I couldn’t manage a reply without spilling some gravy on my shirt. “I stay with a girl as long as I can hold her and she can hold me.”
“You mean you have one woman after another, eh?”
I was easy game for this line of questioning, and Nusi grilled me thoroughly. Yet — as I learned later — she had accepted me long before we began to talk. If she was trying to figure me out, it wasn’t a pusillanimous weighing of pro’s and cons: she just wanted to be ready.
“I like to know what I can expect from a guy,” she said.
“And what do you think you can expect from me?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted pensively. “But whatever it is, it isn’t much.”
If she finds me so unpromising, I thought, I might as well shut up. My lapse into gloomy silence apparently pleased her. “You’re hurt, eh?” she asked with sudden affection.
“Yes, I am.”
“Well that’d prove you cared for me a little, wouldn’t it? My husband doesn’t,” she said with a flash of bitterness. “He’s so uninterested, I can call him the worst names and he doesn’t even listen.”
Later on, Nusi asked me about the university. “Tell me something worth knowing, like what do you study?” She worked in a department store, wrapping merchandise, but when we talked it was like talking with one of my classmates. She could think with precision and speed, and showed a genuine appetite for both facts and ideas. It took me no time to see ourselves as Eliza Doolittle and Professor Higgins. I saw us dining in the same restaurant several years later: Nusi wearing a smart new dress, a schoolteacher perhaps, with a pleasant apartment for us to go to. Her potentialities had been criminally wasted in the past by poverty and an insensitive husband, but she had finally come into her own. A woman who didn’t expect much from me, yet I transformed her life. I decided I would.
However, she drew a different conclusion from our talk. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t worry about you being younger than me,” Nusi said as we got up from the table. “Maybe you don’t know much about life and people, but at least you know more than I do about things you learn from books. It kind of evens out, I suppose. I can’t stand guys who’re dumber than I am.”
We left the restaurant and, as we had nowhere else to go and the hot day had turned into a warm night, we decided to go back to St. Margit Island. We took the bus to the Danube and walked across the bridge, hand in hand. The river smelled fresh as a mountain brook. There was a pale moon and the soft dark mass of the island lay ahead of us like a huge bed, with the puffy black mounds of trees for pillows. Maybe Nusi had similar associations, for she suddenly stopped.
“I warn you, you won’t get anywhere with me tonight. I wouldn’t sleep with a guy unless I’d known him for at least a month.” She was ready to turn back and wouldn’t go on until I succeeded in convincing her that I accepted her terms. “You need a woman like me to set you straight,” she concluded.
The island was quiet and apparently deserted. There may have been other couples about but if so they had hidden themselves well. If Nusi wanted to know everything about me, she was also willing to tell everything about herself. She was bitter and desperate about what she was saying, yet her manner of saying it was almost cheerful. Her marriage began to go wrong when she first got pregnant. “He knew I was pregnant but he kept railing at me for looking fat, it was driving me crazy, all his cracks about my figure. It was his own child and all he had to say was that I was a fat woman.” Things seemed to improve for a time after their son was born: Jozsef became considerate again. He even decided to work overtime, to stay in the factory until midnight, putting aside money for his son. Nusi felt confident until a “woman friend” brought the news that Jozsef was doing overtime with a girl, not at the plant. By the time their daughter was born, he didn’t even try to make up stories when he stayed out. “When he didn’t even try to lie any more, I knew I’d had it.”
“Why don’t you divorce him?”
“For whom?” she asked, looking me over.
I couldn’t resist kissing her for her practical turn of mind, and she returned the kiss with her thick, soft mouth. It was more questioning than her question. As we went on walking, hand in hand, along the moonlit paths and through the cool deep grass, it was possible to imagine that we would start a new life together.
