Portraits of a Marriage (40 page)

I earned an eight-thousand-pengő commission doing the mausoleum, the builder wouldn’t give me more. I had an account in a bank and one day, stupidly, I deposited this little extra cash. My husband came across the statement quite by chance, the statement revealing how my little-here and little-there had started to amount to a reasonable sum. He didn’t say anything—of course he didn’t say anything, what a crazy idea!—but I could see it upset him. He thought a member of the family shouldn’t be making a profit on his parents’ family vault. Can you credit that? I couldn’t understand it myself, not to this day. I only tell you the story to show you how strange the rich are.

There’s something else. I got used to everything, I bore it all silently. But they had one habit I really couldn’t stand. Even today I have to take a deep breath because I feel sick just thinking about it. It was that one step too far! I have learned a few things in my time, and there is never an end to learning. But I can bear it all; I am resigned to it. You never know, perhaps I might even get used to the idea of getting older. Silently. But that habit of theirs I couldn’t bear. I redden when I remember it, red with helpless fury, like a turkey.

You mean bed? Yes, but not the way you think. It was related to bed, but in another way. I mean their nightgowns and their pajamas.

You don’t understand. Well, I agree it’s hard to explain. What I mean is that I looked around me, amazed at everything in the house: I felt an almost religious awe, the way you do when you see a giraffe in the zoo. There was the colored toilet paper, the Swedish chiropodist, the lot. I
understood that such unusual people could not live by ordinary, everyday rules. They had to have food served a different way, the beds made a different way, like no ordinary mortal being.

Naturally, their food had to be cooked differently because their digestive system had to be quite different, like the kangaroo’s. I’m not absolutely sure how it was with their intestines, but they certainly digested their food in a way no ordinary mortal does. Not naturally, in the regular way, but in a way that forced them to use peculiar laxatives, strange enemas … the whole thing was a great secret.

So I looked on while they did all this, gazing in wonder, mouth open, often with goose pimples. High culture, it seems, is not just a matter of museums but something you find in people’s bathrooms and the kitchens where others cook for them. Their way of life did not change, not a bit, not even during the siege, would you believe it? While everyone else was eating beans or peas, they were still opening tins of delicacies from abroad, goose liver from Strasbourg and such things. There was a woman in the cellar, who spent three weeks there, the wife of an ex–minister of state whose husband had fled west to escape the Russians, who stayed here because she had some other man … and believe it or not, this woman was on a diet, a diet she maintained even as bombs were falling. She was looking after her figure, cooking some tasty something on a spirit flame using only olive oil because she feared that the fat in the beans and the gristle that everyone stuffed themselves with out of fear and anxiety might lead her to put on weight! Whenever I get to thinking about it, I marvel what a strange thing this thing called culture is.

Here in Rome there are all these wonderful statues and paintings and grand tapestries, like the castoffs of a lost world, the kind we get in junk shops back home. But maybe all the masterworks of Rome offer just one view of culture. It might be that culture is also what happens when people cook for the rich, with butter or oil, with complicated recipes prescribed by the doctor—as if it were not only their teeth and guts that required nourishment but they had to have a special soup for the liver, a different cut of meat for the heart, a particular blend of salads for the gall bladder, and a rare form of pastry with raisins for the pancreas. And having eaten all this, the rich withdraw into solitude so that their mysterious organs of digestion can get on with digesting. That’s culture too! I
understood it all, admired it, and full-heartedly approved of it. It was just their way with nightshirts and pajamas I failed to understand. I could never reconcile myself to it. Damn the God that invented such things!

