“Why am I afraid?” he suddenly started. For this, this thing that was about to happen right now, was what he had wanted, what he had planned. Yes, he was going to die — but he wanted to die — and there beside him, in the flesh, perhaps even taking part, would be a beautiful girl bearing a special secret, in the role of death-demon, as on the Etruscan tombs.
Now he really longed for it. His teeth chattered and his arms were numb with terror, but he wanted it to happen. They would open the door and the girl would come in to him, come to the bed and kiss and embrace him, while the murder weapon went about its work … Let her come and embrace him … only let her come … only let them open the door …
But the door did not open. Already outside the early morning cocks were crowing, the next room was completely silent, the night-light itself was flickering low, and he fell into a deep sleep.
Then it was morning, like any other morning. He woke in a bright room, a bright friendly room, to Vannina coming in and asking how he had slept. It was morning, a normal, friendly Italian summer morning. Soon it would be horribly hot, but now it was still pleasant. Only the aftertaste of last night’s drunkenness troubled him, nothing else.
The girl was saying something, about how drunk he had been the night before, but this had endeared him and made him very popular with all the party, and they had kept him there overnight because they were afraid he wouldn’t be able to make it home.
Talk of going home reminded him of Éva, who surely must have called on him the evening before to be with him when … What would she think of him? That he had run away: had run away from her?
Then it occurred to him that in the course of the whole alarming and visionary night he had not once thought of Éva. The love-pause. The longest pause of his life. Strange thing, to die for a woman and never think of her the entire night — and what a night!
He got his clothes more or less in order and took his leave of a few people sitting outside in the bar area who greeted him like their dear old friend. How the sun shone in through the little window! Really there was nothing rat-like about these people. They were the good honest Italian proletariat.
“And these people wanted to kill me?” he wondered. “True, it’s not really certain that they did intend to kill me. But it’s strange that they didn’t after all, in fact they must have really longed to while they were stealing my wallet. No, these Italians are really quite different.”
His hand unconsciously groped for his wallet. The wallet was there in its place, next to his heart, where the Middle-European, not entirely without a touch of symbolism, keeps his money. He stopped in surprise, and took the wallet out. The two hundred lire and the small change, a few ten-lire coins, were unmistakably there.
Perhaps they had put the wallet back while he slept — but there would have been no sense in that. More probably they had never taken it. It had been there in his pocket all the time he had believed it gone. Mihály calmed down. This was not the first time in his life that he had seen black as white, and his impressions and suppositions made themselves entirely independent of objective reality.
Vannina accompanied him out the door, then came with him a short way towards the Gianicolo.
“Do come again. And you must visit the bambino. A godfather has his duties. You mustn’t neglect them. Come again. Often. Always … ”
Mihály presented the girl with the two hundred lire, then suddenly kissed her on the mouth and hurried off.
XXV
HE ARRIVED BACK in his room. “I’ll rest for a bit, and think carefully about what I actually want, and whether I really want it; and only then will I write to Éva. Because my position with her is rather ridiculous, and if I were to tell her why I didn’t come home last night, perhaps she wouldn’t believe me, it’s all so stupid.”
He automatically undressed and began to wash. Was there any point in still washing? But he hesitated only for a moment, then washed, brewed himself some tea, took out a book, lay down and fell asleep.
He woke to the sound of the doorbell. He hurried out, feeling fresh and rested. It had been raining, and the air was cooler now than in recent days.
He opened the door and let in an elderly gentleman. His father.
“Hello, son,” said his father. “I’ve just arrived on the midday train. I’m so glad to find you at home. And I’m hungry. I’d like you to come out to lunch with me.”
Mihály was immensely surprised at his father’s unexpected appearance, but surprise was not in fact his predominant feeling. Nor indeed was it the embarrassment and shame when his father looked around the room, struggling painfully to stop his face betraying his horror at the shabby milieu. A quite different feeling filled him, a feeling he had known of old, in lesser degree, in the days when he often went abroad. The same feeling had always affected him when he came home from his longer absences: the terror that his father had in the meantime grown older. But never, never, had his father aged so much. When he had last seen him he was still the self-confident man of the commanding gestures he had known all his life. Or at least that was how Mihály had still thought of him, because he had then been at home for some years, and if any change had occurred in his father during that time he had not noticed its gradual workings. He now registered it all the more sharply because he had not seen his father for a few months. Time had punished his face and his figure. There were just a few, but quite undeniable, signs of anxiety: his mouth had lost its old severity, his eyes were tired and sunken (true, he had been travelling all night, who knows, perhaps third class, he was such a parsimonious man), his hair was even whiter, his speech seemed rather less precise, with a strange, and at first quite alarming hint of a lisp. It was impossible to say exactly what it was, but there was the fact, in all its dreadful reality. His father had grown old.
And compared with this everything else was as nothing—Éva, the planned suicide, even Italy itself.
“Just don’t let me burst out crying, not just now. Father would deeply despise that, and he might also guess my tears were for him.”
Mihály pulled himself together and put on his most expressionless face, the face he habitually adopted for anything to do with his family.
“It was very kind of you to come, Father. You must have had important reasons for making this long journey, in summer … ”
“Yes of course, son, my reasons were important. But nothing unpleasant. There isn’t anything wrong. Although you haven’t asked, your mother and the family are well. And I see there’s nothing particularly wrong with you. Well then, let’s go and have lunch. Take me somewhere where they don’t cook in oil.”
“Erzsi and Zoltán Pataki were with me the day before yesterday,” his father said during the meal.
“What’s that? Erzsi’s in Pest? And they were together?”
“Oh yes. Pataki went to Paris, they made up, and he brought Erzsi home.”
“But why, and how?”
“My son, I truly do not know, and you can imagine, I didn’t enquire. We talked only about business matters. You know that your … how can I put this? … your odd, but I have to say not entirely surprising, behaviour placed me in an absurd situation with regard to Erzsi. An absurd financial situation. For Erzsi to liquidate her investment, in today’s climate … but you know all this, I think. Tivadar told you all about it in his letter.”
“Yes, I do know. Perhaps you won’t believe this, but I’ve been terribly worried about what might happen. Erzsi said that Zoltán … but do go on.”