by Antal Szerb
Well, that’s the situation. Your father was not entirely persuaded that I should write to you at all. You can imagine how nervous and distressed these events have made him, and how alarming he finds the prospect that sooner or later we shall have to pay everything back to your wife. He’s taken it all so much to heart that we want to send him on a holiday for a break (we’re thinking mainly of Gastein), but he won’t hear of it because of the extra expense of travelling during the summer holiday season.
So, dear Misi, on receipt of this letter be so good as to pack up and come straight home, the sooner the better.
Love from everyone,
Tivadar
Tivadar had certainly enjoyed writing that letter, revelling in the fact that he, the feckless playboy of the family, was now in a position to preach morality to the sober and serious Mihály. This in itself, and the superior tone of voice from a totally unsympathetic younger brother, made him very angry. Now, returning home could be seen as nothing more than an imposition, a horrid and hateful command.
But, it seemed, there really was no alternative. If he paid back the loan from Millicent there would be nothing left for him to live on in Rome. What also disturbed him deeply was what Tivadar had said about his father. He knew that Tivadar was not exaggerating. His father had a tendency to depression, and the whole disaster, in which material, social and emotional problems were linked together in such a complicated way, was just the sort of thing to destroy his peace of mind. If the other elements failed to achieve this, it was enough in itself that his favourite son had behaved so impossibly. He really would have to go home, if only to make amends for this, to explain to his father that he simply could not have done other than he did, not even for Erzsi’s good. He needed to show that he was not a runaway, that he took full responsibility for his action, as a gentleman should.
And once home he would have to knuckle down to work. Now everything would be work. Work was the promised reward for a young man setting out, for completing his studies, and work was the penitential act and punishment for those who met with failure. If he went home and worked steadily, sooner or later his father would forgive him.
But when he thought in detail about this ‘work’—his desk, the people he had to deal with, and above all the things that filled his time after work, the bridge parties, the Danube outings, the well-to-do ladies, he felt exasperated to the point of tears.
“What did the shade of Achilles say?” he pondered. “‘I would rather be a cotter in my father’s house than a prince among the dead.’ For me it’s the reverse. I’d rather be a cotter here, among the dead, than a prince at home, in my father’s house. Only, I’d need to know what exactly a cotter is … ”
Here, among the dead … for at that moment he was walking in the little Protestant cemetery behind the pyramid of Cestius, beside the city wall. Here lay his fellows, dead men from the North, drawn here by nameless nostalgias, and here overtaken by death. This fine cemetery, with its shady wall, had always lured souls from the North with the illusion that here oblivion would be sweeter. At the end of one of Goethe’s Roman elegies there stands, as a memento: Die Pyramide vorbei, leise zum Orcus hinab. “From the tomb of Cestius, the way leads gently down to Hell.” Shelley, in a wonderful letter, wrote that he would like to lie here in death, and so he does, or at least his heart is there, beneath the inscription: Cor cordium.
Mihály was on the point of leaving when he noticed a small cluster of tombs standing apart in one corner of the cemetery. He went over and perused the inscriptions on the plain Empire-stones. One of them read simply, in English: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water”. On the second a longer text declared that there lay Severn, the painter, the best friend and faithful nurse on his death-bed of John Keats, the great English poet, who had insisted that his name should not be inscribed on the neighbouring stone, under which he lay.
Mihály’s eyes filled with tears. So here lay Keats, the greatest poet since the world began … though such emotion was somewhat irrational, given that the body had been lying there for a very long time, and the spirit was preserved by his verses more faithfully than by any grave-pit. But so wonderful, so truly English, was the manner of this gentle compromise, this innocent sophistry, that perfectly respected his last wishes but nonetheless announced without ambiguity that it was indeed Keats who lay beneath the stone.
When he raised his eyes some rather unusual people were standing beside him. They were an enchantingly beautiful and undoubtedly English woman, a second woman dressed as a nurse, and two lovely English children, a little boy and girl. They simply stood motionless, looking rather awkwardly at the grave, at each other, and at Mihály. He stood and waited for them to say something, but they did not speak. After a while an elegant gentleman arrived, with the same expressionless face as the others. He bore a strong resemblance to his wife: they might have been twins, or at least brother and sister. He stood before the grave, and the wife pointed out the inscription. The Englishman nodded, and with great solemnity and some embarrassment gazed in turn at the grave, at his family, and at Mihály. And he too said nothing. Mihály moved a step further away, thinking that perhaps they were discomposed by his presence, but they simply remained standing, nodding from time to time, and looking self-consciously at one another. The two children’s faces were every bit as embarrassed and blankly beautiful as the adults’.
