The Story of My Wife by Milán Füst

simply stretched out on the carpet and nibbled, as if on a picnic. I didn't even turn on the light, I just let the darkness close in on us.
    And then I began to talk, too. Told her about. . . well, what? My travel experiences, mostly. About the urge that's in every young man to find out if there is happiness anywhere in this world. For what else is a young man interested in but to learn what goes on in those dimly-lit huts after the hypnotic din of a sun-drenched day subsides? When light fades from the walls and he stands alone in the cold tropical night. Who are those shriekers and clamorers, he wonders, who during the day simply gobble up the sun. What goes through their minds when night comes and the moon shines into their shabby little rooms?
    "This was when I wound up in Selangor," I said to my wife, "on my way to even remoter parts of Malaya. I can't tell you what fascination life there had for me. I had seen indolence before but never such voluptuous idleness . . . The way these people could stretch out and lounge about and chew tobacco in the shade, their eyes forever bright, as though they were always drunk, always burning. They kept sipping life as if it were some delicate wine. I, harried and overworked as always, thought I had finally reached the happy isles.
    "Until, of course, I found out a thing or two about the place. 'You can't measure happiness,' a member of one of their ruling families told me once. (He, of course, studied in Paris and London and naturally spoke Dutch, too.) 'Take a look at them when they are raving mad,' said this pale-faced descendant of a long line of sultans, 'when they seethe and whip out their knives.'
    '"Life is a but a struggle," this oriental aristocrat informed me. And laughed rather coldly. And to illustrate, he told me little stories about these people, to help me understand what this serene-seeming island paradise was really like. He mentioned unusual goings-on under the surface, disappearances, strange pilgrimages—God knows what else. But mainly he told me about the grandmothers and their sorceries. He asked me to consider just that: a world ruled by women who were tiny, by the way, the older ones smaller still, and all shriveled, though tough and immovable, like a mountain. It's easy to imagine, how all this can lead to ruin, how it can devastate the young especially, who become generally apathetic, oblivious, interested in only one thing; the Dutch guilder. And when the scramble for those guilders gets to be too hectic, the women just chuck everything, very proudly put on their chadoors and journey to Mecca to kiss a stone.
    "And I say the same to you now," I continued, turning to matters closer at hand. "Life is indeed a struggle, as you can see, that's what it is all about. It's no use looking for happy people."
    I tried hard to make her see my point. There are people, I know, who think only they are unhappy. The whole world writhes in ecstasy, only their skies are overcast.
    "Take my life, for instance," I said to her and smiled. "After all, I am human, too, and believed with all the rest of them that I was entitled to a little happiness."
    And strangely enough, I began to talk about my own life, something I hardly ever did.
    I talked about my struggles, my work, about the odd and baffling world I sprang from—my family, in short, whose members in a way also put on a chadoor and disappeared when they felt too stifled, or simply fed up with those around them. They were also forever preoccupied, oblivious, never paying the slightest attention. Our mother only liked to cook and play the piano, these were her two passions. Father, on the other hand, had not much use for fancy feelings and moods—one night he took a pitcher of water and dumped it into the piano. All he wanted to do was think, to figure things out. What was it he kept turning over in his head?
    Not much, I suspect—a new type of camera maybe, an old hunt he'd gone on once, or whether the czars of Russia