Sándor Márai
American Journal
Part Two: 1984–1989
...
5 March- A film director from Budapest (I've never
heard of him before) has written a letter in which, though unknown to me,
he calls on me to return home because there is no sense in the "empty gesture"
of emigration; everything back there is fine and dandy, etc. The letter-writer
categorises the fact that I have been living abroad for 36 years as a "gesture"
and calls on me to return home, where they will await me with "the national
anthem or incognito," as you please. At times like this I am always amazed
at how uninformed contemporaries are in their judgement of one another's stances.
The assumption that I would join the "useful idiots," as Lenin called them,
goes without saying for the letter-writer. At times like this it is always
a relief to know that two oceans separate you from this type of person.
*
6 March- L.'s eyes are not improving; she lives by
groping around, and I grope along with her. She spends a lot of time thinking
about her childhood and Kassa [now Kosice, Slovakia*, even has dreams about
those back there. Today she talked about Róza, our elderly maid, who was our
marvellous cook in Buda, but with her failing eyes one day- and it just happened
to be a fussy dinner for invited guests- she short-sightedly handed over a
salad in which an earthworm was lurking. When L. pointed it out to her, old
Róza shamefacedly declared, "In that case, I'll leave." And leave she did- having
to grope around, elderly, she took herself off to the hopelessness of a poorhouse.
Memories which come back in old age and are painful. We ought to have retained
Róza, done something for her... In the end, these conjurings-up of spirits are
the worst.
*
18 March- A dinner in the Mikó utca apartment, 40
years ago today. Everything was, at that point, still in its place, two maids,
the big apartment. The table setting as in the good old days: silver ware,
china, everything just as it should be. Of the family members around the table,
sharing in that supper on my name-day, my mother, Aunt Julie, brother-in-law
Gyula, sister-in-law Tessie, and Alice Madách have all passed away. My brothers
are still alive, so am I, and L. too, though only just. That night German
Nazi troops occupied Budapest. Everything was dislocated- life, work, Hungary,
the old order and disorder. A total break.
I was 44 and just recovering from a severe illness. Two weeks later came the
move out to Leányfalu, into exile, with the dog and a maid. The bombardment
of Budapest began, with our own house being hit by 36 shells and bombs on
the last day of the siege; everything was destroyed. I left half my life there.
Then came the second round, the roaming across continents. It was 40 years
ago today that the self I was until then perished, and that other self who
I am today took shape- and now even that is in the process of disintegration.
*
11 April- Very tired. A large dose of Vitamin C.
Reading matter: Hungarian poetry, Hungarian literary history. Tranquillity
when I think of death; disquiet when I think about dying.
*
8 May- I totter along the street like Blondel, the
tightrope walker, balancing with his pole above Niagara Falls. Not even "on
sand" any longer, but on a rope, hands stretched out in front, feeling about
in empty air. Sight in the left eye is nearly gone; I am unable to read or
write with it. The right eye still functions, dimly, with effort, though I
don't know for how long. If there is not that much, I shall no longer be able
to read; that will be what I shall regret, there is no longer anything else
that will be missed. With L.'s latest fall- fortunately, not dangerous: a slip
in the bathroom- the two sick, near-blind old people who we are totter in support
of one another. And always "it could be worse"- which is true.
*
20 June- Hungarian poetry every evening. And bits
of reading on literary history. Hungarian literature was a miraculous labour
in every age.
*
23 June- The first summery day. The air is heavy,
with a whiff of lead in it.
I limp along whether walking, writing and reading, but I still walk, write
and read. Nietzsche's "What does not kill me makes me stronger" – is not certain.
A person may sometimes just be weakened by something that does not kill him.
But the everyday trial of strength of existence, thinking and cognition somehow
endows one with a sense of consequence, if only for a second.
