by Antal Szerb
“In the Ulpius house we found Ervin and János in their usual chairs. I gaily announced the fact that we had each taken fifteen centigrams of morphine and would soon be dead, but first we wanted to say goodbye. Tamás was already white as a sheet and staggering. I just looked as if I had had a glass too many, and I had the thick speech of a drunk. János instantly rushed out and phoned Casualty to tell them there were two youths who had each taken fifteen centigrams of morphine.
“‘Are they still alive?’ he was asked.
“When he said we were they told him to take us there immediately. He and Ervin shoved us into a taxi and took us to Markó Street. I still couldn’t feel anything.
“I felt a lot more when the doctor brutally pumped out my stomach, and removed any desire I had for suicide. Otherwise, I can’t help the suspicion that what we had taken wasn’t morphine. Either Éva had deceived Tamás, or the doctor had deceived her. His illness could have been auto-suggestion.
“Éva and the boys had to stay up with us the whole night to watch that we didn’t fall asleep, because the Casualty people had said that if we did it would be impossible to wake us again. That was a strange night. We were somewhat embarrassed in each other’s company. I was thrilled because I had committed suicide—what a great feeling!—and happy to be still alive. I felt a delicious fatigue. We all loved one another deeply. The staying awake was a great self-sacrificing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in long Dostoyevskian conversations, and drank one black coffee after another. It was the sort of night typical of youth, the sort you can only look back on with shame and embarrassment once you’ve grown up. But God knows, it seems I must have grown up already by then, because I don’t feel the slightest embarrassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.
“Only Tamás said nothing. He just let them pour icy water over him and pinch him to keep him awake. He really was ill, and besides, he was tortured by the knowledge that once again he had failed. If I spoke to him he would turn away and not answer. He regarded me as a traitor. From then on we were never really friends. He never spoke about it again. He was just as kind and courteous as before, but I know he never forgave me. When he did die, he made sure I had nothing to do with it.”
Here Mihály fell silent and buried his head in his hands. After a while he got up and stared out of the window into the darkness. Then he came back, and, with an absent smile, stroked Erzsi’s hand.
“Does it still hurt so much?” she asked softly.
“I never had a friend again,” he said.
Again they were silent. Erzsi wondered whether he was simply feeling sorry for himself because of the maudlin effect of the wine, or whether the events in the Ulpius house had really damaged something in him, which might explain why he was so remote and alienated from people.
“And what became of Éva?” she finally asked.
“Éva by then was in love with Ervin.”
“And the rest of you weren’t jealous?”
“No, we thought it natural. Ervin was the leader. We thought him the most remarkable person among us, so it seemed right and proper that Éva should love him. I certainly wasn’t in love with Éva, though you couldn’t be so sure about János. By that stage the group was beginning to drift apart. Ervin and Éva were increasingly sufficient for one another and kept looking for opportunities to be alone together. I was becoming genuinely interested in the university and my study of religious history. I was filled with ambition to be an academic. My first encounter with real scholarship was as heady as falling in love.
“But to get back to Ervin and Éva. Éva now became much quieter. She went to church and to the English Ladies’ College, where she’d once been a pupil. I’ve already mentioned that Ervin had an exceptionally loving nature: being in love was as essential to him as wild adventures were to Szepetneki. I could well understand that even Éva couldn’t remain cold in his presence.
“It was a touching affair, very poetic, a passion permeated with the ambience of Buda Castle and being twenty years old—you know how it is—so that when they went along the street I almost expected the crowd to part reverentially in front of them, as if before the Sacrament. At least, that was the sort of respect, the boundless respect, we had for their love. Somehow it seemed the fulfilment of the whole meaning of the group. And what a short time it lasted! I never knew exactly what happened between them. It seems Ervin asked for her hand in marriage and old Ulpius threw him out. János believed he actually struck him. But Éva simply loved Ervin all the more. She would willingly have become his mistress, I have no doubt. But for Ervin the sixth commandment was absolute. He became even paler and quieter than before, and never went to the Ulpius house. I saw him less and less. And in Éva the big change must have finally happened around this time, the one I personally found so hard to understand later. Then one fine day Ervin simply vanished. I learnt from Tamás that he had become a monk. Tamás destroyed the letter in which Ervin told him of his decision. Whether he knew Ervin’s religious name, or where he was, and in which Order, was a secret that went with Tamás to the grave. Perhaps he revealed it only to Éva.
