Heaven knows. Maybe I should make an effort to tell you what happened. You know what — I’ll start at the end. Maybe that way it will be clearer, leaving out the beginning.
His problem was that he was bourgeois. What’s bourgeois? The pictures in Red propaganda show us evil, potbellied figures who spend the entire day studying share prices while driving their workers to exhaustion. That’s the way I pictured them, too, before I found myself among them. But later I understood that the whole business of the bourgeois and the class war was different from what we proles were told.
These people were sure they had a role in the world; I don’t mean just in business, copying those people who had had great power when they themselves had little power. What they believed was that when it came down to it, they were putting the world into some sort of order, that with them in charge, the lords of the world would not be such great lords as they had been, and the proles would not remain in abject poverty, as we once were. They thought the whole world would eventually accept their values; that even while one group moved down and another one up, they, the bourgeois, would keep their position — even in a world where everything was being turned upside down.
Then one day he asked to speak to me. He said he wanted to marry me — me, the maid! I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but at that moment I hated him so much I could have spat at him. It was Christmas and I was squatting by the fire, preparing to light it. I thought it was the greatest insult I’d ever received. He wanted to buy me like he would some fancy breed of dog — that’s what I felt. I told him to get out of my way. I didn’t even want to look at him.
So he didn’t make me his wife then. After a while time passed and he got married. He married a proper lady. They had a child but the child died. The old man died too, and I was sorry about that. When he died the house was like a museum where people only dropped by to take a look. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a bunch of schoolchildren turned up one Sunday morning, rang the bell, and said it was an educational visit. By that time my husband was living in a different house, with his wife. They did a lot of traveling. I’d stayed with the old gentleman. The old woman wasn’t daft. I was scared of her, but I loved her too. There was some knowledge flickering in her, some age-old female wisdom. She had cures for liver and kidney ailments. She knew about washing and how to listen to music. She knew about us too, about the boy’s rebellion, without saying a word … she recognized the long-standing tension between us the way only women know, as if by a kind of radar. Women can sniff out the secrets of any man in their vicinity.
So she knew her son was hopelessly lonely because the world into which he’d been born, to which he belonged heart and soul — in his memories, in his dreams, even when he was wide awake — could no longer protect him. It couldn’t protect him because it was falling apart, disintegrating like an old piece of cloth, beyond use even as a decorative throw or a rag for wiping. She knew her son was no longer moving forward, no longer on the attack: he was on the back foot, merely defending. She knew that people who stop moving forward and spend their lives on the back foot are no longer alive: they merely exist. The old woman sensed this danger: her ancient female weaving-and-spinning instincts told her as much. She was aware of this secret the way families are aware of a sinister genetic weakness that is not to be spoken of because considerable interests are at stake. No one should know or speak about the fact that anemia or madness had ravaged the family in the past.
What are you looking at? Yes, I am just as neurotic as the rich. And it wasn’t being among the rich that gave me my neurosis. I was neurotic in my own way in the ditch back home … that is to say if I ever had anything of the kind people call “home.” Whenever I say the word “family” or “home,” I see nothing, I only smell things: earth, mud, mice, human smells. Then, beyond all that, another smell, one hovering over my half-animal, half-human childhood, over the pale blue sky, the mushroom-smelling wood wet with rain, the taste of sunlight, a smell like metal when you touch it with your tongue. I was a neurotic child too, why deny it? It’s not just the rich that have secrets.
But it’s the end I want to tell you about, the very last time I saw my husband. Because, sitting with you here at dawn in this hotel in Rome, I feel I know for certain that that was the last time.
Wait, let’s not drink any more. A black coffee instead … Give me your hand. Put it to my heart. Yes, it’s pounding. That’s how it pounds every dawn. It’s not the black coffee or the cigarettes, it’s not even being with you that does it. It pounds because I remember that moment — the moment I last saw him.
Please don’t think it is desire that makes my heart pound like this. There is no cheap movie scene involved in that pounding. I have already told you that I never loved him. There was a time when I was in love with him, of course, but that’s only because I hadn’t yet lived with him. Love and being in love don’t go together, you know.
I was foolish and in love, and everything happened just as I had planned. The old woman died and I went to London. Show me that second photograph! Yes, that was my virile Greek, dearest. He taught singing in London, in Soho. He was a real Greek, down to his fingernails, and could flash those beautiful, fiery, dark eyes of his. He could whisper and swear and, when roused, show as much of the whites of his eyes as that Neapolitan tenor we saw at the concert the other day.
I felt very lonely in London. London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there. The English have become connoisseurs of boredom: they know how to deal with it. I went there as a maid and quickly found employment. At that time foreign maids were in demand the way African slaves once were. There is a city in England called Liverpool that, they say, is built on the skulls of black men — not that I know that for certain. I couldn’t stand being a maid in London for long, because the job was quite different in London than it had been in Budapest. It was better in some ways and worse in others. It wasn’t the work so much. The fact that I had to work was no bother. I could barely speak the language, which was a serious concern, but what was worse was that I didn’t really feel like a maid in the house, more just a component. A component, that is, not in an English household with an English family, but in some kind of big business dealing with imports. I was an imported article. On top of that it wasn’t a real English family I had joined but a rich German Jewish family living in London. The head of the family had fled Hitler to England, bringing his family with him, and was producing warm woolen underwear for the army. He was a thoroughly German Jew — that is to say, as much German as Jewish. He wore his hair close-cropped, and I think — though I don’t know this for certain, it’s not impossible — had had a surgeon apply some dueling scars to his face, hoping he’d pass for someone who had been a proper card-playing German student. That’s what I kept thinking when I occasionally looked at his picture.
They were good people, though, and played at being English with more enthusiasm than the English themselves then wanted or had means to do. The house was lovely. It was in a green outer suburb of London. There were four in the family, plus a staff of five and a daily charwoman. I was on the door, responsible for letting people in. The staff included a cook and a manservant as back at home, a kitchen maid, and a driver. I thought this was all perfectly proper. Very few of the grand old English families were employing such specialized staff by this time. They’d sold the great family houses, or had them rebuilt, maintaining the obligatory minimum staff in the few grand households where people still preserved old customs.