Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai Page B

person whose gaze seemed so physical, so electric. It was Lázár. He was standing by a pillar talking to our hostess, but his eyes were on me. We hadn’t seen each other for a year.
    The footmen opened the mirror-covered double doors and people started filtering into the dimly lit, candle-illuminated dining hall, everyone moving as though they were part of a theatrical procession.
    Lázár came over to me.
    “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, his voice choked back, almost formally.
    “Why?” I asked, my voice a little hoarse, still dizzy with success.
    “Something is different with you,” he said. “I just wanted to say I am sorry now for the cheap trick we once played on you. Do you still remember it? …”
    “I remember,” I said. “Please don’t give it a thought. Geniuses love to play.”

“Are you in love with someone?” he asked, perfectly calm, perfectly serious, looking me straight in the eye.
    “Yes,” I replied just as calmly, just as solemnly. “With my husband.”
    We were standing in the doorway of the dining hall. He looked me over from head to foot. Very softly and with enormous sympathy, he whispered:
    “Poor soul.”
    Then he gave me his arm and led me to the table.
    He was one of my neighbors at supper. The other was an aged count who had no idea who I was and kept paying me overblown compliments. Next to Lázár, on his left, was seated the wife of a famous diplomat, who spoke only French. The food too was French. Between courses and pieces of French conversation Lázár turned to me and said in a very low voice, naturally, without any prevarication, as though we were simply continuing a discussion begun much earlier:
    “And what have you decided to do?”
    I was slowly working my way through the poultry and the sauce. I leaned over the plate with knife and fork in hand, smiled at him, and answered as lightly as if it were the merest chitchat.
    “I have decided to take possession of him. I mean to take him back.”
    “That’s impossible,” he said. “He has never left you. That’s precisely why it’s impossible. You can take back those who have been unfaithful. You can take back those who have gone away. But those who have never really, properly arrived, that’s impossible. It can’t be done.”
    “Then why did he marry me?” I asked.
    “Because he would have been lost if he hadn’t.”
    “Lost in what way?”
    “Emotionally. He felt something that was much stronger than he was and he felt unworthy of it.”
    “Emotionally?” I asked quietly in a level voice while still leaning over the table but so that no one else could hear me. “The emotion that bound him to the woman with the lilac ribbon?”
    “What do you know about that?” he asked and sat up straight.
    “Only as much as I need to know,” I said truthfully.
    “Who mentioned this to you? Peter?”
    “No,” I replied. “Don’t you think we know everything about those we love?”
    “That’s true,” he solemnly agreed.
    “And you?” I asked him, astonished at my steady voice. “Do you know the woman with the lilac ribbon?”
    “I …?” he muttered and bowed his bald head. He looked at the plate, clearly discomposed. “Yes, I know her.”
    “Do you see her sometimes?”
    “Rarely. Practically never.” He gazed into the air above him. “It is a very long time since I last saw her.”
    He began drumming nervously on the table with his long, bony fingers. The diplomat’s wife was asking something in French and I responded to something the old count had said; he—who knows why?—had tried to amuse me with a few Chinese mottoes. But I found it hard just then attending to his Chinese mottoes. Champagne arrived, and fruit. Once I had taken a first sip of the pale pink Champagne and the count had managed to extricate himself with some difficulty from the conversation about Chinese mottoes, Lázár turned to me again.
    “Why are you wearing that lilac favor this evening?”
    “You noticed