That’s how it was with Lázár the evening after Judit’s visit. He talked about all kinds of things — about Rome, about new books, about the relationship between literature and the seasons. Then he stood up, shook my hand, and said good-bye. That was when I felt it had not been a game. My heart was thumping with tension. I felt he had left me to my fate, that I had to deal with things by myself from then on. That was the moment I first began to respect the woman who had had such an effect on Lázár. I respected her and feared her. A few days later I went away.
A long time passed. I have only vague memories of it. It was, you might say, the development section of the drama. I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details of that.
I traveled for four years, all over Europe. My father had no real notion of the reason for my absence. My mother might have known, but she kept quiet about it. For a long time I noticed nothing unusual. I was young and the world, as they say, was mine.
There was peace then … though not proper peace, not really. We were between two wars. The borders were never completely open, but the trains did not stop too long at the variously colored international barriers. People asked each other for loans, not only people but countries, as if nothing had happened, going about their lives with miraculous confidence. And, what was still more miraculous, they received the loans — long-term loans — and they built houses, big ones, small ones, and generally behaved as though they had seen the back of painful, terrible times forever, as though it were an entirely new era, so that now everything was as it should be: they could plan far ahead, bring up their children, and give themselves over to individual pleasures that were not only delightful but even a touch superfluous. That was the world in which I started traveling — the world between two wars. I can’t say that the feeling I set out with, and which I experienced at various stopping places on my journey, was one of absolute security. We behaved like people who had, to their surprise, been robbed of everything: our whole lives were tinged with suspicion during the brief period between two wars in Europe: we, all of us, individuals and nations, made enthusiastic efforts to be generous and great-hearted, but — secretly, at any rate — we carried revolvers in our pockets and would occasionally reach, in a panic, for our wallets in the pocket above our hearts. Not just for our wallets, probably, but for our hearts and minds too, because we feared for them also. Nevertheless, one could at least travel again.
Everywhere people were building new houses, new estates, new towns, and, yes, new nations too. I headed north first, then south, then west. Eventually I spent several years in the cities of the West. The things I loved and in which I most earnestly believed were most directly to hand there. It was like when we learn a language at school and then travel to the country where the book language is the mother tongue of real people. In the West I lived among the members of a truly civil society, people who clearly did not regard membership of their class as a form of acting or sloganeering, nor a chore, but simply lived in the manner befitting those who had inherited the house they lived in from their ancestors, a house slightly too small, a little too dark and old-fashioned perhaps, but the house they best knew, one not worth demolishing in order to build another. Their way of life was as it was, needing the odd spot of repair and upkeep. We, at home, were still busy building that house, a home worthy of the civic being; between palaces and cottages we were constructing a wider, more compendious way of life in which everyone might feel at home: Judit Áldozó, myself, both of us.
Judit was only a shadow in my thoughts during those years. At first she was primarily the memory of a fierce, fevered condition. Yes, I had been ill and beside myself, ranting. My eyes were not clear. I had become deeply conscious of my loneliness; a freezing wave of loneliness had swept into my life. Fearing loneliness, I fled from it to a person whose being, whose energy, and whose smile suggested that this loneliness might be shared. That was what I remembered. But then the whole world opened up and it proved very interesting. I saw all kinds of statues, gas turbines, and other forms of loneliness; I saw people who felt joy hearing the music of a single line of verse; I saw economic systems that promised dignity and generosity; I saw vast cities, mountaintops, beautiful medieval wells, little German towns, their main squares surrounded by sycamores; cathedral towers, beaches with golden sand and dark blue oceans; women bathing naked on the shore. I saw the world. The memory of Judit Áldozó couldn’t compete with the wonders of the world. She was less than a shadow compared to this new reality. Life showed me, and promised me, everything in those years. It offered me liberation from the narrow confines and melancholy clutter of our house. It stripped me of the clothes I had to wear in order to perform my parts back home, and let me lose myself in the traffic of the world. It offered me women too, an army of women, the women of the entire world, from Flemish brunettes with hot-dreamy looks, through bright-eyed French women, to meek German girls … all kinds of women. I moved in the world. Women revolved around me as they do around every man, sending messages, calling: the respectable who promised me their entire lives; the flirtatious who offered lives of simple, sensuous, wild abandon — nothing permanent, but something long enough, something more mysterious than a quick fly-by-night affair.
“Women.” Have you noticed the wary, uncertain way in which men pronounce the word? It is as if they were speaking of a not completely enchained, ever rebellious, conquered but unbroken tribe of discontents. And, really, what does the everyday concept “women” signify in the hurly-burly of existence? What do we expect of them? … Children? Help? Peace? Delight? Everything? Nothing? A few moments of pleasure?
We carry on living, desiring, meeting, and falling in love, and then we marry, and, with that one woman, we experience love, childbirth, and death, all the time allowing our heads to be turned by a neatly formed ankle, and ready to face ruin for the sake of a hairdo or the hot breath emanating from another’s lips. We lie with them in middle-class beds, or on sofas with broken springs, in cheap no-questions-asked hotels, down filthy side streets, and feel a very brief satisfaction. Or we grow drunk on high-flown sentiment with a woman, weepy and full of vows. We promise to face the world together, to assist each other, to live on a mountaintop, or in the heart of some great city … But then time passes, a year, or three years, or two weeks — have you noticed how love, like death, has nothing to do with clocks or calendars? — and the grand plan to which both the woman and the man have agreed is not carried through, or only partially carried through, not quite as either had imagined. And so the man and woman part, with anger or with indifference, and once again they set out, full of hope, ready to start again with someone new. Alternatively, they might stay together out of sheer exhaustion, draining the lifeblood from each other, and so sicken, killing each other little by little before dying. But then, in that very last moment, just as they are closing their eyes, what is it they understand? What had they wanted from each other? They seem to have done nothing except conform to an old, blind law, the law of love, at whose bidding the world must constantly renew itself, because the world requires the lust of men and women to perpetuate the species. So was that all? What, poor things, had they been hoping for? What have they given each other? What have they received? What a terrifying, secret audit! Is the instinct that draws one man to one woman personal? Isn’t it just desire, always, eternally, simply desire, that occasionally, for some brief interval, is incarnated in a particular body? And this strange, artificial excitement, the fever in which we live: might that not have been nature’s fully conscious way of preventing men and women feeling utterly alone?