I didn’t understand it then. He never wrote, never painted, never played any musical instrument. He despised “art lovers.” But he did read a lot, “systematically”—his favorite word—a little too systematically for my taste. I read passionately, according to mood. He read as though he were carrying out one of life’s important duties. Once he had begun a book he wouldn’t leave it until it was finished—not even when it annoyed or bored him. Reading was a religious obligation for him: he valued letters as highly as priests do relics. But he was like that with pictures too, and with museums, theaters, and concerts. Everything interested him, literally everything. But the only thing I was “interested in” was him.

[...] We’d often invite guests for dinner. They’d drink to our happiness, praise our lovely home: me, the young mother, the beautiful baby, and our perfect lives. What were they thinking when they left? The foolish ones were jealous, but those who were wise and sensitive must have breathed a sigh of relief when they left our house, and thought, “Alone at last!” We served excellent food and the rarest foreign wines; we enjoyed quiet, thoughtful conversation. It was just that something was missing, and the guests who could sense this were inevitably happy to leave. My mother-in-law tended to arrive in a state of mild panic and leave as soon as she decently could. We felt all this but did not know it. Maybe my husband did know it; he probably did … But there was nothing he could do at the time except clench his teeth and go on being helplessly happy.

What were these six weeks about? What were we waiting for? Were we hoping for something? We seemed to be living in silence. My husband had brought books to read: he had perfect pitch as far as language was concerned and, like a great musician, could tell the false note from the true. He was like Lázár in this respect. We’d sit on the balcony at twilight and I’d read to him: French poems, English novels, heavy German prose. And Goethe and some scenes from Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. He loved that play. He had seen it on stage once, in Berlin, and had never forgotten it. He also loved Büchner’s Danton’s Death. And Hamlet, and Richard III. I was obliged to read him verses by the great Hungarian poet János Arany, from his late Autumn Crocuses cycle. Then we’d dress, have supper in one of the best restaurants, drink sweet Italian wine and eat sea crab.

In some ways we were living like nouveaux riches, like people who want to make up for everything they have ever lacked, to enjoy it all, and all at once. People that listen to Beethoven while chewing on a capon and slurping French Champagne in time to the music. But it was also like saying good-bye to something. Those years, the last years before the war, were drenched in this peculiar atmosphere. It was like saying good-bye without quite knowing it. My husband said precisely that: something about Europe. I said nothing. It was not Europe I was leaving. Can we, just the two of us, as women, own up to the fact that, concepts such as “Europe” have little to do with us? What I knew deep in my heart was that I lacked the strength to cut myself off from something more important. I was almost choking with helplessness.

“I don’t feel a great need to be loved,” he finally said.

“That’s impossible,” I said, grinding my teeth. “You are a human being. You have an absolute need to be loved.”

“It is precisely this that women don’t believe, cannot know, and do not understand,” he said as if addressing the stars. “That there exists a type of man who has no need of love. He gets on fine without it.”

He spoke without pathos, from a great distance, but perfectly naturally. I knew he was telling me the truth now. At least he believed he was telling me the truth. I started to argue.

“You can’t know everything about yourself. Maybe you just don’t have the courage to feel. You should be less certain, more humble,” I pleaded with him.

One day—I remember it perfectly, it was an April morning, the fourteenth, a Sunday—I was sitting out on the terrace, reading a book, the garden, cautiously planted for spring with yellow euphorbia, in front of me, when I felt something happen inside me. Please don’t laugh. I have no wish to play Joan of Arc with you. I heard no heavenly voices. But there was a voice, a voice so strong it was like the most passionate feeling you could ever feel. The voice told me that I really couldn’t go on living like this, that there was no sense in anything, that my situation was demeaning, ruthless, inhuman. I had to change. I had to perform a miracle. There are dizzying moments in life when we see everything clearly, when we are aware of our power and our potential, when we see what it is we have been too timid or cowardly to do. These are life’s decisive moments. They come to us unannounced, like death or conversion. This was one of them.

I shuddered. My whole body tingled: it was like goose pimples. I started to feel cold.

I looked at the garden and my eyes filled with tears.

What was it I was feeling? I felt that I was responsible for my own fate. That my life depended on me. There was no point in waiting for some angelic visitation either in my personal life or in any relationship. My husband and I had a problem of some sort. I don’t understand my husband. He doesn’t belong to me, doesn’t want to belong entirely to me. I knew there was no other woman in his life … I was pretty, young, and I loved him. Lázár was not the only powerful figure in his life, the only one with powers. I had powers of my own. I should use them.

