Journey by Moonlight

For Bianca

O
N THE TRAIN
everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back-alleys.

Mihály first noticed the back-alleys when the motor-ferry turned off the Grand Canal for a short cut and they began appearing to right and left. But at the time he paid them no attention, being caught up from the outset with the essential Veniceness of Venice: the water between the houses, the gondolas, the lagoon, and the pink-brick serenity of the city. For it was Mihály’s first visit to Italy, at the age of thirty-six, on his honeymoon.

During his protracted years of wandering he had travelled in many lands, and spent long periods in France and England. But Italy he had always avoided, feeling the time had not yet come, that he was not yet ready for it. Italy he associated with grown-up matters, such as the fathering of children, and he secretly feared it, with the same instinctive fear he had of strong sunlight, the scent of flowers, and extremely beautiful women.

The trip to Italy might well have been postponed forever, but for the fact that he was now married and they had decided on the conventional Italian holiday for their start to married life. Mihály had now come, not to Italy as such, but on his honeymoon, a
different
matter entirely. Indeed, it was his marriage that made the trip possible. Now, he reasoned, there was nothing to fear from the danger Italy represented.

Their first days were spent quietly enough, between the
pleasures
of honey-mooning and the gentler, less strenuous forms of sightseeing. Like all highly intelligent and self-critical people, Mihály and Erzsi strove to find the correct middle way between snobbery and its reverse. They did not weary themselves to death ‘doing’ everything prescribed by Baedeker; still less did they wish to be bracketed with those who return home to boast, “The museums? Never went near them,” and gaze triumphantly at one another.

One evening, returning to their hotel after the theatre, Mihály felt he somehow needed another drink. Quite what of he wasn’t yet sure, but he rather hankered after some sort of sweet wine and,
remembering the somewhat special, classical, taste of Samian, and the many times he had tried it in Paris, in the little wine
merchant’s
at number seven rue des Petits Champs, he reasoned that, Venice being effectively Greece, here surely he might find some Samian, or perhaps Mavrodaphne, since he wasn’t yet quite
au fait
with the wines of Italy. He begged Erzsi to go up without him. He would follow straightaway. It would be just a quick drink, “really, just a glass” he solemnly insisted as she, with the same
mock-seriousness
, made a gesture urging moderation, as befits the young bride.

Moving away from the Grand Canal, where their hotel stood, he arrived in the streets around the Frezzeria. Here at this time of night the Venetians promenade in large numbers, with the
peculiar
ant-like quality typical of the denizens of that city. They
proceed
only along certain routes, as ants do when setting out on their journeyings across a garden path, the adjacent streets remaining empty. Mihály too stuck to the ant-route, reckoning that the bars and
fiaschetterie
would surely lie along the trodden ways, rather than in the uncertain darkness of empty side-streets. He found several places where drinks were sold, but somehow none was exactly what he had in mind. There was something wrong with each. In one the clientele were too elegant, in another they were too drab; another he did not really associate with the sort of thing he was after, which would have a somehow more
recherché
taste. Gradually he came to feel that surely only one place in Venice would have it, and that he would have to discover on the basis of pure instinct. Thus he arrived among the back-alleys.

Narrow little streets branched into narrow little alleyways, and the further he went the darker and narrower they became. By stretching his arms out wide he could have simultaneously touched the opposing rows of houses, with their large silent, windows, behind which, he imagined, mysteriously intense Italian lives lay in
slumber
. The sense of intimacy made it feel almost an intrusion to have entered these streets at night.

What was the strange attraction, the peculiar ecstasy, that seized him among the back-alleys? Why did it feel like finally coming home? Perhaps a child dreams of such places, the child raised in a gardened cottage who fears the open plain. Perhaps there is
an adolescent longing to live in such a closed world, where every square foot has a private significance, ten paces infringe a
boundary
, decades are spent around a shabby table, whole lives in an armchair … But this is speculation.

He was still wandering among the alleys when it occurred to him that day was already breaking and he was on the far side of Venice, on the Fondamenta Nuova, within sight of the burial island and, beyond that, the mysterious islands which include San Francesco Deserto, the former leper colony, and, in the far distance, the houses of Murano. This was where the poor of Venice lived, too remote and obscure to profit from the tourist traffic. Here was the
hospital
, and from here the gondolas of the dead began their journey. Already people were up and on their way to work, and the world had assumed that utter bleakness as after a night without sleep. He found a gondolier, who took him home.

