“Last week you told Éva that I was looking after this ring for her. Éva needs money: she wants to sell the ring. The moment she goes to have it valued, she will find out it is a fake. Naturally, I am the only one who could have had it faked. That is your doing,” I said hoarsely.
“Why?” he asked astonished. It was a simple question. “Why you? It could have been somebody else. Vilma, for example.”
We stood silent.
“How low will you sink, Lajos?” I asked.
He blinked and examined the ash on his cigarette.
“What sort of question is that? How low will you sink?” he asked uncertainly.
“How low will you sink?” I repeated. “I imagine everyone has a kind of gauge, a spirit level that determines what is good and bad within them. It’s universal, everything has a limit, everything that is to do with human relationships. But you have no gauge.”
“Mere words,” he said, and waved them away as if bored. “Gauges, levels. Good and bad. Mere words, Esther.”
“Have you thought,” he continued, “that the great majority of our actions are undertaken without reason and have no purpose? People do things that bring them neither gain nor joy. If you looked back on your life you would notice that you have done a good many things simply because they seemed impossible to do.”
“That’s a little too fancy for me,” I said, depressed.
“Fancy? Nonsense! Just uncomfortable, Esther. There comes a time in life when a man grows tired of everything having a point. I have always loved doing those things that have no point, things for which there is no explanation.”
“But the ring,” I insisted.
“The ring, the ring!” he muttered, annoyed. “Let’s not get started with the ring! Did I tell Éva that you were looking after the ring? I might have. Why would I have said it? Because it seemed the thing to say at the time, it was the simplest, the most reasonable thing. You bring up the ring, Laci talks about some bills…what do you want? That’s all in the past, these things no longer exist. Life destroys everything. It’s impossible to live all your life with a burden of guilt. What soul is as innocent as you describe? Who is so high and mighty that she has the right to stalk someone else all their life? Even the law understands the concept of obsolescence. It’s only you people who insist on denying it.”
“Don’t you think you are being a little unfair?” I asked more quietly.
“Maybe,” he said, also in a quieter voice. “Levels! Gauges of the soul! Please understand that there are no gauges in life. I might have said something to Éva, I might have made a mistake yesterday or ten years ago, something to do with money or rings or words. I have never in my life resolved on a course of action. Ultimately people are only responsible for the things they consciously decide to do…Actions? What are they? Instincts that take you by surprise. People stand there and watch themselves acting. It is intention, Esther, intention is guilt. My intentions have always been honorable,” he declared with satisfaction.
“Yes,” I replied, uncertain. “Your intentions might have been honorable.”
“I know,” he said, more gently now, a little wounded, “I know I am a misfit in the world. Should I change now, in my fifty-sixth year? I have never wanted anything but good for everyone. But the chances of good in this world are limited. One has to make life more beautiful, or else it’s unbearable. That’s why I said what I said to Éva about the ring. The possibility consoled her at the time. That’s why I told Laci fifteen years before that I would repay him, though I knew I would never do so. That’s why I promise people all kinds of things on the spur of the moment and know, as soon as I tell them, that I will never do what I promised. That’s why I told Vilma I loved her.”
“Why did you tell her?” I asked, surprised at how calm and detached I sounded.
“Because that was what she wanted to hear,” he said without a thought. “Because she had staked her life on me telling her that. And because you did not stop me from saying it.”
“I?” I whispered, confused, especially confused now because I was practically choking. “What could I have done?”
“Everything, Esther,” he said, innocent as a newborn child. It was the old voice, the voice of his youth. “Everything. Why did you not answer my letters? Why did you not answer my letters while you still could have? Why did you forget the letters and leave them with us when you left? Éva found them.”
He came over to me now, quite close, and leaned over me.
“Have you seen these letters?” I asked.
“Have I seen them?…I don’t understand, Esther. I wrote them.”
And I could tell by his voice that for once, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was not lying.
17
“Now let me tell you something,” he said, and, leaning against the sideboard with the photographs on it, he lit a cigarette and threw the match distractedly into the box holding people’s calling cards. “Something happened between us that we can no longer settle by not speaking about it. One can remain silent all one’s life about the most important things. People die in silence. But there may be occasions to speak, when one should not remain silent. I believe it was this kind of silence that might have been the original sin of which the Bible speaks. There is an ancient lie at the heart of life, and it can take a long time before a man notices it. Don’t you want to sit down? Sit down, Esther, and hear me through. No, excuse me, this time, just this once, I would like to be judge and prosecutor. All this time you have been the judge. Sit down, please.”
He spoke courteously but in an almost commanding manner.
“There you are,” he said, and pushed a chair toward me. “Look, Esther, for twenty years we have been talking at cross-purposes. Things are not so simple. You have read out your list of charges against me — you and others — and they are indeed faults, alas, and perfectly true. You talk of rings and lies, of promises not kept, of bills that I have not paid. There is more, Esther, and worse. There’s no point in telling it all…I make no excuses for myself…but details like this will no longer decide my future. I have always been a weak man. I would like to have achieved something in the world, and I believe I was not altogether without talent. But talent and ambition are not enough. I know now they are not enough. To be properly creative one needs something else…some special strength or discipline or a mixture of the two; the stuff, I think, they call character…And that quality, that talent, is something that is missing in me. It’s like a strange deafness. It is as if I knew the music, the tune being played, precisely, but could not hear the notes. When I met you I was not quite so certain of what I am telling you now…I didn’t even know that you represented character for me. You understand?”
“No,” I honestly replied.
Somehow it was not his words that astonished me but his voice, the way he spoke. I had not heard him speak like this before. He spoke like a man who…but it is almost impossible to pin the voice down. He spoke like a man who has seen or discovered something, some truth, or is on his way to doing so though he could not yet declare it, because he was getting ever closer and was shouting his impressions at the world for all he was worth. He spoke like a man who felt something. It was not a voice I was used to with him. I listened without speaking.
“It’s so simple,” he said. “You’ll understand it straightaway. It was you: you were what I was missing, you were my character, my being. One recognizes this sort of thing. A man without character, or with an imperfect character, is morally something of a cripple. There are people like that, people who in every other respect are perfectly normal but for a missing arm or leg. Such people are given prostheses, an artificial arm or leg, and suddenly they are capable of working again, of being useful. Please don’t be angry at my analogy, but you must have been a kind of artificial limb to me…a moral prosthesis. I hope I haven’t offended you?” he asked tenderly, and leaned over to me.