And then, suddenly, he was famous. Why? It was impossible to explain. Hands reached out for him, he was in demand, first in literary salons, then on platforms in public debates, then in the press—you saw his name everywhere. People started imitating him: papers and journals were full of Lázár-style books and articles, none of them written by him and yet of all of which he was the hidden author. Then, even more surprisingly, the general public too began to take an interest in him, which was something no one understood, since his writing contained nothing that might amuse or console or delight people: he never seemed to be trying to establish any contact with his readers. But they forgave him that too. Within a few years he occupied the leading position in the peculiar competition that constitutes the worldly side of intellectual existence: his work was constantly discussed, his texts analyzed and picked over as though they were ancient Oriental manuscripts, subjects for high scholarship. None of this changed him. Once, at one particularly successful moment, I asked him what he felt. Didn’t the sheer noise around him offend his ears? For, naturally enough, there were critical voices too, jealous voices screaming at him, full of hatred and false accusation. But all this cry and countercry merged into a single sea of sound, out of which his name rose, sharp and clear, like the sound of the first violin in the orchestra. He heard my question through and turned it over in his mind. Then he replied most solemnly: “It’s the revenge of the writer.” That was all he said.
I knew something about him that others didn’t know: I knew he loved to play. Everything was play to him: people, situations, books, the mysterious phenomenon generally referred to as literature. Once, when I accused him of this, he shrugged and said that the deep secret at the core of art, in the artist himself, was the embodying of an instinct for play. And literature? I asked. Literature is, after all, more than that, literature offers answers and moral values … He heard me through as seriously and courteously as ever, and replied that this was true enough, but that the instinct that fuels human behavior is the instinct for play and that, in any case, the ultimate meaning of literature, as of religion, and, indeed, of all the arts, is form. He avoided my question. The mass of readers and critics naturally cannot know that a person can play just as solemnly with a kitten chasing a ball of wool in the sunshine as with a problem of knowledge or ethics, engaging with both with an equal inner detachment, concentrating entirely on the phenomenon or thought before him, giving his heart to neither. He was a player in that sense. People didn’t know this about him … And he was the witness, the observer in my life: it was something we often discussed, perfectly openly. Every man, you know, has someone who fulfills the role of defense lawyer, custodian, and judge, and at the same time his accomplice, in the mysterious and terrifying trial that is his life. That figure is his witness. He is someone who sees and understands perfectly. Everything you do is done partly with him in mind, so when you succeed at some venture you ask yourself: “Would he be convinced by it?” This witness hovers in the background throughout our entire life. He is not a comfortable playfellow in that sense. But there is nothing you can do to free yourself of him, and maybe you don’t even want to try.
Lázár, the writer, fulfilled that role in my life: it was with him I played the strange games of youth and adulthood, games that would have been incomprehensible to anyone else. He was the only one who knew, and of whom I alone knew, that it didn’t matter that the world regarded us as adults, as a serious industrialist, as a famous writer; that it was beside the point that women regarded us as excitable or melancholy or passionate examples of manhood … what really mattered was this capricious, brave, ruthless desire to play, which distorted and yet at the same time, at least for ourselves, lent beauty to the hollow, ritual theater of life.
Whenever we found ourselves together in society we were like two evil conspirators, understanding each other without secret signals, immediately engaging in our game.