Have patience, I’m about to tell you. After making the bed I had to lay the nightshirt on top of it facedown, folding the bottom end of it back and over, spreading the sleeves. See what I mean? Looked at this way, the nightshirt or pajamas looked faintly Arabic, like some Eastern pilgrim at prayer, stomach to the ground, his arms spread over the sand. Why did they insist on this? I have no idea. Maybe because it’s more convenient that way, because it involves one movement less, because you just need to pull it on from the back and there you are, ready for bed, without having to struggle into it and tire yourself out before going to sleep. But I hated this kind of calculation, absolutely loathed it. I simply couldn’t tolerate this affectation of theirs. My whole nervous system rebelled against it. My hands shook with fury whenever I made their beds, folding and adjusting their nightgowns, pajama jackets, and trousers the way the manservant taught me. Why?

People are peculiar, you see. They are born that way, even when they’re not rich. Everyone is annoyed or driven mad by something. Even the poor who tolerate everything for a while, who resign themselves to everything and bear the weight of the world on their backs with a certain awe and helplessness, accepting whatever comes their way. There comes a moment for them, one that came for me each evening when I was making the bed, putting out their nightwear in the required manner. That was when I understood that soon people would no longer put up with the world as it was. I mean individuals as well as nations. Someone would scream out loud that they had had enough, that things had to change. And that when this happened, people would take to the streets and go on the rampage, smashing and breaking things. Though that’s only the circus part, a sideshow. Revolution, I mean real revolution, is that which has already happened inside people. Don’t stare at me like an idiot, gorgeous.

I might be talking rubbish, but not everything runs according to the laws of normal logic, not everything people say or do has to make sense. Do you think it’s rational or logical that I should be lying with you in this bed? Don’t you get it, sweetheart? Never mind. Just keep your
mouth shut and carry on loving me. Our logic makes no sense—but here we are.

So that’s the nightwear business. I loathed this habit of theirs. But eventually I resigned myself to that too. They were so much stronger, after all. It is possible to hate dominant forms of life just as it is possible to admire them, but you cannot deny them. I grew to hate them. I hated them to the extent that I joined them and became rich myself; wore their clothes, lay down in their beds, started to watch my figure, and, eventually, got to taking laxatives before I went to bed, just like the rich. I didn’t hate them because they were rich and I was poor, no, please don’t misunderstand me. It would be nice if someone finally understood the true state of affairs.

Newspapers and parliaments are constantly going on about this now. Even the movies are full of it, or so I understood watching a newsreel the other day. Everyone is talking about it. I wonder what has got into people. I can’t imagine it’s good for people to be talking so crudely, so generally about rich and poor, about Americans and Russians. I don’t understand it. They even say there is bound to be a great revolution and the Russians will come out on top, along with the poor, by and large. But a very refined man once told me in a bar—a South American, I think, a drug dealer, so I heard, who supposedly kept a stash of heroin in his dentures—that that was not how it was going to be, that it would be the Americans who’d win out in the end, because they had more money.

I thought a good deal about this. The saxophonist said the same thing. He said the Americans would drill a great hole in the ground and pack it with atom bombs, and then this little guy in glasses, the man who was currently the president over the ocean, would get down on his hands and knees, carrying a burning match, and crawl over to the hole, light the fuse of the atom bomb, and then—whoosh!—the whole caboodle would go up. I thought it a load of nonsense at first. But I can’t bring myself to laugh anymore. I have seen a great deal that seemed just as ridiculous but soon became reality. My experience is that, generally, the more stupid the idea, the more certain that, one day, it will be turned into fact.

I’ll never forget the gossip in Budapest near the end of the war. One day, for example, the Germans ranged cannons along the embankment
on the Buda side of the city. Enormous cannons they were, properly dug in by the bridgeheads. They broke up the pavements and placed machine-gun nests all the way along the lovely chestnut-lined shore. People looked at them anxiously, but there were some smart people who declared there would not be a siege of Budapest because all those terrifying weapons, the heavy artillery by the bridges, the bundles of explosives on the bridges themselves, were all a confidence trick. It was a trick to pull the wool over the Russians’ eyes. They didn’t really want a battle. That’s what they were saying. But it was no trick: at least it didn’t fool the Russians. The Russians arrived at the river one day and shot everything to pieces, including the cannons. So I have no idea if what the South American said will come true, but I suspect that, in the end, it will work out exactly as he said, if only because it sounded so ridiculous at first hearing.

