Esther's Inheritance Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator

  Also by Sándor Márai

  Copyright

  1

  I don’t know what else God has in store for me. But before I die I want to write down what happened the day Lajos visited me for the last time and robbed me. I have been waiting three years to set this down. Now I feel an irresistible voice urging me on, insisting I should record the events of that day—and everything I know about Lajos—because it is my duty to do so and because I don’t have much time. There’s no mistaking such a voice. That is why I obey it, in God’s name.

  I am no longer young nor healthy and soon I must die. Am I still afraid of dying?…That Sunday when Lajos visited us for the last time, I was, among other things, cured of my fear of death. Maybe time, which has not spared me, maybe memory, which is almost as ruthless as time, maybe some peculiar grace that, as my faith teaches, is sometimes granted the undeserving and the willful, maybe simply experience and old age enable me now to gaze on death with equanimity. Life has been extraordinarily kind to me, and, just as extraordinarily, it has robbed me of everything…what else can happen? Die I must, because that’s how things are, and because I have fulfilled my duties.

  I realize that’s a big word to use, and now that I see it written down I feel a little scared. It’s a haughty word that I shall have to answer for sometime in front of someone. How long was it before I recognized my duty and how I resisted it, screaming and protesting most desperately, before I gave in. The first time I felt death might be salvation was when I knew that death was resolution and peace. Life alone is struggle and humiliation. And what a struggle it was! Who ordered it, and why was it impossible to avoid? I did all I could to escape it. But my foe pursued me. Now I know he could do nothing about it: we are bound to our enemies, nor can they escape us.

  2

  If I want to be honest—and what point in writing this if I am not?—I must confess that nowhere in my life and actions can I find the least trace of that biblical fury or passion, not even of the hardness and decisiveness, that seemed to strike strangers when it came to my views about Lajos or my personal fate. “I must do my duty!”—what a firm, declamatory expression. We live…then one day we notice that we have “done” or “not done” our duty. I have started to think that the great, decisive moments that broadly govern our lives are far less conscious at the time than they seem later when we are reminiscing and taking stock. By that time I had not seen Lajos for twenty years, and I thought myself inured against my memories. Then one day I received his telegram, which was like an opera libretto, just as theatrical, as dangerously childish and false, as everything he had said and written to others twenty years before…It was so much like a declaration, so full of promises, so clearly and transparently false, false! I went out to Nunu in the garden, the telegram in my hand, stood on the veranda, and loudly announced the news.

  “Lajos is coming back!”

  What would my voice have sounded like? It is unlikely that I was screaming with joy. I must have spoken like a sleepwalker suddenly woken out of her sleep. I had been sleepwalking for twenty years. For twenty years I had been walking at the edge of a precipice, neatly balanced, calm and smiling. Now I had been awoken and knew the truth. But I no longer felt dizziness. There is something calming about the sense of reality, whether of life or death. Nunu was binding the roses. She looked up at me from below, from a depth, under the deep roses, blinking in the sunlight, aged and calm.

  “Well, of course,” she said.

  She carried on binding.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow,” I answered.

  “Good,” she said. “I will lock away the silver.”

  I started to laugh. But Nunu remained serious. Later she sat down next to me on the concrete bench and read the telegram. “We will arrive in a car,” wrote Lajos. From the rest we concluded he was bringing his children. “There will be five of us,” the telegram continued. Chicken, milk, cream, thought Nunu. Who were the other two? we wondered. “We’ll stay till the evening,” the telegram went on to announce, followed by the kind of awful fancy talk Lajos could never resist, not even in a telegram. “Five people,” said Nunu, “arriving in the morning to leave in the evening.” Her pale old lips moved soundlessly as she counted and calculated. She was working out the cost of dinner and supper. Having done so, she said:

  “I knew he’d come back sometime. But he dare not come alone now! He’s bringing support, children and strangers. But there’s nothing here anymore.”

  We sat in the garden and looked at each other. Nunu thinks she knows everything about me. And maybe she does know the truth, that simple ultimate truth we dress up in so many rags all our lives. I have always found Nunu’s “omniscience” a little insulting. But she had been so good to me, and her goodness was so wise, so dry and uncomplicated. Eventually I always gave in to her. In those last years, when my life seemed to have been shrouded in an invisible damp mist, she was the torch by whose weak and gentle light I could guide my steps. I knew the visit was unlikely to have truly dangerous, terrifying consequences, just as I knew that her suggestion, on reading the first few words of the telegram, that the silver be locked away was a joke. That’s an exaggeration, I thought. Nunu is teasing me. And I knew at the same time that in the end, at the last minute, Nunu would in fact lock away the silver, and that later still, once the silver was forgotten, when we discussed the whole thing, the thing that could not be hidden, Nunu would be somewhere nearby with her keys, in her best black dress, with her wrinkles, with her silent, observant caution. But I also knew that when that moment came I would be beyond all mortal help, even Nunu’s.

