The Story of My Wife by Milán Füst Read Free Book Online

little pleasures? I wouldn't do it, by God, come what may. She was still a young woman, she was entitled to this much, and besides, seeing her in them gave me pleasure—I even enjoyed the thought that while I broke my back on those bloody boats, all my labors, all my sweat were turned (dear God) into laces and tulles.
    The thing was that I did have a little nest egg put away at that time, but I knew that using it up would spell disaster; the slide downward would be inevitable. And what then? I'd be at anyone's mercy, would have to take any job that came along, provided there were any to be had. The economic situation kept getting worse; and in the shipping business things were downright catastrophic. For instance, this is what happened to me in Southampton one day. I was sitting in a restaurant, a mediocre one, at that, and I noticed that the waiter was staring at me. I suddenly let out a cry: "What on earth are you doing here?" "What am I doing here? Wake up, man, don't you know what's going on out there?" Of course I knew, I heard enough about it. Skippers with fine reputations signing up in British ports as ordinary seamen. Expert engineers happy to be taken on as stokers.... I heard all about it, but who believed it? Now, however, I saw it with my own eyes: an officer with excellent credentials working as a waiter in a restaurant. This scared me.
    So I was soon on my way to the Levant again; the thought of something like this happening to me was incentive enough. But I went there for nothing. Purses were sealed tight, as were people's hearts. As is my wont, I made them irresistible offers—to ship Bohemian glass, fine textiles, porcelain, and who knows what else, for nothing, for a song, but even so there were no takers.
    "Wet your money with a little spit and stuff it in your pocket," advised a shipowner, a very shrewd old woman, from Sebenico. I was shocked; I never heard her talk like this. She weathered every storm until now, nothing could faze her, she was shrewd, persistent, insidious. If she wasn't let in through the door, she'd climb in through the window. We were like small-time grocers, we dealt in tiny quantities of goods and chartered our boats when business was bad. Or we'd buy a rusty old ship, run it to the ground, and try to sell it at a tiny profit. We'd sit up nights, she smoking a pipe, I puffing on a cigar, trying to come up with a workable idea.
    But now there was nothing. I went home. As it was, my wife had been pestering me for some time to quit those tar-paper boxes (that's how she referred to the ships I'd commanded then), and was after me to try to get a better position somewhere (she obviously would have liked her husband to be a more respectable sea captain). So I wrote to an old friend of mine in London, a Greek shipowner named Alexander Kodor, who also knew how to pinch pennies, though when I met him his star had already risen—he became a very wealthy man. The second time I met him, in Italy, he was swelling with pride as he embraced me. "I am the king of the seas," he said and gave me a very significant look.
    He exaggerated, of course; he was no king of the seas, only the principal shareholder of a maritime insurance company. Which is enough if you also happen to be a speculator and wheeler-dealer of the first order, which he was. He could easily help me, in other words, if he wanted to. And he did help, this time he really did, he spared no effort. Later that year I became the captain of a lovely little boat, a truly wonderful vessel ... oh she was dainty and delicate like a young miss—a birthday cake if I ever saw one. Not a scratch on it anywhere, though it had been in service for eight years. Five thousand tons but very fast and geared for Mediterranean travel. Daphne was her name, and they made good use of her, I must say. After the war an international group took it over, who were small on capital but big on ideas. They fitted it out as a kind of excursion boat for inexpensive