“Ervin certainly did not become a monk just because he couldn’t marry Éva. We had in the past talked a great deal about the monastic life, and I know that Ervin’s religion went too deep—he would never have become a monk merely out of despair and romantic sensibility, without any definite sign of an inner calling. Certainly he saw it as a sign from above that he couldn’t marry Éva. But the fact that he left so hastily, virtually fled, could have been largely to do with the fact that he wanted to escape from Éva and the temptation she represented for him. So although he ran away, perhaps a bit like Joseph, he nonetheless accomplished what we had dreamed about so much at that time. He offered up his youth as a willing sacrifice to God.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Erzsi. “If, as you say, he was so loving by nature, why offer that up as a sacrifice?”
“Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It’s not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That’s why the Church won’t allow eunuchs to become priests.”
“And what did Éva have to say to all this?”
“Éva remained unattached, and from this point on she was impossible to put up with. By this time Budapest was in the hands of the currency sharks and the officers of the Entente. Éva somehow or other got herself into the officers’ set. She knew various languages and her manner was somehow not typically Hungarian but more cosmopolitan. I know she was very much in demand. She went, from one day to the next, from a little adolescent girl to a stunning woman. This was when, in place of the earlier friendly and open expression, her eye took on that other quality: that look, as if she were listening to some far off, murmuring sound.
“Earlier on, Tamás and Ervin had dominated the group. Now it was János’s turn. Éva needed money so that she could make her exquisite appearance among the exquisite people. She was very clever at sewing herself elegant things out of nothing, but even that nothing costs a little something. That was where János came in. He’d always been able to get hold of money for Éva. Where from, he alone knew. Often he swindled the very same Entente officers she danced with. ‘I’ve been realising the group assets,’ he would say cynically. But by then we all talked cynically, because we always adapted ourselves to the leadership style.
“I didn’t like János’s methods very much. They were pretty unscrupulous. I didn’t like it, for example, when he called one day on Mr Reich, an old book-keeper in my father’s firm and, with a horribly convoluted story about my gambling debts and proposed suicide, lifted a fairly serious sum of money from him. Of course I then had to agree that I had incurred a debt at cards, though I never had a card in my hand in all my life.
“And what I particularly didn’t lik
e was his stealing my gold watch. It happened on the occasion of a grand ‘do’ out of doors somewhere, in a then fashionable summer inn, I no longer remember the name. There were several of us present—Éva’s friends, two or three foreign officers, some young inflation-millionaires, some strange women, remarkably daring for those times in their dress and general behaviour. My usual sense of impermanence was made worse by the fact that Tamás and I were mixing with people not our own, people we had nothing in common with, and by the same old feeling that nothing mattered. But then I wasn’t the only one with this sense of impermanence. The whole city had it, it was in the air. People had a lot of money and they knew that it made no difference: it might vanish from one day to the next. The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier.
“They were apocalyptic times. I don’t know if we were still sober when we sat down to drink. As I recall, it’s as if I became drunk in the first few moments. Tamás drank little, but the universal feeling that the world was going to end was so much in accord with his state of mind that he moved with unaccustomed ease among all those people, even the gypsies. I talked with him a lot that night. Not perhaps so much in words, but the words we did speak had a profoundly sinister resonance. And once again, marvellously, we understood each other—understood each other in our impermanence. And we shared this sympathy with the strange women: at least, I felt that my modest religious-historical thesis about the Celts and the Islands of the Dead found an echo in the drama student sitting near me. Then I got into a tête-à-tête with Éva. I courted her as if I hadn’t known her since her skinny, big-eyed adolescence and she received my courtship with a complete womanly seriousness, talking in half-finished sentences and staring into the distance, in the full glitter of her pose of that time.
