What was that home he was thinking about? Where was it? Was it his first wife? I don’t think so. Home, real home, is not to be found on maps, you know. But home stands for a great deal, not just good and lovely things, but hateful, contrary things too. We are learning that lesson ourselves now, aren’t we, now that we no longer have a home? Don’t imagine we’ll get it back by paying the odd home visit. There’ll be good-byes and tears, some will feel heartbroken, some will strut about proudly waving their new foreign passports while paying a bill with their traveler’s check … But the home we think about when we’re abroad, that has gone for good. Do you still dream of your home in Zala? I do sometimes dream of the wetlands in the Nyírség, but whenever I do I wake with a headache. It seems home is not just a region, a town, a house, or people but a feeling. What’s that? Are there eternal feelings? No, dear, I don’t think so. You know very well I adore you, but if one day I stopped adoring you because you have cheated on me or gone off with someone — but that’s all impossible, isn’t it? Should it ever happen, should I ever have to say good-bye to you, please don’t think my heart will break. We’ll carry on having charming conversations, if you like … but there will be one thing we won’t talk about, because that will have been over, vanished into thin air. There’s no time for mourning. There is only ever one home in your life, like love, the one true love. And it passes like love, like true love. And it’s right it should be like that; otherwise it would all be too much for us to bear.
That first woman, my husband’s first wife — she was a refined lady. Very beautiful, very self-controlled. It was her self-control I most envied. That seems to be one of those things you can’t learn or buy with money. It’s something you’re born with. It may be that the stuff these strange people, the rich, are so busy cultivating all the time is nothing more than a kind of self-discipline. Their blood cells, their very glands, are all precisely under control. I hated this capacity in them, and my husband knew I hated it. It was precisely because his first wife was cultured and self-controlled that my husband left her one day. He had grown tired of self-control. I was more than just a woman to him: I was a trial, a rehearsal, an adventure, both hunt and prey, a form of fraud, a sacrilege — like when someone in polite society suddenly spits on the carpet. The devil knows what these things mean. I’ll fetch a cognac, a three-star bottle, all right? I’ve grown thirsty with all this talking.
Drink, my dear. There — you see how I drink? I put my lips to where your lips have touched the glass … what surprising, tender, marvelous ideas you have! I could weep when something like this occurs to you. I have no idea how you do it. I’m not saying the idea is entirely original, it might be other lovers in the past have thought of it … but it’s still a wonderful gift.
There — now I have drunk after you. You see my husband never made tender gestures like this. We never once drank from the same glass while looking into each other’s eyes as we are doing now. If he wanted to please me, he would buy me a ring — yes, that nice ring with the turquoise stone, the one you were looking at just now with such fascination: that too was a present from him. What’s that, darling? Fine, you can take it, have the ring valued as you did the others, at that first-rate man of yours. You shall have whatever you want.
Shall I tell you more about the rich? There is no way of telling anyone everything about them. I mean, I lived among them for years, but it was like walking in my sleep, in a deep sleep filled with dread. I always worried about saying the wrong thing when I talked to them. I worried in case I listened wrong or touched things in the wrong way. They never shouted or cursed at me, certainly not! They trained and educated me instead, sensitively, patiently, the way the Italian organ grinder out in the street trains his monkey, showing him how to perch on his shoulder and how to preen himself. But they also taught me the way one might teach a cripple, someone incapable of walking, of doing anything the way it ought to be done. Because that is what I was when I first went to them: a cripple. I couldn’t do anything properly. I couldn’t walk, not as they understood walking, couldn’t say hello, couldn’t speak … and as for eating? I hadn’t the foggiest notion how to eat! Even listening was beyond me — listening properly, that is, listening with purpose: in other words, with evil intent. I listened and gawped. I was a fish out of water. But little by little I learned everything they had to teach me. I worked at it and got on. It surprised them how much and how quickly I learned. It was I who left them gawping in the end. I’m not boasting, but I do believe they were quite astonished when they saw how much I learned.
I knew about the family vault, for example. The mausoleum. Oh, lord, that mausoleum! You know how it was back then, when I was still a maid in their house. I saw how everyone was robbing them. The cook made a bit on the side, the servant took backhanders from the salesmen who inflated the prices for brandy, wine, and the best cigars, the chauffeur stole and sold the gas in their cars. All this was to be expected. My employers were perfectly aware of it: it was part of the household budget. I didn’t steal anything myself, since I only cleaned the bathroom, where there was nothing to steal. But later, once I had become “Her Ladyship,” I couldn’t help thinking of everything I had seen in the cellar and the kitchen, and the mausoleum was too much of a temptation. I couldn’t resist it.
You see there came a day when my husband — a proper gentleman — suddenly felt his life was incomplete without a family vault in the Buda graveyard. His parents, the old gentleman and the old lady, were old-fashioned in their death, turning to dust under simple marble tombstones without a proper mausoleum. My husband grew quite morose when this omission occurred to him. But he soon recovered and set to work to remedy the fault. He asked me to negotiate with the designer and the clerk-of-works to create the perfect mausoleum. By that time we had more than one car, a summer house in Zebegény and a permanent winter residence on exclusive Rózsadomb, not to mention a mansion in Transdanubia, near Lake Balaton, on an estate that my husband found himself lumbered with as the result of some deal. We certainly couldn’t complain we had nowhere to live.
But a mausoleum we did not have. We hastened to correct this oversight. Naturally we couldn’t trust any ordinary builder with the job. My husband took great pains to discover the leading funerary expert in the city. We had plans brought over from England and Italy, whole books, their pages printed on heavy burnished paper … you have no idea the amount people have written on the subject of funerary monuments. I mean, after all, to just go and die, that’s nothing special — people scrape out a bit of earth and shove you in, end of story. But gentlefolk lead different lives, and, naturally, their deaths are different too. So we employed an expert to help us choose a model, and had a beautiful, spacious, dry mausoleum built, complete with cupola. I wept when I first saw the mausoleum from within, the sheer glory of it, because, for just a moment, it made me think of the sandy ditch we lived in out on the wetlands. I mean, the vault was bigger than the ditch. With careful foresight they had left enough space at the center for six graves, I have no idea for whom. Maybe they were expecting guests, the visiting dead, just in case someone dropped in and needed somewhere to stretch out. I looked at the three spare places and told my husband I would sooner be buried by dogs than lie in this crypt of theirs! You should have seen him laugh when I said it!