So that’s the nightwear business. I loathed this habit of theirs. But eventually I resigned myself to that too. They were so much stronger, after all. It is possible to hate dominant forms of life just as it is possible to admire them, but you cannot deny them. I grew to hate them. I hated them to the extent that I joined them and became rich myself; wore their clothes, lay down in their beds, started to watch my figure, and, eventually, got to taking laxatives before I went to bed, just like the rich. I didn’t hate them because they were rich and I was poor, no, please don’t misunderstand me. It would be nice if someone finally understood the true state of affairs.
Newspapers and parliaments are constantly going on about this now. Even the movies are full of it, or so I understood watching a newsreel the other day. Everyone is talking about it. I wonder what has got into people. I can’t imagine it’s good for people to be talking so crudely, so generally about rich and poor, about Americans and Russians. I don’t understand it. They even say there is bound to be a great revolution and the Russians will come out on top, along with the poor, by and large. But a very refined man once told me in a bar — a South American, I think, a drug dealer, so I heard, who supposedly kept a stash of heroin in his dentures — that that was not how it was going to be, that it would be the Americans who’d win out in the end, because they had more money.
I thought a good deal about this. The saxophonist said the same thing. He said the Americans would drill a great hole in the ground and pack it with atom bombs, and then this little guy in glasses, the man who was currently the president over the ocean, would get down on his hands and knees, carrying a burning match, and crawl over to the hole, light the fuse of the atom bomb, and then — whoosh! — the whole caboodle would go up. I thought it a load of nonsense at first. But I can’t bring myself to laugh anymore. I have seen a great deal that seemed just as ridiculous but soon became reality. My experience is that, generally, the more stupid the idea, the more certain that, one day, it will be turned into fact.
I’ll never forget the gossip in Budapest near the end of the war. One day, for example, the Germans ranged cannons along the embankment on the Buda side of the city. Enormous cannons they were, properly dug in by the bridgeheads. They broke up the pavements and placed machine-gun nests all the way along the lovely chestnut-lined shore. People looked at them anxiously, but there were some smart people who declared there would not be a siege of Budapest because all those terrifying weapons, the heavy artillery by the bridges, the bundles of explosives on the bridges themselves, were all a confidence trick. It was a trick to pull the wool over the Russians’ eyes. They didn’t really want a battle. That’s what they were saying. But it was no trick: at least it didn’t fool the Russians. The Russians arrived at the river one day and shot everything to pieces, including the cannons. So I have no idea if what the South American said will come true, but I suspect that, in the end, it will work out exactly as he said, if only because it sounded so ridiculous at first hearing.
I also thought a lot about what this very refined man said about how the Americans would win because they were rich. The rich — now there is something I do understand. My experience was that you had to be very careful with the rich because they are extraordinarily crafty. They possess enormous resilience … though heaven alone knows where the resilience comes from. One thing is certain — they are subtle, and it is never easy dealing with them. What I said about their nightwear is evidence of that. People who have you prepare their pajamas the way I was told to prepare them are not ordinary people. Such people know exactly what they want, day and night, and a poor man should cross himself when coming into their presence. Of course I mean only the genuinely rich, not those who just happen to have money. Those are less dangerous. They flash their money around the way a child blows bubbles. And it all ends as it does with soap bubbles: the bubble just bursts in their hands.
My husband was genuinely rich. That might be why he was always so tired.
Pour me another glass, just one finger. No, darling, no, I won’t drink from your glass this time. Inspired ideas are not to be repeated. They quickly wear out and lose their magic. Don’t take it the wrong way.
Don’t rush me, I can only tell it in its proper order.
He was offended, yes, he was terminally offended. That was something I never understood, because I was born poor. There is a strange similarity between the really poor and the really rich … you can’t offend either of them. My father, who was a barefoot fruit picker in the wetlands, was as impossible to offend as the prince of the Rákóczis. My husband was embarrassed by his wealth: far from him to flash it about! He would have worn any disguise to avoid his wealth being pointed out. His manners were so refined, so quiet, so fearfully courteous that you couldn’t offend him with words, with manners, or with acts, since it all washed off his refinement like water off a leaf. They left no scar. No, the only person capable of offending him was himself. And the tendency to offend himself grew in him like some wicked, sickly passion.
Later, when he began to suspect that there was something wrong with him, he started to panic. He was like someone dangerously ill who suddenly loses faith in the famous physician, in the whole range of science and medicine, and turns instead to the woman selling herbal cures because she might be able to help. That was how he came to me one day, leaving his wife and his old life behind. He thought I could offer a kind of herbal cure for him. But I was no herbalist.
Pass me that photo, let me have another look at him. Yes, that’s what he was like fifteen years ago.
Have I said I wore this picture round my neck a long time? In a small locket, on a lilac ribbon? Do you know why? Because I’d paid for it. I was just a servant then and bought it out of my wages: that was why I looked after it. My husband never knew what an important matter it was for someone like me to pay money for something for which there is no pressing need, I mean real money, like the change from my wages or a tip. Later I spent money like water — his money — I threw thousands around the way I sent dust flying with my feather duster on mornings when I was still a servant. It wasn’t real money to me. But my heart was in my mouth when I bought this photograph, because I was poor and felt it a sin to spend money on things that were not absolutely essential. That photograph was a sin for me, mere vanity. I bought it all the same, sneaking a visit to the famous, highly fashionable photographer in the city center, ready to pay the full price without bargaining. The photographer laughed and sold it to me at cut price. Buying his photograph was the only sacrifice I ever made for that man.
He was reasonably tall, a couple of inches taller than me. His weight was steady. He controlled his body the way he controlled his words and manners. He put on a few pounds in winter, but lost them again in May and remained at that weight till Christmas. Don’t think for a moment that he dieted. Forget diets. It was just that he treated his body the way he might treat one of his employees. His body was required to work for him.
He treated his eyes and his mouth the same way. His eyes and mouth laughed separately, as and when they were required. They never laughed at the same time. Not the way you did, my precious, so freely, so sweetly, both eyes and mouth smiling at once, yesterday when you truly excelled yourself and sold that ring — and came home to me with the good news.