A little more Márai

More passages from Márai's The Real Thing or Real... still haven't decided on a title...


I slept deeply that night. I was like a burned-out element. The current runs through something and burns the resistance away. The soul darkens. When I woke and went into the garden – it was early spring and the mornings were warm with a touch of the sirocco so some days I had breakfast set in the garden – my husband had already gone. I breakfasted alone, sipping bitter tea, not feeling hungry.

There were newspapers lying on the table. For lack of anything else to do I read one of the headlines. A small state had just disappeared off the map. I tried to imagine how the people in that foreign country might feel, waking up at dawn to discover that their lives, their customs, everything they believed or had sworn by, had disappeared from one day to the next, had ceased to matter, and that they were now on the threshold of something entirely new – maybe better, maybe worse, but something that at any rate was utterly different from the country they knew, which might just as well have sunk beneath the waves, and that was where they had to live thenceforth, under entirely new conditions, underwater… I thought about it. And also about myself and what I wanted...

...Do you know the feeling you get when you are beyond pain and despair, beyond the most tragic events, and suddenly become very sober, indifferent, almost cheerful? For example when the person you loved best is being buried, and you suddenly remember that you have left the refrigerator door open back home and the dog is probably eating the cold meat you had saved for the wake?.. And the very moment when everyone is singing and standing around the coffin, you start arranging things, whispering, as calm as you like, something about the refrigerator?... Because we are quite capable of that, we live between such infinitely divided shores, in a world of such vast distances. I sat in the sunlight and it was as if I were contemplating someone else’s bad luck, thinking quite coldly and rationally about all that had happened...


Tomorrow I am reading and talking at a small place near Stoke-by-Nailand in Suffolk...