Love in a Bottle

by Antal Szerb

  Bátky became cool and detached. He could see he would never get close to this woman, and what is love without a meeting of souls?

  “I’m going away tomorrow, to France. My father is a tower guard at Notre Dame.”

  “And when are you coming back?” she enquired.

  “I’m not coming back,” he replied grimly.

  “As you wish,” she shrugged, and made her way quickly down the stairs.

  A few days later the Sunday Pictorial found an occasion to carry yet another picture of Lady Rothesay. It was her all right.

  “Women are incomprehensible,” he wrote on a slip of paper, and carefully filed it away.

  1934

  MUSINGS IN THE LIBRARY

  LOOKING BACK on the blissful days of my youth, as they begin to slip away from me, I can now see that the best of them were those spent in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. I won’t deny that the hours I whiled away on night watch at the Scouts camp were also very pleasant, and my first amorous embrace, up in the mountains of Austria, though pure puppy love, comes pretty close—love and nature have seldom let me down. But the very best moments were undoubtedly those spent in the Bibliothèque nationale, especially the winter evenings.

  Now, the beauty of penny-pinching is perhaps that it is so typically French. No illumination of any kind was permitted to penetrate the ever-receding mystery of the huge space under the arched ceiling. That would have been wanton extravagance. Instead, tall green lampshades, placed at strictly rational distances apart, burnt directly over the tables. These were of course switched on only after total blindness had set in. Immediately the silence intensified, humming with feverish excitement, since closing time was now imminent and everyone’s life suddenly depended on getting through the next fifty pages. The only sound to be heard was the rhythmic, monotone rustling of pages being turned and the occasional voice raised in protest by some superannuated lunatic at the counter where the all-powerful ushers were enthroned.

  At five minutes before a quarter to six, a personage specially assigned to the task would proclaim in a voice of thunder: “Mesdames et Messieurs, on va bientôt fermer”—the closing ‘er’ being wonderfully drawn-out, wavering off to vanish in the remoteness of those never-to-be visited rooms where the library kept its millions of books. Then, at five forty-five precisely, the same functionary would call out, with all the succinctness we have come to expect from ancient prophets of doom: “On ferme!” And everyone trooped out.

  My friend Swen Reimer filed out with me. As we made our way across the vast courtyard in the gathering gloom, I spotted the girl I had been admiring on and off throughout the day whenever I needed a break from my reading. Now, as she crossed the space in front of us, there was no difficulty deducing her national origins. In her crisp trench coat, blue student’s cap and powerful stride there were distinct adumbrations of the Prussian military.

  “You know, Reimer,” I observed. “If I were German, I’d go straight up to her and declare: ‘Young lady, you are German, I am German. Shall we leave together?’”

  Then something dreadful happened. Reimer replied:

  “Yes, I might just do that, but I’d have to be on my own.” Then, “Do excuse me,” he continued, in his usual, slightly offended-sounding tone, and promptly abandoned me. He was with the girl in an instant, seemed to strike a chord with her almost at once, and the two of them marched off into some erotic hinterland, leaving me standing there as if turned to stone.

  It was an unspeakable disappointment. I had always imagined that Reimer would be just as timid as all the other souls who haunt the libraries of the world. I had no sense of his being in any way superior. I had felt sure of him, I had complacently despised him, and now… That’s what happens when you put your trust in people.

  I wandered through the Place du Palais Royal, where I was particularly struck by a display in the window of the Louvre department store. It presented a stork bringing dazzlingly lit presents to dazzlingly lit children sitting in a little house, in which the gifts appeared in rotation and then miraculously disappeared. It reminded me that Christmas—that ritual humiliation of the selfish and the lonely—was creeping up on us. I carried on down the Rue des Saints-Pères, where I lived, thinking how pleasant it would be if there were a letter waiting for me in my room.

  “Even better would be one with a cheque inside,” I mused, more pragmatically. “But should some female acquaintance have written, that would at least be something. I wouldn’t even mind going back to the customs office, so long as there really were something for me in the post, something completely unexpected.”

  Regarding the customs people: I once had to go there to register my presence while they opened a parcel that had come addressed to me from some person or persons unknown. I stood trembling before three officials while they withdrew a large cardboard box from its brown paper wrapping. They opened it, very cautiously, and discovered a thick wad of cotton wool. The suspicious wadding was then dissected with professional expertise. Hidden in its depths was a tiny flower—an autumn crocus. The ‘amusing’ Gallic anecdotes that followed showed their true mentality. For my part, I smiled a superior smile and thought it ridiculous to have been summoned to the main offices for this. But at the same time I was deeply moved. For, apart from the rose and carnation, which of course everyone knows, the autumn crocus was the one flower I could identify by name. In fact I am always delighted when I see one, as for once I can be sure that it isn’t a snapdragon, or salvia, but incontrovertibly an autumn crocus.

