I well remember the scene. Vilma had been buried in the afternoon. When we returned from the funeral I lay down exhausted on the divan in my darkened room. Lajos entered, head to foot in black, having dressed with such care for the funeral he might have been a soldier on parade—I recall he had special black buttons made for the occasion—and with a few grave words he handed me the ring. I was so tired and confused that I didn’t properly understand what he said and just stared vacantly as he placed the ring on the little table beside the divan, nor did I object when later he reminded me of the ring and put it on my finger. “You should have the ring,” he solemnly declared. I came to my senses afterward. The ring belonged to Éva, naturally: it belonged to my dead sister’s daughter, of course it did. But Lajos found an ingenious way to counter my argument. This kind of ring, he said, is not a family heirloom, it is a symbol, the symbol of family hierarchy. It therefore followed that after the deaths of both Mother and Vilma it should pass to me, since I was the oldest female. That settled it.
I said nothing and put the ring away. I had no intention, of course, not for a moment, of keeping the family heirloom. My conscience and the letter I have written in the case of my death—it’s there in the sideboard next to the ring and the underwear—bears witness to the fact that I have kept it for Éva and have arranged for her to have it when I die. Then I decided to send the ring to Vilma’s daughter for her engagement or her wedding, should she marry. The letter that deals with my few humble possessions clearly appoints Vilma’s orphans as the inheritors, on condition that they should not sell the house or the garden while Nunu is alive. (Somehow I imagined Nunu would go on living for many years yet, and why not? She has no particular reason to die, just as she has no particular reason to live! In any case the feeling that she will outlive me is both exciting and reassuring.) I put the ring away because I didn’t want to argue with Lajos and because I felt that this modest piece of jewelry, which might nevertheless help one of us given our circumstances—I thought the price it would fetch might cover the cost of a young woman’s trousseau—was better placed with me than be lost in the kind of clutter that naturally accumulated around Lajos, clutter that multiplied like weeds in a favorable climate. He’ll sell it or lose it in a game of cards, I thought, and was somewhat moved by his gesture of offering it to me. And just at the moment—God give me strength and help me be honest—when we had just laid my sister’s coffin in the earth, I hoped that the lives of Lajos, the children, and, indeed, my own life, might be put in order. The ring no longer mattered very much, it was the situation as a whole that mattered…So I put the ring away. And that’s how I took it away with me later when we separated and hid it among my mementos together with my will.
And in the meantime, in those years when I saw nothing of Lajos, I did not once look at the ring, because I was certain, the way a sleepwalker is certain, that the ring was fake.
“I was certain.” What a thing to say! I had never held the ring in my hands. I was frightened of it. I feared the knowledge I had never put into words. I couldn’t help but know that everything Lajos touched lost its original meaning and value, broke down into its elements, changed as did the noble metals once the alchemists got them into their retorts…I couldn’t help but know that Lajos was not only capable of changing the nature of metals and stones but could turn true people into false ones. I couldn’t help but know that a ring could not remain an innocent object once Lajos got his hands on it. Vilma had been ill a long time and couldn’t mind all the household affairs, so Lajos had the run of the place and had taken possession of the ring…the very moment Nunu said it, I knew it was true. Lajos had conned me with the ring, as with everything else. I sat up in bed, quite pale.
“Have you had a look at it?”
“Yes,” said Nunu quite calmly. “One time when you were not at home and left me with the keys. I took it to the jeweler. He had changed the setting too. He had picked some white metal for the clasp. Steel is less valuable than platinum. White gold, they said. He had changed the stone too. The ring you have looked after so carefully all these years is not worth five krajcárs.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
Nunu shrugged.
“Wake up, Esther!” she scolded me.
I watched the candle flame and said nothing. Of course, if Nunu said it, it must be true. And why should I pretend not to have suspected it for a long time, from the moment Lajos gave me the ring. A fake, I thought there and then. Everything he touches instantly becomes a fake. And his breath, it’s like the plague, I thought. I clenched my hand into a fist. It wasn’t because of the ring…what did a ring or any number of rings matter at my time of life? Everything he has touched is fake, I thought. And then I thought something else, saying it out loud:
“Was giving it to me a calculated act? Because he feared being pursued, by the children or someone else, later…and since the ring was a fake anyway he gave me the copy so they should discover I had it and once it turned out to be fake, blame me?”
I was thinking aloud, as I always did when with Nunu. If anyone understood Lajos it was old Nunu, who knew him inside and out and read his every thought, even those thoughts he dared not actually think. Nunu was always fair. She answered in her usual way, gently and without fuss.
“I don’t know. It’s possible. But that would be a really lowdown thing to do. Lajos was not a schemer of that kind. Lajos has never once committed a criminal act. And he loved you. I don’t think he would have used the ring to drag your name through the dirt. It simply happened that he had to sell the ring because he needed the money, but lacked the courage to admit he had sold it. So he had a copy made. And he gave you that worthless copy. Why? Was it a calculated act? Was it cheating? Maybe he just wanted to be generous. It was such a wonderful moment, everyone arriving fresh from Vilma’s funeral, his first gesture being to hand over to you the family’s only valuable heirloom. I suspected it as soon as you described the grand moment. That’s why I had it looked at later. It’s a fake.”