*
30 June- A volume of selected newspaper articles
that Krúdy wrote between 1914 and 1919. I start from the back, with him describing
the redistribution of land at Kápolna in February 1919. The piece is exciting
for me, because it brings the drawing-room intoxication of my youth closer
to hand: I was then a second-year arts student at the University of Budapest
and, at 19, a "rookie" trainee journalist with the daily Magyarország. Barna
Búza, the minister in the Károlyi government who oversaw land redistribution,
had placed me there. Búza- a man of short stature with a pock-marked face,
an old-style liberal and honourable advocate of reform- had been at school
with my father. I was living in Pest during the October 1918 revolution and
the run-up to it, green and in a hurry, a cub-reporter eye-witness to the
rotten war and then the revolution. I was present in the Astoria Hotel the
night the president and his wife were invited over from the Károlyi Palace,
because the Budapest garrison had lain down its arms and gone over to the
cause of the revolution. Károlyi, who had been hauled out of bed, was wearing
a fur coat over his pyjamas, and I heard him asking: "Fine, fine, but what
does the King say to this?" I was present in Parliament when István Tisza
announced that the Monarchy had lost the war; I watch him as he speaks, a
grey glove on one hand: he must have had some skin complaint. I write my report
in the parliamentary reporters' gallery; my boss was Gyula Török, the bearded
writer, then famous as the author of The Emerald Ring, my protector and mentor
at the newspaper. Among the new men jostling ostentatiously around Károlyi
is Pál Kéri, a gifted and particularly corrupt man, one of those who, a few
months later, would persuade the president to release Béla Kun, Szamuely and
the other Communists from gaol and hand over power to them. That happened.
Krúdy evokes all these faces and figures. Also that guest-house on Rákóczi
út where I was quartered then, and where I came close to dying of the Spanish
flu but recovered without the help of doctors or medicine. Those were the
weeks in which everything was decided: Benes© & Co. had already Balkanised
the Monarchy; Horthy & Co. were getting ready to exact reprisals. The
Krúdy book brings all this back. It was a wild youth, an overture, everything
blaring and bellowing.
*
...
22 November- Thanksgiving Day. Profound peace within me and around
us, and in that peace something that could be said to be a sense of gratitude.
Gratitude to America that fate has brought me here, at the end, to the shore
of the Pacific Ocean, to this friendly cave in this pretty town, where I don't
know a living soul and everything I have disliked is appeasingly remote: "nationalism,"
breast-pounding patriotism, inveterate racist rancour... And the Hungarian language
has endured, offering the means, at this great remove, "to give you sustenance,
and so I choose as your guardian the absence that makes the heart grow fonder."
Thank you.
*
31 December- After lunch, L. unexpectedly, without
any warning signs, became ill with fainting symptoms. Precipitate spells like
this have occurred a number of times during the past ten years. It's not a
heart attack, she has no pain: a loss of consciousness with essentially no
pulse. I gave her a dose of Synpathol and managed to carry her into the bedroom;
I put her to bed and she fell asleep. By the evening she was better. The two
of us are ripe to go. L.'s eyesight has not improved, indeed deteriorated
if anything; the physician advises further eye surgery, but L. is afraid of
anaesthetics, me too, so I don't dare either to favour or reject a new operation
but leave the decision to her. Death as a couple, simultaneously- that would
be the greatest boon for both of us. This year even the stragglers amongst
our personal acquaintances have departed. I have no objection of any kind
to going; I am uneasy solely about the manner of dying. One must entrust that
to fate. We have lived life to the full.
Reading matter in recent weeks: Aristotle, the chapter on the soul from the
complete, two-volume English edition. He did not believe the soul had a separate
existence: body and soul are only conceivable as complementary, and if the
body succumbs, the soul too is extinguished.
Occasionally, the Odyssey and modern Hungarian poetry.
1985
28 January- We have no future, life has run its course;
all I now look forward to is to go peacefully. The symptoms of physical and
intellectual attrition are day-to-day occurrences. There are times when it's
as if I were remembering myself.
*
26 February- A letter from Vienna. The correspondent
is watching Hungary's "liberalisation" from close at hand and has doubts about
the phenomenon because "it's as if the pope were to stand up on the Vatican
balcony and announce to the assembled throng that 'Salvation didn't work out;
we have to make a fresh start, and this time do it all differently.'" The
comparison is apposite. Like Egon Erwin Kisch, the German journalist who,
when asked just before the war to dream up a sensationalist headline of some
sort for the dwindling Prager Tagblatt came up with: "Franz Ferdinand lebt,
der Weltkrieg war umsonst"- "Franz Ferdinand alive- the World War was futile."
