by Sándor Márai
But then I discovered the volatility had deep roots, so deep I could shed no light on it. Poverty was somewhere at the bottom of it. Judit was struggling with her memories. I was sometimes moved by the sheer intensity of her desire to be stronger, more disciplined than her memories. But now that the barriers were down, the barriers raised between her and the world by poverty, some tide had burst its banks in her. It wasn’t that she wanted more, something better and more glamorous than what I offered: what she wanted was something different. Do you understand? She was like an invalid who imagines she might feel better in another room; or that there might be a different doctor, wiser than her own, that she might consult; or that there was a medicine on sale somewhere that was more potent, more effective than the medicines she had so far taken. It was always something else she wanted: always something different. Occasionally she apologized for it. She didn’t really say anything, just looked at me. It was at these moments I felt closest to her proud, wounded soul. She would look at me all but helplessly, as if she could not help her poverty and her memories. And then a voice started speaking inside her that was louder than this silent pleading. The voice wanted something else. It started straightaway, that first evening.
What did she want? Revenge and all that goes with it. In what form? She herself did not know. She probably hadn’t worked out her battle plan. It does no good shaking the foundations of the sagging, sunken, inert structure into which people are born. Occasionally there is an accident, some particular human contact, some chance encounter or event: we wake, take a look round the world, and are suddenly surprised to find we have no home to go to. We don’t even know what to look for or how to limit our desires; what it is we actually desire. We can no longer see the horizon: the image we had has been blown out of shape. All at once nothing satisfies, nothing will do. Yesterday we were happy with a bar of chocolate, a brightly colored ribbon, or any simple pleasure such as sunshine or health. We drank clean water from a damaged old cup, happy that the water was cold and quenched our thirst. In the evening we might have leaned on the rails of a corridor in the tenement courtyard listening in the dark to music playing in the distance and been almost happy. We might have looked at a flower and smiled. The world offered wonderful satisfactions now and then. But then comes an accident and the soul loses its inner peace.
What did Judit do? She instigated, in her own fashion, a kind of class war against me.
Maybe it was not against me, not personally. It was just that I embodied a world for which she felt an infinite longing, a world she so desperately, so feverishly envied, and tried, in a cold fury, with such unfortunate results, to enter, so that when at last she found a repository for these longings—that is to say, in me—she quite lost her equilibrium. At first she was anxious and fussy. She sent back her food. Then, to my quiet surprise, she started changing hotel rooms. She exchanged the little en suite apartment overlooking the park for a bigger one that had a view of the river, with separate bedroom and dressing room. “It’s quieter here,” she said, like a fussy traveling diva. I listened to her complaints with a smile. Naturally I paid her bills and said nothing. I gave her a checkbook and asked her to pay for everything herself. After only three months, the bank informed me—with surprising speed—that the sizable account I had opened for Judit had nothing left in it. How, and on what, had she spent the money, which for her would have represented a substantial sum, a small fortune? It wasn’t a question I ever addressed to her, of course: quite likely she would not have been able to answer. The harness of her soul had snapped, that’s all. Her wardrobe overflowed with expensive clothes selected, surprisingly, according to the best of taste, mostly entirely superfluous feminine fripperies. She shopped in the best stores, without a thought, paying by check: hats, dresses, furs, fashionable novelties, first smaller, then bigger items of jewelry. She craved these things with an extraordinary hunger, a hunger somewhat unnatural in her position. Most of the things she never wore. She was like a starved creature set in front of a laid table, who doesn’t care that nature very quickly sets a limit to our desires or that surfeit might lead to sickness.
Nothing was good enough. Nothing was colorful, sweet, salty, hot, or cold enough. Her soul was excitedly seeking something to quench her thirst as quickly as possible. She spent the morning exploring the most expensive central stores, desperately concerned that the shop not overcharge her for the item she desired. What item? Another fur? Another colorful, fashionable trinket of the season? Yes, all this; and then there were the impossible, crazy things, things bordering on the outrageous. One day I was forced to say something. It stopped her dead in her tracks, like someone arrested in the middle of a riot. She looked around as if waking from a dream and began to cry. She cried for days. Then, for a long time, she bought nothing.
