Hang on a minute, I’ve got a headache. Waiter, a glass of water! And an aspirin. Thank you.
Talking about it now, I feel the same dizziness as I did then. It was like leaning over a huge waterfall. And there is no safety barrier anywhere, not a hand to reach out for. Only the water roaring and the call of the deep, and you suddenly feel that profound, frightening urge … suddenly you know you need every ounce of your strength to turn around and walk away again. You can still do something. You just have to take a step backwards, to say a word, to write a letter, to do something. Down there waits the roaring water. That’s how it feels.
That’s just what I was thinking of when I got this headache. Today I can see all this clearly, at least a few moments of it. For example, when she told me that she had a lover in London, a Greek teacher of singing. That was near the end, once she had decided to come home. But first she wanted clothes: shoes, decent luggage. The Greek music master bought her everything she wanted. Then she came home, took a room near the station, picked up the phone, and rang me, saying “Hello” in English, as though she had forgotten Hungarian.
What effect did this news have on me? I’d like to be honest with you, so I am trying to recall, to look into my heart, to check my recollection, and can only answer in a single word: none. It is hard for people to understand the true significance of actions and relationships. Someone dies, for example. You don’t understand it. The person is already buried, and you still feel nothing. You go about in mourning with a ceremonial solemnity, you look straight ahead of you when you are in society, but then, when you’re at home, alone, you yawn, you scratch your nose, you read a book and think of everything except the dead man you are supposedly mourning. On the outside you behave one way, properly somber and funereal; but inside, you are astonished to note, you feel absolutely nothing, at most a kind of guilty satisfaction and relief. And indifference: a deep indifference. This lasts a while, for days, perhaps for months. You cheat the world: you are indifferent on the sly. Then one day, much later, maybe after a year, when the dead one has long decomposed, you are just walking along and suddenly you feel dizzy and have to lean against the wall because the event has finally gotten through to you: the feeling that had tied you to the dead one. The meaning of death. The fact, the reality of it, the knowledge that it is useless to scrape away the earth with your fingers and uncover what is left of him: you will never again see that smile, and all the wisdom and power in the world is incapable of raising the dead man to make him walk down the street toward you with a smile on his face. You can lead an army and occupy every corner of the globe, but it’s still useless. And then you cry out. Or maybe not even that. You just stand in the street, pale, aware of a loss so great it seems the world has lost all meaning. It is as if you were left totally alone, the only man on earth.
And jealousy. What does that mean? What is there behind it? Vanity, of course. Seventy percent of our body is made up of fluids; only the remaining thirty percent is constituted of the solid matter that makes up a human being. In the same way, human character is comprised of seventy percent vanity, the rest made up of desire, generosity, fear of death, and a sense of honor. When a man in love walks down the street with bloodshot eyes because a woman — just as vain as he is, just as needy, just as lonely, just as desperate for happiness, just as unfortunate a creature as everyone else — has found brief solace in another man’s arms somewhere in town, it is not that he wants to save the woman’s body or soul from some imagined danger or humiliation: it’s his own vanity that he wishes to preserve from harm. Judit told me she had a Greek music master for a lover. I nodded politely, as if to say “Yes, I see,” and changed the subject. And indeed, right at that moment, I felt nothing. It was much later, once we had divorced, once I knew that other people loved her too, once I was alone, that I remembered the Greek music master, and groaned in fury and despair. Well, then, I thought, I would kill them both, both Judit and the Greek music master, if I ever laid hands on them. I suffered like a wounded creature, a wild animal shot in the thigh, all because a woman with whom I had nothing more to do, whose society I avoided because we had failed each other in every respect, had at some time in the past an affair with a man whom she, Judit, would only faintly remember now, the way one remembers a dead man one hardly knew. But then, at the moment she actually confessed to the affair, I felt nothing. I carried on peeling an apple with a polite, agreeable expression on my face, as if this were precisely what I expected to hear and I were content to get the anticipated news.
That was how we got to know each other.
Then, eventually, Judit had had enough of all that my money could buy her. She had bolted her food like a greedy child, and now she was sick. Disappointment and indifference followed. She woke up one day offended — not by me, not by the world at large, but by the realization that no one can pursue their desires for long without due punishment. I found out that back in her childhood at home, on the farm, they were as unspeakably, as impossibly, as shamefully poor as sociological studies sometimes describe. They had a little house and a few acres of land, but debt and the size of the family meant they had to sell. After this there remained nothing but a shack and a yard. And that’s where they lived, her father, her mother, and her paralyzed sister. The children were scattered about the world: they were engaged in service. She spoke about her childhood without emotion, in a matter-of-fact way, but it took her a long time to speak about poverty. She never tried to make me feel guilty; she was too much of a real woman for that — in other words, she was wise and practical in the essential things. People don’t blame fate for death, sickness, and poverty, they accept and bear it: she simply stated things. She told me how in winter they lived underground, she and the family. Judit would have been six when famine drove them from their home to another part of the country, where they took jobs harvesting melons. She didn’t mean “living underground” in a figurative sense: she meant really underground, digging a deep ditch in the earth, covering it with reeds, and spending the entire winter there. She also told me, in great detail — and I could see this childhood memory meant a lot to her — that there were dreadful frosts that year, so the meadow mice had to scamper all over them and take refuge with them in the ditch. It was very unpleasant, Judit recalled, in a faraway voice but without complaint.
So you see, there was this beautiful woman sitting opposite me with expensive furs round her neck, her fingers glittering with jewels in the dazzling restaurant, so not a man could pass by without running a brief glance up and down her, and all the while she was quietly telling me how unpleasant it had been living underground in the great frost with thousands of mice running over their makeshift beds. At times like this I sat in silence beside her, looking at her, listening to her. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had slapped me across the face sometimes, not for any particular reason but simply because she happened to remember something. But Judit simply continued talking, as matter-of-fact as ever. She knew more about poverty, the world, and living with others than all the sociological textbooks put together. She never blamed anything or anyone; she simply remembered and observed.