I swore.
“Good,” she said, and seemed to have calmed down. “So now I’ll tell you.”
There was such exhaustion in her voice! She hung the rosary back on the wall. She walked to and fro, across the room, twice, her steps long and light … yes, very like a puma in a cage. She leaned against the cupboard. She was tall now, much taller than me. She threw her head back, folded her arms, and gazed at the ceiling.
“How did you know who it was? …” she asked suspiciously, with considerable disdain, talking like a cheap suburban servant now.
“I just knew,” I replied in the same way. “I found out.”
“Did he talk about it?”
There was a certain familiarity in that “he,” but a great deal of respect too. I could see she was still suspicious, wary in case there was something not quite right behind the scenes, worried that I might cheat her. She stood there the way the accused stands before the detective or the prosecutor; there is that helpless sense of waiting and then, under a conclusive “weight of evidence,” the collapse and desire to confess, but then the words stick in the throat … The criminal worries that the lawyer will trick him, that the lawyer doesn’t really know the truth but is just pretending, that he is wheedling a confession out of him, getting at the underlying truth by pretending to be nice, using some psychological sleight-of-hand … But he knows he can’t keep silent any longer. It’s like a process that, once begun, cannot be stopped. Now he actually wants to confess.
“No,” I said.
“Fine,” she said, and closed her eyes for a second. “I believe you.”
A moment of silence.
“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said, breathing heavily. “He wanted to marry me.”
“I see,” I said, as if nothing could be more natural. “And when was that?”
“Twelve years ago, in December. And he persisted. For two whole years.”
“How old were you then?”
“Eighteen.”
So my husband was thirty-six years old at the time. I carried on in my friendly way, as if nothing had happened.
“Do you have a photograph from that time?”
“Of him?” she asked, surprised. “Yes. You have just seen it.”
“No,” I said. “Of you, Judit.”
“I have,” she said sourly, more like an ill-tempered servant now. “It happens I have.”
She pulled open the dressing-table drawer and picked up a school exercise book covered in checkered paper — you know, the sort we used at school for French conversation and comprehension, notes on La Fontaine, and so forth … She leafed through it. There were religious images, advertisements snipped from newspapers … I stood up and looked over her shoulder as she turned the pages.
The religious images were of Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Joseph. But otherwise, everything in the book suggested a remote or close association with my husband. The newspaper cuttings were advertisements for my husband’s factory. There was a bill for a top hat sent by a city hat shop. Then there was my father-in-law’s obituary. And the announcement, on watermarked paper, of our forthcoming engagement.
She leafed through all this without emotion, a little tired, as if, having looked at such scraps often enough in the past, she was almost bored of them, yet unable to let them go. For the first time I was watching her hands: strong, bony, and long, with carefully trimmed but unvarnished nails. Long, powerful, bony fingers. With two of them she picked up one of the photographs.
“Here it is,” she said with a bitter smile, the corners of her mouth turned down.
The picture showed Judit Áldozó at the age of eighteen, just the age when my husband wanted to marry her.
It had been taken somewhere in town, in a cheap studio. Gold letters on the back advertised the fact that the owner was prepared to commemorate all moments of family rejoicing. It was a conventional photograph, posed and artificiaclass="underline" invisible metal rods adjusted the girl’s head to the required position, so that she should be looking toward something far away, her eyes startled and glazed. Judit Áldozó had braided the two bunches of her hair into a crown for the occasion, in the style of Queen Elizabeth of Habsburg. Her proud and frightened peasant face looked as if it were pleading for help.
“Give it back,” she said harshly, and took it away from me, slipping it back into the checkered notebook as though hiding something private from the outside world.
“That’s what I looked like back then,” she said. “I’d been here three years by then. He never talked to me. Then one day he asked me if I could read. I said I could. Good, he said. But he never gave me a book. We didn’t talk.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing,” she said, shrugging. “That’s all.”
“You just knew?”
“You can tell.”
“True,” I sighed. “And then?”
She looked up toward the ceiling and leaned against the cupboard. There was the same glazed, slightly startled expression in her eyes as in the photograph, as if she were gazing into the distant past. “So, after three years,” she said, speaking more slowly and haltingly now, “he talked to me. It was afternoon on Christmas Day. We were both in the parlor. He spoke for a long time. He was very nervous. I just listened.”
“Yes?” I said, and swallowed.
“Yes,” she repeated, and took a gulp too. “He said he knew it was very difficult. He didn’t want me to be his lover. He wanted us to go away together, somewhere abroad. Italy,” she said, and the tension vanished from her face. She smiled and her eyes sparkled as if she had really understood the full meaning of that wonderful word, as if it meant everything to her, more than anyone could say or hope for in life.
We both instinctively glanced at the cover of the dog-eared tourist brochure lying on the table, the sea slightly ruffled, the children playing in the sand … That was as close as she got to Italy.
“And you refused?”
“I did,” she said, her expression darkening.
“Why? …”
“I just did,” she snapped back. And then, uncertainly: “I was afraid.”
“Of what? …”
“Everything,” she said, and shrugged.
“Because he was master and you were servant? …”
“That among other things,” she quietly agreed, and cast me a look that was almost grateful, as if thanking me for saying so instead of her, saving her the agony. “I was always afraid. But not just of that. I felt something was wrong. He was too far above me,” she said, shaking her head.
“Were you afraid of your mistress?”
“Of her? … No,” she said and smiled again. I could see she thought me a little dense, someone completely at sea in matters of the real world, so she began to explain the situation to me as if she were talking to a child.
“I was not afraid of her, even though she knew.”
“Your mistress knew? …”
“Yes.”
“Who else knew? …”
“Only she and his friend. The writer.”
“Lázár?”
“Yes.”
“Did he speak to you about it? …”
“The writer? Yes. I went to his apartment.”
“Why?”
“Because he asked me to. Your Ladyship’s husband.”
The use of the term stood out, mocking and remorseless at once. What it said to me was: “To me he is ‘he.’ That much I know. To you he is just your husband.”
“All right,” I said. “In other words two people knew, my mother-in-law and the writer. And what did the writer say?”
She shrugged again.
“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “He just looked at me and listened.”