But then she went through another strange period of silence, as if looking far into the distance, remembering. I was moved by her silence. She was with me whenever I wanted her. She was like a thief caught in the act: ashamed, obedient, on her best behavior. I decided not to mention it again, not to warn her. Money was of little importance, after all: I was still rich at the time, and knew by then that it was pointless saving money if by doing so I lost mysef. Because I too lived dangerously in those months; all three of us did, Judit, my wife, and I. We were in mortal danger in the strict sense of the word: everything to which we had clung had collapsed; our lives had turned into a floodplain, a tide of dirty water washing everywhere, drowning our memories, our security, our homes. Now and then we could raise our heads above the water and look around for the nearest shore. But there was no shore to be seen anywhere. Everything has to adopt a form at some stage, even rebellion. Eventually everything is reduced to cliché. Of what value was money in this quiet earthquake? Let the money be washed away with the tide along with the rest; with calm, with desire, with self-respect, with vanity. There comes a day when everything suddenly seems very simple. So I said nothing to Judit, but let her do whatever she wanted. I gave her everything, just like that. For a while she resisted the shopping plague, moderated it, stared at me in panic, exactly like a servant accused of greed, infidelity, or extravagance; and then she set out on her mad dash round town again: dressmakers, antiques dealers, fashion stores.
Hang on a minute, I’ve got a headache. Waiter, a glass of water! And an aspirin. Thank you.
Talking about it now, I feel the same dizziness as I did then. It was like leaning over a huge waterfall. And there is no safety barrier anywhere, not a hand to reach out for. Only the water roaring and the call of the deep, and you suddenly feel that profound, frightening urge … suddenly you know you need every ounce of your strength to turn around and walk away again. You can still do something. You just have to take a step backwards, to say a word, to write a letter, to do something. Down there waits the roaring water. That’s how it feels.
That’s just what I was thinking of when I got this headache. Today I can see all this clearly, at least a few moments of it. For example, when she told me that she had a lover in London, a Greek teacher of singing. That was near the end, once she had decided to come home. But first she wanted clothes: shoes, decent luggage. The Greek music master bought her everything she wanted. Then she came home, took a room near the station, picked up the phone, and rang me, saying “Hello” in English, as though she had forgotten Hungarian.
What effect did this news have on me? I’d like to be honest with you, so I am trying to recall, to look into my heart, to check my recollection, and can only answer in a single word: none. It is hard for people to understand the true significance of actions and relationships. Someone dies, for example. You don’t understand it. The person is already buried, and you still feel nothing. You go about in mourning with a ceremonial solemnity, you look straight ahead of you when you are in society, but then, when you’re at home, alone, you yawn, you scratch your nose, you read a book and think of everything except the dead man you are supposedly mourning. On the outside you behave one wa
y, properly somber and funereal; but inside, you are astonished to note, you feel absolutely nothing, at most a kind of guilty satisfaction and relief. And indifference: a deep indifference. This lasts a while, for days, perhaps for months. You cheat the world: you are indifferent on the sly. Then one day, much later, maybe after a year, when the dead one has long decomposed, you are just walking along and suddenly you feel dizzy and have to lean against the wall because the event has finally gotten through to you: the feeling that had tied you to the dead one. The meaning of death. The fact, the reality of it, the knowledge that it is useless to scrape away the earth with your fingers and uncover what is left of him: you will never again see that smile, and all the wisdom and power in the world is incapable of raising the dead man to make him walk down the street toward you with a smile on his face. You can lead an army and occupy every corner of the globe, but it’s still useless. And then you cry out. Or maybe not even that. You just stand in the street, pale, aware of a loss so great it seems the world has lost all meaning. It is as if you were left totally alone, the only man on earth.
