Portraits of a Marriage (39 page)

I can see you don’t understand. They themselves could probably understand it on an intellectual level, they being such cultivated people, but not in their hearts or their guts. Their hearts and guts never had a moment of peace. They were afraid that all the calculations, all the planning, all that keeping things tidy, weren’t worth anything: that one day it would all be over. But what did they really think would be over? The family? The factory? The money? No, these people knew that what they were afraid of was nowhere near so simple. What they were afraid of was that one day they’d have no energy left and be too tired to hold things together. You know that Eytie mechanic, the one we took that ancient jalopy of a car to the other day, to see what was the matter with it? Remember how he told us the engine was still running and that there were no cracks in it, but that the whole thing had metal fatigue? It was as if my employers were frightened of developing metal fatigue; that everything they had scraped together would fall apart, and then their “culture” would be done for.

That’s enough about them. I could go on forever. Just think of all the secrets stored in their drawers and in those safes that were built into the walls, where they kept deeds and shares and documents and jewels. What are you shrugging for? But my darling, my one and only, these things are not as we proles imagine! The rich are really strange. Maybe there is some dark crevice in their souls where they are hiding something else. It was the key to this safe, hidden in this crevice, that I wanted to steal from them. I wanted to discover what was locked deep in their hearts.

But the rich remain rich even when dispossessed. I saw them after the siege, clambering out of their cellars, chiefly the Christians but then the Jews too, people who had somehow managed to survive, every one of them robbed and dispossessed to the extent that you couldn’t imagine having less. Nevertheless—robbed of everything, their houses
bombed flat, their businesses in ruins because of the war and what followed it, not to mention the great change you could sense in the air even before it happened, the surprise the Commies were preparing for them—these rich Christians and Jews, the rich, were back in their villas within two years, and the women with their neat little earrings and silver-fox collars were back in the Café Gerbeaud. How did they do it? I don’t know. But I’m quite sure that their lives straight after the war were not different from before and during. They were just as fussy about their food and clothes. When the first train set off for abroad and they had received their first travel permit from the Russian high command in Budapest, they were already complaining about having to spend the night in the upper berth of their sleeping car to the shops in Zurich or Paris. You see what I mean? Being rich must be a condition, much like sickness or health. Say you are rich, you might, in some mysterious way, be rich forever, but however much money you have, you never feel properly rich. Maybe you need to
believe
in your wealth in order to be properly rich—I mean, the way saints and revolutionaries believe that they are different. And you can’t afford to feel guilty if you are rich: if you felt guilty for a second you’d be finished. The not-truly-rich, those who have visions of the poor while indulging in a beefsteak and drinking Champagne, will eventually lose out, because they are insincere in their wealth. They’re not rich out of conviction, they are only pretending, cowardly, sneakily, to be rich. You have to be very disciplined to be rich. You can perform a few charitable acts, but only as a kind of a fig leaf. Listen, darling. I hope one day, when I am no longer around and you meet someone who has more jewelry left than I have, you will not be too sensitive about such things. Don’t be cross. I’m just telling you what I think. There! Give me your lovely artistic hand, let me clutch it to my heart. Can you feel it beating? It’s beating for a proper prole, you see. Well, there you are. That’s me all over.

Enough to say I was a clever little girl and quickly learned all there was to know about wealth. I served them for a long time and learned their secrets. But one day I left them, because I’d grown tired of waiting. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for my husband to desire and miss me. What are you looking at? I waited just as I should under the circumstances. I was strong. I had a plan.

.  .  .

Have another look at his photograph, take a good look. I kept it because I paid the photographer good money for it, when I was still a maid, because he was still with his first wife.

Let me adjust the bolster under your head. Go on, relax, stretch out. You should always relax when you’re with me, darling. I want you to feel good when you are with me. It’s exhausting enough for you working all night in that bar with the band. When you are here in bed with me, you should do nothing except love me, then relax.

