Portraits of a Marriage (41 page)

He was far more likely to smile. When I met that hunk of a Greek in London, the man who taught me a great many things—don’t go bothering me with what he taught me, I couldn’t tell you everything, we’d be here till dawn—he warned me never to laugh in company when in England because it was considered vulgar. I should just smile and keep smiling. I tell you this because I want you to know everything you might find useful sometime.

My husband could smile like nobody’s business. I was so jealous of it sometimes I felt quite sick just thinking about his smile. It was as if he had learned a high art at some mysterious university where the rich go to get their education and smiling is a compulsory subject. He even smiled when he was being cheated. I tried it on with him sometimes. I cheated him and watched. I cheated him in bed and watched to see what he’d do. There were moments when that was dangerous. You never know how someone will react when they’re cheated in bed.

The danger was a deathly thrill to me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one day he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed me in the stomach—like a pig at slaughter time. It was only a dream, of
course: wish fulfillment. I learned the term from a doctor I consulted for a while because I wanted to be fashionable like the others, because I was rich and could indulge myself with a few psychological problems. The doctor got fifty pengő for an hour’s work. This fee entitled me to lie on a sofa in his surgery and to regale him with my dreams as well as all the rude talk I could muster. There are people who pay to have a woman lie on a sofa and talk filth. But it was I who did the paying, learning terms like “repression” and “wish fulfillment.” I certainly learned a great deal. It wasn’t easy living with the gentry.

But smiling was something I never learned. It seems you need something else for that. Maybe you have to have a history of ancestors smiling before you. I hated it as much as I did the fuss about the pajamas … I hated their smiles. I cheated my husband in bed by pretending to enjoy it when I didn’t really. I’m sure he knew it, but did he draw a knife and stab me? No, he smiled. He sat in the huge French bed, his hair tousled, his muscles well toned, a man in top condition, smelling faintly of hay. He fixed me with a glassy look and smiled. I wanted to cry at such moments. I was helpless with grief and fury. I am sure that later, when he saw his bombed-out house, or still later, when they kicked him out of the factory and expropriated him, he was smiling the same smile in exactly the same way.

It is one of the foulest of human sins, that serene, superior smile. It is the true crime of the rich. It is the one thing that can never be forgiven. Because I can understand people beating or killing each other when they have been hurt. But if they merely smile and say nothing, I have no idea what to do with them. Sometimes I felt no punishment was enough for it. There was nothing I, a woman who had clambered out of the ditch to find myself in his life, could do against him. The world could not harm him, whatever it did to him, to his wealth, to his lands, or to anything that mattered to him. It was the smile that had to be wiped out. Don’t those famous revolutionaries know this?

Because shares and precious stones may vanish, but the trace of these things, a kind of residual bloom, will hang around the rich even after they have lost everything. When you take the really rich and strip them to their bare skin, they still retain the aura of wealth, an aura no earthly power can drag from them. The fact is that when you have someone truly rich, someone with fifty thousand acres, say, or a factory with two
thousand workers, and they lose it all, they still remain richer than my kind, however well we happen to be doing.

How they do it? I don’t know. Look, I was there when wealthy people were having a particularly bad time back home. All the odds were stacked against them. Everyone hated them. Little by little, step by methodical step, they were deprived of everything, all their visible goods, and later, with supreme skill, of their invisible goods too. And yet these people remained as serene as before.

I stood there gaping. I wasn’t angry. I did not feel in the least like mocking. I don’t want to make a big song and dance about money to you, or to go on forever about the rich and the poor. Don’t get me wrong, I know it would sound good if I started shouting at dawn about how much I hated the rich, about their money, their power. I hated them, yes I did, but it wasn’t their wealth I hated. It was more that I was afraid of them, or rather that I was in awe of them the way primitive man feared thunder and lightning. I was angry with them the way people used to be angry with the gods. You know about the little gods, those tubby ones, those of human proportions, who talk big, screw around, and are real rogues, those who interfere with the mess of ordinary people’s lives, who worm their way into others’ beds, into women’s lives, who steal the food off the table, gods who behave much as people do. They are not gods like that; they are middling, helpful gods of human size.

