“That’s Mama,” she said quietly but with evident delight. “How beautiful she is. She must have been younger there than I am now.”
An eighteen-year-old Vilma gazed back at us, a little chubby, dressed in the garments of the time, in white lace with high black boots, her hair undone, curled, and combed over her brow, carrying flowers and a fan. The picture must have been for an occasion, since it was a touch self-conscious and unnatural. Only the dark, questioning eyes betrayed something of the later angry, passionate Vilma.
“Do you remember her?” I asked, and knew my voice was not quite steady.
“Vaguely,” she replied. “Someone comes into my room in the dark and leans over me with a warm familiar scent. That’s all I remember. I was three years old when she died.”
“Three and a half,” I say, flustered.
“Yes. But really I only remember you. You are always adjusting something on me, my dress or my hair, and you are always in my room, you always have something to do there. Then you too disappear. Why did you leave, Esther?”
“Hush,” I say. “Hush, Éva. You don’t yet understand.”
“Yet?…” she asked, and started to laugh in the same singsong way, the laugh a little forced, too drawn out, too theatrical. Everything she said seemed extraordinarily important, too carefully composed. “Are you still playing at being the little mama, Esther, dear?” she said, kindly, superior, and compassionate. And now it was she who, with an adult movement, put her arm round my shoulder, led me over to the couch, and sat me down.
This time we looked at each other like two women, women who know or guess each other’s secrets. Suddenly a hot flush of excitement ran through me. Vilma’s daughter! I thought. The daughter of Vilma and Lajos. I felt I was blushing with a jealousy that sprang from somewhere so deep it shocked me with its energy and power: it was as if a jealous voice were shouting in me. I didn’t want to listen to it. She could have been your daughter! was what the voice was crying. Your daughter, the meaning of your life. Why has she come back? Agitated, I bowed my head, burying my face in my hands. The significance of the moment balanced the shame I felt even as I was moving. I knew I was betraying my secret, that I was being watched by someone who was pitilessly observing my shame and discomfort; that the young woman who might have been my daughter had no sympathy and was not about to save me in this sorry situation. After an interval that seemed to be infinitely long I heard her mature, strange, self-aware, indifferent voice again.
“You shouldn’t have gone away, Esther. I know it can’t have been easy with Father. But you should have known you were the only one who might have helped him. And then there were Gábor and me. You simply left us to our fates. It was like abandoning two children at the gate of a house. Why did you do it?”
And when I remained silent, she calmly added:
“You did it out of revenge. Why look at me like that? You were wicked and acted out of revenge. You were the only woman who had any power over Father. You were the only woman he ever loved. No, Esther, that much I know, at least as well as you and Father. What happened between you? I have thought about it a long time. I had time to think, an entire childhood. Believe me, that childhood was not particularly happy. Do you know the details? I am quite prepared to tell you. I came here to tell you. And, at the end of my story, to ask you to help. I feel you owe us that much.”
“Anything,” I said, “I’ll do anything to help you.”
I straightened up. The difficult moment had passed.
“Look, Éva,” I went on, and now I too felt calm. “Your father is a really interesting, very talented man. But all those things you were talking about just now have become a little confused in his memory. You should be aware that your father is quick to forget. Please don’t think I am criticizing him. He can’t help it. That’s his nature…”
“I know,” she answered. “Father never remembers reality. He is a poet.”
“Yes,” I said, my heart a little lighter. “He might be a poet. Reality gets confused in his mind. That’s why you shouldn’t believe everything he says…his memory is poor. The time you are talking about was the most difficult, most unbearably painful, most complicated part of my life. You say revenge! What kind of word is that to use? Who taught you to use it? You know nothing. Everything your father says about that time is fantasy, pure fantasy. But I do remember the reality. It was rather different. I owe nothing to anyone.”
“But I have read the letters,” she retorted in a matter-of-fact way.
Now I fell silent. We looked at each other.
“What letters?” I asked, astonished.
