It was as if I had been thinking aloud. She answered me.
“I’ll leave the house. I am sorry for the old lady, but I have to go.”
“Where will you go, Juditka?” I asked, using the familiar form of her name, which seemed to come easily to me now.
“I’ll go into service,” she said. “In the country.”
“Can’t you go home?” I asked, glancing at the photograph.
“They’re poor,” she said without expression, quite matter-of-fact.
The word echoed in the room like a cracked bell. It was as if, ultimately, this was the reality that underlay everything we could discuss from then on. It was as if some object had flown through the room and we had both followed its path, I out of curiosity, she indifferently, without comment. The word was familiar to her.
“I don’t think that will help,” I said after a while. “Why should you leave? No one has harmed you and no one will. If you want to go now, why did you stay so long in the first place? Don’t you see,” I said, as if arguing with her, as if hitting on an important point, “that now that you have stayed so long, you might as well stay on. Nothing new has happened.”
“No,” she said. “I’m going.”
We spoke quietly, two women together, in brief half-sentences.
“Why?”
“Because it’s out in the open now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he knows.”
“My husband?”
“Yes.”
“Did he not know till now?”
“He knew,” she answered. “But he has forgotten.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“And who is there to tell him seeing he has forgotten?” I asked her.
“You, ma’am,” she stated quite simply.
I put my hand to my heart.
“Look here, my girl,” I said. “What are you talking about? That is your fevered imagination talking. Why do you think I would tell him? What could I possibly say?”
By now we were staring at each other with undisguised curiosity, looking into each other’s eyes so keenly, so greedily, we were like people who had lived together for years with our eyes closed. Now that our eyes were open, we could not get enough of what we saw. And at the same time we knew for the first time that all these years we had never been brave or honest enough to let our eyes meet. We always looked away and talked of something else. We lived in our respective spaces. It was just that both of us carried a secret, and this secret was the meaning of both our lives. And now we had admitted it.
What did she look like? Maybe I could describe her for you.
But first a glass of water, is that all right? My throat is dry. Miss, just a moment, a glass of water, please. Thank you. Look, they have started putting the lights out already … But there isn’t much more. Would you like another cigarette?
Well, she had a wide brow, a pale, open face; her hair was a bluish black. It was pinned up in a bun, parted in the middle. She had a snub, Slavic nose. Her face was quite smooth, with fine, clearly defined features, like the face of Mary in mourning in one of those village altarpieces painted by some anonymous, traveling artist. It was a proud face, so pale it was almost white. The blue-black hair framed that white like … but I’m not good at comparisons. What can I say? I leave that kind of thing to Lázár. Not that he would say anything: he’d only smile, because he thinks comparisons are below him. It is facts he wants, simple sentences.
So I’ll stick to plain facts, if you’re not bored.
It was a beautiful, proud peasant face. In what way peasant? It just was. It lacked the patently obvious complexity of expression you invariably find on middle-class faces, that tense, vulnerable air of sourness. This face was smooth, implacable. You couldn’t charm it into a smile with cheap compliments and niceties. It was a face alive with memories, memories of ages long since vanished, memories that were probably not even personal. Tribal memories. The eyes and the lips led independent lives. Her eyes were blue-black like her hair. I once saw a puma at the Dresden Zoo. Her eyes were like that.
Those eyes were staring at me now the way a drowning man might stare at someone on the shore, possibly a murderer, or a potential rescuer. My eyes are feline too, a warm light brown … I know my eyes were glittering too that moment, searching her face the way beams search when an army is expecting an assault. But it was her lips that were most terrifying. Soft, pouting lips. It was the mouth of a big beast that was no longer carnivorous. Her teeth were a brilliant white, strong and straight. She was clearly a powerful woman, muscular and well proportioned. And now it was as if a shadow had fallen across that white face. But she made no complaint. She answered me quietly and confidentially, in the voice not of a servant but of a woman like myself.
“There are these,” she said. “The pictures. He will know now. I’ll go away,” she obstinately repeated, almost a little crazed.
“Could it be that he hasn’t known till now?”
“Oh,” she said, “it’s a long time since he looked at me.”
“And you always wear that locket?”
“Not always,” she said. “Only when I’m alone.”
“What happens when you are on duty and he is here, visiting?” I asked more confidentially. “Don’t you wear it then?”
“No,” she replied, equally confidentially, “because I don’t want to remind him of it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Just because,” she said, and opened her blue-black eyes wide as if staring down a well, into the distant past. “Why should he remember, now that he has forgotten?”
Very quietly, I asked her, in confidence, wanting to tease out the answer:
“What, Judit? What was there to forget?”
“Nothing,” she replied, cold and harsh.
“Were you his lover? Tell me.”
“No, I wasn’t his lover,” she replied, her voice clear and strong, as if she were accusing someone.
