Esther's Inheritance (10 page)

He blinked and examined the ash on his cigarette.

“What sort of question is that? How low will you sink?” he asked uncertainly.

“How low will you sink?” I repeated. “I imagine everyone has a kind of gauge, a spirit level that determines what is good and bad within them. It’s universal, everything has a limit, everything that is to do with human relationships. But you have no gauge.”

“Mere words,” he said, and waved them away as if bored. “Gauges, levels. Good and bad. Mere words, Esther.”

“Have you thought,” he continued, “that the great majority of our actions are undertaken without reason and have no purpose? People do things that bring them neither gain nor joy. If you looked back on your life you would notice that you have done a good many things simply because they seemed impossible to do.”

“That’s a little too fancy for me,” I said, depressed.

“Fancy? Nonsense! Just uncomfortable, Esther. There comes a time in life when a man grows tired of everything having a point. I have always loved doing those things that have no point, things for which there is no explanation.”

“But the ring,” I insisted.

“The ring, the ring!” he muttered, annoyed. “Let’s not get started with the ring! Did I tell Éva that you were looking after the ring? I might have. Why would I have said it? Because it seemed the thing to say at the time, it was the simplest, the most reasonable thing. You bring up the ring, Laci talks about some bills…what do you want? That’s all in the past, these things no longer exist. Life destroys everything. It’s impossible to live all your life with a burden of guilt. What soul is as innocent as you describe? Who is so high and mighty that she has the right to stalk someone else all their life? Even the law understands the concept of obsolescence. It’s only you people who insist on denying it.”

“Don’t you think you are being a little unfair?” I asked more quietly.

“Maybe,” he said, also in a quieter voice. “Levels! Gauges of the soul! Please understand that there are no gauges in life. I might have said something to Éva, I might have made a mistake yesterday or ten years ago, something to do with money or rings or words. I have never in my life resolved on a course of action. Ultimately people are only responsible for the things they consciously decide to do…Actions? What are they? Instincts that take you by surprise. People stand there and watch themselves acting. It is intention, Esther, intention is guilt. My intentions have always been honorable,” he declared with satisfaction.

“Yes,” I replied, uncertain. “Your intentions might have been honorable.”

“I know,” he said, more gently now, a little wounded, “I know I am a misfit in the world. Should I change now, in my fifty-sixth year? I have never wanted anything but good for everyone. But the chances of good in this world are limited. One has to make life more beautiful, or else it’s unbearable. That’s why I said what I said to Éva about the ring. The possibility consoled her at the time. That’s why I told Laci fifteen years before that I would repay him, though I knew I would never do so. That’s why I promise people all kinds of things on the spur of the moment and know, as soon as I tell them, that I will never do what I promised. That’s why I told Vilma I loved her.”

“Why did you tell her?” I asked, surprised at how calm and detached I sounded.

“Because that was what she wanted to hear,” he said without a thought. “Because she had staked her life on me telling her that. And because you did not stop me from saying it.”

“I?” I whispered, confused, especially confused now because I was practically choking. “What could I have done?”

“Everything, Esther,” he said, innocent as a newborn child. It was the old voice, the voice of his youth. “Everything. Why did you not answer my letters? Why did you not answer my letters while you still could have? Why did you forget the letters and leave them with us when you left? Éva found them.”

He came over to me now, quite close, and leaned over me.

“Have you seen these letters?” I asked.

“Have I seen them?…I don’t understand, Esther. I wrote them.”

And I could tell by his voice that for once, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was not lying.

17

“N
ow let me tell you something,” he said, and, leaning against the sideboard with the photographs on it, he lit a cigarette and threw the match distractedly into the box holding people’s calling cards. “Something happened between us that we can no longer settle by not speaking about it. One can remain silent all one’s life about the most important things. People die in silence. But there may be occasions to speak, when one should not remain silent. I believe it was this kind of silence that might have been the original sin of which the Bible speaks. There is an ancient lie at the heart of life, and it can take a long time before a man notices it. Don’t you want to sit down? Sit down, Esther, and hear me through. No, excuse me, this time, just this once, I would like to be judge and prosecutor. All this time you have been the judge. Sit down, please.”

