Portraits of a Marriage

  Everything important in that household was done by qualified tradesmen. “Qualified” was one of their favorite words. If the doorbell broke, it wasn’t the manservant who fixed it but a qualified tradesman called in for the occasion. They trusted no one but qualified tradesmen. There was one fellow who came regularly, a man with a ceremonial air, wearing a bowler. He looked like a university professor called out to a council meeting in the provinces. His job was to trim corns. But he wasn’t just any old trimmer of corns, the kind people like us sometimes visit in town, slipping off our shoes and extending our feet so they can slice the corn or an extra growth of hard skin away. Heaven forfend! He wasn’t even the usual kind of home chiropodist—we would never have allowed one of those in the house. No, this man had a proper business card and you could find his telephone number in the directory. What it said on the card was “Swedish Pedicure.” We had a Swedish pedicurist come to the house once a month. He always wore black and handed over his hat and gloves with such ceremony when he entered that I felt quite overcome with awe: I almost kissed his hand. My own feet were frostbitten, on account, as you know, of those damp winters in the ditch, and I had corns and bunions and ingrown toenails that were so painful I could hardly walk sometimes. But I would never have dreamt of asking this foot artist to touch my foot. He brought a bag with him, like a doctor. He put on a white gown, carefully washed his hands in the bathroom, as if preparing himself for the operation, then took an electric gadget from his bag, something like a small dentist’s drill, sat himself down by Her Ladyship or the old man, or my husband, and set to work, shaving away the hardened parts of their ineffable skin. So that’s our corn cutter. I must say, darling, one of the high points of my life was when I was lady of that refined house and ordered the maid to call the “Swedish pedicurist.” I desired to have my refined corns treated. Everything comes to you if you wait long enough. As did this.

  There was also the reading. The reading started the moment I brought the old man his orange juice. He lay in bed with the bedside light on and read an English newspaper. The Hungarian papers, of which there were a great many in the house, were only read by us servants, in the kitchen or in the toilet when we were bored. The old woman read the German press; the old man the English, but mostly only those pages that were full of long columns of numbers, the daily updates on foreign stock markets, because while he wasn’t a great reader of English, the numbers did interest him … As for the young gentleman, he read now the German, now the French papers, but as far as I could see he only read the headlines. I expect they thought these papers were better informed than ours, made a louder noise, and could tell bigger, more whopping lies. I liked reading the papers myself. I’d gather up whole bedsheets full of foreign papers in the various rooms and read them, nervous and awestruck.

  There were many qualified tradesmen to see. After the orange juice, if it wasn’t the Swedish pedicurist, it was the masseuse. She wore a lorgnette and was quite rude. I knew she stole the bathroom creams and cosmetics. But she pinched cakes too, and the exotic fruits left in the parlor from the day before. She’d quickly stuff her face with two mouthfuls, not because she was hungry but just to deprive the house of something. She simply had what we called sticky fingers. Then she’d enter Her Ladyship’s room and give her a thorough pounding.

  The gentlemen got massages too, administered by a man they referred to as “the Swedish gymnastics instructor.” They went through a few exercises in swimming shorts with him, then the instructor prepared a bath and stripped down so he could splash my husband and the old man with alternate cups of hot and cold water.

  I can see you have no idea why he should do this. You have a great deal to learn, sweetheart.

  The idea behind the instructor switching between hot and cold water was to improve their circulation. They couldn’t have set about their day with the necessary energy required without it. Everything in the house was approached with an eye to order and to scientific rigor. It took me a long time to understand how all these rituals related to each other.

  In summer the coach would come three times a week before breakfast to play tennis with them in the garden. The coach was an older man, silver haired, very elegant, like the picture of the English thinker on that old copper engraving in the museum. I’d sneak a surreptitious look at them playing from the window of the servants’ quarters. It touched me to see this deeply moving spectacle of two old gentlemen, master and coach, engaged in a courteous game of tennis, discoursing with ball, as it were, rather than with words. My employer, the old man, was a powerful, sun-bronzed figure … he kept his tan even in the winter, because every afternoon after lunch he took a siesta under the sunlamp. Perhaps he needed a tanned face to inspire greater respect at work. I don’t know, it’s just a guess. At his advanced age he was still playing tennis, like the king of Sweden. The white trousers and the bright knit sleeveless jumper really suited him! After tennis they’d take a shower. There was a special set of showers for tennis, down in the basement in a gym with wooden floors, where there were all kinds of gymnastic equipment, including wall bars and some idiotic rowing boat—you know, the kind that has only a seat and oars on springs. They practiced rowing on it when the weather was bad and they couldn’t go down to the clubhouse to take a canoe down the Danube. So the Swedish pedicure man left, then the masseur-cum-gym-instructor then the tennis coach … or whoever came next. Then they got dressed.

