Sandor Marai - Esther's Inheritance

“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.

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.

“Don’t you want to read them?” asked Lajos.

“No,” I said. “Why? I believe they say what you told me they said. They are not of great importance. You,” I said, almost crazy, pronouncing the words as if making a great discovery. “You can even make facts lie.”

“You never received these letters?” Lajos asked calmly, as though he were not too concerned with my criticisms of him.

“Never.”

“Who stole my letters?”

“Who stole them? Vilma. Who else? Who else would benefit from doing so?”

“Of course,” he said. “It couldn’t have been anyone but her.”

He went over to the sideboard and took a good look at the stamps on the letter and the franking, then leaned closer to look at Vilma’s picture, with a smile of good-natured interest, the cigar in his hand emitting clouds of curling smoke. He gazed at the picture fully absorbed, as though I was not in the room, wagging his head, then giving a low whistle of appreciation, the way one burglar might admire the work of another. He stood there, legs widely spaced, one hand in his coat pocket, the other with the smoking cigar, a satisfied professional.

“She made a good job of it,” he said eventually, and turned to me, stopping one step from me. “But in that case,” he went on, “what is it you want from me? What is my crime? My debt? The great thing I failed to do? What is the lie? It’s just details. But there was a moment,” he pointed to the letters, “when I did not lie, when I put out my hands because I was dizzy, the way a high-wire walker starts to get dizzy. And you did not help me. No one lifted a finger. So I danced on as best I could, since a thirty-five-year-old man does not fancy falling from such a height…You know I’m not particularly given to sentimentality, that’s right, I’m not even a passionate man. It was life that interested me…risks…the game, as you called it. I am not, nor have I ever been, the kind of man who stakes everything on a woman, on passion and sentiment…Nor was it any unstoppable tide of sentiment that swept me to you, I can tell you that now. You see, I don’t want to make you cry, it’s not that I want your heart to melt. That would be ridiculous. I did not come to beg. I came to demand. Do you understand now?” he asked quietly, amicable but solemn.

“Demand?” I said almost inaudibly. “That’s interesting. Go on. Demand.”

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll try. It is nothing I could put down on paper or go to the law with, of course. But there are other kinds of law. You may not realize it, but this is the moment you should become aware that beside the moral law there is another, just as binding, just as valid…how to put it? Are you beginning to suspect what it might be? There’s a kind of self-knowledge people are usually very reluctant to bear. You should know that it is not only words, vows, and promises that bind people together, nor is it feelings or sympathies that determine the true nature of their relationship. There’s something else, a law that is firmer and more severe, that determines whether one person is bound to another or not…It’s like the law between fellow conspirators. That is the law that bound me to you. I knew about this law. Even twenty years ago, I knew. I knew as soon as I met you. There’s no point in being modest now: I believe that of the two of us, Esther, it is I who am made of sterner stuff. That ‘stuff’ is not sterner in the sense that handbooks of moral guidance pretend. Nevertheless it is I, the faithless, the fly-by-night, the fugitive, who am more capable of remaining true to that law in both soul and will, this law of which you will find no trace in books or in the tables of the law but which is, nevertheless, the true law. And it is a very hard law…Listen. The law of life is that what is once begun has to be finished. This does not make for a particularly happy state of affairs. Nothing happens when it’s supposed to: at the very moment when you have spent your precious time preparing to receive an important gift, life gives you nothing. This belatedness, this disorder, can hurt you for years. We think someone is just playing with us. But one day we notice that everything has been exactly as it is supposed to be, in perfect order, in perfect time…it is impossible for people to meet one day sooner than they are supposed to. They meet when they’re ready for meeting…They’re ready not necessarily by virtue of their whims and wishes but by virtue of something deeper, some undeniable stellar law, the way planets meet in infinite time and space, precise to within a microsecond, colliding at a unique moment, one in a billion years in the vastness of space. I don’t believe in chance meetings. I am a man who knows a good number of women…forgive me, but this is an unavoidable part of what I have to say…I have met beautiful ones, high-spirited ones, in fact I have known some who were animated by some fire-breathing demon; I have known heroic women who could wade through Siberian snows in the company of a man, remarkable women who could help me and were prepared to share with me the terrible loneliness of existence for a while. Yes, I have known all these,” he said quietly, reminiscing, more to himself than to me.