Portraits of a Marriage (6 page)

After the child died, I felt utterly exhausted, and of course I immediately fell ill with pleurisy. For months I lay in bed, got better, then relapsed again. I was in hospital. My husband brought me flowers and visited me every day, at lunchtime and in the evening when he came home from the factory. I had a nurse. I was so weak I had to be fed. And all the time I knew that none of this would help, that my husband would not forgive me; that being ill would not relieve me of my guilt. He continued as tender and courteous as ever … I wept each time he left me.

My mother-in-law visited me a lot at this time. Once, just before spring, when I had recovered some of my strength, she was sitting at my
bedside, quietly knitting as usual. She gave me a friendly smile and murmured confidentially:

“What do you want revenge for, Ilonka?”

“What?” I asked, startled, and felt myself flushing. “What’s this talk about revenge?”

“It’s something you kept repeating when you were in a fever. ‘Revenge, revenge!’ you cried. There’s no revenge to be had, my dear, only patience.”

I listened. I was excited. It was the first time since the child’s death that I’d really listened to anything. Then I started speaking.

“I can’t bear it, Mama. What did I do wrong? I know I am not innocent, but I simply can’t understand where I went wrong, what sin I committed. Am I not part of his life? Should we divorce? If you think it would be better for us to separate, Mama, I’ll divorce him. You must know I think of nothing else, that all my feelings are directed at him. But if I can’t help him, I’d sooner be divorced. Please advise me, Mama.”

She looked at me with a serious, wise, sad expression.

“Don’t upset yourself, child. You know very well there’s no advice I can give. It’s just life: we have to live and put up with it.”

“Live?! Live?!” I shouted. “I’m not a tree! I can’t live life like some tree. We need something to live
for
. I met him and I grew to love him: suddenly life had meaning. Then everything changed in a strange way … It’s not that
he
has changed. It’s not that he loves me any less now than he did in the first year of our marriage. He loves me, even now. But he is angry with me.”

My mother-in-law said nothing. She didn’t seem to approve of what I’d just said, but she didn’t seek to contradict me.

“Am I right?” I anxiously asked.

“Not in the way you put it,” she said, picking her words carefully. “I don’t think he is exactly angry with you. Or, to put it more precisely, I don’t think it is with
you
that he is angry.”

“With who, then?” I asked in a temper. “Who has hurt him?”

“That’s a difficult question.” The old woman frowned. “It’s hard to answer.”

She sighed and put her knitting down.

“Has he never spoken to you about his childhood?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Occasionally. In his own way. With the same
odd, nervous laugh he gives whenever he talks of something personal. People, friends … But he has never said that anyone had harmed him.”

“No, of course not,” she said dismissively. “You couldn’t possibly put it like that. Harmed him? Life can damage people in so many ways.”

“Lázár,” I said. “The writer … you know him, Mama? He may be the only one who knows anything about him.”

“Yes,” said my mother-in-law. “He used to adore Lázár. That man certainly does know something about him. But there’s no point in talking about him. He’s not a good man.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I feel the same way.”

She picked up her knitting again. She smiled gently and added, almost as an afterthought:

“Don’t excite yourself, child. The pain is all too fresh at the moment. But life comes along and miraculously arranges human affairs, including all those things that now seem intolerable. You’ll leave the hospital, go home, and another baby will arrive to take the place of the first one …”

“I don’t believe that,” I said, and felt my heart shrink with despair. “I have such a bad feeling. I think we are at the end of something. Tell me the truth: do you think our marriage is a genuinely bad marriage?”

She gave me a sharp look from under half-closed lids, through her glasses.

“No, I don’t think your marriage is a bad marriage,” she pronounced.

“Interesting you should say that,” I bitterly replied. “Sometimes I think it is as bad as it could possibly be. Does Mama know of better ones?”

“Better?” she asked quizzically, and turned away her head as if she were looking into the distance. “Maybe. I don’t know. Happiness, real happiness, tells no tales. But I certainly know of worse. For example …”

She fell silent. It was as if she were suddenly frightened, regretting opening her mouth. But I wouldn’t let her drop the subject now. I sat up in bed, threw off the covers, and demanded she continue.

