Again Ervin smiled.
“No, not for a long time now. You see, it is true that when I first joined the Order I imagined that I would serve the Church with my pen, I would be a Catholic poet … But later … ”
“What? Your inspiration left you?”
“Not at all. I left it. I realised it was all really beside the point.”
Mihály thought deeply. He was beginning to understand what sort of worlds separated him from Father Severinus, who had been Ervin … “How long have you been in Gubbio?” he asked eventually.
“Wait a moment … it must be … six years. But it could be seven.”
“Tell me, Ervin, I used to think about this a lot, if you remember. Do you monks also have the feeling that time goes forward, and that every little bit of it has a special truth? Do you have a sense of history? If you recall some event, can you say if it happened in 1932 or in 1933?”
“No. It is one of the blessings of our lot that God lifts us out of time.”
Ervin began to cough violently. Mihály realised only then that he had been coughing for some time, a dry, ugly cough.
“Tell me, Ervin, isn’t there something wrong with your lungs?”
“Well, they’re certainly not in perfect order … in fact you could say they’re in a pretty bad way. You know, we Hungarians are really pampered. Houses in Hungary are so well-heated. These Italian buildings really wear you down, always in unheated cells and cold churches … and in sandals on the stone floor … and this cowl doesn’t warm you very much.”
“Ervin, you’re ill … aren’t they treating you?”
“You’re very good, Mihály, but you mustn’t grieve about it,” he said, coughing. “You see, it’s simply a blessing for me, being ill. Because of it they agreed that I could leave Rome to come here to Gubbio, where the air is so healthy. Perhaps I really will get better. Then again, physical suffering is part of our monastic system. Others have to mortify the body — in my case the body takes care of this itself … But let’s leave all this. You came here to talk about yourself. We shouldn’t be wasting precious time on things neither you nor I can do anything about.”
“But Ervin, it’s not as if … you shouldn’t live like that, and you should go somewhere where they looked after you, and made you drink your milk, and lie in the sun.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mihály. Perhaps the time for that will come. Even monks have to guard against death, because if we simply allow the illness to take us over it would be a form of suicide. If the problem gets serious, I really will see a doctor … but we’re still a long way from that, believe me. And now you must talk. Tell me everything that’s happened to you since I last saw you. And first of all, tell me how you found me.”
“János Szepetneki said you were somewhere in Umbria, he didn’t know where precisely. And some unusual chance happenings, some really strong indications, made me suspect that you were in Gubbio, and indeed the famous Father Severinus.”
“Well, I am Father Severinus. And now tell me about yourself. I’m all attention.”
He rested his head in his hand in the classical pose of the father-confessor, and Mihály began to speak, haltingly at first, and with difficulty, though Ervin’s questions were a wonderful help. “But that long experience of the confessional is quite wasted on me,” Mihály thought to himself, for he could never have withheld the outpouring that was just waiting to burst from him. As he spoke it all came to the surface — everything that since his escape had lived inside him like a repressed instinct: how deeply he felt a failure in his adult, or quasi-adult life, his marriage, his desperation to know where he might start again, what he could expect from the future, how he could get back to his true self. And above all, how he was tortured by nostalgia for his youth and the friends of his youth.
When he reached this point the strength of his emotion overwhelmed him and his voice broke. He was filled with self-pity, and at the same time ashamed of his own sentimentality before Ervin, before Ervin’s mountain-peak serenity. Then he suddenly burst out in shocked amazement:
“And you? How can you bear it? Doesn’t it upset you too? Don’t you miss them? How do you manage it?”
The faint smile again passed over Ervin’s face, then he bent his head, and made no answer.
“Answer me, Ervin, answer, I beg of you. Don’t you miss them?”
“No,” he said in a toneless voice, with a wild look on his face. “I miss nothing.”
There was a long silence between them. Mihály was trying to understand Ervin. It couldn’t be otherwise. He must have purged everything from himself. Since he had had to tear himself away from everyone, he had dug up from his soul the very roots of anything that might flower into those feelings that bind people together. Now there was no pain, but he lived on in this fallow, this barren, land, on the bare mountain … Mihály shuddered to think of it.
Then a sudden thought struck him:
“I heard a story about you … how you exorcised a woman who was visited by the dead, here, in some mansion in the Via dei Consoli. Tell me, Ervin: that was Éva, wasn’t it?”
Ervin nodded.
Mihály jumped up in excitement, and gulped down the remaining wine.
“Oh, Ervin, tell me … how was … what was she like, Éva?”
What was Éva like? Ervin considered this. “Well, how should she be? She was very beautiful. She was, as always … ”
“How? She hadn’t changed?”
“No. Or rather, I didn’t notice any change in her.”
“And what is she doing?”
“I’m not very sure. She spoke a lot about how lucky she’d been, and how much she’d moved about in the West.”
Had anything flared up in Ervin when they met? He dared not ask.
“You don’t know what she’s doing now?”
“How should I know. It’s a few years, I believe, since she was here in Gubbio. But I have to say, my sense of time is pretty unreliable.”
“And tell me … if you can … how did it happen that … how did you get the dead Tamás to leave?”
Mihály’s voice sounded with the fear that filled him whenever he thought of it. Ervin again smiled that little smile.
“It wasn’t difficult. The old house made her see ghosts. Those doors of the dead have affected others in the same way. I merely had to persuade her to move out. Then again, I believe she played the whole thing up a little. Well, you know Éva … I’m afraid she never actually saw Tamás. She wasn’t having visions. Although it is possible that she was. I can’t say. You know, I’ve had to deal with so many apparitions and ghosts over the years, especially here in Gubbio with its doors of the dead, I’ve become rather sceptical in this respect … ”
“But then … you did cure her?”
“Not at all. As usually happens in these cases. I spoke to her very seriously, prayed with her a little, and she calmed down. She came to see that the place of the living is with the living.”
“Are you sure of that, Ervin?”
“Absolutely sure,” he replied with great seriousness. “Unless you choose what I chose. Especially among the living. But why am I preaching this to you? Even you know this.”
“She said nothing at all about how Tamás died?”
Ervin did not answer.
“Tell me, would you be able to exorcise the memory of Tamás, and Éva, and all of you, out of me?”
Ervin thought deeply.
“Very difficult. Very difficult. And I don’t know if it would be a good thing, because what would you be left with then? Really, it’s very hard to counsel you, Mihály. Pilgrims as desperate for help and so hard to help don’t often come to Sant’ Ubaldo. What I could advise, what my duty should advise, you wouldn’t accept. The store of mercy opens only for those who want to share in it.”