Sandor Marai - Esther's Inheritance

“It’s not too late,” said Lajos. “You will see, it is not too late.”

He declared this with such conviction it seemed he was on confidential terms not only with the secretary of state but with God himself, that he could arrange matters of age and death too if he chose.

We heard him and were moved.

Then everyone fell to talking excitedly. “Mister” Endre arrived and stood beside the concrete bench a little reserved and confused, like someone whose appearance had not been entirely voluntary but had been summoned by Lajos in “an official capacity.” Lajos was organizing things. He introduced people, arranged them into picturesque groups, and initiated little scenes — scenes of farewell, scenes of delight and tearful reconciliation — all this with a few words or a hint, concealing the true meaning and import of the meetings behind a facade of stagy artificial group compositions that were empty of content; and everyone played along, all of us smiling in confusion, even respectable Endre, with a briefcase under his arm, the contents of which we never discovered and which he must have brought with him for purely symbolic purposes, as a line of defense to show that he would not have come voluntarily but was on official business. And it was obvious that everyone was happy that Lajos was here, happy to be present at this reunion. I would not have been surprised to see a small crowd gather behind the garden palings and sing something. But the general confusion was so much like a deluge that individual details were lost in the flood of well-being. Later, about dusk, when we had recovered our senses, we stared at each other amazed, as if we had fallen under the spell of an Indian fakir at work; the fakir had thrown a rope into the air, climbed the rope, and disappeared among the clouds before our very eyes. We were looking at the sky, seeking him there, and were astonished to see that he was taking a bow among us, here on earth, his begging bowl in front of him.

N unu had served a cooked breakfast, the guests had settled down on the veranda, nervously eating and getting to know one other. Everyone felt that it was only the powerful spell of Lajos’s presence that prevented loss of temper. It was pure theater, every word of it. The hours were artfully crammed: Scene One, “The meal,” Scene Two, “A walk round the garden.” Lajos, with his director’s eye, occasionally spotted this or that group falling behind, and clapped his hands and brought the company into line. At last he was alone with me in the garden. Laci was on the veranda waxing enthusiastic, rapt and unguarded, talking with his mouth full. It was he who had first surrendered to Lajos’s charm, forgot his doubts, and was happily and openly bathing in the sunshine of the familiar presence. The first words Lajos addressed to me were, “Now we have to put everything right.”

Hearing this my heart began to beat loudly and nervously. I did not answer. I stood facing opposite him under the tree next to the concrete bench on which he had so often lied to me, and finally I took a good hard look at him.

There was something sad about him, something that reminded me of an aging photographer or politician who is not quite up-to-date regarding manners and ideas but continues obstinately, and somewhat resentfully, to employ the same terms of flattery he has used for years. He was an animal tamer past his prime, of whom the animals are no longer afraid. His clothes, too, were peculiarly old-fashioned: as if he were wanting to keep up with the fashions at all costs but some inner demon prevented him from being elegant or fashionable in the way he thought was necessary and which he liked. His tie, for example, was just a shade louder than was right for the rest of his outfit, his character and age, so he had the air of a gigolo. His suit was of a light color, fashionable in that it was loose and made for traveling, the kind you see movie moguls in magazines wear when they are globe-trotting. Everything was a little too new, specially chosen for the occasion, even his hat and shoes. And all this communicated a certain helplessness. My heart went out to him. Perhaps, if he had come in rags, a broken man without a shred of hope, I would not have tolerated this cheap feeling of sympathy. He’s had it coming to him, I would have thought. But this hopeless modishness, so redolent of shame, filled me with pity. I gazed at him and suddenly felt sorry for him.

“Sit down, Lajos,” I said. “What do you want of me?”

I was calm and well meaning. I was no longer afraid of him. This man has known failure, I thought, and felt no satisfaction thinking that; in fact, I felt nothing but pity, a deep and humiliating pity. It was as if I had noticed that he was dyeing his hair or had committed something equally unbecoming; ideally I would have cursed him for the past and for the present, seriously cursed him, but without any particular severity. Suddenly I felt myself to be much older, much more mature than he was. Lajos had stopped developing at a certain point and had aged into an impudent, pedantic fraud, nothing particularly dangerous, indeed — and this was the sadder part — something rather aimless. His eyes were clear, gray, irresolute, as they had been so long ago when I last saw him. He smoked his cigarette through a long cigarette holder — his hands with their prominent veins had particularly aged, and never stopped trembling — and to top it all he was looking at me so attentively, so calmly and objectively, he clearly knew that for once it was pointless and in vain to try to deceive me; I knew his tricks, I knew the secrets of his art, and whatever he said in the end he would have to answer with or without words, but, this once, it would have to be the truth…Naturally, he began with a lie.

“I want to put everything right,” he repeated mechanically.

“What do you want to put right?”

I looked into his eyes and laughed. Surely, this could no longer be serious! I thought. After a certain time has passed between people it is impossible to “put anything right” I understood this hopeless truth the moment we were sitting together on the concrete bench. One lives and patches, improves, constructs, or, occasionally, ruins one’s life, but after a while one notices that whatever has been so compounded of errors and accidents is quite unique. There was nothing more Lajos could do here. When somebody appears out of the past and announces in heartfelt tones that he wants to put “everything” right one can only pity his ambition and laugh at it: time has already “put things right” in its own peculiar way, the only way to put anything right. And so I answered:

“Forget it, Lajos. We are all happy, of course, to see you…the children and yourself. We don’t know what you have in mind, but still we are happy to see you again. Let’s not talk about the past. You don’t owe anybody anything.”

Even as I was speaking I noticed how I too was in the grip of the mood of the moment, I too was saying the first things that came into my head, things that were, to put it bluntly, lies. It was only an excess of feeling and the concomitant confusion that could have exaggerated and declared that the past no longer existed, that Lajos did not owe “anybody anything.” We were both aware of this false note and gazed at the pebbles with downcast eyes. The tone we had adopted toward each other was pitched too high: too high, too dramatic, false. I suddenly noticed I had started to argue, not very logically but at least sincerely and with passion, since I could not hold myself back.

“I doubt whether that is the only reason you have come,” I said quietly, because I feared that there on the veranda where the conversation occasionally fell silent people might be listening to us, hearing what I was saying.