Portraits of a Marriage (27 page)

It was a polite and pleasant existence with my wife, though later, after my son died, I felt cheated. Loneliness was eating me away, infecting everything around me. I was becoming seriously ill with it. My mother suspected as much but didn’t say anything. Years passed. Lázár became ever less of a presence. We met occasionally, but we no longer played our old games. We must have grown up, I suppose. To grow up is to become lonely. Lonely people either fail and become resentful, or come to some good-natured accommodation with the world. Since I was lonely
within
a marriage, within a family, it wasn’t easy coming to a good-natured accommodation. I gave my time to work, to society, and to travel. My wife did everything she could for the sake of a happy and contented life together. She labored feverishly at it, the way a man labors at breaking stones: there was even an air of desperation about her efforts. I was unable to help her. Once, a long time ago, I tried the experiment of taking her away to Merano. It was on the way there I discovered it was hopeless, that there would not be an accommodation. My life—what I had made of it—was certainly tolerable but almost entirely without meaning. A great artist might be able to cope with such loneliness. He’d pay a terrible price for it, but his work might offer him some compensation. No one else could do his work for him, after all. His work would offer something simple and lasting: people would regard it as something miraculous. That’s what they say. It was what I imagined. I spoke to Lázár about it once and he was of a different opinion. He said that the sense of loneliness is bound to lead to premature defeat. There was no escape. Those were the rules. Do you imagine that is so? I myself don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t an artist, so I felt all the more alone, both in my life and in my work. My work was of no vital importance to humanity. I was a manufacturer of utilitarian goods, my job being to provide certain necessities of a civilized life on a production line. Production was a perfectly honorable enterprise, but it was machines, not I myself, that produced the goods: it was what my workforce was employed to do; what they were tamed, taught, and disciplined to achieve; it was their purpose. What was it I did in this factory
my father had built up and which his engineers had constructed? … I’d go in at nine like most senior management, chiefly because I had to set an example. I read through the mail. My secretary informed me who had tried to contact me by phone and who else wished to speak to me. After that, the engineers and salesmen arrived, told me how things stood, and asked me for my opinion concerning the possibility of manufacturing some new line. The brilliant, hand-picked engineers and clerks—mostly handpicked by my father—were always ready with new plans. I heard them through, raised some minor problems, suggested modifications. Most of the time I simply agreed and approved. The factory went on producing what it produced morning, noon, and into the evening; the salesmen made sales and demanded their commission; I spent the entire day in my office. All this amounted to a moderately useful, necessary, honest activity. We did not cheat ourselves, our customers, the state, or the world at large. The only person being cheated was I myself.

That was because I believed that work was an inevitable, unconditional part of my life. “It is my working life,” as people say. I observed the faces of those near to me. I listened to what they said, and I tried to answer the central question as to whether work was fulfilling for them, or whether they secretly felt exploited; that the best part of them, their very essence, was being drained out of them. From time to time there were those less satisfied with their working conditions, people who tried to do everything better or simply differently, not that doing things “differently” always meant a better or more appropriate way. But at least they wanted to do something different. They wanted to change the world in some way. They wanted to find new meaning in their work. And that is the point, I think. It’s not enough for people to earn a living, to support their family, and to do an honest job … no, people want more than that. They want to realize their ideas, bring their plans to fruition. It’s not just bread and jobs; it is a vocation they want. Without that, life has no meaning. They want to feel needed, not just because they supply the necessary manpower in a factory or fulfill an office to other people’s general satisfaction … they want to achieve something, something others could not achieve. Of course it is only the talented who really want this. Most people are lazy. Maybe, in even their souls there flickers the vague thought that life is not entirely about wages,
that God had some other purpose for them … but that was all so long ago! And they—this remainder who can remember no sense of purpose—are in the majority. And they hate the talented. They regard those who want to live and work differently from them, those who don’t rush from the robotic life of the workplace to the robotic life of the home as soon as the bell rings, as ambitious, as creeps. They find all kinds of refined, convoluted ways of crushing talented people’s enthusiasm for solitary work. They mock, they tease, they raise obstacles and spread rumors about them.

I witnessed all this in my office whenever my workers, engineers, and business contacts came to see me.

And I? What did I do? I was the boss. I sat there like a sentry. I took great trouble to be dignified, humane, and just. At the same time, of course, I also made sure that the factory and my staff provided me with what befitted, and was required by, my position. I was very punctilious in working the proper hours at the factory: to put it more precisely, I worked as hard as those I employed. I strove to serve capital and profit in the appropriate manner. But I felt absolutely hollow inside. What was my sphere of action in the factory? I was free to accept or reject ideas, I was free to change working practice, I was free to seek new markets for our products. Did I take pleasure in the handsome profits? “Pleasure” is the wrong word. I took satisfaction at having fulfilled my public obligations, and the money enabled me to live a blameless, fashionable, generous, and disinterested kind of life. At the factory, and in business generally, people regarded me as the very model of a respectable businessman. I could afford to be liberal, to offer a living wage, and more than a living wage, to a good many … It’s nice being able to give. It was just I myself who took no real joy in it. I lived in comfort, but my days were spent doing honest work. My hands were not idle; at least the world did not regard me as either indolent or a waste of space. I was the good boss: that’s what they said in the factory.