  But it was pointless “knowing” all this; so all of a sudden my mood lifted as if nothing threatened me. I remember, I was joking with Nunu. We were sitting in the garden listening to the intoxicated hum of late-autumnal wasps, talking quietly and for a long time of Lajos and the children, as well as of Vilma, my dead sister. Our seat was in front of the house, under the window behind whose shutters Mother had died twenty-five years before. In front of us were the lime trees and Father’s apiary, but it was all empty now. Nunu didn’t like messing about with the hives, and one day we sold all eighteen colonies. It was September, gentle, mild days. We sat there with that familiar sense of security that smacks partly of shipwreck and partly of happiness without desire. Come on now, I thought, what is there left for Lajos to take away?…The silver? Ridiculous idea: what were a few bent silver spoons worth? I calculated that Lajos would have passed fifty now, in fact he would have been fifty-three in the summer. It was unlikely that one could help him with silver spoons. If this kind of thing did help, let him take them. Nunu must have been thinking something similar. Then she gave a sigh and went into the house, only turning round on the veranda.

  “Be careful not to spend too much time alone with him. Invite Laci, Tibor, and Uncle Endre to lunch too, just as you do every other Sunday when you come together to fool about with spirits. Lajos has always been frightened of Endre, I do believe he owes him something. Remember, is there anyone to whom he does not owe anything?” she asked, a
nd started laughing.

  “They have all forgotten,” I said, and began to laugh myself.

  I was already defending him. What could I do? He was the only man I ever loved.

  3

  The telegram that brought news of disaster and delight had arrived on Saturday about noon. I can only faintly remember the afternoon and evening before Lajos’s arrival. No. Nunu was right: I was no longer frightened of Lajos. We can be frightened by those we love or hate, by someone who is very good or quite ruthless or had quite deliberately betrayed us. But Lajos had never been awful to me: true, he wasn’t good, either, in the sense school textbooks describe goodness. Did he betray me? No, I never felt betrayed by him. Certainly, he lied: he lied the way the wind howls, with a certain natural energy, in high spirits. He could tell the most wonderful lies. For example, he lied that he loved me, only me. Then he married my little sister, Vilma. Though later I became convinced that he hadn’t planned all this, it wasn’t a plot or a conspiracy, there was nothing intentional about it: Lajos never did anything deliberately wicked. He told me he loved me—and I don’t doubt he meant it, even now—but he happened to marry Vilma, maybe because she was prettier, maybe because that day the wind happened to be blowing from the east, or maybe because that was what Vilma wanted. He never said why.

  That night before the expected arrival of Lajos—it would be the last time in this life, as I well knew—I stayed up a long time arranging various mementos, preparing for his visit, and reading his old letters before falling asleep. Even today I believe, it is a superstition of mine—and reading his old letters I felt this once again with particular certainty and force—that Lajos had some hidden source of power, that he was like those little streams you find on high mountains that wind aimlessly down the slopes and disappear without a trace in the depths of a cave. No one used or directed that power. Now, reading over his letters the night before he came back to haunt me, I marveled at the fierce workings of this aimless energy. In each of his letters he addressed me with power enough to move anyone—especially a highly sensitive woman—indeed, whole crowds, even masses. It wasn’t that he had anything particularly “significant” to say, nor did I detect any particular literary talent in his ideas: his epithets were scrappy, his style undisciplined—but his manner, the voice audible in every line of his writing, was unmistakably his and his alone! He was always writing about the truth, about some imagined truth that he had just realized and urgently wanted me to know.

  He never wrote about his feelings, not even his plans, instead he described the town where he happened to be staying so vividly the reader could immediately see the streets and the room where Lajos was writing the letter, could hear the voices of people who had said something clever or amusing the day before. On top of this he would lay out the great idea that was currently demanding his attention, and all in such miraculously authentic terms that everything seemed larger than life. It was just that—and even this tin-eared reader could sense it—none of it was true, or rather it was all true but not as Lajos wrote it. His description of the town was as scrupulously accurate as any topographer’s, but it was a lunar town, pure moonshine. He took extraordinary care to bring this false-truth alive. It was the same with people and scenery. Everything was described with the utmost attention to detail.

  I read the letters and was moved. Maybe—it is possible—we were too weak for him. Around midnight a fierce warm wind played around the house; I got out of bed and closed the windows. I would not want to excuse my feminine frailty, I have no time for it, really, but that midnight I stood in front of the long mirror that used to hang above my mother’s dressing table and took good stock of myself. I knew I was not yet old. By some peculiar whim of fate I had not aged much in twenty years: the years had left few marks on me. I was never plain, but mine was never the sort of beauty to which men seem to be drawn. It was respect and a kind of timid languishing that I inspired in them. Thanks to gardening and possibly my own metabolism I had not put on weight: I was tall, straight, and well proportioned. I had a few gray hairs now, but they were imperceptible among the light blond of the rest, my most characteristic feature. Time had drawn a few very delicate lines round my eyes and mouth, nor were my hands as they had been, having grown a little rough with housework. Nevertheless, when I looked in the mirror, I saw a woman waiting for her lover. It was, of course, a ridiculous momentary idea. I had passed forty-five. Lajos had long been living with someone else, he might even be married. I hadn’t heard anything from him for years. Occasionally I saw his name in the papers, once with regard to some political scandal. It would not have surprised me if one day Lajos had become famous, or, indeed infamous. But the scandal quickly died away. Another time I read that he had fought a duel with someone in the courtyard of some barracks, had fired into the air and was uninjured! And this was all very much in keeping with his character, both the duel and the being uninjured. I have no idea whether he has ever been seriously ill, either. His fate lay elsewhere, I thought. And I got back into bed, together with my letters and memories and the sour-sweet consciousness of my lost youth.

