Free Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai Page A

had it mended. He was a stickler for detail. One time he said—laughing as he said it—that he was a true adventurer, since you could only have adventures if you had order about you and took care of things … You are amazed? Yes, I was often amazed when he talked like that. Living with men is very difficult, darling; they have souls, you see …
    Would you like a cigarette? … I’m going to light one, because I feel a bit agitated. Remembering that lilac ribbon always brings back that tremulous, anxious feeling.
    As I was saying, there was something about his voice that day. He wasn’t in the habit of phoning home about such minor matters. I offered to take it in to the factory myself at lunchtime, if he needed it. But he thanked me and rejected the offer. “Put it in an envelope,” he said. “The clerk will be there in no time.”
    So now I set to examining the wallet, every last little nook and cranny of it. It was the first time in my life I had done something like that. Believe me, I was pretty thorough.
    The outermost section had money in it, his Institute of Engineers card, 8 ten-fillér stamps and 5 twenty-fillér ones, and besides that there was his driver’s license and a season ticket for the baths, complete with photograph. The picture had been taken ten years ago, just after a haircut, when men tend to look ridiculously younger than they are, as though they had just failed their school exams. Then there were a few of his calling cards, with just the name, no crest, no position. He was very particular about such things. He would not have any heraldic device stitched into his linen or engraved on the silver. It was not that he despised them, but that he was careful to conceal them from the world. There was only one kind of rank among people, he used to say, and that was character. He would come out with things like that sometimes, matters of pride and sensitivity.
    There was nothing important in the outer pockets of the wallet. It was all very orderly, like his whole life, like the drawers of his desk, like his wardrobe, like his notes. There was always order around him, so,naturally, there was order in his wallet too. Maybe it was only his heart that was not completely in order, that did not work in perfect harmony, you know … people who are very particular about external order may be covering up real disorderliness inside. But this was no time for meditation. I burrowed my way through his wallet like a mole through crumbling earth.
    In the innermost pocket I found the photographs, including the child’s photograph. The boy was just eight hours old in the picture. He had a lot of hair and, wouldn’t you know it, he was clenching his little fists and raising his arms. He was three kilo eighty and fast asleep … That’s when they took the picture. How long do you think that goes on hurting? As long as we live? That’s what I think.
    That was what mattered to me most when I searched through the innermost pocket of that wallet; that and the lilac ribbon.
    I took the ribbon out, felt it, and, naturally, sniffed it. It had no smell. It was an old ribbon, dark lilac. It smelled of crocodile skin. It was four centimeters long—I measured it—and one centimeter wide. It had been tidily cut with a pair of scissors.
    I was so frightened I had to sit down.
    I stayed sitting like that with the ribbon in my hand, my heart still firmly resolved to possess my husband, to conquer him the way Napoleon wanted to conquer England. I sat like that, badly shaken, as if I had just read that my husband had been arrested on the outskirts of town because he had robbed or killed someone. I was like that woman married to the “Monster of Düsseldorf” who discovered one evening that the police had taken her husband away because that hearty fellow, that exemplary father, a man who paid his taxes on the button and who liked to go out for a drink after supper, tended to disembowel people he met on the way. It was like