In any case, had he suggested where to look, had he given me a clue as to where I might find her?
I decided to visit my mother-in-law that very morning and have a serious talk with her.
I was flushed with heat. Once again I felt as if I had stepped into a hot, dry stream of air. I tried to cool down by deliberately thinking rational thoughts. I was burning up the way I was that moment I first opened — oh so long ago, the same time the previous day — the secret pocket in my husband’s wallet. Lázár had told me not to touch anything and to wait … Could it not all have been some horrific vision? Maybe the incriminating evidence, the lilac ribbon, was of less significance than I imagined? Or maybe it was just Lázár playing games again, the same peculiar, incomprehensible game he had been playing that evening some years ago? Could it be that life was no more than a terrible, extraordinary game to him, something to conduct experiments on as he pleased; that he was a chemist working with dangerous acids and corrosives, who wouldn’t care if one day he blew up the world? … There had been something cold about his eyes, in that ruthless, objective, calm, indifferent, and yet infinitely curious gaze of his, when he said I should go to my mother-in-law’s house and “look for clues” to Peter’s secret there … And yet I knew he was telling the truth, not playing games. I knew that the danger he warned me about was real.
There are days, you know, when one doesn’t really want to leave one’s room. When the sun, the stars, your environment, everything, speaks to you, when everything is pressingly relevant and wants to say something. No, not just about the lilac ribbon and what lay behind it in my mother-in-law’s house or elsewhere. It’s reality: the truth they’re after.
Then cook came out into the garden to give me the housekeeping book and we did our sums and discussed dinner and supper.
My husband was earning a lot of money at the time, and he gave me as much as I wanted without bothering to keep track of it. I had a checkbook and could spend as and when I liked. Naturally, I was very careful, particularly at that time, to buy only the essentials. But “the essentials” is a rather general concept … I was obliged to notice that for me, “the essentials” meant many things that, just a few years ago, would have been mere vanity — impossible luxuries. Our fish came from the most expensive delicatessen in town, our poultry was ordered, unseen, by phone. It was years since I had visited the market either with or without cook. I couldn’t tell you how much it cost for the first fruit of spring, I simply demanded the staff should buy the best and most expensive … My sense of reality was a little confused back then. And that morning, with the housekeeping book in my hand, the book in which that greedy magpie of a cook had scribbled whatever figures she fancied, for the first time in years it occurred to me that all the unhappiness and despair I felt, everything I took to be of primary importance, might be the product of money and the wicked, terrifying spell it exercised over me … I thought that if I were poor I might worry less about my husband, about myself, and about things like lilac ribbons. Poverty and sickness have this miraculous power of completely changing one’s priorities; one’s sentimental and psychological values go out the window. But I was neither poor nor sick in the strictly medical sense of the term. That was why I told cook:
“Prepare some cold chicken with mayonnaise tonight. But I only want breast of chicken. And lettuce salad.”
Then I went into the house to dress and get out into the world in search of the woman with the lilac ribbon. That was my mission. I didn’t plan it. There was nothing I specifically intended to say or do: I was simply obeying an internal command.
I was walking down the street, the sun was shining, and of course I had not the least idea where I was going or what I was looking for. I should call on my mother-in-law, I knew that much. However vague this sounds, I had not the slightest doubt that I would find the person I was looking for. The one thing I couldn’t know was that Lázár, with one word, almost his last word, had already set things up, and that I would stumble on the secret straightaway: I would simply dip into the tangled web of the world and pluck it out.
And yet I felt no surprise when I found her. Such a cheap word, “found” … I was just an instrument then, a performer in the play of fate. Whenever I think back now, I grow dizzy and feel a deep humility. I marvel at how everything turned out to be in such remarkable order, every detail immediately and closely following the one before it, everything fitting together with pinpoint precision. It was as if it had all been arranged by someone, perfectly timed, mysterious yet reassuring … I really learned the meaning of faith then. I had been like those people of little faith, abandoned on a stormy sea … but now I discovered that the world that looks so chaotic on the surface has an inner order, an order as rational and miraculous as music. The situation of which our personal destinies were a part, the destinies of three people, suddenly resolved itself: destiny was fulfilled. And every aspect of it suddenly became beautifully clear. It was like coming upon a tree bearing poisoned fruit. I was left simply staring.
But then I believed I was the active force, busy doing something, so I did just as Lázár suggested and took a bus to my mother-in-law’s house.
I thought I was simply doing a quick sweep, taking stock of the place. I might even stop there for a while to take in something of the clean air of her blameless life: it might help me recover a little from the horribly stifling experiences that had so occupied mine. I might tell her what I knew, do a little sobbing, and ask her to strengthen and console me … If she knew anything of Peter’s past she would tell me. That’s what I thought. I sat on the bus and imagined my mother-in-law’s house as a sanatorium on a high mountain. It was as if I were finding my way there from a fetid marsh. That was the mood in which I rang her bell.
She lived in the inner city, on the second floor of a hundred-year-old tenement building. Even the stairwell smelled of English lavender water. I might have been in a linen cupboard. As I rang and waited for the elevator, that cool scent hit me and I felt an overwhelming nostalgia for a different life, a cooler, leaner life free of passion. My eyes filled with tears as the elevator rose. And I still didn’t know that the power that had arranged all this was, in these moments, simply directing me. I rang the bell and the maid opened the door.