“The letters, Esther,” she sharply retorted. “Father’s letters, the ones he wrote to you at the time. You know, when he used to visit the house, when he was obsessed with you, saying that you should run away together because he couldn’t go on otherwise, could no longer keep up appearances, that he couldn’t cope with Vilma, who was stronger than he was and who hated you, Esther…because Mother did hate you…. Why? Because you were younger? Or more beautiful, or more real? Only you can answer that.”
“What are you talking about, Éva,” I cried, and shook her by the arm. “What letters? What is this nonsense?”
She freed her arm, stroked her forehead with her gentle childlike hands, and stared at me with big wide eyes.
“Why are you lying?” she asked, her voice cold and hard.
“I have never lied,” I answered.
She shrugged.
“I have read the letters,” she said, and folded her arms like a magistrate. “They were lying in the cupboard for ages, in the cupboard where Mama kept her underwear, where you hid them—you know, in that rosewood box…It is hardly three years since I found them.”
I felt myself going pale, the blood draining from my face.
“Tell me what they say,” I demanded. “Think what you like, think me a liar, but tell me everything you know about those letters.”
“I don’t understand,” she said sharply, now that it was her turn to be surprised. “I am talking about the three letters that Father wrote you when he was engaged to Mama, begging you to release him from his emotional prison, because he loved only you. The last letter was dated just before the wedding. I compared the dates. It’s the letter where he writes that he can’t speak to you directly because he hasn’t the strength and is ashamed on account of Mama. I don’t think Father has ever written a more sincere letter. He writes that he is a crushed, injured man, that he trusts only you, that only you can give him back his self-respect and sanity. He begs you to elope with him, to abandon all else, to go abroad with him; that he puts his life into your hands. It is a letter of despair. It is impossible that you should not remember it, Esther. It is impossible, isn’t it? For some reason you don’t want to discuss these letters with me…maybe they are painful on account of Mama, or you simply want to hide the whole thing from me. I understood everything once I read these letters. I saw my father in quite a different light from that time on. It’s enough that once in one’s life one should strive to be strong and good. It wasn’t his fault that he failed. Why didn’t you answer?”
“What should I have answered?” I asked, in the same flat, indifferent voice anyone might use in admitting that they had lied, and if I had genuinely known of these letters.
“What?…My god! You should have answered something. These were the sort of letters people get just once in a lifetime. He wrote that he would wait till the morning for your answer. If you did not answer he would know you lacked the strength…in which case he had no choice but to remain here and marry Mama. But he couldn’t speak to you about this. He was afraid you would not believe him because he had often lied before. I cannot know what happened between you…I don’t even have any right to ask. But you did not answer his letter, and soon everything went terribly wrong. Don’t be cross, Esther…now that it is all over I think you were partly responsible for what happened.”
“When did your father write those lett
ers?”
“The week before the wedding.”
“Where did he address them?”
“Where? Here, home, to your house. You lived here then together with Mama.”
“You found them in a rosewood box?”
“Yes, in a box, in the cupboard where the underwear was kept.”
“Did anyone have a key to that cupboard?”
“Only you. And Father.”
What could I have answered? I let go of her arm, stood up, went over to the sideboard, and picked up Vilma’s portrait and gazed at it a while. It had been a long time since I had held the picture in my hands. Now I stared at those familiar and yet terrifyingly strange eyes and suddenly I understood.
14
My sister Vilma hated me. Éva was right, there had been bad blood between us for as long as I can remember, a nameless dark fury the reasons for which had disappeared over the years. Nothing can explain this mutual hatred—for the fact is that I hated her as much as she did me—nor did either of us ever seek to explain it. I cannot be more precise in specifying whether this or that act of hers did the damage; she would have said something different anyway, and that was why we were so much against each other. She was always the stronger, even in matters of hatred. If someone were to have asked her why she hated me so relentlessly, she could have spat out a long list of accusations complete with reasons, but none of them would have explained the hatred. We put aside the excuses. There remained the fury, the hot thick feeling that floods every inch of the human landscape with its muddy slime, and when Vilma died there were no family ties left, only a blank floodplain of hatred.