“You will understand it eventually, but you will suffer a great deal. Passionate souls like yours are proud and suffer greatly. You say you want to possess your husband’s heart. You also say your husband is a genuine man, not a fickle womanizer but a serious, pure-hearted man with a secret. What could that secret be? That is what you are determined to find out, dear soul; it is what you want to know. Don’t you know that God gave people individual souls, each his or her own? Each soul is full of secrets, each as great as the universe. Why do you seek a soul that God has created secret? It may be the meaning, the mission of your life to put up with it, to bear it. Who knows, perhaps you might injure your husband in the process, even ruin him if you succeeded in laying his soul bare, if you forced him to adopt a life, or to assume feelings, that he feels bound to resist. One shouldn’t love by force. The woman I was talking about was young and beautiful, like you, and did all kinds of stupid things to recover her husband’s love; she flirted with other men to make him jealous, she lived a fast life, tried to make herself still more beautiful, spent a fortune on Viennese outfits, high-fashion dresses, the way unfortunate women sometimes do when there is no faith in their hearts and they lose their spiritual balance. That having failed, she rushed out into the world, to clubs, to parties, everywhere where there are crowds and bright light, where people seek to escape the emptiness of their lives and their vain and hopeless passions, places where people go to forget. How hopeless it all is,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “There is no forgetting.”

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 had stopped wanting things: he didn’t want happiness, he didn’t want success, maybe he no longer wanted even to write. All he wanted was to know the world, to understand it, to get to the truth of it … He was bald and always looked as though he were politely bored. At the same time there was something of the Buddhist monk about him, his slightly slanted eyes inscrutably watching the world so you couldn’t tell what he thought of anything.

[...] 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 life … With so many millions of people living in fear and misery, should I really be worrying about whether I really owned every last little bit of my husband’s heart? What was my husband’s secret, or my personal happiness, compared to the world’s secrets, the world’s misery? What was I doing playing detective in a world that is savage enough, frightening and mysterious enough, already? … But these were pseudo-questions, you know, pretenses … One woman’s feelings don’t amount to an entire world. Then I thought back to what the old priest had said, and wondered if he was right. Maybe I didn’t have enough faith, enough humility … Perhaps there was something arrogant about me, something unworthy of a Christian, a woman, indeed of a human being; something arrogant about this crazy project, this amateur-detective attempt to scrape away the surface of a private world and reveal my husband’s secret; something unworthy about trying to find that certain mysterious person with her lilac ribbon. Perhaps … but I was so overwrought at the time I can no longer explain my feelings clearly.

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 with? Extraordinary objects, all those things their inner lives require: fancy hearts made of candy; brightly colored postcards; ancient, long-discarded cushions; cheap little china figurines; things thrown away by that other world, the world of their social superiors … I once had a chambermaid who collected boxes of the rice powder I had finished with and my empty perfume bottles; she collected this stuff the way wealthy connoisseurs collect snuffboxes, Gothic carvings, or works by the French impressionists. In the world they inhabit, these objects represent what we consider beautiful, as works of art. Because no one can live with just the bare necessities in the real world … we need a little superfluity in our lives, something dazzling, something that sparkles, something lovely, however cheap or worthless. Few people can live without the dream of beauty. There has to be something—a postcard, all red and gold, showing a sunset, or dawn in a forest. We’re like that. The poor are no different.

But what I was confronted with, in that room behind the locked door, was not like that.

The woman who occupied this room had quite deliberately stripped away all elements of comfort, bric-a-brac, and cheap glitter. You could see she had strictly, ruthlessly, denied herself anything the world might cast away or regard as luxury. It was a severe room. It was as though the woman had undertaken certain vows to live here. But the vows, the woman, the room—none of it was welcoming. That’s why it frightened me.

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 alluring siren of an ailing, decadent, bourgeois home. This woman was not my husband’s sweetheart, not even if she kept his portrait in a locket suspended on a lilac ribbon around her neck. Do you know what this woman was like? I’ll tell you what I felt: I felt she was hostile but my equal. She was a woman just as passionate, sensitive, strong, worthy, vulnerable, and full of suffering as I was, as is everyone who is conscious of her rank. I sat in the chair, the lilac ribbon in my hand, unable to utter a word.