Sandor Marai - Portraits of a Marriage

“It’s for three,” he said. He took his glasses off and polished them. He stared straight ahead in that shortsighted way. The bill said three-sixty. I handed back one-forty. He waved me away.

“Keep it, Ede. It’s yours.”

This was it. The flashpoint! But he wasn’t looking at me, he was trying to stand up. That wasn’t too easy for him, and he had to clutch at the counter. I looked at the one-forty in my palm and wondered whether to throw it in his face. But I couldn’t speak. Eventually, after a good deal of trouble, he managed to straighten up.

“You parked far away, Doctor?” I asked.

He shook his head and gave a smoker’s cough.

“I don’t have a car. I’ll use the subway.”

I answered him as firmly as I could.

“Mine’s parked nearby. It’s new. I’ll drive you home.”

“No,” he hiccupped. “The subway is fine. Takes me right home.”

“Now you listen to me, buddy!” I bellowed at him. “I’ll drive you home in my new car! Me, the stinking prole.”

I came out from behind the counter and took a step toward him. If he refuses, I thought, I’ll knock his teeth out. Because, in the end, you just have to.

It was like the cat got his tongue. He squinted up at me.

“Okay,” he said, and nodded. “Take me home, you stinking prole.”

I put my arms around him and helped him through the door, the comradely way only men know, the kind of men who’ve slept with the same woman. Now that’s real democracy for you.

He got out at One Hundredth, just before the Arab quarter. He disappeared, like concrete in the river. I never saw him again.

Here come the writers. You’d best clear off — quick, that way, to the left. There might be a labor-camp vet from the old country among them … No harm in being careful. Call in again at the end of the week. And mind to steer well clear of the cement trade.

Welcome, gentlemen. You are served, sir!

Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived the war, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy, then to the United States. His novel Embers was published for the first time in English in 2001.

George Szirtes is the prize-winning author of thirteen books of poetry and several translations from Hungarian, including Sándor Márai’s Casanova in Bolzano and The Rebels . He lives in the United Kingdom.

This is a joke impossible to translate directly. Ede / Lajos is mispronouncing the names of the two leading, opposing schools of Hungarian writing in the twentieth century: he says népis instead of népies (popular ruralist) and turbánus (or turbanists) instead of urbánus (urbanist, cosmopolitan).