But all this meant nothing; it was just a tiresome, careful, conscientious way of filling time. Life remains hollow if you don’t fill it up with something exciting, some project with a hint of danger. That project can only be work, of course. It is the other kind of work, the invisible work of the soul, the intelligence and talent, whose productions enrich and humanize the world and lend it the air of truth. I read a great deal.
But you know how it is with reading too … you only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work. One day I noticed that the books I read had ceased to have anything properly to do with me. I read as I might in some foreign city, to fill the time, the way you go to visit a museum, gazing at the exhibits with a kind of courteous disinterest. I read as if I were fulfilling an obligation: a new book appeared that everyone was talking about, so I read it. Or there was some old classic I had missed reading and so felt my education was incomplete, that something was missing. That was the way I read … There had been a time when reading was an experience. I grabbed new books by well-known authors with my heart in my mouth; a new book was like meeting someone new, an encounter fraught with risk, that might result in happiness and general benefit, but was also potentially threatening: it might produce unwelcome consequences. By now I was reading the way I worked in the factory, the way I went to social occasions two or three times a week, the way I went to the theater, the way I lived at home with my wife, courteously, considerately, with the ever more pressing, ever more upsetting, ever louder, ever more urgently demanding questions pounding at my heart that led me to wonder if I was seriously ill, in great danger, sick unto death, or the subject of some developing plot or cabal, certain of nothing, fearing that one day I might wake to find everything I had worked for, this whole painstaking, careful, orderly enterprise—the respectability, the good manners, and the culminating masterpiece, our polite coexistence—collapsing around me … That was the fraught emotional state I was constantly living in at the time. And one day I discovered in my wallet, the brown crocodile-skin wallet I had been given by my wife, a faded lilac ribbon. That was when I realized that Judit Áldozó had been waiting for me all these years. She had been waiting for me to stop being a coward. But many years had passed since our conversation that Christmas.

As for the lilac ribbon—I don’t have it anymore, it vanished along with the wallet and everything else in life, like the people who had once worn such significant objects of superstition—I found it in the deepest
pocket of the wallet, where I kept nothing except a lock of my little dead son’s hair. It took me some time to understand what the lilac ribbon was doing there, how I had come into possession of it, and when Judit might have smuggled it into the wallet. My wife had gone away to a spa, leaving me alone in the house, and my mother had sent Judit down to oversee the spring cleaning. I must have been in the bathroom when she slipped into my bedroom and hid the ribbon in my wallet, the wallet having been left lying on the table. At least, that is what she told me later.

What did she mean by it? Nothing. All women are superstitious when it comes to love. What she wanted was for me to have something of hers permanently about my person, something she herself had worn on her body. That was her way of binding me, communicating with me. Bearing in mind her position and our relationship, this was an act of genuine subversion. She undertook it because she was prepared to wait.

When I understood this—the lilac ribbon did communicate something of it in its own eloquent way—I felt strangely irritated. I was annoyed by this minor act of sabotage. You know what it’s like when a man discovers that all he has planned has come to nothing, that everything has been knocked sideways. Now I discovered that this woman, who lived just a few blocks away, had been waiting ten years for me. But beyond the irritation I also felt a certain calm. I wouldn’t want to make too much of the feeling. I hadn’t in fact made plans, nor did I prepare new ones. I didn’t say to myself: “You see, that was what you’ve been covering up all these years, the thing you weren’t prepared to admit, that there is somebody or something more important than your normal way of life, your role in society, your work, and your family: some twisted passion you have been denying … but the passion remains and is waiting for you and won’t let you go. And that’s all right. Now the tension is over. Your life and work were not entirely meaningless after all. Life still wants something of you.”

No, I couldn’t say I thought this, but the fact is that the moment I found the ribbon the tension was gone. Where to locate these vital psychological processes: in the nerves, in our minds? My mind had long forgotten the episode, but my nerves still recalled it. And now, when she sent me that signal, such a well-mannered, servantlike signal—women are like servants in love; all of them would prefer their love letters
on paper decorated with motifs of brightly colored roses, entwined hands, or pairs of amorous doves, and would, ideally, stuff the pockets of their intended with locks of hair, handkerchiefs, and other superstitious mementos!—now, finally, I was at peace. It was as if everything had suddenly been endowed with a mysterious purpose: my work, my life, and yes, even my marriage … Does this make sense?

I do understand now. The thing is, there are some things that simply have to happen in life: everything has to find its place. But that is a very slow process. Decisions, ideals, intentions are of little help here. Have you noticed how difficult it is to arrange the furniture in a room so it is perfect, so you never want to move it again? It takes years, and you think everything is just where it should be, while all the time you have the vague, uncomfortable feeling that it is not quite right after all, that maybe the armchairs are not in their proper places and perhaps there should be a table just where that chair is now. And then, eventually, after ten or twenty years have passed, years in which you have never felt fully comfortable, when the furniture and the space available for it seem to have been at odds for ages, you suddenly see how it should be, you spot the mistake, you understand the secret inner dimensions of the room, push the furniture a little this way or that and find, or so you think, that everything has finally found its place. And for a few more years you feel convinced that the room is finally perfect, a complete success. But then—say, after ten more years—you grow dissatisfied again, if only because you change, as we all do, as does our spatial awareness, so that there never can be perfect, final order. That’s how life is: we develop strategies to tackle it, and for a long time we believe the strategies are the appropriate ones, so we go to work in the morning, take a walk in the afternoon, and engage in cultural activities in the evening. Then, one day, we discover the only way we can continue to bear or make sense of it is by turning the whole thing on its head, and we can’t begin to understand how we could have tolerated the idiotic system as it was. That’s how things change around us and in us. And it is all temporary, even the new order, the inner peace, because it is part of the process of change and works according to its laws, so eventually it too stops working … And why? Maybe because we ourselves come to a stop sometime. As does everything that is of any consequence to us.