He spoke courteously but in an almost commanding manner.

“There you are,” he said, and pushed a chair toward me. “Look, Esther, for twenty years we have been talking at cross-purposes. Things are not so simple. You have read out your list of charges against me—you and others—and they are indeed faults, alas, and perfectly true. You talk of rings and lies, of promises not kept, of bills that I have not paid. There is more, Esther, and worse. There’s no point in telling it all…I make no excuses for myself…but details like this will no longer decide my future. I have always been a weak man. I would like to have achieved something in the world, and I believe I was not altogether without talent. But talent and ambition are not enough. I know now they are not enough. To be properly creative one needs something else…some special strength or discipline or a mixture of the two; the stuff, I think, they call character…And that quality, that talent, is something that is missing in me. It’s like a strange deafness. It is as if I knew the music, the tune being played, precisely, but could not hear the notes. When I met you I was not quite so certain of what I am telling you now…I didn’t even know that you represented character for me. You understand?”

“No,” I honestly replied.

Somehow it was not his words that astonished me but his voice, the way he spoke. I had not heard him speak like this before. He spoke like a man who…but it is almost impossible to pin the voice down. He spoke like a man who has seen or discovered something, some truth, or is on his way to doing so though he could not yet declare it, because he was getting ever closer and was shouting his impressions at the world for all he was worth. He spoke like a man who felt something. It was not a voice I was used to with him. I listened without speaking.

“It’s so simple,” he said. “You’ll understand it straightaway. It was you: you were what I was missing, you were my character, my being. One recognizes this sort of thing. A man without character, or with an imperfect character, is morally something of a cripple. There are people like that, people who in every other respect are perfectly normal but for a missing arm or leg. Such people are given prostheses, an artificial arm or leg, and suddenly they are capable of working again, of being useful. Please don’t be angry at my analogy, but you must have been a kind of artificial limb to me…a moral prosthesis. I hope I haven’t offended you?” he asked tenderly, and leaned over to me.

“No,” I said. “It is simply that I don’t believe it, Lajos. There is no such thing as a prosthetic being. You can’t graft the moral character of one person onto another. Forgive me, but these are just ideas.”

“No, they are not just ideas. A moral character is not something you inherit but a quality you acquire. People are not born with morals. The morals of wild animals, the morals of children, are not the same as the morals of a sixty-year-old circuit judge in Vienna or Amsterdam. People acquire their moral characters in the same way as they acquire their mannerisms and their culture.”—He was intoning like a priest.—“There are people who are more adept at moral character, yes indeed, there are moral geniuses just as there are musical and literary geniuses. You are such a moral genius, Esther; no, please don’t deny it. I feel it in you. I am tone-deaf when it comes to issues of morality, practically illiterate. That is why I needed to be with you, or that at any rate is the chief reason, I think.”

I was obstinate. “I don’t believe it,” I said, “but even if it were so, Lajos, you cannot want someone to act as moral nanny to all kinds of morally imperfect beings. A woman can’t play moral nurse her whole life.”

“A woman! A woman!” he said quickly, courteously waving my answer away. “I am talking about you, Esther. I mean you.”

“A woman,” I said, and felt the blood rush to my face. “I know you mean me. I have had enough of being the model for a false view of the world all my life. Get that into your head at last. There is no point in me saying it again…though maybe you are right, we cannot remain silent about this forever. I don’t believe in your ideas, Lajos, I believe in reality. The reality is that you deceived me; once upon a time people might have put this in a more flowery, romantic way, such as: ‘I was your plaything, your toy.’ You are a strange gambler; you play with passions and people instead of cards. I was one of the queens in your hand. Then you stood up and went off elsewhere. Why? Because you grew bored. You had had enough and simply walked away. That’s the truth. That is the terrible immoral truth. One can’t throw a woman away the way one does a matchbox simply because one has passions, because that happens to be one’s nature, because one finds it impossible being tied to a woman or because one is ambitious, or because everything and everyone is merely useful. I can even understand that…it is a low act with something human in it. But to discard someone out of sheer carelessness, that is lower than low. There is no excusing that, because it is inhuman. Do you understand now?”

