Portraits of a Marriage (35 page)

Here’s the coffee. Go on, drink it. Here’s your cigarette. Now listen.

I’m always nervous when talking about this, so don’t be surprised if I sometimes show it, sweetheart. A lot of things happened to us. We,
who lived in Pest throughout the siege and all that came before and after it. It was a mercy you were away from it in the provinces at the time. You are a wise man. So wonderful.

Well, I’m sure everything was better in Zala. But we who were rotting away in the cellars of Pest, waiting for bombs, we had a hard time. You were also wise to find your way to Pest no earlier than ’47, by which time there was a government in place and the bars were open. I believe you when you say they welcomed you with open arms. But don’t talk about that to anyone. There are a lot of bad people about, and some Jew, a survivor of the labor camps, might suggest you had some reason for lying low in Zala till ’47. All right, all right, I’ll shut up.

This man, the artistic one, once told me we had all gone mad, all of us who survived the siege. And that we’re all in the madhouse now.

Who was this artistic-looking gentleman? Well, he was not a drummer. There is only one drummer in the world that matters, darling, and that is you. He didn’t have an Italian work permit … the kind of work he did needed no permit. For a while he wrote books. Take that frown off your face, I know you don’t like reading. I can’t bear to look at you with your brow furrowed like that. Don’t rack your brains, you wouldn’t have heard of him anyway. What did he write? Lyrics? The kind of song lyrics your band plays in the bar? No, I don’t think that was his sort of thing. True, by the time I met him, he was playing with the idea of writing songs for café singers, and he might have if they’d asked him. That’s because, by that time, no other form of writing interested him. He might even have been willing to do some copywriting, he felt such contempt for the written word. He loathed his own writing too, not just the stuff others wrote, that anyone ever wrote. Why? I don’t really know, but I have my suspicions. He once told me he understood book burning because there has never been a single book that could help people.

Was he crazy? Well, you see, that had never occurred to me. What a clever man you are!

Do you want to know what went on there, in the elegant house where I served as a maid? All right, I’ll explain. But listen carefully to what I am about to tell you, because it’s no fairy tale: it’s what school textbooks
call history. I know books and schools were never your style. Nevertheless, listen, because what I am about to tell you has vanished from the world. It’s as distant as those stories you hear about ancient Hungarians who went about the world on horseback and tenderized their steak by keeping it under the saddle. They wore helmets and armor, they lived and died in those things. My employers were historical characters, like them, like the great chieftain Árpád, father of the Hungarians, leader of the seven chieftains, as you might remember from your village school. Wait, I’ll sit down next to you on the bed. Give me a cigarette. Thanks. So it was like this.

I want to explain to you why I never felt comfortable in that lovely house. Because they treated me very well. The old man, His Excellency, treated me like an orphan, a poor little soul—you know, like a relative with a clubfoot from the poor side of the family forced to take shelter with the rich side. And the charitable family does everything possible not to make the newcomer self-conscious about the sad difference in status. It might have been the charity that was the most annoying thing. It made me so angry!

Mind you, I made my peace with the old master pretty soon. Do you know why? Because he was mean. He was the only one in the family who never tried to be kind to me. He never addressed me as “Judit, love.” He gave me no cheap gifts, no hand-me-down clothes from gentlefolk, like the old lady—Her Ladyship—who gave me her ragged winter coat, or the young master, the young master who later married me, who gave me the right to be called Her Ladyship. He himself had some office, such as lord of the City Council, but he didn’t care much for titles and never used it. He didn’t even like people calling him the usual “Your Excellency.” It was to be “Doctor” at all times. But I was already Her Ladyship by then. Not that he bothered with that, either. It amused him when the servants started addressing me as “Your Ladyship.” It was a slightly sarcastic sort of amusement at silly people who took such things too seriously.

The old master was different. He tolerated the “excellency” stuff because he was a practical man who knew that the great majority of people were not only grasping but vain and stupid too and that there was nothing you could do about it. The old man never asked. He ordered. If I made a mistake, he growled at me, and I was so frightened
I would drop the tray or whatever I was holding. If he so much as looked at me, my palms would begin to sweat and I trembled. He looked like one of those bronze statues you see in Italian towns, in the square … you know, those early-century statues when merchants became proper subjects for bronze … potbellied little squirts in frock coats and rumpled trousers. In other words, patriots, patriots who did nothing but get up in the morning and play the patriot till it was time for bed again; the kind of people who earn a statue by founding the local horse abattoir, that kind of thing. And their pants were just as rumpled in real-life cloth as in bronze. The old man would look about him in the manner of those turn-of-the-century statues, giving us his statue look, much like the real merchants, the statues’ originals, I expect.

