Journey by Moonlight

“Write and tell him that you’ve tried hard to reason with me to go back to him, and you think I would be willing, only my pride won’t let me admit it; that it would be better if he came to Paris and tried to talk with me. You’ll prepare the way. Write a good letter, my Sárika. You can be sure Zoltán will be very gallant towards you.”

“Splendid. I’ll write straight away, here, right here, right now. Now, Erzsi, when you’re in Pest, and Zoltán’s wife again, you can send me a really nice pair of shoes. You know, they’re so much cheaper and better in Pest, and they last so much longer.”

XXIV

FOIED VINOM PIPAFO, CRA CAREFO. Enjoy the wine today, tomorrow there’ll be none. The wine had run out: the mysterious inner spring that wakes a man day after day and sustains him with the illusion that life is worth getting up for, had run dry. And as the spring, like the wine, ran dry, it had been replaced from below by waters rising from the dark sea, the inner lake, connected through its depths to the great ocean, the Other Wish, antagonistic to life and more powerful than it.

The legacy of Tamás that had lain within him like a seed had now grown to reality. This growth — his own, special death — had burgeoned inside him, had fed itself on his sap, had thought with his thoughts and reasoned with his reasons, drunk in all the fine sights for its own purposes, until it reached wholeness, and now the time had come for it to move out into the world as a reality.

He wrote to Éva with the exact time: Saturday night. She replied: “I’ll be there”.

That was all. Éva’s curt, matter-of-fact reply filled him with dismay. Was that all he got? Such a routine attitude towards death! It was terrifying.

He felt a kind of chill beginning to spread through him, a strange sickly chill, like a limb going progressively numb under local anaesthetic, when your own body becomes alien and frightening. And so whatever it was inside him that stood for Éva slowly died. Mihály was well acquainted with love’s pauses, its blank intermissions, when, between the more ardent periods of passion, we become suddenly quite indifferent to the beloved, and look into the beautiful unfamiliar face wondering whether this actually is the woman … this was one of those pauses, but more pronounced than any he had known before. Éva had gone cold.

But then what would become of the Tamás-like sweetness of his final moments?

An odd, untimely humour put strength into him, and he acknowledged that the great act had got off to a decidedly poor start.

This was Saturday afternoon. He submitted himself, in these his last remaining hours, to some searching questions. What does a man do when nothing has meaning any longer? “The last hours of a suicide”: the phrase, so applicable to his situation, dismayed him even more than his earlier decision that he was “mad with love” or that “he could live no longer without her”. How distressing that the most sublime moments and stages of our lives can be approached only with the most banal expressions; and that, probably, these are indeed our most banal moments. At such times we are no different from anyone else. Mihály was now “preparing himself for death” just as any other man would do who knew he would soon have to die.

Yes, there was nothing else for it. He could not escape the law by which, even in his last moments, he was compelled to conform. He too would write a farewell note, as convention required. It would not be right to leave his father and mother without a farewell. He would write them a letter.

That was the first real moment of pain, when this idea struck him. Until then he had felt nothing more than a weary, dull depression, a fog, through which filtered the mysterious green glitter of the awaited climax of his last moments, and his thoughts of Tamás. But as he began to consider his parents he felt a sharp pang, a sharp, bright pang: the fog cleared, and he began to pity them, and to pity himself, stupidly, sentimentally, absurdly. Feeling ashamed, he took out his pen. With exemplary discipline and detachment, but therefore in words warm with feeling, he would announce his deed, calmly, masterfully, as one experienced in death.

As he sat there with the pen in his hand, waiting for the words of exemplary discipline to enter his head, there was a sudden knocking at the door. Mihály started violently. A week could go by and no-one called on him. Who could this be, just now? For a moment nameless suspicions flitted through his head. The lady of the house was not at home. No, he wouldn’t open the door. There was truly no reason now why he should. He had no business with anyone now.

But the knocking became increasingly vigorous and impatient. Mihály shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: “What are they doing, making all this commotion?” and he went out. As he did so he experienced a subtle sense of relief.