Journey by Moonlight

“Ervin certainly did not become a monk just because he couldn’t marry Éva. We had in the past talked a great deal about the monastic life, and I know that Ervin’s religion went too deep — he would never have become a monk merely out of despair and romantic sensibility, without any definite sign of an inner calling. Certainly he saw it as a sign from above that he couldn’t marry Éva. But the fact that he left so hastily, virtually fled, could have been largely to do with the fact that he wanted to escape from Éva and the temptation she represented for him. So although he ran away, perhaps a bit like Joseph, he nonetheless accomplished what we had dreamed about so much at that time. He offered up his youth as a willing sacrifice to God.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Erzsi. “If, as you say, he was so loving by nature, why offer that up as a sacrifice?”

“Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It’s not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That’s why the Church won’t allow eunuchs to become priests.”

“And what did Éva have to say to all this?”

“Éva remained unattached, and from this point on she was impossible to put up with. By this time Budapest was in the hands of the currency sharks and the officers of the Entente. Éva somehow or other got herself into the officers’ set. She knew various languages and her manner was somehow not typically Hungarian but more cosmopolitan. I know she was very much in demand. She went, from one day to the next, from a little adolescent girl to a stunning woman. This was when, in place of the earlier friendly and open expression, her eye took on that other quality: that look, as if she were listening to some far off, murmuring sound.

“Earlier on, Tamás and Ervin had dominated the group. Now it was János’s turn. Éva needed money so that she could make her exquisite appearance among the exquisite people. She was very clever at sewing herself elegant things out of nothing, but even that nothing costs a little something. That was where János came in. He’d always been able to get hold of money for Éva. Where from, he alone knew. Often he swindled the very same Entente officers she danced with. ‘I’ve been realising the group assets,’ he would say cynically. But by then we all talked cynically, because we always adapted ourselves to the leadership style.

“I didn’t like János’s methods very much. They were pretty unscrupulous. I didn’t like it, for example, when he called one day on Mr Reich, an old book-keeper in my father’s firm and, with a horribly convoluted story about my gambling debts and proposed suicide, lifted a fairly serious sum of money from him. Of course I then had to agree that I had incurred a debt at cards, though I never had a card in my hand in all my life.

“And what I particularly didn’t like was his stealing my gold watch. It happened on the occasion of a grand ‘do’ out of doors somewhere, in a then fashionable summer inn, I no longer remember the name. There were several of us present—Éva’s friends, two or three foreign officers, some young inflation-millionaires, some strange women, remarkably daring for those times in their dress and general behaviour. My usual sense of impermanence was made worse by the fact that Tamás and I were mixing with people not our own, people we had nothing in common with, and by the same old feeling that nothing mattered. But then I wasn’t the only one with this sense of impermanence. The whole city had it, it was in the air. People had a lot of money and they knew that it made no difference: it might vanish from one day to the next. The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier.

“They were apocalyptic times. I don’t know if we were still sober when we sat down to drink. As I recall, it’s as if I became drunk in the first few moments. Tamás drank little, but the universal feeling that the world was going to end was so much in accord with his state of mind that he moved with unaccustomed ease among all those people, even the gypsies. I talked with him a lot that night. Not perhaps so much in words, but the words we did speak had a profoundly sinister resonance. And once again, marvellously, we understood each other — understood each other in our impermanence. And we shared this sympathy with the strange women: at least, I felt that my modest religious-historical thesis about the Celts and the Islands of the Dead found an echo in the drama student sitting near me. Then I got into a tête-à-tête with Éva. I courted her as if I hadn’t known her since her skinny, big-eyed adolescence and she received my courtship with a complete womanly seriousness, talking in half-finished sentences and staring into the distance, in the full glitter of her pose of that time.