Beware of Pity (31 page)

But it was too late! Ilona was waiting in the salon, and had obviously heard me coming. As soon as she caught sight of me the expression on her face changed.

“Jesus and Mary, what’s the matter? You’re so pale … Has … has anything else happened to Edith?”

“No, nothing,” I just managed to stammer, and was about to go on. “I think she’s asleep. Excuse me—I have to go home.”

But there must have been something alarming in my brusque manner, because Ilona firmly took my arm and guided me—no, pushed me, into an armchair.

“Here, sit down for a minute first. You must pull yourself together … and your hair, what on earth do you think it looks like, all untidy … No, stay where you are”—for I was about to get to my feet—“I’ll get you a cognac.”

She went over to the sideboard and filled a glass. I knocked it straight back. Ilona was looking at me in concern as I put the glass down with a shaking hand (never in my life had I felt so weak, so exhausted), and she sat down with me and waited in silence, sometimes cautiously casting me an anxious sidelong glance, as if she were watching an invalid. At last she asked, “Did Edith … say anything? I mean, anything about you personally?”

I sensed, from her sympathetic tone of voice, that she guessed it all. And I was too weak to deny it. I just murmured quietly, “Yes.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t reply. I noticed only that she was suddenly breathing faster. Cautiously, she leant closer to me.

“And this … this was really the first time you realised?”

“How could such a thing occur to me … such nonsense! Such madness! How can she think that … why pick on me? Why me?”

Ilona sighed. “Oh God—and she always thought you kept coming here for her sake … she thought that was why you visited us. I … I never believed that, because you were so … so unselfconscious, and so full of a different kind of warm feeling. I was afraid from the first that you were only sorry for her. But how could I warn the poor child, how could I be cruel enough to talk her out of a delusion that made her happy? For weeks she’s been living only for the idea that you … And then, when she kept asking me and asking me whether I thought that you really liked her, I couldn’t be unkind … I had to soothe her and make her feel better.”

I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. “Well, now it’s quite the opposite. You must talk her out of it, you really must talk her out of it. It’s nothing but delusion on her part, a fever, a childish fancy … the usual crush adolescent girls get on a uniform, and if another military man turns up tomorrow she’ll transfer her crush to him. You must explain that to her … you must set the record straight at once. After all, it’s pure chance that I happen to be here, that I was the one who came to this house and not another man, a better man, one of my comrades. Such things wear off quickly at her age …”

But Ilona shook her head. “No, my dear friend, don’t deceive yourself. It’s serious with Edith, deadly serious, and getting more dangerous every day … no, dear friend, I can’t suddenly make something so difficult easy for you. Oh, if you only knew what it’s like in this house! She rings her bell three or four times in the night, wakes up the rest of us without a thought, and when we hurry to her bedside terrified that something has happened to her there she is, sitting up in bed distraught, staring into space and always asking us the same question. ‘Don’t you think he really may like me a little, just a very little? I mean, I’m not so ugly.’ And then she demands a mirror, but she tosses it away again at once, and next moment she realises that she’s deluding herself—only for it all to begin again a couple of hours later. In her desperation she asks her father, and Josef, and the maidservants. Yesterday she even summoned that Gypsy woman from the outing the day before—you’ll remember her—asked her to come and see her again in secret, and got her to predict the same future for her as before. She’s written letters to you five times, long letters, and then torn them up again. She thinks and talks of nothing else from morning to evening, from early to late. Sometimes she wants me to go
to see you and find out if you like her just a little or whether … whether she’s a nuisance to you, because you never say anything, you avoid speaking out. She wants me to go and see you at once, to catch up with you on your way home, and the chauffeur has to get ready and fetch the car. Three times, four, five times she’ll tell me exactly what I must say to you, how to put my question. And at the last moment, when I’m standing ready in the front hall, her bell rings again, I have to go back to her in my hat and coat and swear to her on my mother’s life never to make the slightest allusion to what she said. Oh, how would you know what goes on? It’s all over for you once you close the front door behind you. But the moment you’ve gone she’s repeating every word you said to her, asking what I think, and whether I believe that … And if I tell her, ‘Well, you can see how much he likes you,’ she screams at me, ‘You’re lying! That’s not true! He didn’t say a kind word to me today.’ But at the same time she wants to hear what I think all over again, I have to repeat it three times over and assure her that … And then there’s her old father. He’s been very upset since all this began, yet he loves and idolises you like his own child. You should see him when he’s been sitting beside her bed, tired out, for hours on end, petting and soothing her until she finally falls asleep. And then he himself paces restlessly up and down all night, up and down in his room … And you—you really didn’t notice anything at all?”

