by Sándor Márai
In some ways we were living like nouveaux riches, like people who want to make up for everything they have ever lacked, to enjoy it all, and all at once. People that listen to Beethoven while chewing on a capon and slurping French Champagne in time to the music. But it was also like saying good-bye to something. Those years, the last years before the war, were drenched in this peculiar atmosphere. It was like saying good-bye without quite knowing it. My husband said precisely that: something about Europe. I said nothing. It was not Europe I was leaving. Can we, just the two of us, as women, own up to the fact that, concepts such as “Europe” have little to do with us? What I knew deep in my heart was that I lacked the strength to cut myself off from something more important. I was almost choking with helplessness.
One night we were sitting on the balcony. There were grapes in a glass bowl, and big yellow apples. It was apple-gathering time in Merano. The air was so sweet, so full of the smell of apples, it was as if someone had left the lid off an enormous jar of preserves. Below us a French palm-court orchestra was playing melodies from an old Italian opera. My husband had wine brought to the table; the wine—Lacrima Christi—was dark and stood in a crystal jug. There was sweetness in everything, even in the music, something a little overripe, a touch sickening. My husband felt it too and declared:
“Tomorrow we go home.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s be on our way.”
Suddenly he spoke up in that melancholy, deep voice of his that always touched me. It was like a solemn instrument of some primitive tribe:
“Tell me, Ilonka, what do you think we should do after this?” he asked.
Did I understand what he meant? He was talking about us, our life together. It was a starry night. I looked at the stars, the autumnal stars in that Italian sky, and shuddered. I felt the moment had come when we had to speak the truth. My hands and feet were cold but my palms were sweating with excitement.
“I don’t know, I really don’t know. I couldn’t bear to leave you. I can’t imagine life without you,” I said.
“I know, it’s very difficult,” he calmly replied. “I wouldn’t want it, either. Maybe it’s not the right time yet. Maybe there will never be a right time. But there’s something in our life together, just as there is in this holiday, as in everything in our mutual lives, that is shameful and unbefitting. Is it that we daren’t tell each other what that is?”
At last he had said it. I closed my eyes and felt dizzy. I stayed silent like that, my eyes closed.
“So tell me at last, what is it that is driving us apart?” I asked.
For a long time he said nothing, simply thought. He put out his cigarette and lit another. He was smoking strong English cigarettes at that time, the smoke of which always made me feel a little giddy. But that smell was part of him too, like the smell of hay in his linen cupboard, because he loved to scent his clothes with a bitter oil smelling of hay. What extraordinary details constitute our sense of a person!
“I don’t feel a great need to be loved,” he finally said.
“That’s impossible,” I said, grinding my teeth. “You are a human being. You have an absolute need to be loved.”
“It is precisely this that women don’t believe, cannot know, and do not understand,” he said as if addressing the stars. “That there exists a type of man who has no need of love. He gets on fine without it.”
He spoke without pathos, from a great distance, but perfectly naturally. I knew he was telling me the truth now. At least he believed he was telling me the truth. I started to argue.
“You can’t know everything about yourself. Maybe you just don’t have the courage to feel. You should be less certain, more humble,” I pleaded with him.
He threw away his cigarette. He stood up. He was tall—did you see how tall he was?—a head taller than me. But now he towered over me, leaning against the balcony railings, looking more melancholy than ever with the foreign stars behind him. I wanted to unravel him, to find his secret heart. He crossed his arms.
“What is a woman’s life?” he pondered. “Feeling possesses every cell of her, from head to foot. I am perfectly aware of this, but I can only understand it in an intellectual way. I can’t surrender myself to feeling.”
“And the child?” I raised my voice.
“That’s the point,” he retorted, his voice slightly shaking. “I’m willing to put up with a lot for the child’s sake. I love the child. It’s through the child that I am able to love you.”
“And I …” I began, but did not finish. I did not dare tell him that it was the opposite for me, that the child was a vehicle for my love of him.
We spoke for a long time that night, with many long silences. Sometimes I think I remember every word.
“It’s impossible for a woman to understand. A man’s life depends on the state of his soul. The rest is all extra, a side product. And the child? The child is this strange miracle,” he said, then turned to me.
“This is the right time to make a vow. Let’s do it right now. Let’s vow to stay together. But try to love me a little less. Love the child more,” he pleaded, a little hoarse, almost as if he were threatening me. “Your heart must let me go. That’s all I want. You know I have no ulterior motive. I can’t live under conditions of such emotional tension. There are men more feminine than me, for whom it is vital to be loved. There are others who, even at the best of times, can only just about tolerate the feeling of being loved. I am that kind. It is a kind of shyness, if you like. The more masculine a man, the more shy he is.”
“What do you want?” I cried. “What can I do?”
“Let’s make a pact,” he said. “Let’s do it for the child’s sake so we can stay together. You know exactly what I want. Only you can help,” he continued, frowning. “Only you can loosen this knot. If I really wanted to leave, I would simply leave. But I don’t want to leave either you or the child. However impossible it might prove, I want to try harder. I want us to stay together: together, only not so intensely, not so unconditionally, not so much as a matter of life or death. Because I can’t go on like this,” he added. “I am very sorry but I just can’t.” And he gave a polite smile.
Then I asked something stupid.
“In that case, why did you marry me?”
“When I married you I knew almost everything about myself. But I didn’t know enough about you. I married you because I didn’t know you loved me as much as you do.”
He looked almost frightened as he said that.
“Is that a crime?” I asked. “Is it such a crime to love you as I do?”