I might have been an insignificant puff of wind as far as he was concerned, not quite human. I was nothing. When I brought the orange juice to his room—they were strange like that, starting the day with orange juice, followed by gym and the punching bag, then a sugarless tea, with proper breakfast only later, a big breakfast enough for two in the morning room, as regularly as Easter mass in the village church at home—when I brought in the orange juice, I wouldn’t dare look at the old man as he lay in bed, reading by the bedside light. I was too frightened to look into his eyes.

The old man wasn’t, in fact, all that old at the time. Nor was I always nothing to him. I think I can tell you now that he’s gone, that sometimes—when I was helping him on with his coat in the dark hall—he went so far as to pinch my ass or pull my ear. In other words, he gave me unmistakable signs that he thought me attractive and that the only reason he wasn’t about to proposition me was that he was a man of taste who considered me below his rank. He was not the kind to have an affair with a servant. What I thought was: I’m just a servant in the house. If the old man wants to have his way, if he insists, let’s just put up with it and drop the idea of pleasure. I had no right to resist the wishes of such a powerful, stern figure. It was probably what he thought too. He would have been mightily surprised if I did resist.

But it never came to that. He was the master, that’s all, so whatever he wanted would have to be.
He
would never have thought of taking me for wife, not in his wildest dreams. Nor would he have wondered,
not for a second, if it was right or wrong to have his way with me. That’s why I preferred serving on the old man. I was young, healthy, and vigorous, fully aware of my youth and health, and I loathed the idea of being ill. The old man still had a healthy, vigorous mind. His wife and his son—the one who later married me—were already ill. It’s not that I thought as much: I just knew it.

Everything in the elegant house was beset with danger. For a long time I just stared and gawked the way I did as a child when I was sick and found myself in hospital. The hospital was quite an experience for me, perhaps the greatest and most beautiful experience of my childhood. A dog had bitten me, here on the calf, and the district medical officer wouldn’t have me being tended in the ditch where we were living, bound up in rags, the way we always were whenever we cut ourselves. He sent a gendarme for me and had me carried to hospital by force.

The hospital in the nearby little town was just an old building, but to me it seemed a magical fairy-tale castle.

I was interested in everything and frightened of everything there. Even the smell, that country-hospital smell, was exciting! And attractive too, simply by virtue of being new, a smell different from the smell of the ditch, the burrow where I lived like an animal with my dad, my mother, and the rest of the family: polecat, field mouse, hamster, we were all these things. The hospital was treating me for rabies and gave me painful injections, but what did I care about injections or rabies! Night and day I watched the comings and goings of the world: the suicidal, the cancer-ridden, and the incontinent, all in a common ward. Later, in Paris, I saw a lovely engraving of an ancient French hospital at the time of the revolution, a vaulted hall where ragged people sat in beds. My hospital was just as unlikely a place for me to spend the best days of my childhood, the best being the days when I was in danger of contracting rabies.

But I didn’t get rabies. They cured me. At least I didn’t get it then, not the way they describe the disease in textbooks. But maybe something rabid remained in me. I sometimes wondered about it later. They say people with rabies are constantly thirsty while at the same time being frightened of water. I felt a bit like that myself whenever things
were going well. I have been intensely thirsty all my life, but whenever I found a way of quenching my thirst I recoiled from it in disgust. Don’t worry, I won’t bite you.

It was this hospital I was reminded of—that and the rabies—when I landed up at the elegant house.

There wasn’t a large garden, but it was scented like a rural drugstore. They used to bring home strange herbs from abroad. Everything was from abroad there, you know, even the toilet paper! Don’t stare like that! They never went shopping like ordinary mortals, you know. They just rang the wholesaler, who brought them everything they needed—meat for the kitchen, shrubs for the garden, a new record for the record player, books, bath salts, scents, pomades whose smells were so dreamlike, so exciting, sweet, and tantalizing they made me dizzy and quite sick. I practically wept with emotion whenever I cleaned the bathroom after them and smelled their soap and cologne, every lingering smell and scent. And it was all on account.

