He sat back down at his desk and covered his face with both hands. He didn’t say anything for a time. Then, perfectly charmingly, without any transition from one mood to another, he asked if he should put some coffee on.
That’s what he was like.
But that’s not all. He was aging, but sometimes it seemed as if, behind his hand, he was laughing vengefully at the process of aging. There are men, you know, who think old age is the time for revenge. Women at that age go mad, take hormones, put on more makeup, or take young lovers … But men when they age often go about smiling. And it is precisely this smiling kind of older man that is most dangerous as far as women are concerned: they are like a conquering army. At this stage of the great, boring duel between men and women—of which it is impossible to get bored—it is men who are the stronger, because they are no longer driven to fury by desire. They are no longer ruled by the body: they are in charge. And women can scent this the way a feral creature can scent a hunter. We can only rule over you men as long as we can hurt you. While we can carefully feed men with a few tidbits, a little give-and-take of power, then immediately deny them the merest taste of it and watch them shouting and screaming, writing letters, and uttering dire threats, we can relax, because we know the power is still ours. But when men are old it is they who have the power. Not for long, it’s true. Being old is not the same as being ancient. Because the next stage is approaching, the time of dotage, when men become children and they need women again.
Go on, laugh. I’m only chattering on, being amusing, because the sky is almost light. See, you are so beautiful when you smile proudly, like that.
This man was sly and vengeful in his aging. Occasionally he’d remember he was getting old, and the thought would cheer him up, his eyes sparkling behind his glasses, and he’d look at me with delight and satisfaction. He was practically rubbing his hands together, happy because there I was in his room and he was aging and I could no longer hurt him. I would cheerfully have hit him then, torn the glasses from his nose, thrown them on the floor, and stamped on them. Why? Just so I should hear him cry out. So he would shake me by the arm or hit me, or … Well, yes. But there was nothing I could do, because he was aging. And I was afraid of him.
He was the only man I was ever afraid of. I had always believed I understood men. I thought they were eight parts vanity and two of something else. Don’t grunt like that; I’m not talking about you—you are an exception. But I thought I knew them, knew how to talk their language. Because nine out of ten men thought that if I looked at them from under my brow as if looking up to them, I must be admiring their beauty or intelligence! I could lisp and simper with them, play pussycat, admiring their terrifying intellect, which I, a poor little nobody of a girl, an ignorant, innocent shrinking violet, couldn’t properly grasp, of course, and certainly not understand. It was enough for me to worship at their wise, masculine feet, listening spellbound to their brilliant observations, especially since they were kind enough to permit me, silly woman that I am, to tell them how brilliant, how superior, they were at work, how one of them managed to put one over on those Turkish salesmen when he palmed them off with low-quality leather rather than top grade, or how another courted the powerful so faithfully that they eventually rewarded him with a Nobel Prize or a knighthood. That was the kind of thing they used to brag about. As I said, you are an exception. You don’t speak, you just keep drumming. And when you don’t speak, I know for certain that there is nothing you are trying to keep silent about. It’s marvelous.
But the others are not like you, darling. The others are vain, vain in bed, in restaurants, while they are just walking along or putting on their morning coats to flatter the latest celebrity, or loudly summoning the waiter in a coffee house … everything about them declares vanity, as if vanity were the one true incurable human disease. Eight parts vanity, I said? Maybe nine. I was reading in the Sunday supplement of one of the papers that our planet is mostly water and that only a little of it is dry land. That’s how it is with men; they’re nothing but vanity supported by a few fixed ideas.
This one was vain in a different way. He was proud of having killed everything in him that might have been a product of vanity. He treated his body as if it were an employee. He ate little; his manners moderate and disciplined. When he drank wine, he shut himself away in his room as if he wanted to be alone with some perverse figure who suffered from an evil obsession. He didn’t care whether I was in the apartment at all when he was drinking. He’d set me up with a bottle of French brandy, a few nice nibbles on a tray, and a box of Egyptian cigarettes, then retire to his room to drink. It was as if he didn’t think highly enough of women to let one watch him drinking.
