I LEARNED later that he had gone first to the school and been told where he could find me: I was on my way to the exhibition with my class and might already have arrived. As far back as he could remember, he said, he had never been inside one of these places, and as he set off to find us he was glad to have the chance to see the famous collection at the same time. I was already in the building when I spotted him, standing in one of the rooms among the statues, and I was very happy to see him there. My body registered that pleasing sense of intimacy that had long shed any charge of sexuality. In that respect we had both put our lives in order; this was more like the instinct by which animals born blind recognize one another, the shared memory of a collective dream. I was always happy when I saw Bálint.

We didn’t speak to each other immediately. I had my hands full. I couldn’t leave the class to their own devices, and I needed to get a sense of the contents of the different rooms. So I went from one to the other, looking about, with an increasing sense of dismay. My aesthetic preference is for the smoothness of bronze and polished marble, and those calm, serene, noble faces, and I was confident that the pupils would understand and respond to those perhaps even better than I would. Instead, I had stood, in something verging on horror, before the piece that was the pride of the exhibition, staring at its shapeless contours, the twisted heads and the sightless gaze in their eyes that were not eyes but holes carved in stone in place of eyes, vacant spaces that held the real meaning of those faces. None of them had eyes, ears, or noses.

He was obviously waiting for us to be able to move away somewhere and talk. Ever since Blanka’s departure we had met regularly if infrequently, but we had never been together for more than a few minutes without a member of the family being with us. Bálint liked Pali and enjoyed talking to him: Pali’s being there troubled him so little that at first it rather offended me. He found my little daughter Kinga amusing and handled her rather better than her father did, who was always the overanxious parent whose ceaseless attention she found rather annoying. A few days earlier Bálint had spent the whole afternoon with us, so bumping into him in the gallery wasn’t a complete novelty, though an even more delightful surprise for that. I signaled with my eyes to my colleague to ask if she could manage without me and she nodded her affirmation; the children were quiet and taking an interest in the statues. So I went over to him and as usual started to talk about Blanka: we’d had a letter from her the day before. He stopped me in my tracks. We could talk about that later. He wasn’t there by chance. He had come because he wanted to discuss something with me, then and there if possible.

We sat down on one of the benches, he at a short distance from me, so that I could see both him and the statues. There was now a different expression on his face, a curious look of reconciliation, of things having been resolved. It annoyed me just a little. Bálint’s face always betrayed his changing moods, whether of anger or mockery, intimacy or coldness, and I had seen him in this state of mind before. There was the same unfeeling detachment he had shown when he told me he had been put to work in an office yet again, not as a result of any particular complaint made against him or because of his class origins but because it had apparently been decided that, in the end, he just wasn’t a good enough doctor to be in charge of a ward: he supposedly lacked something, some God-given gift, that would have made him a good physician. He clearly didn’t see it as anything tragic. He talked about the whole business as if it had happened to someone else. My parents’ response showed that they were much more upset about it than he was. But I knew what lay behind his display of resignation.

I didn’t have to wait long for the message he had come to deliver. It was couched in the simple terms one might use for ordering a book. He had decided to marry me: I was to divorce Pali and live with him.

I didn’t move. I simply turned my gaze away from him and back to the statues. Near us, on a low plinth, stood three marble columns with a large stone ball entitled The Warrior. It was just a torso, one of those strange, formless ones that have a head but no face and no limbs. It was grotesque, but, God knows why, it projected an extraordinary force. I looked at it and made no reply. I didn’t think he expected one. He knew, as we all did, perhaps even my husband himself, that Pali’s coming to live with us had been a sort of accident. He lived among us and in our apartment but no one had ever taken him seriously, not even my father, with all his views on the sacredness of marriage. Bálint also knew that Kinga wasn’t a true token of love between us, the romantic fulfillment of our life together: we had simply wanted someone through whom we could satisfy our need for caressing and petting without feeling embarrassed. We might as well have bought a puppy.

He didn’t reach over to take my hand and I didn’t offer it. Some years before I had asked him what he felt when he suddenly saw Timár’s car pulling up outside the house in the village and he was told he was free to return to Pest, and that everyone knew he had been innocent all along. He shrugged his shoulders, as if reluctant to reply, then gave me that look I knew so well of old, the one that told me that this was clearly one of those things I would never understand, and he muttered something about it having meant nothing to him. “So being rehabilitated counts for nothing?” I had asked indignantly, and my father, who was with us at that moment, remarked that one should never be ungrateful or cynical. “I’m not cynical,” he retorted with irritation; and he went on, in a rather louder voice than usual, “It meant nothing to me at the time. It’s something neither of you would ever understand.”

Well, I understood now.

I lowered my eyes. I didn’t want the children to see tears streaming from them. I felt his fingers closing around my wrist. At that moment, perhaps for the first time in our lives, he had no idea what was going on in my mind. His touch was warm, and its gentle pressure told me exactly what he was thinking: “Look, I know how happy you are. Everything that has kept us apart has now changed, is behind us. Show your happiness not through tears but with your whole heart, the way you once knew how to.” For the first time in our lives he just couldn’t see that I had given way not to joy but to despair—despair for myself and for him. If I was weeping so profusely I could no longer bear to control myself as the place and the circumstances required, it was because it was such a long time since I had last loved him.

