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Was he patriotic? I don’t know. He tended to be suspicious of patriotic talk. To him the country meant only the language. It wasn’t by chance he was reading dictionaries at this time — nothing but dictionaries. He spent the night leafing through Spanish-Italian and French-German dictionaries. He did the same while drinking, or in the morning, as the air-raid warnings sounded, as if he hoped that in the middle of this terrible cacophony of destruction he might finally find a word that would serve as an answer. But most of the time it was Hungarian dictionaries and lexicons he read with a spellbound, adoring expression, as if he were in the grip of an ecstasy, enjoying a kind of mystical vision in church.

He would take the odd Hungarian word from the dictionary, stare at the ceiling, then pronounce the word, letting it flutter above him like a butterfly … yes, I remember, he once actually pronounced the word “butterfly,” then watched it fluttering around him as though the word were the thing itself in the powdery golden sunlight, flitting this way and that, hovering, catching the sun on its lightly dusted wings, as he followed its angelic choreography, a Hungarian word doing its dance of the spirit, and suddenly he was happy and gentle because this was the greatest and loveliest experience left to him in life. In his heart, it seemed, he had already given up the bridges, the fields, the people. It was only the Hungarian language he believed in by then: that was his home.

One night when he was drinking he allowed me in. I sat down opposite him at the end of the big divan, lit a cigarette, and watched him. He paid no attention to me; he was mildly drunk. He walked up and down the room, shouting out individual words.

“Sword!” he cried.

He took a few faltering steps forward, then stopped as though he had tripped over something. He stared at the floor.

“Pearl!” he said to the carpet.

Then he gave a cry, put his hand to his brow as if it hurt.

“Swan!” he said.

He looked at me as though he were confused, as if he had only just noticed I was in the room with him. Believe it or not, I lowered my eyes and didn’t look back at him. I was ashamed. I felt I was witnessing an immoral act, a lapse of taste, in which I was Peeping Tom, a voyeur, watching the sufferings of a sick man through a crack in the wall. It was like watching a shoe fetishist, someone who thinks the part more important than the whole. He recognized my presence through the fog of wine, and blinked once or twice in acknowledgment. He gave an embarrassed, guilty smile, as though he had been caught doing something faintly disgraceful. He spread out his arms by way of excuse, as if to plead he couldn’t help it, the obsession being stronger than prudence or good manners.

“Cat’s tail!” he stuttered. “Barberry!”

Then he sat down beside me on the divan, took my hand, and covered his eyes with his other hand. He sat there a long time without saying anything.

I didn’t dare speak. But I understood that what I had just seen was part of the act of dying. He wasn’t sacrificing his life thinking the world would submit itself to his mind. He was forced to concede that the mind was powerless. You won’t understand this, my dearest, because you are an artist, a real, genuine artist, the kind that has little to do with the mind, because drumming requires no meaning. Don’t get cross now! What you do is far more important. There, you see? But this man was a writer, and for a long time he believed in meaning. He believed the mind was a power, like any other power that is capable of changing the world: like light, like electricity, like magnetism. And he, being a human being, might control the world through his mind without the use of any other instrument — you know, like the hero of the very long Greek poem, the one they named a travel agency after not so long ago, remember? What was he called? Ah, yes, Ulysses. You wouldn’t need instruments, you wouldn’t need technology, you wouldn’t need Arabic numerals. I think that’s how he imagined it.

But then he had to learn that reason — the mind — is worthless, because the instincts are stronger. Fury is greater than reason. And once fury has instruments at its disposal, it whistles at reason. Fury and instrument launch their own wild dance.

So he no longer expected anything of words. He no longer believed that words put into rational order could help the world or humankind. Words, when they get twisted — as they have in our time, he said, meaning the everyday words spoken between us, person to person — are superfluous, useless gravestones. The truth, he felt, was that words, the human voice itself, had become one continuous boom. Voices change when loudspeakers start screaming and crackling.

He no longer believed in words, but he always liked them, tasted them, gulped them down. At night, when the whole city was dark, he could get drunk on a few words of Hungarian. He savored words the way you were savoring your Grand Napoleon the other day, when the South American dealer offered you smuggled hash. You drank the precious stuff with your eyes closed, with genuine appreciation, exactly the way he pronounced “Pearl!” or “Barberry!” Words were solid chunks of consumable matter to him, flesh and blood. And when he was in their grip, he’d spout nonsense like any drunk or madman. One time, I remember, he was grunting and shouting the words of some Asian language. I heard him and felt like running away. I thought I was witnessing some extraordinary Eastern rite, or had lost my way in this crazy world and was, for the first time, seeing an alien people, or what remained of them. I had blundered onto a strange man speaking strange words. The words came from far away, miles and miles away. It was the first time I had ever been aware of being specifically Hungarian. But that’s what I am, God knows — all my ancestors Hungarians from the old Cumanian region. I even have a mole on my back — they call it a birthmark — that is often regarded as the signature of the tribe. It’s called “the Mark of the Cumans.” What? You want to see it again? Fine, later.

I remember my husband once telling about some famous Hungarian who was a count, then became prime minister. He was named after a river — Count Danube or Tisza, I forget which. This count fell in love with a woman my husband knew. He had heard from the woman that when this bearded count was prime minister, he would sometimes go to a special room at the Hotel Hungaria with a few friends and invite little Berkes, the Gypsy fiddler, to join them. Then they’d close the door and listen silently to the Gypsy playing. They drank little. Then, at dawn, this grave, stern nobleman, our prime minister, who wore a frock coat most of the time, would stand in the middle of the room and begin dancing to a slow tune while the rest solemnly gazed on. Strangely enough, nobody laughed at the idea of a man — a prime minister — dancing alone, at dawn, moving very slowly to Gypsy music. And this is what occurred to me that dawn, when I heard my friend shouting and waving his arms about in a room that contained only his books and me.

Oh, those books! So many books! I never counted them, because I knew he couldn’t bear for me to be moving his books around. Only by squinting, out of the corner of my eye, could I size up the shelves. The room was filled floor to ceiling with them, the shelves bowing under the weight of the books, hanging at angles, sagging like a pregnant mare’s belly. The city library has more books, of course, maybe a hundred thousand or even a million; not that I know why people need all those books. I’ve been perfectly happy with the Bible and a paperback novel, one with a lovely colored cover showing a count kneeling before a countess. I was given the novel by a magistrate in Nyíregyháza when I was just an apprentice maid; he fancied me and invited me into his office to give it to me. I have looked after these two books. The rest I just read as and when they came along. I mean, I read them when I was being a proper lady. Don’t look at me like that! Believe me, I was obliged to read books, take baths, have my toenails polished, and say things like “Bartók liberated the soul of the people’s music.” But I grew pretty bored of that, because I knew something about the people myself, and a bit about music too. It wasn’t anything I could say to ladies and gentlemen, of course.