He drank rare wines and went about it seriously. He chose a bottle from his collection the way a pasha might choose one or another odalisque from his harem to spend the night with. When he filled his last glass, he would loudly declare, “To Hungary!” I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t laughing when he raised his glass. He wasn’t clowning. The last glass was always drained in honor of the country.
Was he patriotic? I don’t know. He tended to be suspicious of patriotic talk. To him the country meant only the language. It wasn’t by chance he was reading dictionaries at this time—nothing but dictionaries. He spent the night leafing through Spanish-Italian and French-German dictionaries. He did the same while drinking, or in the morning, as the air-raid warnings sounded, as if he hoped that in the middle of this terrible cacophony of destruction he might finally find a word that would serve as an answer. But most of the time it was Hungarian dictionaries and lexicons he read with a spellbound, adoring expression, as if he were in the grip of an ecstasy, enjoying a kind of mystical vision in church.
He would take the odd Hungarian word from the dictionary, stare at the ceiling, then pronounce the word, letting it flutter above him like a butterfly … yes, I remember, he once actually pronounced the word “butterfly,” then watched it fluttering around him as though the word were the thing itself in the powdery golden sunlight, flitting this way and that, hovering, catching the sun on its lightly dusted wings, as he followed its angelic choreography, a Hungarian word doing its dance of the spirit, and suddenly he was happy and gentle because this was the greatest and loveliest experience left to him in life. In his heart, it seemed, he had already given up the bridges, the fields, the people. It was only the Hungarian language he believed in by then: that was his home.
One night when he was drinking he allowed me in. I sat down opposite him at the end of the big divan, lit a cigarette, and watched him. He paid no attention to me; he was mildly drunk. He walked up and down the room, shouting out individual words.
“Sword!” he cried.
He took a few faltering steps forward, then stopped as though he had tripped over something. He stared at the floor.
“Pearl!” he said to the carpet.
Then he gave a cry, put his hand to his brow as if it hurt.
“Swan!” he said.
He looked at me as though he were confused, as if he had only just noticed I was in the room with him. Believe it or not, I lowered my eyes and didn’t look back at him. I was ashamed. I felt I was witnessing an immoral act, a lapse of taste, in which I was Peeping Tom, a voyeur, watching the sufferings of a sick man through a crack in the wall. It was like watching a shoe fetishist, someone who thinks the part more important than the whole. He recognized my presence through the fog of wine, and blinked once or twice in acknowledgment. He gave an embarrassed, guilty smile, as though he had been caught doing something faintly disgraceful. He spread out his arms by way of excuse, as if to plead he couldn’t help it, the obsession being stronger than prudence or good manners.
“Cat’s tail!” he stuttered. “Barberry!”
Then he sat down beside me on the divan, took my hand, and covered his eyes with his other hand. He sat there a long time without saying anything.
I didn’t dare speak. But I understood that what I
had just seen was part of the act of dying. He wasn’t sacrificing his life thinking the world would submit itself to his mind. He was forced to concede that the mind was powerless. You won’t understand this, my dearest, because you are an artist, a real, genuine artist, the kind that has little to do with the mind, because drumming requires no meaning. Don’t get cross now! What you do is far more important. There, you see? But this man was a writer, and for a long time he believed in meaning. He believed the mind was a power, like any other power that is capable of changing the world: like light, like electricity, like magnetism. And he, being a human being, might control the world through his mind without the use of any other instrument—you know, like the hero of the very long Greek poem, the one they named a travel agency after not so long ago, remember? What was he called? Ah, yes, Ulysses. You wouldn’t need instruments, you wouldn’t need technology, you wouldn’t need Arabic numerals. I think that’s how he imagined it.
