That was something he could never do. I lived with him, I was his wife and, before that, his servant. Needless to say, I felt much closer to him as a servant than when I was merely his wife. Even so, I never saw him give a full-hearted laugh the way you do.
He was far more likely to smile. When I met that hunk of a Greek in London, the man who taught me a great many things — don’t go bothering me with what he taught me, I couldn’t tell you everything, we’d be here till dawn — he warned me never to laugh in company when in England because it was considered vulgar. I should just smile and keep smiling. I tell you this because I want you to know everything you might find useful sometime.
My husband could smile like nobody’s business. I was so jealous of it sometimes I felt quite sick just thinking about his smile. It was as if he had learned a high art at some mysterious university where the rich go to get their education and smiling is a compulsory subject. He even smiled when he was being cheated. I tried it on with him sometimes. I cheated him and watched. I cheated him in bed and watched to see what he’d do. There were moments when that was dangerous. You never know how someone will react when they’re cheated in bed.
The danger was a deathly thrill to me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one day he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed me in the stomach — like a pig at slaughter time. It was only a dream, of course: wish fulfillment. I learned the term from a doctor I consulted for a while because I wanted to be fashionable like the others, because I was rich and could indulge myself with a few psychological problems. The doctor got fifty pengő for an hour’s work. This fee entitled me to lie on a sofa in his surgery and to regale him with my dreams as well as all the rude talk I could muster. There are people who pay to have a woman lie on a sofa and talk filth. But it was I who did the paying, learning terms like “repression” and “wish fulfillment.” I certainly learned a great deal. It wasn’t easy living with the gentry.
But smiling was something I never learned. It seems you need something else for that. Maybe you have to have a history of ancestors smiling before you. I hated it as much as I did the fuss about the pajamas … I hated their smiles. I cheated my husband in bed by pretending to enjoy it when I didn’t really. I’m sure he knew it, but did he draw a knife and stab me? No, he smiled. He sat in the huge French bed, his hair tousled, his muscles well toned, a man in top condition, smelling faintly of hay. He fixed me with a glassy look and smiled. I wanted to cry at such moments. I was helpless with grief and fury. I am sure that later, when he saw his bombed-out house, or still later, when they kicked him out of the factory and expropriated him, he was smiling the same smile in exactly the same way.
It is one of the foulest of human sins, that serene, superior smile. It is the true crime of the rich. It is the one thing that can never be forgiven. Because I can understand people beating or killing each other when they have been hurt. But if they merely smile and say nothing, I have no idea what to do with them. Sometimes I felt no punishment was enough for it. There was nothing I, a woman who had clambered out of the ditch to find myself in his life, could do against him. The world could not harm him, whatever it did to him, to his wealth, to his lands, or to anything that mattered to him. It was the smile that had to be wiped out. Don’t those famous revolutionaries know this?
Because shares and precious stones may vanish, but the trace of these things, a kind of residual bloom, will hang around the rich even after they have lost everything. When you take the really rich and strip them to their bare skin, they still retain the aura of wealth, an aura no earthly power can drag from them. The fact is that when you have someone truly rich, someone with fifty thousand acres, say, or a factory with two thousand workers, and they lose it all, they still remain richer than my kind, however well we happen to be doing.
How they do it? I don’t know. Look, I was there when wealthy people were having a particularly bad time back home. All the odds were stacked against them. Everyone hated them. Little by little, step by methodical step, they were deprived of everything, all their visible goods, and later, with supreme skill, of their invisible goods too. And yet these people remained as serene as before.
I stood there gaping. I wasn’t angry. I did not feel in the least like mocking. I don’t want to make a big song and dance about money to you, or to go on forever about the rich and the poor. Don’t get me wrong, I know it would sound good if I started shouting at dawn about how much I hated the rich, about their money, their power. I hated them, yes I did, but it wasn’t their wealth I hated. It was more that I was afraid of them, or rather that I was in awe of them the way primitive man feared thunder and lightning. I was angry with them the way people used to be angry with the gods. You know about the little gods, those tubby ones, those of human proportions, who talk big, screw around, and are real rogues, those who interfere with the mess of ordinary people’s lives, who worm their way into others’ beds, into women’s lives, who steal the food off the table, gods who behave much as people do. They are not gods like that; they are middling, helpful gods of human size.
That’s how I felt when I thought of the rich. It wasn’t their money, their mansions, their precious stones that made me hate them. I was not a revolutionary proletarian, not a worker with a proper consciousness, nothing like that.
Why not? It was because of the depths from which I’d risen. I knew more than street-corner orators did; I knew that under it all, right at the bottom of things, there isn’t, nor has there ever been, justice; that when you end one injustice, it is immediately replaced by another. More than that, I was a woman, a beautiful woman at that, and I wanted my own place in the sun. Is that a crime? Maybe the revolutionaries — those who thrive by promising that everything will be fine providing we kick out whatever exists and is bad and do something that in other circumstances we would consider bad — maybe they would despise me for it. But I want to be honest with you. I want to give you everything I have, that I still have, not just the jewels. That’s why I must tell you that the reason I hated the rich was because it was only money I could take from them. But the rest, the secret and meaning of wealth, that sense of otherness which cast a more frightening spell over me than money did, that they did not give me. They hid it so well that no revolutionary could take it from them. They stowed it away more securely than valuables in the safes of foreign banks, than the pieces of gold buried in their gardens.
I couldn’t work out the way they could suddenly change subject and simply talk about something else the very moment when the subject seemed most exciting and painfully relevant. There were moments I was so furious my heart beat in my mouth. I was furious when in love, furious when I had been hurt, furious when I saw injustice, when someone was suffering — sometimes I felt like screaming out in righteous indignation. But they — they stayed quiet and smiled at such moments. It’s beyond words as far as I am concerned. Words are never really enough, not when anything really matters, matters as much as birth or death. Words don’t do those occasions any real justice. Maybe music can do it, I don’t know. Or when we feel desire and touch someone, like this. Don’t move. There was a good reason that other friend of mine hid the dictionaries in the end. He was looking for a word. But he couldn’t find it.
So don’t be surprised. I’m no good at explaining myself. I’m just talking … How far off the point talking is when you really want to say something!
Give me the photograph again. Yes, that’s what he looked like when I met him. Later, when I last saw him — after the siege — he was just the same. He had changed only the way a well-made object changes with use … a little more shiny, a little smoother, a little more burnished if you like. He was aging like a good razor or cigarette holder.