Her job didn’t pay well, but Jozsef had lately been bringing home his pay cheque — ever since he’d started sleeping with the bitch next door. “She’s the one who wants us to have his money — she doesn’t want to fight us in the hall, she’s afraid of the neighbours talking.” Jozsef still ate his meals at home and kept his things there. “Sometimes he still sleeps with me when he’s so drunk he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
When we got tired of walking we sat down under a huge oak surrounded by bushes. Nusi leaned back against the tree. We began kissing and I reached my hand under her jumper — only to withdraw it quickly as her mouth went limp, reminding me of the one-month moratorium. “Don’t worry,” Nusi said, “I prepared myself when I put on my blouse.” She slid forward and lay back on the ground. “I just wanted to find out if you liked me well enough to stick around for a month without it.” When I entered her, her body contracted as if she’d been broken in two, and she enjoyed herself intensely. But as she brushed the leaves from her jumper, she remarked with a grimace: “I was making love behind the bushes when I was seventeen — now I’m thirty-one, and I still have to do it behind the bushes. I’m making great progress, aren’t I?”
She had been faithful to her husband until the last couple of years, when she had got friendly with a few men. “But it never worked out. Men don’t understand that if you have children, you can’t just come running whenever they want you to. At least they said they couldn’t understand — it was a good excuse to break off.”
I saw Nusi home in a taxi and the next day, Sunday, we met again. She told me she had dropped out of school two years before matriculation, to get married, and I persuaded her to enroll in a night school for the fall term and get her diploma. We could now go to our apartment with books and notes. When my mother was out, we made love; when my mother was home, I helped Nusi with her studies. She changed a great deal, became younger, fuller and prettier, but she was still as sceptical as ever. “You’re doing all this just so you won’t have to feel guilty when you leave me.”
I met her husband only once, at dinner-time in their kitchen, and although I knew him as “the drunk,” he was entirely sober. I was introduced as an instructor from the school. Jozsef looked at me knowingly, then at Nusi, before he sat down to eat. He was a handsome, muscular man of about thirty-five, and he looked tired.
“School! Don’t make me laugh Nusi. You’ll never make it.”
“She’s bright,” I remarked.
“Like my ass,” he stated with finality, and attacked his food.
I attempted a tone of casual comment. “Maybe you’re too stupid to realize how smart she is.”
His jaw slowed down but he went on eating. Nusi’s face, though unmoved, acquired the air of a smile. The children stared at their plates and picked up their forks smartly.
“Are you a bachelor?” Jozsef asked later. I could tell from his voice that he’d figured out a come-back.
“Yes,” I answered warily.
“It’s an easy life, eh? A hen today, a chick tomorrow, eh?”
“Some people call them women.” I detested him for picking on Nusi instead of me. But he knew he had us both; his jaw speeded up.
Nusi turned toward him with murder in her eyes. “I don’t think Mr. Vajda’s private life is any of your business.”
His wife’s look held the full measure of his guilt, and he began to laugh nervously. “What have I done? Can’t a man carry on a little conversation in his own home?”
” His home!” the old lady commented.
He turned toward me again. “That’s how it is when you get married, pal — the hens gang up on you. Don’t ever get married. W
hat I wouldn’t give to be a bachelor again! Free as a bird — there’s nothing like it.”
Nusi’s mother couldn’t suppress another comment. “I’d like to know who’s a bachelor if not you! You certainly act like one. I haven’t seen a jailbird yet as free as you are.”
Jozsef shook his head in exasperation. “It’s not the same, mother, it’s not the same.” He shrugged his shoulder, indicating that whatever I might have taken, it wasn’t of any value to him.
“I’m not your mother. And as far as I’m concerned, you might as well move next door.”
“How could I? How could I walk out on Nusi?” He spoke to his mother-in-law, but he was looking at his wife, pitying her with a vengeance. “I’d feel sorry for her — who’d look after her if I left?”
Nobody said another word and after dinner Jozsef got up. “I’ll be back,” he said ominously to Nusi and, motioning good-bye to me, went out.
“Going to his girl friend’s,” the old lady muttered, “and he says he isn’t a bachelor.”