  In other ways too the post stands for the element of unpredictability in my otherwise straightforward life. On one occasion I received an invitation to a ball with “I’ll be there” written on it in an unknown hand. On another occasion I was sent an old-fashioned tie-pin that arrived, as I worked out later, just in time for my name day. Then a Mickey Mouse badge appeared one Christmas Eve. And once, at a time when I was asking myself with particular bitterness just why I had to live in Paris—so far from Budapest, my beloved home—to embrace the self-imposed exile in the cause of greater knowledge that afflicted a whole generation of young Hungarians between 1924 and 1930, the postman brought me a perfumed envelope containing a ticket for the Budapest transport system, already punched.

  I tried not to think about who the kind sender might be. At the time I had no one in my life. I had arrived from Hungary two years earlier, having cut every tie and entanglement. All my relationships had been decisively terminated, I corresponded only with other men, and then always very briefly. For this steady stream of little surprises I impersonally gave credit to the post office itself, or ascribed it to my fate as written in the stars, and their inscrutable way of protecting me from the mortal sin of terminal loneliness.

  Nor had my stars—that celestial arm of the French postal service—forgotten me on this fateful evening. In the box behind the keyhole I found a letter, addressed in a hand which needless to say I did not recognise. I opened it with palpitating heart. For the sake of brevity, I reproduce it verbatim:

  Most Respected Doctor X,

  I hope you will excuse my writing to you as a stranger. My cousin, whose letter is enclosed, told me that that you wouldn’t mind. I arrived in Paris a few days ago, and would like to work in the Bibliothèque nationale. I would be enormously grateful if you could advise me about what I need to know.

  Respectfully yours,

  Ilonka Csáth

  It was accompanied by a few lines from Edit Wessely, now calling herself Mrs Gyula Somebody.

  My dear Tom,

  Would you please take my little cousin into your much-vaunted care. She is very pretty. Behave yourself at all times, and don’t cheat on me with all those flappers.

  Edit

  This same Edit had been my great love at university, the heroine of endless poetical walks in the Buda hills. I had been very fond of her, but since then she had done the dirty on me and married, as had increasing numbers of my former acquaintances. As for this Ilonka
Csáth, I knew nothing about her. With my usual inborn pessimism I reckoned she would quite probably be obese, and almost certainly stupid. Never mind. The main thing was that my faith in the old post office had not been disappointed. So far everything that it had brought had been propitious.

  I carried on up to my little room. This ‘room’, like that of every other Hungarian intellectual in Paris, was the smallest, ugliest and most humble abode imaginable; and like the room of every other Hungarian intellectual in Paris, it has become so glorified in memory that it outshines all my other paradises in all their variety.

  After some humming and hawing I composed the following reply:

  Dear Colleague,

  I would be happy to put myself at your disposal in the Bibliothèque nationale at any time. You can identify me by the brown handkerchief I wear over my heart, and more particularly, by the fact that I always sit in seat number 266. If not there, I am to be found in the coffee house going off to the right.

  Yours etc.

  And gradually I forgot all about her.

  Then one morning I became aware of a young girl moving hesitantly along the central passageway dividing the two sections of the library. She was behaving the way people do when checking the seat numbers in a cinema to see which is theirs. Finally she stopped next to my table, glanced at the people sitting on either side of me, blushed, took out a work of reference from the nearest bookcase and began flicking aimlessly through it. She was very pretty. All the same, I carried on reading.

  It occurred to me that this could well be Ilonka Csáth. She was obviously wracking her brains trying to decide which one was me. (Young lady, I am your man. Perhaps you should speak to me. But then again, perhaps you aren’t Ilonka Csáth. Women can be divided into two groups: those who are Ilonka Csáth, and those who are not. Representatives of the latter greatly outnumber the former. Oh, nonsense…) And I continued with my reading.

  Once I had fully understood the next sonnet I glanced up again. The person in question was no longer there. I felt just a little put out, disappointed and betrayed. Something might have come of it. But that’s women for you—they always go away. And she was so very attractive. I read another two sonnets, then stood up and set off for lunch. When I reached the door, the same very attractive young lady got up from the next table and ran over to me.

  “Excuse me,” she said, in appalling French, “but aren’t you Tamás X?”

  “I am indeed,” I replied in Hungarian, “and you are most probably Ilonka Csáth.”

  She was delighted by my perspicacity.

  “I thought it must be you, but I was afraid to say anything.”

  “How could a grown woman, a university student, be so shy?” I asked, in a rather superior tone. “So, in a word, you would like me to initiate you into the mysteries of the Bibliothèque nationale. I would be delighted. But what would you say to the idea that we first have lunch?”

  “Lunch? I… I usually just have coffee.”

  “You poor thing. So you’re having to watch the pennies?”

  “Not at all. But I’m not yet used to going into restaurants. This is my first time away from home, you know.”

  “Then you must get used to it with me. I know a very good, and cheap, little Czech restaurant, where you can get authentic Hungarian food. Real pork chops and cabbage, just like at home.”

  “Yes, that would be nice,” she answered uncertainly.

  I took her straight there, my behaviour a rather odd mixture of the paternal and the gallant.

  Over the meal I asked her for news of the university. She was very chatty, endlessly informative about the ways of the teaching staff and the reaction of the students to their lectures.