The rich are strange, darling. As you know, I myself was pretty rich for a while. I had a maid to scrub my back in the morning. I even had a car, a convertible coupe, driven by a chauffeur. I had an open sports car, too, to race about in. And, believe it or not, I didn’t feel in the least embarrassed to be moving among them. I was not retiring or bashful. I made myself at home. There were moments I imagined I was really rich. But now I know that I wasn’t, not really, not for a second. I simply had jewels, money, and a bank account. I was granted these things by those who could afford them. Or I took it from them, when I had the opportunity. I was a clever little girl, you see. I learned in the ditch, in my childhood, not to be idle, to pick up whatever lay at hand, to smell it, take a bite of it, and to hide it—to hide everything that others threw away. An old enameled pot with a hole in it was just as valuable as a precious stone. I was just a slip of a girl when I learned that lesson. You can never be too industrious.

Now, these rainy days, that’s what I always ask myself. Have I been industrious? Have I given things proper attention? I don’t suffer from pangs of conscience. On the contrary, I worry in case I’ve forgotten to take anything I could have. Like you. For example, that ring of mine
that you sold yesterday … you struck a really good deal, darling. I’m proud of you. I’m not just saying that—after all, no one knows better than you do how to sell jewelry. I don’t know where I’d be without you. I say “my” ring, but it was really the ring Her Old Ladyship used to wear. It was a present from the old man for their silver wedding anniversary. I found it by accident in a drawer after the old woman died. I was the lady of the house by then and felt entitled to it. I put the ring on and examined it. And I remembered how many years ago, after first coming to the house, I found a ring on the laundry table among other forgotten things while the old girl was happily splashing about in the bath: an old-fashioned, heavy ring with a fat gemstone in it. I put it on and examined it with such nervous excitement that I started trembling, threw the ring back onto the table, and ran to the toilet, because my whole body was seized with cramps, I felt so sick. It was all because of the ring. But this time, after Her Ladyship’s death, I said nothing to my husband. I just slipped it into my pocket. I didn’t steal it. It was mine by right, since after his mother’s death my husband gave me anything that even faintly sparkled. But it felt good just to take this one ring, the one she proudly wore on her finger, and to put it into my pocket without my husband knowing, without his permission. And I looked after it really well—that is, until yesterday, when you finally sold it.

What are you laughing at? Take it from me, that house was so particular even the toilet paper was imported from abroad. There were four bathrooms: the one for the old lady had pale green tiles, the young gentleman’s were yellow, the old boy’s dark blue. The fourth was used by the servants. All the bathrooms except ours had matching toilet paper, imported from America. There’s everything you want in America—vast industries and plenty of millionaires. I’d like to go there sometime. I heard my husband, the first one, the real one, went there after the war when he decided he wanted no more of the People’s Democracy. But I wouldn’t want to meet him now. Why? What would be the point? Sometimes it just happens that two people have said everything they could possibly say to each other and have nothing left to say.

Not that you can ever be sure of that. Some conversations go on forever. Wait, I haven’t finished!

.  .  .

It was a beautiful house and we servants had our own bathroom, but that just had ordinary white tiles. The paper we used was ordinary white too, a little rough, as I remember. It was a well-ordered house.

The old man was the mainspring of order. Everything went as smooth as clockwork, with the delicate precision of a fine lady’s watch bought not two weeks ago. The staff rose at six in the morning. The ritual of cleaning had to be as religiously attended to as mass at church. Brooms, brushes, dusters, rags, the window cloths, proper oils for parquet and furniture—the refined grease with which we treated the floorboards was like those highly expensive egg-based preparations beauty salons produce for the glamorous—and I mustn’t forget all the exciting machinery, like the vacuum cleaner, which did not merely suck the dirt from the rugs but brushed them too; the electric polisher that buffed the parquet so bright you could see your face in it. I used to stop sometimes and simply gaze at myself like those nymphs in the ancient Greek reliefs … yes, I’d lean over and examine my face, my eyes sparkling, just as absorbed, as startled as that half-boy, half-girl statue I once saw in the museum looking adoringly at his or her charming reflection.