Erzsi had long been sick with worry and exhaustion. Only at one-thirty had it occurred to her that, appearances
notwithstanding
, even in Venice one could doubtless telephone the police, which she did, with the help of the night porter, naturally to no avail.

Mihály was still like a man walking in his sleep. He was
abominably
tired, and quite incapable of providing rational answers to Erzsi’s questions.

“The back-alleys,” he said. “I had to see them by night, just once … it’s all part of … it’s what everyone does.”

“But why didn’t you tell me? Or rather, why didn’t you take me with you?”

Mihály was unable to reply, but with an offended look climbed into bed and drifted towards sleep, full of bitter resentment.

“So this is marriage,” he thought. “What does it amount to, when every attempt to explain is so hopeless? Mind you, I don’t fully understand all this myself.”

E
RZSI
however did not sleep. For hours she lay, with knitted brow and hands clasped under her head, thinking. Women are generally better at lying awake and thinking. It was not exactly new or surprising to her that Mihály could say and do things she failed to understand. For a time she had successfully concealed her lack of comprehension, wisely asking no questions and acting as if eternally familiar with everything to do with him. She knew that this wordless assumption of authority, which he thought of as her ancestral, intuitive woman’s wisdom, was her strongest means of holding on to him. Mihály was full of fears, and Erzsi’s role was to comfort him.

But there is a limit to everything, especially as they were now married and on a proper honeymoon. In those circumstances to stay out all night seemed grotesque. For an instant she entertained the natural feminine suspicion that Mihály had in fact been with another woman. But this possibility she then completely dismissed. Setting aside the utter tastelessness of the idea, she well knew how timid and circumspect he was with all strange women, how
terrified
of disease, how averse to expense, and above all, how little interest he had in the female sex.

But in point of fact it would have been of some comfort to her to know that he had merely been with a woman. It would put an end to this uncertainty, this total blankness, this
inability
to imagine where and how he had spent the night. And she thought of her first husband, Zoltán Pataki, whom she had left for Mihály. Erzsi had always known which of the office typists was his current mistress. Zoltán was so doggedly, blushingly, touchingly discreet, the more he wished to hide something the clearer
everything
became to her. Mihály was just the reverse. When he felt guilty he always laboured to explain every movement, desperately wanting her to understand him completely, and the more he explained the more confusing it became. She had long known that she did not understand him, because Mihály had secrets even from himself, and he did not understand her since it never occurred to him that people other than himself had an inner life
in which he might take an interest. And yet they had married because he had decided that they understood each other perfectly, and that, for both, the marriage rested on purely rational
foundations
and not fleeting passion. For just how long could that fiction be sustained?

A
FEW
EVENINGS
later they arrived in Ravenna. Mihály rose very early the next morning, dressed and went out. He wanted to visit, alone, Ravenna’s most important sight, the famous
Byzantine
mosaics. He now knew there were many things he could never share with Erzsi, and these he reckoned among them. In the matter of art history she was much better informed, and much more
discerning
, than he, and she had visited Italy before, so he generally left it to her what they would see, and what they would think when they saw it. Paintings only rarely interested him, and then at random, like a flash of lightning, one in a thousand. But the Ravenna mosaics … these were monuments from his private past.

Once in the Ulpius house he, together with Ervin, Tamás, and Tamás’s sister Éva, poring over these mosaics in a large French book, had been seized by a restless and inexplicable dread. It was Christmas Eve. In the vast adjoining room Tamás Ulpius’s father walked back and forth alone. Elbows on the table, they studied the plates, whose gold backgrounds glittered up at them like a mysterious fountain of light at the bottom of a mineshaft. Within the Byzantine pictures there was something that stirred a sleeping horror in the depth of their souls. At a quarter to twelve they put on their overcoats and, with ice in their hearts, set off for midnight mass. Then Éva fainted, the only time her nerves ever troubled her. For a month afterwards it was all Ravenna, and for Mihály Ravenna had remained to that day an indefinable species of dread.

That profoundly submerged episode now re-surfaced in its entirety, as he stood there in the cathedral of San Vitale before the miraculous pale-green mosaic. His youth beat within him with such intensity that he suddenly grew faint and had to lean against a pillar. But it lasted only a second, and he was a serious man again.