But then he had to learn that reason—the mind—is worthless, because the instincts are stronger. Fury is greater than reason. And once fury has instruments at its disposal, it whistles at reason. Fury and instrument launch their own wild dance.
So he no longer expected anything of words. He no longer believed that words put into rational order could help the world or humankind. Words, when they get twisted—as they have in our time, he said, meaning the everyday words spoken between us, person to person—are superfluous, useless gravestones. The truth, he felt, was that words, the human voice itself, had become one continuous boom. Voices change when loudspeakers start screaming and crackling.
He no longer believed in words, but he always liked them, tasted them, gulped them down. At night, when the whole city was dark, he could get drunk on a few words of Hungarian. He savored words the way you were savoring your Grand Napoleon the other day, when the South American dealer offered you smuggled hash. You drank the precious stuff with your eyes closed, with genuine appreciation, exactly the way he pronounced “Pearl!” or “Barberry!” Words were solid chunks of consumable matter to him, flesh and blood. And when he was in their grip, he’d spout nonsense like any drunk or madman. One time, I remember, he was grunting and shouting the words of some Asian language. I heard him and felt like running away. I thought I was witnessing some extraordinary Eastern rite, or had lost my way in this crazy world and was, for the first time, seeing an alien people, or what remained of them. I had blundered onto a strange man speaking strange words. The words came from far away, miles and miles away. It was the first time I had ever been aware of being specifically Hungarian. But that’s what I am, God knows—all my ancestors Hungarians from the old Cumanian region. I even have a mole on my back—they call it a birthmark—that is often regarded as the signature of the tribe. It’s called “the Mark of the Cumans.” What? You want to see it again? Fine, later.
I remember my husband once telling about some famous Hungarian who was a count, then became prime minister. He was named after a river—Count Danube or Tisza, I forget which. This count fell in love with a woman my husband knew. He had heard from the woman that when this bearded count was prime minister, he would sometimes go to a special room at the Hotel Hungaria with a few friends and invite little Berkes, the Gypsy fiddler, to join them. Then they’d close the door and listen silently to the Gypsy playing. They drank little. Then, at dawn, this grave, stern nobleman, our prime minister, who wore a frock coat most of the time, would stand in the middle of the room and begin dancing to a slow tune while the rest solemnly gazed on. Strangely enough, nobody laughed at the idea of a man—a prime minister—dancing alone, at dawn, moving very slowly to Gypsy music. And this is what occurred to me that dawn, when I heard my friend shouting and waving his arms about in a room that contained only his books and me.
Oh, those books! So many books! I never counted them, because I knew he couldn’t bear for me to be moving his books around. Only by squinting, out of the corner of my eye, could I size up the shelves. The room was filled floor to ceiling with them, the shelves bowing under the weight of the books, hanging at angles, sagging like a pregnant mare’s belly. The city library has more books, of course, maybe a hundred thousand or even a million; not that I know why people need all those books. I’ve been perfectly happy with the Bible and a paperback novel, one with a lovely colored cover showing a count kneeling before a countess. I was given the novel by a magistrate in Nyíregyháza when I was just an apprentice maid; he fancied me and invited me into his office to give it to me. I have looked after these two books. The rest I just read as and when they came along. I mean, I read them when I was being a proper lady. Don’t look at me like that! Believe me, I was obliged to read books, take baths, have my toenails polished, and say things like “Bartók liberated the soul of the people’s music.” But I grew pretty bored of that, because I knew something about the people myself, and a bit about music too. It wasn’t anything I could say to ladies and gentlemen, of course.