There was a variety of games. We had our “Mr. Smith” game. Shall I explain it so you understand how it was with us? The rules of this game were that we had to go straight into it, without any warning, when we were in company—that is to say, in the company of various Mr. and Mrs. Smiths—so they should not suspect anything. So we would meet somewhere with others present, and immediately get started. What does one Mr. Smith say to the other Mr. Smith should they be speaking in company about, say, the recent collapse of the government, or the Danube flood that swept through entire neighborhoods, or the divorce of the famous actress, or the well-known politician caught with his hands in the public purse, or how the fellow caught up in that scandal shot himself at a well-known beauty spot? Mr. Smith would hem and haw and say, “Well, fancy that,” then go on to add some thumping commonplace, such as “Wet stuff, water!” or “If people will insist on putting their feet into water, they must expect to get wet!” Or something like “Well, it takes all sorts.” It’s what the Smiths have been saying since the dawn of time. When the train arrives they say, “It’s arrived.” Should the train stop in Füzesabony, they solemnly announce, “Ah, Füzesabony!” And they are always right. And maybe that is why the world is so hopeless, so dreadful beyond comprehension: it is because the clichés are always true, and only an artist or a genius has the gall to rap a cliché over the knuckles, to expose what is dead and against life in them, to show that, behind the truisms beloved of our respectable and matter-of-fact Mr. Smith, there lurks another truth, an eternal truth that stands the world on its head and sticks its tongue out at Füzesabony and is not a bit surprised when the morally bankrupt high official is discovered in a pink nightie by the security police, his body dangling from a window … If the subject happened to be a political debate, Lázár or I would answer Mr. Smith without hesitation, saying: “Well, as ever, one of them is right, but the other is not altogether wrong. Let’s give everyone a chance.” Lázár and I perfected the Mr. Smith game so that all the real-life Mr. Smiths never once noticed and carried on precisely as before.
Then there was the “In our day …” game, and that was pretty good too. Back in our day, you should know, everything was better: sugar was sweeter, water more fluid, the air more like proper air; women didn’t run around flinging themselves into men’s arms but spent the day paddling and bathing in the river, right till sunset, and even after the sun set they’d stay there paddling in the river. And when men saw a pile of banknotes in front of them, they didn’t try to grab it but pushed it away, declaring: “Go on, take it away, give it to the poor. Yes, sir, that’s what men and women were like in our day.” We played a lot of games like that …
This was the man to whom I sent Judit Áldozó so that he might give her the once-over. As I said, it was just like sending her to the doctor.
Judit called on Lázár in the afternoon. I met him in the evening. “Look,” he said. “What’s the point? The matter is already settled.” I listened to him with suspicion. I was afraid he was just playing another game. We were sitting in a city-center café, like the one we’re in now. He kept turning his cigarette holder—he always used long cigarette holders when smoking, because he was constantly suffering from nicotine poisoning, forever contemplating complex plans and inventions that would help humankind escape the painful consequences of this particular poison—gazing at me so earnestly, studying me with such attention, that I grew ever more suspicious. I wondered if this was another of his straight-faced jokes, a new game in which he was only pretending that this affair was deadly serious, and that soon enough he would laugh aloud at me, as he so often did, and go on to prove that there was nothing important or deadly serious about it, and that it was just another of those Mr. Smith games. After all, it is only the lower orders who believe the universe revolves around them and that the stars carefully arrange themselves with their fate in mind. I know he considered me a bourgeois—not in the contemptuous sense of the word that is so fashionable now; no, he recognized that it takes considerable effort to maintain a bourgeois existence, and would not look down on
my origins, my manner, or my values, because he too had a high opinion of the middle classes. It was just that he considered me a hopeless case. He felt there was something hopeless in my situation. The bourgeois is always trying to escape, he said. But he didn’t want to say any more about Judit Áldozó. Courteously but firmly he changed the subject.
Afterwards I often thought back to this conversation the way a sick man remembers learning the real name and nature of his disease when he first visited the famous doctor. The great doctor goes about his examination in a thorough, careful manner, using every kind of instrument, then airily begins to talk of something else, inquiring whether we did not fancy a voyage, or have seen the latest fashionable play, or been in touch with some mutual acquaintance. The only subject he does not touch upon is the one we are most anxious to hear about. That is, after all, why we are there, why we have suffered the tension and discomfort of the examination: it is because we wanted to be certain of something, because we ourselves do not know whether our condition is unusual, whether it is a general malaise or just a collection of insignificant symptoms, since we have been aware for some time that our anxious and troubled state is a sign of something wrong in our constitution, in the very rhythm of our life, all the while hoping that it could all be put right at a stroke, faintly but unambiguously suspecting that the great man knows the truth but isn’t telling us. So there’s nothing to do but wait until we discover for ourselves the truth the doctor kept from us, discover it through the development of further symptoms, through various other signs of danger, and through the manner of our treatment. In the meantime everyone really knows the score: the sick man knows he is very sick; the doctor knows not only that he is very sick but that the patient himself suspects as much and, furthermore, that the patient is quite aware that the doctor is keeping something from him. But there is nothing anyone can do about this; all both can do is to wait until the sickness takes some particular course. Then a cure of some sort may be attempted.
