scenes. He said there was a character whose one wish was that life should present him with “a green tackle box”: you know the kind of green box in which a fisherman keeps his hooks, lines, and bait. Well, this character grows old, life passes him by, and eventually the gods take pity on him and send him the box. The character looks at the box he has longed for all his life, moves to the front of the stage, examines the box more closely, and, with deep sadness, declares, “It’s not green enough …” Lázár quoted this sometimes when talking about human desire. And as Judit and I slowly grew more familiar I began to feel that I was “not green enough” for her. For a long time she did not dare see me as I was. People are always scared of seeing on an ordinary human scale things they have intensely desired or have raised into an ideal. We were living together by this time, and the intolerable
tension that had infected our earlier, more feverish years had gone: now we perceived each other as people, as man and woman, complete with physical weaknesses demanding simple human cures … and yet she still liked to regard me in a way I never saw myself. It was as if I were the priest of a strange religion or the scion of some aristocratic family. I saw myself merely as a lonely man nursing a few hopes.

The café is almost empty. There’s this cold smoke everywhere. We can go too, if you like. But I’ll just get to the end of the story first. Give me a light. Thanks. Having started, I might as well finish—if I don’t bore you. I was talking about hope, and I should say how I discovered the truth and how I could live with it. Shall I go on?

All right, then, listen. I’m listening too. I am looking deep into my soul as I speak. I am all ears. I said I wanted to tell you the truth, so that is what I am obliged to do.

You see, dear boy, I was hoping for a miracle. What kind of miracle? Well, simply that love might prove to be eternal; that its mysterious, superhuman power might overcome loneliness, dissolve the distance between two people, and break down any artificial barriers that society had erected in the form of education, money, history, and memory. I felt in mortal danger and was looking for a hand to grasp. I longed for reassurance that there really was such a thing as empathy, as companionship: that all this was still humanly possible. So I reached out for Judit.

Once the first phase of confusion, tension, and anxious waiting had passed, we naturally turned to each other for love. I married her and waited for the miracle.

I imagined the miracle to be quite simple. I thought the differences between us might dissolve in the great melting pot of love. I lay down in bed with her as if I had finally arrived home after a long exile, at the end of a voyage. Home is much simpler, but more mysterious and more important, than abroad, because not even the most exotic foreign place can offer the experiences a few familiar rooms can. I mean childhood. It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives. It’s what we recall when, much later, we see the Niagara Falls or Lake Michigan. We see the light and hear the sound of surprises, joys, hopes, and fears locked away in childhood. That is what we love, what we are forever
seeking. And for an adult, perhaps only love can conjure something of that tremulous hopeful sense of waiting … love—in other words, not just bed and all that bed entails, but those moments of searching, waiting, and hoping that throw two people together.

Judit and I lay down in bed and made love. We made love passionately, expectantly, in wonder and hope. We were probably hoping that what the world and mankind had ruined might be put right by the two of us eye-to-eye in this other, purer, more ancient realm, in that eternal country without and beyond borders. I mean in bed. Any love preceded by an extended period of waiting—though maybe it’s not exactly romantic love when just a few cinders remain unconsumed by the purgatorial fires of waiting—hopes for a miracle from both the other and itself. Neither Judit nor I was exactly a youngster by then, but we were not old, just man and woman, in the complete, most basic sense of those words. We reach an age when it is not purely sexual satisfaction we desire of each other, not full-blown happiness or release, but a simple and solemn truth that vanity and falsehood had previously hidden from us, hidden from us even when we were in love: it is the truth that we are human beings, we men and women, and that we share a common enterprise or responsibility on earth, a responsibility that may not be quite as personal as we think. Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it.

Once people are old enough, it is the truth they want, and they want it in bed, too, in the sheer physical underworld of it. It isn’t beauty we most want—after a while we stop noticing the beauty, anyway. It’s not that the other should be wonderful, exciting, wise, experienced, curious, lusty, and responsive. So what is it that matters so much? It is the truth. In other words, it is exactly the same thing as matters in literature and in all human affairs. This truth is a compound of spontaneity, readiness, and the willingness to be surprised by the miraculous gift of joy that arrives unplanned, unintended. Even when we are being selfish, wanting only to receive, it is the ability to give, to give in an almost distracted, vaguely conscious way, as it were, without planning, without mad ambition. It’s what I think of as “bed truth.” No, old man, there is no Soviet-style
pyatiletka
, no Five-Year Plan, nor Four-Year Plan, either. The feeling that drives two people together can have no plan.

Bed is jungle, wilderness, a place full of surprises, teeming with the
unexpected; there is the same unbearable dank heat, the same extraordinary flowers and lianas with their deathly scent and their ability to twine around you; the same glowing eyes of the same beasts of prey watching you in the half-light, the heraldic beasts of desire and obsession, ever ready to pounce. Jungle and half-light, strange cries in the distance—you can’t tell whether it is a man screaming by a well, his throat ripped open by some predator, or nature itself screaming, nature, which is human, animal, inhuman at once—bed entails all that. This woman knew all there was to be known. She had the secret knowledge: she knew the body. She knew self-control and loss of self-control. Love for her was not a series of occasional meetings but a constant return to a familiar childhood base: a blend of homecoming and festival; the dark-brown light over a field at dusk, the taste of certain familiar foods, the excitement and anticipation, and, under it all, the confidence that once evening came, there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk. She was like a child tired of playing, making her way home because the light in the window was calling her to a hot dinner and a clean bed. That was love as far as Judit was concerned.