by Antal Szerb
“Truly, Ilonka, if only you knew at what a good moment you came into my life. It’s made me see just how much the library, and books, and scholarship really mean to me—and that includes the bookish life itself, with all its moments of bitterness. Because now I’ve been able to share it with you.”
She clapped her hands to her head, and her eyes took on a veiled look, as if I’d made a declaration of love. I hastened to put things right, because I believe in precision in matters of feeling.
“I think that—how can I put this?—only the selfish are beyond consolation.”
“József Eötvös,” she retorted.
“József Eötvös, indeed,” I replied, somewhat irritably. I could not help but feel the irony of her interjection, with its unstated reproach—an irony directed at the perpetual student, with his love of quotations.
“Good,” she said. “But surely I’m allowed to be grateful. Can’t you see? Before I met you I didn’t know which end of a book to pick up. I treated them like objets d’art. I’ve learnt a great deal from you.”
“Please don’t feel you owe me anything for that. I find it just as rewarding. It’s a pleasure for me too. Taking you through those books, into my personal domain, my little empire—it was almost as delightful as initiating a virgin into the secrets of love.”
She looked at me in astonishment. I had no idea where such a crude comparison could have come from, and I felt rather alarmed. But she simply nodded, and put her hand a few encouraging centimetres closer to mine on the table.
I placed mine on hers. It was very beautiful. Nature loves harmony, and the hand rarely belies the nature of the person.
However it is quite difficult to sustain a rational conversation when you are holding hands with someone. There is something intensely emotional about it, in its sheer simplicity. When a grown man takes his girl’s hand he becomes a warm-hearted apprentice boy on a Sunday afternoon outing.
I felt a little more at ease when she finally withdrew hers, glanced at her watch, and said, very quietly: “Shall we go?”
She was so lost in thought she even allowed me to pay for her drink. That was the start of the catastrophe.
On the way home we scarcely spoke, and then only about the simplest things. As we were crossing the Pont des Arts, she suddenly stopped. She stood looking out over the Seine towards the Île de la Cité, and hummed the tune of a popular song to herself. I remember how much that surprised me. I would never have imagined earlier that the sort of banal sentiment you find in such a song could even enter her brain, let alone that she might hum it to herself.
That evening, as usual, I read the eternally great Casanova. Of all my friends among the deceased writers, the notorious adventurer was the one I loved most—the man who managed, in just one short life, to experience the full beauty and squalor of the most beautiful of centuries. He and I had little in common. The essential characteristic of Don Juans is that they are easy to please. Casanova loved every woman his eyes fell upon with equal ardour, and every night of passion he spent was the best of his life. I, on the other hand, am a sort of anti-Don Juan. Women rarely please me, and then only in certain circumstances ordained by fate, when they address me in a certain tone of voice, at specially chosen moments—and even then not very much.
Strolling around the streets of Paris I simply never noticed women (and certainly none of them bothered to cast their nets out for me). I was like the man caught on film, the passer-by hurrying along the street, deep in thought, who sees nothing of what is around him and simply rushes through.
But that evening I thought of Ilonka in the somewhat disreputable light of a Casanova escapade. It had taken me a week to get to the point where she let me hold her hand… My God, how Casanova would have despised my tardiness! Because, in principle, I too was a believer in the life of danger. My heart beat in sympathy with Casanova’s women and the diabolical intrigues that led to such happy endings. So why then was I so comfortably at home in mundane reality?
I shall be as cunning as old Casanova, I thought. I’ll take it very slowly, one step at a time. Today she let me pay for her vermouth. Tomorrow night she’s coming with me to Montparnasse… The transition from the intellectual plane to the erotic will be imperceptible. Books are the most potent aphrodisiacs, as Paolo and Francesca were well aware, and indeed—not to press the point too far—perhaps also Abelard and Héloïse.
