Journey by Moonlight

by Antal Szerb

  “I’m going. Your wife, by the way, is a thoroughly repulsive woman.”

  “I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

  János Szepetneki climbed onto his bike.

  “Pay for my lemonade,” he shouted back, and vanished into the darkness that had meanwhile fallen.

  The married couple remained where they were, and for a long time did not speak. Erzsi was furious, and at the same time found the situation rather ridiculous. “When old classmates meet,” she thought … “It seems Mihály was deeply affected by these old schoolboy doings. I suppose for once I’d better ask who this Ervin and this Tamás were, however ghastly they might be.” She had little patience with the young and immature.

  But in truth something quite different bothered her. Naturally she was upset that she had made so little impression on János Szepetneki. Not that it would have had the slightest significance what such a … such a dubious creature might think about her. All the same there is nothing more critical, from a woman’s point of view, than the opinion held of her by her husband’s friends. In the matter of women men are influenced with incredible ease. True, this Szepetneki was not Mihály’s friend. That is to say, not his friend in the conventional sense of the word. But there was apparently a powerful bond between them. And of course the most foul-minded of men can be especially influential in these matters.

  “Damn him. Why didn’t he like me?”

  Basically, Erzsi was not used to this sort of situation. She was a rich, pretty, well-dressed, attractive woman. Men found her charming, or at the very least sympathetic. She knew it played a large part in Mihály’s continuing devotion that men always spoke appreciatively of her. Indeed she often suspected that he looked at her not with his own eyes but those of others, as if he said to himself, “How I would love this Erzsi, if I were like other men.” And now along comes this pimp, and he finds me unattractive. She simply had to say something.

  “Tell me, why didn’t your friend the pickpocket like me?”

  Mihály broke into a smile.

  “Come on, it wasn’t you he didn’t like. What upset him was the fact that you’re my wife.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks it’s because of you that I’ve betrayed my youth, our common youth. That I’ve forgotten all those who … and built my life on new relationships. And well … And now you’ll tell me that I’ve obviously got some fine friends. To which I could reply that Szepetneki isn’t my friend, which is of course only avoiding the question. But … how can I put this? … people like that do exist. This watch-stealing was just a youthful rehearsal. Szepetneki later became a successful con-man. There was a time when he had a great deal of money and forced various sums onto me which I couldn’t pay back because I didn’t know where he was hanging out—he was in prison—and then he wrote to me from Baja to send him cash. And every now and then he turns up and always manages to say something really unpleasant. But as I say, people like him do exist. If you didn’t know that, at least now you’ve seen it. I say, could we buy a bottle of wine somewhere round here, to drink in our room? I’m tired of this public life we’re leading here in the piazza.”

  “You can get one in the hotel. There’s a restaurant.”

  “And won’t there be an awful fuss if we drink it in the room? Is it allowed?”

  “Mihály, you’ll be the death of me. You’re so scared of waiters and hotel people.”

  “I’ve already explained that. I told you, they’re the most grown-up people in the whole world. And, especially when I’m abroad, I do hate stepping out of line.”

  “Fine. But why do you have to start drinking again?”

  “I need a drink. Because I have to tell you who Tamás Ulpius was, and how he died.”

  IV

  “I HAVE TO TELL YOU about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you’ll forgive my saying so, you will always be to some extent a mere newcomer in my life.

  “When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it’s the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I’ve never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets—or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.

  “But best of all I loved the Castle Hill district of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen’s wife buried in the high tower of Deva.

  “I’m putting this rather well, don’t you think? Perhaps it’s this excellent bottle of Sangiovese …

  “I often saw Tamás Ulpius on Castle Hill, because he lived up there. This in itself made him a highly romantic figure. But what really charmed me was his pale face, his princely, delicate melancholy, and so much else about him. He was extravagantly polite, dressed soberly, and kept aloof from his classmates. And from me.

  “But to get back to me. You’ve always known me as a thickset, well-built, mature young man, with a smooth calm face, what they call a ‘po-face’ in Budapest. And as you know I’ve always been rather dreamy. Let me tell you, when I was at school I was very different. I’ve shown you my picture from those days. You saw how thin and hungry, how restless my face was, ablaze with ecstasy. I suppose I must have been really ugly, but I still much prefer the way I looked then. And imagine, with all that, an adolescent body to match—a skinny, angular boy with a back rounded by growing too fast. And a corresponding lean and hungry character.

  “So you can imagine I was pretty sick in mind and body. I was anaemic, and subject to fits of terrible depression. When I was sixteen, after a bout of pneumonia, I began to have hallucinations. When reading, I would often sense that someone was standing behind my back peering over my shoulder at the book. I had to turn round to convince myself that there was no-one there. Or in the night I would wake with the terrifying sensation that someone was standing beside my bed staring down at me. Of course there was no-one there. And I was permanently ashamed of myself. In time my position in the family became unbearable because of this constant sense of shame. During meals I kept blushing, and at one stage the least thing was enough to make me want to burst into tears. On these occasions I would run out of the room. You know how correct my parents are. You can imagine how disappointed and shocked they were, and how much my brothers and Edit teased me. It got to the point where I was forced to pretend I had a French lesson at school at two-thirty, and so was able to eat on my own, before the others did. Later I had my supper kept aside as well.

