Free Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb Page A

undemanding, always bound up in your own solid existence, on a rather different level to what Erzsi is accustomed to. Now one of you is going to have to adapt to the other’s standard. If she adapts to yours, that will sooner or later create trouble, because she is going to feel herself déclassée the moment she comes into contact with the old set. For example, in Italy you might meet one of her girlfriends, who pulls a face when she hears you’re staying at a hotel that isn’t exactly top notch. The alternative is that you move up to Erzsi’s level, and this, sooner or later, will have material consequences because—if you will forgive me—I probably know the strength of the firm better than you do, you being such an abstracted sort of fellow—not to mention that you are four brothers, and your respected father a somewhat conservative, rather puritanical old gentleman who believes in saving rather than using his income … in a word, to be brief, you are hardly in a position to maintain Erzsi’s standard of living on your own account. And since it is a matter close to my heart that she should never want for anything, I beg you not to take it amiss when I tell you that should the need ever arise I am absolutely at your disposal, should you ever ask for help in the form of a long-term loan. Quite frankly, I would much prefer to pay you a regular monthly sum, but I know that would be an impertinence. But in any event this much I have to tell you: if ever you are in need, just turn to me.
    Now please don’t be angry with me. I’m a simple businessman with nothing better to do than to make money, and that, thank God, I do pretty well. I think it’s only fair that I should be able to give it away to whoever I choose, if I want to, no?
    Well, once again, nichts für ungut. Keep well and happy.  

With affectionate greetings an d t rue respect,  

Zoltán.
    The letter left Mihály very angry. He felt nauseated by Pataki’s effete ‘decency’, which, properly speaking, was not ‘decency’ but unmanliness, or, if it was genuine, then hardly more acceptable because he had rather a low opinion of that quality. And such obsequiousness! It was no good. Pataki, for all his acquired wealth, still had the soul of a shop-assistant.
    If Zoltán Pataki was still in love with Erzsi after she had treated him so truly shamefully, then that was his affair, and his problem. But it wasn’t that that made Mihály angry. It was those parts of the letter that bore on himself and Erzsi.
    First of all, the financial considerations. Mihály had an extreme respect for ‘economic necessity.’ Perhaps precisely because he had so little talent for it. If someone said to him, “material considerations compel you to this or that course of action,” he would immediately fall silent, and see the justification for every form of baseness. For just that reason, this aspect of the matter made him particularly uneasy. It had arisen as an issue long before the present, but Erzsi had always treated it as a joke. From a materialistic point of view she had made a very poor choice in him. Previously married to a man of substance, now the wife of a modest bourgeois—this sooner or later was bound to make itself felt, as the cool-headed and worldly Zoltán Pataki had already seen so clearly.
    There rushed into his mind a host of details which, even on their honeymoon, had sharply exposed the difference in their living standards. One needed to look no further than the hotel where they were staying. Having discovered in Venice and Ravenna that Erzsi’s Italian was so much better than his own, and that she dealt so much more competently with hotel staff, of whom he had a particular horror, Mihály had in Florence delegated the hotel and all other practical considerations to her. Whereupon Erzsi, without further ado, had taken a room overlooking the river, in an oldbut extremely expensive little hotel, on the grounds that if one is in Florence one simply