The thought was no less horrifying than the statues standing around us. If I could I would have plucked it out like a splinter from under a fingernail. I saw in an instant that Pali was the only solid element in the concentrated unreality in which we were all struggling and drowning. My father had been reduced to helplessness and my mother slaved away day and night and lived in a permanent state of nerves: she and I were the only ones who were still what we had always been. The old houses in Katalin Street had vanished. Everyone who had known us as we were had taken refuge in illness, like Mrs. Temes, or disappeared to some distant island, like Blanka, or been killed, like the Major and the Helds. But Pali was real and true, even if none of us acknowledged that or took him seriously; perhaps even he didn’t think of himself as a real member of the family. Now he would no longer be there, and his leaving the apartment would shut off the one route through which we might ever follow him. It would mean that now we would never be able to escape. Bálint had come back and blocked the way. He had struggled on for so long on his own and finally come to see that without us he would never find what he had always wanted, something from the time when the two of us were children. Only through us could he make his way back to Katalin Street. We were the only ones who remembered that time when everything in his life held hope and promise.

I lost all interest in who was watching or what people might think of me. For the first time since I had become a teacher I stopped caring about what the pupils might say—that they had seen me sitting on a bench unable to hold back my tears. Bálint moved closer to me. By now he wasn’t simply holding my hand; he also had his arm around my shoulder. I was thinking about how all my life I had been preparing for just this moment, the moment when I would become his wife, and now here we were, so close to achieving that, closer than we had been even on the day Henriette died. The war had ended, there was no more bombing, and it was now more than ever possible to make plans that might actually come to something. But we had both grown older, he no longer loved me with the same soulful intensity that he once had, my own feelings for him had cooled and were exhausted. We would be setting out on life as traveling companions aboard a ship that might be blown God knows where, clinging to each other and exchanging our sad memories, having known the same sunny uplands and what it had been like living there before we had been plucked away to sea; both having seen the same blue sky shining, before the thunder broke.

I just sat there. In my mind I was bidding farewell to calm and tranquility. I was saying goodbye to Pali whom I loved and beside whom life was simple and comfortable. He had never asked more of me than I was able to give, had never once pried into my silences and secrets. By now I was no longer crying. My tears had run dry. I was numb with fear. Bálint looked at me, and there was a tenderness in his eyes, and pity. He was used to my not understanding him and had often made fun of me. Even in the days when we were so madly in love he had complained about how little I was able to read his mind. Now, as I gazed back at him, I would have loved to tell him that perhaps for the first time in our lives I knew exactly what was going on inside his head and why he felt so sorry for me. I also knew what he had left unsaid, something he should have added to his request: “It is a corpse I am offering you, Irén, not the person you once loved. The man you will marry is an empty shell, just so much empty air.”

I listened, utterly chilled by this moment that had overtaken and overwhelmed us both. I should have told him not to concern himself about me, to pity himself rather than pity me. Irén Elekes was no more. She might never have existed. While I had Blanka at my side I had felt complete, whole, perfect. I believed, as she did, that I had been born to be that way. Then one day I realized that I had never been either what people thought me or what I had imagined myself to be: I had believed in it only because there was someone who loved me so much that she took all my sins upon herself, even before I—had I not been a slave to convention and essentially a coward—might have been able to understand what they would be. But Blanka was gone, leaving me to perpetrate my crimes by myself, and the people I lived with kept out of my way in fear and trembling. Only Pali was able to put up with me, because he had no memory of my younger self. I sat and contemplated myself and the rest of us, in the new apartment, where Bálint would be coming to live in the hope of recovering the peace and calm he had known in his father’s house, and I saw him standing there in amazement at me shouting at my mother, hurling a plate to the floor, slapping little Kinga when she got on my nerves, or back in the kitchen utterly exhausted after a long day at school, brandishing a cup at the men that someone had forgotten to wash and complaining to one and all about the miserable life I led.

So there we sat in silence. Neither of us spoke the words we should have, and this time it was I and not Bálint who saw that whatever we did say would change nothing. I looked at the statues standing around us, those strange forms that were little more than blocks of stones piled on top of one another rather than carved, and I imagined them directing their eerie, unseeing gaze at us. Then I turned my head away. I had heard Bálint heave a sigh, or rather not a sigh but a yawn, a yawn not of boredom but of sheer exhaustion, and I suddenly realized that I wanted to yawn too. I was inexpressibly weary. It was like finding myself able to sit and rest at last after years, decades of being pursued and hunted down.

We said nothing about the practical arrangements, and nothing about the details. We knew it wasn’t urgent, that there would be plenty of time. Pali would see to whatever had to be done and make it all happen with the minimum of bloodshed. My pupils were lining up. When I went back to join them, Bálint went with me, as if he couldn’t bear to leave me alone for a minute. I conducted myself admirably. I spoke thoughtfully and clearly, and even added a few remarks about the displays. Conscious that I might have been seen crying on the bench, I did my best to make them forget my loss of composure even as I deplored the sort of strength that could summon up the self-control needed to force oneself to be what other people expected when I would have much rather have stayed as I am: I was tired of everything and everyone, above all of Bálint. We set off, and I knew that never again, as long as we lived, would I really be myself, and that what had happened, and was going to happen, would be meaningless, pointless, and far too late.

My colleague walked at the head of the group, the two of us at the back. It was midday, the sun was shining brightly, and as we left the gallery we chatted about the weather. Our distorted shadows writhed on the pavement, and I watched them flitting along beside us in the strong sunlight. Two vast blocks of stone stalked ahead. Their shadows had neither eyes, nor hands, nor feet. They were just limbless trunks.