Was he crazy? Well, you see, that had never occurred to me. What a clever man you are!
Do you want to know what went on there, in the elegant house where I served as a maid? All right, I’ll explain. But listen carefully to what I am about to tell you, because it’s no fairy tale: it’s what school textbooks call history. I know books and schools were never your style. Nevertheless, listen, because what I am about to tell you has vanished from the world. It’s as distant as those stories you hear about ancient Hungarians who went about the world on horseback and tenderized their steak by keeping it under the saddle. They wore helmets and armor, they lived and died in those things. My employers were historical characters, like them, like the great chieftain Árpád, father of the Hungarians, leader of the seven chieftains, as you might remember from your village school. Wait, I’ll sit down next to you on the bed. Give me a cigarette. Thanks. So it was like this.
I want to explain to you why I never felt comfortable in that lovely house. Because they treated me very well. The old man, His Excellency, treated me like an orphan, a poor little soul — you know, like a relative with a clubfoot from the poor side of the family forced to take shelter with the rich side. And the charitable family does everything possible not to make the newcomer self-conscious about the sad difference in status. It might have been the charity that was the most annoying thing. It made me so angry!
Mind you, I made my peace with the old master pretty soon. Do you know why? Because he was mean. He was the only one in the family who never tried to be kind to me. He never addressed me as “Judit, love.” He gave me no cheap gifts, no hand-me-down clothes from gentlefolk, like the old lady — Her Ladyship — who gave me her ragged winter coat, or the young master, the young master who later married me, who gave me the right to be called Her Ladyship. He himself had some office, such as lord of the City Council, but he didn’t care much for titles and never used it. He didn’t even like people calling him the usual “Your Excellency.” It was to be “Doctor” at all times. But I was already Her Ladyship by then. Not that he bothered with that, either. It amused him when the servants started addressing me as “Your Ladyship.” It was a slightly sarcastic sort of amusement at silly people who took such things too seriously.
The old master was different. He tolerated the “excellency” stuff because he was a practical man who knew that the great majority of people were not only grasping but vain and stupid too and that there was nothing you could do about it. The old man never asked. He ordered. If I made a mistake, he growled at me, and I was so frightened I would drop the tray or whatever I was holding. If he so much as looked at me, my palms would begin to sweat and I trembled. He looked like one of those bronze statues you see in Italian towns, in the square … you know, those early-century statues when merchants became proper subjects for bronze … potbellied little squirts in frock coats and rumpled trousers. In other words, patriots, patriots who did nothing but get up in the morning and play the patriot till it was time for bed again; the kind of people who earn a statue by founding the local horse abattoir, that kind of thing. And their pants were just as rumpled in real-life cloth as in bronze. The old man would look about him in the manner of those turn-of-the-century statues, giving us his statue look, much like the real merchants, the statues’ originals, I expect.
I might have been an insignificant puff of wind as far as he was concerned, not quite human. I was nothing. When I brought the orange juice to his room — they were strange like that, starting the day with orange juice, followed by gym and the punching bag, then a sugarless tea, with proper breakfast only later, a big breakfast enough for two in the morning room, as regularly as Easter mass in the village church at home — when I brought in the orange juice, I wouldn’t dare look at the old man as he lay in bed, reading by the bedside light. I was too frightened to look into his eyes.
The old man wasn’t, in fact, all that old at the time. Nor was I always nothing to him. I think I can tell you now that he’s gone, that sometimes — when I was helping him on with his coat in the dark hall — he went so far as to pinch my ass or pull my ear. In other words, he gave me unmistakable signs that he thought me attractive and that the only reason he wasn’t about to proposition me was that he was a man of taste who considered me below his rank. He was not the kind to have an affair with a servant. What I thought was: I’m just a servant in the house. If the old man wants to have his way, if he insists, let’s just put up with it and drop the idea of pleasure. I had no right to resist the wishes of such a powerful, stern figure. It was probably what he thought too. He would have been mightily surprised if I did resist.
But it never came to that. He was the master, that’s all, so whatever he wanted would have to be. He would never have thought of taking me for wife, not in his wildest dreams. Nor would he have wondered, not for a second, if it was right or wrong to have his way with me. That’s why I preferred serving on the old man. I was young, healthy, and vigorous, fully aware of my youth and health, and I loathed the idea of being ill. The old man still had a healthy, vigorous mind. His wife and his son — the one who later married me — were already ill. It’s not that I thought as much: I just knew it.
Everything in the elegant house was beset with danger. For a long time I just stared and gawked the way I did as a child when I was sick and found myself in hospital. The hospital was quite an experience for me, perhaps the greatest and most beautiful experience of my childhood. A dog had bitten me, here on the calf, and the district medical officer wouldn’t have me being tended in the ditch where we were living, bound up in rags, the way we always were whenever we cut ourselves. He sent a gendarme for me and had me carried to hospital by force.
The hospital in the nearby little town was just an old building, but to me it seemed a magical fairy-tale castle.
I was interested in everything and frightened of everything there. Even the smell, that country-hospital smell, was exciting! And attractive too, simply by virtue of being new, a smell different from the smell of the ditch, the burrow where I lived like an animal with my dad, my mother, and the rest of the family: polecat, field mouse, hamster, we were all these things. The hospital was treating me for rabies and gave me painful injections, but what did I care about injections or rabies! Night and day I watched the comings and goings of the world: the suicidal, the cancer-ridden, and the incontinent, all in a common ward. Later, in Paris, I saw a lovely engraving of an ancient French hospital at the time of the revolution, a vaulted hall where ragged people sat in beds. My hospital was just as unlikely a place for me to spend the best days of my childhood, the best being the days when I was in danger of contracting rabies.
But I didn’t get rabies. They cured me. At least I didn’t get it then, not the way they describe the disease in textbooks. But maybe something rabid remained in me. I sometimes wondered about it later. They say people with rabies are constantly thirsty while at the same time being frightened of water. I felt a bit like that myself whenever things were going well. I have been intensely thirsty all my life, but whenever I found a way of quenching my thirst I recoiled from it in disgust. Don’t worry, I won’t bite you.