“By the time it started to become light I felt really ill. Then, when I’d sobered up a bit, I realised my gold watch had disappeared. I was really shocked. My despair verged on hysteria. You have to understand: the mere loss of a gold watch is not in itself such a misfortune, not even when you are twenty and have nothing else of value in the world, nothing but your gold watch. But when you are twenty, and you sober up in the light of dawn to find your gold watch has actually been stolen, then you begin to see a symbolic importance in the loss. I had it from my father, who is not by nature a great giver of gifts. I tell you, it was my only object of value, the only one worth mentioning—admittedly a bulky, commonplace thing, whose pretentious, petty-bourgeois quality stood for everything I disliked. But its loss, now that it appeared to me in its full symbolic significance, filled me with panic. It was the feeling that I was now irrevocably damned: that they had stolen the very possibility that I might one day sober up and get back to the bourgeois world.
“I staggered over to Tamás, told him that my watch had been stolen, said that I would telephone the police and tell the innkeeper to lock the gate. They would have to search every guest. Tamás calmed me down in his own special way:
“‘It’s not worth it. Let it go. Of course it was stolen. They’ll steal everything you’ve got. You’ll always be the victim. It’s what you really want.’
“I stared at him in amazement. But in fact I never said a word to anyone about the disappearance of the watch. As I gazed at Tamás I suddenly understood that only János Szepetneki could have stolen it. In the course of the evening there had been a game of exchanging clothes. Szepetneki and I had swapped coats and ties. Probably when I got my coat back the watch had already gone. I started to look for János to confront him, but he’d already left. I didn’t see him the next day, or the day after that.
“And on the fourth day I still hadn’t been able to challenge him about it. I was sure that only he could have taken it, and that he had done so because Éva needed money. In all probability he had taken it with her full knowledge. She had set up the whole clothes-swapping game—and that was the point of the scene when I sat alone with her. Perhaps its whole purpose was so that I wouldn’t immediately notice that it had gone. When I stumbled on this possibility I was able to accept what had happened. If it happened because of Éva, it was all right. It was all part of the game, the old games in the Ulpius house.
“From that moment I was in love with Éva.”
“But then why have you so strenuously denied all along that you were ever in love with her?” Erzsi interjected.
“Of course. I was quite right to. It’s only for want of a better word that I call what I felt for her, love. That feeling wasn’t in the least like the feeling I have for you, and had, if you’ll forgive me, for one or two of your predecessors. In a way it was quite the reverse. I love you because you’re part of me. I loved Éva because she wasn’t. That’s to say, loving you gives me confidence and strength, but when I loved her, it humiliated and annihilated me … Of course these expressions are merely antithetical. When it happened, I felt that the truth of the old plays was supreme, and I was being slowly destroyed in the great climax. I was being destroyed because of Éva, through Éva, just as we had played it in our adolescence.”
Mihály got up and walked restlessly round the room. It had at last begun to worry him that he had so given himself away. To Erzsi, a stranger …
Erzsi remarked:
“Before that, you said something about … that you couldn’t possibly be in love with her, because you knew each other too well, there wasn’t the necessary distance between you for you to fall in love.”
(“Good—she hasn’t understood,” he thought. “She’s taking in only as much as her basic jealousy can grasp.”)
“It’s good that you mention that,” he continued, calmly. “Until that memorable night there was no distance. Then I discovered, as the two of us sat there, like a lady with her gentleman, that she had become a totally different woman, a strange, splendid, stunning woman, whereas the old Éva would have carried within her, ineradicably, the old dark, sick sweetness of my youth.