That’s how it was with Lázár the evening after Judit’s visit. He talked about all kinds of things—about Rome, about new books, about the relationship between literature and the seasons. Then he stood up, shook my hand, and said good-bye. That was when I felt it had not been a game. My heart was thumping with tension. I felt he had left me to my fate, that I had to deal with things by myself from then on. That was the moment I first began to respect the woman who had had such an effect on Lázár. I respected her and feared her. A few days later I went away.
A long time passed. I have only vague memories of it. It was, you might say, the development section of the drama. I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details of that.
I traveled for four years, all over Europe. My father had no real notion of the reason for my absence. My mother might have known, but she kept quiet about it. For a long time I noticed nothing unusual. I was young and the world, as they say, was mine.
There was peace then … though not proper peace, not really. We were between two wars. The borders were never completely open, but the trains did not stop too long at the variously colored international barriers. People asked each other for loans, not only people but countries, as if nothing had happened, going about their lives with miraculous confidence. And, what was still more miraculous, they received the loans—long-term loans—and they built houses, big ones, small ones, and generally behaved as though they had seen the back of painful, terrible times forever, as though it were an entirely new era, so that now everything was as it should be: they could plan far ahead, bring up their children, and give themselves over to individual pleasures that were not only delightful but even a touch superfluous. That was the world in which I started traveling—the world between two wars. I can’t say that the feeling I set out with, and which I experienced at various stopping places on my journey, was one of absolute security. We behaved like people who had, to their surprise, been robbed of everything: our whole lives were tinged with suspicion during the brief period between two wars in Europe: we, all of us, individuals and nations, made enthusiastic efforts to be generous and great-hearted, but—secretly, at any rate—we carried revolvers in our pockets and would occasionally reach, in a panic, for our wallets in the pocket above our hearts. Not just for our wallets, probably, but for our hearts and minds too, because we feared for them also. Nevertheless, one could at least travel again.
Everywhere people were building new houses, new estates, new towns, and, yes, new nations too. I headed north first, then south, then west. Eventually I spent several years in the cities of the West. The things I loved and in which I most earnestly believed were most directly to hand there. It was like when we learn a language at school and then travel to the country where the book language is the mother tongue of real people. In the West I lived among the members of a truly civil society, people who clearly did not regard membership of their class as a form of acting or sloganeering, nor a chore, but simply lived in the manner befitting those who had inherited the house they lived in from their ancestors, a house slightly too small, a little too dark and old-fashioned perhaps, but the house they best knew, one not worth demolishing in order to build another. Their way of life was as it was, needing the odd spot of repair and upkeep. We, at home, were still busy building that house, a home worthy of the civic being; between palaces and cottages we were constructing a wider, more compendious way of life in which everyone might feel at home: Judit Áldozó, myself, both of us.
