Journey by Moonlight

by Antal Szerb

  Mihály decided that he had slept in more reassuring places. What worried him even more was that his passport was downstairs with the grim-faced, but no less sly-looking, proprietor, who had resisted his cunning suggestion that he fill in the registration form himself on the pretext that his passport was written in an incomprehensible foreign tongue. The innkeeper insisted that the passport should remain in his keeping as long as Mihály continued on the premises. It seemed he had had some bad experiences. The inn was indeed just the sort to guarantee its owner his fair share of those. During the day, Mihály reckoned, probably only down-at-heel revellers frequented the place, while in the evening horse-thieving types guffawed over cards in the so-called sala da pranzo, an eating area pervaded with kitchen smells.

  But in whoever’s hands, for whatever reason, the passport was a potential threat to him, betraying his name to his pursuers. Just to make off, leaving the passport behind, would have been as distressing as going out without his trousers on, as we do in our dreams. He lay on the questionably clean bed, feeling very tense. He slept little. A mixture of sleep, dozing and anxious wakefulness blended themselves together into the all-pervasive night-time feeling of being closely followed.

  He rose at the crack of dawn, sneaked downstairs, roused the innkeeper after a long struggle, paid his bill, reclaimed his passport, and hurried off to the station. A half-awake woman made coffee for him at the bar counter. After a while, some sleepy labourers came in. Mihály’s anxiety would not leave him. He was in constant terror that someone would arrest him. The appearance of every soldier or policeman fuelled his suspicion, until, at last, the train pulled in. He began to breathe more freely and prepared to abandon his cigarette and climb on board.

  Just then a very young and startlingly handsome little fascista stepped up to him and asked for a light before he threw down his cigarette.

  “Ecco,” said Mihály, and offered him the cigarette. He was entirely off his guard. Especially now that the train had come.

  “You’re a foreigner,” said the fascista. “I can tell from the way you said ‘ecco’. I’ve a sharp ear.”

  “Bravo,” said Mihály.

  “You’re Hungarian,” the little man beamed up at him.

  “Si, si,” said Mihály, smiling.

  In that instant the fascista seized him by the arm, with a strength he would never have thought possible in such a small person.

  “Ah! You’re the man the whole of Italy is searching for! Ecco! This is your picture!” he added, producing a piece of paper. “Your wife is looking for you.”

  Mihály jerked his arm away, pulled out a calling card, and quickly scribbled on it, “I am well. Don’t try to find me,” and gave it, with a ten lire note, to the little fascista.

  “Ecco! Send this telegram to my wife. Arrivederci!”

  Once again he tore himself away from the man, who had renewed his grip, jumped onto the moving train, and slammed the door behind him.

  The little train went up to Norcia, in the hills. When he disembarked the Sibilline mountains stretched out before him with their two-thousand-metre peaks. To the right lay the Gran Sasso, Italy’s highest range.

  It was fear that had driven him to the mountains, as it once had the builders of those towns. Up there, in the wilderness of ice and snow, they would not find him. He wasn’t thinking now of Erzsi. Indeed he felt that Erzsi, as an individual, had been disarmed by his telegram. But Erzsi was only one of many. It wasn’t so much people that were following him as whole institutions, and the whole dreaded terrorist army of the past.

  For indeed, what had been his life during the past fifteen years? At home and abroad he had been schooled in mastery. Not self-mastery, but the mastery of his family, his father, the profession which did not interest him. Then he taken his place in the firm. He had really tried to learn the pleasures befitting a partner in the firm. He had learnt to play bridge, to ski, to drive a car. He had dutifully entangled himself in the sort of love affairs appropriate to a partner in the firm. And finally he had met Erzsi, who was sufficiently talked about in high society for the level of gossip to satisfy what was due to the young partner in a fashionable firm. And he had ended by marrying her, a beautiful, sensible, wealthy woman, notorious for her previous affairs, as a partner should. Who knows, perhaps it needed only another year and he would become a real partner: the attitudes were already hardening inside him like calluses. You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you’re just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.

  He made his way on foot up into the hills and meandered around the villages. The natives remained peaceful, did not pursue him. They accepted him as just another crazy tourist. But a middle-class person meeting him on the third or fourth day of his wanderings would have taken him not for a tourist but a madman. He was unshaven, unwashed, and sleeping in his clothes: he was simply a man on the run. And inside, he was utterly in turmoil, up there among the harsh outline of pitiless mountains, the inhuman solitude, the utter abandonment. The faintest shadow of purpose never flickered across his consciousness. All he knew was that there was no going back. The whole horde of people and things pursuing him, the lost years and the entire middle-class establishment, fused in his visionary consciousness into a concrete, nightmarish shape. The very thought of his father’s firm was like a great steel bar raised to strike him. At the same time he could see that he was slowly ageing, his body was somehow caught up in slow but visible processes of change, as if his skin was shrivelling at the speed of a minute hand ticking round a clock. These were the first signs of a delirious fever of the nerves.

