“If it were only that you had given yourself to me, I would be grateful to you. I would desire you, for you’re the most beautiful woman on earth to me, but that isn’t everything. It’s a precious gift, but not unique. Margit, there’s not much true love in the world, though so much is said about it and still more is written. Those who haven’t known it swear it doesn’t exist. You’re a mature, intelligent woman. You have a profession; you have some experience of life. Tell me: how many times have you loved as you do now? You yourself have said, only two times that count. Years ago there was — Stanley. You were full of passion and girlish naivete. That passion was unconsummated and untested. It was a presentiment of the element, like the hum in the shell you put to your ear that lets you imagine the ocean.
“There were men in your life. You crossed out their names because, as you say, they didn’t count. At last I was here, blown into your life from the far side of the world, from a country that’s strange to you, putting thoughts into your language with difficulty. There are thousands of matters that absorb me that you know nothing about, and yet you say without hesitation, ‘You are the man. I was waiting for you. I only want to belong to you. I want more: to help you become what you ought to be.’”
Her thigh moved over his knee; she rested her head on her hands. He hardly saw the moist gleam of her wide-open eyes. “Speak,” she begged. “Speak.”
“The last evening in Agra you said — sitting by me, for I had just awakened — you said, with a world of goodness and devotion in your face, ‘I wish you were a leper.’ I was taken aback. I was seeing the stumps of those people on the carts with their hands and feet eaten away — those poor stammering wretches to whom one gives alms. ‘Are you mad?’ I shouted. I was angry at you. Then you stroked me tenderly and said, ‘For then all the world would disown you except me. Then at last you would know that I love you.’ It seemed an eccentric metaphor to me, but now I see the truth in it. You are capable of that sort of love — of deep, even painful joy at devoting yourself beyond human endurance, recklessly, without calculation.”
“Speak,” she whispered when he was silent.
“Very well, Margit.” He put his hand on her warm, receptive one. “This will hurt. I warn you.”
“Go on,” she breathed, moving her lips over his chest.
“You thought of my boys. You know that I have two sons. You bought them, Geza and Sandor, carved animals, elephants, buffalo, tigers. You chose very carefully. I remember it alclass="underline" your defiant smile, for it had to be a surprise for me, and it was. You put me to shame; you had thought of them and I, their father, hadn’t. I remember every move, the funny way you wrinkled your nose when you looked closely to see if they were really sandalwood. A box of toys from you, but you kept yourself in the background, so they came from me, and you were happy to do better than I had, to fulfill my responsibility for me. And now you demand that I go away with you and take away their father at a stroke. Margit, I love you, but I don’t want to lose them for—”
She writhed like a fish when it feels the hook.
“No, Istvan!” she cried in desperation, pounding the pillows with her fists. “You know me, after all. Don’t think badly of me. I had one desire — to save you from the fate of those people in the film. I was trembling all the time we were in the theater, thinking that you could have been one of those who were shot or mangled. Or one of the exiled and homeless who fled as refugees, feeling bitter because they had lost, or because they had not understood what they were doing and had brought destruction on the capital they love. You want to be free. A creative person must be free. I only wanted to help you in that. I’m stupid, stupid. Forgive me, Istvan. I’d never have dared demand that you give up your children.”
She beat her forehead against his hand and her hot tears flowed over his skin. He stroked the back of her neck and felt sorry for them both. He clenched his jaws until it hurt.
“I don’t want you to suffer like this.”
“You did right! You should beat me if you see me being senseless and wicked. I had the best intentions, and only now I see that I didn’t love you enough. Don’t remember it against me, please.”
“I’m like a leper, Margit, at least for one-third of humanity, because I come from there, from the Red camp. You would like for me to repudiate my country, and it is there. To abandon my family, and it is there. To forget the language they speak there. You want me to advance by betraying my homeland. Think: you yourself would lose your respect for me. You would never be able to trust me. You would wonder: since he renounced all that, how can I be sure he will not be untrue to me as well?”
“Don’t distress yourself,” she moaned. “I know the way I spoke was horrid, but I was truly not thinking that way.”
He was close to her. She felt his presence with her body, which was touching his; his open palm was under her forehead. But she felt that he was far away, looking at her contemptuously. The bitter taste of her mistake was in her mouth.
“It’s my fault, Margit,” he said, suffering as much as she was. “I shouldn’t have loved you, shouldn’t have met you on it with every gesture and every kiss vowing faithfulness. I couldn’t renounce you. I didn’t know how. And I can’t do it today. I’m so happy that I found you. That I have you. Don’t ask me to hasten the hour that must come. I ought to beg for your forbearance, for when I say, Stay with me, I’m not speaking of the last day, the hour of death. That is how it should be…I’m only pushing the day away, like a coward. It’s not far off: a year, two years — the threshold we can’t cross together.
“I believe I know you, and I know how much you’re worth. Sometimes I pray: God, let her be happy. To do that, after all, is to pray against you and me. For since I can’t bury the past, I can’t say: Istvan died, a father died, Hungary died, and someone was born who — apart from pain and self-loathing — has nothing to offer. After all, the one you would take with you would not be me. Do you understand? I would despise myself. Could you be happy with me?”
“Istvan! I shouldn’t have said that,” she sobbed.
“You should have. We’ve avoided this conversation for too long. You thought: it’s his decision. I don’t want it to seem that I am trapping him. I won’t urge him; it will happen of itself. And I steered around the questions that needed to be asked, for honesty demands that they be asked. We must both answer them in good faith, supporting each other. You must help me in this, and I must help you.”
“That is just how I have always thought about this moment,” she gasped out, wiping her tears. “Nothing is final yet. Everything can still change.” There was a ring of resilient hope in her voice. “After all, you still haven’t given me anything to be despondent about. I see how happy I can be. I want the deep peace I find in you. Will that be taken from me? To mock me? He could not play with us so cruelly.”
She breathed fitfully. Her words were tremulous and broken from her crying a moment before. He knew that she was not making her argument to him, but bargaining for him with the One they both, though they knew He existed, wanted to leave out of their considerations. He stroked her head, which shifted heavily on his chest as if it had become severed from her body. There was nothing sensual in these caresses, only tenderness and the hope of quieting the sobbing that was going away like a storm driven by the wind — the sobbing that tore at his heart.