Not that my husband smelled of patchouli. I could smell him through my tears, with my eyes closed, and suddenly I started trembling.
Why? What was it he smelled of? He smelled of damp straw, if you want to know. Just as he had years ago, before we separated. As he did that first night when I lay in his bed and that sour, privileged, masculine smell made me retch. He was exactly as he had been — flesh, clothes, smell — exactly as before.
I let go of his neck and wiped my tears with the back of my hand. I felt dizzy. I took a compact from my bag, opened the little mirror, and applied some lipstick. Neither of us said a word. He stood and waited until I repaired my tearful, smeary makeup. I only dared look up at him once I had checked in the mirror that my face was fit to be seen.
I could hardly believe my eyes that he should be standing in front of me, on that improvised bridge, among queues that stretched into the far distance — some ten or twenty thousand people in the smoky, sooty town where there were few houses left unmarked by shell or bullet holes. There was hardly an unbroken window anywhere. There was no traffic, no policeman, no law, nothing: it was a place where people dressed like beggars even when there was no need to, deliberately looking wretched, ancient, and penniless, growing wild beards, stumbling about in rags to avoid trouble or to rouse others to pity. Even grand ladies carried sacks. Everyone had a backpack. We were like village brats, or travelers. And there was my husband, standing right in front me. It was the same man I hurt seven years ago. Nothing had changed. He was the man who when he understood that I was not his lover, not even his wife, but his enemy, came to me one afternoon, smiled, and quietly said:
“I think it might be best for us to separate.”
He always started sentences that way when he wanted to say something very important: “I think” or “I imagine.” He never spoke his mind directly, never hit you in the eye with it. When my father could take no more, he would exclaim: “Goddammit!” And then he would hit me. But my husband, whenever he couldn’t bear something, courteously opened a little door each time, as if what he was saying were merely something to consider, a by-the-way thought, in the course of which the meaning, the damage in what he said, could slip by you. He learned this in England, in the school where he studied. Another favorite phrase of his was “I’m afraid.” One evening, for example, he turned to me and said, “I’m afraid my mother is dying.” She did in fact die, the old woman, at seven o’clock the same evening. She had turned quite blue by that time, and the doctor told my husband there was no hope. “I’m afraid” was a phrase that neutralized extremes of feeling and provided a kind of analgesic for the pain. Other people say, “My mother is dying.” But he was always careful to speak politely, to say sad or unpleasant things without offense. That’s the kind of people they are, and that’s all there is to it.
He was being careful even now. Seven years after the war between us had finished, after the siege in the real war was over, there he was, at the bridgehead. He looked at me and said:
“I’m afraid we’re in the way.”
He said it quietly and gave me a smile. He didn’t ask how I was, how I had survived the siege, or whether I needed anything. He just advised me that we might possibly be in the way. He pointed in the direction of a road near Mount Gellért where we might talk. Once we reached a place where there were no people, he stopped, looked round, and said:
“I think this might be the best place to sit.”
He was right: it was the “best” place to sit. There was an intact pilot’s seat in the wrecked Rata plane nearby, so there was just enough room for two people in the useless machine. I didn’t say anything but obediently took my seat in the pilot’s seat. He sat down beside me. But first he swept away the dirt with his hand. Then he took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands with it. We sat silently next to each other for a while, neither of us speaking. I remember the sun was shining. The place was very quiet, just wrecked planes, cars, and artillery.
Any ordinary person would imagine that a man and a woman might exchange a few words on meeting by the Danube, among the ruins of Budapest, after the siege. They might, for example, start by establishing the fact that both are still alive, don’t you think? “I’m afraid” or “I think”—one could imagine that. But my husband’s mind was elsewhere, so we just sat in front of the cave opposite the mineral springs and stared at each other.
I stared pretty hard, as you can imagine. I started trembling again. It was like being in a dream: dream and reality at once.
You know I’m not any kind of fool, darling. Nor am I a sentimental little tramp who turns on the tears whenever she feels on edge or when she has to say good-bye. The reason I was trembling was because the man sitting beside me, opposite the vast tomb that the whole city had become, was not a human being, but a ghost.
Some people only persist in dreams. Only dreams, dreams more effective than formaldehyde, can preserve apparitions like my husband as he seemed to me at that moment. Just imagine — his clothes were not ragged! I can’t remember precisely what he was wearing, but I think it was the same charcoal-gray double-breasted suit I last saw him in, the one he wore when he said, “I think it might be best for us to separate.” I couldn’t be absolutely sure about the suit, because he had many others like it — two or three, single-breasted, double-breasted — but in any case the same cut, the same material, and by the very same tailor who made his father’s suits.
Even on a morning like this he was wearing a clean shirt, a pale-cream lawn shirt, and a dark gray tie. His shoes were black and double-soled. They looked brand-new, though I have no idea how he could have crossed that dusty bridge without a speck of dust sticking to his shoes. I was, of course, perfectly aware that the shoes were not new and that they only looked that way because they’d hardly been worn — after all, he had a dozen like them in his shoe cupboard. I had seen enough of his shoes on the hall seat when it was my job to clean those fine leather objects. Now there he was, wearing them.
They talk about something being “brand-new,” fresh from the box the shop provides for you. Budapest was not so much a box as a mass grave out of which people were still climbing. It was the same mass grave he himself had emerged from. There was not a crease on the suit. His light-beige gabardine raincoat—“Made in England”—was casually draped across his arm, a very roomy coat, almost obscenely comfortable, as I remember. I was the one who unwrapped the package from London when it arrived. Much later, I was to pass the shop in London the coat had been bought from. It was there in the window among other things. He carried the coat in an almost careless fashion, thrown across his arm because it was a mild end-of-winter afternoon.
He wore no gloves, of course, because he only wore gloves in the very depths of winter when it was freezing. So I looked at his hands too. They were white and clean, his nails so unobtrusively manicured you’d think they’d never seen a pair of scissors. But that was him all over.
You know what was the strangest thing? When you put him up against that filthy, muddy, ragged crowd creeping over the bridge, his presence should have been practically incendiary. And yet he was almost invisible. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone from among the crowd came over, took him by the lapels, and shook and poked him, just to check that he was real. Imagine what would happen in the French Revolution, in those months of the Terror, when aristocrats were being hunted all over Paris the way children hunt sparrows with catapults, if an elderly nobleman appeared on the street in lilac frock coat and powdered wig, amiably waving at carts filled with fellow counts and earls on their way to the scaffold. There would be nothing to choose between him and my husband, each as spectacular as the other. He was mysteriously different from the toiling throng around him, as if he had emerged not from one of the many bombed-out houses but from an invisible theater, a piece of period drama for which he was appropriately fitted by the dresser. It was an old part in an old play, the kind that’s never going to be put on now.