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war, no pension, no livelihood, too old and sick to take a job digging ditches or cutting down trees, and her mother, broken and loathing physical work, and herself, sixteen, in her sixth year at the Hungarian lyceumthat the Slovaks closed down, when along came this man, the owner of a farm, and vineyards, he was rich, forty-five, with a hotel in Bratislava, and she had given in to him to save her family from misery or death by starvation or old age in the poorhouse, he was overbearing, mean, dense, he didn’t believe in anything, God, democracy, human decency, nothing, just himself, and he wanted a son to inherit his farm and hotel and vineyards, but he wasn’t prejudiced, he didn’t mind that she was Hungarian. She bore him a daughter and that day he stormed out and drank himself dumb, he didn’t speak to her for a week and then he began to beat her when he was drunk; that was when a hearty, hard-drinking bunch began to meet at the farm, cars would drive up from Bratislava, from Košice, from Turčanský Svatý Martin, there were meetings in his study and he became a member of a right-wing party, but she didn’t pay any attention and when he came to her at night, his breath stinking like a wine cellar, he would force her to do what for him might still have been pleasure but for her was suffering and shame; as she got to know this man with the bull neck and the heavy breath, she also discovered her Truth: she had met another man, a gardener who had tuberculosis and who later died, and he lent her books about the path to God, the developing of one’s spiritual strength, the spiritual universe and life beyond the grave, and she came tobelieve that everything here is nothing but one immense process of purging oneself of the stain of evil, and evil is matter and man must purge himself of matter, of the body, of desire, his goal must be the spirit, but not even that, for the spirit is just another stage, a higher stage than the physical one, and the ultimate aim is to reach God, to become one with Him, to dissolve one’s own self in the infinite horizon of bliss that radiates mystical divine Love and Goodness.
    Soon after, her husband was killed. After the Communist coup in February 1948 they nationalized his hotel, then his farm, and then they arrested him; he escaped, but they shot him as he tried to swim the Danube to Austria. She got a job in an office and learned bookkeeping, becoming a good bookkeeper; she went to live in Košice with her little girl (her parents were both dead) and she wanted to raise her little girl in the truth that she herself had discovered.
    She lent me some of those books. They were bound collections of various parapsychological and theosophical journals; I found an article on the powers of amulets and the effectiveness of copper circlets which, when worn on the naked skin at the perihelion of Mars, will protect the wearer from rheumatism and bleeding, and I asked her whether it didn’t seem strange to her that people who place so much emphasis on the spirit should be so concernedwith the body since three quarters of those theosophical formulas concerned protection against disease, and whether she believed it all. She replied that at each stage of one’s existence one must obey the laws that come from God, and the laws of physical existence call for attention to one’s physical well-being. And as for the formulas, she asked how I could admit I had never tried them yet claim I doubted their effectiveness. So you too, she said, are imperfect and reject the truth, everyone rejects the truth, but in the end everyone will discover it, because God is Mercy. And with those words, a curious look came into her eyes, a flash of anxiety, as if she were afraid I wanted to rob her of something, of the certainty she possessed and without which she couldn’t survive, couldn’t bear the burden of her widowhood, the burden of death and of a sad, destroyed life; it was the expression of an ensnared little