Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai Read Free Book Online

that he began to age.
    We didn’t say any more about it that night. Nor the next day—not ever. Two days later we set off home. On our return we found the child in a fever. He died the following week. After that we never talked about anything personal again. We simply lived together waiting for something. For a miracle, perhaps. But there are no miracles.
    One afternoon, a few weeks after the child’s death, I came home from the cemetery and went into the nursery. My husband was standing in the dark room.
    “What are you doing here?” he asked me roughly. Then he came to his senses and left the room.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, over his shoulder.
    It was he who had fitted out the room. He had personally chosen every piece of furniture and arranged everything about it, right down to the position the furniture was to occupy. True, he hardly ever entered the room while the child was alive, and even then he used to stand confused on the threshold, as if he feared the awkwardness and ludicrousness of an emotional scene. But he asked to see the child each day, in his room, and every morning and evening he had to have a report of how the child had slept and its general state of health.
    Afterwards he only once went in there: that was a few weeks after the funeral. In any case, we locked up the room and I had the key, and that’s how it stayed for three years, until our divorce came through, nor did we ever open it; everything stayed just as it was the moment we took the child to the clinic. I did sometimes sneak in to clean … without anyone knowing, of course.
    I was half-crazy in those weeks after the funeral. But I pulled myself together and dragged myself about, if only because I didn’t want to collapse altogether. I was drawing superhuman strength from somewhere. I knew it was perfectly possible that he was feeling even worse than Idid, that he might be close to a serious breakdown, and that even if he denied it, he needed me.
    But something happened between us in those weeks, or rather between him and the world … I can’t quite find the words for it. Something in him did break. All this, of course, happened without anything being said. Isn’t that always the case with serious, even life-threatening, events generally? When a person begins to cry or scream, the crisis is past.
    He was calm during the entire funeral too. He said nothing. His calm was infectious. We followed the little white-and-gold coffin in silence, with straight backs and dry eyes. But do you know—he never once came to the cemetery with me to visit the grave? … He might have gone there by himself, I don’t know.
    “When someone starts crying, you know it’s a cheat. Everything is over by then,” he said to me once. “I don’t believe in tears. Pain is silent and sheds no tears.”
    What was happening to me in those weeks? Looking back now I would say I was working my way up to revenge. Revenge? Against whom? Against fate? Against those who treated him? That would have been stupid. Believe me when I say the child had been treated by the best doctors in town.
    People say all kinds of things about times like this. “It was as much as they could bear,” they say. That’s how it was. It was as much as I could bear. But it happened in stages. Everyone was busy with all kinds of things in those few days when the little one was dying. Their smallest cares seemed to exercise them more than the saving of my child’s life. I can’t forgive them for this, of course, not even now. I wanted to be revenged on them. But I felt the desire for another kind of revenge too, a revenge not in my mind but in my heart. It was the revenge of indifference. A strange indifference and contempt burned within me then. It was a fierce cold flame. Because it’s not true that suffering purifies people; that we become better, wiser, more understanding in the process. We become cold and indifferent. When, for the first time in our lives, we properly understand