We fell silent. There was no arguing with that voice; I knew it was the truth. And you can hate me, you can tell me I was wrong, but at the very moment I relaxed a secret inner voice told me: “It’s a pity she’s telling the truth. How much simpler it would all be …”
“So what happened? …” I asked.
She shrugged, clearly flustered, fury, indignation, and despair flashing across her face like lightning over a deserted landscape.
“Will Madam keep it to herself?” she asked in a cracked, raw voice, as if in warning.
“Keep what?”
“If I tell her, will she keep it to herself? …”
I looked into her eyes. I knew I had to be true to whatever I promised. This woman would kill me if I lied to her now.
“If you tell me the truth,” I eventually said, “that will be the end of it.”
“Swear,” she said, solemn and uncertain.
She stepped over to the bed and took the rosary from the wall, handing it to me.
“Will you swear?” she asked.
“I swear,” I said.
“That you will never tell your husband what you heard from me, from Judit Áldozó?”
“Never,” I said. “I swear.”
I can see you don’t understand this. Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure I understand it, either. But then it all seemed so natural, so simple.… I was standing in my mother-in-law’s maid’s room, swearing to a servant that I would never tell my husband what I was about to hear from her? Is that simple enough? Yes, I think it is.
I swore.
“Good,” she said, and seemed to have calmed down. “So now I’ll tell you.”
There was such exhaustion in her voice! She hung the rosary back on the wall. She walked to and fro, across the room, twice, her steps long and light … yes, very like a puma in a cage. She leaned against the cupboard. She was tall now, much taller than me. She threw her head back, folded her arms, and gazed at the ceiling.
“How did yo
u know who it was? …” she asked suspiciously, with considerable disdain, talking like a cheap suburban servant now.
“I just knew,” I replied in the same way. “I found out.”
“Did he talk about it?”
There was a certain familiarity in that “he,” but a great deal of respect too. I could see she was still suspicious, wary in case there was something not quite right behind the scenes, worried that I might cheat her. She stood there the way the accused stands before the detective or the prosecutor; there is that helpless sense of waiting and then, under a conclusive “weight of evidence,” the collapse and desire to confess, but then the words stick in the throat … The criminal worries that the lawyer will trick him, that the lawyer doesn’t really know the truth but is just pretending, that he is wheedling a confession out of him, getting at the underlying truth by pretending to be nice, using some psychological sleight-of-hand … But he knows he can’t keep silent any longer. It’s like a process that, once begun, cannot be stopped. Now he actually wants to confess.
“No,” I said.
“Fine,” she said, and closed her eyes for a second. “I believe you.”
A moment of silence.
“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said, breathing heavily. “He wanted to marry me.”
“I see,” I said, as if nothing could be more natural. “And when was that?”
“Twelve years ago, in December. And he persisted. For two whole years.”
“How old were you then?”
“Eighteen.”
So my husband was thirty-six years old at the time. I carried on in my friendly way, as if nothing had happened.
“Do you have a photograph from that time?”
“Of him?” she asked, surprised. “Yes. You have just seen it.”
“No,” I said. “Of you, Judit.”
“I have,” she said sourly, more like an ill-tempered servant now. “It happens I have.”
She pulled open the dressing-table drawer and picked up a school exercise book covered in checkered paper—you know, the sort we used at school for French conversation and comprehension, notes on La Fontaine, and so forth … She leafed through it. There were religious images, advertisements snipped from newspapers … I stood up and looked over her shoulder as she turned the pages.
The religious images were of Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Joseph. But otherwise, everything in the book suggested a remote or close association with my husband. The newspaper cuttings were advertisements for my husband’s factory. There was a bill for a top hat sent by a city hat shop. Then there was my father-in-law’s obituary. And the announcement, on watermarked paper, of our forthcoming engagement.
She leafed through all this without emotion, a little tired, as if, having looked at such scraps often enough in the past, she was almost bored of them, yet unable to let them go. For the first time I was watching her hands: strong, bony, and long, with carefully trimmed but unvarnished nails. Long, powerful, bony fingers. With two of them she picked up one of the photographs.
“Here it is,” she said with a bitter smile, the corners of her mouth turned down.
The picture showed Judit Áldozó at the age of eighteen, just the age when my husband wanted to marry her.
It had been taken somewhere in town, in a cheap studio. Gold letters on the back advertised the fact that the owner was prepared to commemorate all moments of family rejoicing. It was a conventional photograph, posed and artificial: invisible metal rods adjusted the girl’s head to the required position, so that she should be looking toward something far away, her eyes startled and glazed. Judit Áldozó had braided the two bunches of her hair into a crown for the occasion, in the style of Queen Elizabeth of Habsburg. Her proud and frightened peasant face looked as if it were pleading for help.
“Give it back,” she said harshly, and took it away from me, slipping it back into the checkered notebook as though hiding something private from the outside world.
