My first husband, my real husband, kept his shoes in a shoe cupboard, because he had so many fine shoes he needed to have a cupboard made for them. And he was always reading books, damned clever books. For a long time I thought it was impossible to offend a man so wealthy that he even had to have a shoe cupboard. It’s not for nothing I mention the shoe cupboard. When I first entered the service of my husband’s family, it was the shoe cupboard I liked best. I liked it but it scared me too. I didn’t have any shoes for a long time when I was a child. I was over ten years old when someone gave me a pair that fitted and actually belonged to me. It was a used pair given to the cook by the deputy sheriff’s wife. It was the kind people wore during the war, low-heeled shoes, the sort you buttoned up. They were too tight for the cook, and one winter morning when I was fetching milk for the house she took pity on me and gave me these marvelous shoes. Maybe that was why I was so glad to have this great trunk, the one I left back in Pest when I skipped the democracy after the Russian siege of Budapest. The trunk was still in one piece after the siege, complete with the shoes. I was so happy … Well, that’s enough about shoes.
Here’s the coffee. Wait, I’ll bring some cigarettes too. These sweet American cigarettes make me gag. Yes, I understand you need the cigarettes for your art. Night shifts in the local bar require cigarettes too. But careful of your heart, my angel. I couldn’t bear it if any harm befell you.
How did I come to be employed in that gentleman’s household? Well, it wasn’t a wife they were advertising for, you may be sure of that. It was only much later I became a wife there, a wife and a lady, with the full complement of old honorifics: “honorable” lady, “excellent” lady, “most excellent” lady … I was hired as a servant, a general maid.
What are you looking at? I’m not joking.
As I said, I was a servant. Not even a proper servant, just a scullery maid, essentially a cleaner. Because this was an elegant house, my sweet, a house proper for gentlefolk. I could tell you a great deal about it and what went on there, how they lived, their habits, their dinners, their conversations, their boredom. For years I went about on tiptoe there, hardly daring to breathe. I was scared. It took years, you know, before I was admitted into the inner rooms, because I knew nothing about what to do and how to behave in such refined company. I had to learn. At first I was only allowed to work in the bathroom and the toilet. They wouldn’t even let me near the food in the kitchen, I could only peel potatoes or help with the washing up … It was as if my hands were considered filthy. They had to be careful in case anything I touched got dirty. But maybe it wasn’t them: not them, not the master, not the cook or the serving man, no. It was me. I felt my hands were never clean enough for an elegant house like that. I felt like that for a long time. My hands were often red then, creased, hard, and full of sores. Not as soft and white as they are now. Not that they ever criticized my hands. It was just that I did not dare touch anything, because I feared I’d leave a mark. I certainly never dared touch their food. You know the way doctors put on a thin gauze mask when they are performing an operation, because they’re worried about infecting the patient. I held my breath when handling their things … the glass from which they drank, the pillows on which they slept. You, you may laugh, but even when I was cleaning the toilet bowl after them I was careful that the lovely white porcelain should not be dirtier for me having touched it. This fear, this anxiety, lasted for years. It was a very superior household.
I can see what you’re thinking! You think fear and anxiety were done with the day my luck turned and I became lady of the house, an “honorable” and “most excellent” so-and-so. No, little one, you’re wrong. It didn’t stop. That day certainly arrived, but I was just as anxious then as I had been those years before, when I was only a scullery maid. I was never at peace, never happy in that house.
Why not, when that house gave me everything? Everything good: everything bad. Every harm and every satisfaction.
That’s such a hard question, sweetheart. The question of satisfaction, I mean … Sometimes I think it’s the hardest question anyone can ask.
Pass me the photograph. It’s a long time since I last looked at it … Well, yes, that was my husband. The other? The one who looks like an artist? Who knows? Perhaps he was an artist. Not a real artist, though. Not an artist through and through — like you, for example. You can tell by looking at him. He was always looking at me so solemnly, so ironically, it seemed he couldn’t believe in anything, not a solitary thing; in nothing and no one, not in himself, not even in the idea of himself as an artist. He looks tired there, and had aged a little when I took the picture. He himself said he looked secondhand in it. You know, like those pictures in the papers showing before and after. I took it in the last year of the war between two bombing raids. He was sitting at the window, reading. He didn’t even know he was being photographed. He didn’t like pictures of himself, either photographs or drawings. He didn’t like being looked at while he was reading. He didn’t like being spoken to when he was quiet. He didn’t like … yes, he didn’t like it … when people loved him. What’s that? Did he love me? No, my dear, he didn’t love me, not even me. He just put up with me for a while, in the room a corner of which you see there. That bookcase and all those books there, they were destroyed soon after I took the picture. The room you see was wrecked. And the house, of which this is the fourth floor. We used to sit there between bombings. Everything you see in this picture has been destroyed.
Here’s the coffee. Go on, drink it. Here’s your cigarette. Now listen.
I’m always nervous when talking about this, so don’t be surprised if I sometimes show it, sweetheart. A lot of things happened to us. We, who lived in Pest throughout the siege and all that came before and after it. It was a mercy you were away from it in the provinces at the time. You are a wise man. So wonderful.
Well, I’m sure everything was better in Zala. But we who were rotting away in the cellars of Pest, waiting for bombs, we had a hard time. You were also wise to find your way to Pest no earlier than ’47, by which time there was a government in place and the bars were open. I believe you when you say they welcomed you with open arms. But don’t talk about that to anyone. There are a lot of bad people about, and some Jew, a survivor of the labor camps, might suggest you had some reason for lying low in Zala till ’47. All right, all right, I’ll shut up.
This man, the artistic one, once told me we had all gone mad, all of us who survived the siege. And that we’re all in the madhouse now.
Who was this artistic-looking gentleman? Well, he was not a drummer. There is only one drummer in the world that matters, darling, and that is you. He didn’t have an Italian work permit … the kind of work he did needed no permit. For a while he wrote books. Take that frown off your face, I know you don’t like reading. I can’t bear to look at you with your brow furrowed like that. Don’t rack your brains, you wouldn’t have heard of him anyway. What did he write? Lyrics? The kind of song lyrics your band plays in the bar? No, I don’t think that was his sort of thing. True, by the time I met him, he was playing with the idea of writing songs for café singers, and he might have if they’d asked him. That’s because, by that time, no other form of writing interested him. He might even have been willing to do some copywriting, he felt such contempt for the written word. He loathed his own writing too, not just the stuff others wrote, that anyone ever wrote. Why? I don’t really know, but I have my suspicions. He once told me he understood book burning because there has never been a single book that could help people.