As he was turning away, Mihály suddenly stared at them with undisguised astonishment. He felt that they were not human but ghostly dolls, mindless automata standing here over the poet’s grave: inexplicable beings. Had they not been so very beautiful perhaps they would have been less astonishing, but they had the inhuman beauty of people in advertisements, and he was filled with an unspeakable horror.
Then the English family moved away, slowly and still nodding, and Mihály recovered himself. In sober consciousness he reviewed the past few minutes, and became truly anxious.
“What’s wrong with me? What sort of mental state have I fallen into again? It was like a dark, shameful reminder of my adolescence. These people were quite clearly nothing other than self-conscious, thoroughly stupid English, confronted by the fact that this was Keats’s grave and not knowing where to begin, perhaps because they had no idea who Keats was. Or perhaps they knew, but couldn’t think how to behave appropriately at the grave of Keats the famous Englishman, and because of this they were embarrassed in front of each other and of me. A more insignificant or banal scene you really couldn’t imagine, and yet I immediately thought of the most unspeakable horror in the world. Yes. Horror isn’t at its most intense in things of night and fear. It’s when you are staring in full sunlight at some mundane thing, a shop window, an unknown face, between the branches of a tree … ”
He thrust his hands in his pockets and quickly made his way back.
He decided that he would travel home the next day. It was too late to leave that day, because Tivadar’s letter had not arrived much before noon. He would have to wait until morning to change the cheque he had been sent, and to despatch the money he owed to Millicent. He was spending his last night in Rome. He wandered around the streets with an even greater sense of surrender than before, and found everything even more charged with significance.
He was bidding farewell to Rome. It was not particular buildings that had found their way into his heart. The overwhelming experience was of the life of the city itself. He wandered aimless and uncertain, with the feeling that tucked away in the city were still thousands upon thousands of districts he would now never see. And again he had the feeling that the really important things were happening elsewhere, where he was not; that he had missed the secret signal. His road led absolutely nowhere and his nostalgia now would gnaw him eternally, remain eternally unquenched, until he too departed, Die Pyramide vorbei, leise zum Orcus hinab …
The light was fading and Mihály walked with lowered head, hardly noticing even the streets, until, in a dark alleyway, he bumped into someone, who muttered
, “sorry”. Hearing the English word, he looked up and saw before him the young Englishman who had so struck him at Keats’s grave. There must have been something in Mihály’s face as he looked at the Englishman, for he raised his hat, murmured something, and hurried off. Mihály turned and stared after him.
But only for a moment. Then, with determined footsteps, he hurried after him, without thinking why he did. As a boy, under the influence of detective novels, one of his favourite pastimes had been to fall in suddenly behind some unknown person and to track him, taking great care not to be noticed, sometimes for long hours. He would not follow just anyone. The chosen person had to have been revealed to him by some means, some cabalistic sign, as had this young Englishman. It could not have been by empty chance that in all this vast city he had met him twice on the same day, and that day such a significant one, and that in both of them the meeting had produced such unprovoked astonishment. Some secret lay hidden in this, and he would have to follow it to its end.
With the excitement of a detective he tracked the Englishman through the narrow streets to the Corso Umberto. He had not lost his boyhood skill. He could still follow unobserved, like a shadow. His quarry walked up and down the Corso for a while, then took a chair on a café terrace. Mihály also sat down, drank a vermouth, and watched him in a fever of anticipation. He knew that something must happen. He had the impression that the Englishman was no longer as calm and expressionless as he had been at the graveside. Under the regular lines of his face and the alarming clarity of his skin some strange life seemed to be throbbing. Of course the restlessness showed on his impeccable English surface no more than the wing of a bird brushing the surface of a lake. But restless he certainly was. Mihály knew that the man was waiting for someone, and he too was infected with the apprehension of waiting, which was amplified in him like a voice through a megaphone.
The Englishman began to glance repeatedly at his watch, and Mihály could hardly bear to remain in his seat. He fidgeted, ordered yet another vermouth, then a maraschino. This was no time for economising. Anyway, he was going home the next day.
At last an elegant limousine drew up outside the café, the door opened and a woman glanced out. Instantly the Englishman sprang up and disappeared into the car, which moved off smoothly and silently.
It took but an instant. The woman had appeared in the open car door for no more than a moment, but Mihály had recognised her, as much by intuition as by sight. It was Éva Ulpius. He too had leapt to his feet, had seen her glance fall on him for just a moment, and caught the very faint smile that appeared on her face. But it was over in a flash, and Éva had disappeared inside the car and vanished into the night.
He paid for his drinks and staggered out of the café. The omens had not lied. It was for this that he had been summoned to Rome: because Éva was here. Now he understood that she was the source and object of his nostalgia. Éva, Éva …
And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was ‘filled with pleasurable expectation’. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by ‘pleasurable expectation’. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.
