“And on no condition will you tell me her name?”
He said nothing. I could tell from his eyes and voice that he was uneasy, unable to decide.
“Do you like going to your mother-in-law’s house?” he suddenly asked.
“My mother-in-law?” I asked, astonished. “Of course, delighted to. But what has that to do with anything?”
“All I am saying is that Peter feels at home at his mother’s house too,” he mumbled. “When people are looking for something, they always look at home first … Life sometimes arranges things as artfully, as arbitrarily, as in detective fiction … You know how it is: the police are feverishly looking for clues here and there, sticking pins into the wall, while the letter they are looking for is lying in front of them, on the victim’s desk. But nobody thinks to look there.”
“Should I be seeking help in finding the woman with the lilac ribbon from Peter’s mother?” I asked, ever more confused.
“All I can say,” he answered cautiously, not looking at me, “is that before you set off into the wide world to look for Peter’s secret, you should look round Peter’s other home, his mother’s. I am sure you’ll find something there to help you. The parental home is always, to some extent, the scene of the crime. You’ll find everything you need to know about a man there.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Tomorrow morning I will visit her and have a look around … Only I don’t understand what I am supposed to be looking for.”
“It’s the way you wanted it,” he said, as if disclaiming all responsibility.
The music began to howl. We entered the hall among the dancers. Men talked to me; then, after a while, my husband took my arm and led me away. We went straight home. This all happened on the fifteenth of April, on Monday evening, in the fifth year of our marriage.
I slept deeply that night. I was like a burned-out element. The electricity sometimes runs through things and burns the resistance away. The soul darkens. When I woke and went into the garden — it was early spring and the mornings were warm with a touch of the sirocco, so some days I had breakfast set in the garden — my husband had already gone. I breakfasted alone, sipping bitter tea, not feeling hungry.
There were newspapers lying on the table. For lack of anything else to do, I read one of the headlines. A small state had just disappeared off the map. I tried to imagine how the people in that foreign country might feel, waking up at dawn to discover that their lives, their customs, everything they believed or had sworn by, had disappeared from one day to the next, had ceased to matter, and that they were now on the threshold of something entirely new — maybe better, maybe worse, but something that, at any rate, was utterly different from the country they knew, which might just as well have sunk beneath the waves, and that was where they had to live thenceforth, under entirely new conditions, underwater. I thought about it, and also about myself, and what I wanted … What divine commandment had I received, what was the message from heaven? What was the meaning of this continuous excitement in my heart? What was my anxiety, my humiliation, my sorrow compared to the anxiety and sorrow of those millions upon millions of people who were waking this morning to find they had lost what was most precious to them, that had been the center of their lives, the sweet, secret, familiar order of their homeland? … But I kept leafing distractedly through the papers, unable to give world affairs my full attention. I asked myself what right I had in a world like this to worry so intensely about myself, to be so obsessed by what would happen to me and whether I had any right to care so much about my own life … With so many millions of people living in fear and misery, should I really be worrying about whether I really owned every last little bit of my husband’s heart? What was my husband’s secret, or my personal happiness, compared to the world’s secrets, the world’s misery? What was I doing playing detective in a world that is savage enough, frightening and mysterious enough, already? … But these were pseudo-questions, you know, pretenses … One woman’s feelings don’t amount to an entire world. Then I thought back to what the old priest had said, and wondered if he was right. Maybe I didn’t have enough faith, enough humility … Perhaps there was something arrogant about me, something unworthy of a Christian, a woman, indeed of a human being; something arrogant about this crazy project, this amateur-detective attempt to scrape away the surface of a private world and reveal my husband’s secret; something unworthy about trying to find that certain mysterious person with her lilac ribbon. Perhaps … but I was so overwrought at the time I can no longer explain my feelings clearly.
I sat in the garden, the tea got cold, the sun was shining. The birds were already restless, chattering away. Spring was coming on. I thought how Lázár didn’t like the spring: all that fecundity, all those emissions, he said, affect the gastric juices and upset the balance between feeling and reason … That’s what he said. And then I remembered all we had talked about just a few hours ago at night, with the music in the background, beside the fountain, in that rich, cold, grand house, in the suffocating jungle smells of the conservatory. I remembered, and now it seemed as though it were all just something I’d read.
Do you know the feeling you get when you are beyond pain and despair, beyond the most tragic events, and suddenly become very sober, indifferent, almost cheerful? For example, when the person you loved best is being buried, and you suddenly remember that you have left the refrigerator door open back home and the dog is probably eating the cold meat you had saved for the wake? … And the very moment when everyone is singing and standing around the coffin, you start arranging things, whispering, as calm as you like, something about the refrigerator? … Because we are quite capable of that: we live between such infinitely divided shores, in a world of such vast distances. I sat in the sunlight and it was as if I were contemplating someone else’s bad luck, thinking quite coldly and rationally about all that had happened. I recalled what Lázár had said, word for word, but his words did not strike me now with the force they had then. The tension of the previous day had dissolved. I recalled sitting in the conservatory with the writer but it was as if it hadn’t been me. I thought of the lilac ribbon the way you might of a piece of society gossip. By the end, the content and nature of my life might have been summed up by others over tea or supper as follows: “Do you know the Xes? … Yes, the industrialist and his wife. They live on the hill at Rózsadomb. Things aren’t going well for them. The wife has discovered that her husband is in love with someone else. Just imagine, she found a piece of lilac ribbon in his wallet, then it all came out … Yes, they’re separating.” That would have been a way of putting it, what had happened to me, to us. How often had I heard this kind of thing about other couples, stray remarks overheard in company, and not even bothered with it … Could it be that one day we too would become subject to society gossip, my husband and I and the woman with the lilac ribbon?
I closed my eyes, leaned back in the sunshine and, like the wise woman of some primitive village, tried to imagine the face of the lilac-ribboned woman.
Because that face had a life — in the next street, somewhere in the universe. What did I know about her? What can we know of anyone? Five years I had lived with my husband, believing I knew everything about him, knowing his every habit, every gesture: the way he hurriedly washed his hands before meals, never even glancing at the mirror, combing his hair with one hand; the way he’d suddenly be smiling an absentminded, furious smile, never telling me what he’d been thinking of; and more — all we learn of another’s body and soul through intimate contact, however frightening, indifferent, moving, depressing, wonderful, or dull that might be. I believed it was all there was to know. Then one day I discovered I knew nothing about him … knew less, in fact, than Lázár, that strange, disappointed, sarcastic figure who exercised such power over my husband’s soul. What kind of power? … Human power. It was different from mine: greater than my powers as a woman. I can’t explain it, can only feel it, and have always felt it, from the moment I first saw them together. But that very same man had just told me the day before that he was now obliged to share his power with the lilac-ribboned woman … And now I knew that whatever wonderful or terrible things were happening in the world, it was pointless accusing myself of selfishness, lack of faith, or lack of humility, pointless comparing my problems to those of the world of nations, the problems of those millions suffering their various tragedies, because there was nothing I could do — selfish and petty as I was, obsessed and blind as I was — except get out on the street and search out the woman I had to confront face-to-face, the woman I had to talk to. I had to see her, to hear her voice, look into her eyes, examine her skin, her brow, her hands. Lázár said — and now, closing my eyes in the sunlight, I heard his voice again as clearly as if he were sitting opposite me and we were at the party with the music, back in the dizzying, unreal atmosphere of our conversation — that the truth was dangerous but at the same time far more commonplace, closer to hand, than I could imagine. What might that “commonplace” truth be? What did he mean by that?