It was as if I had been thinking aloud. She answered me.
“I’ll leave the house. I am sorry for the old lady, but I have to go.”
“Where will you go, Juditka?” I asked, using the familiar form of her name, which seemed to come easily to me now.
“I’ll go into service,” she said. “In the country.”
“Can’t you go home?” I asked, glancing at the photograph.
“They’re poor,” she said without expression, quite matter-of-fact.
The word echoed in the room like a cracked bell. It was as if, ultimately, this was the reality that underlay everything we could discuss from then on. It was as if some object had flown through the room and we had both followed its path, I out of curiosity, she indifferently, without comment. The word was familiar to her.
“I don’t think that will help,” I said after a while. “Why should you leave? No one has harmed you and no one will. If you want to go now, why did you stay so long in the first place? Don’t you see,” I said, as if arguing with her, as if hitting on an important point, “that now that you have stayed so long, you might as well stay on. Nothing new has happened.”
“No,” she said. “I’m going.”
We spoke quietly, two women together, in brief half-sentences.
“Why?”
“Because it’s out in the open now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he knows.”
“My husband?”
“Yes.”
“Did he not know till now?”
“He knew,” she answered. “But he has forgotten.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“And who is there to tell him seeing he has forgotten?” I asked her.
“You, ma’am,” she stated quite simply.
I put my hand to my heart.
“Look here, my girl,” I said. “What are you talking about? That is your fevered imagination talking. Why do you think I would tell him? What could I possibly say?”
By now we were staring at each other with undisguised curiosity, looking into each other’s eyes so keenly, so greedily, we were like people who had lived together for years with our eyes closed. Now that our eyes were open, we could not get enough of what we saw. And at the same time we knew for the first time that all these years we had never been brave or honest enough to let our eyes meet. We always looked away and talked of something else. We lived in our respective spaces. It was just that both of us carried a secret, and this secret was the meaning of both our lives. And now we had admitted it.
What did she look like? Maybe I could describe her for you.
But first a glass of water, is that all right? My throat is dry. Miss, just a moment, a glass of water, please. Thank you. Look, they have started putting the lights out already … But there isn’t much more. Would you like another cigarette?
Well, she had a wide brow, a pale, open face; her hair was a bluish black. It was pinned up in a bun, parted in the middle. She had a snub, Slavic nose. Her face was quite smooth, with fine, clearly defined features, like the face of Mary in mourning in one of those village altarpieces painted by some anonymous, traveling artist. It was a proud face, so pale it was almost white. The blue-black hair framed that white like … but I’m not good at comparisons. What can I say? I leave that kind of thing to Lázár. Not that he would say anything: he’d only smile, because he thinks comparisons are below him. It is facts he wants, simple sentences.
So I’ll stick to plain facts, if you’re not bored.
It was a beautiful, proud peasant face. In what way peasant? It just was. It lacked the patently obvious complexity of expression you invariably find on middle-class faces, that tense, vulnerable air of sourness. This face was smooth, implacable. You couldn’t charm it into a smile with cheap compliments and niceties. It was a face alive with memories, memories of ages long since vanished, memories that were probably not even personal. Tribal memories. The eyes and the lips led independent lives. Her eyes were blue-black like her hair. I once saw a puma at the Dresden Zoo. Her eyes were like that.
Those eyes were staring at me now the way a drowning man might stare at someone on the shore, possibly a murderer, or a potential rescuer. My eyes are feline too, a warm light brown … I know my eyes were glittering too that moment, searching her face the way beams search when an army is expecting an assault. But it was her lips that were most terrifying. Soft, pouting lips. It was the mouth of a big beast that was no longer carnivorous. Her teeth were a brilliant white, strong and straight. She was clearly a powerful woman, muscular and well proportioned. And now it was as if a shadow had fallen across that white face. But she made no complaint. She answered me quietly and confidentially, in the voice not of a servant but of a woman like myself.
“There are these,” she said. “The pictures. He will know now. I’ll go away,” she obstinately repeated, almost a little crazed.
“Could it be that he hasn’t known till now?”
“Oh,” she said, “it’s a long time since he looked at me.”
“And you always wear that locket?”
“Not always,” she said. “Only when I’m alone.”
“What happens when you are on duty and he is here, visiting?” I asked more confidentially. “Don’t you wear it then?”
“No,” she replied, equally confidentially, “because I don’t want to remind him of it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Just because,” she said, and opened her blue-black eyes wide as if staring down a well, into the distant past. “Why should he remember, now that he has forgotten?”
Very quietly, I asked her, in confidence, wanting to tease out the answer:
“What, Judit? What was there to forget?”
“Nothing,” she replied, cold and harsh.
“Were you his lover? Tell me.”
“No, I wasn’t his lover,” she replied, her voice clear and strong, as if she were accusing someone.
We fell silent. There was no arguing with that voice; I knew it was the truth. And you can hate me, you can tell me I was wrong, but at the very moment I relaxed a secret inner voice told me: “It’s a pity she’s telling the truth. How much simpler it would all be …”
“So what happened? …” I asked.
She shrugged, clearly flustered, fury, indignation, and despair flashing across her face like lightning over a deserted landscape.
“Will Madam keep it to herself?” she asked in a cracked, raw voice, as if in warning.
“Keep what?”
“If I tell her, will she keep it to herself? …”
I looked into her eyes. I knew I had to be true to whatever I promised. This woman would kill me if I lied to her now.
“If you tell me the truth,” I eventually said, “that will be the end of it.”
“Swear,” she said, solemn and uncertain.
She stepped over to the bed and took the rosary from the wall, handing it to me.
“Will you swear?” she asked.
“I swear,” I said.
“That you will never tell your husband what you heard from me, from Judit Áldozó?”
“Never,” I said. “I swear.”
I can see you don’t understand this. Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure I understand it, either. But then it all seemed so natural, so simple.… I was standing in my mother-in-law’s maid’s room, swearing to a servant that I would never tell my husband what I was about to hear from her? Is that simple enough? Yes, I think it is.