The Fawn

The next time we met I could see from your face that you had been searching for me high and low: you could have murdered me. I lay in your arms staring up at the ceiling and at the light moving across it from the cars in the road down below; how could I have possibly explained that I had hidden myself away from you for three days because Angéla had reinforced the thread on the middle button on your jacket?

So you don't love her? You are just being kind to her, the way Domi bácsi was, and Emil, and everyone else who ever knew her? So what does it mean to the two of you that you got involved with me and that you love me? What more can I take away from her than I already have? Your love that, as you had just told me, you hadn't felt for her in ages? Your body that hers hasn't responded to for ages, ever since she became a reincarnation of Emil and turned her gaze away from everything transient, from actual people, to contemplate eternity? What could I possibly take from her when you are so very good to her and will continue to be because it is in your nature and simply because she is so very good to everyone else - mad dogs would lie down trustingly at her feet and fishes would sing to her - and the less she means to you the more you think about her and the more you do for her?

They said of me in the local paper that I dressed unostentatiously and observed the simple ways and serious- mindedness of a true Socialist actress; it never occurred to them that I was just mean.

At that point I should have gone up to you, shaken you and yelled that it wasn't true what you were thinking, but I kept quiet because I realised that you were deeply jealous of him, and you thought some sort of wild delight had taken hold of me, some malicious pleasure, but instead in fact I was so merry I started to sing Mark Antony's song at the top of my voice, "In thy vats our cares be drowned, / With thy grapes our hairs be crowned,"

I was thinking how utterly immoral you were, with your kindness and good-heartedness; as you made your way down the hill you were no doubt thinking how immoral I was too.

But who had I ever belonged to, and where else, if not the common people- you excepted to Ambrus' pigs and Auntie Ilư's shoes and the racket from that piano and the free suppers at the Three Hussars - my and whole world of hopeless longing, and my desperate sense of oppression?

“The wife only" Weltner repeated.

…, the tears were pouring my my face and got smeared all over yours and you never realised that I was crying because I was afraid. I was afraid of this stranger I had become, this person who gave away money and wished a beggar goodnight.

After the night my father died there was nothing left for her to be afraid of.

I always watched her closely, as if she were an animal in a zoo; I was trying to see what made her so beautiful.

“If you had had just a moment's suspicion, if it had occurred to vou just once to look at me, even for a second, really look at me, with the same kind of interest vou showed when you looked at my body, which you knew even better than I did, perhaps you might have noticed how much distress you had unwittingly caused me, and you might have realised that I was trying to tell you about the diffused but unremitting pain that you gave me with you endless reminiscences.”

“You said that no-one had ever liked you for what you really were, you were always playing a role to make people accept you, but with me you stood up straight and didn't feel you had to sing if you wanted to show me your teeth, like the wolf in the story. I wasn't paying attention, I wasn't interested in what you were saying.”

“But I was never in love with anyone the way I was with you. When someone falls in love with me I watch their face and their gestures; I am interested in all the different ways these things reveal themselves - the trembling of a hand, the way a mouth widens; I pay no attention to the words, but I always look at the face.”

“You really would have loved my father. I've never talked about him much. If I haven't done so it's because I never say much about anything, not about you or anyone else; as a child I was so quiet I never learned to talk very well. What it says on my CV is a pack of lies, the things people say about me are all lies, I lie so easily I could have made a career out of it. I have come to realise that if I can't bear to speak the truth even to you then I am beyond all help.”