That’s how I felt when I thought of the rich. It wasn’t their money, their mansions, their precious stones that made me hate them. I was not a revolutionary proletarian, not a worker with a proper consciousness, nothing like that.

Why not? It was because of the depths from which I’d risen. I knew more than street-corner orators did; I knew that under it all, right at the bottom of things, there isn’t, nor has there ever been, justice; that when you end one injustice, it is immediately replaced by another. More than that, I was a woman, a beautiful woman at that, and I wanted my own place in the sun. Is that a crime? Maybe the revolutionaries—those who thrive by promising that everything will be fine providing we kick out whatever exists and is bad and do something that in other circumstances we would consider bad—maybe they would despise me for it. But I want to be honest with you. I want to give you everything I have, that I
still have, not just the jewels. That’s why I must tell you that the reason I hated the rich was because it was only money I could take from them. But the rest, the secret and meaning of wealth, that sense of otherness which cast a more frightening spell over me than money did, that they did not give me. They hid it so well that no revolutionary could take it from them. They stowed it away more securely than valuables in the safes of foreign banks, than the pieces of gold buried in their gardens.

I couldn’t work out the way they could suddenly change subject and simply talk about something else the very moment when the subject seemed most exciting and painfully relevant. There were moments I was so furious my heart beat in my mouth. I was furious when in love, furious when I had been hurt, furious when I saw injustice, when someone was suffering—sometimes I felt like screaming out in righteous indignation. But they—they stayed quiet and smiled at such moments. It’s beyond words as far as I am concerned. Words are never really enough, not when anything really matters, matters as much as birth or death. Words don’t do those occasions any real justice. Maybe music can do it, I don’t know. Or when we feel desire and touch someone, like this. Don’t move. There was a good reason that other friend of mine hid the dictionaries in the end. He was looking for a word. But he couldn’t find it.

So don’t be surprised. I’m no good at explaining myself. I’m just talking … How far off the point talking is when you really want to say something!

Give me the photograph again. Yes, that’s what he looked like when I met him. Later, when I last saw him—after the siege—he was just the same. He had changed only the way a well-made object changes with use … a little more shiny, a little smoother, a little more burnished if you like. He was aging like a good razor or cigarette holder.

Heaven knows. Maybe I should make an effort to tell you what happened. You know what—I’ll start at the end. Maybe that way it will be clearer, leaving out the beginning.

His problem was that he was bourgeois. What’s bourgeois? The pictures in Red propaganda show us evil, potbellied figures who spend the entire day studying share prices while driving their workers to exhaustion.
That’s the way I pictured them, too, before I found myself among them. But later I understood that the whole business of the bourgeois and the class war was different from what we proles were told.

These people were sure they had a role in the world; I don’t mean just in business, copying those people who had had great power when they themselves had little power. What they believed was that when it came down to it, they were putting the world into some sort of order, that with them in charge, the lords of the world would not be such great lords as they had been, and the proles would not remain in abject poverty, as we once were. They thought the whole world would eventually accept their values; that even while one group moved down and another one up, they, the bourgeois, would keep their position—even in a world where everything was being turned upside down.

Then one day he asked to speak to me. He said he wanted to marry me—me, the maid! I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but at that moment I hated him so much I could have spat at him. It was Christmas and I was squatting by the fire, preparing to light it. I thought it was the greatest insult I’d ever received. He wanted to buy me like he would some fancy breed of dog—that’s what I felt. I told him to get out of my way. I didn’t even want to look at him.

So he didn’t make me his wife then. After a while time passed and he got married. He married a proper lady. They had a child but the child died. The old man died too, and I was sorry about that. When he died the house was like a museum where people only dropped by to take a look. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a bunch of schoolchildren turned up one Sunday morning, rang the bell, and said it was an educational visit. By that time my husband was living in a different house, with his wife. They did a lot of traveling. I’d stayed with the old gentleman. The old woman wasn’t daft. I was scared of her, but I loved her too. There was some knowledge flickering in her, some age-old female wisdom. She had cures for liver and kidney ailments. She knew about washing and how to listen to music. She knew about us too, about the boy’s rebellion, without saying a word … she recognized the long-standing tension between us the way only women know, as if by a kind of radar. Women can sniff out the secrets of any man in their vicinity.

