“What a shame,” she said once she recognized me. “The dear lady is not at home.”
Suddenly, with a well-practiced movement she caught my hand and kissed it.
“Please don’t,” I said, but it was too late. “Forget the formalities, Juditka. I’ll wait for her.”
I smiled at the calm, proud, open face before me. This was Judit, my mother-in-law’s maid, who had been with her for fifteen years. She was a Transdanubian peasant girl and had joined my mother-in-law’s household when there was still a proper staff. She was a scullery maid then, very young, maybe no more than fifteen. When my father-in-law died and they gave up the large apartment, the girl moved into the inner-city apartment with my mother-in-law. In the meantime, Judit, who in marriageable terms was an old maid of thirty by then — or even over thirty years old — had been promoted to the rank of housekeeper.
We were standing in the dimly lit hall, so Judit put the light on. The moment she did so I started trembling. My legs were shaking and the blood drained from my face, but I continued to stand up straight. The housekeeper was wearing a colored cotton-print dress that morning, and a low-cut dirndl — cheap working clothes. She wore a white head scarf. And round her pale, muscular, peasant-servant neck, on a lilac ribbon, hung an amulet, a cheap locket of the kind you get on the market.
I stretched out my hand without hesitating, without thinking, and with a single movement tore the ribbon from her neck. The locket fell to the floor and opened. You know what was the strangest thing? Judit made no attempt to pick it up. She stood erect and, with a slow, easy movement, crossed her arms across her chest. She looked down at me without moving as I bent down, picked up the locket, and examined the two photographs inside it. Both showed my husband. One of them was very old, taken about sixteen years ago. My husband was twenty-two at the time, Judit fifteen. The other was taken last year, the one he was supposed to have had done for his mother, for Christmas.
We stood there a long time, both of us quite still.
“Forgive me,” she eventually said, courteously, almost grandly. “We shouldn’t just be standing here. Please, do come in.”
She opened the door and led me into her room. I entered without speaking. She stood on the threshold, shut the door, and firmly, quite decisively, turned the key — twice.
I had never entered that room before. Why should I have? … Believe it or not, I had never really studied her face before or regarded it as important.
I studied it now.
There was a white painted table in the middle of the room, and two chairs. I was weak and was afraid I might lose my balance, so I slowly made my way over to one of the chairs and sat down. Judit did not sit; she stood by the locked door, her arms folded, calm and determined, as if wanting to prevent anyone else coming in and disturbing us.
I took a good look around. I had a lot of time on my hands. I knew that every single object, each tiny scrap, was of paramount importance to me here, here at “the scene of the crime”—that’s the phrase that vaguely came to mind, the phrase Lázár had used for the room where I was now sitting. It was an expression I came across each day in the papers, when they reported how the police, having arrested the criminal, would go to the scene of the crime and conduct a thorough investigation … I was investigating the room in exactly the same way. Something had happened here, or some place like it, many years ago, an event lost in the mists of time … and now suddenly here I was — judge, witness, and perhaps victim too. Judit said nothing. She did not disturb me, understanding precisely how important everything about this room was to me.
But there was nothing surprising there. The furnishings were not exactly poor, but neither were they comfortable. It was the kind of room you see in a convent, a guest room prepared for the better class of secular visitor: the copper bed; the white furniture; the white curtains; the striped peasant rug; the picture above the bed of the Virgin, complete with rosary; the little jug of flowers on the bedside table; the extremely modest but carefully chosen little decorative objects ranged along the glass shelf above the basin. Do you know what this said to me? It said: resignation. It had an air of conscious, voluntary resignation. You could practically breathe it … And the moment I breathed it I no longer felt angry, I felt only sadness and a deep, bottomless fear.
Of course I felt all kinds of emotions and sensations in those long minutes. I noticed everything and sensed what lay beyond each individual item, lapping at them like a sea. It was someone’s fate: it was a life. Suddenly I felt scared. I could hear Lázár’s sad, hoarse voice, clearly and precisely predicting that I would be amazed to find the truth much simpler, much more ordinary, but much more frightening than I ever imagined. True enough, this was all pretty ordinary. And yes, frightening too.
Wait, I want to get things properly in perspective.
Just now I was saying that I detected an air of resignation. But I observed secrecy and outrage too. Don’t go away thinking this was a hovel, one of those Pest slums where poor servants find accommodation. It was a clean, comfortable room: a maid’s room at my mother-in-law’s could be no other. I also said it was the kind of guest room you find in a convent: little cells where the guest not only lives, sleeps, and washes, but is also obliged to consider his soul. Every object in such a place — the whole atmosphere — is a constant reminder of strict commandments issued by a superior being … There was no trace of perfume, cologne, or scented soap in the room. Beside the basin lay a common cake of tallow soap, the kind you use for laundry. Next to that some water for rinsing the teeth, a toothbrush, a brush, and a comb. I also spotted a box of rice powder and a facecloth of chamois leather. That was the sum of this woman’s worldly possessions. I took all this in, item by item.
There was also a framed group photograph on the bedside table. Two little girls, two spry adolescent boys, one of them in uniform, and a startled-looking older couple, a man and a woman, in ceremonial dress. In other words, the family, somewhere in Transdanubia. Next to them, fresh catkins in a glass of water.
A tangle of undarned stockings lay in a sewing basket on the table beside an out-of-date tourist brochure whose brightly colored cover showed children playing on the sandy beach of a faintly ruffled sea. The brochure looked worn, its corners turned down: you could see it had been read over and over again. And on the door there hung a maid’s black working dress with a white pinafore. That was the total sum of the room’s contents.
These commonplace objects implied a conscious self-discipline. You could tell from them that whoever lived here did not need to be taught order, that the order sprang from within, that she was quite capable of teaching herself. Do you know enough about servants’ rooms to know what they are stuffed with? Extraordinary objects, all those things their inner lives require: fancy hearts made of candy; brightly colored postcards; ancient, long-discarded cushions; cheap little china figurines; things thrown away by that other world, the world of their social superiors … I once had a chambermaid who collected boxes of the rice powder I had finished with and my empty perfume bottles; she collected this stuff the way wealthy connoisseurs collect snuffboxes, Gothic carvings, or works by the French impressionists. In the world they inhabit, these objects represent what we consider beautiful, as works of art. Because no one can live with just the bare necessities in the real world … we need a little superfluity in our lives, something dazzling, something that sparkles, something lovely, however cheap or worthless. Few people can live without the dream of beauty. There has to be something — a postcard, all red and gold, showing a sunset, or dawn in a forest. We’re like that. The poor are no different.