*
9 March- L. blindly clipped her fingernails and injured
the nail-bed with her unsteady hand. The bleeding had still not stopped by
the third day, so we went to hospital, where they made a "drain" to draw off
the accumulated pus and administer antibiotics. Back home she has fainted
yet again; a sudden drop in blood pressure is causing the fainting. There
is no medicine, no help; on all fours, I somehow managed to lug her to bed.
After a few hours' lie-down she gets better. We have talked over what is to
be done if either one of us should go. There is not much scope for action
(first aid, etc.). It has to be endured; that sort of thing has a way of somehow
working itself out.
Reading matter: a biography of Schopenhauer. The poetry of post-1945 young
Hungarian poets. Many of them are talented.
*
1 April- The flat had to be heated last night. A
tropical swelter explodes at dawn.
In the evening, Aeschylus' The Persians (in English); the text's authentic,
Greek import hovers vaguely somewhere in the distance... Seven of his plays
are extant, The Persians just one of perhaps seventy that he wrote. He won
many prizes, out-writing Sophocles and the covetous, pushy dilettantes. In
the end, jealous dramatists rejoiced because an eagle dropped a tortoise on
Aeschylus' bald head, thinking the bare skull was a rock on which it might
crack open the tortoise's shell. It is all much simpler today: a competitor
would be accused of being a Fascist or Communist.
*
6 April- L. stumbles in the bedroom, falls and breaks
her left arm. In the same place as it was broken seven years ago, in Salerno:
the left humerus. We go by ambulance to hospital, where they X-ray and pin
the fracture together.
*
11 April- LXXXV.- L. lost consciousness in the morning.
I was alone; it was hard lifting her into bed. The third such attack in the
last four weeks.
Freedom is a private undertaking. There is no such thing as institutionalised
freedom. Anyone can only be free every day by oneself, under one's own steam- and
only ever for a short time.
Reading: the letters of Mark Twain. And Aeschylus' The Persians. One surprise
amongst the birthday greetings: President Reagan and his wife send their best
wishes on my 85th.
*
5 May- For four weeks nurses have been lining up,
one behind the other, one washing and tidying her up, helping her to walk
and lie down, a second cleaning up, a third instructing in physiotherapy,
a fourth taking the blood pressure and checking the pulse... L. is living in
a swoon. In the meantime, everything is as if paralysed, both days and nights.
At night, if L. is sleeping, my reading is Sophocles and occasionally Hungarian
poetry. Weariness, like someone who has been struck down out of the blue.
*
21 May- What does senility have to offer beyond existence?
Nothing. I understand those who preempt the ending.
*
6 July- Three months have passed, and today L. went
out on the street for the first time. The three months of nursing day-and-night
were successful; she did not find walking difficult. Her eyesight has not
improved; she is virtually blind. I myself am unsteady in my gait; sight in
my glaucomatous eye is failing, the other eye is also weak. That is how we
live, the blind leading the blind. The time of decrepitude is on its way,
when one shucks off everything without any sense of loss.
I have finished the thriller (mostly at night, once L. was asleep). I shall
write no more fiction.
*
11 July- The big come-down in life is not when a
person discovers, at the end, that he was mistaken. More crushingly, he has
no means of doing anything other than be mistaken.
*
17 July- Reading: Mémoires du Duc de Sully. The book
was printed in London around 1760. A present. In the age of pocket books that
are printed in runs of one million this "book" is like a prehistoric relic.
Font, paper, type area, binding - everything is reverential. A book then was
still a liturgical phenomenon, like a font of holy water or a tabernacle;
its contents were addressed to a person, the reader, not to consumers.
*
9 September- L. has "gone downhill" since her fall;
the arm has healed, but an inner slump has overlaid the fall, and she is unable
to come out of it. I concern myself solely with her, day and night, striving
to make her condition bearable, insofar as that is possible. It's as if there
were no longer a separate personality; I have become absolutely identical
with her.
*
17 October- L. was at the internists's. Blood pressure,
cardiac function, vital organs- all intact. She cannot see and can only hear
with the help of an electronic hearing aid. She cannot take a step without
me; I guide her by the arm, but I myself need a walking-stick and am rocky
on my feet. Following the examination, the doctor sadly declares: "Senility."
