Journey by Moonlight

“Mihály hasn’t changed, but I have. Once he stood for the great adventure, rebellion, the stranger, the man of mystery. I now know he just passively lets outside forces carry him along. He’s no tiger. Or at least, there are people far more remarkable than he is. János Szepetneki. And the ones I haven’t yet met. Mihály returns my love at the moment simply because he’s looking to me for bourgeois order and security, and everything I actually ran to him to escape from. No, it doesn’t make sense. I’m cured of him.”

She rose, washed, and began to dress. Mihály also woke. Somehow he immediately took in the situation and also got dressed, and they breakfasted with barely a word. He escorted Erzsi to the train and waved her goodbye. Both knew it was now finally over between them.

XXII

THE DAYS that followed Erzsi’s departure were dreadful. Shortly afterwards Waldheim left too, for Oxford, and Mihály was completely on his own. He had no interest in anything. He did not move out of the house, but lay all day long on his bed, fully dressed.

The reality-content of Erzsi’s news had run through his whole system like a poison. He thought endlessly, and with ever-increasing anxiety, about his father, whom his own behaviour and the impending financial crisis had surely reduced to a dreadful state of mind. He could see the old man before him: presiding disconsolately over the family dinner, twirling his moustache or rubbing his knee in his distress, struggling to act as if nothing was wrong, his forced jollity making the others even more depressed, and everyone ignoring his sallies, becoming gradually more silent, eating at double speed to get away as fast as possible from the miseries of the family gathering.

And if Mihály did occasionally manage to forget his father, his thoughts turned to Éva. That Éva would leave for an impossibly distant country, perhaps for ever, was worse than anything. Because, dreadful as it was that she had no desire to know about him, life was nonetheless bearable so long as one knew she was living in the same city, and that they might chance to meet, or at least she might be glimpsed from afar … But if she went away to India, there was nothing left for him. Nothing.

One afternoon a letter arrived from Foligno, from Ellesley.

Dear Mike,

I have some very sad news for you. Father Severinus, the Gubbio monk, recently fell seriously ill. More precisely, he had a long-standing tubercular condition which got to the stage where he could no longer remain in the monastery and they brought him to the hospital here. During those hours when neither his illness nor his devotions claimed him, I had the opportunity to talk with him, and gained some small insight into his remarkable state of mind. I have no doubt that in earlier centuries this man would have been venerated as a saint. He spoke of you often and in terms of the greatest affection, and I learnt from him — how mysterious are the ways of Providence — that in your youth you and he had been close friends and always very attached to one another. He asked me to let you know when the inevitable happened. This request I now fulfil, for Father Severinus died in the night, towards dawn this morning. He was alert to the last, praying with his fellow Franciscans seated by his bed, when the moment of departure came.

Dear Mike, if you had the absolute faith in eternal life that I have you would take some comfort in this news, because you would trust that your friend was now where his fragmentary mortal existence received its deserved complement, the Life Eternal.

Don’t forget me completely. Write sometimes to your devoted

Ellesley