They went on till three in the morning. Then the Persian piled the two film studio girls he had been entertaining into a car, invited the others for Sunday afternoon at his villa in Auteuil, and took his leave. The others made their way home. Sári was escorted by the French gentleman, Erzsi by Szepetneki.
“I’m coming up with you,” Szepetneki announced when they reached the door.
“How charming. Especially as I share with Sári.”
“Damnation. Then come to my place.”
“It’s clear, Szepetneki, you’ve been a long time away from Budapest. Otherwise there’s no other way to explain how you could so little understand the sort of woman I am. You’ve ruined everything.”
And without a word of parting, she went off in great triumph.
“Hey, what was all that flirting with this Szepetneki?” asked Sári when they had settled into their beds. “Just be careful, that’s all.”
“It’s already over. Can you imagine: he wanted to come up with me.”
“Did he now? You’re behaving as if you had never left Pest. ‘My child, never forget that Budapest is the most moral city in Europe.’ That’s not how they take these things here.”
“But Sári, the first evening … So all it needs for a woman’s dignity is … ”
“Of course. But then you should never even talk to men … Here that’s the only way a woman can ‘defend her dignity’. Just as I do. But tell me, why should a woman defend her dignity? Just tell me why. Do you think I wouldn’t have happily gone with that Persian if he had asked me? But did he ask me? It was in his mind. What a wonderful man! Otherwise, you did well not to get involved with this Szepetneki. He’s very good-looking, I won’t deny, and very much the man, but I have the feeling … look, what I’m trying to say, but you know this already, he’s a crook. He’ll end up taking your money. ‘Take very great care, my child.’ He once stole five hundred francs from me on a similar occasion. So, night night.”
“A crook,” Erzsi thought to herself, as she lay without sleeping. “That’s just what he is.” All her life she had been the model of a good girl, adored by her nannies and fräuleins, her father’s pride and joy, the best pupil in the form, sent abroad to academic competitions. Her whole life had been sheltered and ordered, the good bourgeois life consecrated to a sternly supervised moral order. In due course she married a wealthy man, dressed elegantly, took on a grand house and presided over it as a model housewife. She always wore the identical hat sported by every other woman of the same rank in society. She took her summer holidays where fashion dictated, held the same opinions about theatrical productions, uttered the turns of phrase currently de rigueur. In everything she was a conformist, as Mihály would say. Then she began to get bored. The boredom developed into a full neurosis, and then she chose Mihály for herself, because she felt that he was not entirely conformist, that in him there was something utterly alien to the conventions of bourgeois existence. She believed that through him she too could get beyond the walls, into the badlands, the wide flood-plain and what lay there in the unknown distances. But Mihály was simply trying, through her, to become a conformist himself, using her as a means to become a regular bourgeois, only stealing out into the badlands, into the bushes, furtively and alone, until conformity no longer bored him and he was used to it. Now if János Szepetneki, who had no wish to conform, who lived more or less as a professional bandit beyond the walls, who was so much more untamed and vigorous than Mihály … if he … “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright/In the forests of the night … ”
The Sunday afternoon at Auteuil was elegant and dull. The actress-types were not there this time, and the company entirely mondain and well-heeled, typical of the French grande bourgeoisie. But this world did not interest Erzsi, being even more conformist and devoid of tigers than its Budapest equivalent. She began to breathe freely only when, on the way home, they called to take János Szepetneki out to dinner, and then went on to dance. János was demonic. He drank, showed off, recited poetry, wept and was at times extremely manly. But all this was really quite superfluous. He was thoroughly overdoing his part because, not to put too fine a point on it, Erzsi was without doubt already disposed to spend the night with him, following the inner logic of events, and in quest of the burning tiger.
PART THREE ROME
Go thou to Rome — at once the Paradise
The Grave, the City, and the Wilderness.
XIII
MIHÁLY had now been in Rome for several days, and still nothing had happened to him. No romantic leaflet had fallen out of the sky to direct him, as he had secretly expected after what Ervin had said. All that had happened was Rome itself, so to speak.
Compared with Rome, every other Italian city was simply dwarfed. Venice, where he had been with Erzsi, officially, and Siena, where he went unofficially with Millicent, paled in comparison. For here he was, in Rome alone, and, as he felt, on higher instructions. Everything he saw in Rome seemed to symbolise fatality. The feeling that, in the course of a morning stroll, or late one special summer afternoon, everything would suddenly be filled with a rare and inexpressible significance, was one that he had known before. Now it never left him. He had known streets and houses to stir in him far-reaching presentiments but never with the force of these Roman streets, palaces, ruins, gardens. Wandering among the vast walls of the Teatro Marcello, gazing into the Forum with wonder at the way little baroque churches had sprung up between the ancient columns, looking down from some hill at the star-shape of the Regina Coeli prison, loitering in the alleyways of the ghetto, passing through the different courtyards from Santa Maria sopra Minerva to the Pantheon, with its great millwheel of a roof open to the dark blue summer sky: these filled his days. And in the evening weary, weary to death, he would fall into bed in the ugly little stone-floored hotel room near the station, where he had scuttled in terror on the first evening, and then lacked the energy to change it for something more suitable.
From this general trance he was awakened by a letter from Tivadar, which Ellesley had forwarded from Foligno.
Dear Misi,
We were all very concerned to read that you’ve been ill. With your usual vagueness you forgot to mention what precisely is wrong with you, and you can imagine how anxious we are to know. Please remedy this in due course. Are you now fully recovered? Your mother is extremely worried. Don’t take it amiss that I’ve not sent you any money before this, but you well know the difficulties with foreign exchange. I hope the delay hasn’t caused you any problems. Now, you wrote, send a lot of money. This was a bit vague—‘a lot of money’ is always relative. You may find what I have sent rather little, since it’s not much more than the amount you say you owe. But for us it is a lot of money, considering the state the business is in just now, about which the less said the better, and the major investments we made recently, which will take years to amortise. But at least it will be enough for you to pay off your hotel bills and come home. Luckily you had a return ticket. Because it hardly needs saying, you really have no alternative. You can understand that in the current circumstances the firm really won’t stand the strain of continuing to finance one of its partners residing expensively abroad, quite without rhyme or reason.