Antal Szerb: Journey by Moonlight

Mihály stopped talking and sipped his wine. After a while Erzsi asked:

“Tell me, were you in love with Éva Ulpius?”

“No, I don’t think so. If you really must know if I was in love with anyone, then it was more like Tamás. Tamás was my ideal. Éva was just a bonus, and the erotic catalyst in these games. But I wouldn’t really agree that I was in love with him, because the phrase is misleading, and you would continue to think there was some unhealthy homo-erotic bond between us, which simply wasn’t the case. He was my best friend, using the word in a very adolescent sense, and what was unhealthy in the affair was, as I said before, something quite different and of a deeper nature.”

“But tell me, Mihály … this is rather difficult to believe … you were with her for years on end, and there was never any question of an innocent flirtation between you and Éva Ulpius?”

“No, none.”

“How was that?”

“How? … in fact … probably, that we were so intimate that it wasn’t possible to flirt or fall in love with one another. For love, there has to be a distance across which the lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity. Two lovers are the two oppositely charged poles of the universe.”

“This is all very deep, for so late at night. I don’t get the full picture. Perhaps the girl was ugly?”

“Ugly? She was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. No, that isn’t quite right. She was the one beautiful woman against whom I have since measured all others. All my later loves were like her in some particular. With one, it would be the legs, with another, the way she lifted her head, with a third, her voice on the telephone.”

“Myself included?”

“You included … yes.”

“In what way am I like her?”

Mihály blushed and fell silent.

“Tell me. I insist.”

“How can I put it? … Stand up, would you, and come over here beside me.”

Erzsi stood beside his chair. He put his arm around her waist and looked up at her. She smiled.

“Now … that’s it,” said Mihály. “When you smile down at me like that. That’s how Éva smiled when I was the victim.”

Erzsi disengaged herself and sat down again.

“Very interesting,” she said, somewhat crestfallen. “You’re certainly holding something back. Never mind. I don’t consider it necessary that you should tell me everything. I don’t feel any pangs of conscience about the fact that I’ve not told you about my adolescence. I don’t think it very important. But tell me — you were in love with this girl. It’s just a matter of words. Where I come from it was what you would call love.”

“No. I tell you I wasn’t in love with her. Just the others.”

“What others?”

“I’m about to explain. For years there was no other visitor at the Ulpius house but me. When we were eighteen the situation changed. Then we were joined by Ervin and János Szepetneki. They came to see Éva, not Tamás, as I did. What happened was that around that time the school put on a drama festival, as it did every year, and as we were the final year group we did the main item of the whole event. Any chance to do a play was good news. The only trouble was that there was a large female role in it. To fill it, the boys brought along their fantasy-heroines from the skating rink and the dancing school, but the teacher producing the play, an extremely clever young priest who hated women, didn’t find any of them suitable. I somehow mentioned the fact in Éva’s hearing. From that moment she would not rest. She felt that this was her chance to begin her career as an actress. Tamás of course wouldn’t hear of it. He thought it grotesque and degrading that she should begin in the context of school, such an intimate, almost family setting. But Éva positively terrorised me until I took the matter up with the teacher in question. He was very fond of me, and told me to bring her along. This I did. She had barely opened her mouth before he declared, ‘You must have the part, you and no-one else.’ Éva plucked up the nerve to raise the subject with her puritanical, theatre-hating father and pleaded with him for half-an-hour until at last he consented.

“Of course I don’t want to talk about the performance itself just now. I’ll just observe in passing that Éva, generally speaking, was not a success. The assembled parents, my mother included, found her too forward, insufficiently feminine, a little common — in a word, somehow not quite the thing. Or rather, they sensed the rebellion latent in her, and even though there was nothing objectionable in her acting, her costume, or her general behaviour, they took exception to her morals. But this didn’t make her a success with the boys either, despite the fact that she was so much more beautiful than the heroines of the skating-rink and the dancing school. They conceded she was very attractive, ‘but somehow …’ they said, and shrugged their shoulders. These young bourgeois types already carried the germ of their parents’ attitude to the unconventional. Only Ervin and János recognised the enchanted princess in her. Because they too were rebels by this time.

“János Szepetneki you saw today. He’s always been like that. He was the best verse-reader in the class. In particular he was a great hit in the literary and debating society as Cyrano. He carried a revolver about with him and every week shot burglars dead in the middle of the night, trying to steal secret documents from his widowed mother. While the other lads were still laboriously treading on their dancing partners’ toes, he was having wild adventures. Every summer he went off to the battlefront and took up the rank of second lieutenant. His new clothes would be torn within minutes — he always seemed to fall off something. His greatest ambition was to prove to me that he was my superior. I think it all started when we were thirteen. One of our teachers took up phrenology and decided from the bumps on my head that I was gifted, whereas János’s skull showed he wasn’t very bright. He never got over this. Years after we’d left school he was still going on about it. He had to be better than me at everything — football, study, intellectual things. When later on I gave up all three he was really at a loss and didn’t know where to turn. So then he fell in love with Éva, because he thought that Éva was in love with me. Yes, that was János Szepetneki.”

“And who is this Ervin?”

“Ervin was a Jewish boy who’d converted to Catholicism, perhaps under the influence of the priests who taught us, but more probably I think following his own inner promptings. Earlier, at sixteen, he’d been the brightest of all the clever and conceited boys: Jewish boys tend to mature early. Tamás really hated him for his cleverness, and became thoroughly anti-Semitic whenever he was mentioned.

“It was from Ervin that we first heard about Freud, Socialism, the March Circle. He was the first of us to be influenced by the strange world of what later became the Károlyi revolution. He wrote wonderful poetry. In the style of Ady.

“Then, practically from one day to the next, he changed completely. He shut himself off from his classmates. I was the only one he communicated with. But as for his poetry, to my mind, I just didn’t understand it, and I didn’t like the fact that he started writing long lines without any rhyme. He became a recluse, read books, played the piano — we knew very little about him. Then one day in Chapel we noticed him going up to the altar, with the other boys, for the sacrament. That was how we knew he had converted.

“Why did he become a Catholic? Ostensibly, because he was drawn to the strange beauty of the religion. He was also attracted by the dogma and the harshness of its moral code. I do believe there was something in him that craved austerity the way other people crave pleasure. In a word, all the usual reasons why outsiders convert … And he became a model Catholic. But there was another side to it too, which I didn’t see so clearly at the time. Ervin, like everyone else in the Ulpius house except me, was a role-player by nature. When I think back now, even as a younger pupil he was always playing at being something. He played the intellectual and the revolutionary. He was never relaxed and natural, the way a boy should be, not by a long way. Every word and gesture was studied. He used archaic words, he was always aloof, always wanting the biggest role for himself. But his acting wasn’t like Tamás’s and Éva’s. They would just walk away from their part the moment it was over and look for something new. He wanted a role to fill with his whole being, and in the Catholic religion he finally found the hugely demanding role he could respect. After that he never altered his posture again. The part just grew deeper and deeper.