by Sándor Márai
On the other hand, no one dressed more simply, more soberly than my husband. He never once wore anything conspicuous. You’d never catch him with a loud or vulgar tie. God forbid! He dressed in what they call “best bourgeois taste.” I once heard the old man quietly say to his son: “Look at that ridiculous man there, dressing like gentry.” He was pointing at someone wearing a short fur coat with a drawstring and a hunter’s cap. They avoided anyone that was not of their class, the class that, according to them, constituted civil society. Being respectable members of society, they owed nothing either to those below or above them.
My husband somehow always succeeded in wearing the same clothes: a suit made of heavy charcoal-gray material. And a plain, dark, neat tie to go with it. Of course he changed his outfits with the seasons and according to the customs of the house, society, and universal taste. But when I think of him now … he rarely comes to mind, occasionally in dreams, and he’s always looking at me as if he’s cross about something. I don’t understand why! I always see him in a dark suit, a solemn, double-breasted gray suit, like a kind of uniform. The old man was similar. He always seemed to be in an old-fashioned suit with a frock coat that generously covered his paunch. That’s what I always imagined him in, anyway, and I think it actually was like that! They took great care that their environment, their very lifestyle, should always be discreet, retiring, colorless. They knew what money meant; even their grandparents were rich, Grandfather being a highly placed bureaucrat and wine grower. They didn’t have to learn to be wealthy the way some Johnny-come-lately bumpkins do now, the kind who love nothing better than wearing a silk top hat as they climb into their brand-new American cars. Everything about the house was quiet, like the color of their ties. It was just that, deep down, secretly, they always wanted more. Things just had to be perfect. That was their obsession. That’s why the wardrobes were overflowing, why they could never get enough of shoes, linen, and ties. My husband took no notice of fashion: he just knew what was necessary and what was superfluous. It was in his blood. But the old man was still not completely confident in all the ways of high society. I’ll give you an example. In one of his wardrobes, on the inside of the door, he had a printed English-language table of what color clothes and what sort of tie it was appropriate to wear on what occasion. On a rainy Tuesday in April, for example, the drill might be to wear a dark-blue suit with a pale-blue striped tie, and so on.
It’s really hard being rich.
So I mugged up on it—wealth, that is. I studied with them for years, drinking it all in. I studied wealth as religiously as children study catechism at the village school.
It was only after a while I understood that it wasn’t a matter of this or that outfit, this or that tie, not really, but something else. They wanted to be perfect. That was what they were obsessed with: perfection. That’s why they were crazy. Perfection seems to be the rich man’s plague. It’s not a set of clothes they want, it’s a clothes store. Nor is one store enough. If there is more than one wealthy person in the house, it takes several stores. Not because they need or use them: just so they should have them available.
Another example. One day I discovered that there was a locked room on the third story of the villa just by the big balcony, a room with a small balcony of its own. It was a room they never used, that had been the nursery. It had been my husband’s room when he was a child. For years on end no one entered it except the staff, and even we only went in once a year to clean. It was here that everything associated with my husband’s early years slumbered on behind drawn blinds and a locked door. It was like a museum in there, the toys all in place like the paraphernalia and costumes of a bygone age. The first time I went in there, I felt a deep pang of pity. It was early one spring and they sent me to clean it. There was still the sour, sharp smell of the disinfectant they used on everything in the room, especially on the linoleum-covered floor: it was a hygienic sty, somewhere a child had once lived and played and complained of stomachaches. An artist had painted images of animals, fairy tales, dwarfs and Snow White on the white walls. The furniture was pale green, in faded oil colors. There was a beautifully made wooden cot with a net canopy, a marvelous set of scales to weigh the child on, and then, on the shelves, splendid games, teddy bears, building blocks, electric trains, picture books … all in exemplary order, as if on exhibition.
It was that pang of pity that did it for me. I hurried to open the window and raise the blinds. I was desperate for air. I still don’t quite know how to describe what I felt on first entering that room where my husband was a child. I swear it wasn’t the ditch I was thinking of, the ditch where I grew up. Believe me, life wasn’t so bad in that ditch. True, it wasn’t that good, either; it was simply different, the way everything is in reality. The ditch was reality for me. Poverty is not what adults imagine it is for children, I mean adults who were never poor. For a child poverty is fun as well as misery … Poor children like the dirt in which they can roll about and play. And you don’t need to wash your hands when you’re poor. What would be the point? Poverty is only bad for adults, very bad, worse than anything. It’s like the mange or stomach cramps. Poverty is the worst thing … And yet, when I stepped into the room, I did not envy my husband. I felt sorry for him instead, for having spent his childhood there, in that operating theater of a nursery. I felt someone brought up like this, in a place like this, could never be a whole person. They could only be a copy of a person, something that resembles a human being.