He wrote at once to Tivadar to say that his state of health would not permit an extended journey. He did not send the money to Millicent. Millicent was so rich she could manage without it. If she had waited all this time she could wait a bit longer. The delay was Tivadar’s fault for not sending more money.
That evening, in his elation, his nervous excitement after the feverish waiting, he got drunk on his own, and when he woke later in the night with a violently palpitating heart he again knew the terrible feeling of mortality which in his younger days had been the strongest symptom of his passion for Éva. He well knew, now even more clearly than he had the day before, that for a thousand and one reasons he really had to go home; and that if despite that knowledge he remained in Rome because of Éva—and how uncertain it was that he actually had seen her—he was putting everything at risk, perhaps doing irreparable offence against his family and his own status as a bourgeois, and that very uncertain days lay ahead. But not for one minute did it occur to him that there was anything else he could do. All this, the great gamble and the death-haunted feeling, was so much part of those adolescent games. Not tomorrow, and not the day after, but one day he and Éva would meet, and, until then, he would live. His life would begin anew, not as it had been during all the wasted years. Incipit vita nova.
XIV
EVERY DAY he read the newspapers, but with rather mixed feelings. He enjoyed the paradox that they were written in Italian, that potent and voluminous language, but (in their case) with the effect of a mighty river driving a sewing-machine. But the contents deeply depressed him. The Italian papers were always ecstatically happy, as if they were written not by humans but by saints in triumph, just stepped down from a Fra Angelico in order to celebrate the perfect social system. There was always some cause for happiness: some institution was eleven years old, a road had just turned twelve. So someone would make a monumental speech, and the people would enthusiastically applaud, at least according to accounts in the press.
Like all foreigners, Mihály was exercised by the question of whether the people did actually welcome everything as fervently, and were as steadily, indefatigably, tirelessly happy, as the papers insisted. Naturally he was aware that it was difficult for a foreigner to take an exact measure of Italian contentment and sincerity, especially when he never spoke to anyone, and had no real connection with any aspect of Italian life. But as far as he could judge, from such a distance, and given his general detachment, it seemed to him that the Italian people were indeed indefatigably enthusiastic and happy, ever since these had come into fashion. But he also knew what trifling and stupid things could suffice to make man happy, whether individually or in the mass.
However he did not occupy himself at great length with this question. His instincts told him that in Italy it was all very much the same whoever happened to be in power and whatever the ideas in whose name they ruled. Politics touched only the surface. The people, the vegetative sea of the Italian masses, bore the changing times on their back with astonishing passivity, and lived quite unconnected with their own remarkable history. He suspected that even Republican and Imperial Rome, with its huge gestures, its heroics and bestial stupidities, had been nothing more than a virile drama on the surface, the whole Roman Empire the mere private affair of a few brilliant actors, while down below the Italians placidly ate their pasta, sang songs of love, and begat their countless offspring.
One day a familiar name met his eye in the Popolo d’Italia: ‘The Waldheim Lecture’. He studied the article, from which it emerged that Rodolfo Waldheim, the world-famous Hungarian classical philologist and religious historian, had given a lecture at the Accademia Reale, entitled Aspetti della morte nelle religioni antiche. The fiery Italian journalist fêted the lecture as shedding entirely new light not just on death-practices in ancient religions but on the nature of death in general. The text was moreover an important document of Hungaro-Italian friendship. The audience had enthusiastically received the famous professor, whose very youthfulness had surprised and delighted them.
This Waldheim, Mihály decided, could be no other than Rudi Waldheim, and he was filled with a kind of pleasure, for this man had at one time been a good friend. They had been at university together. Although neither was very congenial by nature—Mihály because he rather looked down upon anyone who was not of the Ulpius set, Waldheim because he felt that compared with himself everyone else was ignorant, dull and cheap—nonetheless a kind of friendshi
p had grown between them out of their interest in religious history. The relationship had not been a very lasting one. Waldheim’s knowledge was already formidable: he had read everything that mattered, in every language, and he willingly and brilliantly expounded to Mihály, whom he found an eager listener, until he realised that his interest in the subject was not very deep. He decided his friend was a dilettante and withdrew into suspicion. Mihály for his part was astonished and dismayed by the vastness of his friend’s knowledge. If a mere beginner knew so much, he wondered, how much more would a bearded practitioner know, and he entirely lost heart, particularly as not long afterwards he abandoned his university studies. Waldheim however went on to Germany to perfect himself at the feet of the great masters and the two lost touch completely. Years later Mihály would read in the newspapers of another step in Waldheim’s rapid rise up the academic ladder, and when he became a lecturer at the university Mihály had been on the point of writing to congratulate him, but then hadn’t. They had never again met in person.