Is that something I said to my husband too? No, sweetheart. I did not mean for him to feel good when he was in bed with me. And that was the trouble, really. Somehow I couldn’t resolve in myself to make him feel good with me, though he did everything to please me, poor man, undertook every kind of sacrifice for my sake. He broke with his family, with society, with all his usual ways. When he came to me it was really like emigrating, the way some bankrupt man-about-town sets out on a sea voyage to a faraway land. Maybe that was exactly why I could never reconcile myself to him; he just wasn’t at home with me. All the time he was with me it was as if he had run away to an exciting, spicy, hot country like Brazil and married some local woman. Does such a person ever wonder how he got there? And when he is with that local woman, even at the most intimate moments, isn’t his mind elsewhere? Isn’t he thinking of home? Perhaps. It made me nervous. That was why I didn’t want him to feel too good when we were together, at table or in bed.

What was that home he was thinking about? Where was it? Was it his first wife? I don’t think so. Home, real home, is not to be found on maps, you know. But home stands for a great deal, not just good and lovely things, but hateful, contrary things too. We are learning that lesson ourselves now, aren’t we, now that we no longer have a home? Don’t imagine we’ll get it back by paying the odd home visit. There’ll be good-byes and tears, some will feel heartbroken, some will strut about proudly waving their new foreign passports while paying a bill with their traveler’s check … But the home we think about when we’re abroad, that has gone for good. Do you still dream of your home in
Zala? I do sometimes dream of the wetlands in the Nyírség, but whenever I do I wake with a headache. It seems home is not just a region, a town, a house, or people but a feeling. What’s that? Are there eternal feelings? No, dear, I don’t think so. You know very well I adore you, but if one day I stopped adoring you because you have cheated on me or gone off with someone—but that’s all impossible, isn’t it? Should it ever happen, should I ever have to say good-bye to you, please don’t think my heart will break. We’ll carry on having charming conversations, if you like … but there will be one thing we won’t talk about, because that will have been over, vanished into thin air. There’s no time for mourning. There is only ever one home in your life, like love, the one true love. And it passes like love, like true love. And it’s right it should be like that; otherwise it would all be too much for us to bear.

That first woman, my husband’s first wife—she was a refined lady. Very beautiful, very self-controlled. It was her self-control I most envied. That seems to be one of those things you can’t learn or buy with money. It’s something you’re born with. It may be that the stuff these strange people, the rich, are so busy cultivating all the time is nothing more than a kind of self-discipline. Their blood cells, their very glands, are all precisely under control. I hated this capacity in them, and my husband knew I hated it. It was precisely because his first wife was cultured and self-controlled that my husband left her one day. He had grown tired of self-control. I was more than just a woman to him: I was a trial, a rehearsal, an adventure, both hunt and prey, a form of fraud, a sacrilege—like when someone in polite society suddenly spits on the carpet. The devil knows what these things mean. I’ll fetch a cognac, a three-star bottle, all right? I’ve grown thirsty with all this talking.

Drink, my dear. There—you see how I drink? I put my lips to where your lips have touched the glass … what surprising, tender, marvelous ideas you have! I could weep when something like this occurs to you. I have no idea how you do it. I’m not saying the idea is entirely original, it might be other lovers in the past have thought of it … but it’s still a wonderful gift.

There—now I have drunk after you. You see my husband never made tender gestures like this. We never once drank from the same glass while looking into each other’s eyes as we are doing now. If he wanted to please me, he would buy me a ring—yes, that nice ring with the turquoise
stone, the one you were looking at just now with such fascination: that too was a present from him. What’s that, darling? Fine, you can take it, have the ring valued as you did the others, at that first-rate man of yours. You shall have whatever you want.