He laughed. He stood in the darkness, smoking his cigarette, softly laughing. It was sad laughter, not in the least cynical or superior.
“It’s worse than a crime,” he answered. “It’s a mistake.”
Then he added, in a friendly way:
“I didn’t make that answer up. Talleyrand said it first when he discovered that Napoleon had had the young duc d’Enghien executed. I have to tell you, it’s a cliché.”
Fat lot I cared about Napoleon and the duc d’Enghien! I understood exactly what he wanted to say. I began to bargain with him.
“Listen,” I said. “The situation may not be quite so intolerable. We will both grow old. You might find the warmth of love more comforting once you yourself grow cold.”
“But that’s precisely it,” he quietly replied. “That’s the whole point. It is the thought that old age is inevitable, that it’s creeping on.”
He was forty-eight at the time he said this, forty-eight precisely that autumn. He looked a lot younger, though. It was after our separation that he began to age.
We didn’t say any more about it that night. Nor the next day—not ever. Two days later we set off home. On our return we found the child in a fever. He died the following week. After that we never talked about anything personal again. We simply lived together waiting for something. For a miracle, perhaps. But there are no miracles.
One afternoon, a
few weeks after the child’s death, I came home from the cemetery and went into the nursery. My husband was standing in the dark room.
“What are you doing here?” he asked me roughly. Then he came to his senses and left the room.
“I’m sorry,” he said, over his shoulder.
It was he who had fitted out the room. He had personally chosen every piece of furniture and arranged everything about it, right down to the position the furniture was to occupy. True, he hardly ever entered the room while the child was alive, and even then he used to stand confused on the threshold, as if he feared the awkwardness and ludicrousness of an emotional scene. But he asked to see the child each day, in his room, and every morning and evening he had to have a report of how the child had slept and its general state of health.
Afterwards he only once went in there: that was a few weeks after the funeral. In any case, we locked up the room and I had the key, and that’s how it stayed for three years, until our divorce came through, nor did we ever open it; everything stayed just as it was the moment we took the child to the clinic. I did sometimes sneak in to clean … without anyone knowing, of course.
I was half-crazy in those weeks after the funeral. But I pulled myself together and dragged myself about, if only because I didn’t want to collapse altogether. I was drawing superhuman strength from somewhere. I knew it was perfectly possible that he was feeling even worse than I did, that he might be close to a serious breakdown, and that even if he denied it, he needed me.
But something happened between us in those weeks, or rather between him and the world … I can’t quite find the words for it. Something in him did break. All this, of course, happened without anything being said. Isn’t that always the case with serious, even life-threatening, events generally? When a person begins to cry or scream, the crisis is past.
He was calm during the entire funeral too. He said nothing. His calm was infectious. We followed the little white-and-gold coffin in silence, with straight backs and dry eyes. But do you know—he never once came to the cemetery with me to visit the grave? … He might have gone there by himself, I don’t know.
“When someone starts crying, you know it’s a cheat. Everything is over by then,” he said to me once. “I don’t believe in tears. Pain is silent and sheds no tears.”
What was happening to me in those weeks? Looking back now I would say I was working my way up to revenge. Revenge? Against whom? Against fate? Against those who treated him? That would have been stupid. Believe me when I say the child had been treated by the best doctors in town.
People say all kinds of things about times like this. “It was as much as they could bear,” they say. That’s how it was. It was as much as I could bear. But it happened in stages. Everyone was busy with all kinds of things in those few days when the little one was dying. Their smallest cares seemed to exercise them more than the saving of my child’s life. I can’t forgive them for this, of course, not even now. I wanted to be revenged on them. But I felt the desire for another kind of revenge too, a revenge not in my mind but in my heart. It was the revenge of indifference. A strange indifference and contempt burned within me then. It was a fierce cold flame. Because it’s not true that suffering purifies people; that we become better, wiser, more understanding in the process. We become cold and indifferent. When, for the first time in our lives, we properly understand our fate, we become almost calm. Calm and extraordinarily, terrifyingly lonely.
During those weeks I didn’t go to confession as I used to. What would I have had to confess? What was my sin and how had I committed it? I felt I was the most innocent creature that ever lived. I don’t feel that way now … Sin is not just what the catechism says it is. Sin is not simply that which we commit. Sin is also what we desire but are too weak to do. When my husband—for the first and last time in his life—barked at me in that peculiar hoarse voice in the nursery, I understood my sin. I had sinned, in his eyes, because I was unable to save the child.
You’re staring into space. I can see you’re confused. You feel that only deeply wounded feelings or acute despair can lead a man to such an unjust accusation. Not for one moment did I feel his accusation to be unjust. “Yes, but think of all you did do,” you say. Well, yes, it wasn’t something I could be arrested for, whatever anyone thought. I sat at that child’s bedside for eight days. I slept there and nursed him. I was the one who went against usual practice and called other doctors when the first, and then the second, failed to help. Yes, I did all I could. But I did it all so my husband should find strength to live, so that he should remain mine, so he should love me—because there was no other way but through the child. You understand? … It was for my husband I prayed when I was praying for the child. My husband’s life was the life that mattered. That was the only reason the child’s life was of importance. That’s a sin, you say! … What is sin? I didn’t know then. I do know now. People who are part of us need to be loved and supported: those closest to our hearts, the love of whom lies deepest in us, they need all our power. It all collapsed when the child died. I knew I had lost my husband because, even though he said nothing, he blamed me. Ridiculous and unfair to blame me, you say. I don’t know. I find it impossible to talk about.
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 d
own.
“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 …”