“No, there is no forgetting. God will not allow us to forget the questions life poses to us in a storm of passion. You are in a fever, child. A fever of vanity and selfishness. It may be that your husband’s feelings toward you are not precisely what you would have them be; it may be he is simply a proud or lonely man who cannot, or is afraid to, show his feelings, because they were badly wounded once. There are many such wounded people in the world. I cannot absolve your husband, dear child, because he too lacks humility. Putting two such proud people together can lead to a lot of suffering. But there is such greed in your soul at the moment it reminds me of sin. You want to dispossess another man of his soul. That’s always the case with lovers, it’s what they want. And that is a sin.”
“I didn’t know it was a sin,” I said, still kneeling, and started to shiver and tremble.
“It’s always a sin when we are not satisfied with what the world freely offers us, when people offer us something of themselves, when we greedily want to rob them of their secrets. Why can’t you live more modestly? With fewer emotional needs? … Love, real love, is patient, dear child. Love is endlessly patient and can wait. The course you have embarked on is impossible and inhumane. You want to take possession of your husband. But that is after God has arranged your mortal life to be the way it is. Can you not understand that?”
“But I am suffering, Most Reverend Father,” I said, and was afraid I might burst into tears.
“Then suffer,” he replied quite flatly now, almost indifferently.
“Why do you fear suffering?” he asked after a while. “Suffering is a fire that will purge you of greed and vanity. What is happiness? … And what gives you the right to be happy? Are you sure that your desire and love are so selfless they deserve happiness? If they were, you would not be kneeling here now, but would be living the life intended for you, going about your tasks, willing to do what life bids you do,” he said sternly, looking hard at me.
It was the first time he had looked at me with those small, bright, glittering eyes. Having done so, he immediately turned away and closed them.
Then, after a long silence, he spoke again.
“You say your husband is angry with you because of the child’s death?”
“That’s what I feel,” I answered.
“Yes,” he said, and turned the matter over in his mind. “It’s possible.”
It was clear the proposition did not take him by surprise; that he thought almost anything was possible where relationships between people are concerned. Almost as an incidental afterthought, he asked me:
“And you have never blamed yourself?” His voice was flat again, mere conversation.
His accent was marked, a little Slovakian. I don’t know why, but his regional accent was almost consoling in that moment.
“How can I answer such a question, Reverend Father? Who can answer a question like that?”
“Now look here,” he suddenly said, so informally, so gently that I wanted to kiss his hand. He spoke with zeal, in the simple rural manner that only old village priests can manage. “I can’t know what is hidden in your soul until you tell me, and what you have confessed to me today, child, is just some kind of strategy or ploy. But what God is whispering in my ear is that it is not the whole truth. What he is whispering is that you are full of self-accusation on this or that count. I could be mistaken, of course,” he added to excuse himself, and suddenly stopped there and fell silent. I could see he was regretting something.
“But that’s good,” he said after a while, his voice faint, almost shy. “If it is self-accusation, it is good. Because then you might eventually be healed.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Pray,” he simply said. “And work. That is what religion commands us to do. I know no more than that. Are you sorry for your sins? Do you regret them?”
“I am sorry and do regret them,” I garbled.
“Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys,” he said. “I absolve you.”
Then he began to pray. He wanted to hear no more from me.
Two weeks later, one morning, I found the lilac ribbon in my husband’s wallet.
Believe it or not I never went through my husband’s wallet or pockets. I never took anything from him. He gave me everything I asked for, so why should I steal? I know, many women steal from their husbands out of a sense of obligation, almost as an act of virtue. Women generally do a great deal in the name of virtue. “I’m not that kind of tramp,” they say, and get on with doing that which they have no taste for. But I am not that sort. I’m not boasting, I’m simply not.
And I was only looking into his wallet that morning because he rang to say he had left it at home and was sending one of his clerks for it. That’s no reason, you will say, of course. But there was something odd about his voice, something hurried, almost excited. He sounded anxious on the phone. You could tell from his voice that this little act of forgetfulness meant something to him. This is the kind of thing a person hears not with the ears but with the heart.
It was the crocodile-skin wallet he was carrying just now, the one you’ve just seen. Did I tell you I gave it to him? … He faithfully used it too. Because I should tell you quite clearly, that man was faithful and true. He kept faith, even with mere objects. He wanted to keep and look after everything. It was the bourgeois in him, the noble bourgeois. Nor was it only objects he wanted to preserve, but all he found delightful, beautiful, valuable, and meaningful in life — you know, the lot: good habits, ways of doing things, furniture, Christian ethics, bridges, the works people had constructed with enormous labor, ingenuity, and suffering, geniuses and laborers both … And it was all part of the same thing to him: he loved this world and wanted to preserve it from danger. Men call this culture. We women don’t use big words like that when talking to each other. It’s enough to remain wisely silent once they start quoting Latin. We know the true essence of things. All they know are concepts. The two are usually quite different.
But back to the crocodile-skin wallet. He looked after that too, because it was beautiful, because it was finely made, and because I gave it to him. When it needed mending, he had it mended. He was a stickler for detail. One time he said — laughing as he said it — that he was a true adventurer, since you could only have adventures if you had order about you and took care of things … You are amazed? Yes, I was often amazed when he talked like that. Living with men is very difficult, darling; they have souls, you see …
Would you like a cigarette? … I’m going to light one, because I feel a bit agitated. Remembering that lilac ribbon always brings back that tremulous, anxious feeling.
As I was saying, there was something about his voice that day. He wasn’t in the habit of phoning home about such minor matters. I offered to take it in to the factory myself at lunchtime, if he needed it. But he thanked me and rejected the offer. “Put it in an envelope,” he said. “The clerk will be there in no time.”
So now I set to examining the wallet, every last little nook and cranny of it. It was the first time in my life I had done something like that. Believe me, I was pretty thorough.
The outermost section had money in it, his Institute of Engineers card, 8 ten-fillér stamps and 5 twenty-fillér ones, and besides that there was his driver’s license and a season ticket for the baths, complete with photograph. The picture had been taken ten years ago, just after a haircut, when men tend to look ridiculously younger than they are, as though they had just failed their school exams. Then there were a few of his calling cards, with just the name, no crest, no position. He was very particular about such things. He would not have any heraldic device stitched into his linen or engraved on the silver. It was not that he despised them, but that he was careful to conceal them from the world. There was only one kind of rank among people, he used to say, and that was character. He would come out with things like that sometimes, matters of pride and sensitivity.