In all true life there comes a moment when a man is so deep in passion, it is as if he had cast himself into the waters of Niagara without a life belt. I don’t believe in love that begins like a picnic, a holiday excursion complete with rucksack and singing and sunbeams breaking through the boughs … You know, that flood of spring-is-here feeling most people experience at the start of a relationship … I am deeply suspicious of it. Passion does not celebrate holidays! It’s a dark force that builds and destroys worlds and waits on no answer from those it has touched, nor does it ask them whether they feel good as a result. Frankly, it doesn’t care either way. It gives everything and demands everything: it is that unconditional passion of which the deepest stratum is nothing less than life-and-death. There is no other way of experiencing passion … and how few make it that far! People comfort and cosset each other in bed, tell whopping lies, and pretend to feel all kinds of things, selfishly robbing the other of what they fancy, possibly throwing some superfluous tidbit of joy the other’s way in return … But they have no idea that this is not passion. It is no accident that history has regarded great lovers with the same awe and veneration as heroes, as brave pioneers who have risked all by voluntarily embarking on a hopeless but extraordinary human enterprise. Yes, true lovers run every kind of risk, literally, in every possible sense. It is a joint enterprise, in which the woman is as much the guiding force as the man, just as heroic, just as full of valor as a knight setting out to seek the Holy Grail, that being the whole point of the crusade, of the battles, of the wounds received, of the final vanquishing … What else should lovers want? What other purpose has that ultimate, unconditional sacrifice toward which fatal passion drives all those it has touched? Life articulates itself through this power, then immediately turns away from those it has sacrificed, completely indifferent to them. All ages and all religions honor lovers for this reason. Lovers bind themselves to the stake when they are in each other’s arms. The true lovers, I mean. The courageous, the few, the chosen. The rest simply hope to find a woman the way they might a beast of burden, or to spend a few hours in sweetly pale and comforting arms, either to flatter their male or female vanity, or to satisfy the legal demands of a biological urge … But that’s not love. Behind each lover’s embrace stands the figure of Death, whose shadows are no less powerful than those wild flashes of joy. Behind every kiss looms the secret desire for annihilation, for an ultimate happiness that is no longer in the mood for argument but knows that to be happy is to cease entirely and surrender to feeling.
Love is feeling without an end in view. Maybe that is why lovers have always been honored by old religions, by ancient epic poems, and in song … Deep in unconscious memory people recall how love was great once, when it was not just a form of social commerce or a way of whiling away time, a game or an amusement to be compared with bridge or a society ball. They recall that there was once a frightening task all living beings had to accomplish, that task being to love, love being the full articulation of life, the most complete experience of existence and of its natural consequence, nonexistence. But people don’t learn this till very late. And how unimportant are the virtues or moral standing or beauty or fine qualities of the partner in this enterprise! To love is to know joy as completely as it can be known and then to perish. But all those people, those hundreds of millions of people, carry on, hoping for help, waiting for their lovers to perform some act of charity on their behalf, a show of tenderness, patience, forgiveness, comfort. And they have no idea that what they receive in this way is unimportant: it is they themselves who must give, only they, give unconditionally — that is the meaning of the game.
That’s how we set out on love, Judit Áldozó and I, when we started life in the house just outside town.
That, at least, is how I set out. That was the kind of thing I felt. And I hoped. I still went into the office, but I felt so detached from everything I was like a crook who knows he must be discovered one day, and that when that day comes, he will have to leave his job and all that goes with it … What did I discover? I discovered I no longer had anything to do with the part I played in the world, but I kept proper hours and followed the rules as strictly as ever. I was first to arrive at the factory, and the last to leave, at six, when there was only the doorman left in the place, and I carried on walking across town, just as before. I used to visit the old cukrászda and would sometimes see my wife there—“my first wife,” I almost said, my real wife. Because I never once felt that Judit was my wife. She was the other woman.
What did I feel when I saw the first, my real wife? I didn’t feel sentimental. But the blood always drained from my face. I gave her an embarrassed greeting and firmly looked away. Because the body remembers, you know, it never forgets. It’s like a sea and a shore that once belonged together.
But that isn’t what I wanted to talk about now, now that I have told you almost everything. The end of this story is as stupid as anything you will hear from the most stupid or ordinary man. Shall I tell you anyway? Well, of course, now I have started you will want me to finish.
Look, old man, we lived for a year under these highly unlikely physical and psychological circumstances. I lived for a year as if I were living in the jungle among wild beasts and poisonous plants, with snakes beneath each stone or bush. That year might well have been worth it. Worth what had preceded it and what was to come.
As to what preceded it, you know most of that now. What happened next took even me a little by surprise. I can see you are thinking that one day I discovered that Judit had been cheating on me. No, old man, I wasn’t to know that until much later. She only betrayed me once she had no other choice.
It took me a year to discover that Judit Áldozó was stealing from me.
Don’t look at me with that incredulous expression. I don’t mean it figuratively. It wasn’t my feelings she was robbing me of, it was the money in my wallet. I mean in the usual sense of the word, the way the police report it in their notebooks.
When did she start stealing? Oh, immediately, from the very first moment. No, wait. Let me think. No, it wasn’t at the very beginning. At that stage she was merely deceiving me. I told you how, at the beginning of the relationship, when we were still living in the hotel, I opened an account for her at my bank and provided her with a checkbook. The account was very soon overdrawn. It was almost impossible to understand this flood of spending, this waste. Yes, she bought a great many things, furs, accessories, but I never looked to see what she was doing. I never cared about the quantity or quality of her shopping, only about her feverish acquisitiveness. It was the pathological fury of the over-compensation that worried me. To put it bluntly, a letter arrived from the bank one day to inform me that her account was exhausted. Naturally, I deposited more money in it, but somewhat less this time. A few weeks later the account was drained again. At that point I warned her, but only in a light, joking manner, not seriously, that she had no idea of our material circumstances. Her ideas of money and property had changed in England: here, at home, we were more modest, less steeped in wealth than she imagined. She dutifully heard the sermon through. She did not ask for more money. Then we moved into the house with the garden and I gave her a monthly allowance that was far more than necessary for housekeeping and her own requirements. We never spoke of money again.