Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai Page B

as you like, something about the refrigerator? … Because we are quite capable of that: we live between such infinitely divided shores, in a world of such vast distances. I sat in the sunlight and it was as if I were contemplating someone else’s bad luck, thinking quite coldly and rationally about all that had happened. I recalled what Lázár had said, word for word, but his words did not strike me now with the force they had then. The tension of the previous day had dissolved. I recalled sitting in the conservatory with the writer but it was as if it hadn’t been me. I thought of the lilac ribbon the way you might of a piece of society gossip. By the end, the content and nature of my life might have been summed up by others over tea or supper as follows: “Do you know the Xes? … Yes, the industrialist and his wife. They live on the hill at Rózsadomb. Things aren’t going well for them. The wife has discovered that her husband is in love with someone else. Just imagine, she found a piece of lilac ribbon in his wallet, then it all came out … Yes, they’re separating.” That would have been a way of putting it, what had happened to me, to us. How often had I heard this kind of thing about other couples, stray remarks overheard in company, and not even bothered with it … Could it be that one day we too would become subject to society gossip, my husband and I and the woman with the lilac ribbon?
    I closed my eyes, leaned back in the sunshine and, like the wise woman of some primitive village, tried to imagine the face of the lilac-ribboned woman.
    Because that face had a life—in the next street, somewhere in the universe. What did I know about her? What can we know of anyone? Five years I had lived with my husband, believing I knew everything about him, knowing his every habit, every gesture: the way he hurriedly washed his hands before meals, never even glancing at the mirror, combing his hair with one hand; the way he’d suddenly be smiling an absentminded, furious smile, never telling me what he’d been thinking of; and more—all we learn of another’s body and soul through intimate contact, however frightening, indifferent, moving, depressing, wonderful, or dull that might be. I believed it was all there was to know.Then one day I discovered I knew nothing about him … knew less, in fact, than Lázár, that strange, disappointed, sarcastic figure who exercised such power over my husband’s soul. What kind of power? … Human power. It was different from mine: greater than my powers as a woman. I can’t explain it, can only feel it, and have always felt it, from the moment I first saw them together. But that very same man had just told me the day before that he was now obliged to share his power with the lilac-ribboned woman … And now I knew that whatever wonderful or terrible things were happening in the world, it was pointless accusing myself of selfishness, lack of faith, or lack of humility, pointless comparing my problems to those of the world of nations, the problems of those millions suffering their various tragedies, because there was nothing I could do—selfish and petty as I was, obsessed and blind as I was—except get out on the street and search out the woman I had to confront face-to-face, the woman I had to talk to. I had to see her, to hear her voice, look into her eyes, examine her skin, her brow, her hands. Lázár said—and now, closing my eyes in the sunlight, I heard his voice again as clearly as if he were sitting opposite me and we were at the party with the music, back in the dizzying, unreal atmosphere of our conversation—that the truth was dangerous but at the same time far more commonplace, closer to hand, than I could imagine. What might that “commonplace” truth be? What did he mean by that?
    In any case, had he suggested where to look, had he given me a clue as to where I might find her?
    I decided to visit my mother-in-law that very morning and have