Antal Szerb - Journey by Moonlight

“Earlier on, Tamás and Ervin had dominated the group. Now it was János’s turn. Éva needed money so that she could make her exquisite appearance among the exquisite people. She was very clever at sewing herself elegant things out of nothing, but even that nothing costs a little something. That was where János came in. He’d always been able to get hold of money for Éva. Where from, he alone knew. Often he swindled the very same Entente officers she danced with. ‘I’ve been realising the group assets,’ he would say cynically. But by then we all talked cynically, because we always adapted ourselves to the leadership style.

“I didn’t like János’s methods very much. They were pretty unscrupulous. I didn’t like it, for example, when he called one day on Mr Reich, an old book-keeper in my father’s firm and, with a horribly convoluted story about my gambling debts and proposed suicide, lifted a fairly serious sum of money from him. Of course I then had to agree that I had incurred a debt at cards, though I never had a card in my hand in all my life.

“And what I particularly didn’t like was his stealing my gold watch. It happened on the occasion of a grand ‘do’ out of doors somewhere, in a then fashionable summer inn, I no longer remember the name. There were several of us present—Éva’s friends, two or three foreign officers, some young inflation-millionaires, some strange women, remarkably daring for those times in their dress and general behaviour. My usual sense of impermanence was made worse by the fact that Tamás and I were mixing with people not our own, people we had nothing in common with, and by the same old feeling that nothing mattered. But then I wasn’t the only one with this sense of impermanence. The whole city had it, it was in the air. People had a lot of money and they knew that it made no difference: it might vanish from one day to the next. The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier.

“They were apocalyptic times. I don’t know if we were still sober when we sat down to drink. As I recall, it’s as if I became drunk in the first few moments. Tamás drank little, but the universal feeling that the world was going to end was so much in accord with his state of mind that he moved with unaccustomed ease among all those people, even the gypsies. I talked with him a lot that night. Not perhaps so much in words, but the words we did speak had a profoundly sinister resonance. And once again, marvellously, we understood each other — understood each other in our impermanence. And we shared this sympathy with the strange women: at least, I felt that my modest religious-historical thesis about the Celts and the Islands of the Dead found an echo in the drama student sitting near me. Then I got into a tête-à-tête with Éva. I courted her as if I hadn’t known her since her skinny, big-eyed adolescence and she received my courtship with a complete womanly seriousness, talking in half-finished sentences and staring into the distance, in the full glitter of her pose of that time.

“By the time it started to become light I felt really ill. Then, when I’d sobered up a bit, I realised my gold watch had disappeared. I was really shocked. My despair verged on hysteria. You have to understand: the mere loss of a gold watch is not in itself such a misfortune, not even when you are twenty and have nothing else of value in the world, nothing but your gold watch. But when you are twenty, and you sober up in the light of dawn to find your gold watch has actually been stolen, then you begin to see a symbolic importance in the loss. I had it from my father, who is not by nature a great giver of gifts. I tell you, it was my only object of value, the only one worth mentioning — admittedly a bulky, commonplace thing, whose pretentious, petty-bourgeois quality stood for everything I disliked. But its loss, now that it appeared to me in its full symbolic significance, filled me with panic. It was the feeling that I was now irrevocably damned: that they had stolen the very possibility that I might one day sober up and get back to the bourgeois world.

“I staggered over to Tamás, told him that my watch had been stolen, said that I would telephone the police and tell the innkeeper to lock the gate. They would have to search every guest. Tamás calmed me down in his own special way:

“‘It’s not worth it. Let it go. Of course it was stolen. They’ll steal everything you’ve got. You’ll always be the victim. It’s what you really want.’

“I stared at him in amazement. But in fact I never said a word to anyone about the disappearance of the watch. As I gazed at Tamás I suddenly understood that only János Szepetneki could have stolen it. In the course of the evening there had been a game of exchanging clothes. Szepetneki and I had swapped coats and ties. Probably when I got my coat back the watch had already gone. I started to look for János to confront him, but he’d already left. I didn’t see him the next day, or the day after that.

“And on the fourth day I still hadn’t been able to challenge him about it. I was sure that only he could have taken it, and that he had done so because Éva needed money. In all probability he had taken it with her full knowledge. She had set up the whole clothes-swapping game — and that was the point of the scene when I sat alone with her. Perhaps its whole purpose was so that I wouldn’t immediately notice that it had gone. When I stumbled on this possibility I was able to accept what had happened. If it happened because of Éva, it was all right. It was all part of the game, the old games in the Ulpius house.

“From that moment I was in love with Éva.”

“But then why have you so strenuously denied all along that you were ever in love with her?” Erzsi interjected.

“Of course. I was quite right to. It’s only for want of a better word that I call what I felt for her, love. That feeling wasn’t in the least like the feeling I have for you, and had, if you’ll forgive me, for one or two of your predecessors. In a way it was quite the reverse. I love you because you’re part of me. I loved Éva because she wasn’t. That’s to say, loving you gives me confidence and strength, but when I loved her, it humiliated and annihilated me … Of course these expressions are merely antithetical. When it happened, I felt that the truth of the old plays was supreme, and I was being slowly destroyed in the great climax. I was being destroyed because of Éva, through Éva, just as we had played it in our adolescence.”

Mihály got up and walked restlessly round the room. It had at last begun to worry him that he had so given himself away. To Erzsi, a stranger …

Erzsi remarked:

“Before that, you said something about … that you couldn’t possibly be in love with her, because you knew each other too well, there wasn’t the necessary distance between you for you to fall in love.”

(“Good — she hasn’t understood,” he thought. “She’s taking in only as much as her basic jealousy can grasp.”)

“It’s good that you mention that,” he continued, calmly. “Until that memorable night there was no distance. Then I discovered, as the two of us sat there, like a lady with her gentleman, that she had become a totally different woman, a strange, splendid, stunning woman, whereas the old Éva would have carried within her, ineradicably, the old dark, sick sweetness of my youth.

“But generally Éva didn’t give a damn for me. I rarely managed to see her and when I did she showed no interest in me. Her restlessness was somehow pathological. Especially after the serious suitor appeared — a wealthy, famous, not-exactly-young collector of antiques, who had turned up once or twice at the Ulpius house with the old man, caught the odd glimpse of her, and had long busied himself with plans to make her his wife. The old Ulpius informed Éva he would hear not a word of protest: she had lived off him quite long enough. She would marry, or go to hell. Éva asked for two months’ delay. The old man consented, at the fiancé’s request.