"The back-alleys. I had to see them by night, just once ... it's all part of ... it's what everyone does."
"But why didn't you tell me? Or rather, why didn't you take me with you?"
(to himself)
"So this is marriage. What does it amount to, when every attempt to explain is so hopeless? Mind you, I don't fully understand all this myself."
“You talk as if you know why I was angry with you.”
"But of course I know,” Mihály blurted out, and blushed again.
“If you know, say it,” Szepetneki said aggressively.
“I’d rather not here ... in front of my wife.”
“It doesn’t bother me. Just have the courage to say it. What do you think was the reason I wouldn’t speak to you in London?”
“Because it occurred to me there had been a time when I thought you had stolen my gold watch. Since then I’ve found out who took it.”
“You see what an ass you are. I was the one who stole your watch.”
So it was you who took it?”
“It was.”
"Now that you are in Italy you could help me look for him."
"I can't scour the collected monasteries of Umbria and Tuscany. And I don't even know that Ervin would want to see me. If he had wanted to see me he could have let me know his whereabouts long ago. So now you can clear off, János Szteptenki. I hope I don't set eyes on your again for a good few years."
—"You're just as clever at not understanding people as you are great at not finding, and not looking for, people who have gone out of your life. That's why I was angry with you."
"One grows up. We all grow up, and you forget why you were offended with someone for ten years."
"By the time he got back to the hotel, after a long rambling walk, it seemed inevitable to him that she would, one day, leave him, and do so after horrible crisis and sufferings, after squalid affairs with other men, her name 'dragged through the mud, as the saying goes. "
—
"Already she had become for him a sort of beautiful memory."
—
And she fell asleep. Now he was the one who lay awake for hours. He felt that finally, definitively, he was facing the bankruptcy and collapse of his marriage. He had to acknowledge that here too he had failed as an adult, and what was even worse, he had to concede that Erzsi had never before given him such pleasure as now, when he made love to her not as a partner in adult passion, but as an immature girl, a flirtation on a springtime outing."
—
"He found the two National Bank lire cheques, each for the same amount, one in his name, the other in hers.
He withdrew his own, and in its place smuggled in a sheet of paper of similar size. Then, very carefully, he put it in his wallet, and went back to bed.
—
Mihály left the train, ordered a coffee, and, while the espresso machine coaxed the marvelous steaming liquid out of itself, drop by drop, he began to chat with a local about the sights of Perugia.
Finally, he drank the coffee.
—
