by Sándor Márai
The hospital in the nearby little town was just an old building, but to me it seemed a magical fairy-tale castle.
I was interested in everything and frightened of everything there. Even the smell, that country-hospital smell, was exciting! And attractive too, simply by virtue of being new, a smell different from the smell of the ditch, the burrow where I lived like an animal with my dad, my mother, and the rest of the family: polecat, field mouse, hamster, we were all these things. The hospital was treating me for rabies and gave me painful injections, but what did I care about injections or rabies! Night and day I watched the comings and goings of the world: the suicidal, the cancer-ridden, and the incontinent, all in a common ward. Later, in Paris, I saw a lovely engraving of an ancient French hospital at the time of the revolution, a vaulted hall where ragged people sat in beds. My hospital was just as unlikely a place for me to spend the best days of my childhood, the best being the days when I was in danger of contracting rabies.
But I didn’t get rabies. They cured me. At least I didn’t get it then, not the way they describe the disease in textbooks. But maybe something rabid remained in me. I sometimes wondered about it later. They say people with rabies are constantly thirsty while at the same time being frightened of water. I felt a bit like that myself whenever things were going well. I have been intensely thirsty all my life, but whenever I found a way of quenching my thirst I recoiled from it in disgust. Don’t worry, I won’t bite you.
It was this hospital I was reminded of—that and the rabies—when I landed up at the elegant house.
There wasn’t a large garden, but it was scented like a rural drugstore. They used to bring home strange herbs from abroad. Everything was from abroad there, you know, even the toilet paper! Don’t stare like that! They never went shopping like ordinary mortals, you know. They just rang the wholesaler, who brought them everything they needed—meat for the kitchen, shrubs for the garden, a new record for the record player, books, bath salts, scents, pomades whose smells were so dreamlike, so exciting, sweet, and tantalizing they made me dizzy and quite sick. I practically wept with emotion whenever I cleaned the bathroom after them and smelled their soap and cologne, every lingering smell and scent. And it was all on account.
The rich are strange, darling. As you know, I myself was pretty rich for a while. I had a maid to scrub my back in the morning. I even had a car, a convertible coupe, driven by a chauffeur. I had an open sports car, too, to race about in. And, believe it or not, I didn’t feel in the least embarrassed to be moving among them. I was not retiring or bashful. I made myself at home. There were moments I imagined I was really rich. But now I know that I wasn’t, not really, not for a second. I simply had jewels, money, and a bank account. I was granted these things by those who could afford them. Or I took it from them, when I had the opportunity. I was a clever little girl, you see. I learned in the ditch, in my childhood, not to be idle, to pick up whatever lay at hand, to smell it, take a bite of it, and to hide it—to hide everything that others threw away. An old enameled pot with a hole in it was just as valuable as a precious stone. I was just a slip of a girl when I learned that lesson. You can never be too industrious.
Now, these rainy days, that’s what I always ask myself. Have I been industrious? Have I given things proper attention? I don’t suffer from pangs of conscience. On the contrary, I worry in case I’ve forgotten to take anything I could have. Like you. For example, that ring of mine that you sold yesterday … you struck a really good deal, darling. I’m proud of you. I’m not just saying that—after all, no one knows better than you do how to sell jewelry. I don’t know where I’d be without you. I say “my” ring, but it was really the ring Her Old Ladyship used to wear. It was a present from the old man for their silver wedding anniversary. I found it by accident in a drawer after the old woman died. I was the lady of the house by then and felt entitled to it. I put the ring on and examined it. And I remembered how many years ago, after first coming to the house, I found a ring on the laundry table among other forgotten things while the old girl was happily splashing about in the bath: an old-fashioned, heavy ring with a fat gemstone in it. I put it on and examined it with such nervous excitement that I started trembling, threw the ring back onto the table, and ran to the toilet, because my whole body was seized with cramps, I felt so sick. It was all because of the ring. But this time, after Her Ladyship’s death, I said nothing to my husband. I just slipped it into my pocket. I didn’t steal it. It was mine by right, since after his mother’s death my husband gave me anything that even faintly sparkled. But it felt good just to take this one ring, the one she proudly wore on her finger, and to put it into my pocket without my husband knowing, without his permission. And I looked after it really well—that is, until yesterday, when you finally sold it.