I also thought a lot about what this very refined man said about how the Americans would win because they were rich. The rich—now there is something I do understand. My experience was that you had to be very careful with the rich because they are extraordinarily crafty. They possess enormous resilience … though heaven alone knows where the resilience comes from. One thing is certain—they are subtle, and it is never easy dealing with them. What I said about their nightwear is evidence of that. People who have you prepare their pajamas the way I was told to prepare them are not ordinary people. Such people know exactly what they want, day and night, and a poor man should cross himself when coming into their presence. Of course I mean only the genuinely rich, not those who just happen to have money. Those are less dangerous. They flash their money around the way a child blows bubbles. And it all ends as it does with soap bubbles: the bubble just bursts in their hands.

My husband was genuinely rich. That might be why he was always so tired.

Pour me another glass, just one finger. No, darling, no, I won’t drink from your glass this time. Inspired ideas are not to be repeated. They quickly wear out and lose their magic. Don’t take it the wrong way.

Don’t rush me, I can only tell it in its proper order.

He was offended, yes, he was terminally offended. That was something I never understood, because I was born poor. There is a strange similarity between the really poor and the really rich … you can’t offend either of them. My father, who was a barefoot fruit picker in the wetlands, was as impossible to offend as the prince of the Rákóczis. My husband was embarrassed by his wealth: far from him to flash it about! He would have worn any disguise to avoid his wealth being pointed out. His manners were so refined, so quiet, so fearfully courteous that you couldn’t offend him with words, with manners, or with acts, since it all washed off his refinement like water off a leaf. They left no scar. No, the only person capable of offending him was himself. And the tendency to offend himself grew in him like some wicked, sickly passion.

Later, when he began to suspect that there was something wrong with him, he started to panic. He was like someone dangerously ill who suddenly loses faith in the famous physician, in the whole range of science and medicine, and turns instead to the woman selling herbal cures because she might be able to help. That was how he came to me one day, leaving his wife and his old life behind. He thought I could offer a kind of herbal cure for him. But I was no herbalist.

Pass me that photo, let me have another look at him. Yes, that’s what he was like fifteen years ago.

Have I said I wore this picture round my neck a long time? In a small locket, on a lilac ribbon? Do you know why? Because I’d paid for it. I was just a servant then and bought it out of my wages: that was why I looked after it. My husband never knew what an important matter it was for someone like me to pay money for something for which there is no pressing need, I mean real money, like the change from my wages or a tip. Later I spent money like water—his money—I threw thousands around the way I sent dust flying with my feather duster on mornings when I was still a servant. It wasn’t real money to me. But my heart was in my mouth when I bought this photograph, because I was poor and felt it a sin to spend money on things that were not absolutely essential. That photograph was a sin for me, mere vanity. I bought it all the same, sneaking a visit to the famous, highly fashionable photographer in the city center, ready to pay the full price without bargaining. The photographer laughed and sold it to me at cut price. Buying his photograph was the only sacrifice I ever made for that man.

He was reasonably tall, a couple of inches taller than me. His weight was steady. He controlled his body the way he controlled his words and manners. He put on a few pounds in winter, but lost them again in May and remained at that weight till Christmas. Don’t think for a moment that he dieted. Forget diets. It was just that he treated his body the way he might treat one of his employees. His body was required to work for him.

He treated his eyes and his mouth the same way. His eyes and mouth laughed separately, as and when they were required. They never laughed at the same time. Not the way you did, my precious, so freely, so sweetly, both eyes and mouth smiling at once, yesterday when you truly excelled yourself and sold that ring—and came home to me with the good news.

That was something he could never do. I lived with him, I was his wife and, before that, his servant. Needless to say, I felt much closer to him as a servant than when I was merely his wife. Even so, I never saw him give a full-hearted laugh the way you do.