Portraits of a Marriage (49 page)

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There were times later when he would leave me alone like that, morning or evening, at any time, because after a while, without any formal arrangement, I moved in. He gave me a key without thinking twice about it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. There was a woman who came to clean for him, sometimes even cook. But she didn’t have to tidy after him. Everything was perfectly accommodating … even the apartment, those handsome, well-proportioned rooms with their old Viennese furniture. There was nothing particularly grand about the place: it was just three rooms on the fifth floor of a relatively new block. One of the rooms was filled with books.

When I first arrived he treated me as a guest. He would produce delicious tidbits out of some invisible pantry, such as tinned sea crab. While everyone else was living off beans he treated me to tinned pineapples. He even offered me vintage brandy. He never drank any himself, but he did store wine. He had a personal collection of the great wines of France, of Germany, of Burgundy, of the Rhine, and all the best Hungarian regions, the bottles covered in cobwebs. He collected rare wines the way other people did postage stamps or fine porcelain. And when he opened one of these bottles, he would examine it with rapt attention, tasting the wine like a pagan priest preparing for sacrifice. He would offer me a glass now and then—a little resentfully, I thought, as if he didn’t think me quite worthy of the wine. He preferred to pour me brandy. Wine was not a woman’s drink, he said.

He could surprise me with his opinions. He was generally a little fixed in his views, like an old person who no longer wants to argue about things.

I was also surprised at how tidy his personal things were. I mean his cupboards, his drawers, and the shelves where he kept his manuscripts and books. It wasn’t the cleaning woman who was responsible for that, but he himself. He positively radiated order: he was quite obsessive about it. He wouldn’t let ashes or cigarette butts pile up in the ashtray. Every half hour he would empty it into a bronze bucket that he himself would tip into the general waste in the evening. His writing desk was as neat as a draftsman’s in an engineer’s office. I never once saw him move furniture about, but whenever I got there it looked as if the cleaning woman had just left. The order was within him, in his person and in his life. But that was something I understood only later, and even now I
don’t know whether I really understood it. It was an artificial, not a living, order, if you know what I mean. It was precisely because the world outside was falling to pieces that he was so determined to maintain his own internal sense of order. It was a last line of defense against external chaos, a little personal revolt. As I said, I don’t really understand it even now. I’m just telling you.

I slept that night with a proper, regular heart. He was right: the body was remembering something. But what? I didn’t know then, but I can explain it now … He reminded me of my husband. I hadn’t thought of him in a very long time, not having seen him for years, never having wanted to see him. I imagined I had forgotten him. But my skin, my organs, and indeed my heart had not forgotten. And when I entered the life of this bald man who had been my husband’s close friend, my body instantly started remembering. Everything about him reminded me of my husband. There was something about the way this bald, silent figure had appeared out of nothing. He was like an ill-tempered, indifferent magician who is no longer interested in magic or tricks. It took me some time to understand why I was drawn to him, and what it was I remembered.

It was like a dream then, everything strangely dreamlike. People were being rounded up like dogs. Rounded up and murdered. Houses were collapsing. The churches were as crowded as the beaches had been.

Very few people remained in their homes, so there was nothing particularly odd about me going in and out of another person’s apartment, but I knew I had to be careful and not make any mistakes or else he’d throw me out. Or he would disappear at the very worst moment of the war and leave me there alone. I knew that if I tried to seduce him or made myself too agreeable, he would simply open the door, and who knows where I’d finish up. I also knew there was nothing I could do to help him, simply because he didn’t need anything. He was one of those unfortunates who can tolerate anything, any kind of deprivation or humiliation, who can put up with anything except the idea of being helped.