But what would Ilonka say to all this? Without question she liked me as a wise friend, but could she accept me in another relation? Would she want to? She was so virginal, so well brought-up. Despair took hold of me once again. But I suddenly started to recall a whole series of little incidents whose significance had somehow escaped my notice: the cigarette holder… her occasional remarks that she would always think of me whenever she read something beautiful, that sort of thing… In fact—I realised in astonishment—she was the one who had been courting me and I, the great scholarly mind, hadn’t even noticed! Oh sainted Casanova… But now I’ll show him, I thought.
The next morning I found a new Ilonka in the library. At first I thought that the alteration was in me, produced by the sudden reverse of direction in my feelings. But then I realised that the change was quite independent of my particular state. It had its own life. She was wearing a gorgeous new hat in place of the old student’s cap, and she had powdered her face. The collected manhood of two tables was gazing at her in admiration—the poets, the geriatrics, even the Chinese, and her own reading seemed altogether less focused. From time to time she smiled across at me, sweetly, without inhibition.
Her change of attitude became even more obvious over lunch. The atmosphere of Paris, which seemed not to have touched her before, had now breached all her defences. She chattered away spontaneously and happily, sprinkling Parisian expressions around her sentences—I’ve no idea where she could have picked them up. She criticised people, found fault with the meal, and made it clear she would rather have been offered something a little more interesting. I could see that the time for Casanova-style chicanery had clearly passed, and that evening we dined on Montparnasse.
That evening, in the genuinely good restaurant, the supposedly timid Ilonka revealed a surprising assertiveness. In the Czech place she hadn’t even picked up the menu. Instead, with a mixture of modesty and unworldliness, she had simply left the ordering to me. This time she scrutinised the list with great cunning, and managed to pick out a meat dish that proved totally inedible. The wine we drank was Haut Sauterne, since I had once heard that that was what you ordered if you wanted to seduce a woman. I don’t know what effect it has on women, but it made me extremely witty. Ilonka, who never betrayed the slightest trace of humour, listened to all my opinions with the greatest deference.
After dinner we went into the Viking Café bar and drank cognac. We sat on a cosy leather sofa, very close together, in the Parisian manner. Reimer was sitting at one of the nearby tables with the German maiden, and we exchanged conspiratorial smiles.
“I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but we’re just like a loving couple,” I observed.
“If it doesn’t bother you, then it certainly doesn’t me. My nine aunties aren’t going to ambush us in here.”
“Tell me, Ilonka… have you ever been in love?”
“I’m not saying. You never tell me anything.”
“Me? What should I be telling you?”
“Who you’ve been in love with, and how much—those sort of things.”
“But you’re not interested in my little life.”
“Not in the least. Only, I would just love to be able to hypnotise you and find out some of your secrets. I’d love to be able to read you like a book. Oh, Tamás, Tamás, you’re so stupid!”
I kissed her hand, with great emphasis.
“My little girl!”
Ecstatic happiness floated down on green clouds from the ceiling above us, with its collection of suspended model boats. For the moment I was indeed in love, and I gazed in adoratio
n at this girl who had turned the compass needle of her heart in my direction. But in that instant Casanova, in his billowing black cloak and rice-powdered wig, stepped back into my consciousness.
“Poetic feelings aren’t quite enough, my young friend,” he said. “There must be action, I humbly suggest. Action.”
But no action followed. Instead it was Ilonka who proposed that we go for a walk.
“It’s only just eleven,” she added. “Let’s take a look at the banks of the Seine.”
“Splendid.”
“But we need to remember, I have to be back at the student hostel before one. Nobody is allowed in after one. The other day a girl was made to wait outside until morning.”
“Well, they’re so highly moral, these French,” I said. “The sort of depraved hussy who isn’t back by one deserves to spend the night with her boyfriend.”
I now knew what I had to do to carry out Casanova’s advice. Somehow I had to fritter away the time, in ways that she wouldn’t notice. If she wasn’t back by one she would come and sleep with me out of sheer insecurity. The flood of ideas pouring in on me made me quite dizzy.
