Esther's Inheritance

by Marai, Sandor

  We both looked at the unsteady candle flame. I felt cold.

  “Nunu, darling,” I asked her. “Please close the shutters. And there, on the sideboard, you’ll find three letters. Would you bring them over, my dear?”

  She moved slowly through the room, her shadow enormous on the wall. She closed the windows and brought over the letters, then she tucked me up and sat back down beside me, her arms folded, a touch ceremonially in her ceremonial dress, as if appearing at some peculiar, grotesque occasion, an occasion unlike others, one that was neither wedding nor funeral. She sat and listened.

  “Do you understand, Nunu?” I asked her.

  “Yes, my girl, I understand. I understand,” she said, and put her arms around me.

  So we sat and waited for the candle to burn down or for the wind to abate, the wind that had been moaning around the house ever since midnight, tearing at the muddy boughs of the trees, waiting perhaps for morning. I myself didn’t know what we were waiting for. I shivered.

  “You are tired,” she said, and covered me up.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am very tired. It was all too much, you know. I’d like to sleep, Nunu dear. Would you be so kind as to read me those three letters?”

  She reached into her apron pocket, searched for her wire-framed spectacles, and carefully studied the letters.

  “Lajos wrote them,” she said.

  “You recognize his writing?”

  “Yes. Have you only just received them?”

  “Just now.”

  “When did he write them?”

  “Twenty years ago.”

  “Is it the fault of the mail that they have just been delivered?…” she asked, partly curious, partly jealous.

  “No, not the mail,” I smiled.

  “Whose fault was it?”

  “Vilma’s.”

  “She stole them?…”

  “She stole them.”

  “I see,” she said, and sighed. “I hope she rests in peace. I never did like her.”

  She adjusted the glasses on her nose, leaned to the flame, and began to read one of the letters as if she were back at school, quietly, in a singsong voice.

  “‘My one and only darling,’” she read, “‘life is playing extraordinary tricks on us. I have no other hope but that I should have found you forever…’”

  She stopped reading, pushed the glasses up to her forehead, and turned to me with shining eyes, moved and enchanted.

  “He certainly could write a wonderful letter!”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Read on. He was a brilliant letter writer.”

  But the wind, the end-of-September wind that had until then been snapping at the walls of the house, suddenly tore open the window, billowed through the curtains, and, as if it were bringing news, touched and shifted everything in the room. Then it blew out the candle flame. I still remember that. And remember also, though only vaguely, that at some stage Nunu closed the window, and I fell asleep.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived the war, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy, then to the United States. His novel Embers was published for the first time in English in 2001.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  George Szirtes is the prizewinning author of thirteen books of poetry and several translations from Hungarian including Sándor Márai’s Casanova in Bolzano and The Rebels, and also poetry, fiction, and drama. He lives in the United Kingdom.

  ALSO BY SÁNDOR MÁRAI

  Embers

  Casanova in Bolzano

  The Rebels

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Translation copyright © 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published in Hungary as Eszter hagyatéka by Révai, Budapest, in 1939.

  Copyright © Heirs of Sándor Márai. Csaba Gaal, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

  Márai, Sándor, 1900–1989.

  [Eszter hagyatéka. English]

  Esther’s inheritance / by Sándor Márai ; translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published in 1939 in Budapest, Hungary as Eszter hagyatéka by Révai.

  I. Title.

  PH3281.M35E8613 2008

  894'.511334—dc22 2008019610

  eISBN: 978-0-307-27043-6

  v1.0