… What would I do with the kind of facts required for a day in court, when mine are in my heart and in my head? What would I do with memories of some musty alcove, the sultry secrets of a bachelor’s apartment or the decayed remains of an adultery or the intimate memories of a dead woman and two old men stumbling toward the grave? What a poor, pathetic trial it would be, if now, at the end of our lives, I wanted to take you to court for adultery and attempted murder and I tried to force a confession out of you at a point when the law would regard the act or the not-quite-act as having long since passed the statute of limitations? It would be mortifying, and unworthy of both of us and our youth and our friendship. And perhaps it would make you feel better to recount it all, or what facts there are to recount. But I don’t want you to feel better,” he says calmly. “I want the truth, and that doesn’t lie in a few long-out-of-date facts and the private passions and errors of the body of a woman long dead and turned to dust … What is all that to me anymore, me the husband, you the lover, now that her body no longer exists and we have grown old? We will talk these things through once more, try to establish the truth and then go to our deaths, I in this house, you somewhere else, in London or the tropics. At the end of our lives, what do truth and falsehood count, or deceit, betrayal, attempted murder, or actual murder, or the question of where, when, and how often wife, the love and hope of my life, betrayed me with my closest friend?
You talk about all these sad and demeaning things, you admit everything, you tell exactly how it began, what kind of envy, jealousy, anxiety, and sadness drove you into each other’s arms, what you felt when you embraced her, what feelings of guilt and revenge filled Krisztina’s body and mind all those years … you could d o all that, but what would any of it be worth? At the end it all becomes very simple, what was and what might have been. What was once is not even dust and ashes now. What once made our hearts burn until we thought we would either die or have to kill someone-and I know that feeling, I, too, knew that terrible temptation, shortly after you left, when I was alone with Krisztina-all that is less than the dust the wind blows across the graveyards. It is humiliating and pointless even to mention it. And anyway, I know it all so exactly that I might have read it in a police report. I could recite you the trial evidence like a lawyer at the hearing: And then? What would I do with the secrets of a body that no longer exists? What is fidelity, what do we expect of the woman we love? I am old, and I have thought a great deal about this too. Is the idea of fidelity not an appalling egoism and also as vain as most other human concerns? When we demand fidelity, are we wishing for the other person’s happiness? And if that person cannot be happy in the subtle prison of fidelity, do we really prove our love by demanding fidelity nonetheless? And if we do not love that person in a way that makes her happy, do we have the right to expect fidelity or any other sacrifice? Now, in my old age, I would not dare answer these questions as unequivocally as I would have done forty-one years ago, when Krisztina left me alone in your apartment, where she had been so often before me, where you had assembled all those objects in order to receive her, where two people close to me betrayed and deceived me so vulgarly, so ignominiously, and-as I realize now-with such banality. That is what happened.” His voice is indifferent, almost bored.
“And what people call ‘,’ the sad and banal rebellion of a body against a situation and a third person-in retrospect is almost alarmingly a matter of indifference, almost the source of pity like a quarrel or an accident. I did not understand this back then. I stood in your secret apartment as if I were taking in the details of a crime, I stared at the furniture, the French bed … When one is young and one’s own wife deceives one with the only friend who is closer than a brother, it is natural to feel that the world has crashed around one. It is inevitable, because jealousy, disappointment, and vanity are all excruciating. But it passes … not consciously, and not from one day to the next. Years later, the fury is still there-and yet finally it is over, just as life will be one day. I went back to the castle, to my room, and waited for Krisztina. I waited to kill her or to have her tell me the truth so that I could forgive her. I waited until evening, then I went to the hunting lodge, because she had not come. Which was perhaps childish … Now, looking back, when I want to pass judgment on myself and others, I see this pride, this waiting, this departure, as somewhat childish. But that’s how things are, do you see, and neither reason nor experience can do much to change one’s stubborn nature. You, too, must know this now.
“I went to the hunting lodge not far from the house-you know it well-and I did not see Krisztina for eight years. The first time I saw her again one morning was as a corpse, when Nini sent word that I could return to the house because she was dead. I knew that she was ill, and as far as I know she was taken care of by the best doctors, who came and stayed here in the castle for months and did everything to save her. As they put it, “We have done everything within the scope of modern medicine.’ Those are just words. They apparently did everything within their erratic knowledge and the limits of their vanity. Every evening for eight years, I was informed of what was going on in the castle, both before Krisztina was ill and then later, when she decided to become ill and die. I do believe such things can be decided-and now I am quite certain of it. But I couldn’t help Krisztina because there was an unpardonable secret between us of the kind that it is better not to force open prematurely, because there is no telling what still may be hidden underneath. There are worse things than suffering and death … it is worse to lose one’s self-respect. That was why I was so afraid of the secret between the three of us. Self-respect is the irreplaceable foundation of our humanity; wound it, and the hurt, the damage, is so scalding that not even death can ease the torture. Vanity, you say. Yes, vanity … and yet self-respect is what gives a person his or her intrinsic value.
That is why I so feared this secret, that is why people accept the compromises they do, even cheap and cowardly ones.
“Look around you and you will see nothing but partial solutions: this one leaves the woman he loves out of fear of a secret, that one stays and says nothing and waits unceasingly for an answer … I have seen such things. And I have experienced them, too. It is not cowardice, it is one’s will to life summoning its last line of defense. I went home, I waited until evening, then I moved to the hunting lodge and waited eight years for something, anything: a word, a message. But Krisztina did not come. In a carriage, the journey there from the castle takes two hours.
But to me, these two hours, these twelve miles, were a greater distance in time and space than the tropics to you. That is a given in me, that is how I was raised, that is how things unfolded. Had Krisztina sent a message-any message-her wishes would have been granted. Had she wanted me to fetch you back, I would have set out to search the world for you and bring you back. Had she wanted me to kill you, I would have gone to the ends of the world to find you and kill you. Had she wanted a divorce, I would have given her a divorce. But she wanted nothing.
Because she, too, had a strong personality, as a woman, and she, too, had been wounded by those she loved: by this one because he fled from love, not wishing to be consumed by a fateful liaison; by that one because he knew the truth, waited, and said nothing. Krisztina, too, had character, in a different sense of the word from the one we men use. In those years, you and I were not the only ones to whom things happened: they happened to her, too.
“Destiny brushed against me and fulfilled itself, and all three of us had to bear the brunt. For eight years, I did not see her. For eight years, she did not summon me. Just now, while I was waiting for you so that we could discuss what had to be discussed one day, since there is so little time left, I learned something from my nurse: I learned that Krisztina asked for me when she was on her deathbed. Not for you … And I do not say that with satisfaction-nor without it, either, kindly note.