What’s that? Was he a snob? Of course he was, among other things, a snob. He couldn’t stand being helped because he was solitary and a snob. Later I understood that there was something under this snobbish manner of his. He was protecting something—not himself, no; he was
trying to preserve a culture. It’s not funny. I expect you’re thinking of those olives. That’s why you’re laughing? We proles, we don’t really get the idea of “culture,” sweetheart. We think it’s a matter of being able to quote things, of being fussy, of not spitting on the floor or belching when we’re eating, that kind of thing. But that’s not culture; it’s not a matter of reading up and learning facts. It’s not even a matter of learning how to behave. It’s something else. It was this other idea of culture he was wanting to protect. He didn’t want me to help him, because he no longer believed in people.

For a while I thought it was his work he wanted to protect. It’s a lousy enough world to protect your work against. But when I got to know him, I was astonished to discover that he had completely stopped working.

So what did he do? you ask. He just read and walked. It might be hard for you to understand this, you being a born artist, a proper professional drummer. You can’t imagine life without drumming. But he was a writer, a writer who no longer wanted to write because he no longer believed that writing could change human nature. It’s not that he was a revolutionary: he didn’t want to change the world in that way, because he didn’t believe human nature could be changed by revolutions. One time he happened to mention that it wasn’t worth changing society because people would be exactly the same after as before. It was something else he wanted. It was himself he wanted to change.

You don’t get it—of course you don’t get it. I myself didn’t get it for a long time; I didn’t believe him. I just trod carefully around him, happy that he was willing to tolerate me. The place was full of people leading secret lives, men and women, and Jews most of all. People hiding from the militia … Okay, okay, relax. I believe you, you had no idea what was going on in Budapest. You couldn’t possibly know how people lived there, how they lived like insects, in silence. A lot of them slept in their wardrobes, the way moths do in the summer, with the smell of naphthalene all around them. It was the way I set up camp in his apartment too. I tried not to make any noise, to give no signs of life.

He paid no attention to me. Sometimes he sat up and, as if noticing I was there, he’d smile and ask me some commonplace question, politely, cheerfully, but always as though we had already spent years in conversation.

Once I arrived at seven in the evening. There was already an autumnal smell in the air, and the days were closing in. I entered and saw his bald head as he sat by the window in the half-light. He wasn’t reading, just sitting there, his arms folded, staring out of the window. He heard my footsteps but didn’t turn round.

“Do you know Chinese numbers?” he asked over his shoulder.

There were times I thought he was genuinely mad. But I had learned by then how to deal with that. The trick was to enter the conversation without any intervening talk, picking up exactly where he left off. He liked me to answer briefly in a word or two, just a yes or a no. So I obediently answered him. I said “no.”

“I don’t know, either,” he calmly answered. “I don’t understand the writing at all, because they use concepts, not letters. I don’t have any idea about their numbers. I only know they don’t use Arabic numerals. Nor the older Greek ones. So we may suppose”—this being one of his favorite expressions, and he would always raise his long forefinger at this point, like a teacher when explaining something to a particularly dense class—“that they have numbers unlike any other Western or Eastern ones. And that precisely,” he declared, “is why they have no technology. Because technology begins with Arab numerals.”

He looked tired sitting there, gazing out into the damp gray evening. The thought that Chinese numbers were not like the Arabic clearly bothered him. I simply stared and said nothing, because all I knew about the Chinese was that there were a lot of them, that their skins were yellow, and that they were constantly smiling. I’d read that in a picture magazine.

“So technology begins with Arabic numbers?” I asked nervously.

There was a great explosion that moment somewhere near the bottom of Castle Hill, the sound of an anti-aircraft gun being fired.

He looked over in that direction and, with a great deal of satisfaction, answered, “Yes,” nodding as if delighted that his argument should be so vividly illustrated. “You heard that explosion? That’s technology. It is one of the reasons we need Arabic numerals. It’s much harder to multiply and divide with Greek or Roman numbers. Just consider how much time it would have taken for someone to work out how to write down two hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and twelve
in the Greek system. It is impossible, madam, quite impossible in Greek numerals.”