The nursery was as perfect as the rest of the house. It could not be more perfect. It was like their wardrobes and their shoe cupboards. It was as if everything had to be a place for storing things. Apart from their store of clothes and shoes they also needed their special store of books and pictures. It was like a factory store, really. There was a separate locked room in the attic that served as the official lumber room—another store. And all these stores were not there only to contain clothes and shoes and books and pictures, but were a form of perfection in themselves, the same obsessive perfection.
I expect there was a kind of store deep in their souls, too, where the obsession was nurtured, mothballed, and kept in proper order. They certainly had more of everything than they ever needed: two cars, two gramophones, two ice-cream-making machines, several radios, and several pairs of binoculars: the kind of opera glasses that people take to the theater, enameled and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, carried in pretty cases; the sort they took to the races for watching the horses; another for hanging round their necks on board ships so they could admire the sunset. I can’t be certain, but for all I know they might have had different ones for looking at cliffs, for watching the sun rise, for sunsets, for observing birds in flight, and so on. Everything they bought was intended to make the perfect more perfect.
It was the servant who shaved them, but my husband’s bathroom contained half a dozen shaving sets, the latest on the market. There were also half a dozen cutthroat razors in a deerskin case—Swedish, American, and English blades—though he never once touched his face with one of them. It was the same with lighters. My husband bought every lighter going, then threw them into drawers to rust along with other pretty gadgets, because he actually preferred to use a common match. One day he brought home an electric shaver in a leather case but never used it. If he was thinking of buying records to play on the gramophone, he always bought a complete set—the complete works of this or that composer all at once: the complete Wagner, the complete Bach, all the different recordings. There was nothing more important to him than having every single piece of Bach in the collection, every single damn piece—the full set, you understand?
As for books, the book dealer no longer waited for them to decide which book to buy but sent them every new book that came in, anything they might possibly pick up and read sometime. It was the servant’s job to cut the pages and then arrange them on the shelves in their cut, but mostly unread, condition. They did read, of course. They read plenty. The old man read books about
trade, and liked travelogues. My husband was an extraordinarily cultivated man: he even liked poetry. But all those books the dealers showered us with in the name of courtesy—well, no mortal could ever have read them all, one life just wasn’t enough. Not that they sent the books back; no, they didn’t feel justified in doing that, because one had, after all, to support literature. And on top of that there was all the worry and tension in case the marvelous novel they had just bought was not the best possible novel, or indeed, God forbid, that there might be a novel somewhere else more perfect than the one they had asked to be sent over last week from Berlin! They were terrified in case some book, some implement, some object that was not part of a set, something substandard and of no value—in other words, something imperfect—found its way into the house.
So everything was perfect there—kitchen, parlor, all the things in all the stores—everything perfect and shipshape. It was only their lives that fell short of perfection.
What was missing in them? Peace. These people had not a moment of peace. That’s despite living according to a strict timetable, despite the deep silence of the house and their lives. No voice was ever raised. Nothing ever took them by surprise. It was all calculated, foreseen: the financial crash, diphtheria, every twist and turn in life, right down to death. But still they were not at peace. Maybe they would have found peace if they once committed themselves, if they hadn’t been so circumspect. But they didn’t have the heart or guts for that. You need courage to live in a more headlong way, without a timetable, hour by hour, day by day, moment by moment, not expecting anything, not hoping for anything, just being. But they were incapable of that, they couldn’t just be. They could get up in the morning all right, in royal fashion, like kings, brushing their teeth in the presence of their courtiers. They could take breakfast with as much ceremony as the pope says mass here in Rome in that special chapel of his that some old man covered with a lot of naked figures. I was there once. And it was my old employers’ breakfast the chapel brought to mind.
Breakfast was a ritual to them. Then they went off to lead useful lives. All day they manufactured marvelous machines and sold whatever it was they produced. Then they invented new machines. The times in between they spent socializing. And at night they returned to rest, because they had spent all day being useful, cultivated, orderly, and well behaved. It is very tiring living like that! You’re an artist, so you wouldn’t know how tiring it is when, first thing in the morning, someone knows exactly what they’ll do the rest of the day, right till midnight. You live only as your wonderfully artistic soul commands you to live, and you don’t know in advance what idea might come into your head while you’re drumming, how the rhythm of the music might take you so you throw your drumsticks into the air, or respond to a blast from the saxophone player with a burst of drumming. You are an artist. Spontaneous. My employers were utterly different. They fought tooth and nail to keep things as they were. And it wasn’t only in the factory they manufactured stuff, but at breakfast and over dinner too. They were busily making the stuff they called culture, which meant discretion: smiling discreetly, blowing your nose discreetly. It was vital for them to preserve whatever culture they produced through work and manners: it was their entire life. The preserving of it was more important to them than the making of it.