“Fake,” she repeated mechanically, in the flattest of tones.
“Why wait to tell me now?” I asked her.
Nunu brushed a few gray locks from her forehead.
“There was no need to tell you everything straightaway,” she said, almost tenderly. “You had had quite enough bad news about Lajos.”
I got out of bed, went over to the sideboard, and searched out the ring in the secret drawer, Nunu helping me look in the light of the billowing candle flame. Having found it, I held the ring to the flame and thoroughly examined it. I don’t know anything about precious stones.
“Scratch the surface of the mirror with it,” suggested Nunu.
But the stone made no mark on the glass. I put on the ring and gazed at it. The stone sparkled with a cold vacant light. It was a perfect copy, created by a master.
We remained sitting on the edge of the bed gazing at the ring. Then Nunu kissed me, gave a sigh, and went off without a word. I carried on sitting there for a long time staring at the fake stone. Lajos has not even arrived yet, I thought, but he has already taken something from me. That’s all he can do, it seems. That’s the way it is, it is his constitution. A terrible constitution, I thought, and started shivering. That’s how I fell asleep, all goose-flesh, the fake ring on my finger, my senses dulled. I was like someone who has spent too long in a stuffy room then suddenly feels dizzy in the pitiless sharp air of truth that roars about her like a gale.
5
The day Lajos returned to us happened to fall on a Sunday at the end of September. It was a wonderfully mild day, its colors glassy and clear. Gossamer was drifting between the trees, and the air was sparklingly clear without a trace of mist, a thin transparent solution coating everything with the finest enamel, as if all visible objects, including the sky itself, had been touched in with the most delicate of brushes. I went out into the garden in the early morning and cut three dahlias for the vase. Our garden is not particularly big, but it does com
pletely surround the house. I don’t think it had passed eight o’clock yet. I was standing in the dew, in the great silence, when I heard conversation on the veranda. I recognized the voices of my brother and Tibor. They were talking quietly, and in the stillness of the morning every word rang out as clear as if it had been broadcast by some invisible loudspeaker.
In the first few moments I would like to have intervened and warned them that I could hear it all, that they were not alone. But already the first sentence, spoken in a low voice, silenced me. Laci, my brother, was asking:
“Why didn’t you marry Esther?”
“Because she wouldn’t have me,” came the answer.
I knew Tibor’s voice, and my heart beat loud in my chest. Yes, this was Tibor, his quiet, calm voice, and every word of his was the kindly, slightly melancholy truth spoken patiently and dispassionately.
Why does Laci ask such things? I thought, insulted and agitated. My brother’s questions always have an air of accusation: they sound aggressive and unbearably intimate. Laci hates any kind of secret. But people like their secrets. Might another man have given an evasive answer and protested against this invasion of privacy? Tibor answered quietly, as honest and correct as if someone had asked him a question about the railway timetable.
“Why wouldn’t she have you?” my brother badgered him.
“Because she loved someone else.”
“Who?” came the flat, ruthless question.
“Lajos.”
Then they fell silent. I heard the scrape of a match, one of them lighting a cigarette. It was so quiet I even heard Tibor blow the match out. The question I was anticipating came as perfectly on cue as thunder after lightning. Laci was doing the asking.
“Do you know he is coming here today?”
“I know.”
“What does he want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he owe you money too?”
“Let it go,” a reluctant voice replied. “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“He owes me,” Laci declared with childish pride, as if it were something to boast about. “He had borrowed Father’s gold watch too. He asked me to lend it to him for a week. That was ten years ago. No, wait, twelve years. He still hasn’t given it back. Another time he took away the complete set of encyclopedias. Borrowed. I never saw those encyclopedias again. He asked me for three hundred korona. But I didn’t give him that,” said the voice, with the same childish self-satisfaction.
And the other voice, the deeper, quieter, more even one, answered rather modestly.
“It wouldn’t have been such a disaster if you had given it to him.”
“You think so?” Laci asked, suddenly ashamed. I stood among the flowerbeds and could almost see the blush on that aged child-face of his as he smiled in confusion. “What do you think? Does he still love Esther?”
There was a long wait before he received an answer to this. I really would like to have said something myself, but it was too late. It was a ridiculous situation. Here I was, alone, much older, surrounded by the flowers in my garden like the heroine of some old-fashioned poem, on the very morning when I was waiting for him to call, the man who had deceived and robbed me, here in the very house where it had all happened and where I had spent my entire life, where I kept Vilma and Lajos’s letters in a sideboard along with the ring that I knew for certain, at least since the previous night—though I had previously suspected it—was fake, theatrically overhearing a theatrical conversation, waiting for an answer to a question, the only question of any interest to me, and what happens? The answer is delayed. Tibor, the conscientious judge of the situation, weighed his words carefully.
“I don’t know,” he said after a time. “I don’t know,” he repeated more quietly, as if arguing with someone. “Doomed love cannot die,” he finally added.