Nusi let go of her temper. “Did you hear him? He’s eating here because he feels sorry for me! He’s feeling sorry for me!” She was furious. She beat her fists on the table and the plates gave a clinking sound as they shook. “I wish there was a God, He’d punish him for that, if nothing else!” She pushed back her chair and began pacing the kitchen, turning around herself like a prisoner in a cell remembering that she’s got a life-term. “He’s ruined my life and he makes it look as if he’s doing me a favour!” She raised her arms to heaven, repeating over and over again: “I wish there was a God!” When I tried to quiet her, she turned on me. “I don’t care whether you leave me or not, but don’t you be around when you can’t be nice to me any longer! That’s the worst thing you can do to a woman.” Then, at last, she began to cry, and her back bent as if suddenly the whole weight of that crammed and windowless kitchen had descended on her. Little Nusi was watching from her grandmother’s arms, fearful and hesitant. Finally she freed herself and walked slowly to her mother and, reaching no higher, embraced her around the knees.
The next day I rented a hotel room so that we could be alone at least for twenty-four hours. As I wanted and loved her, I could cheer her up quite easily, and we had many good days before the snow fell.
Then I began seeing the wife of a homosexual.
She was the mother of two small boys, but her husband never touched her after he succeeded in fathering his alibis. He was very particular about protecting his secret. He didn’t want to risk his job, which had a villa and a chauffeured car to go with it, and he forbade his wife to have affairs, as this might have led people to suspect him. To make sure that she did nothing to endanger his vulnerable position, he had his sister living with them, whose job it was never to let her sister-in-law out of her sight. A considerate father, he asked his sons every evening to tell him about their day: what were they doing, what was Mother doing, did they meet interesting people? An imposing and manly figure, he attended official receptions and parties with his wife, and never left her side. He was jealous of her and wasn’t ashamed to show it. He smiled modestly when people called him the Hungarian Othello. “I guess I’m an old-fashioned husband,” he used to say, half-apologetically, “I’m madly in love with my wife.” His wife was a beautiful and strange woman.
I met Nusi less often and had to make an effort to appear enthusiastic and interested. She accused me of being listless and impatient with her, and we began to have scenes. Yet I couldn’t take Nusi at her word and leave her as she had said I should when I couldn’t be nice to her any longer. She was going to night school and doing well, and had a good chance of getting a secretarial job in a couple of years. This, as she had so shrewdly predicted, helped to assuage my guilt, but not so completely that I could bring myself to break with her. If there was ever a woman who had suffered enough disappointment and deprivation to last a lifetime, that woman was Nusi. Yet I couldn’t have an erection out of a sense of guilt and obligation. There were times when I went to bed with her, after complicated arrangements, and ended by excusing myself.
“There’s no animal as mean as a man who no longer loves a woman, I had once declared ŕ propos her husband, and now the description was beginning to fit me. The welcome escapade from the misery of marriage was shaping up this time into an entanglement no less miserable than the marriage itself.
Once I confessed my problem to my new lover, lamenting that I didn’t know which would be worse for Nusi — if we broke off or carried on. “My dear,” she observed with a sigh, “it isn’t a moral problem you’ve got there — it’s a case of extreme conceit.”
A few days later I had a violent argument with Nusi. She accused me of being bored with her, and I protested that I loved her just as much as ever and our only problem was her suspicious nature. As she wouldn’t believe me, I finally admitted that she was right and suggested that we should quit.
After a few moments of dark deliberation, she straightened her shoulders and looked through me with her huge eyes. “Well, it ends just like I always thought it would. I wish someday somebody would surprise me.”
Thirteen
On Anxiety and Rebellion
The dread of life, the dread of oneself
— Soren Kierkegaard
Obviously there is a difference to him in the way he dies.
— Norman Mailer
I would have to describe a great many unamorous experiences to explain why I left Hungary again, this time for good — and so soon after offering to die for her. It seems I loved my country as ardently as if she were a woman, and just as inconstantly.