“For example?”

“Well, yes,” she said, and sighed. She picked up her knitting again. “I’m sorry we should have to talk about these things. But if it is any
comfort to you, I confess my own marriage was worse, because, frankly, I did not love my husband.”

She said this calmly, almost indifferently, the way old people sometimes speak when they are near death, people who know the true meaning of words, are afraid of nothing, and care more for truth than for keeping the peace. I went pale.

“That’s impossible,” I muttered like an idiot. “You had such a good life together.”

“It wasn’t a bad life,” she replied in a dry voice, knitting away furiously. “I got him the factory, you know. He, in his turn, brought me love: one party always gives more love than the other. But it’s easier for those who do the loving. You love your husband, so it’s easier for you, even though you suffer for it. I had to pretend to a feeling that had nothing to do with what I really felt. That’s much harder. I put up with it all my life, and you see, here I am. That’s always the case with life. Romantic, passionate people expect more, of course. I was never passionate. But, believe me, your situation is better. I almost envy you.”

She tipped her head to one side and looked hard at me.

“But don’t you go thinking I had a hard life. My life was no different from anyone else’s. I only tell you this because you asked, and because you are muddled with fever. Well, so now you know. You were asking if your marriage was as bad as it could be. I don’t think it is. It’s a marriage,” she declared, as if pronouncing judgment.

“Would Mama advise us to stay together?” I asked in fear.

“Of course,” she answered. “What are you thinking of? What do you think marriage is? A mood? A bright idea? It’s a sacrament, one of the laws of life. One shouldn’t even think about it,” she admonished me, apparently insulted.

We said nothing for a long time. I gazed at her bony hands, her clever, nimble fingers, and the knitting pattern; I looked at her pale, calm face with its smooth features, ringed by white hair. There was no sign of suffering there. Even if she had suffered, I thought, she has succeeded in achieving the greatest of human triumphs: she had passed the test of life with distinction. She has not been broken by it. What more can anyone do? Everything else—desire, dissatisfaction—is nothing
compared to this. That’s what I told myself. But deep inside me I felt I couldn’t simply accept the situation. So I told her:

“I can’t deal with his unhappiness. If he can’t be happy with me, let him go and seek happiness elsewhere, with someone else. With
her.”

“Who?” my mother-in-law asked me, closely examining the stitches in her knitting, as if there could be nothing more important.

“With his true wife,” I answered harshly. “You know. The real one. The one intended for him.”

“What do you know about her?” my mother-in-law asked, her voice quiet, still not looking at me.

It was I who was embarrassed again. Whenever I argued with these people, with mother and son, I always felt like a child, someone who had not been granted admittance to the serious adult rooms of life.

“About who?” I asked greedily. “Who is there I should know about?”

“Her,” my mother-in-law cautiously responded. “The real wife you were talking about … the intended one.”

“Why? Is there an intended? Does she exist somewhere?” I asked, very loudly now.

My mother-in-law bent over her knitting. Her voice was quiet.

“There is always an intended one somewhere.”

Then she fell silent. And I never heard her talk of this again. She was like her son: there was something final about her.

But then, a few days after this conversation, I had gotten myself into such a condition of terror, I got better. I hadn’t understood my mother-in-law’s words straightaway. It was hard to feel seriously jealous at first, since she had spoken in general terms, in a kind of symbolic fashion. Well, of course, the intended always must live somewhere. But what about me,
me
, what was my role? I asked as I recovered. Who is his real wife, his intended wife, if not me? Where does she live? What is she like? Is she younger? Is she blond? How much does she know? I was utterly terrified.

I panicked. I quickly recovered, went home, had dresses made, hurried to the hairdresser, played tennis, went swimming. I found everything in order at home … so much so I thought someone had moved out of the house. Or it was something else: you know … the realization that my life had, in the last few years, been relatively happy—that
despite the suffering, the restlessness, and all I had thought intolerable, now that it was gone, all was well, better than it had even been? It was an odd feeling. Everything in the house was in its place, but the rooms felt empty, as if the executor had been through them, as if the most important items of furniture had—carefully, sensitively—all been removed somewhere. It’s not furniture that furnishes a house, of course, but the feeling that fills people’s hearts.