  I would be lying if I claimed to have felt particularly unfortunate in those hours. Oh yes, there was a time some twenty or twenty-two years ago when I was unfortunate. But the feeling gradually melted away, the wound scabbed over. It was an unfamiliar strength that enabled me to suppress the upwelling of pain. There are wounds time does not heal. I knew that I myself was not healed. Only a few years after our “separation”—it is very difficult to find the right word for what happened between Lajos and me—the unbearable suddenly became natural, simple. I no longer needed anything; I didn’t need help, there was no need to call the police or the doctor or the priest. Somehow or other I continued living…Eventually there was a circle of friends, people who assured me that they needed me. A couple of them even proposed: Tibor, who was some years younger, and Endre, whom only Nunu addresses in the deferential way, as “Mister Endre,” though he is not a day older than Lajos. Somehow or other I managed this game or accident quite well. The suitors remained good friends. That night I also reflected how life, in some miraculous fashion, had been kinder to me than I could ever have hoped.

  4

  It was after midnight that Nunu came into my room. Our house still has no electric light—Mama had no time for the invention, and after her death we kept postponing it because of the expense—so Nunu’s entrances tend to be a little theatrical. This time, too, she stood there with the flickering candle in her hand, her gray hair standing up everywhere, in her nightgown, like some midnight apparation. “Lady Macbeth,” I said, smiling. “Come over here and sit down.” I knew she would look in on me that night.

  Nunu is the family member who “stands in” for all the other family members in the house. She had arrived thirty years before, part of the nomadic process whereby families drift about the world like mythical figures: she arrived out of an archaic past, part of the genealogical fabric of great-aunts and grandnieces, just for a few weeks. Then she stayed because she was needed. And later she stayed because everyone else in the family had died off before her, so Nunu was left, decade on decade, step by step, to ascend the ladder of family hierarchy, until she finally took Grandmother’s place, moved into the room upstairs, and inherited her sphere of influence. Then Mama died, and then Vilma. One day Nunu noticed that she was not “standing in” for anybody; she noticed that she, the newcomer—she, the remnant—was the only family.

  The successful conclusion of this complex career did not go to her head. Nunu had no ambition to be “mother” to me, nor did she pretend to be a guardian angel. As years went by she became ever more taciturn and sensible, so ruthlessly and dryly sensible it seemed she must have experienced everything life had to offer, so matter-of-fact and impassive she might have been a piece of furniture. Laci once said that Nunu had the air of something varnished, like an old walnut cabinet. She always dressed the same, summer and winter, in a dress of some smooth material that was no
t silk but was not taffeta either and which struck strangers, and even me, as a little too Sunday-best. In recent years she spoke just as much as was necessary and no more. She never told me anything of her previous life. I knew she wanted to share my every thought, my every care, but this plea was silent, and when she did say something it was as if we had been arguing for months, arguing fiercely and passionately, about the same subject, and she were simply putting the final full stop to it with a brief sentence. This was the way she spoke now as she sat down on my bed.

  “Have you had the ring looked at?”

  I sat up and rubbed my temples. I knew what she was thinking; I also knew that she was right: we had never talked about this, in fact I may never have showed her the ring, but still I knew she would be right, that the ring would prove a fake. I guessed as much. Nunu was uncanny like this. When did she hear of the ring? I wondered, then put the question aside, because it was perfectly natural that Nunu should know everything that pertained to the house, to the family, to my person, indeed to my life, including everything my dead sister had hidden away in the cellar or in the attic, so she would have known of the ring too. I had all but forgotten the story of the ring, because it was painful to think of it. When Vilma died, Lajos gave me this piece of jewelry, Grandmama’s ring. This middling-size diamond set in platinum was the only object of value my family possessed. I can’t quite understand how it remained in our possession—Father, too, valued the ring, regarding it with superstitious awe, and took great care of it though he was free enough with land and other valuables. It had the status of those famous diamonds in royal collections, the Kohinoor, the kind of precious stones that go in catalogs, whose market value no one considers and which are only meant to sparkle at the official anniversaries of dynasties, on the finger of a leading member of the family or on a queen’s brow, and that was how we, four generations of us, had guarded it, “the ring.” I never knew the actual value of the stone. In any case it would have fetched a good price, though nothing as princely as family legend would have it. It passed from Grandmama to Mama, and after our mother’s death it went to Vilma. When Vilma died Lajos suddenly waxed sentimental and in a moment of high pathos presented it to me.