He didn’t ask me how I was nowadays, where I lived, or who I lived with. He was more interested in asking whether I had tasted olives stuffed with pimiento.
What a crazy question! I looked him in the eye and continued looking, watching those gray-green, searching eyes of his, a worryingly serious pair of eyes. The way he looked at me in that quiet cukrászda, among the falling bombs, you’d have thought both our lives depended on the answer.
I thought about it, because I didn’t want to lie to him. Yes, I answered, I had tasted them; naturally I had tasted them; I had eaten them in Soho once, in London, in the Italian quarter, in a small restaurant the Greek had taken me to. But I didn’t mention the Greek. Why mention the Greek as well as the olives? I thought.
“Ah, that’s good,” he said, relieved.
In a slightly timid voice — I never dared speak to him as I really wanted to — I asked him why it should be particularly good news that I had eaten olives stuffed with pimiento.
He heard out the question in full seriousness.
“Because you can no longer get them,” he briskly replied. “You can’t get olives at all in Budapest now. You used to be able to buy them in the city center at a reputable delicatessen—” and he mentioned a name—“but it has never been our way here to stuff olives with pimientos. That’s because when Napoleon came this way with his army, he only got as far as Győr, in the north.”
He lit a cigarette and gave a nod as if there was nothing further to say on the subject. An old Viennese pendulum clock hung above our heads. I heard it tick. And there were still those distant explosions that sounded like a well-fed animal breaking wind. It was all very dreamlike. It wasn’t a happy dream; nevertheless, I felt a curious calm, as I did later whenever I was with him. I can’t explain it to you. I was never happy in his company — sometimes I hated him, and he often drove me to fury. But it was never dull being with him. I wasn’t impatient or restless. It was as if I had taken off my shoes or bra in company, as if I could strip completely and divest myself of everything I had been taught. I was simply at peace with him. The most violent weeks of the war were to follow, but I was never so calm, so at peace with myself as in those weeks.
Sometimes I found myself thinking it was a pity I was not his lover. Not that I felt any particular desire for him or that I was desperate to creep into his bed. He had aged, and his teeth were yellow: there were bags under his eyes. I was half-hoping he was impotent and that that was why he did not look at me as a woman should be looked at. Or maybe he preferred boys and wasn’t interested in women? That’s what I hoped. All I could see was that he was unconcerned about me.
He would often clean his glasses with great care, the way a diamond cutter works at the rough stone. He was never careless in his clothes, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what he wore. And yet I can remember all my husband’s suits! I haven’t retained a single thing about this man’s external appearance, clothes and all.
And then he returned to the subject of olives, saying:
“It was always impossible getting genuine pimiento-filled olives in Budapest. Not even in peacetime, a long while ago. All you could get were those dry little olive buds without any filling. That’s if you were lucky. Mind you, stuffed olives were pretty rare, even in Italy.”
He raised his finger and pushed his glasses up to his brow.
“It’s strange,” he mused. “Soft, sourish, pimiento-filled olives were only obtainable in Paris, in the Ternes quarter, on the corner of the street named after Saint Ferdinand, from a grocer of Italian descent, near the end of the twenties.”
Having said this, having finally brought to my attention every possible fact it was possible, at this stage of human evolution, to know regarding olives stuffed with pimientos, he gazed straight ahead with a look of utmost satisfaction and stroked his bald pate with one hand.
Well, he has definitely gone mad, I thought. I looked at him in astonishment. Here I was, sitting at a table on Castle Hill while the city was being bombed below us, in the company of a madman who was once a friend of my husband’s. But it didn’t feel bad. It never did when I was with him.
Gently, as if talking to a madman, I asked why he thought that olives, of the kind I had actually eaten some time in the past in a small Italian restaurant in that part of London known as Soho, were destined to play such an important part in my current and possibly future life. He listened to me carefully, his head slightly tipped to one side, and looked, as he always did when he was thinking, into the distance.
“Because that culture is over,” he said in a friendly, patient manner. “Everything we considered to be culture is done for. The olive was just one small element of the many flavors that made up that culture. All these little sparks of flavor, these individual delights and wonders, worked together to produce the marvelous feast we call taste. Taste is an aspect of culture,” he said, and raised his hand, like a conductor in a concert waving in some crescendo of destruction. “And it’s all vanishing. It will vanish even if elements of it remain. They may still be selling olives stuffed with pimientos somewhere in the future, but the class that cultivated the taste for it and understood what it meant will have vanished. There will remain only the knowing about it, which is not the same thing. Culture is experience, I say,” he intoned like a priest, his hand raised. “It is living experience, timeless as sunshine. To know about things is to know merely secondhand. It is like wearing secondhand clothes.” He shrugged, then added courteously, “Which is why I am glad that you did at least have the opportunity of tasting olives.” And as he finished the sentence, a shell burst nearby, like a precisely placed period, shaking the building.
“It’s time to pay,” he said, and stood up, as if the explosion had reminded him that it was all very well announcing the death of culture, but there were things to be done. He opened the door for me like a proper gentleman and we walked down the deserted Zerge Steps in silence. That is how our true relationship began.
We went straight to his place. On the way we crossed the beautiful bridge that within a few months would be mere wreckage in the water. Bundles of explosives were already dangling off it, the Germans having made meticulous preparations to blow it up. He gazed calmly, almost approvingly, at the neat arrangement.
“This too is doomed to destruction,” he said as we crossed it, and pointed to the vast iron arches that suspended and counterbalanced the weight of the great bridge. “It will be blown to pieces. Do you want to know why? Well,” he spoke quickly, as if answering himself in a complex debate, “because whenever people have given so much serious thought and applied so much expertise to preparing a plan, that plan will eventually be carried out. The Germans are brilliant at blowing things up,” he said. “No one knows better how to blow things up than the Germans. So this suspension bridge, our Chain Bridge, will be destroyed as will, one after the other, the rest of the bridges, just the way they destroyed Warsaw and Stalingrad. They do these things to perfection.” Having said this, he stopped in the middle of the bridge with his arm raised as if to declare the significance of the German capacity for destruction.
“But this is terrible,” I cried out in despair. “All these beautiful bridges …”