Journey by Moonlight

by Antal Szerb

  “And the other occasion?”

  “That was much more mysterious. It happened in Gubbio, not long ago. But that I really shouldn’t tell you about.”

  “Gubbio? Why does that name seem so familiar?”

  “Presumably from the legend of Saint Francis in The Little Flowers.”

  “Of course, yes, the wolf of Gubbio … the one Saint Francis made a pact with, that he wouldn’t trouble the townspeople, and they in return provided him with food? … ”

  “And every evening the wolf could be seen, with two baskets round his neck, going about the houses of Gubbio one after the other, collecting love-gifts.”

  “Is this Gubbio still in existence?”

  “Of course. It’s quite near here. You must visit it when you are better. It’s very interesting, not only for the wolf legend … ”

  They talked a lot about England, Doctor Ellesley’s other home, which he greatly missed. Mihály too was very fond of England. He had spent two very serious, dreamy years there, before going on to Paris and home. In London he had wallowed in an orgy of solitude. Sometimes he went for weeks without speaking to anyone, just a few working men in suburban pubs, and then only a few words. He loved the appalling London weather, its foggy, watery softness, in which one can sink as low as the temperature in solitude and spleen.

  “In London November isn’t a month,” he said, “it’s a state of mind.”

  Ellesley readily agreed.

  “You see,” Mihály continued, “now it comes back to me: in London one November I also experienced something which, with people like yourself, would no doubt have strengthened their belief that the dead somehow survive. In me it only strengthens the conviction that there is something wrong with my nervous system. Listen to this. One morning I was working down in the factory (as I said, this was in November) when I was called to the telephone. An unknown woman asked me to go without fail that afternoon, on important business, to such and such a place, and gave me an unfamiliar name and address. I protested that there must be some error. ‘Oh no,’ said this unknown female voice, ‘I’m trying to contact a Hungarian gentleman who works in the Boothroyd factory as a volunteer. Is there another one of that description?’ ‘No-one,’ I replied, ‘and you have my name correctly. But tell me, what is it about?’ She couldn’t say. We talked about it for some time and eventually I agreed to go.

  “I went because I was curious. Is there any man who wouldn’t respond to the dulcet tones of an unknown woman on the telephone? If women really knew men they would ask us for everything over the telephone—in unfamiliar voices. The street, Roland Street, was in that rather forbidding bit of London behind Tottenham Court Road, just north of Soho, where the painters and prostitutes live who can’t afford Soho proper or Bloomsbury. I don’t know for certain, but I think it very likely that this is the part of London where you find the founders of new religions, Gnostics and the seedier kinds of spiritualist. The whole area gives off an aura of religious dereliction. Well, anyway, that’s where I had to go. You have to understand I am incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere of streets and places. As I made my way through the dark streets looking for Roland Street in the fog—it was mist rather than fog, a white, transparent, milky mist, typical of November—I was so overcome by this sense of spiritual abandonment I was almost seasick.

  “I finally found the house, and a plate beside the door with the name given me by the strange voice on the telephone. I rang. After some time I could hear shuffling, and a sleepy slattern of a maid opened the door.

  “‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  “‘Well, I’ve no idea,’ I said, and felt rather embarrassed.

  “Then someone shouted down, as from a long way off. The maid pondered this and for some time said nothing. Then she led me to a grubby little stairway and said, in the usual English way, ‘Just go straight up.’ She herself remained below.

  “At the top of the stairs I found an open door and a room in semi-darkness. There was no-one in it. Just then the door opposite closed, as if someone had just that instant left the room. Remembering the maid’s instructions, I crossed the room and opened the door that had just closed. I found myself in another semi-dark, old-fashioned, dusty and tasteless room, with no-one in it, and again the door across the way closed, as if someone had just that instant gone out. Again I crossed the room and entered a third room, then a fourth. Always a door quietly closing before me, as if someone was walking ahead of me. Finally, in the fifth room … well, it’s an overstatement to say finally, because although there was no-one in that fifth room, there at least was no door closing before me. In this room there was only one door, the one I had come through. But whoever had been walking ahead of me was not in the room.

  “There was a lamp burning in the room, but no furniture apart from two armchairs. On the walls pictures, rugs hanging everywhere, every sort of worthless old-fashioned lumber. I sat down rather hesitantly in one of the armchairs and prepared to wait. Meanwhile I kept glancing restlessly about me, because I was quite sure something very strange was happening.

  “I don’t know how long I had been sitting like that, when suddenly my heart began to knock horribly, because I had realised what I had unconsciously been looking for. From the moment I entered this room I had had the feeling that I was being watched. Now I had found who it was. On one of the walls hung a Japanese rug, depicting various sorts of dragon and other fantastic animals, and the eyes of these animals were made of large coloured-glass buttons. I now saw that one of the animals had an eye that wasn’t glass, but a real eye, and was staring at me. Presumably someone was standing behind the rug looking at me.