  His doctors later agreed that the nervous fever was the result of exhaustion. It was little wonder. For fifteen years Mihály had systematically driven himself too hard. He had forced himself to become something other than what he was, to live never after his own inclination but as he was expected to. The latest and not least heroic of these exertions had been his marriage. Then the excitement of travel, and the wonderful series of unwindings and unfoldings which the Italian landscape had induced in him, together with the fact that throughout his honeymoon he had drunk practically non-stop and never taken enough sleep, all had contributed to the collapse. Essentially, it was a case of a man not realising how tired he is until he sits down. The accumulated exhaustion of fifteen years had begun to overwhelm him from that time in Terontola when he involuntarily, but not unintentionally, took the other train, the train that carried him ever further from Erzsi, towards solitude and himself.

  One evening he arrived in one of the larger hill towns. By then he was in such a surreal state of mind that he never enquired after the name, being all the more reluctant to do so since he had realised, around midday, that he could not remember a single word of Italian—so we need not record the name of the town. In the main square stood a friendly-looking albergo, where he called in, and dined with a perfectly good, normal appetite on gnocchi in tomato sauce, the local goat’s cheese, oranges and white wine. But when the time came to pay he noticed the waitress looking at him suspiciously and whispering with two other people sitting in the room. He instantly rushed out, then roamed restlessly up and down on the scrubby macchia-covered hill above the town until, forced to leave by a howling wind, he let himself down a steep hillside.

  He ended up in a deep, well-like valley where the wind was less fierce. But the place was so closed-in, so dark and desolate it would have seemed to him quite natural to come upon a few skeletons, with a royal crown amongst them, or some other bloody symbol of ancient dignity and tragedy. Even in his normal mind he was highly susceptible to the mood of place: now he was ten times so. He ran headlong out of the deep recess, then became exhausted. A pathway led him up a gentle hill. Arriving at the top he stopped at the base of a low wall. It was a friendly, inviting place. He jumped up on to the wall. So far as he could see, by the weak light of the stars, he was in a garden, in which fine cypress trees grew. A small mound beside his foot offered itself as a
natural pillow. He lay down and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

  Later the starlight grew much stronger. The stars became so bright it was as if some strange disturbance filled the sky with energy, and he awoke. He sat up, looked hesitantly around in the eerie luminosity. From behind a cypress tree, pale and melancholy, stepped Tamás.

  “I must go back now,” Tamás said, “because I can’t sleep under this terrible starlight.” Then he moved away, and Mihály wanted to rush after him, but could not get onto his feet, however much he struggled.

  He awoke at dawn, with cold and the first light, and looked sleepily around the garden. At the foot of the cypress trees, extending in all directions, stood crosses marking graves. He had slept in the town’s garden of rest, the cemetery. Nothing could have been more horrible. By day, and perhaps also by moonlight, the Italian cities of the dead were indeed perhaps more friendly and inviting than those of the living, but for Mihály the episode had a horrific symbolic meaning. Again he fled in terror, and from that moment one might properly date the onset of his illness. What happened to him afterwards he was unable to recall.

  On the fourth, fifth or perhaps sixth day, on a narrow mountain path, he became aware of the sunset. The pink and gold hues of the setting sun were, to his fevered condition, quite overwhelming, even more so perhaps than when he was rational. In his saner moments he would have been ashamed to respond so strongly to the familiar, banal and utterly meaningless colours of the sky. But as the sun went down behind a mountain he suddenly clambered impulsively onto a rock, seized with the feverish notion that from its top he would be able to watch for a little longer. In his clumsiness he took a wrong hold and slithered down into the ditch beside the road, where he no longer had the strength to get up. There he remained prostrate.

  Luckily, towards dawn some peddlers came by on mules, saw him lying in the moonlight, recognised the genteel foreigner and with respectful concern took him down to the village. From there the authorities sent him on, with many changes of transport, to the hospital at Foligno. But of this he knew nothing.

  VIII

  WHEN HE RECOVERED consciousness he was still unable to speak a word of Italian. In a weary, timorous voice, using Hungarian, he asked the nurse the usual questions: where was he, and how had he got there? The nurse being unable to reply, he worked out for himself—it was not very difficult—that he was in hospital. He even remembered the strange feeling he had experienced in the mountains, and grew calmer. All he wanted to know was, what was wrong with him? He felt no pain, just very weak and tired.

  Luckily there was in the hospital a doctor who was half English, and who was called to his bed. Mihály had lived in England for many years and the language flowed in his veins, so much so that it did not desert him now, and they could communicate fully.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” said the doctor, “just horrendous exhaustion. What were you doing, to get yourself so tired?”

  “Me?” he asked, meditatively. “Nothing. Just living.” And he fell asleep again.

  When he woke again he felt a great deal better. The English doctor visited him again, examined him, and informed him there was nothing wrong and he would be able to get up in a few days.

  The doctor was interested in Mihály and talked with him a great deal. He was keen to establish the cause of his extreme exhaustion. He gradually became aware how little comfort Mihály took in the thought that he would be well in a few days and would have to leave the hospital.

