Esther's Inheritance (3 page)

“Scratch the surface of the mirror with it,” suggested Nunu.

But the stone made no mark on the glass. I put on the ring and gazed at it. The stone sparkled with a cold vacant light. It was a perfect copy, created by a master.

We remained sitting on the edge of the bed gazing at the ring. Then Nunu kissed me, gave a sigh, and went off without a word. I carried on sitting there for a long time staring at the fake stone. Lajos has not even arrived yet, I thought, but he has already taken something from me. That’s all he can do, it seems. That’s the way it is, it is his constitution. A terrible constitution, I thought, and started shivering. That’s how I fell asleep, all goose-flesh, the fake ring on my finger, my senses dulled. I was like someone who has spent too long in a stuffy room then suddenly feels dizzy in the pitiless sharp air of truth that roars about her like a gale.

5

T
he day Lajos returned to us happened to fall on a Sunday at the end of September. It was a wonderfully mild day, its colors glassy and clear. Gossamer was drifting between the trees, and the air was sparklingly clear without a trace of mist, a thin transparent solution coating everything with the finest enamel, as if all visible objects, including the sky itself, had been touched in with the most delicate of brushes. I went out into the garden in the early morning and cut three dahlias for the vase. Our garden is not particularly big, but it does completely surround the house. I don’t think it had passed eight o’clock yet. I was standing in the dew, in the great silence, when I heard conversation on the veranda. I recognized the voices of my brother and Tibor. They were talking quietly, and in the stillness of the morning every word rang out as clear as if it had been broadcast by some invisible loudspeaker.

In the first few moments I would like to have intervened and warned them that I could hear it all, that they were not alone. But already the first sentence, spoken in a low voice, silenced me. Laci, my brother, was asking:

“Why didn’t you marry Esther?”

“Because she wouldn’t have me,” came the answer.

I knew Tibor’s voice, and my heart beat loud in my chest. Yes, this was Tibor, his quiet, calm voice, and every word of his was the kindly, slightly melancholy truth spoken patiently and dispassionately.

Why does Laci ask such things? I thought, insulted and agitated. My brother’s questions always have an air of accusation: they sound aggressive and unbearably intimate. Laci hates any kind of secret. But people like their secrets. Might another man have given an evasive answer and protested against this invasion of privacy? Tibor answered quietly, as honest and correct as if someone had asked him a question about the railway timetable.

“Why wouldn’t she have you?” my brother badgered him.

“Because she loved someone else.”

“Who?” came the flat, ruthless question.

“Lajos.”

Then they fell silent. I heard the scrape of a match, one of them lighting a cigarette. It was so quiet I even heard Tibor blow the match out. The question I was anticipating came as perfectly on cue as thunder after lightning. Laci was doing the asking.

“Do you know he is coming here today?”

“I know.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does he owe you money too?”

“Let it go,” a reluctant voice replied. “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“He owes me,” Laci declared with childish pride, as if it were something to boast about. “He had borrowed Father’s gold watch too. He asked me to lend it to him for a week. That was ten years ago. No, wait, twelve years. He still hasn’t given it back. Another time he took away the complete set of encyclopedias. Borrowed. I never saw those encyclopedias again. He asked me for three hundred korona. But I didn’t give him that,” said the voice, with the same childish self-satisfaction.

And the other voice, the deeper, quieter, more even one, answered rather modestly.

“It wouldn’t have been such a disaster if you had given it to him.”

“You think so?” Laci asked, suddenly ashamed. I stood among the flowerbeds and could almost see the blush on that aged child-face of his as he smiled in confusion. “What do you think? Does he still love Esther?”

There was a long wait before he received an answer to this. I really would like to have said something myself, but it was too late. It was a ridiculous situation. Here I was, alone, much older, surrounded by the flowers in my garden like the heroine of some old-fashioned poem, on the very morning when I was waiting for him to call, the man who had deceived and robbed me, here in the very house where it had all happened and where I had spent my entire life, where I kept Vilma and Lajos’s letters in a sideboard along with the ring that I knew for certain, at least since the previous night—though I had previously suspected it—was fake, theatrically overhearing a theatrical conversation, waiting for an answer to a question, the only question of any interest to me, and what happens? The answer is delayed. Tibor, the conscientious judge of the situation, weighed his words carefully.