As love is an emotional glimpse of eternity, one can’t help half-believing that genuine love will last forever. When it would not, as in my case it never did, I couldn’t escape a sense of guilt about my inability to feel true and lasting emotions. This shame was surpassed in intensity only by my doubts as to whether my lover had ever really loved me, when she was the one who ended the affair. In this I’m like most of my sceptical contemporaries: since we no longer reproach ourselves for failing to conform to absolute ethical precepts, we beat ourselves with the stick of psychological insight. When it comes to love, we reject the distinction between moral and immoral for the distinction between “genuine” and “superficial.” We’re too understanding to condemn our actions; we condemn our motives instead. Having freed ourselves from a code of behaviour, we submit to a code of motivation to achieve the sense of shame and anxiety that our elders acquired by less sophisticated means. We rejected their religious morality because it set man against his instincts, weighed him down with a burden of guilt for sins which were in fact the workings of natural laws. Yet we still atone for the creation: we think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection. We hang onto the hope of eternal love by denying even its temporary validity. It’s less painful to think “I’m shallow,” “She’s self-centred,” “We couldn’t communicate,” “It was all just physical,” than to accept the simple fact that love is a passing sensation, for reasons beyond our control and even beyond our personalities. But who can reassure himself with his own rationalizations? No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling — that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We’re untrue even to life.
Which may be why we prefer to rest our minds on less ephemeral subjects than ourselves. Personally, I found it a great relief to contemplate anxiety on the abstract level, and earned my B.A. and M.A. by diligent study, with particular attention to Kierkergaard. I also worried a great deal about the state of the nation.
If, as V. S. Pritchett said, “Hungarians are nationalists before everything else,” we’ve been provoked into patriotism by our history. One of the worst provocations at this time were the November 7 parades to celebrate the creation of the Soviet Union. It was usually a cold and windy day, but the Party got everybody out by the simple device of ordering people to march in groups from the place where they worked or studi
ed, so that the personnel officers could mark those who didn’t show up. I remember the parade in 1952, when the Department of Philosophy marched behind the Bureau of Statistics, and I watched one of the clerks — a short, middle-aged man with a face as blue as ink — struggling to hold up his huge wooden placard. Several times he almost tripped over the long handle, as he tried to keep the cardboard picture of Rákosi from buckling in the wind, and he kept falling back into our ranks. Then, without any warning, he stepped out of line and began to beat the placard against a lamp post. “I’m fed up with that ugly mug!” he cried. “Bald-headed gangster! The one day I could sleep in, and they drag us out on the streets!” He was banging the placard with the sudden strength of a madman, and actually broke the thing to pieces. “He’s a Russian stooge! You hear? He’s a murderer!” Out of nowhere, in an instant, there were two men in the blue uniforms of the Security Police, grabbing the man by the arm on each side. As they led him away, he began to whimper in the voice of an old woman. “It was too heavy, comrades, that was the only reason, believe me … it was too heavy.”
One can’t witness many such scenes without a growing desire to turn the winds. Indeed, in the early 1950’s the whole country was charged with a pre-revolutionary atmosphere, and both the population and the Security Police were growing increasingly restless. As in all countries which lack a free press and every other open expression of public sentiment, the universities were hotbeds of sedition. At our secret meetings we decided (hitting upon The Big Certainties) that Hungary would be better off free and independent than she was as a ruthlessly oppressed and avidly exploited colony of the Soviet Union. We agreed that there should be an end to arbitrary arrests and executions, that the Russians should pay for the wheat and uranium they were taking out of the country, that there should be no more foreign bases and troops on Hungarian soil, that there should be free elections. We seethed against the predominance of spineless mediocrities in all the seats of power, and we vowed to eliminate poverty. We felt the eyes of a hopeful world upon us (as well as the eyes of the police) and we dreamed of the double glory of liberating our country and contributing to the fall of the Russian Empire — if we weren’t killed first. Finally, emboldened by such clear-cut alternatives, we began to hold public meetings of protest.
In Praise of Older Women Page 12