  “Do you have business in Foligno or the area?”

  “Not at all. I had no idea there was such a place as Foligno.”

  “Where will you go? Back to Hungary?”

  “No, no. I’d like to stay in Italy.”

  “And what would you want to do here?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Do you have any relations?”

  “No, no-one,” said Mihály, and, in his state of nervous debilitation, burst into tears. The tender-hearted doctor felt extremely sorry for this poor abandoned soul and began to treat him with even greater kindness. But Mihály had not wept because he had no relations, just the opposite—because he had so many—and he feared he would not long be able to preserve the solitude he so much enjoyed in the hospital.

  He told the doctor that all his life he had longed to be in bed in a hospital. Of course not seriously ill or suffering, but as at present, just lying there in passive and involuntary exhaustion, being nursed, without purpose or desire, far from the normal business of men.

  “It’s no use. Italy has everything I ever longed for,” he said.

  It became apparent that the doctor shared his love of historical connections. By degrees he came to spend all his free time at Mihály’s bedside, in historical discussions that flitted about lethargically. Mihály learnt a great deal about Angela da Foligno, saint and mystic, the most famous daughter of the town, who was virtually unheard of in Foligno itself. And he came to know a lot about the doctor, since, as with all Englishmen, his family history proved rather colourful. His father had been a naval officer who had caught yellow fever in Singapore, was tormented in his delirium with terrible visions, and on his recovery turned Catholic, thinking that would be the only way he could escape the torments of the devil. His family, a religious one consisting for the most part of Anglican clergymen, rejected him, whereupon he became fiercely anti-British, left the Navy, joined the Italian merchant service, and later married an Italian woman. Richard Ellesley—that was the doctor’s name—had spent his childhood in Italy. From his Italian grandfather they inherited a considerable fortune, and his father had educated the young Ellesley at Harrow and Cambridge. During the war the old man went back into the British Navy, fell at the battle of Skagerrak, the fortune evaporated, and Ellesley had to earn his living as a doctor.

  “The only thing I inherited from my father,” he said with a smile, “was the fear of damnation.”

  Here the roles were reversed. Mihály lived in terror of a great number of things, but hell was certainly not among them. He had little feeling for the afterlife. So he undertook to cure the doctor. A cure was urgently needed. About every third day the little English doctor would be seized by terrible fear.

  The terror was not induced by bad conscience. He was a virtuous and kindly soul, with no obvious cause for self-reproach.

  “Then why should you think you’ll be damned?”

  “My God, I’ve no idea why I should be damned. It won’t be because of what I am. They’ll just take me.”

  “But devils have power only over the wicked.”

  “That we can never know. Even the prayer says it. You know: ‘Saint Michael Archangel, defend us in our struggles; be our shield against the wickedness of Satan and his snares. As God commands you, so we humbly beseech you; and you who command the Heavenly Armies, with the strength of the Lord deliver unto eternal damnation Satan and all the evil spirits who lead us into danger’.”

  The prayer reminded Mihály of his school chapel, and the horror its words had always conjured up inside him as an adolescent. But it was not Satan and damnation that disturbed him. It was the prayer with its bleak reminder of bygone days. He generally thought of Catholicism as a modern phenomenon, which indeed it is, but that one prayer seemed like a relic of buried ages.

  Whenever the terror of Satan seized him, Ellesley would hurry off to priests and monks for absolution of his sins. But this was of little use. For one thing, because he did not feel himself to be in sin, the act of forgiveness did not help. Another problem was that his confessors, for the most part, were simple country priests who persisted in carefully and repeatedly drawing his attention to the horrific nature of Satan, which merely made his condition worse. But at least the amulets and other magic charms were a help. On one occasion a saintly old woman blessed him with a sacred incense, and that kept him calm for two whole months.

  “But what about you?” he asked Mihály. “Aren’t you afraid? What do you think happens
to the soul after death?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “And you have no hope of survival after death, and eternal life?”

  “The names of great men live forever. I am not great.”

  “And you can endure life on those terms?”

  “That’s another question.”

  “I don’t understand how anyone can believe that when a man dies he vanishes completely. There are a thousand proofs to the contrary. Every Italian can tell you that. And every Englishman. In all these two nations there isn’t a single person who hasn’t met with the dead, and these, after all, are the two most honest races. I had no idea Hungarians were so cynical.”

  “Have you met with the dead?”

  “Of course. More than once.”

  “How?”

  “I won’t describe it, it might just upset you. Although, one occasion was so straightforward it shouldn’t disturb you. I was a pupil at Harrow before the war. One day I was lying in my bed—with the ’flu—and staring out through the window. Suddenly I saw my father standing on the window sill in his naval uniform, saluting me. The only strange thing was that his officer’s cap had two wings, as in pictures of Mercury. I jumped up from the bed and opened the window. But he had gone. This was in the afternoon. That same morning my father was killed. That was the time it took for the spirit to get from Skagerrak to Harrow.”