I held the picture close to my nearsighted eyes and examined it carefully. How strong the dead are! I thought helplessly. At that particular moment Vilma was alive in a mysterious form of being that the dead assume when they want to intervene in our lives, the dead whom we believe are buried under mounds of earth and bound by the chains of decay. But come the day, and they appear and act. Maybe this is that day, Vilma’s day, I thought. And I remembered the afternoon when she was dying, when she could only recognize what was around her for a few seconds at a time, when I was weeping at her bedside, waiting for her to speak, to bid farewell or pronounce a word of reconciliation, all the while knowing that I hadn’t forgiven her, not even then, on death’s threshold, any more than had she in her swoon of death forgiven me. I covered my face with my hands and wept. And then she spoke. You’ll think of me yet, said she, no longer in her right mind. She has forgiven me! I thought, hoping it might be so. But what I secretly felt was, She is threatening me. And then she died. After the funeral I stayed in the apartment for months. One couldn’t leave the children alone to fend for themselves. Lajos traveled abroad and was away for a few months. I stayed in the empty apartment waiting for something.
But as for Vilma’s cupboard, that particular cupboard where Éva was later to find the letters, I never once opened it. If someone were to ask why, I might give the righteous answer, proclaiming in ringing words that I had no right to meddle in the affairs of the dead. The truth is I was a coward. I was afraid of what might be in the cupboard, afraid of the memory of Vilma. And that was because, having died and therefore unilaterally brought an end to our eternal passionate dialogue and concluded the quarrel between us, she seemed to have placed any memory we might have shared, any ambition or temper we might have had in common, under a peculiar ban. Lajos went away after the funeral and I lived there with the children in an apartment where nothing belonged to me and yet everything had been partly stolen from me, where all useful items seemed to have been stamped by some mysterious executor—at that stage it was only the presence of executors of that kind we detected in the apartment, the real, the everyday, the official executors appearing only later, bearing bills for Lajos’s debts—that was where I ran the household without daring to touch anything, feeling it was not mine, and where I brought up the children more timidly than any professional governess. Everything in the apartment was against me, everything under ban, everything exuded the strange, hostile quality that determines one’s deeper sense of what is mine and what is yours in life. Nothing that remained here was mine. Vilma took it all with her, everything I would have wanted; she ruined everything, forbade everything I desired. She ruled over us with the despotic power only the dead can exercise. I put up with it for a while. I was waiting for Lajos, waiting for a miracle.
He rarely wrote while traveling abroad; at most he sent postcards. By that time he was putting on an act again; this time was “one of the turning points” of his life, a decisive moment he had to seize with both hands in a grand gesture: he had to be dressed to perfection for the part. The proper dress was mourning wear, the decisive moment the journey abroad. He set out like one who could not bear the pain, who had to escape his memories.
I think the truth was that he had a marvelous time amusing himself in those foreign cities, establishing business contacts—“burying himself in work,” as he put it—in other words, going to the occasional museum or library and spending the rest of the time sitting around in cafés and restaurants, his contacts mainly sentimental. The soul of Lajos is made of flexible stuff, I thought. But in the months I waited for him I realized that I could not live with him, that something was missing in him, in his spirit, in his very being, some bonding agent without which you cannot form human relationships. His tears were real tears, but they did not dissolve anything in him, no memory, no pain: Lajos was always fully committed to delight or melancholy but actually felt nothing at all. There was something inhuman in all this. When he returned a few months later I did not wait for him but went home a few days before, leaving the children in the care of a dependable woman, writing Lajos a letter in which I said I did not want the role of pretend-mother, I wanted to know nothing about him and never wished to see him again. I received no answer to this letter. In the first few weeks—well, the first few years—I was waiting for him to answer, but later I understood that he could not answer, that the world in which we had lived together had crumbled away. After that I expected nothing from him.
