Sandor Marai - The Rebels

Making a great effort, she returned to her room and lay down once more in the bed she had only stolen from at night when everyone else was asleep. There was no need for the boys to know that she was still capable of moving about. For years now the boys had believed her to be bed-bound. And that was how it should be: there were certain advantages in the strategy she had developed for holding the family together. She kept the keys under her pillow along with the letter of credit from the pawnbroker for eight thousand crowns. Her few items of jewelry—her diamond-encrusted black enamel medallions, her earrings, her long gold necklace, and her little gold watch—she stored under the bolster. The silver, the antique beaten silver, the remaining glitter of her once glittering family, she kept in a leather trunk under the bed, and across her chest, in a small deerskin pouch, she hoarded the ready cash her husband sent her back from the front. That was all. The longer she existed in this state of pretended helplessness the better she understood the advantages of central control, of keeping everything hidden but close to hand. It was indeed a considerable advantage and a vital element of her strategy that she should be lying helpless in bed. Her bed was the epicenter of the entire family, the heart through and around which the blood flowed. She had been lying there for three years, apparently without moving. She knew there was a war on but in her heart of hearts thought it a mere excuse, a quibble that enabled her husband to go philandering and prevented him sitting at her bed. The older boy had made off with much the same excuse a year before. Now it was the younger one’s turn. What a fraud it all is, she thought, exhausted.

She lay in the bed unmoving, dreaming of teeth. She dreamt all her teeth had vanished. She knew this meant death: her lifelong experience and her various books of dreams told her as much. She was going to die: the boys would search her room, find the silver, the valuable papers, the jewels. She was planning to set up some kind of trust that the orphans’ court would handle, something that would allow the father and the sons the quarterly installment of a silver spoon or fork. She lay in bed with her eyes wide open, listening to the first sounds of morning. Every so often she tired and dropped off. In bed she always wore an old and not entirely clean mantilla shawl as if she were expecting visitors. She thought it natural that the wife of Colonel Prockauer should have plenty of callers. She had long been oblivious to the fact that no one visited her. All her life she had dreamed vainly of a soirée that she, the wife of Colonel Prockauer, would organize, opening up all three rooms of the apartment as well as the garden where there would be lanterns and items of improvised furniture, and small tables laden with wine, cold meats, and pastries; a soirée with perhaps a Gypsy band, with all the officers of the garrison present and even the commander dropping in for half an hour, not to mention various local dignitaries, with the mayor at the helm. She had often calculated whether the rooms would be big enough and tried to estimate the cost of the evening. She would stand at the garden gate in the gray silk dress made for her on the occasion of their silver anniversary, the dress she had never worn since, with her two sons by her side welcoming the guests. The colonel would wear all his decorations for the occasion. Whenever this frequently imagined but never realized dream came back to haunt her she began to cry, but no one was aware of this.

The boys woke. There was the sound of running water. They were washing and talking quietly between themselves. The maid was searching for something in the kitchen. The work of the day was beginning, that curious, complex struggle in which she took part despite her immobility, not relaxing for a second but directing the affairs of the household as well as every stage of her sons’ lives from her bed. The sideboard opposite the bed contained the food. She had arranged it in such a position that she could keep an eye on the girl’s every movement, so that not a cupful of flour, no slice of bacon, no single egg should leave the sideboard without her observing before the girl closed it and deposited the key back under her pillow. She willed herself upright in bed when the boys went out of the house, gazing after them through the walls, mentally escorting them, watching them all the way. There were times she could swear she could see them hanging about some street corner in town as clearly as if they had been standing in front of her and could even hear their voices as they chatted with this or that person. In the evening when they returned she would interrogate them about their movements and sometimes their accounts tallied with what she had imagined.

The maid came in, kissed her hand, and set the breakfast, drawing open the blinds. The mother handed over the key and watched anxiously as the maid searched out items in the sideboard. She held the box of sugar in her lap and counted out five cubes. The boys received one and a half, she and the girl one each. The hot sun poured in through the window with the full strength of summer.

“Get some meat for dinner today,” she told the maid. “Open a jar of cherries. Use the old plum jam to make some jam pockets, it’s there next to the soap.”

She closed her eyes. Let everything be as though it were his birthday.

She should give him something today. She took mental note of her valuables, but every gift presented a risk and could lead to temptation. If she gave him the gold necklace he might sell it or give it away to some woman. Lajos once sold his watch. Her husband had once taken out three thousand crowns and gone off to a spa where he went through it all while she stayed at home struggling to bring up the boys. She had to make up the three thousand from the household budget and it took eight years, taking out ever more loans, saving pennies out of his captain’s and then his major’s salary. Prockauer needed white gloves every day of the week. In summer he changed shirts every other day. When time allowed he would blend cologne with the water he washed his face with while she, the mother, had to wash herself with crude soap.

“He said I smelled of tallow,” she said quietly to herself.

The maid’s hand hesitated in the act of laying out the food, but she didn’t look up, being familiar with the invalid’s habit of occasionally making strange comments without introduction or indeed any connection in the same low voice, some statement that did not require an answer. Mother looked sideways at the maid to detect whether she had heard. She didn’t mind being heard, in fact it gave her a certain satisfaction that under the cover of her illness she could time and again give voice to whatever incurable state of affairs preoccupied or tortured her. Prockauer had once admonished her for not using scented soap or perfumes. Her hands, like those of many officers’ wives, carried the permanent smell of paraffin since Prockauer’s gloves needed daily washing. These slights were a constant pain to her. Photographs of Prockauer hung on the wall opposite, above the bed, showing him at the various monotonous stages of a military career from second lieutenant to colonel in full dress and on horseback at his last frontline post. She had been talking to the pictures for the last three years, conversing with them through long nights and endless afternoons, silently or in a muttering whisper. Prockauer had made off to the front where he was undoubtedly carousing and getting into debt. It gave her a certain pleasure to think that Prockauer would have to be dealing with his creditors by himself. She sought out the colonel’s face in the picture and glared at it from under furrowed brows, mocking and ironic.

THE BOYS KISSED HER HAND AND SAT DOWN TObreakfast. Lajos had been wearing civilian clothes for a while now. He put on old summer outfits that he had slightly outgrown, whose waists were now a little tight so he looked like a schoolboy in them. He tucked his armless sleeve into his coat pocket. Ever since the amputation he had grown fatter and more suspicious. He complained of the small portions provided for him. He accepted offers of extra helpings from his mother and brother at dinner, put on a wheedling voice to plead for the tastiest parts, offered to swap things, and the maid sometimes complained that he had eaten the leftovers from dinner that she had put away for supper. Just as well that I keep the pantry in my room, thought Mother. In the few months since Lajos had returned from the hospital he had grown a belly and his mother suspected he was eating in secret somewhere. His mouth and his eyebrows had stopped twitching but the glazed, indifferent look in his eyes persisted, relieved only by the odd flash of curiosity or malevolence.