My husband’s life was so detached from mine at this time he might as well have been living abroad. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have received a letter from him one day, delivered from the next room.

Before all this he would talk to me about the factory, about his plans, hesitantly as though conducting an experiment. Then he would wait with bowed head and listen to my answer as though he himself were being examined. There was no discussing plans now: it seemed he had no special plans for anything anymore. He didn’t invite Lázár, either. A whole year passed and we didn’t see him, only read his books and articles.

One day—I remember it perfectly, it was an April morning, the fourteenth, a Sunday—I was sitting out on the terrace, reading a book, the garden, cautiously planted for spring with yellow euphorbia, in front of me, when I felt something happen inside me. Please don’t laugh. I have no wish to play Joan of Arc with you. I heard no heavenly voices. But there was a voice, a voice so strong it was like the most passionate feeling you could ever feel. The voice told me that I really couldn’t go on living like this, that there was no sense in anything, that my situation was demeaning, ruthless, inhuman. I had to change. I had to perform a miracle. There are dizzying moments in life when we see everything clearly, when we are aware of our power and our potential, when we see what it is we have been too timid or cowardly to do. These are life’s decisive moments. They come to us unannounced, like death or conversion. This was one of them.

I shuddered. My whole body tingled: it was like goose pimples. I started to feel cold.

I looked at the garden and my eyes filled with tears.

What was it I was feeling? I felt that I was responsible for my own fate. That my life depended on me. There was no point in waiting for some angelic visitation either in my personal life or in any relationship.
My husband and I had a problem of some sort. I don’t understand my husband. He doesn’t belong to me, doesn’t want to belong entirely to me. I knew there was no other woman in his life … I was pretty, young, and I loved him. Lázár was not the only powerful figure in his life, the only one with powers. I had powers of my own. I should use them.

I felt such absolute power surge through me, I could have killed someone or built a whole new world with it. Maybe it is only men who truly feel such power and are conscious of it at the decisive moments of their lives. We women are generally terrified and paralyzed at such times.

But I had no intention of backing down. That day, on Sunday, the fourteenth of April, a few months after the child’s death, I made the one and only fully conscious choice in my life. You needn’t look at me with those big frightened eyes of yours. Listen carefully. I’ll tell you what happened.

I decided to take possession of my husband.

Why aren’t you laughing? You mean it’s nothing to laugh at? I didn’t feel like laughing, either. The prospect of the task daunted me. I was so frightened, I was quite out of breath at the thought. Carrying out this task was the meaning of my life, I thought. I couldn’t hold back any longer. There was no way of leaving it for time or chance to sort out; I simply couldn’t wait for something to happen, couldn’t just accept the alternative of going on as I was until it did. I knew right then that it wasn’t I who had decided on a course of action: the action had decided me. My husband and I were engaged in a life-or-death struggle, but we couldn’t be separated until something of devastating power came between us. Either this man was going to come back to me, body and soul, without reserve or shame, or I would leave him. He had a secret I knew nothing about and I would get it out of him even if I had to dig it out, tooth and nail; even if it was buried deep beneath the ground like a long-buried bone the dog digs up, or like a body some mad lover wants to disinter. It was either this or I move on. Things could not go on the way they were. It was exactly as I said: I decided to take possession of my husband.

Put it like that and it sounds simple enough. But you’re a woman too, so you know it is one of the hardest tasks you can undertake. Sometimes I think it’s the hardest of all.

You know how it is when a man decides to do something and overcomes every obstacle, anything that might prevent him carrying out his plan and imposing his will … well, yes, this was that kind of situation, that state of mind. Those we love are the world. When Napoleon—about whom I know little more than that he was master of the world for a while and had the duc d’Enghien killed, and that doing that was more than a sin; it was a blunder—have I mentioned that before? What I mean to say is that when Napoleon decided to conquer Europe, his decision was no more momentous than mine was then. It was what I vowed to do that breezy Sunday in April.