“No!” In my desperation it came out as a loud cry. “No, I swear, nothing at all, not the least little thing! Do you think I’d have kept on coming here, do you think I could have sat talking to you all, playing chess and dominoes, playing gramophone records, if I’d guessed? But how can she have deluded herself to the point where she thinks that I … that I of all people …
how can she expect me to go along with such nonsense, such childishness? … No, no, no!”

The idea of being loved against my will was so terrible that I was about to jump up, but Ilona firmly took my wrist.

“Hush! I beg you, dear friend, don’t get so worked up, and above all keep your voice down! She has a way of hearing things through walls. And please, for Heaven’s sake, be fair to her. The poor girl took it as a good sign that the news came from you, you were the one who told her father about this new cure. He went straight to see her and wake her up in the middle of the night. Can’t you imagine how the two of them sobbed and thanked God that their terrible trials were over? And they’re both convinced that once Edith is better, a young woman like other young women, you’d … well, I don’t need to spell it out to you. That’s why you
can’t
upset the poor child now, not when she needs strong nerves to face the new cure. We have to be very, very careful and never let her guess—God forbid!—that the idea of it is so … so
dreadful
to you.”

But my desperation had made me ruthless. “No, no, no!” I insisted, bringing my hand down on the arm of the chair. “No, I
can’t
… I
won’t
have her loving me, not like that … And I can’t go on acting now as if I didn’t notice anything, I can’t sit here at my ease saying sweet nothings … I can’t! You don’t know what happened … what happened in there, and … oh, she misunderstands me entirely. I only felt sorry for her. It was only pity, that’s all, no more.”

Ilona did not reply, but looked straight ahead of her. Then she sighed.

“Yes, I was afraid of that all along. All this time I’ve had a feeling that … but my God, what’s going to happen now? How can she be told?”

We sat there in silence. Everything had been said. We both knew that there was no way out of it, none. Suddenly Ilona sat up very straight, with an intent, listening expression on her face, and almost at the same time I heard the crunch of the car drawing up on the gravel outside. It must be Kekesfalva. Ilona quickly got to her feet.

“You’d better not see him now … you’re too upset to talk to him calmly. Wait a moment, I’ll get you your cap and sword. Your best way is to go out into the park through the back door. I’ll think of some reason why you can’t stay this evening.”

She quickly fetched my things. Luckily Josef had hurried out to the car, so I was able to get past the outbuildings of the house unnoticed. Once I was in the park, the fear of having to answer questions quickened my pace. It was the second time I had fled from that fateful house surreptitiously, like a thief in the night.