And jealousy. What does that mean? What is there behind it? Vanity, of course. Seventy percent of our body is made up of fluids; only the remaining thirty percent is constituted of the solid matter that makes up a human being. In the same way, human character is comprised of seventy percent vanity, the rest made up of desire, generosity, fear of death, and a sense of honor. When a man in love walks down the street with bloodshot eyes because a woman—just as vain as he is, just as needy, just as lonely, just as desperate for happiness, just as unfortunate a creature as everyone else—has found brief solace in another man’s arms somewhere in town, it is not that he wants to save the woman’s body or soul from some imagined danger or humiliation: it’s his own vanity that he wishes to preserve from harm. Judit told me she had a Greek music master for a lover. I nodded politely, as if to say “Yes, I see,” and changed the subject. And indeed, right at that moment, I felt nothing. It was much later, once we had divorced, once I knew that other people loved her too, once I was alone, that I remembered the Greek music master, and groaned in fury and despair. Well, then, I thought, I would kill them both, both Judit and the Greek music master, if I ever laid hands on them. I suffered like a wounded creature, a wild animal shot in the thigh, all because a woman with whom I had nothing more to do, whose society I avoided because we had failed each other in every respect, had at some time in the past an affair with a man whom she, Judit, would only faintly remember now, the way one remembers a dead man one hardly knew. But then, at the moment she actually confessed to the affair, I felt nothing. I carried on peeling an apple with a polite, agreeable expression on my face, as if this were precisely what I expected to hear and I were content to get the anticipated news.
That was how we got to know each other.
Then, eventually, Judit had had enough of all that my money could buy her. She had bolted her food like a greedy child, and now she was sick. Disappointment and indifference followed. She woke up one day offended—not by me, not by the world at large, but by the realization that no one can pursue their desires for long without due punishment. I found out that back in her childhood at home, on the farm, they were as unspeakably, as impossibly, as shamefully poor as sociological studies sometimes describe. They had a little house and a few acres of land, but debt and the size of the family meant they had to sell. After this there remained nothing but a shack and a yard. And that’s where they lived, her father, her mother, and her paralyzed sister. The children were scattered about the world: they were engaged in service. She spoke about her childhood without emotion, in a matter-of-fact way, but it took her a long time to speak about poverty. She never tried to make me feel guilty; she was too much of a real woman for that—in other words, she was wise and practical in the essential things. People don’t blame fate for death, sickness, and poverty, they accept and bear it: she simply stated things. She told me how in winter they lived underground, she and the family. Judit would have been six when famine drove them from their home to another part of the country, where they took jobs harvesting melons. She didn’t mean “living underground” in a figurative sense: she meant really underground, digging a deep ditch in the earth, covering it with reeds, and spending the entire winter there. She also told me, in great detail—and I could see this childhood memory meant a lot to her—that there were dreadful frosts that year, so the meadow mice had to scamper all over them and take refuge with them in the ditch. It was very unpleasant, Judit recalled, in a faraway voice but without complaint.
So you see, there was this beautiful woman sitting opposite me with expensive furs round her neck, her fingers glittering with jewels in the dazzling restaurant, so not a man could pass by without running a brief glance up and down her, and all the while she was quietly telling me how unpleasant it had been living underground in the great frost with thousands of mice running over their makeshift beds. At times like this I sat in silence beside her, looking at her, listening to her. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had slapped me across the face sometimes, not for any particular reason but simply because she happened to remember something. But Judit simply continued talking, as matter-of-fact as ever. She knew more about poverty, the world, and living with others than all the sociological textbooks put together. She never blamed anything or anyone; she simply remembered and observed.