  “In any other circumstances it would have seemed to me like something out of a detective novel. You read so much about foreigners vanishing in London without trace, and this seemed just the sort of start you would imagine for such a story. I tell you, the natural thing would have been for me to panic, suspect criminal intent, and put myself in a defensive posture. But I didn’t. I just sat there, stock-still, frozen with terror. Because, you see, I recognised the eye.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That eye was the eye of a friend of my youth, a certain Tamás Ulpius who died young in tragic, although rather unclear, circumstances. For a few moments my fear was suspended, and a sort of pallid ghostly happiness filled me, a sort of ghost of happiness. I called out, ‘Tamás,’ and wanted to rush over to him. But in that instant the eye vanished.”

  “And then?”

  “Properly speaking, that’s all there was. But what happened next is quite inexplicable. An old lady came into the room, a strange, old-fashioned, repulsive, large-eyed woman, and with a fairly expressionless face asked me something. I didn’t understand, because she wasn’t speaking English. I tried her in French, German, even Hungarian, but she just shook her head sadly. Then she said something in a strange tongue, with much greater expression, besieging me with more and more questions. I listened hard, if only to try and catch what language she was speaking. I have a good ear for languages, especially those I don’t speak. I decided that what she was talking was not Latinate, Germanic, or Slav. It was not even Finno-Ugric, because I had studied Finnish at one stage at university. And then suddenly I just knew that she was the only person in the whole world speaking that language. Where that idea came from, I really don’t know. But I was so horrified I jumped up, rushed out of the room and back home.”

  “And how do you explain it all?” asked Ellesley.

  “I can think of no other than that it was November. I had got into that house through some strange random mistake. Our lives are full of inexplicable coincidences … ”

  “And the eye?”

  “The eye was surely in my imagination, an effect of the situation I was in and the London November. Because I am unshaken in my belief that the dead are dead.”

  IX

  HIS TIME was up. Mihály was well again and due to leave the hospital. No thief released after twenty years’ pr
ison could have felt more cut off from everything, or more devoid of purpose, than Mihály did when, with his little suitcase (his only possessions were the few frugal purchases he had put together on the day of his escape) he made his solitary way between the low-roofed houses of Foligno.

  He was in no mood to go home. It would have been impossible to appear among his family after his desertion, which he would be unable and unwilling to explain. And he could not bear the thought of returning to Pest, going in to the office, involving himself in the firm’s business, and relaxing over bridge and small talk.

  He still had so many Italian cities to see. They would surely have so much for him to discover. He decided to write home and ask for money.

  But he put off the business of writing the letter from one day to the next. He had so far remained in Foligno to be near Dr Ellesley, the only person with whom he had any connection, however slight. He took a room, where he lived quietly, read the English novels the doctor lent him, and enjoyed his lunches and dinners. Food was the only thing that tied him to reality in those blank days. He loved the undisguised sentimentality of Italian cooking. Conventional French-European cuisine approves only subtle, subdued, qualified flavours, like the colours of men’s suits. The Italian loves intense sweetness, extreme tartness, strongly distinctive aromas. Even the huge servings of pasta could be seen as an expression of this sentimentality.

  One evening he was sitting with Ellesley outside the main coffee-house of the town. As usual they were speaking English. Suddenly a young girl approached, addressed them in an American accent and joined them at the table.

  “Please excuse my troubling you,” she said, “but I’ve spent the whole day wandering around this godforsaken town and found no-one I could communicate with. Can you please explain something? It’s the reason I came here. It’s very important.”

  “We are at your disposal.”

  “You see, I’m studying art history at Cambridge.”

  “Ah, Cambridge?” cried Ellesley with delight.

  “Oh yes, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Why? Did you graduate there?”

  “No. I was at Cambridge, England. But how can we be of service?”

  “Well, I’m studying art history and I came to Italy because, as you probably know, there are lots of great pictures here they don’t have anywhere else. And I’ve seen everything.”

  She took out a little notebook, and continued:

  “I’ve been to Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice, and a whole lot of other places whose names I can’t read just now, the light’s so bad here. The last place was Per … Perugia. Did I say that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the museum there I met a French gentleman. He was French, that’s why he was so kind. He explained everything beautifully, and then told me that I absolutely must go to Foligno, because there is a very famous picture there, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, you know, the guy who did the Last Supper. So I came here. And I looked for this picture the whole day and didn’t find it. And nobody in this revolting little bird’s nest can direct me to it. Would you please tell me where they hide this painting?”

  Mihály and the doctor looked at one another.

  “A Leonardo? There’s never been one in Foligno,” replied the doctor.

  “That’s impossible,” said the girl, somewhat offended. “The French gentleman said there was. He said there’s a wonderful cow in it, with a goose and a duck.”

  Mihály burst out laughing.

  “My dear lady, it’s very simple. The French gentleman was having you on. There is no Leonardo in Foligno. And although I’m no expert, I have the feeling that there is no such picture by Leonardo, with a cow, a goose and a duck.”

  “But why did he say there was?”

  “Probably because cynical Europeans tend to liken women to these animals. Only European women, of course.”

