“It’s you,” she said, and went pale.
“We were chatting, Mama,” I said, and stood up.
The three of us stood in the maid’s room, my mother-in-law, Judit, and I, like the three Fates in a tableau vivant. The image suddenly came to me and, grief-stricken as I was, I gave a nervous laugh. But I couldn’t go on laughing, because my mother-in-law entered the room, paler than ever, sat down on Judit’s bed, covered her face with her hands, and started to cry.
“Please don’t cry,” said Judit. “She has sworn not to tell him.”
She gave me a long, slow, lingering look, examining me from head to toe, then left the room.
After dinner I rang Lázár. He wasn’t home; it was his servant who answered the phone. About half past four the phone rang: it was Lázár from town. He was silent for a while, as if he were a very long way away, in another galaxy, because he had to think very carefully about his answer to my request, which was, after all, ridiculously simple. I wanted to see him as a matter of priority.
“Shall I come over to you?” he eventually asked rather gruffly.
But there was no point, because I was expecting my husband any moment. I couldn’t suggest meeting in a café or Konditorei either. Somewhat annoyed, he relented in the end, saying:
“If you insist, I’ll go home and wait for you at the apartment.”
I immediately accepted the invitation. I really didn’t think much about it in the meantime. In those days generally, but particularly in the hours following the conversation in the morning, I was in such an extraordinary state of mind I seemed to be moving at the dangerous fringes of life, in a space somewhere between prison and hospital, in another world altogether, where the normal rules of life — those that govern social and domestic life, simply did not apply. Even the trip to Lázár’s house felt like a strange emergency, like being in an ambulance or in a police car … Only once I was ringing the bell did the trembling of my hands remind me that what I was doing was something out of the ordinary, something not entirely proper.
He opened the door, kissed my hand, and without saying a word led me into a large room.
He lived on the fifth floor of a new building on the Danube embankment. Everything in the building itself was brand-new, comfortable and modern. Only the décor of his own apartment was old-fashioned, somehow secondhand and provincial. I looked around and was really surprised. However agitated and preoccupied I was, I still took it all in, and was starting to assess various details of the furnishings, because, well, you know how strange we all are, how even when we are being led off to be hanged, we carry on registering things, like a bird in a tree or a wart on the judge’s chin as he reads the death sentence … So there I was in this apartment. It was as if I’d called at the wrong place. Deep inside me, you know, I had already imagined Lázár’s den, and was expecting something exotic, something faintly Wild West, a wigwam perhaps, along with a mass of books and the scalps of his female conquests — or of his competitors. But it was nothing like that. There were bits of nineteenth-century cherrywood furniture, covered with regulation lace doilies, the sort you are greeted with out in the country — you know, those uncomfortable high-backed, fancy chairs, and the glazed sideboard stuffed with all kinds of office-clerk trash: glasses from Marienbad, Prague pottery … It was a room that might have been occupied by a middle-income country lawyer who had moved up to the city, whose wife had inherited the furniture and they couldn’t yet afford anything new … But there was no sign of a woman’s touch, and Lázár, as far as I knew, was quite wealthy.
He did not take me to the room with “all those books,” the one in which he received Judit Áldozó. He was courteous in every way, the way a doctor is to his sick patient on a first visit. He showed me to a seat and, naturally, did not offer me any refreshment. From the beginning to the end he was attentive, correct, and reserved, as though he had seen all this before and knew, the way that doctors know when addressing a terminally ill patient, that the conversation was pointless, that all he could do was listen, politely nodding and maybe scribble some ineffective prescription, a syrup or a powder, without offering any hope … What did he know of the situation? Only that there was no advising people in matters of feeling. I myself suspected this in my own vague way. Sitting there opposite him, I was annoyed to realize that it had been a pointless journey. There is no such thing as “counsel” in life. Things just happen and there’s an end of it.
“Did you find her?” he asked without preamble.
“Yes,” I answered, since he wasn’t someone who needed a wealth of explanation.
“And do you feel better and calmer for it?”
“I wouldn’t say so. And that’s precisely why I’ve come to you. I want to find out what happens next.”
“I really can’t tell you,” he replied without emotion. “Maybe nothing. You will recall that I warned you not to pick at the wound. It had healed quite nicely. There was, as doctors say, a decent cicatrix. But now it has been disturbed. It has suffered a small cut.”
The medical terms did not surprise me. It felt like a doctor’s waiting room or surgery anyway. There was, I should stress, nothing in the least “literary” about this, nothing like what you might imagine being in a famous writer’s apartment … No, everything was bourgeois, middle-class, terribly modest and orderly. He noticed my eyes flicking around. It wasn’t an entirely comfortable feeling sitting opposite him, because I could see he noticed everything. I felt exposed, as if I were on an operating table. I expected it all to finish up in a book one day.
“I need a certain order around me,” he explained. “People are so disorderly. Ideally one should be as orderly as a postmaster in one’s affairs. I can’t concentrate in a disordered environment.”
He did not say what it was he could not concentrate on; probably on life in general … on surfaces, on depths, on the places where lilac ribbons flutter.
“I have sworn not to say a word to my husband,” I said.
“He’ll find out anyway,” he nodded.
“Who will tell him?”
“You will. It’s just not possible to keep it quiet. It’s not only words that will tell him, it’s your very soul. Your husband will discover everything, and soon.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, without ceremony, he almost snapped.
“What do you want from me, madam?”
“A clear and precise answer,” I retorted, and it surprised me how clear and precise I could be. “You were right when you said that something in our lives would explode. Did I set it off, or was it an accident, mere chance? … I don’t suppose it matters now. In any case, there’s no such thing as chance. My marriage has failed. I fought like crazy and sacrificed my whole life for it. I don’t know what I did wrong. I found a piece of evidence — a few clues. I finished up talking to someone who told me she was closer to my husband than I was.”
He leaned on the table, listened, and smoked.
“Do you think this woman has left a permanent mark on my husband? Do you think she has lodged herself in his heart, in his memory, in his nerves forever? Is that what it’s all about? Is that what love is?”
“Forgive me,” he said courteously, but with a trace of mockery in his voice. “I am just a writer, and a male one at that. I don’t have the answers to difficult questions like that.”
“Do you believe,” I asked, “that there is one true love that grows to dominate a person’s soul so they can’t love anyone else?”