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[...] There was simply this woman on the other side of the tracks, going about her business, waiting and aging, as I was … and there I was on my side, not knowing why my life lacked something, why it was unbearable, or what to make of the feeling that haunted my days and nights, those feelings that…

This was not the room of some kittenish little flirt who inherits her mistress’s silk stockings and discarded clothes, secretly sprays herself with Madam’s French perfume, and makes eyes at the master of the house. The woman facing me was not the normal household demon, the lower-orders lover, the …

These commonplace objects implied a conscious self-discipline. You could tell from them that whoever lived here did not need to be taught order, that the order sprang from within, that she was quite capable of teaching herself. Do you know enough about servants’ rooms to know what they are stuffed …

[...] But I kept leafing distractedly through the papers, unable to give world affairs my full attention. I asked myself what right I had in a world like this to worry so intensely about myself, to be so obsessed by what would happen to me and whether I had any right to care so much about my own li…

Lázár was smoking a cigarette, listening, watching the dancers. I hadn’t seen him for a year and now he seemed like a complete stranger … He radiated such extraordinary loneliness, he might as well have been living at the North Pole. Loneliness and calm. A sad calm. I suddenly understood that he ha…