We boarded a taxi and told the driver to take us to the Pont Neuf. After some inner struggle I resolved to kiss her. She leant her head obediently on my shoulder, but most decisively forbade the kiss.
“We mustn’t, we mustn’t.”
“Why ever not? What sort of silliness is this?”
“I’m a good girl. No one has ever kissed me before.”
“That’s no good. Sooner or later someone will have to.”
“No, I don’t like it. What the point of it?”
“Some people say it’s very pleasant.”
“Then you should go and kiss them.”
We were now at the Pont Neuf. We got out and walked, arm snugly in arm, along the bank.
“What a beautiful night,” she remarked. “And how beautiful Notre Dame is. And how good it is it is to be walking here with you. Oh, mon ami, mon ami, mon ami… Throw that cigarette away. How can you possibly smoke at a time like this?”
“Let’s sit down, then.”
We sat on a bench on the deserted bank of the Seine. I made a fresh attempt at a kiss.
“No, no. I’ve already told you, no,” she said irritably. “Why do you want to humiliate me? You’ve treated me like a true friend up to now. You’ve always taken me seriously and talked to me sensibly. And now you want to kiss me, as if I were just any other girl, simply because it’s an evening in Paris and it’s what people do.”
I let her go, and pulled myself away from her, with dull grief in my heart.
“All right, Ilonka,” I said. “Now I shan’t kiss you until you kiss me first. And if never, well then, never. I know you only put up with my presence because I am so terribly clever and you can use me, like a work of reference. But the moment I dare to get closer to you, as one young person with another, one living being with another… Mais passons. Let’s just talk about the sonnets of Maurice Scève and the Lyon school of poets. The whole school was very highly regarded, even more so than your old one in Budapest.”
“Tamás, don’t tease me.”
Slowly, visibly struggling with herself, she leant over to me and kissed me. I could sense the tears running down her face.
And now there was no restraining the kisses, as they came one after the other, with a strange, lachrymose happiness, and went on until we were gasping for breath. They came from the other side of so much loneliness, such barren deserts and fields of ice, these kisses, that they simply froze me as they first arrived on the hearth. But then, slowly, slowly, they became real kisses, ever more magical, intimate and thrilling.
“How clever of you to come to Paris, Ilonka. And how thoughtful of the Good Lord to provide us with the banks of the Seine.”
“Oh, mon ami, how I have loved you, and how lonely you looked, behind your spectacles, with your Maurice Scève. And I was silly enough to think that you had been waiting for me all along, my prince transformed into a reference book. But you’re not lonely now, are you?”
No, I wasn’t lonely. Here was that longed-for Other, in sweet physical proximity, as far as that is possible on an embankment bench. But I still hadn’t forgotten Casanova. Just half-an-hour left, and she would be turned away from the hostel.
“At last I can tell you,” she continued. “My love for you isn’t something that began yesterday. I’ve been thinking of you for two years now.”
“What? But you’ve only known me for ten days.”
She laughed.
“Really, I should be rather cross with you. I’ve known you for two years. Once at Edit’s—but you don’t remember?”
“No. These days my memory for faces is terrible.”
“It’s true I was only a little girl in a school uniform at the time, horribly thin, and my hair was quite different. And you never even noticed me. All you could think about was Edit. But I never took my eyes off you all evening. And I’ve loved you ever since.”
“Ilonka! Is this possible? That someone could have loved me for two whole years, hopelessly, across such a distance, and then suddenly they just walk into my life? This is so like Ibsen’s Master Builder I really can’t believe it. And you didn’t even recognise me in the library.”
“Of course I recognised you, but I was so embarrassed I was too afraid to speak. I was thinking I would just go home and never try to see you again.”
“But tell me… then why didn’t you say anything about this before? Why didn’t you give me any hint or news of yourself, for two whole years?”