  I watched all this from the servants’ window, peeking out at them like a village maiden watching those brightly painted, ugly, but moving icons on the wagons of a passing religious fair: there was a mysterious, sanctified feeling about it, something faintly supernatural, not quite human. I often felt like that as I watched the family in my first few years with them.

  Unfortunately, it was quite some time before I was allowed in to breakfast, since this was one of the major family rituals. I had to serve my time before I was permitted to minister to them. Of course they never sat down to it uncombed or unwashed, in their night things. They dressed for it with as much care as they would for a wedding. By that time they would have exercised, showered, and bathed, and the manservant would have shaved both my husband-to-be and the old man. They had already leafed through the English, French, and German papers. They listened to the radio while shaving, but not to the news, because they were afraid they might hear something that might spoil their morning appetites … They listened to simple, stirring dance music, a kind of jollifying that lifted their spirits and prepared them to face the rigors of the day ahead.

  They dressed with great care. The old man had a dressing room with built-in wardrobes. Her Ladyship had something similar, as did my husband. They stored clothes for all seasons there, in slipcases hung with camphor, as if ready for mass. But they had ordinary wardrobes too, where everyday items were kept, stuff they wanted quickly to hand. Even as I’m speaking the smell of those wardrobes comes back to me, making my nose twitch. They had something brought over from England that looked like a cube of sugar but which, when you put your nose to it, filled the room with the smell of autumn haystacks. Her Ladyship liked the artificial scent of hay in her cupboards and linen chests.

  But there weren’t just chests and wardrobes, there were shoe cupboards too … oh, heavens! It was the high point of my life, you know, as good as a Sunday off, when, at last, they let me loose on the shoe cupboard. There was so much cleaning material there—leather-care cream, a range of polishes—and I set about those shoes without using spit or saliva, using only those marvelous greasy ointments, the alcoholic liquid polish, the soft brushes, the rags! And believe me, I polished every one of those shoes and boots—the old man’s, my husband’s—until you could see your face in them! But it wasn’t just the clothes and shoes that had their own wardrobes and cupboards; so did the linen. The linen chest was divided into compartments according to material and quality, the shirts separated from the underpants! And, my God, what shirts, what underpants! … I think it was while ironing my hu
sband’s “lawn underpants” that I first fell in love with him! He had his monogram even on his pants, heaven knows why. It was near where his belly button would be, and above the monogram there was the royal crest. The old man was, besides everything else, an adviser at the royal court, not just the head of a city council like his son … there was a difference in rank there, a step up on the ladder between baron and count. As I said, it took time for me to come to grips with all this.

  But I forget the glove cupboard, where a variety of gloves lay in some mind-numbingly complex order, like preserved herring in a tin box. There were gloves to wear in the street, in town, for hunting, for driving; gray ones, yellow ones, white ones; gloves made of fawn leather, gloves lined with fur for the winter. There was a special drawer full of kid gloves for ceremonial occasions, and another with black mourning gloves for funerals, those grand occasions whenever someone important kicked the bucket. And soft gloves of pigeon gray to wear with the frock coat and top hat, though they never actually put those on, but carried them the way the king carries a scepter. Ah, those gloves! And then there were the jackets and vests of every kind, jackets with or without sleeves, long and short, thick and thin, in every color, of every quality, neat little tweed jackets and the like. There were times in the fall when they dressed for the evening, without a dressing gown, a little sportily, and sat down in front of the fire to smoke. The manservant would put dried pine twigs onto the embers so that everything should be just so, the way it was in the advertisements for brandy in English picture magazines, where you see the lord graciously puffing at his pipe by the hearth, replete with his daily intake of alcohol. And there he is, faintly smirking in his tweed jacket.

  There were other jackets too: cream-colored ones they wore for grouse hunting, along with narrow-brimmed Tyrolean hats, complete with chamois feather. My husband had knit cardigans for spring and summer. And of course all kinds of colors and weights for winter sports. But the list is endless.

  And to top it all, that smell of must and hay. The first time I lay down in my husband’s bed my gorge rose at the smell, this cunning, perverse male smell I remembered from all those years ironing his underpants and tidying his linen cupboard. When I was so happy, so excited by the smell and the memory, I was actually sick. My husband’s body smelled the same. It was the kind of soap he used too, you know. That, and the alcoholic cologne with which the servant treated his face after shaving, and the water he washed his hair in: it was all that same autumnal haystack smell … hardly perceptible, a mere breath. And somehow it wasn’t a human smell, but a haystack, yes, in very early fall, in a French painting of the last century … Maybe that was why I started heaving when I first lay down in bed and he embraced me. Because by that time I was his wife. The other one, the first, had gone. Why? Maybe she couldn’t bear the smell, either? Or the man? I don’t know. There’s no one clever enough to explain why a man and woman are attracted to each other and then why they part. All I knew was that the first night I spent in my husband’s bed, it was not like sleeping with someone human but with some strange, artificial being. The strangeness of it made me so excited that I was sick. Then I got used to it. After a while I stopped feeling sick whenever he called me to him or we embraced; my stomach was no longer heaving. People can get used to anything, even happiness and wealth.

