All those books! After the siege, I sneaked in there again. He had already immigrated to Rome. I found only the shell of a bombed building, the books just damp pulp. The neighbors said the house had received several hits. The bombs had made a soup of the books. They were lying in piles and swamps in the middle of the room, which, it seemed, the owner had only just left. One neighbor, a dentist, told me that the writer hadn’t bothered to save a single book. He didn’t search among the wet piles … when he came up from the cellar, he just stood among the books and gazed at what was left of them, his arms folded. The neighbors waited beside him, curious, keen to see him pale-faced, bewailing his bad luck. But much to their surprise, he seemed to look on the wreckage with satisfaction. Isn’t that strange? The dentist swore he was almost cheerful, nodding away as if something had worked out according to plan, as if some great fraud or slander had finally come to light. He seemed to have been expecting it. The writer stood in the midst of the havoc, among his damp and soggy books, stroking his bald head, murmuring, “At last!”
As the dentist recalled it, some people there felt affronted by this. But he didn’t care whether they heard him or not. He simply shrugged and left. He spent some time wandering round town as many others did. But no one ever saw him near his old apartment again. It seemed he must have put a firm period to something the moment he stood among the piles of soaked books. The dentist suspected the writer was just playing the fool, putting on a show to prove he was not hurt by what he’d lost. Others wondered whether behind the sigh of relief there might not lie the realization of failure involving a secret political allegiance — the writer might have been a fascist, a Communist, or an anarchist, so that’s why he said “At last!” But they couldn’t be certain of anything. The books remained on the pile of rubbish in the bombed house and rotted away. It’s interesting — people were stealing all kinds of things in Budapest at the time, anything from cracked bedpans to Persian carpets and dentures, whatever they could lay their hands on. But nobody stole books. It was as if books had been taboo. It was bad luck to touch them.
He disappeared soon after the Russians entered the city. Someone said he’d been seen on the back of a Russian truck on the way to Vienna. No doubt he paid with his hoarded gold napoleons or with dollars. They said they saw him with a few salvaged goods on top of a pile of raw leather, his head uncovered, his glasses on his nose, reading some book. Maybe it was a Hungarian dictionary. What do you think? I don’t know. In any case he vanished from the city.
But we can’t be too sure of that, either. There’s something about this that doesn’t fit into the picture as I remember him. I prefer to think he would have traveled by sleeper car, on the first sleeper that left the city. He would have put his gloves on when getting on the train, bought a few newspapers at the station, and when the train started he wouldn’t have looked out, but drawn the curtains of the compartment so he shouldn’t see the ruins of the bombed town. He hated mess.
That’s how I imagine him. I prefer it like this. It’s odd, really, now, when there’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that is that he is dead … There is nothing else I know about him for certain.
In any case, he was, for me, the last representative of the old prewar world … that other world, the world of my husband, I mean the world of the gentry. Not that he had any truck with the gentry. After all, he wasn’t rich, he had neither title nor rank … He belonged in a different way.
You know how the rich kept all kinds of tatty things “in storage”? He too kept something stored away. It was culture, or taste — call it what you will … it was that which he believed to be culture. Because, my one and only, it’s important to recognize that culture is not what we proles imagine … It’s not the splendid apartment, the books on the shelf, polite conversation, and colored toilet paper. There’s something else, something the rulers don’t pass on to the ruled, not even now, when everything is different from before, when the rich have understood that they can remain rich only so long as they shower us proles with all the trifles that only yesterday were the height of desirability … But there is something they won’t be passing on. Because there’s still a kind of conspiracy among the rulers, even now, though it’s different from before … It’s not gold, not libraries, not galleries, not fine clothes, not ready cash, not shares, not jewelry, not delicate manners they are hiding away, but something more difficult to take from them. Quite likely the writer would have regarded some of these so-called important things with contempt too. He said to me, one time, that he could live on apples, wine, potatoes, bacon, bread, black coffee, and cigarettes — nothing else. Nothing else was necessary in life. Add a change of clothes, a few items of underwear, plus the well-worn raincoat he always wore, winter and summer. He wasn’t just saying this: listening to him, I knew it was the truth. Because, after a while, it wasn’t only him who could be silent a long time. I quickly learned it from him. I learned he had to be listened to.
I think I listened pretty closely. I solved him like a crossword puzzle. Not with my brain, but with my lower body, the way we women feel and learn. I eventually came to the conclusion that nothing that was of importance to everyone else was of any importance to him. All he needed was bread, bacon, apples, and wine. Some dictionaries.
And, ultimately, a few tasty, luscious Hungarian words that melt in the mouth. He would leave everything that was important to others without a moment’s hesitation.
All he loved by then was the sun, wine, and words, words without associations, just words in themselves. It was fall, the town was being bombed, civilians and soldiers both huddled in cellars — funny to think the soldiers were more afraid of the bombs than civilians were! — while he was sitting in the autumnal sunlight, having pushed an armchair over to the window. He had bags under his eyes. He was smiling, his mouth half-open, hungrily drinking in the late-fall sunlight in the deathly silence of war.
It seemed he was happy at last, but I knew he wouldn’t live much longer, that this was a form of dying.
Because, however he rejected everything culture considered important, however he wrapped himself in his faded old raincoat, he still belonged to the world that was crumbling and vanishing around him. What was this world? The world of the rich and celebrated? My husband’s world? No, the rich were just the dregs of something that would once have been regarded as culture. See — even as I pronounce the word I am blushing as though I had said something improper. It’s as if he or his spirit were here, listening to what I’m saying, sitting on the edge of the bed in the hotel in Rome, and when I pronounce the word “culture” he suddenly looked at me with that awful gaze of his, looking right into my guts, and asked, “What was that, madam? Culture? That’s a big word! Do you know, madam”—and I can see him raising his forefinger as he looks at me seriously like a conscientious teacher—“do you have any idea what culture is? You paint your toenails red, I believe … And you like reading a decent book in the morning or before going to sleep … and you sometimes drift off pleasantly to music, am I right?” Because he liked talking like that, in a slightly mocking, old-fashioned way, like some character out of a nineteenth-century novel. “No, madam,” I can hear him now. “That’s not culture. Culture, madam, yes, culture, is a reflex!”