  She was one of those rare girls who don’t come apart at the seams the moment they open their mouths. For all her shyness, she expressed herself precisely and thoughtfully, and once she warmed to her theme the sentences flowed, sweetly, lyrically, eloquently. She was a second-year arts student, just twenty—which nowadays means little more than adolescent. She was still young enough for intellectual merit to make a strong impression on her.

  We got on wonderfully well. She was so much like a colleague I almost forgot that she was such an attractive young woman, and I would have loved to take her to my bosom. I even tried to pay for her meal, despite the state of my finances. But, true to Hungarian custom, she refused so adamantly it was as if I had impugned her respectability.

  The afternoon passed in what seemed a moment. How proud I felt, leading her timid steps round the catalogues and the pigeon-holes where orders were placed, and explaining the inner meaning of the pictures, all as if I personally had discovered the art of printing. I taught her everything that mattered. I pointed out the more egregious old-timers, sitting there poring over their books—the old gent with his blue cap who would stand up from time to time and whistle for a few minutes; the one who never stopped munching away; the mad one, and the talkative one who had discovered the primal human language from which all others could be derived. And when we went for coffee, I declared rather fancifully:

  “Don’t let it worry you that ninety per cent of the people you see in here are geriatrics, cripples and lost souls. It’s not only an asylum for the likes of them. It’s also a refuge for the eternally young—people like you and me, for example—and in fact all human life…”

  I just couldn’t find logical expression for my feelings.

  But in fact Ilonka was in little need of reassurance. It was obvious on that first afternoon that she would be completely at home in the library. Perhaps this was because her sensitivity and timidity found a protective calm in the ordered, reliable, studiously innocent world that is scholarship, of which the library is the outward and visible embodiment. How comforting it is to know that everything is in its place, and all so aloof and impersonal. Moods and desires come and go, like so many restless tourists, but the folios remain in place, waiting benignly to be read by succeeding centuries. Buses, taxis and metros rush us about at frantic speed; placards bawl out every grubby little change in our material lives: the library stands for what is pure and true.

  At closing time I escorted her back to the students’ hostel where she was staying.

  “What are you doing after supper?” I asked.

  “Nothing, really. I’ll talk to the girls for a while, then go to bed and read.”

  “And the night life of Paris, doesn’t that interest you? Have you been up to Montparnasse?”

  “No, and I’ve no wish to. I don’t like being with lots of other people. Besides, I couldn’t go there on my own.”

  “Then come with me.”

  “I couldn’t. I’ve only spoken to you for the first time today. After all.”

  Her moral sense reassured me. It told me she was a proper Hungarian girl.

  “Don’t you feel lonely at night? Don’t you miss your mother?”

  “Not today. Today I’m really happy.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Well… there’s the library. I’m so happy to be working there. And you’ve been so good to me. Will you help me again, some time?”

  “But of course, gladly… I really don’t enjoy the evenings. For me, it’s the most difficult part of the day.”

  I could have said a great deal more on that theme, but I didn’t want to become sentimental. She would have taken it as a way of pushing myself on her.

  “I don’t want you to be sad,” she said.

  We looked at one another, and were silent for some time. I’m not saying it was a deeply meaningful silence. I was listening to myself and to the muffled beatings of my soul, something not to be shared with such a young girl. For a true gentleman, loneliness is a private matter.

  “Well, then,” I said, and smiled. I waited for her to say something. Then I kissed her hand and left.

  I had gone a few steps along the Boulevard St Michel, still sensing the soft touch of her hand on my lips, when I had the sudden feeling that someone was foll
owing me. I turned around, and there she stood.

  “Please don’t be angry. I wanted to give you this cigarette holder… you were so good to me.”

  I was so surprised all I could do was grin. But before I could formulate any meaningful sentence in my head, she had slipped away, swiftly and silently, on weightless steps. The cigarette holder was one of those you can pull out to a really impressive length. I was thrilled with it, but at the same time something told me I should be asking myself why a girl who spent her days in a library should have given it to me. I filed it away as a memento of the Bibliothèque nationale. That seemed to me right and proper—due payment for scholarly services rendered. After all, I had devoted an entire afternoon to her.

  After I had known her about a week, I managed to persuade her to come with me after closing time to the Rue d’Antin, to try my favourite vermouth.

  There is a rather special little place in the Rue d’Antin where the only drink on offer is the Italian vermouth known as Crocefisso. The place has the sort of odd-looking door you find in English pubs—no top or bottom, just two swinging wooden boards in between to stop people looking in. This strange door seemed to create a strong impression of moral degeneracy in the girl. She recoiled from it in horror, and it took me a full quarter of an hour to persuade her to go in.

  The only person inside was the old patronne, who poured the vermouth out into a long-necked glass before each of us in turn. Ilonka spent some time gazing nervously around.

  “Do you come and booze here regularly?” she asked.

  “Well, if by ‘boozing’ you mean dropping in occasionally with one of my friends and having a few glasses together.”

  “I’m sure you’d much rather be here with your friends… Tell me, it really troubles my conscience, the amount of time you’re spending on me.”

  I instantly felt an enormous tenderness towards her—the expansive, generous feeling you get when there is something you really ought to do and you actually do it.