“No,” I replied, my throat dry. “Carry on. I won’t laugh.”
“Men, you know,” she said in a wise pedagogic manner with a light sigh.
I did laugh. But I immediately grew serious again. I couldn’t help but notice that Éva, Vilma’s daughter, this child with whom I had lightheartedly adopted an adult, grown-up-woman tone, knew something about men, certainly something more and more certainly than I did, I who could have been her mother. I scolded myself for laughing.
“Yes, yes,” she said innocently, and opened her big blue eyes to indicate her seriousness. “Men. There are such men, men unbound by family, possessions, or territory. They would have been hunters or fishermen in the past. Sometimes Father was away for months and then we were educated in institutions run by nuns who were good-natured if a little scared but who tried to keep us in order in much the same way as if they had found us abandoned by the roadside, as if bits of the jungle were still sticking to our hair, as if we had spent our time dining with monkeys off trees bearing loaves of bread. You see, that is the kind of colorful childhood we enjoyed…Not that I’m complaining. Please don’t think I am complaining about Father. I love him, and I think he was nicest to me when he returned from one of his longer excursions a little exhausted, utterly broke, looking as if he had been fighting wild animals. It was really good at such times, for a while at least. On Sunday mornings he would take us to the museum and then to the sweetshop and the cinema. He would ask to look at our exercise books, clip on his monocle, and would chide and teach us with a solemn frown…It was all most amusing, Father as schoolmaster, can you imagine?”
“Yes,” I said. “The poor thing.”
But I didn’t know who I felt more sorry for, the children or Lajos, nor did Éva ask. Now she was clearly absorbed in her memories. She continued in a friendly, easy manner.
“Actually, we didn’t have too bad a time of it. That is, until one day the woman arrived.”
“What woman?” I asked, striving to maintain a quiet conversational tone.
She shrugged.
“Fate,” she pouted. “You know. Fate, the lady arriving at just the right time, at the very last moment…”
“What moment?” I asked, my mouth dry.
“The moment Father began to age. The moment the hunter notices his eye is not as sharp as it was, that his hand is trembling. One day Father took fright.”
“What frightened him?”
“Old age. Himself. There’s nothing sadder than when a man of his sort grows old, Esther. Then anyone, anyone at all can take advantage of him.”
“What has she done to him?”
We spoke quietly, whispering like accomplices.
“She controls him,” she said. Then, after a few moments: “We owe her money. Have you heard? I am engaged to him.”
“Her son?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love him?”
“No.”
“Then why are you marrying him?”
“We have to save Father.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Something bad. He has bills in his hand.”
“Do you love someone else?”
Now it was her turn to fall silent. She stared at her pink-lacquered fingernails. Then, wise and mature, she quietly added: “I love Father. There are two people in the world who love him: you, Esther, and I. Gábor doesn’t count. He is quite different.”
“You don’t want to marry the son?”
“Gábor is much calmer,” she said, avoiding the answer. “It’s as if he had locked himself away through a kind of deafness. He doesn’t want to hear anything and seems not to see what is happening around him. It’s his way of defending himself.”
“There is someone else,” I ventured and stepped closer to her. “Someone you love, and if it were possible to arrange things…somehow…it wouldn’t be easy…and you should know, Éva, that I have little now, that we, Nunu and Laci and I, are poor now…but I might know someone who might help you.”
“Oh, you could help, all right,” she said in her cold voice again, with careless certainty as if dropping an aside. But it was some time since she had looked into my eyes. She was standing with her back to the window, and I couldn’t see her face. The sky had grown gray since lunch, and through the window I could see dense dark September clouds gathering above the garden. The room floated in a half-light. I went over to the window and closed one of the open casements, afraid that someone might overhear us in the heavy silence before the rain.
“You must tell me,” I said, my heart racing in a way it had not done for a very long time, the last time perhaps on the night when Mother died. “If you want to escape — you and your father — from these people, you must tell me if there is someone you love…If money can help…Now tell me.”
“I think, Esther,” she said, her eyes cast down on the floor in her innocent schoolgirl voice, “that money, that is to say money alone, can no longer help. We need you too. Though Father knows nothing about this,” she hastily added, almost frightened.