“But I called you, Esther,” he said quite quietly. “Don’t you remember? Yes, I was weak. But then, at the last moment, I came to my senses and knew that only you could help me. I called you, I begged you. Don’t you remember my letters?”

“I know nothing about any letters,” I said, and was frightened to note how sharp my voice sounded, sharper than it had ever been, almost shrieking. “It’s all lies. The letters are a lie, like the ring, like everything you ever said or promised me. I know nothing about the letters, I don’t believe in them. Éva has only just told me that she had found letters like that…in the rosewood box…how should I know what is true in all this? I don’t believe you. I don’t believe Éva either. I don’t believe in the past. It is all lies and conspiracies, a piece of theater full of stage properties, old letters and vows that were never made. I don’t go to the theater nowadays, Lajos. I haven’t been to a theater in fifteen years. I don’t go out. I know the truth, do you understand? The truth. Look at me! This is the truth! Look into my eyes! I am old. We are at the end of life, as you yourself so grandly declared. Yes, it is the end, and you are the reason that this is the way it has passed, so empty, so false; it is why I stayed here, living alone like an old maid who is thrifty with her feelings but eventually buys a cat and a dog as pets…my pets are people.”

“Yes,” he admitted, bowing his head in guilt. “That is a very dangerous thing to do.”

“Yes, dangerous,” I repeated, instinctively more quietly now, then fell silent. I had never spoken for as long and as passionately as that at one go. I was quite out of breath.

“So, let us leave it,” I said. Suddenly I felt weak. I did not want to cry, so I sat there with my arms folded and my back straight, but I must have gone very pale because Lajos looked at me, concerned.

“Do you want a glass of water? Shall I call someone?”

“Don’t call anyone,” I said. “It’s not important. It looks as though I am no longer as healthy as I was. Look, Lajos, while two people are still at the stage where one doubts the words of the other, then there is soil enough, however shallow, to build a relationship on. The soil may be marshland or loose sand. You know that what you build will eventually fall down, yet there is something in the enterprise that is real, human and destined. But those cursed by fate to build on you have a far worse time of it, because one day they are obliged to notice that they have built on mere air, on nothing. Some people lie because it’s their nature, because they seek some advantage or spontaneously for a moment’s excitement. But you lie the way rain rains: you can lie with tears, you can lie with your actions. It must be very difficult. There are times I think you’re an absolute genius…the genius of lies. You look into my eyes or touch me, your tears welling, and I start to feel how your hand trembles, but all the time I know you are lying, that you have always lied, right from the first moment. Your life has been one long lie. I don’t even believe in your death: that will be a lie too. Oh yes, you’re a genius all right.”

“Well, there you are,” he replied calmly. “In any case, I have brought you the letters. I did, after all, write them for you. Here they are.”

And with a simple courteous gesture he produced the three letters from his coat pocket and handed them over to me.

18

A
t that point I was not too concerned with the contents of the letters. I was fully aware of Lajos’s capabilities as a letter writer. But I did have a thorough look at the envelopes. All three bore my name and address, the hand was clearly Lajos’s, and the franking proved them to have been mailed to my address twenty-two years ago, the week before Vilma and Lajos were married. I am sure that I never received them. Somebody must have intercepted them. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to steal them: it was always Vilma, endlessly curious about mail, who took the letters from the mailman, and it was she who had the key to the sideboard. I carefully examined the backs of the envelopes, then threw them down beside the other objects displayed on the sideboard, next to the photograph of Vilma.