That may well be, but equally there are periods during the day when her mind
is lively, she recalls everything, can recite long poems, talk shrewdly and
perceptively about people and events. She cannot see her food and is sometimes
unable to distinguish the character of dishes. By day and in the evening,
her ability to orient seems to fail. And she is just as beautiful at 87 as
she was when young- differently so, but still "beautiful." I don't know how
long my strength will hold out, but I would like to be with her to the last
moment, helping and nursing her. Everything has to be done for her; she is
incapable of eating, keeping herself clean, or digesting by herself. This
is how we have been living since the fall in April. The doctor says the state
may remain the same for a good while; it may deteriorate, but there is no
chance of any improvement. (That is not sure: if she were to regain her sight,
my fear and the uncertainty would cease.)
...I am not reading or writing, but I sometimes dream I am writing something.
In the dream the lines move like a projected text. The lines make sense, what's
more; the word choices are correct, the composition is vivid. None of this
is being written by "me," it is all happening inside me. The return journey
from life to death is dark; I am stumbling along from nothingness into nothingness,
and on the way a word or concept sometimes shines like a glow-worm in a dark
forest.
*
10 November- After three days in hospital for a check-up
L. was transferred to the nearby convalescent hospital. I asked the doctor
to send her home, where, with constant nursing supervision, I can be together
with her. The doctor says that is impossible; home nursing is no longer an
option, she needs full, round-the-clock medical and nursing assistance. The
convalescent hospital to which the ambulance transported her is a single-storey
building with around seventy rooms, most of them with two beds. They put L.
too in one of these.
When I took leave of her today, she said semi-consciously (she can longer
see): "Take care you don't fall into bad company."
*
12 November- I tried to read tonight (Spinoza's Ethics,
in English), but absent-mindedly, and I abandoned it. Later on, it was poems,
Hungarian poets, new people. I couldn't hear the music from the verse, so
abandoned that too. The great weariness, the compulsory labour of the last
months, does not end even now, when she is not with me day and night. I go
back and forth by taxi, yet even so tottering the few steps the trip requires
me to take. I hope I shall last out as long as she needs me. She is very beautiful;
the beauty of passing away is sometimes more convincing than the triumphant
beauty of youth and full womanhood.
*
19 November- There was nothing else that could be
done; she had to be taken to the hospital. I haggled and delayed up till the
last moment, but it could not carry on, because the two of us at home, on
our own, with myself half blind and unsteady on my feet, and also, after half
a year of round-the-clock nursing, liable to collapse at any moment, when
there would be no help at all. There was nothing else that could be done,
but it is dreadful not to have her with me, not to be with her night and day;
she cannot see, and I can't see for her. I don't know how long I am going
to be able to stand this.
*
21 November- The patients are set outside the rooms
until 4 p.m., sitting in wheelchairs in the corridor; those who still have
all their senses propel the wheels up and down the corridor by hand. I found
L. in the room, sitting in a chair, head slumped forward, bound to the seat's
back rest. She is now barely conscious. She groans out from time to time,
but on being asked says that there is no pain. Twice she said, "Mama, mama."
I try somehow to explain that I am now her "mama." She does not respond; maybe
she understood. When I speak to her she will give a yes or no, nothing more.
It's all so dreadful and frightening that I sometimes think I shall be unable
to take it. It is no consolation to be told that "she isn't suffering;" she
is suffering in another way, in some unlit corner of her mind. The beauty
of this ravishing woman has become ennobled in old age; physically, even now,
she is marvellously unscathed. The current within has gone dead, however.
I sit beside her for hours on end, holding her hand; she does not return the
pressure. At 4 p.m. two nurses put her back to bed. Time- day, night, afternoon,
morning- no longer exists for her. A senseless and incomprehensible prayer
of some sort is present inside me for a cosmic beam to restore her balance
of mind, so that the body may regain strength and she can come home and we
can die together. I feel utterly wretched. Rational argument- the time has
come, we have lived our lives- does not help. She was a marvellous creature,
everything about her; as a human and as a woman, she embraced all the graces.
She was, and still is, what has given my Life sense; if she goes, there will
no longer be any sense in anything.
