But one day I opened a letter in which the bank informed Judit that, on such and such a date, they had credited her account with twenty-six thousand pengő. I kept looking at the letter and rubbing my eyes. In those first few moments I felt a rush of blood to the head: I was jealous! I imagined Judit must have brought the money with her from England, where she had had a lover of some sort — not the Greek music master about whom she had told me, but someone else, God knows whom, a milord who had paid her handsomely for her services. This feeling, this idea, hurt so much that I beat my fist against the desk. Then I set off for the bank. There I discovered that Judit had not brought this sum with her from England, but had paid it in, in small installments. She had made her first deposit the day I presented her with the checkbook.
“Women!” you say, and smile. Yes, that’s what I myself said at first, and gave a smile of relief. It now seemed certain — and the order and date of the deposits showed as much — that Judit had asked me for the money but had secretly stowed it away so I shouldn’t know. I thought she was busy with her shopping sprees, carelessly throwing money about everywhere. Indeed, she did throw it about, but not entirely carelessly. As I later discovered, she drove a very hard bargain when she was shopping, and had the receipts made out for bigger sums than she actually paid. Women of the street do this to their dim, happy-go-lucky admirers. When I understood that it was my money that Judit was hoarding, I smiled in relief.
I put the bank statement back in the envelope, stuck down the flap, and left it for Judit. I said nothing about my discovery. But then a new kind of jealousy grew in me. I was living with a woman who kept secrets. She kept secrets the way false women do, the kind that dine with their husbands and families, full of airy charm, but even while happily chatting to those who believe in them, accepting sacrifices and gifts from the man who trusts them, are by the end of the afternoon date already plotting how to sneak into a strange man’s house and shamelessly spend several hours insulting every decent human feeling, betraying those who trust them and take care of them. Please understand that I am an old-fashioned man and have nothing but the deepest contempt for women who break up marriages. My contempt is so deep that I can’t find any fashionable excuse. No one has a right to the sort of sly, filthy, cheap affair such women call happiness, not at the price of secretly or openly wounding other people’s feelings. I have been both the sufferer and the instigator of such repulsive affairs, and if there is one thing in my life I utterly regret and feel ashamed of it is the breakup of my own marriage. I have sympathy for every kind of sexual misadventure, for those caught in the terrifying currents of physical desire: I even understand the most extreme, twisted forms of it. Desire speaks to us in a thousand voices. I understand all that. But only unattached people are free to cast themselves into those deep waters. Anything else is deception and treachery, worse than conscious cruelty.
People who feel something for each other can’t live with secrets in their hearts. That’s what cheating means. The rest is almost coincidental … a purely physical matter, usually on some melancholy impulse, nothing much. But these calculated affairs, in carefully chosen hours, in carefully chosen places, lacking all spontaneity … how sad, how cheap they all are. And behind it all there is this wretched little secret. It stinks out the relationship. It’s as if there were a corpse rotting somewhere in one of the rooms, under a couch.
That’s how it was the day I discovered the bank statement. Judit had a secret. And she did a good job of keeping it from me.
She did a good job though I watched her like a hawk. I couldn’t have watched her more closely if I had hired a team of private detectives to observe her. We lived graciously, intimately, according to the rules of male-female cohabitation, and we lied to each other. She lied that she had no secrets from me; I lied by pretending to believe her. I watched her and kept thinking. At one stage I even thought to change my tactics, to surprise her and corner her, force her to confess. Such a confession might clear the air, the way an opportune summer storm clears away days of stifling heat. But I might also have feared a confession. That this woman, with whom I was sharing my fate, was keeping something from me was a genuinely frightening thought. Twenty-six thousand pengő for a woman who had spent her childhood in a ditch with mice scrambling all over her, a servant, was more than a lot of money: it was a fortune. And the money grew and multiplied. If it were only a matter of the ancient, nagging female practice of artfully putting aside some money from the housekeeping to use as pocket money, of filtering off a small sum from joint expenses … well, that might have been something to smile at. All women do this, because all women are worried that their husbands don’t really understand the necessities of life: their instinct is that men can only earn, not save. All women prepare for a rainy day. The women who do this are as honest as the day is long in other respects, but when it comes to money, they cheat their husbands, stealing from them like domestic magpies or petty thieves. They know that the greatest secret in life is to preserve: jam, people, money — anything important enough to keep. And so they cheat and filch. It’s the female version of the heroic exploit: a petty but tenacious wisdom. But it wasn’t pennies and dimes that Judit was stowing away. Quietly, regularly, sweetly, Judit was robbing me, showing me fake bills, hoarding away money.
We lived graciously and quietly. Judit stole and I watched her. It was the beginning of the end.
One day I found out it wasn’t just money she was robbing me of but the secret something that is a basic condition of anyone’s life: self-respect. Look, I know this idea of self-respect is really little more than vanity. It’s a male word. Women shrug when they hear it said. Women, in case you didn’t know, do not “respect” themselves. They may respect the man they are with, their social or family rank, or their reputation. All this is transference, formality. But when it comes to themselves, and that strange phenomenon compounded of character and self-knowledge crudely glued together that we refer to as “I,” women regard it with a generous, slightly condescending cynicism.
I discovered that this woman was consciously, systematically robbing me — that’s to say she did everything to carve out for herself as large a slice of the loaf we shared as she could inconspicuously manage. I mean the loaf I thought was there for the both of us, and what is more, a loaf made of the finest bread she’d ever eaten. But I learned this not in the bank that regularly, and with the best of intentions, continued informing Judit of the very happy state of her account. No, old man, it was in bed I learned it. And that was so painful … well, indeed, this is the thing we men mean when we say we cannot live without self-respect.