But as I say, one day she had had enough of her new life. She was sick of it. Maybe she had recalled something. Maybe she understood that she couldn’t be compensated for all that had happened to her and the others, to countless millions of people, by rushing round the shops: that there was no solution to be found on the individual level. Great matters are not settled by personal means. The personal is hopeless, superfluous. There is no personal recompense for what has happened and goes on happening to people at large, for what happens now and has happened for a thousand years. And all those who break free for a moment, emerge from the shadows, and bathe in the light: even in their happiest moments they harbor the guilty memory of their betrayal. It is as if they had committed their souls for eternity to those left behind. Did she know all this? She never talked about it. People don’t talk about the reasons for their poverty. She remembered poverty as one of the natural world’s natural phenomena. She never blamed the rich. If anything, she blamed the poor, recalling them and everything that constituted poverty in slightly mocking fashion. As if the poor could somehow help it. As if poverty were a form of sickness, and all those who suffered with it might have somehow avoided it. Maybe they didn’t look after themselves properly; maybe they overate or didn’t wear the right clothes in the evening when it was cold. It was the accusing way close family speak of the chronically sick, as if the dying man suffering from acute anemia with only weeks to live might have done something about it. “He should have started taking his medicine earlier,” “He should have let someone open the window,” “He shouldn’t have stuffed himself with poppy-seed cake!” If only the poor man had done all this, he might have escaped the anemia that was killing him! That was something like the way Judit regarded the poor and poverty. It was as if she had said: “Someone should have done something about it.” But she never blamed the rich. She was too worldly-wise for that.
She was more worldly-wise than is wise, and now, when the goods of the world were laid out before her, she suddenly felt sick, because she had tried to cram in too much of it. But it was her memories that did it, really. Memories are more potent than indulgence. They are always more potent.
She wasn’t a delicate creature, but her memories still got the better of her. I could see her struggling against her weakness. Ever since the world began, there have been healthy and sick, rich and poor. We can alleviate poverty, we can strive for greater equality, we can put limits on our greed, our profiteering, our rapacity, but we can’t turn a dullard into a genius by education, can’t teach the cloth-eared the heavenly beauties of music, nor can we teach temperance to the overf
ed. Judit never talked in terms of justice: she was too worldly-wise for that. The sun rises and sets, she thought, and you will always find the poor somewhere. She had risen from the ranks of the poor simply because she was beautiful, a woman, and because I desired her. But she was growing wise to me too. For her, it was like emerging from a trance. She started looking round. She started to listen.
Apart from our first meeting she had rarely looked directly at me. People don’t gaze into the eyes of an idea, into the eyes of supernatural beings that determine their fates. There must have been a certain glow, a kind of dazzling luminosity, around me in those early years that meant she had to blink and squint when she raised her eyes to meet mine. The effect wasn’t due to my personality or social rank, nor to the fact that I was a man or that I was in any way a special being. To her I had been a secret code that she dare not crack because such codes are the key to happiness and misery. I was, for her, the condition to which a person might aspire her entire life. But when the possibility of that condition arose and was achieved, she recoiled, was disappointed, and became vengeful. Lázár was very fond of one of Strindberg’s plays, the one called A Dream Play. Do you know it? … I have never seen it. He would often quote lines from it and recall particular scenes. He said there was a character whose one wish was that life should present him with “a green tackle box”: you know the kind of green box in which a fisherman keeps his hooks, lines, and bait. Well, this character grows old, life passes him by, and eventually the gods take pity on him and send him the box. The character looks at the box he has longed for all his life, moves to the front of the stage, examines the box more closely, and, with deep sadness, declares, “It’s not green enough …” Lázár quoted this sometimes when talking about human desire. And as Judit and I slowly grew more familiar I began to feel that I was “not green enough” for her. For a long time she did not dare see me as I was. People are always scared of seeing on an ordinary human scale things they have intensely desired or have raised into an ideal. We were living together by this time, and the intolerable tension that had infected our earlier, more feverish years had gone: now we perceived each other as people, as man and woman, complete with physical weaknesses demanding simple human cures … and yet she still liked to regard me in a way I never saw myself. It was as if I were the priest of a strange religion or the scion of some aristocratic family. I saw myself merely as a lonely man nursing a few hopes.