What are you laughing at? Take it from me, that house was so particular even the toilet paper was imported from abroad. There were four bathrooms: the one for the old lady had pale green tiles, the young gentleman’s were yellow, the old boy’s dark blue. The fourth was used by the servants. All the bathrooms except ours had matching toilet paper, imported from America. There’s everything you want in America—vast industries and plenty of millionaires. I’d like to go there sometime. I heard my husband, the first one, the real one, went there after the war when he decided he wanted no more of the People’s Democracy. But I wouldn’t want to meet him now. Why? What would be the point? Sometimes it just happens that two people have said everything they could possibly say to each other and have nothing left to say.
Not that you can ever be sure of that. Some conversations go on forever. Wait, I haven’t finished!
. . .
It was a beautiful house and we servants had our own bathroom, but that just had ordinary white tiles. The paper we used was ordinary white too, a little rough, as I remember. It was a well-ordered house.
The old man was the mainspring of order. Everything went as smooth as clockwork, with the delicate precision of a fine lady’s watch bought not two weeks ago. The staff rose at six in the morning. The ritual of cleaning had to be as religiously attended to as mass at church. Brooms, brushes, dusters, rags, the window cloths, proper oils for parquet and furniture—the refined grease with which we treated the floorboards was like those highly expensive egg-based preparations beauty salons produce for the glamorous—and I mustn’t forget all the exciting machinery, like the vacuum cleaner, which did not merely suck the dirt from the rugs but brushed them too; the electric polisher that buffed the parquet so bright you could see your face in it. I used to stop sometimes and simply gaze at myself like those nymphs in the ancient Greek reliefs … yes, I’d lean over and examine my face, my eyes sparkling, just as absorbed, as startled as that half-boy, half-girl statue I once saw in the museum looking adoringly at his or her charming reflection.
We dressed for cleaning each morning like actors for a performance. We wore costumes. The manservant put on a vest which was like a man’s waistcoat turned inside out. Cook was like a nurse in an operating theater in her sterile white gown, her head covered in a white scarf, waiting for the surgeon and patient to turn up. I was like one of those peasant girls in the operetta chorus dressed for gathering berries at dawn in my traditional maid’s cap. I was obliged to understand that this dressing up wasn’t simply because it was pretty but because it was hygienic and clean, because they didn’t trust me, thinking I might be dirty, carrying a lot of germs. Not that they ever said as much to my face, of course! And they may not actually have thought it, not in so many words. It was just that they were wary, wary of everyone and everything. That was their nature. They were suspicious to an extraordinary degree. They protected themselves against germs, against thieves, against heat and cold, against dust and drafts. They protected themselves against wear and tear and tooth decay. They never stopped worrying, whether it was about their teeth or the state of the furniture, about their shares, their thoughts—the thoughts they adapted or borrowed from books. I was ne
ver consciously aware of this. But I understood that, from the moment I first stepped into the house, they wanted to be protected against me too, from whatever disease I carried.
Why should I be carrying a disease? I was young and fresh as a daisy. All the same, they had me examined by a doctor. It was a horrible examination; it was as if the doctor himself didn’t fancy doing it. Their local doctor was an elderly man, and he tried to joke his way through the minute, painstaking process. But as a doctor—indeed, the family doctor—he essentially approved of the exercise. After all, there was a young man in the house, still just a student, and it was not unlikely that sooner or later the young man would want to get familiar with the new scullery maid, who had, for all purposes, just been plucked out of the ditch. They worried in case he caught TB or the pox off me. I even suspected that the old doctor—an intelligent man—was faintly ashamed of this overscrupulous need for assurance, this just-in-case. Once there proved to be nothing wrong with me, they tolerated me in the house like a decently bred dog that would need no vaccinations. The young gentleman did not contract any infection from me, of course. It was just that—much later—he happened to marry me. That was the one danger they’d never thought to insure themselves against. Not even the family doctor could diagnose it. One has to be so careful, darling. I think the old gentleman, for one, would have had an apoplectic fit if it ever occurred to him that my disease might be transmitted by way of marriage.