Really, it was as if they were living several lives at once. As if they were living their fathers’ and sons’ lives too. As if they weren’t individual, simple, once-and-once-only personal beings, but a move in a long game, which is not any individual’s game but the family’s, the family of a certain class. That’s why they took such care, such anxious care, of those family photographs and family groups. It was like a museum protecting beautifully painted portraits of the famous and long-dead: “Grandfather and Grandmother on the occasion of their engagement.” “Father and Mother’s marriage.” The photograph of a bankrupt uncle in his frock coat or wearing a boater. The picture of a happy or unhappy great-aunt smiling from beneath a veil while holding a parasol. That was them, all of them, together, a slowly evolving, slowly decaying composite person, a prosperous family. It was all utterly alien to me. For me, family was a necessity, a need. For them it was a project.
So that’s what they were like. And because they always took the long view and made careful calculations, they could never really feel at peace. The only people capable of being at peace are people who live in the moment. It’s the same with the fear of death. Atheists don’t fear death, because they don’t believe in God. Are you a believer? What’s that you’re muttering? Yes, I see you nodding to say yes, you are, but how much? I have only ever seen one man who, I was certain, had no fear of death. It was the artist man, that’s right—him. He didn’t believe in God, so he was afraid of nothing, neither of death nor life. Believers are frightened of death because they cling to everything religion promises them; they believe there is life after death, but also judgment. Our artist friend didn’t believe any of that. He said that if there was a God he could not be so cruel as to land people with eternal life. You see how crazy they all are, these artistic types? But respectable families—they fear death as much as they fear life. That’s why this family was religious, and prudent, and virtuous … Because they were afraid.
I can see you don’t understand. They themselves could probably understand it on an intellectual level, they being such cultivated people, but not in their hearts or their guts. Their hearts and guts never had a moment of peace. They were afraid that all the calculations, all the planning, all that keeping things tidy, weren’t worth anything: that one day it would all be over. But what did they really think would be over? The family? The factory? The money? No, these people knew that what they were afraid of was nowhere near so simple. What they were afraid of was that one day they’d have no energy left and be too tired to hold things together. You know that Eytie mechanic, the one we took that ancient jalopy of a car to the other day, to see what was the matter with it? Remember how he told us the engine was still running and that there were no cracks in it, but that the whole thing had metal fatigue? It was as if my employers were frightened of developing metal fatigue; that everything they had scraped together would fall apart, and then their “culture” would be done for.
That’s enough about them. I could go on forever. Just think of all the secrets stored in their drawers and in those safes that were built into the walls, where they kept deeds and shares and documents and jewels. What are you shrugging for? But my darling, my one and only, these things are not as we proles imagine! The rich are really strange. Maybe there is some dark crevice in their souls where they are hiding something else. It was the key to this safe, hidden in this crevice, that I wanted to steal from them. I wanted to discover what was locked deep in their hearts.
But the rich remain rich even when dispossessed. I saw them after the siege, clambering out of their cellars, chiefly the Christians but then the Jews too, people who had somehow managed to survive, every one of them robbed and dispossessed to the extent that you couldn’t imagine having less. Nevertheless—robbed of everything, their houses bombed flat, their businesses in ruins because of the war and what followed it, not to mention the great change you could sense in the air even before it happened, the surprise the Commies were preparing for them—these rich Christians and Jews, the rich, were back in their villas within two years, and the women with their neat little earrings and silver-fox collars were back in the Café Gerbeaud. How did they do it? I don’t know. But I’m quite sure that their lives straight after the war were not different from before and during. They were just as fussy about their food and clothes. When the first train set off for abroad and they had received their first travel permit from the Russian high command in Budapest, they were already complaining about having to spend the night in the upper berth of their sleeping car to the shops in Zurich or Paris. You see what I mean? Being rich must be a condition, much like sickness or health. Say you are rich, you might, in some mysterious way, be rich for
ever, but however much money you have, you never feel properly rich. Maybe you need to believe in your wealth in order to be properly rich—I mean, the way saints and revolutionaries believe that they are different. And you can’t afford to feel guilty if you are rich: if you felt guilty for a second you’d be finished. The not-truly-rich, those who have visions of the poor while indulging in a beefsteak and drinking Champagne, will eventually lose out, because they are insincere in their wealth. They’re not rich out of conviction, they are only pretending, cowardly, sneakily, to be rich. You have to be very disciplined to be rich. You can perform a few charitable acts, but only as a kind of a fig leaf. Listen, darling. I hope one day, when I am no longer around and you meet someone who has more jewelry left than I have, you will not be too sensitive about such things. Don’t be cross. I’m just telling you what I think. There! Give me your lovely artistic hand, let me clutch it to my heart. Can you feel it beating? It’s beating for a proper prole, you see. Well, there you are. That’s me all over.
Enough to say I was a clever little girl and quickly learned all there was to know about wealth. I served them for a long time and learned their secrets. But one day I left them, because I’d grown tired of waiting. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for my husband to desire and miss me. What are you looking at? I waited just as I should under the circumstances. I was strong. I had a plan.