Esther's Inheritance by Sándor Marai

quality you acquire. People are not born with morals. The morals of wild animals, the morals of children, are not the same as the morals of a sixty-year-old circuit judge in Vienna or Amsterdam. People acquire their moral characters in the same way as they acquire their mannerisms and their culture.”—He was intoning like a priest.—“There are people who are more adept at moral character, yes indeed, there are moral geniuses just as there are musical and literary geniuses. You are such a moral genius, Esther; no, please don’t deny it. I feel it in you. I am tone-deaf when it comes to issues of morality, practically illiterate. That is why I needed to be with you, or that at any rate is the chief reason, I think.”
    I was obstinate. “I don’t believe it,” I said, “but even if it were so, Lajos, you cannot want someone to act as moral nanny to all kinds of morally imperfect beings. A woman can’t play moral nurse her whole life.”
    “A woman! A woman!” he said quickly, courteously waving my answer away. “I am talking about you, Esther. I mean you.”
    “A woman,” I said, and felt the blood rush to my face. “I know you mean me. I have had enough of being the model for a false view of the world all my life. Get that into your head at last. There is no point in me saying it again…though maybe you are right, we cannot remain silent about this forever. I don’t believe in your ideas, Lajos, I believe in reality. The reality is that you deceived me; once upon a time people might have put this in a more flowery, romantic way, such as: ‘I was your plaything, your toy.’ You are a strange gambler; you play with passions and people instead of cards. I was one of the queens in your hand. Then you stood up and went off elsewhere. Why? Because you grew bored. You had had enough and simply walked away. That’s the truth. That is the terrible immoral truth. One can’t throw a woman away the way one does a matchbox simply because one has passions, because that happens to be one’s nature, because one finds it impossible being tied to a woman or because one is ambitious, or because everything and everyone is merely useful. I can even understand that…it is a low act with something human in it. But to discard someone out of sheer carelessness, that is lower than low. There is no excusing that, because it is inhuman. Do you understand now?”
    “But I called you, Esther,” he said quite quietly. “Don’t you remember? Yes, I was weak. But then, at the last moment, I came to my senses and knew that only you could help me. I called you, I begged you. Don’t you remember my letters?”
    “I know nothing about any letters,” I said, and was frightened to note how sharp my voice sounded, sharper than it had ever been, almost shrieking. “It’s all lies. The letters are a lie, like the ring, like everything you ever said or promised me. I know nothing about the letters, I don’t believe in them. Éva has only just told me that she had found letters like that…in the rosewood box…how should I know what is true in all this? I don’t believe you. I don’t believe Éva either. I don’t believe in the past. It is all lies and conspiracies, a piece of theater full of stage properties, old letters and vows that were never made. I don’t go to the theater nowadays, Lajos. I haven’t been to a theater in fifteen years. I don’t go out. I know the truth, do you understand? The truth. Look at me! This is the truth! Look into my eyes! I am old. We are at the end of life, as you yourself so grandly declared. Yes, it is the end, and you are the reason that this is the way it has passed, so empty, so false; it is why I stayed here, living alone like an old maid who is thrifty with her feelings but eventually buys a cat and a dog as pets…my pets are people.”
    “Yes,” he admitted, bowing his head in guilt. “That is a very dangerous thing to do.”
    “Yes, dangerous,” I repeated, instinctively more