The old woman was different. She worried about other things. Not about her husband, not about her son, but about the fortune. She was worried about every detail of it. She regarded the family, the factory, the palatial home, the entire miraculous edifice of it, as a kind of rare antique of which there could only be this one unique example. It was like a Chinese jar to her, one that was worth—how should I know?—millions, perhaps. Once broken, it could never be replaced. She watched over everything, over their whole lives … who they were and how they lived. It was her masterpiece, so she worried about it. I sometimes think this worry of hers wasn’t entirely groundless—something did break there, and it won’t be replaced.
What’s that? Are you asking me if she was mad? Well, of course, they were all mad, the lot of them. Only the old man was not mad. And we, the rest of us who lived in the house, the staff—I almost said “the nurses”—were slowly infected by their lunacy. You know, the way the nursing staff in the madhouse, the assistant medics, the head doctor, the director, all are slowly infected by the refined, invisible, concentrated poison of madness. It’s what spreads and germinates in the wards where the lunatics are kept … you can’t detect it under a microscope, but it remains infectious. Anyone healthy who finds himself surrounded by mad people slowly goes as mad as they are. We ourselves were far from normal, we who served, fed, and cleaned them. The manservant, the cook, the chauffeur, and myself: we were the inner circle, the first to catch the madness bug. We aped their manners, partly to mock them, but at the same time we took them seriously and fell under their spell. We tried to live, to dress, to behave like them. We too made a show of offering the food round at the table and talked pretty, making fancy gestures, the way we saw them doing in the grand dining room. When we broke a plate we would say the kind of things they said, like “It’s my nerves. I have a terrible migraine!” My poor mother gave birth to six children in a ditch, but I never once heard her complain of a terrible migraine. That’s probably because she had never heard of migraine, and as far as she knew it might be some kind of food or drink. But I was soon suffering from migraine myself, simply because I was quick at picking things up. Whenever I broke a dish in the kitchen I put my hand on my brow, put on a pained expression, and complained to Cook, “Wind’s in the south, I feel a migraine coming on.” And we didn’t grin at each other, Cook and I; we didn’t stand there splitting our sides laughing, because by now we had both permitted ourselves the luxury of migraines. I was always a quick learner. It wasn’t simply that my hands grew pale, like theirs: I was growing pale within. When my mother saw me one day—after three years in service—she burst into tears. Not tears of joy. She wept out of fear. It was as if I’d grown an extra nose.
They were all barking mad, but mad in a way that meant they could talk to each other politely during the day, to fulfill their official obligations in the time allowed, to smile charmingly and do everything that was required of them according to the best fashion. At the same time I felt they might just as easily, at any moment, say something rude or stab the doctor in the chest with the nearest pair of scissors.
Do you know what betrayed the fact that they were mad? I think it might have been their stiffness. The way they moved, their very language, was stiff. There was no sign of flexibility, softness, nothing natural or healthy in their movement. They laughed and smiled the way actors do after much practice: they adjusted their smiles to fit the occasion. They spoke quietly, particularly when they were most furious. Sometimes they spoke so quietly they hardly moved their mouths, merely whispered. I never once heard a voice raised; never once witnessed an argument in that house. The old man grumbled and rumbled sometimes, but he was infected too, because straight after he would practically bite his own tongue off. He hated any spontaneous fit of cursing or rage.
They performed to each other all the time, even when simply sitting, as if they were trapeze artists in a circus, hanging off the bar, acknowledging applause.
At dinner they’d make such a show of offering each other food you’d think they were guests in their own house. “Here you are, my dear,” “Do have a taste of this, darling” … so it went on. It took some time to get used to it, but eventually I did.
