Free Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai Page B

that for me the moment I spotted and took out the lilac ribbon.
    You think I was being hysterical? No, darling, I’m a woman: both criminal and master detective, both saint and spy, everything at once when it comes to the man I love. I’m not ashamed of it. That’s the way God made me. That is my mission on earth. The room was spinning around me. There was good reason for it to be spinning—several good reasons, in fact.
    One reason was that I knew nothing about the ribbon, had neverseen it before. Women just know such things. I’d never worn such a ribbon ever, on any dress or hat of mine. I made a point of not wearing such solemn, funereal colors. That much was certain, no point going on about it: the ribbon had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t a ribbon my husband had snipped off any hat or dress of mine so that he might treasure it as a token of me. More’s the pity, I thought and felt.
    Another reason—and this is why I felt pins and needles in both hands and feet—was because the ribbon was not only not mine, it was not my husband’s, either. What I mean is, whatever object, whatever material a man like my husband holds in such high regard that he keeps it in his wallet for years, that he rings home about from the office in excitement—I hardly need say it was the ribbon he was ringing about, since he wouldn’t have felt a burning need for money or calling cards, or proofs of membership, not in the morning, in the factory—that object was more than a souvenir or memento to him. No, this was criminal evidence. Hence my numbness.
    What it meant was that my husband was carrying round some kind of token that was of more importance to him than I was. That was what the lilac ribbon meant.
    Could it have meant something else? The ribbon hadn’t faded, simply looked a little worn in the peculiar way dead people’s possessions often do. Have you noticed how the hats and handkerchiefs of the dead tend to age, practically from the moment the wearer dies? They lose color somehow, like leaves torn off the branch, and the green begins immediately to fade as green watercolor does … It seems there is a certain electricity that runs not only through people but also through all their belongings; something that radiates the way the sun does.
    The lilac ribbon was barely alive in those terms. It was as if it had been worn a very long time ago. The person who’d worn it might already be dead … or at least dead to my husband. That’s what I was hoping. I gazed at it, sniffed it again, rubbed it between my fingers, questioned it … but the ribbon did not give up its secret. It remained obstinately silent, with all the defiance of an inanimate object.
    And yet at the same time it was perfectly alive. It was superior, dense with schadenfreude. It was as if a mischievous goblin had stuck out its apoplectic lilac tongue to mock and ridicule me. What it said in goblin language was: “See, I have ventured behind the neat, well-arrangedfaçade of your life. I had an existence then and continue to exist now. I am what is hidden, the secret, the truth.”
    Did I understand what it was saying? … I felt so agitated, so cheated, so shaken! Such fury and curiosity burned in me that I would not have balked at rushing into the street to find the woman who had once worn it in her hair or her corset … I was red with fury at being so insulted. See, even now my face is quite hot, flushed and red, just thinking of the lilac ribbon. Wait, lend me a little powder, let me make myself presentable.
    There. Thank you, I feel better now. Well, the clerk soon appeared and I tidily put back everything in the wallet: the calling cards, the proofs of identity, the money, and the lilac ribbon that was so important to my husband that he rang home excitedly from the factory in the morning and had to send a clerk for it … And then I stood there, the great decision made in my heart, blazing with indignation, understanding nothing of