“You were in Paris, and you know what a well-brought-up girl I am. Besides, if you really want to know, I did.”
“When?”
“Tell me, Tamás, did you ever get that old-fashioned tie pin I sent for your name day?”
“So that was you?”
“Yes, me. And the Mickey Mouse?”
“I did. Thank you very much. But what made you choose an autumn crocus?”
“Well, I must say, it’s not very nice of you not to understand.”
“The crocus?”
“Yes, exactly. It was the only thing you said to me, that time at Edit’s. That all you knew about the autumn crocus was that that was what it was. So I sent you one. How could you forget such a thing?”
“Sensational. Now all you have left to explain is the bus ticket.”
“Oh, yes. What happened was, one day I went for a walk, all on my own, at Hvösvölgy. I was terribly sad, and I thought about you the whole time. When I got home I felt I really had to send you something from the trip, but the only thing I had brought back was the bus ticket.”
“Ilonka, I am so dreadfully ashamed of myself. And I haven’t given you a thought these past two years. In fact, for the last two years I haven’t thought about anyone. Even now I find it difficult to think of anyone but myself. Tell me, will I ever be able to make up for my shortcomings? I see myself as a sort of water man.”
“What sort of water man?”
“The one they pulled out of the lake at Fert. He had grown membranes between his fingers and forgotten how to speak. His name was Istók Hany.”
“You don’t have to say anything. And you’ve nothing to make up for. Those two years were wonderful for me. I was never alone, and I loved you the way adolescent girls do. And now I am almost grown up, and a university student, I can travel on my own, and I’ve come to Paris to be with you. I’m so glad you’ve been alone for these past two years, and I haven’t had to chase anyone else away. Because if you had been with someone, you can’t imagine the wicked schemes I would have been capable of… But Tamás, what’s the matter? That’s the third time you’ve looked at your watch. My God, I’m not late, am I?”
“Not just yet, Ilonka.”
“What’s the time?”
“Just enough for you to get there in a taxi. It’s ten to one.”
What can I say? I’m no Casanova. Perhaps if I’d been a few years you
nger and less broken-down, I would have taken the gamble… but principally, of course… if she hadn’t confessed her feelings. But once she had? It would take more than a little bit of love and a miniscule amount of audacity. The whole thing had become too much for me.
I’m a tired, cold, sardonic, bookish sort of chap, I felt. It was no good. I just wasn’t up to the occasion. Like János Arany when summoned by the maiden, I answered: “It’s too late. I’m going home.”
Once in the taxi we exchanged not a word, we just sat there willing the driver to get us to the hostel. That is, I did. I’ve no idea what she was thinking.
The next day she didn’t come to the library. Only on the one after, and then she addressed me only in the polite plural. Over coffee I asked her:
“Do tell me, Ilonka. What’s the matter?”
“With me? Nothing at all. I been giving a lot of thought to what you said the other day about the origins of the Provençal lyric. If Gaston Paris is right, then the line of the true Latin spirit would be unbroken. But that’s far too elegant to be true… I must take a closer look at Vossler.”
She left Paris soon afterwards. And nothing came of the whole affair.
1934
LOVE IN A BOTTLE
SIR LANCELOT, the knight whom blame could never touch, was visiting Chatelmerveil, the castle of Klingsor the magician. They had dined, the host had brought out his finest wines in honour of his distinguished guest, and the two were sitting in the middle of the cavernous Great Hall enjoying a quiet tipple.
“I’m not just saying this out of politeness,” said Lancelot, “but I don’t remember when I last had such a magnificent wine.”
“Home produce,” the magician replied modestly. “It’s a shame so little of it ever gets drunk. Truly, my dear boy, you can’t imagine what a solitary life I lead. No one comes here for years on end. I really do live like a hermit.”
“Well, you can hardly be surprised—as I keep telling you—if you practise the black arts. No gentleman dares set foot in the place.”