Shall I tell you more about the rich? There is no way of telling anyone everything about them. I mean, I lived among them for years, but it was like walking in my sleep, in a deep sleep filled with dread. I always worried about saying the wrong thing when I talked to them. I worried in case I listened wrong or touched things in the wrong way. They never shouted or cursed at me, certainly not! They trained and educated me instead, sensitively, patiently, the way the Italian organ grinder out in the street trains his monkey, showing him how to perch on his shoulder and how to preen himself. But they also taught me the way one might teach a cripple, someone incapable of walking, of doing anything the way it ought to be done. Because that is what I was when I first went to them: a cripple. I couldn’t do anything properly. I couldn’t walk, not as they understood walking, couldn’t say hello, couldn’t speak … and as for eating? I hadn’t the foggiest notion how to eat! Even listening was beyond me—listening properly, that is, listening with purpose: in other words, with evil intent. I listened and gawped. I was a fish out of water. But little by little I learned everything they had to teach me. I worked at it and got on. It surprised them how much and how quickly I learned. It was I who left them gawping in the end. I’m not boasting, but I do believe they were quite astonished when they saw how much I learned.

I knew about the family vault, for example. The mausoleum. Oh, lord, that mausoleum! You know how it was back then, when I was still a maid in their house. I saw how everyone was robbing them. The cook made a bit on the side, the servant took backhanders from the salesmen who inflated the prices for brandy, wine, and the best cigars, the chauffeur stole and sold the gas in their cars. All this was to be expected. My employers were perfectly aware of it: it was part of the household budget. I didn’t steal anything myself, since I only cleaned the bathroom, where there was nothing to steal. But later, once I had become “Her Ladyship,” I couldn’t help thinking of everything I had seen in the cellar and the kitchen, and the mausoleum was too much of a temptation. I couldn’t resist it.

You see there came a day when my husband—a proper gentleman—
suddenly felt his life was incomplete without a family vault in the Buda graveyard. His parents, the old gentleman and the old lady, were old-fashioned in their death, turning to dust under simple marble tombstones without a proper mausoleum. My husband grew quite morose when this omission occurred to him. But he soon recovered and set to work to remedy the fault. He asked me to negotiate with the designer and the clerk-of-works to create the perfect mausoleum. By that time we had more than one car, a summer house in Zebegény and a permanent winter residence on exclusive Rózsadomb, not to mention a mansion in Transdanubia, near Lake Balaton, on an estate that my husband found himself lumbered with as the result of some deal. We certainly couldn’t complain we had nowhere to live.

But a mausoleum we did not have. We hastened to correct this oversight. Naturally we couldn’t trust any ordinary builder with the job. My husband took great pains to discover the leading funerary expert in the city. We had plans brought over from England and Italy, whole books, their pages printed on heavy burnished paper … you have no idea the amount people have written on the subject of funerary monuments. I mean, after all, to just go and die, that’s nothing special—people scrape out a bit of earth and shove you in, end of story. But gentlefolk lead different lives, and, naturally, their deaths are different too. So we employed an expert to help us choose a model, and had a beautiful, spacious, dry mausoleum built, complete with cupola. I wept when I first saw the mausoleum from within, the sheer glory of it, because, for just a moment, it made me think of the sandy ditch we lived in out on the wetlands. I mean, the vault was bigger than the ditch. With careful foresight they had left enough space at the center for six graves, I have no idea for whom. Maybe they were expecting guests, the visiting dead, just in case someone dropped in and needed somewhere to stretch out. I looked at the three spare places and told my husband I would sooner be buried by dogs than lie in this crypt of theirs! You should have seen him laugh when I said it!

And so we were prepared for all eventualities. Naturally the mausoleum was equipped with electric lights, lights in two colors, blue and white. When everything was ready we called the priest to consecrate this house of dead pleasure. Everything you could possibly think of was
provided, darling—gilt letters above the entrance, and, on the elevation, modestly small, the aristocratic family crest, the crest they wore on their underpants. Then there was a forecourt where they planted flowers, with columns at the entrance leading to a sort of marbled waiting room for visitors should they fancy taking a breather before they died. You then passed from the zinc hall, through the wrought-iron gates, into the parlor, where the elders were arranged. It was a proper mausoleum, set up for eternity, as if the dead interred there were not to be thrown out after thirty to fifty years. There they were, including the most illustrious among them, for eternity, until the last trumpet called them forth in their distinguished pajamas and privileged dressing gowns.