But as I say, one day she had had enough of her new life. She was sick of it. Maybe she had recalled something. Maybe she understood that she couldn’t be compensated for all that had happened to her and the others, to countless millions of people, by rushing round the shops: that there was no solution to be found on the individual level. Great matters are not settled by personal means. The personal is hopeless, superfluous. There is no personal recompense for what has happened and goes on happening to people at large, for what happens now and has happened for a thousand years. And all those who break free for a moment, emerge from the shadows, and bathe in the light: even in their happiest moments they harbor the guilty memory of their betrayal. It is as if they had committed their souls for eternity to those left behind. Did she know all this? She never talked about it. People don’t talk about the reasons for their poverty. She remembered poverty as one of the natural world’s natural phenomena. She never blamed the rich. If anything, she blamed the poor, recalling them and everything that constituted poverty in slightly mocking fashion. As if the poor could somehow help it. As if poverty were a form of sickness, and all those who suffered with it might have somehow avoided it. Maybe they didn’t look after themselves properly; maybe they overate or didn’t wear the right clothes in the evening when it was cold. It was the accusing way close family speak of the chronically sick, as if the dying man suffering from acute anemia with only weeks to live might have done something about it. “He should have started taking his medicine earlier,” “He should have let someone open the window,” “He shouldn’t have stuffed himself with poppy-seed cake!” If only the poor man had done all this, he might have escaped the anemia that was killing him! That was something like the way Judit regarded the poor and poverty. It was as if she had said: “Someone should have done something about it.” But she never blamed the rich. She was too worldly-wise for that.
She was more worldly-wise than is wise, and now, when the goods of the world were laid out before her, she suddenly felt sick, because she had tried to cram in too much of it. But it was her memories that did it, really. Memories are more potent than indulgence. They are always more potent.
She wasn’t a delicate creature, but her memories still got the better of her. I could see her struggling against her weakness. Ever since the world began, there have been healthy and sick, rich and poor. We can alleviate poverty, we can strive for greater equality, we can put limits on our greed, our profiteering, our rapacity, but we can’t turn a dullard into a genius by education, can’t teach the cloth-eared the heavenly beauties of music, nor can we teach temperance to the overfed. Judit never talked in terms of justice: she was too worldly-wise for that. The sun rises and sets, she thought, and you will always find the poor somewhere. She had risen from the ranks of the poor simply because she was beautiful, a woman, and because I desired her. But she was growing wise to me too. For her, it was like emerging from a trance. She started looking round. She started to listen.
Apart from our first meeting she had rarely looked directly at me. People don’t gaze into the eyes of an idea, into the eyes of supernatural beings that determine their fates. There must have been a certain glow, a kind of dazzling luminosity, around me in those early years that meant she had to blink and squint when she raised her eyes to meet mine. The effect wasn’t due to my personality or social rank, nor to the fact that I was a man or that I was in any way a special being. To her I had been a secret code that she dare not crack because such codes are the key to happiness and misery. I was, for her, the condition to which a person might aspire her entire life. But when the possibility of that condition arose and was achieved, she recoiled, was disappointed, and became vengeful. Lázár was very fond of one of Strindberg’s plays, the one called A Dream Play. Do you know it? … I have never seen it. He would often quote lines from it and recall particular scenes. He said there was a character whose one wish was that life should present him with “a green tackle box”: you know the kind of green box in which a fisherman keeps his hooks, lines, and bait. Well, this character grows old, life passes him by, and eventually the gods take pity on him and send him the box. The character looks at the box he has longed for all his life, moves to the front of the stage, examines the box more closely, and, with deep sadness, declares, “It’s not green enough …” Lázár quoted this sometimes when talking about human desire. And as Judit and I slowly grew more familiar I began to feel that I was “not green enough” for her. For a long time she did not dare see me as I was. People are always scared of seeing on an ordinary human scale things they have intensely desired or have raised into an ideal. We were living together by this time, and the intolerable tension that had infected our earlier, more feverish years had gone: now we perceived each other as people, as man and woman, complete with physical weaknesses demanding simple human cures … and yet she still liked to regard me in a way I never saw myself. It was as if I were the priest of a strange religion or the scion of some aristocratic family. I saw myself merely as a lonely man nursing a few hopes.
The café is almost empty. There’s this cold smoke everywhere. We can go too, if you like. But I’ll just get to the end of the story first. Give me a light. Thanks. Having started, I might as well finish — if I don’t bore you. I was talking about hope, and I should say how I discovered the truth and how I could live with it. Shall I go on?
All right, then, listen. I’m listening too. I am looking deep into my soul as I speak. I am all ears. I said I wanted to tell you the truth, so that is what I am obliged to do.
You see, dear boy, I was hoping for a miracle. What kind of miracle? Well, simply that love might prove to be eternal; that its mysterious, superhuman power might overcome loneliness, dissolve the distance between two people, and break down any artificial barriers that society had erected in the form of education, money, history, and memory. I felt in mortal danger and was looking for a hand to grasp. I longed for reassurance that there really was such a thing as empathy, as companionship: that all this was still humanly possible. So I reached out for Judit.
Once the first phase of confusion, tension, and anxious waiting had passed, we naturally turned to each other for love. I married her and waited for the miracle.
I imagined the miracle to be quite simple. I thought the differences between us might dissolve in the great melting pot of love. I lay down in bed with her as if I had finally arrived home after a long exile, at the end of a voyage. Home is much simpler, but more mysterious and more important, than abroad, because not even the most exotic foreign place can offer the experiences a few familiar rooms can. I mean childhood. It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives. It’s what we recall when, much later, we see the Niagara Falls or Lake Michigan. We see the light and hear the sound of surprises, joys, hopes, and fears locked away in childhood. That is what we love, what we are forever seeking. And for an adult, perhaps only love can conjure something of that tremulous hopeful sense of waiting … love — in other words, not just bed and all that bed entails, but those moments of searching, waiting, and hoping that throw two people together.