“That’s what I looked like back then,” she said. “I’d been here three years by then. He never talked to me. Then one day he asked me if I could read. I said I could. Good, he said. But he never gave me a book. We didn’t talk.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing,” she said, shrugging. “That’s all.”
“You just knew?”
“You can tell.”
“True,” I sighed. “And then?”
She looked up toward the ceiling and leaned against the cupboard. There was the same glazed, slightly startled expression in her eyes as in the photograph, as if she were gazing into the distant past. “So, after three years,” she said, speaking more slowly and haltingly now, “he talked to me. It was afternoon on Christmas Day. We were both in the parlor. He spoke for a long time. He was very nervous. I just listened.”
“Yes?” I said, and swallowed.
“Yes,” she repeated, and took a gulp too. “He said he knew it was very difficult. He didn’t want me to be his lover. He wanted us to go away together, somewhere abroad. Italy,” she said, and the tension vanished from her face. She smiled and her eyes sparkled as if she had really understood the full meaning of that wonderful word, as if it meant everything to her, more than anyone could say or hope for in life.
We both instinctively glanced at the cover of the dog-eared tourist brochure lying on the table, the sea slightly ruffled, the children playing in the sand … That was as close as she got to Italy.
“And you refused?”
“I did,” she said, her expression darkening.
“Why? …”
“I just did,” she snapped back. And then, uncertainly: “I was afraid.”
“Of what? …”
“Everything,” she said, and shrugged.
“Because he was master and you were servant? …”
“That among other things,” she quietly agreed, and cast me a look that was almost grateful, as if thanking me for saying so instead of her, saving her the agony. “I was always afraid. But not just of that. I felt something was wrong. He was too far above me,” she said, shaking her head.
“Were you afraid of your mistress?”
“Of her? … No,” she said and smiled again. I could see she thought me a little dense, someone completely at sea in matters of the real world, so she began to explain the situation to me as if she were talking to a child.
“I was not afraid of her, even though she knew.”
“Your mistress knew? …”
“Yes.”
“Who else knew? …”
“Only she and his friend. The writer.”
“Lázár?”
“Yes.”
“Did he speak to you about it? …”
“The writer? Yes. I went to his apartment.”
“Why?”
“Because he asked me to. Your Ladyship’s husband.”
The use of the term stood out, mocking and remorseless at once. What it said to me was: “To me he is ‘he.’ That much I know. To you he is just your husband.”
“All right,” I said. “In other words two people knew, my mother-in-law and the writer. And what did the writer say?”
She shrugged again.
“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “He just looked at me and listened.”
“For a long time?”
“Long enough. He—” again that extending “he”—“wanted to talk to me, to take a good look at me. To persuade me. But he didn’t say anything. There were a lot of books in the room. All those books! I had never seen so many books … He didn’t sit down, just leaned against the stove. He just looked and smoked. He carried on looking at me till it grew dark. Only then did he speak.”
“What did he say?” I asked. I could see them clearly, Lázár and Judit Áldozó, standing silently in the darkening room, struggling over my husband’s soul without saying anything, with “all those books!” around.
“Nothing. He simply asked how much land we owned.”
“A
nd how much is that?”
“Eight acres.”
“Where?”
“In Zala.”
“And what did he say then?”
“He said, ‘That is little. Four people have to live off that.’ ”
“Yes,” I said quickly, confused. I’m not familiar with such things. But I understood enough to know that it was little.
“And then?”
“He rang the bell and said, ‘Judit Áldozó, you may go now.’ Nothing more. But by then I knew nothing would come of it.”
“Because he was against it?”
“He and the whole world. And that’s not the only reason. It was also because I didn’t want to. It was like a sickness,” she said, and slammed her fist on the table. I hardly recognized her. It was as if something in her had exploded. Her limbs jerked as if in an electric shock, as if a flood had hit her. Her words were quiet, but it was as if she were shouting. “The whole thing was like a sickness … I didn’t eat for a year, only tea. But don’t go thinking it was for him I starved,” she quickly added, and put her hand to her heart.
“What do you mean?” I asked, astounded. “What does it mean to starve for someone?”
“They used to do it in the village, a long time ago,” she said, and looked down as if it weren’t quite proper to betray the secrets of the tribe to a stranger. “One person remains silent and refuses to eat until the other does it.”
“Does what?”
“What the other person wants them to do.”
“And does it work?”
“It works. But it’s a sin.”
“I see,” I said, and she knew that whatever she said now it was likely that I would think she really did “refuse to eat” for my husband. “But you did not commit that sin?”
“No, not I,” she quickly answered, and shook her head, blushing, as though she were confessing. “Because by that time I wanted nothing; because the whole thing was like a sickness. I couldn’t sleep; I even developed a rash on my face and thigh. And I was racked with fever for a long time. Her Ladyship looked after me.”