*
...
13 May- L.'s diaries, every day. The replayed time
that, for me, is just as much a "reality" as the present. This moving and
exciting diary is a huge gift. I can relive the everydays and dreams of our
life.
At the firearms store where I bought the pistol. They explain how the shells
may be loaded into the magazine so the weapon is always ready to be fired.
Staggering when I walk. It may be anaemia, perhaps a circulatory disorder.
The fatigue which sometimes prevents me from getting up from the armchair,
thus forcing me to sit for hours on end. After a few steps in the street,
dizziness. If I were to fall and fetch up in hospital, I shall be unable to
use the gun. That's a serious worry.
*
21 May- The "hot-line" starts up at 4 a.m. She speaks
at length, for a long time, a voice that has a music and a scent of flowers.
She just won't stop. I listen to her in the dark room, fearful that she will
come to a stop, that something will prevent her from telling "all." Tonight
she told "all." The "all" was a long declaration of love- the declaration of
love for which I waited for 62 years, and meanwhile we always somehow managed
to talk about other things. A thing that indeed cannot be said "whilst alive,"
only once dead; the declaration wells up from the depths of the ocean, like
some kind of steaming-hot flow of water from the sea-bottom, where deep-water
volcanoes are ablaze. She says that she loved me, loved me alone, loved me
passionately, for 62 years. In the diary all she ever writes is "him," or
"with him," or "at his place." Now she tells all. As it gets towards dawn
her voice gets stuck, reiterates two or three words, like when the needle
get stuck in a groove with the record spinning, now saying the same thing
over and over again. The end of the declaration of love. I have "lived" to
hear that too.
*
18 June- I take a taxi to the edge of town, where,
at the local police training facility, and for a fairly stiff fee, police
officers instruct applicants in handling fire-arms. The trip is timely, because
I am not feeling well and would not like some cack-handed piece of clumsiness
to mess up the moment when the time comes to forestall a prolonged spell of
incapacity and waiting for death. The site operates outside the city, and
even on arrival there are dull cracks of weapons firing to greet one, because
this is where young police recruits are also given training. The civilian
recruits who have signed on for the course, myself included, number around
thirty. Most of them are quite young, with under-age girls amongst the females.
In America the right to bear arms is guaranteed under the constitution, and
anyone may keep a weapon at home, but one may only carry it on the street
if one has a separate permit. A leaflet informs me that some 120 million fire-arms
are currently owned privately in America. Statistics show that in the past
year 84 per cent of deaths due to use of fire-arms were suicides. Two police
officers give a lecture, by way of initial instruction, on how to handle a
handgun, what one should be careful over, what is permitted and what is forbidden.
One may shoot a burglar in one's dwelling, but only if prior to that the intruder
has threatened the inhabitants with a weapon, etc. The pupils in the lecture
room are attentive and quiet. This officially organised instruction in the
technique of killing- or murder and suicide, to put it another way- is a curious
example of what life is worth where we are living. Practical instruction will
commence next week. The first lesson comes to an end late in the evening,
and in the taxi called out from town I slip back through dark fields towards
the built-up area where the targets, people, live. Me too. This is one of
the oddest undertakings in my life- in the end, preparation for a journey from
which "no traveller yet has returned." It is night-time before I get back
to the empty apartment; Lola's bed has been unmade for months now, and I reflect
abstractedly that it will not be long before the moment comes when I can set
off into the nothingness where she is and towards which I am heading. I sleep
soundly, like one who has made all the necessary arrangements at the travel
agency for a long journey.
*
...
28 March- A courier from Pest. He brings contract
proposals from three publishing houses and an invitation from others back
there. A complete, "unconditional" surrender on their part; they will publish
everything- books, articles, the lot, the entire "life's work." It's an interesting
symptom, as if the process of disintegration were getting under way. I shall
not give permission for anything to be published there as long as Russian
occupying forces are in the country. And, once they have gone, they should
hold free, democratic elections at home under the supervision of foreign observers.
Before that happens, I shall not allow publication of any of my works. In
response to my question, he declares that if the present régime were to go,
Hungarians would retain little from the past 40 years other than the healthcare
system.
Translated by Tim Wilkinson
Sándor Márai