Judit was only a shadow in my thoughts during those years. At first she was primarily the memory of a fierce, fevered condition. Yes, I had been ill and beside myself, ranting. My eyes were not clear. I had become deeply conscious of my loneliness; a freezing wave of loneliness had swept into my life. Fearing loneliness, I fled from it to a person whose being, whose energy, and whose smile suggested that this loneliness might be shared. That was what I remembered. But then the whole world opened up and it proved very interesting. I saw all kinds of statues, gas turbines, and other forms of loneliness; I saw people who felt joy hearing the music of a single line of verse; I saw economic systems that promised dignity and generosity; I saw vast cities, mountaintops, beautiful medieval wells, little German towns, their main squares surrounded by sycamores; cathedral towers, beaches with golden sand and dark blue oceans; women bathing naked on the shore. I saw the world. The memory of Judit Áldozó couldn’t compete with the wonders of the world. She was less than a shadow compared to this new reality. Life showed me, and promised me, everything in those years. It offered me liberation from the narrow confines and melancholy clutter of our house. It stripped me of the clothes I had to wear in order to perform my parts back home, and let me lose myself in the traffic of the world. It offered me women too, an army of women, the women of the entire world, from Flemish brunettes with hot-dreamy looks, through bright-eyed French women, to meek German girls … all kinds of women. I moved in the world. Women revolved around me as they do around every man, sending messages, calling: the respectable who promised me their entire lives; the flirtatious who offered lives of simple, sensuous, wild abandon—nothing permanent, but something long enough, something more mysterious than a quick fly-by-night affair.
“Women.” Have you noticed the wary, uncertain way in which men pronounce the word? It is as if they were speaking of a not completely enchained, ever rebellious, conquered but unbroken tribe of discontents. And, really, what does the everyday concept “women” signify in the hurly-burly of existence? What do we expect of them? … Children? Help? Peace? Delight? Everything? Nothing? A few moments of pleasure?
We carry on living, desiring, meeting, and falling in love, and then we marry, and, with that one woman, we experience love, childbirth, and death, all the time allowing our heads to be turned by a neatly formed ankle, and ready to face ruin for the sake of a hairdo or the hot breath emanating from another’s lips. We lie with them in middle-class beds, or on sofas with broken springs, in cheap no-questions-asked hotels, down filthy side streets, and feel a
very brief satisfaction. Or we grow drunk on high-flown sentiment with a woman, weepy and full of vows. We promise to face the world together, to assist each other, to live on a mountaintop, or in the heart of some great city … But then time passes, a year, or three years, or two weeks—have you noticed how love, like death, has nothing to do with clocks or calendars?—and the grand plan to which both the woman and the man have agreed is not carried through, or only partially carried through, not quite as either had imagined. And so the man and woman part, with anger or with indifference, and once again they set out, full of hope, ready to start again with someone new. Alternatively, they might stay together out of sheer exhaustion, draining the lifeblood from each other, and so sicken, killing each other little by little before dying. But then, in that very last moment, just as they are closing their eyes, what is it they understand? What had they wanted from each other? They seem to have done nothing except conform to an old, blind law, the law of love, at whose bidding the world must constantly renew itself, because the world requires the lust of men and women to perpetuate the species. So was that all? What, poor things, had they been hoping for? What have they given each other? What have they received? What a terrifying, secret audit! Is the instinct that draws one man to one woman personal? Isn’t it just desire, always, eternally, simply desire, that occasionally, for some brief interval, is incarnated in a particular body? And this strange, artificial excitement, the fever in which we live: might that not have been nature’s fully conscious way of preventing men and women feeling utterly alone?
Look around you. There’s no escape from sexual tension: it’s there in literature, in paintings, on the stage, and out in the street … Go into a theater. There are men and women sitting in the auditorium watching men and women conspiring onstage, chatting, making promises, and taking vows. The audience coughs and croaks and is clearly bored … but let the words “I love you” be spoken by the actors, or “I want you,” or anything that refers to love, possession, parting, and to the happiness or misery associated with them, the auditorium immediately falls deathly silent: thousands upon thousands, all over the world, are holding their breath. Writers spend their lives cooking such things up: they use the emotion to blackmail the audience. And wherever you go, this whipped-up excitement continues unabated: perfumes, bright dresses, expensive furs, half-naked bodies, skin-colored stockings. It’s the same desire at work—the desire to show off a silk-stockinged knee or, in the summer, on the beach, to go practically naked, because this way the feminine presence becomes more teasing, more exciting, not to mention the makeup, the scarlet basque, the blue eye shadow, the blond highlights, all the cheap rubbish they apply and pamper themselves with—it’s all so unhealthy.