“I don’t know,” he said after a time. “I don’t know,” he repeated more quietly, as if arguing with someone. “Doomed love cannot die,” he finally added.

Then they said more in low voices and went into the house. I could still hear them, looking for me. I put the flowers down on the concrete bench and walked to the bottom of the garden, to the well, and sat down on the bench where Lajos had proposed to me twenty-two years before. There I crossed my arms above my heart, drew the crocheted scarf over my breasts because I was cold, looked out at the highway, and suddenly could not understand Laci’s question.

6

W
hen Lajos first appeared among us, which seems a very long time ago, Laci was effusive in his welcome. Both were rehearsing the family role of “men of great promise.” Nobody could say what exactly it was that Lajos and Laci “promised,” though if you listened long enough to either of them both would have promised a great deal. The resemblance between their characters—the complete lack of any sense of reality, the tendency to unproductive dreaming, a compulsion to tell unconscious lies—drove them together with such irresistible force they might have been lovers. How proud Laci was when he introduced Lajos to the family! They even looked like each other: both their faces radiated something of the last century’s romantic glow, a quality I liked in Laci and that helped me warm to Lajos. There was a time when they dressed like each other, and the town was full of stories of their frivolous, grand-sounding antics. But everyone forgave them because they were young and charming and hadn’t actually done anything scandalous. They were frighteningly alike in both soul and body.

This friendship, which even in their university years had an unsettling air of intimacy, did not cease when Lajos started showing interest in me: it did not cease but rather changed in an odd way. Even a blind man could see that Laci was ridiculously possessive of Lajos, doing everything he possibly could to make his friend part of the family while at the same time disapproving of Lajos’s courtship, interrupting our clumsy moments of togetherness, mocking the uncertain signs of our increasing mutual attraction. Laci was possessive, but in an extraordinary—or perhaps not so extraordinary—way he directed his jealousy only at me and appeared to be happy when Lajos married Vilma, behaving throughout with the utmost tenderness toward them, prepared to sacrifice anything for their happiness. Everyone in the family knew that I was Laci’s favorite, the one for whom he had a fond spot. Later I even thought that Laci’s opposition and antagonism might have played some part in Lajos’s infidelity. But this wasn’t a hypothesis I could ever prove, even to myself.

These two similar people, these two almost identical characters, rivaled each other in friendship. Once Lajos came into his inheritance they even lived together in the capital, in a magnificent bachelor apartment that I never visited but which, according to Laci, was one of the most significant intellectual and social venues of the age. I have every reason to doubt its social significance. In any case, they lived together and had money—Lajos was pretty close to being a rich man at the time, and it was only a childish resentment in Laci that made him mention the gold watch and the few hundred Lajos had wanted to borrow, since Lajos, in the days of his wealth, was generous to everyone, including, of course, his closest friend. They selected a few happily idle members of the
jeunesse d’orée
and lived a life of high jinks. Not that there were debaucheries as such. Lajos, for example, was not particularly fond of wine, and Laci was no night hawk. No, their lives were complex, expensive, and given over to an exacting kind of idleness, the kind of idleness an ignorant outsider might easily mistake for substantial, deliberate activity, amounting to a refined form of life fashionably referred to as “lifestyle”—Laci’s favorite word. These two peculiarly talented young men strove to realize it together. The reality was that they were lying and dreaming. But I only discovered that much later.

With Lajos, the new friend, a whole new set of tensions entered our household. He looked on our rural amusements and lives with a certain bemused condescension. We sensed his superiority and, a little abashed, strove to overcome our shortcomings. We all suddenly started “reading,” particularly authors to whose significance Lajos first drew our attention—“reading” with such industriousness, with such a sense of shame, it was as if we were preparing for the most important examination life could offer. Later we discovered that Lajos himself had never read, or had simply scanned, these authors and thinkers, the works and ideas that he so emphatically recommended, wagging his head and chiding us with good-humored severity. His charm acted on us like a cheap wicked spell. Our poor mother was the first to be utterly bedazzled. Under Lajos’s influence and out of deference to him we “read” all the time, quite differently from before, and also tried to live “a social life,” but one quite different from before. We even refurbished the place. It cost a lot of money, and we were not rich. Mother was always waiting for Lajos, preparing for his visits as if for some kind of test. One time she was mugging up on the latest German philosophers, because Lajos, in his superior way, had asked whether we were acquainted with the works of B, the Heidelberg thinker. No, of course we weren’t. We urgently started reading his high and somewhat cloudy meditations on life and death. Father too was pulling himself together. He drank less and was particularly careful when we had guests to hide his sad patchwork life from Lajos’s all-seeing eye. Every weekend my brother and Lajos would arrive with guests.