All those books! After the siege, I sneaked in there again. He had already immigrated to Rome. I found only the shell of a bombed building, the books just damp pulp. The neighbors said the house had received several hits. The bombs had made a soup of the books. They were lying in piles and swamps in the middle of the room, which, it seemed, the owner had only just left. One neighbor, a dentist, told me that the writer hadn’t bothered to save a single book. He didn’t search among the wet piles … when he came up from the cellar, he just stood among the books and gazed at what was left of them, his arms folded. The neighbors waited beside him, curious, keen to see him pale-faced, bewailing his bad luck. But much to their surprise, he seemed to look on the wreckage with satisfaction. Isn’t that strange? The dentist swore he was almost cheerful, nodding away as if something had worked out according to plan, as if some great fraud or slander had finally come to light. He seemed to have been expecting it. The writer stood in the midst of the havoc, among his damp and soggy books, stroking his bald head, murmuring, “At last!”
As the dentist recalled it, some people there felt affronted by this. But he didn’t care whether they heard him or not. He simply shrugged and left. He spent some time wandering round town as many others did. But no one ever saw him near his old apartment again. It seemed he must have put a firm period to something the moment he stood among the piles of soaked books. The dentist suspected the writer was just playing the fool, putting on a show to prove he was not hurt by what he’d lost. Others wondered whether behind the sigh of relief there might not lie the realization of failure involving a secret political allegiance—the writer might have been a fascist, a Communist, or an anarchist, so that’s why he said “At last!” But they couldn’t be certain of anything. The books remained on the pile of rubbish in the bombed house and rotted away. It’s interesting—people were stealing all kinds of things in Budapest at the time, anything from cracked bedpans to Persian carpets and dentures, whatever they could lay their hands on. But nobody stole books. It was as if books had been taboo. It was bad luck to touch them.
He disappeared soon after the Russians entered the city. Someone said he’d been seen on the back of a Russian truck on the way to Vienna. No doubt he paid with his hoarded gold napoleons or with dollars. They said they saw him with a few salvaged goods on top of a pile of raw leather, his head uncovered, his glasses on his nose, reading some book. Maybe it was a Hungarian dictionary. What do you think? I don’t know. In any case he vanished from the city.
But we can’t be too sure of that, either. There’s something about this that doesn’t fit into the picture as I remember him. I prefer to think he would have traveled by sleeper car, on the first sleeper that left the city. He would have put his gloves on when getting on the train, bought a few newspapers at the station, and when the train started he wouldn’t have looked out, but drawn the curtains of the compartment so he shouldn’t see the ruins of the bombed town. He hated mess.
That’s how I imagine him. I prefer it like this. It’s odd, really, now, when
there’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that is that he is dead … There is nothing else I know about him for certain.
In any case, he was, for me, the last representative of the old prewar world … that other world, the world of my husband, I mean the world of the gentry. Not that he had any truck with the gentry. After all, he wasn’t rich, he had neither title nor rank … He belonged in a different way.
You know how the rich kept all kinds of tatty things “in storage”? He too kept something stored away. It was culture, or taste—call it what you will … it was that which he believed to be culture. Because, my one and only, it’s important to recognize that culture is not what we proles imagine … It’s not the splendid apartment, the books on the shelf, polite conversation, and colored toilet paper. There’s something else, something the rulers don’t pass on to the ruled, not even now, when everything is different from before, when the rich have understood that they can remain rich only so long as they shower us proles with all the trifles that only yesterday were the height of desirability … But there is something they won’t be passing on. Because there’s still a kind of conspiracy among the rulers, even now, though it’s different from before … It’s not gold, not libraries, not galleries, not fine clothes, not ready cash, not shares, not jewelry, not delicate manners they are hiding away, but something more difficult to take from them. Quite likely the writer would have regarded some of these so-called important things with contempt too. He said to me, one time, that he could live on apples, wine, potatoes, bacon, bread, black coffee, and cigarettes—nothing else. Nothing else was necessary in life. Add a change of clothes, a few items of underwear, plus the well-worn raincoat he always wore, winter and summer. He wasn’t just saying this: listening to him, I knew it was the truth. Because, after a while, it wasn’t only him who could be silent a long time. I quickly learned it from him. I learned he had to be listened to.