When Sandor Marai put
a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, he had every reason to believe that
his life was over. He was 89, and, after the death of his wife of more than
five decades, lonely. In a journal he kept at the time Marai wrote:
‘I
totter along the street like Blondel . . . Not even on sand any longer, but on
a rope, hands stretched around in front, feeling the empty air . . .’
For more than 40 years
Marai had lived a life of obscurity in San Diego, after he was driven out of Hungary
in 1948 for his anti-Communist views. The forces that drove him into exile were
still in power in Hungary at the time of Marai’s death. The Berlin Wall was
still standing, and the memories of his glory days, as an author of repute,
must have become mist-filled, even in his own mind.
Born in 1900 in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Sandor Marai (real name: Sandor Karoly Henrik
Grosschmied de Mara) rose to great fame in Hungary in the 1930s. He was a
prolific author of 46 novels. Vehemently anti-Fascist (his wife was Jewish) and
ant-Communist, Marai’s literary output reached its peak in the 1940s, as though
he had a premonition that his life as a writer was about to be cut short. By
the time he died, in 1989, all of his novels were not only out of print their
manuscripts were also thought to have been lost. There was no trace left that
there lived once an author who wrote novels of great poignancy and subtlety.
Zoom forward ten
years: Roberto Callasso, the legendary Italian publisher, on a trip to Paris,
browsed through a publisher’s catalogue which gave a list of ‘neglected
classics’. Callasso came across the name Sandor Marai, of whom he had never
heard. Curious to find out more, Callasso asked for the novelist’s works. He
began reading the French translation and realized that what he had in front of
him was a lost masterpiece. The novel was Embers, which was later translated
and published to great acclaim across the globe. Since the discovery of Embers,
three more Marai novels appeared in English of which Esther’s Inheritance is
one.
The eponymous heroine
of Esther’s
Inheritance is a spinster in her mid-forties, who has been leading a
quiet, if somewhat impecunious, existence after the family fortunes took nose-dive
more than twenty years earlier. The man partly responsible for the debacle was
also the man she had hopelessly fallen in love with. That man, Lajos, a friend
of her brother, Laci, broke her heart by leaving her for her elder sister,
Wilma. Lajos disappeared after Wilma’s death, taking with him their two
children, Eva and Gustav. And now, twenty years later, Esther receives a
telegram from Lajos that he would be visiting her. The telegraph triggers a
maelstrom of emotions in Esther’s mind, and she is compelled to revisit those
portentous times when Lajos promised so much only to betray her. Esther’s
friends, and her faithful housekeeper, Nunu, who have stood by her in her
difficult days, are concerned that Lajos is visiting only because he has a
hidden agenda. Then Lajos arrives with
his children, Esther’s niece and nephew, whom she has not seen for over two
decades. Lajos does have a motive behind the visit, and the lives of the two
ex-lovers are about to collide once more, fatefully, and Esther would once
again allow herself to be robbed of her inheritance by her feckless ex-lover.
Esther’s Inheritance, narrated in the first person by Esther,
builds up slowly and inexorably towards the climactic encounter between her and
Lajos. Lajos is a man who is not malicious by nature, but he is a fantasist, a
larger than life character. He is a man given to grandiloquent ideas, which
change more often than the seasons in the year, and which—every one of it—leave
him in dire financial straits. Esther knows this. At the very beginning of her
story, she describes him thus:
‘He never wrote about his feeling . . . On top
of this he would lay out the great idea that was currently demanding his
attention, and all in such meticulously authentic terms that everything seemed
larger than life. It was just that—and even this tin-eared reader [Esther]
could sense it—none of it was true, or rather it was true, but not as Lajos
wrote it.’
Lajos does not set out
deliberately to hurt people; he does not scheme to cheat them in the manner of
a swindler. He appears to be even genuinely remorseful at the wreckage he has
left behind. That does not, however, stop him from hatching up his next big
idea. He is a man who lives in the present and will do whatever he can to
extricate himself from the latest mess he has landed in. And if that requires
of him to tell lies and emotionally blackmail middle age spinsters whom he has
betrayed in the past, it is all grist for the mill. He has some insight into
his character. When he meets Esther after twenty years and presents her with
his preposterous demand, he says:
‘I have always been a weak man. I would like to
have achieved something in the world, and I believe I was not altogether
without talent. But talent and ambition are not enough . . . To be properly
creative one needs something else . . . some special strength or discipline or
the mixture of the two; the stuff I think they call character . . . And that
quality, that talent is something that is lacking in me.’
Esther is an
intriguing character. She is a woman of high moral fibre and has in abundance
that which Lajos admits to be lacking in him: character. By the time Lajos
comes to see Esther scales have fallen of Esther’s eyes. Twenty years of
leisurely spinsterhood has allowed her to go over again and again in her mind
her relationship not only with Lajos, but also her complex relationship with
her dead sister Wilma, the woman for whom Lajos left her. Yet she is also
credulous in the way only the virtuous can be; and, when Lajos presents her
with letters he had allegedly written days before he married her sister all
those years ago and which she has not read until then, she walks into the trap
Lajos has set for her.
Esther’s Inheritance is a meticulously crafted novel. Beautifully
translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, it is intense, atmospheric,
and harrowing. As Marai takes the reader, sentence by perfectly crafted
sentence, towards the encounter between Lajos and Esther—the pivotal point of
the novel—your teeth are set on edge. There is a sense of inevitability, a
sense of predetermination, to the outcome of the encounter, of which you become
gradually aware, and, with a sense of fatality, you predict it even before
Lajos enters Esther’s room for the final, dramatic, tension-filled showdown.
Yet it does not leave you feeling disappointed—because you have correctly
guessed the end—; neither does it fill you with pity or irritation towards
Esther—there is a solid moral grounding to her decision which you cannot but admire;
she may be credulous, but she is not weak-willed, and does not require anyone’s
pity. Lajos does not deserve disapprobation either—because he is not a bad
person; he is a morally weak man who cannot help doing bad things.
First published in
1939, four years before Embers, Esther’s Inheritance is a
multilayered novel that can be enjoyed at several levels. It vividly evocates a
bygone era and the ethos that disappeared with it; however, it is not just a
trip down the memory lane; with subtlety and skill of a born novelist, Marai
gets his point across: the ephemeral boundaries between the good and the bad,
and the holding power of unrequited love. Esther’s Inheritance is an
irresistible work that clutches to your heart.