The house would be full of people and chatter then. The old parlor had been transformed into some kind of “salon” where Lajos entertained the most fascinating local people, people who had until that time been not so much fascinating as suspicious, people we would not have had in the house at all. Suddenly they had an open invitation. In his worn frock-coat, and with old-fashioned cordiality, my father moved awkwardly among the weekend guests—he dared not even light his pipe on these occasions…And Lajos accepted me, tested me, approved or admonished me with a glance, praised me to the skies and rewarded me or cast me headlong into hell. This lasted three years.

My brother and his strange friend were not vulgar, dissolute young men in the ordinary sense of the word. After a year everyone noticed that Laci had become as dependent on Lajos as we all had, my mother, Vilma, and, later, myself. I could claim now to have been the only sensible one, the sole figure immune to this wicked illusion, but why should I console myself with such a poor distinction? Yes, I did “see through” Lajos straightaway, but did I not rush blindly and eagerly to serve him? He was so solemn and so sensitive. We were quickly forced to acknowledge that he and Laci had abandoned their academic studies. One day at dusk he was standing by the table with a lock of hair flopping over his forehead when he said—and I remember his words exactly, words he pronounced resignedly, as if performing an act of self-sacrifice—“I must exchange the quiet and lonely existence of the study for the noisy, dangerous battlefield of life.” He always spoke as if reading from a book. This declaration shook me and upset me. I felt that Lajos was abandoning his vocation for some great, somewhat obscure project in order to enter a struggle on behalf of somebody or for a whole lot of somebodies, in which he should be armed not with the weapons of knowledge but with those of guile and pragmatism. The sacrifice made me uneasy, because in our family we preferred boys to complete their education before entering “the battlefield of life.” But I believed Lajos when he said his way was different, his weapons not the usual kind. Naturally enough, Laci immediately followed him on his chosen path; they did not bother with the third year of their university course. I was still quite a young girl then. Laci returned to the “world of the mind” some time later; using the last remaining part of our family’s credit he opened a bookshop in town and after all the enthusiasm of the planning stage filled his life with the selling of textbooks and stationery. Lajos was severely critical of this turn in his career, but later, when politics became our passion, he kept his peace.

I never got to know Lajos’s political views. Tibor, whom I often consulted on this kind of issue, shrugged and said Lajos had no political convictions at all, that he sailed with the prevailing wind and simply wanted to be involved wherever power was being distributed. It might have been fair criticism, and yet it wasn’t quite accurate enough. I suspected Lajos was just as liable to make sacrifices for humankind or human ideals—especially the latter, since he always preferred ideas to reality, probably because the field of ideas was likely to prove less dangerous and it was easier compromising with them—and when he sought “involvement” in politics he was willing to put himself on the line, not so much for the prizes available, but for the sheer excitement of being involved, the pathos of involvement being something he fully felt and suffered. My experience of Lajos is that he is the kind of man who begins with lies but then in the middle of his lying grows passionate and weeps, going on to lie more, this time with tears in his eyes, until eventually, to everyone’s utter surprise, he tells the truth as eloquently as he had been telling the opposite…This talent of his naturally did not prevent him from presenting himself for a whole decade as a vanguard proponent of extreme and conflicting views, and he was soon shown the door by all parties. Fortunately Laci did not follow him on this path. He remained in “the intellectual realm,” selling drawing material and dog-eared secondhand textbooks, part of that faintly musty atmosphere. But Lajos went in search of danger, “dangers” he could never quite pin down, leaving us to contemplate him at a distance, a lone figure surviving among storms and tempests, never too far from where lightning was liable to strike.