  “Then on top of this came the worst symptom of all: the whirlpool. Yes, I really mean whirlpool. Every so often I would have the sensation that the ground was opening beside me, and I was standing on the brink of a terrifying vortex. You mustn’t take the whirlpool literally. I never actually saw it; it wasn’t a vision. I just knew there was a whirlpool there. At the same time I was aware that there wasn’t anything there, that I was just imagining it—you know how convoluted these things are. But the fact is, when this whirlpool sensation got hold of me I didn’t dare move, I couldn’t speak a word, and I really believed it was the end of everything.

  “All the same, the feeling didn’t last very long, and the attacks weren’t frequent. There was a really bad one once, during a natural history lesson. Just as I was called on to answer a question, the ground opened beside me. I couldn’t move, I just stayed sitting in my place. The teacher kept on at me for a while, then when he saw that I wasn’t going to move, got up and came over to me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. Of course I didn’t reply. So he just looked at me for a while, then went back to hi
s chair and asked someone else to answer. He was such a fine, priestly soul: he never said a word about the incident. But my classmates talked about it all the more. They thought I had refused to reply out of cheek, or stubbornness, and that the teacher was afraid of me. At a stroke, I had become a public character and enjoyed unprecedented popularity throughout the school. A week later, the same teacher called out János Szepetneki—the one you met today. Szepetneki put on his tough-guy face and stayed in his seat. The teacher got up, went over to him, and soundly boxed his ears. From that time on Szepetneki was convinced I had some special status.

  “But to get onto Tamás Ulpius. One day the first snow fell. I could barely wait for school to finish. I gulped down my solitary lunch and ran straight to Castle Hill. Snow was a particular passion of mine. I loved the way it transformed the city, so that you could get lost even among streets you knew. I wandered for ages, then came to the battlements on the western side, and stood gazing out at the Buda hills. Suddenly the ground beside me opened again. The whirlpool was all the more believable because of the height. As so often before, I found myself not so much terrified by it as waiting with calm certainty for the ground to close again, and the effect vanish. So I waited there for a while, I couldn’t say how long, because in that state you lose your sense of time, as you do in a dream or in love-making. But of this I am sure: that whirlpool lasted much longer than the previous ones. Night was already falling and it was still there. ‘This one’s very stubborn,’ I thought to myself. And then to my horror I noticed it was growing in size, that just ten centimetres remained between me and the brink, and that slowly, slowly, it was approaching my foot. A few more minutes and I would be done for: I’d fall in. I clung grimly on to the safety railing.

  “And then the whirlpool actually reached me. The ground opened under my feet and I hung there in space, gripping the iron bar. ‘If my hand gets tired,’ I thought, ‘I shall fall.’ And quietly, with resignation, I began to pray and prepare for death.

  “Then I became aware that Tamás Ulpius was standing beside me.

  “‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “In that instant the whirlpool vanished, and I would have collapsed with exhaustion if Tamás hadn’t caught me up. He helped me to a bench and waited while I rested. When I felt better I told him briefly about the whirlpool thing, the first time I had ever told anyone in my life. I don’t know how it was: within seconds he had become my best friend, the sort of friend you dream about, as an adolescent, with no less intensity, but more deeply and seriously than you do about your first love.

  “After that we met every day. Tamás did not want to come to my house because, he said, he hated being introduced, but he soon invited me to his place. That’s how I got to know the Ulpius ménage.

  “Tamás’s family lived in the upstairs part of a very old and run-down house. But only the outside was old and run-down: inside it was fine and comfortable, like these old Italian hotels. Although, in many ways, it was a bit creepy, with its large rooms and works of art, rather like a museum. Because Tamás’s father was an archaeologist and museum director. The grandfather had been a clockmaker—his shop had been in the house. Now he just tinkered for his own amusement with antique clocks and all sorts of weird clockwork toys of his own invention.

  “Tamás’s mother was no longer alive. He and his younger sister Éva hated their father. They blamed him for driving their mother to her death with his cold gloominess when she was still a young woman. This was my first, rather shocking, experience of the Ulpius household at the start of my first visit. Éva said of her father that he had eyes like shoe-buttons (which, by the way, was very true), and Tamás added, in the most natural voice you can imagine, ‘because, you know, my father is a most thoroughly loathsome fellow,’ in which he too was right. As you know, I grew up in a close-knit family circle. I adored my parents and siblings, I worshipped my father and couldn’t begin to imagine that parents and children might not love one another, or that the children should criticise their parents’ conduct as if they were strangers. This was the first great primordial rebellion I had ever encountered in my life. And this rebellion seemed to me in some strange way endlessly appealing, although in my own mind there was never any question of revolt against my own father.