He seemed satisfied with this. However uneducated I was, I understood his every word. It was just what the words added up to, the man as a whole, I didn’t understand. You know—what he was. Who he really was. Was he a comedian? Was he mocking me? He looked excited, as though standing in front of a newfangled device, like someone holding a new kind of lock or a calculating machine. I didn’t know how to get through to him. Should I give him a kiss? Slap him? He might kiss me back. But he might just put up with the kiss or slap and calmly make some kind of reply. He might say something like: did I know that with each step a giraffe takes it advances by fifteen feet? He did once say just that in the middle of conversation for no reason at all. He said giraffes were angels of the animal world out in the wild, because there was something angelic about their very being. Even their names suggested angels, their original name being “seraph.”

We were walking through woods in the fall toward the end of the war. He was speaking loudly about giraffes, in ecstasies about how much vegetation they needed to consume in order to survive, so that they should be able to maintain those long necks and tiny heads, that great chest and those enormous hooves … it was as if he were reciting a poem, some incomprehensible hymn. He got quite carried away by his recitation, by the fact that he was alive and that such things as giraffes should exist in the world. I felt uneasy when he talked about giraffes or the Chinese like that. But in time I grew less afraid; it was as if I too could get drunk on his words. I closed my eyes and listened to his breaking voice … It wasn’t what he was saying that affected me, but the strange, irrational loss of control—the way he was shy and jubilant at the same time. It was as if the world were one big festival and he the priest, bellowing like a dervish, chanting and proclaiming the meaning of the festival to the world at large … whether the festival was giraffes or Arabic numerals.

Do you know what else lay behind it? Lust.

Not as the world knows it or as people generally feel it. Lust as perhaps plants, huge ferns, scented lianas, or giraffes or seraphs know it. Maybe it is the kind of lust writers possess too. It took me some time to
understand that he wasn’t crazy, simply full of lust. It was the world that brought on his lust, the fabric of it; word and flesh, voices and stones, everything that exists is tangible and, at the same time, impossible to grasp in its meaning and essence. When he talked like that, he was as serious as people are in bed after an orgasm, when they lie there with their eyes closed. Yes, darling … Like that.

But it wasn’t a dumb silence, not like he had nothing in his head. I mean, you too can listen beautifully when you’re with the band, next to the bass sax, and you look round the bar so seriously, with that Greek-god profile of yours … But however majestic you look in your white dinner jacket, I can see on your face that you are simply listening, not thinking of something else. He listened like he had heard something about something else. And he could listen with great concentration. He could listen the way others shout. He was a sad man.

I never tired of listening to him. It felt pleasantly dizzy, like hearing music. But I did tire of his own listening. Because one had to listen with him and pay close attention to whatever it was he was not saying.

I could never guess what he was thinking of at such times. The times when he suddenly started speaking of giraffes or something like that and suddenly fell silent, I felt the true meaning of what he wanted to say was about to be revealed. But when he started listening he was simply far away from me.

It surprised me and frightened me a little. He was like the man in the fairy tale who has a cap made of fog and suddenly becomes invisible. He disappeared inside his listening. One moment he was there with me, muttering something in a cracked voice, about something I didn’t understand, then he was gone, just like that, as if he were far away. He wasn’t rude about it. I never once felt affronted because he stopped talking to me. Not at all! I felt he was paying me a compliment by being willing to share his silence with me.

You want to know what it was he was so good at keeping quiet about? So intensely, so logically? Oh, my dear, you do ask such difficult questions!

I didn’t imagine, not for a moment, that I could pry into his silence.

But there were occasional signs that something was happening in him, and I began to understand. The time I met him he was setting out to strangle the writer in him. He had made thorough, systematic preparations
for it. He was like a murderer preparing to commit a murder or a conspirator who would sooner take poison than betray his secret. Or, let’s say, a missionary terrified in case he gave away some sacred formula to hostile savages. He would sooner die than do that.