The other mosaics held no further interest for him. He went back to the hotel, waited for Erzsi to make herself ready, then together they systematically visited and discussed all there was to see. Mihály did not of course mention that he had already been
to San Vitale. He slipped rather ashamedly into the cathedral, as if something might betray his secret, and pronounced the place of little interest, to atone for the morning’s painful disclosure.

The next evening they were sitting in the little piazza outside a café. Erzsi was eating an ice-cream, Mihály trying some bitter beverage previously unknown to him but not very satisfying, and wondering how to get rid of the taste.

“This stench is awful,” said Erzsi. “Wherever you go in this town there is always this smell. This is how I imagine a gas attack.”

“It shouldn’t surprise you,” he replied. “The place smells like a corpse. Ravenna’s a decadent city. It’s been decaying for over a thousand years. Even Baedeker says so. There were three golden ages, the last in the eighth century
AD
.”

“Come off it, you clown,” said Erzsi with a smile. “You’re always thinking about corpses and the smell of death. This particular stench comes from life and the living. It’s the smell of artificial fertiliser. The whole of Ravenna lives off the factory.”

“Ravenna lives off artificial fertiliser? This city, where Theodoric the Great and Dante lie buried? This city, besides which Venice is a
parvenu
?”

“That’s right, my dear.”

“That’s appalling.”

In that instant the roar of a motorbike exploded into the square and its rider, clad in leathers and goggles, leapt down, as from horseback. He looked around, spotted the couple and made straight for their table, leading the bike beside him like a steed. Reaching the table he pushed up his visor-goggles and said,“Hello, Mihály, I was looking for you.”

Mihály to his astonishment recognised János Szepetneki. In his amazement all he could say was, “How did you know I was here?”

“They told me at your hotel in Venice that you had moved on to Ravenna. And where might a man be in Ravenna after dinner but in the piazza? It really wasn’t difficult. I’ve come here straight from Venice. But now I’ll sit down for a bit.”

“Er … let me introduce you to my wife,” said Mihály nervously. “Erzsi, this is János Szepetneki, my old classmate, who … I don’t think … I ever mentioned.” And he blushed scarlet.

János looked Erzsi up and down with undisguised hostility,
bowed, shook her hand, and thereafter totally ignored her
presence
. Indeed, he said nothing at all, except to order lemonade.

Eventually Mihály broke the silence:

“Well, say something. You must have some reason for trying to find me here in Italy.”

“I’ll tell you. I mainly wanted to see you because I heard you were married.”

“I thought you were still angry with me. The last time we met was in London, at the Hungarian legation, and then you walked out of the room. But of course you’ve no reason to be angry now,” he went on when János failed to reply. “One grows up. We all grow up, and you forget why you were offended with someone for ten years.”

“You talk as if you know why I was angry with you.”

“But of course I know,” Mihály blurted out, and blushed again.

“If you know, say it,” Szepetneki said aggressively.

“I’d rather not here … in front of my wife.”

“It doesn’t bother me. Just have the courage to say it. What do you think was the reason I wouldn’t speak to you in London?”

“Because it occurred to me there had been a time when I thought you had stolen my gold watch. Since then I’ve found out who took it.”

“You see what an ass you are. I was the one who stole your watch.”

“So it was you who took it?”

“It was.”

Erzsi during all this had been fidgeting restlessly in her chair. From experience she had been aware for some time, looking at János’s face and hands, that he was just the sort of person to steal a gold watch every now and then. She nervously drew her reticule towards her. In it were the passports and traveller’s cheques. She was astonished, and dismayed, that the otherwise so diplomatic Mihály should have brought up this watch business, but what was really unendurable was the silence in which they sat, the silence when one man tells another that he stole his gold watch and then neither says a word. She stood up and announced:

“I’m going back to the hotel. Your topics of conversation, gentlemen, are such that … ”

Mihály looked at her in exasperation.

“Just stay here. Now that you’re my wife this is your business too.” And with that he turned to János Szepetneki and positively shouted: “But then why wouldn’t you shake hands with me in London?”

“You know very well why. If you didn’t know you wouldn’t be in such a temper now. But you know I was in the right.”

“Speak plainly, will you?”

“You’re just as clever at not understanding people as you are at not finding, and not looking for, people who have gone out of your life. That’s why I was angry with you.”

Mihály was silent for a while.

“Well, if you wanted to meet me … we did meet in London.”