Now when Éva was speaking of these unknown letters in such passionate and accusing tones, I suddenly remembered the rosewood box. The box was in fact mine, a present from Lajos for my sixteenth birthday, but Vilma had asked me for it. I was not happy giving it up. I didn’t know Lajos properly then, and was not truly aware of my feelings for him. Vilma begged me for the box, and in the end I surrendered it, reluctantly but without putting up much resistance; I must have gotten bored with her pleading. Vilma was always asking me for my things, anything I had been given: clothes, books, musical scores, anything at all she thought might be treasured or of value to me. That’s how she got the rosewood box. I protested for a while, then grew tired and gave in; I had to give it to her because she was simply stronger. Later, once I suspected that there might be something between Lajos and me, I begged in desperation to have the box back, but Vilma lied that she had lost it. This box, inlaid with rosewood, made of plywood and veneer, scented with spices with a slightly choking smell, lined in red silk, was the only gift I ever received from Lajos. I never considered the ring a real present. The box vanished from my life. Then there it was again, decades later, in Éva’s story, with these strange contents, the three letters from Lajos before his marriage, begging me to elope with him, to save him. I put the picture back where it was.
“What do you people want from me?” I asked, and leaned against the sideboard.
15
“Look, Esther,” she said, a little confused now, and lit another cigarette. “Father will tell you everything. I think he’s right. You may think a great deal has happened since you left us, and indeed a great deal has happened, not always for the best. I don’t remember the earliest days. Then we went to school and life became exciting. We moved apartments yearly, not just apartments but schools and nannies too. Those nannies…my god…as you can imagine Father was none too choosy. Most of them ran off, taking a few o
f our possessions with them, or it was we who ran off, leaving home and furniture behind; we went from one rented apartment to another. One time, when I would have been about twelve years old, we were living in hotel rooms. It was such an interesting life. The headwaiter dressed us, we shared lessons with the elevator boy, and when Father disappeared for a few days the chambermaids would look after us and see to our education. There were times when we ate sea crab day after day and other times when we hardly ate anything. Father is very fond of crab. That was our upbringing. Other children are brought up on sour milk or vitamins…But we generally had a good time. Only later, when Father’s fortunes were on the rise and we reverted to respectable middle-class life, renting an apartment, managing a household, when Father set out on some new venture—and even as a child I trembled at Father’s ventures—we occasionally wept to remember our hotel days, because even in our “respectable life” we were living like nomads in a desert. Father is not really an urban creature, you know. No, don’t protest, I think I might know him better than you do. There is nothing of the materialist in Father, possessions mean nothing to him, he doesn’t even mind whether he has a roof over his head or not. There is something in him of the hunter-gatherer, who rises in the morning, gets on his horse—he always kept a car even at the worst of times, usually driving it himself—and sets out into his own patch of savannah or forest, which in Father’s case was the city, sniffs the air, stays on the alert, hunts down a suitably large banknote, roasts it, and offers everyone a bite; but then, while there is anything left of the prize, for days or even weeks on end, he is not interested in anything else…And, when it comes down to it, this is what we love in Father, and what you too love, Esther. Father is capable of discarding a piano or a decent job the way other people throw away used gloves; he has no respect for objects and market value, you know. This is something we, as women, cannot understand…I have learned a great deal from Father, but his real secret—his carelessness, his inner detachment—I cannot learn. He does not feel closely bound to anything, the only thing he’s interested in is danger, life being the most peculiar danger…God alone knows, God alone can understand this…He needs this danger, this life among people but without human ties; he breaks ties out of curiosity and absentmindedly throws them away. Did you not realize this when…? I mean, did you not feel it? Even as a child I felt we were meant to live in a tent, a migrant tribe traveling through country that was sometimes dangerous, sometimes pleasant, Father with bow and quiver in his hand going ahead, spying out the terrain, dashing to telephones, listening, watching certain signs, then suddenly full of energy, fully alert, and tensed for action…elephants approaching the drinking pool, Father in his covert raising the bow. Are you laughing at me?”