Then they said more in low voices and went into the house. I could still hear them, looking for me. I put the flowers down on the concrete bench and walked to the bottom of the garden, to the well, and sat down on the bench where Lajos had proposed to me twenty-two years before. There I crossed my arms above my heart, drew the crocheted scarf over my breasts because I was cold, looked out at the highway, and suddenly could not understand Laci’s question.
6
When Lajos first appeared among us, which seems a very long time ago, Laci was effusive in his welcome. Both were rehearsing the family role of “men of great promise.” Nobody could say what exactly it was that Lajos and Laci “promised,” though if you listened long enough to either of them both would have promised a great deal. The resemblance between their characters—the complete lack of any sense of reality, the tendency to unproductive dreaming, a compulsion to tell unconscious lies—drove them together with such irresistible force they might have been lovers. How proud Laci was when he introduced Lajos to the family! They even looked like each other: both their faces radiated something of the last century’s romantic glow, a quality I liked in Laci and that helped me warm to Lajos. There was a time when they dressed like each other, and the town was full of stories of their frivolous, grand-sounding antics. But everyone forgave them because they were young and charming and hadn’t actually done anything scandalous. They were frighteningly alike in both soul and body.
This friendship, which even in their university years had an unsettling air of intimacy, did not cease when Lajos started showing interest in me: it did not cease but rather changed in an odd way. Even a blind man could see that Laci was ridiculously possessive of Lajos, doing everything he possibly could to make his friend part of the family while at the same time disapproving of Lajos’s courtship, interrupting our clumsy moments of togetherness, mocking the uncertain signs of our increasing mutual attraction. Laci was possessive, but in an extraordinary—or perhaps not so extraordinary—way he directed his jealousy only at me and appeared to be happy when Lajos married Vilma, behaving throughout with the utmost tenderness toward them, prepared to sacrifice anything for their happiness. Everyone in the family knew that I was Laci’s favorite, the one for whom he had a fond spot. Later I even thought that Laci’s opposition and antagonism might have played some part in Lajos’s infidelity. But this wasn’t a hypothesis I could ever prove, even to myself.
These two similar people, these two almost identical characters, rivaled each other in friendship. Once Lajos came into his inheritance they even lived together in the capital, in a magnificent bachelor apartment that I never visited but which, according to Laci, was one of the most significant intellectual and social venues of the age. I have every reason to doubt its social significance. In any case, they lived together and had money—Lajos was pretty close to being a rich man at the time, and it was only a childish resentment in Laci that made him mention the gold watch and the few hundred Lajos had wanted to borrow, since Lajos, in the days of his wealth, was generous to everyone, including, of course, his closest friend. They selected a few happily idle members of the jeunesse d’orée and lived a life of high jinks. Not that there were debaucheries as such. Lajos, for example, was not particularly fond of wine, and Laci was no night hawk. No, their lives were complex, expensive, and given over to an exacting kind of idleness, the kind of idleness an ignorant outsider might easily mistake for substantial, deliberate activity, amounting to a refined form of life fashionably referred to as “lifestyle”—Laci’s favorite word. These two peculiarly talented young men strove to realize it together. The reality was that they were lying and dreaming. But I only discovered that much later.
With Lajos, the new friend, a whole new set of tensions entered our household. He looked on our rural amusements and lives with a certain bemused condescension. We sensed his superiority and, a little abashed, strove to overcome our shortcomings. We all suddenly started “reading,” particularly authors to whose significance Lajos first drew our attention—“reading” with such industriousness, with such a sense of shame, it was as if we were preparing for the most importan
t examination life could offer. Later we discovered that Lajos himself had never read, or had simply scanned, these authors and thinkers, the works and ideas that he so emphatically recommended, wagging his head and chiding us with good-humored severity. His charm acted on us like a cheap wicked spell. Our poor mother was the first to be utterly bedazzled. Under Lajos’s influence and out of deference to him we “read” all the time, quite differently from before, and also tried to live “a social life,” but one quite different from before. We even refurbished the place. It cost a lot of money, and we were not rich. Mother was always waiting for Lajos, preparing for his visits as if for some kind of test. One time she was mugging up on the latest German philosophers, because Lajos, in his superior way, had asked whether we were acquainted with the works of B, the Heidelberg thinker. No, of course we weren’t. We urgently started reading his high and somewhat cloudy meditations on life and death. Father too was pulling himself together. He drank less and was particularly careful when we had guests to hide his sad patchwork life from Lajos’s all-seeing eye. Every weekend my brother and Lajos would arrive with guests.
The house would be full of people and chatter then. The old parlor had been transformed into some kind of “salon” where Lajos entertained the most fascinating local people, people who had until that time been not so much fascinating as suspicious, people we would not have had in the house at all. Suddenly they had an open invitation. In his worn frock-coat, and with old-fashioned cordiality, my father moved awkwardly among the weekend guests—he dared not even light his pipe on these occasions…And Lajos accepted me, tested me, approved or admonished me with a glance, praised me to the skies and rewarded me or cast me headlong into hell. This lasted three years.