“Yes, but by chance. That doesn’t count. Especially as you know perfectly well we’re not talking about me.”

“If we’re talking about someone else … it would have been no use looking for them.”

“So you didn’t try, right? Even though perhaps all you had to do was stretch out your hand. But now you’ve another chance. Listen to this. I think I’ve traced Ervin.”

Mihály’s face changed instantly. Rage and shock gave way to delighted curiosity.

“You don’t say! Where is he?”

“Exactly where, I’m not sure. But he is in Italy, in Tuscany or Umbria, in some monastery. I saw him in Rome, with a lot of monks in a procession. I couldn’t get to him—couldn’t interrupt the ceremony. But there was a priest there I knew who told me the monks were from some Umbrian or Tuscan order. This is what I wanted to tell you. Now that you’re in Italy you could help me look for him.”

“Yes, well, thanks very much. But I’m not sure I will. I’m not even sure that I should. I mean, I am on my honeymoon. I can’t scour the collected monasteries of Umbria and Tuscany. And I don’t even know that Ervin would want to see me. If he had wanted to see me he could have let me know his whereabouts long ago. So now you can clear off, János Szepetneki. I hope I don’t set eyes on you again for a good few years.”

“I’m going. Your wife, by the way, is a thoroughly repulsive woman.”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

János Szepetneki climbed onto his bike.

“Pay for my lemonade,” he shouted back, and vanished into the darkness that had meanwhile fallen.

The married couple remained where they were, and for a long time did not speak. Erzsi was furious, and at the same time found the situation rather ridiculous. “When old classmates meet,” she thought … “It seems Mihály was deeply affected by these old schoolboy doings. I suppose for once I’d better ask who this Ervin and this Tamás were, however ghastly they might be.” She had little patience with the young and immature.

But in truth something quite different bothered her. Naturally she was upset that she had made so little impression on János Szepetneki. Not that it would have had the slightest significance what such a … such a dubious creature might think about her. All the same there is nothing more critical, from a woman’s point of view, than the opinion held of her by her husband’s friends. In the matter of women men are influenced with incredible ease. True, this Szepetneki was not Mihály’s friend. That is to say, not his friend in the conventional sense of the word. But there was apparently a powerful bond between them. And of course the most foul-minded of men can be especially influential in these matters.

“Damn him. Why didn’t he like me?”

Basically, Erzsi was not used to this sort of situation. She was a rich, pretty, well-dressed, attractive woman. Men found her charming, or at the very least sympathetic. She knew it played a large part in Mihály’s continuing devotion that men always spoke appreciatively of her. Indeed she often suspected that he looked at her not with his own eyes but those of others, as if he said to himself, “How I would love this Erzsi, if I were like other men.” And now along comes this pimp, and he finds me unattractive. She simply had to say something.

“Tell me, why didn’t your friend the pickpocket like me?”

Mihály broke into a smile.

“Come on, it wasn’t you he didn’t like. What upset him was the fact that you’re my wife.”

“Why?”

“He thinks it’s because of you that I’ve betrayed my youth, our common youth. That I’ve forgotten all those who … and built my life on new relationships. And well … And now you’ll tell me that I’ve obviously got some fine friends. To which I could reply that Szepetneki isn’t my friend, which is of course only avoiding the question. But … how can I put this? … people like that do exist. This watch-stealing was just a youthful rehearsal. Szepetneki later became a successful con-man. There was a time when he had a great deal of money and forced various sums onto me which I couldn’t pay back because I didn’t know where he was hanging out—he was in prison—and then he wrote to me from Baja to send him cash. And every now and then he turns up and always manages to say something really unpleasant. But as I say, people like him do exist. If you didn’t know that, at least now you’ve seen it. I say, could we buy a bottle of wine somewhere round here, to drink in our room? I’m tired of this public life we’re leading here in the piazza.”

“You can get one in the hotel. There’s a restaurant.”

“And won’t there be an awful fuss if we drink it in the room? Is it allowed?”

“Mihály, you’ll be the death of me. You’re so scared of waiters and hotel people.”

“I’ve already explained that. I told you, they’re the most
grown-up
people in the whole world. And, especially when I’m abroad, I do hate stepping out of line.”

“Fine. But why do you have to start drinking again?”

“I need a drink. Because I have to tell you who Tamás Ulpius was, and how he died.”