So far, as a young and inexperienced man, I had always thought that the longings of unrequited love were the worst possible affliction of the heart. On that day, however, I began to divine that there is another and perhaps much worse torment than feeling love and desire, and that is to be loved against your will, when you cannot defend yourself against the passion thrust upon you. It is worse to see someone beside herself, burning with the flames of desire, and stand by powerless, unable to find the strength to snatch her from the fire. If you are unhappily in love yourself you may sometimes be able to tame your passion, because you are the author of your own unhappiness, not just its creature. If a lover can’t control his passion then at least his
suffering is his own fault. But there is nothing someone who is loved but does not love in return can do about it, since it is beyond his own power to determine the extent and limits of that love, and no willpower of his own can keep someone else from loving him. Perhaps only a man can feel the full hopelessness of such a relationship, because only a man will feel not just pain, but also somehow guilty about his rejection of it. When a woman is defending herself against unwanted passion, deep in her heart she is only obeying the law of the relationship between the sexes; an initial rejection of all advances is, so to speak, every woman’s primeval instinct, and even if she rejects the most burning desire no one can call her inhuman. However, it is disastrous when Fate readjusts the scales, and a woman has overcome her natural reticence to the point where she confesses her passion to a man, offering him her love without any certainty that it will be returned—and he, the object of her passion, remains cold and unresponsive! In fact that’s a tangle that can never be resolved, for to refuse a woman what she wants means injuring her pride and her sense of modesty. A man turning down a woman’s desire for him is wounding all that is finest in her. However gently he tries to withdraw, whatever courteously evasive words he finds, it is no good. The offer of mere friendship insults a woman who has shown how vulnerable she is—all rejection on his part looks like cruelty, and if her love for him is unrequited he always feels guilty through no fault of his own. This is a terrible bond, and it cannot be undone—you thought you were free, you belong to yourself and owe no one anything, and suddenly you are hunted and cornered, the prey of someone else’s unwanted desire. Deeply wounded, you know that someone—a woman, a stranger!—is waiting for you, thinking of you, longing and pining for you! She
wants you, she cries out for you with every fibre of her being, with her body and her blood. She wants your hands, your hair, your lips, your body. She wants your night and your day, your emotions, your sexual desire and all your thoughts and dreams. She wants to share everything with you, take everything from you and suck it in, breathe it into her. Day and night, whether you are sleeping or waking, there is someone somewhere in the world now, wakeful, burning with passion as she waits for you, someone watching you and dreaming of you. You don’t want to think of her although she is always thinking of you, but that’s no use, and trying to run away is no use either, because you are no longer just yourself but a part of her. A stranger is suddenly carrying you about with her, like a mirror on the move—or no, not a mirror, which reflects only your image, willingly offered to it, whereas the stranger who loves you has already absorbed you into her bloodstream. She always has you in her, she takes you with her wherever you may run. You are always the captive of someone else, somewhere else, no longer yourself, never free, unconstrained and guiltless, always hunted, always under an obligation, you always feel her thinking of you. It is like a steadily burning conflagration. With hatred and horror, you have to endure the longing of this stranger who suffers for lack of you, and I know now that to be loved against his will is the most senseless yet inescapable misfortune that a man can suffer, the worst of all tortures. However innocent he is, it makes him feel guilty.

Not in my most fleeting daydreams had I ever imagined that a woman might love me so fiercely. Of course I had often heard comrades boasting of how this or that girl was “running after them”, perhaps I had even laughed cheerfully with the others at the indiscreet tales told of such immodest advances, because at
the time I didn’t yet know that every form love takes, even the most ridiculous and absurd, involves the life of another human being, and even indifference leaves you running up a debt to love. But what you have only heard and read easily passes you by, and the heart can learn the essential reality of feeling only from personal experience. I had to discover for myself the painful dilemma of having someone else’s passionate love on my conscience before I could feel sympathy for both parties—one forcing itself on the other’s notice, the second forcefully defending itself against the overwhelming emotion of the first. But what an unimaginable excess of responsibility I bore in this case! For if it takes a cruel and almost brutal heart to disappoint a woman’s affections, how much more terrible was the “No”, the “I don’t want to”, that I must say to that impetuous child! I had to injure someone already injured, inflict an even deeper wound on someone already painfully wounded, snatch away the last crutch of hope from a girl whose inner resources were not strong. I knew that if I fled from the love of this child who had inspired only pity in me, I would be endangering and perhaps destroying her. I was aware at once, with cruel clarity, how monstrously guilty I would be if, although I could not accept her love, I did not at least make some pretence of responding to it.