The knocking. That was another thing to get used to. You know, they never stepped into each other’s rooms without first knocking. They all lived under the one roof, but they lived their lives a long way from each other: it was as if there were great tracts of land between them with invisible borders that they had to cross to get from one bedroom to another … The old woman slept on the ground floor. The old man on the first. The young gentleman, my husband-to-be, slept on the second under the mansard. They even had a special set of stairs built for him so that he might have privacy in his own domain—just as he had his own car and, later, his own servant. They took enormous pains not to disturb each other. That was one of the reasons I first thought they were mad. But when we copied their manners in the kitchen, it was by no means mockery. There was a moment, in the first year or two, when I seemed to wake from the trance and suddenly started to laugh. But when I saw how cross the older servants were—the manservant and the cook, I mean—I regretted it. I had broken some sacred rule and ridiculed all that was most holy. I quickly snapped to and felt ashamed of myself. I understood that there was nothing here to be laughed at. Madness is never a thing to be laughed at.
But it was more than madness pure and simple. It took me some time to realize what it was, what it was they were so desperately trying to preserve; what this never-ending round of frantic cleaning, these hospital rules, and all these manners, with their “if you please” and “May I offer you this or that” was about. It wasn’t their money they were protecting, or not simply their money. Because, when it came to money, they were—once again—different from normal people, people not born into money. It wasn’t money but something else they were protecting: it was that they were determined to guard, not just the money. It took me some time to cotton on. I might never have if I hadn’t met the man whose photograph you were looking at just now. Yes, the one that looked like an artist. He explained it to me.
What did he say? Well, one day he told me that the lives of people like that were dedicated not to preserving, but to resisting. That’s all he said. I see you don’t understand. But I do—now.
Perhaps if I tell you the whole story, you might understand it too. But I won’t mind if you fall asleep in the meantime.
I was just saying that everything in the house smelled of hospitals, the hospital where they treated me for rabies,
the one that was the greatest, most marvelous experience of my childhood. What can I say about the cleanliness there? It was unnaturally clean. I mean, all that wax we rubbed into everything—the floorboards, the furniture, the parquet—and then the various creams and liquids we applied to windows, to carpets, to the silver and the copper, the stuff we cleaned and polished until it shone … it was all unnatural. Whoever stepped into the house, and especially someone coming from a place like mine, immediately started sniffing the air and choking in the artificial atmosphere. The hospital was drowning in the smell of carbolic and disinfectant: here it was detergents, the creams and liquids. And then there were the cigars, the foreign cigars, the lingering smoke of Egyptian cigarettes, the expensive liqueurs, the perfumes and scents worn by the guests. All these had long soaked into the furniture, the bed linen, and the curtains; they had eaten and wormed their way into everything.
The old woman had a mania for cleaning. Despite the servant with his tidying and me with my work, she would call in contract cleaners once a month, people who arrived like the fire brigade, complete with ladders and strange machines, who washed and scraped and fumigated just about everything. We also had a regular window cleaner whose one job was to wash and wipe the windows that we, the resident staff, had already washed. The smell of the laundry room was like an operating theater where they destroy the germs by radiating the place with blue lamps. You’ve never seen such a superior laundry room! You might have taken it for an expensive, upper-class funeral parlor. I never entered it without a sense of faint religious awe. I was only allowed in when Her Ladyship told me to help the laundress, who washed, ironed, and folded linen. She reminded me of those women back home that wash the dead and sort out dead men’s clothes. The family wasn’t about to trust me, you can be sure of that! I was a slattern by comparison with the delicate professional summoned to perform the great annual wash! … This special laundress used to be summoned by Her Ladyship with an open postcard announcing the joyful news that the dirty washing was waiting for her! … And of course she came immediately, delighted to be of use. My help was limited to helping her run the finest shirts, underwear, and damask tablecloths through the mangle. On no account would they trust me with the washing itself! There came a day when the laundress did not appear to summons. Instead there was a postcard written by her daughter. I remember every word of it, since I was the one who took the mail upstairs and, naturally, I read whatever was not in an envelope. This was what the laundress’s daughter wrote: “Dear Madam, I regret to inform Your Kind Ladyship that my mother can’t come to do the washing because she is dead.” She signed it: “Your humble servant, Ilonka.” I remember the way Her Ladyship wrinkled her brow as she read the card. She looked cross and shook her head. But she didn’t say anything. At that point I stepped forward and volunteered to do the work, and for a while they let me do it, at least until a new laundress was found, one who was a laundress by calling and had the advantage of still being alive.