So she knew her son was hopelessly lonely because the world into which he’d been born, to which he belonged heart and soul—in his
memories, in his dreams, even when he was wide awake—could no longer protect him. It couldn’t protect him because it was falling apart, disintegrating like an old piece of cloth, beyond use even as a decorative throw or a rag for wiping. She knew her son was no longer moving forward, no longer on the attack: he was on the back foot, merely defending. She knew that people who stop moving forward and spend their lives on the back foot are no longer alive: they merely exist. The old woman sensed this danger: her ancient female weaving-and-spinning instincts told her as much. She was aware of this secret the way families are aware of a sinister genetic weakness that is not to be spoken of because considerable interests are at stake. No one should know or speak about the fact that anemia or madness had ravaged the family in the past.

What are you looking at? Yes, I am just as neurotic as the rich. And it wasn’t being among the rich that gave me my neurosis. I was neurotic in my own way in the ditch back home … that is to say if I ever had anything of the kind people call “home.” Whenever I say the word “family” or “home,” I see nothing, I only smell things: earth, mud, mice, human smells. Then, beyond all that, another smell, one hovering over my half-animal, half-human childhood, over the pale blue sky, the mushroom-smelling wood wet with rain, the taste of sunlight, a smell like metal when you touch it with your tongue. I was a neurotic child too, why deny it? It’s not just the rich that have secrets.

But it’s the end I want to tell you about, the very last time I saw my husband. Because, sitting with you here at dawn in this hotel in Rome, I feel I know for certain that that was the last time.

Wait, let’s not drink any more. A black coffee instead … Give me your hand. Put it to my heart. Yes, it’s pounding. That’s how it pounds every dawn. It’s not the black coffee or the cigarettes, it’s not even being with you that does it. It pounds because I remember that moment—the moment I last saw him.

Please don’t think it is desire that makes my heart pound like this. There is no cheap movie scene involved in that pounding. I have already told you that I never loved him. There was a time when I was in love
with him, of course, but that’s only because I hadn’t yet lived with him. Love and being in love don’t go together, you know.

I was foolish and in love, and everything happened just as I had planned. The old woman died and I went to London. Show me that second photograph! Yes, that was my virile Greek, dearest. He taught singing in London, in Soho. He was a real Greek, down to his fingernails, and could flash those beautiful, fiery, dark eyes of his. He could whisper and swear and, when roused, show as much of the whites of his eyes as that Neapolitan tenor we saw at the concert the other day.

I felt very lonely in London. London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there. The English have become connoisseurs of boredom: they know how to deal with it. I went there as a maid and quickly found employment. At that time foreign maids were in demand the way African slaves once were. There is a city in England called Liverpool that, they say, is built on the skulls of black men—not that I know that for certain. I couldn’t stand being a maid in London for long, because the job was quite different in London than it had been in Budapest. It was better in some ways and worse in others. It wasn’t the work so much. The fact that I had to work was no bother. I could barely speak the language, which was a serious concern, but what was worse was that I didn’t really feel like a maid in the house, more just a component. A component, that is, not in an English household with an English family, but in some kind of big business dealing with imports. I was an imported article. On top of that it wasn’t a real English family I had joined but a rich German Jewish family living in London. The head of the family had fled Hitler to England, bringing his family with him, and was producing warm woolen underwear for the army. He was a thoroughly German Jew—that is to say, as much German as Jewish. He wore his hair close-cropped, and I think—though I don’t know this for certain, it’s not impossible—had had a surgeon apply some dueling scars to his face, hoping he’d pass for someone who had been a proper card-playing German student. That’s what I kept thinking when I occasionally looked at his picture.