All this came as a surprise to me, because I normally gave everything proper consideration. Maybe a little too much consideration. Maybe that is what had been missing in my way of life: the ability to make sudden decisions, or spontaneity, as they call it. I never did anything just because an idea had occurred to me; never acted on the spur of the moment simply because of a rush of feeling, because an opportunity presented itself or because someone demanded it of me. In the factory and the office I was known as a man of considered judgment, someone who’d think things over slowly and carefully before making an important decision. So I was more surprised than anyone else that I was having this breakdown, because I knew, even as I was talking, that I was talking nonsense, and that nothing would be as I planned it, that I should have done it all differently, been subtler, more careful, or more forceful. You know, till that moment, I had pursued love according to the law of cash-and-carry, like the Americans in wartime: you pay, you take away … That was how I thought it was supposed to go. It wasn’t the most high-minded kind of thinking, but it was, if nothing else, healthily selfish. This time, though, I had neither paid for nor taken away the thing I desired, but had allowed myself to plead and prevaricate, in a quite hopeless fashion, in a situation that was undoubtedly humiliating for me.
There’s no explaining delirium. Everyone is seized by it at least once in life … and it may be that life is much poorer if it never once grips us and batters us like a storm, if our foundations are never once shaken by it, so the earth does not shake and the roof tiles all stay on, if its howling fury never once blows away everything that reason and character had kept in order. That’s what happened to me … You ask me if I regret it? No, I answer, I don’t regret it. But I wouldn’t exactly say it gave meaning to my life. It was just something that happened, like a bout of sickness, and once someone gets over a heavy bout of it, it is best to send him abroad to recover. That’s exactly what I did. Such traveling is, of course, a form of escape. But before I went away I wanted to be sure of something, so I asked my friend Lázár, the writer, to invite her over just once, so that he could see her and talk with her, and prevailed on Judit to accept the invitation. I know now that she was right, that I was a coward, and that that is why I did what I did. It was like sending her to the doctor, you see, so that he might examine her and declare her healthy … After all, she was in some ways like someone I might pick up in the street and include in my field of operations, as they have it in the military. She heard me out, disapprovingly, but did as I asked, without protest. She was sullen and certainly insulted. It was as if she had said: “Fine, I’ll go to the doctor if you insist and subject myself to an examination.” But go she did.
Yes, Lázár. It was a strange relationship between us.
We were contemporaries, school friends. He was already thirty-five by the time fame caught up with him: before that he was practically unknown. He used to write odd little articles for hopeless magazines in a tone that made me think he was laughing at his readers, that he had an endless contempt for the whole enterprise, for writing, for publication, for the reader, and for criticism. You could never work out what he really thought about anything. What did he write about? About the sea, about some old book, about some character, everything brief, no more than two or three pages in some magazine that appeared in an edition of no more than a few hundred, a thousand at most. These pieces were so personal you might have thought they were written in the private language of some strange tribe observing the world or what lay behind the world. This tribe — or so I felt when I first read his writing — was one of those vanishing tribes of which only a few members remained to speak the language, the mother tongue of Lázár’s articles. Apart from that he spoke and wrote a calm, passionless, beautiful Hungarian, pure and regular. He used to say to me that he read the works of the great nineteenth-century poet János Arany first thing at morning and last thing at night, the way a man might brush his teeth. But what he wrote was a kind of news from his other country.
And then, suddenly, he was famous. Why? It was impossible to explain. Hands reached out for him, he was in demand, first in literary salons, then on platforms in public debates, then in the press — you saw his name everywhere. People started imitating him: papers and journals were full of Lázár-style books and articles, none of them written by him and yet of all of which he was the hidden author. Then, even more surprisingly, the general public too began to take an interest in him, which was something no one understood, since his writing contained nothing that might amuse or console or delight people: he never seemed to be trying to establish any contact with his readers. But they forgave him that too. Within a few years he occupied the leading position in the peculiar competition that constitutes the worldly side of intellectual existence: his work was constantly discussed, his texts analyzed and picked over as though they were ancient Oriental manuscripts, subjects for high scholarship. None of this changed him. Once, at one particularly successful moment, I asked him what he felt. Didn’t the sheer noise around him offend his ears? For, naturally enough, there were critical voices too, jealous voices screaming at him, full of hatred and false accusation. But all this cry and countercry merged into a single sea of sound, out of which his name rose, sharp and clear, like the sound of the first violin in the orchestra. He heard my question through and turned it over in his mind. Then he replied most solemnly: “It’s the revenge of the writer.” That was all he said.
I knew something about him that others didn’t know: I knew he loved to play. Everything was play to him: people, situations, books, the mysterious phenomenon generally referred to as literature. Once, when I accused him of this, he shrugged and said that the deep secret at the core of art, in the artist himself, was the embodying of an instinct for play. And literature? I asked. Literature is, after all, more than that, literature offers answers and moral values … He heard me through as seriously and courteously as ever, and replied that this was true enough, but that the instinct that fuels human behavior is the instinct for play and that, in any case, the ultimate meaning of literature, as of religion, and, indeed, of all the arts, is form. He avoided my question. The mass of readers and critics naturally cannot know that a person can play just as solemnly with a kitten chasing a ball of wool in the sunshine as with a problem of knowledge or ethics, engaging with both with an equal inner detachment, concentrating entirely on the phenomenon or thought before him, giving his heart to neither. He was a player in that sense. People didn’t know this about him … And he was the witness, the observer in my life: it was something we often discussed, perfectly openly. Every man, you know, has someone who fulfills the role of defense lawyer, custodian, and judge, and at the same time his accomplice, in the mysterious and terrifying trial that is his life. That figure is his witness. He is someone who sees and understands perfectly. Everything you do is done partly with him in mind, so when you succeed at some venture you ask yourself: “Would he be convinced by it?” This witness hovers in the background throughout our entire life. He is not a comfortable playfellow in that sense. But there is nothing you can do to free yourself of him, and maybe you don’t even want to try.