  “I don’t get it. You’re not telling me the French gentleman was playing a trick on me?” she asked, red-faced.

  “You could see it that way, I’m sorry to say.”

  The girl thought deeply. Then she asked Mihály:

  “You aren’t French?”

  “No, no. Hungarian.”

  Her hand made a gesture of indifference. Then she turned to Ellesley:

  “But you’re English.”

  “Yes. Partly.”

  “And do you agree with your friend?”

  “Yes,” said Ellesley, nodding sadly.

  The girl again thought for a while, then clenched her fist.

  “But he was so kind to me! I just wish I knew the bastard’s name.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. Ellesley consoled her:

  “But there’s no great harm done. Now you can write in your notebook that you’ve been to Foligno.”

  “I already did,” she said with a sniffle.

  “Well, there you are,” said Mihály. “Tomorrow you’ll go happily back to Perugia and continue your studies. I’ll take you to the train. I’ve already had the experience of getting on the wrong one.”

  “That’s not the point. The shame of it, the shame of it! To treat a poor defenceless girl like that! Everyone told me not to trust Europeans. But I’m such a straightforward person myself. Can you get whisky here?”

  And they sat together until midnight.

  The girl’s presence had a lively effect on Mihály. He too drank whisky, and became talkative, although mostly it was the girl who spoke. The little doctor became very quiet, being naturally shy, and finding her rather attractive.

  The girl, whose name was Millicent Ingram, was quite wonderful. Especially as an art historian. She knew of Luca della Robbia that it was a city on the Arno, and claimed that she had been with Watteau in his Paris studio. “A very kind old man,” she insisted, “but his hands were dirty, and I didn’t like the way he kissed my neck in the hallway.” That aside, she talked about art history, passionately and pompously, without stopping.

  It gradually emerged that she was the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia parents who enjoyed considerable influence in high society, at least as she saw it, but that some Rousseauistic tendency in her drove her towards solitude and nature, which from her point of view meant Europe. She had attended study semesters in Paris, Vienna and other fine places, but none of it had had any effect. Her soul had preserved its American innocence.

  And yet, as Mihály walked home and prepared for bed, he hummed cheerfully to himself, and his apathy slipped away. “Millicent,” he said. “There’s someone in the world actually called Millicent! Millicent.”

  Millicent Ingram was not the mind-boggling, soppily-named, beautiful American girl to be seen in Paris in the years after the war, when everything else in the world was so drab. It was only in the second of those contexts that Millicent could be classed as an American beauty. The basis of this beauty, though the word is perhaps an overstatement, was that her face was quite devoid of expression. But in any event she was very good-looking, with a little nose, a wholesome mouth that was large (and painted larger) and a fine athletic figure. Her muscles seemed as elastic as rubber.

  And she was American. Indisputably of that class of wonderful creatures exported to Paris in Mihály’s youth. The ‘foreign woman’ is an element of young manhood, of footloose youth. What remains in later years is the undying nostalgia, for in the footloose years we are still gauche and timid, and let slip the better opportunities. Mihály had now lived for so long in Budapest that his lovers had all been from that city. The ‘foreign woman’ now rather denoted his youth. And liberation: after Erzsi, after the serious marriage, after so many serious years. An adventure, at last: something coming unexpectedly and moving towards an unforeseen conclusion.

  Even Millicent’s stupidity was attractive. In the deepest stupidity there is a kind of dizzying, whirlpool attraction, like death: the pull of the vacuum.

  It so happened that the next day, when he had escorted her to the station, and they were about to buy the ticket, he said:

  �
��Why are you going back to Perugia? Foligno is a city too. Why not stay here?”

  Millicent looked at him with her stupidly serious eyes, and said:

  “You’re right.”

  And she stayed. That day was rather hot. They spent the whole of it eating ice-cream and talking. Mihály had the skill that makes English diplomats so feared in their profession: he knew how to be extremely dim when the need arose. Millicent noticed nothing of the intellectual distance between them. Indeed, she felt herself at an advantage because of her art history studies, and this rather flattered her.

  “You are the first European I’ve met who really understood me intellectually,” she said. “The others were so dull, and took no interest in art.”

  He had won her complete confidence. By evening he had gleaned everything there was to know about her, not that there was anything worth knowing.

  That evening they met Ellesley at the café. The doctor was quite surprised that the girl was still in Foligno.

  “You know, I decided I can’t always be thinking about problems of art,” she told him. “A doctor friend of mine said that prolonged intensive study is bad for the skin. Isn’t that so? Anyway I decided to switch myself off for a bit. I’m giving myself an intellectual holiday. Your friend has such a calming influence on me. Such a kindly, simple, harmonious soul, don’t you think?”

  Ellesley noted with resignation that his patient was courting the American girl, and grew even quieter. For he was still very attracted to Millicent. She was so different from Italian women. Only the Anglo-Saxon type can be so clean, so innocent. Millicent—innocent: what a splendid rhyme that would have been, if he had been a poet. But no matter. The main thing was that this heaven-sent delight was doing visible good to his dear Hungarian patient.