“But generally Éva didn’t give a damn for me. I rarely managed to see her and when I did she showed no interest in me. Her restlessness was somehow pathological. Especially after the serious suitor appeared—a wealthy, famous, not-exactly-young collector of antiques, who had turned up once or twice at the Ulpius house with the old man, caught the odd glimpse of her, and had long busied himself with plans to make her his wife. The old Ulpius informed Éva he would hear not a word of protest: she had lived off him quite long enough. She would marry, or go to hell. Éva asked for two months’ delay. The old man consented, at the fiancé’s request.
“The more she neglected me, the stronger was my feeling of what I called, for want of a better word, love. It seems I had a real bent at that time for hopeless gestures: standing around by her gate at night to spy on her as she came home with her laughing and noisy crowd of admirers; neglecting my studies; spending all my money on stupid presents which she didn’t even acknowledge; being cravenly sentimental and creating unmanly scenes if I met her. That was my style. Then I was truly alive. No joy I ever experienced afterwards ever ran as deep as the pain, the exulting humiliation, of knowing I was lost for love of her and that she didn’t care for me. Is that what you call love?”
(“Why am I saying all this? Why? … Once again I’ve drunk too much. But I had to tell her at some stage, and she isn’t really taking it in … ”)
“Meanwhile the delay Éva had been granted was coming to its end. Old Ulpius would occasionally burst into her room and make terrible scenes. In those days he was never sober. The fiancé himself appeared, with his greying hair and apologetic smile. Éva asked for one more week. So that she could go away with Tamás, in a calm atmosphere, so they could take their leave of one another. Somehow money was found for the journey.
“Off they went, to Hallstatt. It was late autumn. There wasn’t a soul there besides them. There’s nothing more funereal than an old historical watering place like that. A castle or cathedral might be ancient, past its time, crumbling away here and there. It’s natural, that’s it
s function. But when that sort of place, a coffee-house or a promenade, designed for the pleasures of the moment, when that shows its impermanence—there’s nothing more ghastly.”
“Yes, yes,” said Erzsi, “just get on with it. What happened to Tamás and Éva?”
“My dear, if I beat about the bush and philosophise, it’s because from that point on I don’t know what happened to them. I never saw them again. In Hallstatt Tamás Ulpius poisoned himself. This time he made no mistake.”
“And Éva?”
“You mean, what part did she have in Tamás’s death? Perhaps none. I’ve no way of knowing. She never returned. It was said that after he died some high-ranking foreign officer came and took her away.
“Perhaps I might have been able to meet her. Once or twice in the following years there might have been a chance. From time to time János would pitch up out of the blue, make obscure reference to the fact that he could possibly arrange for me to see her, and would be happy to do so I if I would reward his services. But by then I had no desire to meet Éva. That’s why János said earlier tonight that it was my fault, because I walked out on the friends of my youth, when all I had to do was hold out my hand … He was right. When Tamás died I believe I went out of my mind. And then I decided I would change, I would tear myself away from the spell. I didn’t want to go the way he went. I would become a respectable person. I left the university, trained for my father’s profession, went abroad to get a better grasp of things, then went home and worked hard to become just like everyone else.
“As regards the Ulpius house, my sense of impermanence was not misplaced. Everything was destroyed. Nothing was left. Old Ulpius didn’t live long after. He was beaten to death while making his way home drunk from a bar on the outskirts of town. The house had earlier been bought by a rich fellow called Munk, a business friend of my father’s. I visited there once. It was awful. They’d fitted it out wonderfully, as if it were much older than it really was. There’s now a genuine Florentine well in the courtyard. The grandfather’s room became an Altdeutsch dining-room with oak panelling. And our rooms! My God, they turned them into some sort of old Hungarian guest house or God knows what, with painted chests, jugs and knick-knacks. Tamás’s room! Talk about impermanence … Holy God, it’s so late! Sorry, love, but I had to tell you all this at some time, no matter how stupid it might sound from the outside … Now, I’m off to bed.”