  But I can’t really tell you much about being rich, not the real truth, though I can see your eyes have lit up, and you’re interested to know what I learned and saw while I was with them. Well, it was certainly interesting. It was like a fantastic journey in a foreign country where they live differently, eat and drink differently, are born and die differently.

  I like it better here with you, in this hotel. I feel I know you better. Everything about you is familiar … Yes, I even feel more comfortable with your smell. Some people say that living in a stinking machine age—what they call civilization—we are bound to lose our sense of smell, that it will simply wither away … But I was born with animals around me, a poor child born among animals, like baby Jesus … so I had the gift of smell that rich people have forgotten. My husband’s family didn’t even recognize their own smell. That was why I didn’t like them. I was simply their servant, first in the kitchen, later in the drawing room and in bed. I was always catering to them. But I love you because I know your smell. Give me a kiss. Thank you.

  No, I can’t tell you everything about being rich, because it would take all night—not just one night, but a thousand nights, and then another thousand, just as in the fairy story, I could talk for a thousand nights, for years on end. So I won’t go on to list everything there was in their cupboards, their chests of drawers, how many outfits and accessories they had, but, believe me, it was like a vast theatrical wardrobe, something to fit every occasion, each part, every second of life! It’s just impossible to go through all that! I’d rather tell you what they were like inside, in themselves. That’s if you’re interested. I know you are. So you just lie there and listen.

  You see, it became clear to me after a while that all that great pile of things—the treasures and trinkets with which they packed their rooms and cupboards—weren’t really necessary. They didn’t need them. Certainly, they pushed things to this or that side but really they weren’t concerned whether anything could actually be used, and if so, for what. The old man had a store of clothes to suit an aging character actor. But he, you see, slept in a nightshirt, wore braces, emerged from the bathroom with his mustache tied up, and he even had a little brilliantined mustache brush with a tiny mirror on top … He liked to walk around his room in a worn old dressing gown whose elbows had worn through even though he had a half a dozen silk ones hanging in his wardrobe, stuff he had been given as birthday or name-day presents by Her Ladyship.

  The old man grumbled a bit but was generally pleased that most things were shipshape. He looked after the money and the factory and adapted well to the role he partly created, partly inherited, though secretly he would have preferred to drink spritzers and play skittles in the afternoon at a nearby inn. But he was smart and knew that whatever a man produces in some ways produces him. It was that man who told me that once, the artistic one, that everything turns against you, and that you’re never free, because you are always captive to the thing you created. Well, the old man had created the factory and the money and was resigned to the fact that he was bound to these things and could never escape them. That’s why he didn’t go to play skittles in Pasarét in the afternoon, but played bridge instead at a millionaires’ club somewhere in the center of town, no doubt with a wry expression on his face.

  There was a kind of bitter, ironic wisdom in the old man that I can’t forget. When I brought him his orange juice on a silver tray in the morning, he looked up from his English newspaper that he had been scanning for stock-market news, pushed his glasses up on his brow, and put his hand out for the glass in his shortsighted way … but there was a bitter smile playing about his lips under the mustache, the kind people pull when taking some medicine in which they have no faith … He dressed with the same expression. And there was something about that mustache. His mustache was cut like Franz Joseph’s—Uncle Joe, you know—it was one of those k und k jobs, proper empire. It was as if the whole man was a leftover from another world, from a time of real peace, where masters were really masters and servants were really servants, when great industrialists thought in terms of fifty million people at a time, when they manufactured a new steam engine or a modern pancake-maker to order. That was the world the old man sprang from, and it was clear that he found the new mini-world too small, too narrow. There was, of course, the small matter of the war.

  He had this mocking smile under his mustache, a mixture of self-contempt and general disdain. The whole world was ridiculous to him. That was how he dressed, how he played tennis, sat down to breakfast, kissed Her Ladyship’s hand, whenever he was being delicate and courteous … it was all somehow contemptible, fit for ridicule. I liked that about him.

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sp; I grew to realize that all the stuff they packed the house with was not for use as far as they were concerned: it was just a form of mania. You know how it is when people suffer a breakdown and have to keep repeating certain obsessive acts, like washing their hands fifty times a day and so on? That’s the way these people bought clothes, linen, gloves, and ties. I remember ties particularly because I had a lot of trouble with them. It was my job to keep my husband’s and the old man’s ties in order. Enough to say they had quite a few ties between them. There is no color in the rainbow that was not covered among those ties: bow ties, dress ties, ready-tied ties all hanging in their wardrobes, arranged in color order. I don’t suppose it’s impossible that there might even have been ties in shades beyond ultraviolet. Who knows?