FICTION: Esthers' Inheritanceby Sándor Márai, translated by George Szirtes, Picador, 148pp, £14.99 OFTEN THE ACTIONS we can make the least sense of are our own. Esther, the narrator of this fourth rediscovered classic from the Hungarian master Sándor Márai, the author of Embers (1942) and The Rebels (1930), is determined to record an incident that she has been dissecting for the past three years, writes Eileen Battersby
"I don't know what else God has in store for me. But before I die I want to write down what happened to me the day Lajos visited me for the last time and robbed me."
Aware that she is dying, she speaks with an urgency as well as slow festering anger. She has been wronged. Of that there is no doubt. But most irritatingly of all, it was she who made this possible. It was her decision, her agreement.
Within a few sentences, Esther has won her audience. She draws us in; here is a woman with a story to tell. "Life has been extraordinarily kind to me, and, just as extraordinarily, it has robbed me of everything . . . what else can happen?" Sándor Márai has the gift of catching a reader; he writes stories that suspend time. Nothing else matters until you reach the final line. Esther knows that her life has slipped through her fingers; it has simply happened and is now ebbing away. "But my foe pursued me. Now I know he could do nothing about it: we are bound to our enemies, nor can they escape us."
This is more than a love gone badly wrong. So much is alluded to without being explained, yet Márai, even through the filter of translation, is so skilful that somehow it is possible to enter Esther's confidence; we understand her dilemma without having to rely on endless detail. Some 20 years had passed without her setting eyes on the man who had destroyed her life. The villain is Lajos, "and" she concedes, "I thought myself inured against my memories. Then one day I received his telegram, which was like an opera libretto, just as theatrical, as dangerously childish and false, as everything he had said and written to others twenty years before."
She is sympathetic, intelligent and exasperated, possessed of a sense of irony as well as humour. She recalls how she announced the news, the impending return of Lajos. And she begins to wonder at herself. "What would my voice have sounded like? It is unlikely that I was screaming with joy. I must have spoken like a sleepwalker suddenly woken out of her sleep. I had been sleepwalking for twenty years."
Having informed Nunu, once a servant, now a loyal companion, of the forthcoming return, Nunu's reaction is telling. "Good. I will lock away the silver." It is obvious before he ever steps into the action that Lajos has a history of deception. Esther knows no one trusts him. "I was already defending him. What could I do? He was the only man I ever loved." In another very different Márai novel, Conversations in Bolzano (1940), in which the notorious womaniser Casanova tells his story through a series of monologues, Márai explored the plight of a man doomed never to find satisfaction in love. It is a strange book, yet it ultimately succeeds if not as a novel, but as a study of love. It does suffer when compared with his other books, particularly appearing as it did in translation soon after the celebrated English publication of Embers. Esther's Inheritance is also about love, yet its narrator is utterly unlike Casanova. Esther has long been suspended by her feelings. She loved Lajos; he was her brother's friend and professed to love her, yet he married her younger sister, Vilma, who is dead.
George Szirtes, the poet who did a marvellous job on translating The Rebels, has triumphed here in evoking Esther's tone of wry regret. Esther's Inheritance was first published in Hungary in 1939 and it brings with it a subtle, vivid sense of a vanished world as reflected through a house that has seen the various members of the family pass through life and on to memory. Into this thoughtful gentle atmosphere reappears the formerly dazzling Lajos, "complete with menagerie". The party consists of his two grown children and his daughter's suitor. There is also an older woman. Without even bothering to greet anyone, Lajos immediately asks for money to pay the taxi driver.
THE WRITING IS very sharp; Esther may be broken-hearted but she misses nothing. "He introduced his children with a gesture that was hard to classify but was unmistakably melodramatic, as though they were orphans." As Esther studies him, she realises "there was something sad about him, something that reminded me of an aging photographer or politician who is not quite up-to-date regarding manners and ideas but continues obstinately, and somewhat resentfully, to employ the same terms of flattery he has used for years. He was an animal-tamer past his prime, of whom the animals were no longer afraid. His clothes, too, were peculiarly old-fashioned . . . Everything was a little too new . . . And all this communicated a certain helplessness."
Her observations are exact yet her emotions are confused. All the grief of love gone horribly bad as well as the essential ambivalence of love is contained in this wise human narrative. Márai literarily came back from the dead with the publication of the first English translation of Embers in 2001. In it, two former friends, once intimate but long estranged by an act of betrayal, meet again after 41 years, during which the old wounds have continued to fester. Their dignified if theatrically choreographed reunion takes place over the course of a lengthy formal dinner and the even longer night that follows. The setting is a castle, high in the Carpathian Mountains, the lonely home of the reclusive general who lives with only his bitter memories for company. There is a third presence at the dinner table, the ghost of the woman they had both loved, the general's dead wife.
Márai was born in 1900 and was a major literary figure in Hungary. His opposition to fascism made his life difficult. Having survived the second World War in his native country he was then forced to leave in 1948 by communism. From Italy, he moved on to the US where he attempted to settle. Yet he failed to find peace and committed suicide in 1989, oblivious to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The eerie perfection of Embers caused a sensation, but it is worth noting that The Rebels, his subversive, coming-of-age tale featuring the offbeat antics of a group of schoolboys bound for the front, could well be his masterpiece. Jaunty, character-driven and original, it is not only a Hungarian variation of All Quiet on the Western Front; it charts the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Throughout it, Márai displays his genius for nuance and social class.
Exactly why is Márai's fiction so evocative, so believable, so unforgettable? Who knows? Each of his novels is individual, self-contained and touched, as is this intelligent, tender little work, with an irony so graceful it makes one catch one's breath.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times