  “Tamás couldn’t stand his father, but conversely, he loved his grandfather and sister all the more. He was so fond of his sister that that too seemed a form of rebellion. I too was fond of my brothers and sister. I never fought with them very much. I took the idea of family solidarity very seriously, as far as my withdrawn and abstracted nature would allow. But it wasn’t our way, as siblings, to make a show of mutual affection—any tenderness between us would have been considered a joke, or a sign of weakness. I’m sure most families are like that. We never exchanged Christmas presents. If one of us went out or came in, he wouldn’t greet the others. If we went away, we would just write a respectful letter to our parents and add as a postscript, ‘Greetings to Péter, Laci, Edit and Tivadar’. It was quite different in the Ulpius family. Tamás and Éva would speak to one another with extreme politeness, and when parting, even if only for an hour, would kiss one another lovingly. As I realised later, they were very jealous of each other, and this was the main reason why they had no friends.

  “They were together night and day. By night, I tell you, because they shared a room. For me, this was the strangest thing. In our house, from the time Edit was twelve she was kept away from us boys, and thereafter a separate female ambience grew up around her. Girlfriends called on her, boyfriends too, people we didn’t know and whose pastimes we thoroughly scorned. My adolescent fantasy was thoroughly exercised by the fact that Éva and Tamás lived together. Because of it, the gender difference became somehow blurred, and each took on a rather androgynous character in my eyes. With Tamás I usually spoke in the gentle and refined way I always did with girls, but with Éva I never experienced the bored restlessness I felt with Éva’s girlfriends—with those officially proclaimed females.

  “The grandfather I did have difficulty getting used to. He would shuffle into their room at the most unlikely hours, often in the middle of the night, and wearing the most outlandish clothes, cloaks and hats. They always accorded him a ceremonial ovation. At first I was bored by the old fellow’s stories, and couldn’t follow him very well since he spoke Old German with a trace of Rhineland accent, because he had come to Hungary from Cologne. But later on I acquired a taste for them. The old chap was a walking encyclopaedia of old Budapest. For me, with my passion for houses, he was a real godsend. He could tell the story of every house on the Hill, and its owners. So the Castle District houses, which up till then I had known only by sight, gradually became personal and intimate friends.

  “But I, too, hated their father. I don’t recall ever once speaking with him. Whenever he saw me he would just mutter something and turn away. The two of them went through agonies when they had to dine with him. They ate in an enormous room. During the meal they spoke not a word to each other. Afterwards, Tamás and Éva would sit while their father walked up and down the enormous room, which was lit only by a standard lamp. When he reached the far end of the room his form would disappear into the gloom. If they spoke to one another he came up and aggressively demanded, ‘What’s that? What are you talking about?’ But luckily he was rarely at home. He got drunk alone in bars, on brandy, like a thoroughly bad sort.

  “Just at the time we got to know each other, Tamás was working on a study of religious history. The study was to do with his childhood games. But he approached it with the method of a comparative religious historian. It was a really strange thesis, half parody of religious history, half deadly serious study of Tamás himself.

  “Tamás was just as crazy about old things as I was. In his case it was hardly surprising. Partly it was inherited from his father, and partly it was because their house was like a museum. For Tamás what was old was natural, and what was modern was
strange and foreign. He constantly yearned for Italy, where everything was old and right for him. And, well, here am I sitting here, and he never made it. My passion for antiquity is more of a passive enjoyment, an intellectual hankering. His was the active involvement of the whole imagination.

  “He was forever acting out bits of history.

  “You have to understand that life for these two in the Ulpius house was non-stop theatre, a perpetual commedia dell’arte. The slightest thing was enough to set them off on some dramatisation, or rather, they acted things out as they talked. The grandfather would tell some story about a local countess who had fallen in love with her coachman, and instantly Éva was the countess and Tamás the coachman. Or, he would tell how the state judge Majláth was murdered by his Wallachian footman, so Éva became the judge and Tamás the footman. Or they would develop some historical melodrama, much longer and more involved, as an ongoing serial. Naturally these plays sketched the events only in broad strokes, like the commedia dell’arte. With one or two items of clothing, usually from the grandfather’s inexhaustible and amazing wardrobe, they would suggest costume. Then would ensue some dialogue, not very long, but highly baroque and convoluted, followed by the murder or suicide. Because, as I think back now, these little improvisations always culminated in scenes of violent death. Day after day, Tamás and Éva strangled, poisoned, stabbed or boiled one another in oil.

  “They could imagine no future for themselves, if they ever did think about one, outside the theatre. Tamás was preparing to be a playwright, Éva a great actress. But to call it ‘preparation’ is a bit inaccurate, because he never wrote any plays, and it never occurred to Éva in her dreamworld that she would have to go to drama school. But they were all the more passionate in their theatre-going. But only to the National: Tamás despised the popular stage in exactly the same way he despised modern architecture. He preferred the classical repertoire, with its wealth of murder and suicide.