Embers

Chapter 15

when you leave, Krisztina also withdraws, he says after a moment. “I remain alone in this room. She has left the English book on the tropics lying on chair. I have no desire to go to sleep, so I pick up the book and thumb through it. I look at the pictures, and try to involve myself with its statistics about the economy and public health. It surprises me that Krisztina is reading such a book. All this won’t concern her very much, I think, the mathematical curve of rubber production on the peninsula can’t be that interesting to her, nor the general health problems of the natives. It’s just not Krisztina, I think. But the book has something to say, not just in English and not just about living conditions on the peninsula. As I am sitting there, book in hand, after midnight, alone in the room after the two people who have meant the most to me, aside from my father, have left, it suddenly dawns on me that the book is another signal. And I realize something else. During the day, things have finally begun to impose themselves on my attention, something has happened, life has turned eloquent. At such moments, I think, great care is required, because on such days life is speaking to us in mute signs, everything suddenly makes us alert, everything is a proof and a symbol, all we need to do is understand. One day things mature and we can put words to them. And, as I think this, I suddenly understand that this book is both a sign and an answer. It is saying: Krisztina wants to leave here. She is thinking about strange worlds, which means she must want something other than this world. Perhaps she wants to run away from here, from something or someone-and this someone can be me, but it can also be you. It is as clear as daylight, I think, Krisztina feels and knows something, and she wants to get away from here, and that’s why she is reading a study of the tropics. I sense a great many things, and I feel that I also understand them. I feel and I understand what happened today: my life has split in two, like a l andscape torn apart by an earthquake. On the one side is childhood, you and everything that the past has meant, and on the other is a dark place through which I cannot see, but through which I must find my way: the remainder of my life. And the two parts of this life are no longer in contact with each other. What happened? I cannot say. I have spent the whole day in an effort to appear calm and in control of myself, and I succeeded; Krisztina could not yet know anything as she looked at me, her face pale and with that strange questioning stare. She could not know, could not read on my face, what had happened on the hunt … And indeed, what had happened? Am I not just imagining all this? Is the whole thing not just a figment of my imagination? If I tell it to anyone, he or she will probably laugh in my face. I have nothing, no proof, in my hand … All I have is a voice inside me, stronger than any proof, crying out unmistakably, incontrovertibly, beyond all doubt, that I am not deceiving myself, and that I know the truth. And the truth is that in the dawn, my friend wanted to kill me. What a ridiculous accusation, out of the empty air, isn’t it? Can I ever speak about this conviction, which is even more horrifying than the thing itself, to another human being? No. But now that I am in possession of this knowledge, with that calm certainty that accompanies our recognition of simple facts, how am I to imagine our future lives together? Can I look you in the eye, or should all three of us, Krisztina, you, and I, play the game and turn our friendship into pure theater while we all watch one another?

“Is it possible to live in such a way? As I said before, I think that perhaps you have gone mad. I think, perhaps it is the music. One cannot be a musician and a relative of Chopin and escape unpunished. But at the same time, I know that this hope is both cowardly and foolish: I have to look truth in the face, I must not imagine things, you are not mad, there is no relief, no way out. You have a reason to hate me and to want to kill me. I cannot grasp what that reason is. There is one simple, natural explanation, namely that you have been smitten with a sudden, wild passion for Krisztina, and this, too, could be a form of madness.

But this assumption is so implausible-there has been no trace, no sign whatever in the life the three of us have led together-that I have to discard it. I know Krisztina, I know you, and I know myself-at least I think I do. Our entire lives, our first acquaintance with Krisztina, my marriage, our friendship, it’s all so open, so clean, so transparent, the personalities and the circumstances are so unambiguous, that I would have to be insane to believe any such thing even for a second. Passions, no matter how perverse, cannot be concealed; a passion that compels the man possessed by it to pick up his weapon one day and turn it against his closest friend cannot be hidden from the world for months on end.

Even I, the perpetually blind and deaf third party, would have had to pick up some sign of it-we virtually live together; no week goes by in which you do not dine with me three or four times; during the day I am in town, in the barracks, serving alongside you; we know everything about each other. And I know Krisztina’s days and nights, her body and her soul, as well as I know my own. It’s a crazy notion, that you and Krisztina … and I am almost relieved when I make myself examine this notion. It must be something else. What happened is deeper, more mysterious, less comprehensible. I have to talk to you. Should I have someone observe you? Like the jealous husband in a c omedy? I am not a jealous husband. Suspicion has trouble taking hold in my nervous system, I am calm when I think about Krisztina, whom I found the way a collector finds the prize of his life, the rarest, most perfect object in his collection, the masterpiece, the goal and meaning of his existence.

Krisztina does not lie, Krisztina is not unfaithful, I know all her thoughts, even the secret ones that are thought only in dreams. The diary bound in yellow velvet that I gave her in the first days of our marriage tells everything, because we had agreed that she would write about her feelings and thoughts for me and for herself-her longings, her emotions, all the by-products of the soul that one dares not speak aloud because one is ashamed or sees them as irrelevant. She would sketch these out in the diary, share with me in a few words what she thought and felt under the influence of a particular person or a situation.

… That is how deeply we trust each other. And the secret diary is always in the drawer of a desk to which only the two of us have keys.

This diary is the most confidential thing there can be between a man and a woman. If there is a secret in Krisztina’s life, it would have shown itself already in her diary. However, I realize, for some time now we have forgotten this secret game … and I stand up and walk through the dark house to Krisztina’s study and look for the yellow diary. The drawer is empty.”

He closes his eyes and sits there like that for some time, his face expressionless like a blind man’s. He seems to be searching for a word.

“It is already after midnight, the house is asleep. Krisztina is tired, I don’t want to disturb her. She has probably taken the diary with her to her room, I think to myself,” he says amicably. “I don’t want to disturb her, I will ask her tomorrow whether she was telling me something with the diary, in our secret sign language. For you see, this confidential little book which we do not discuss-we are each a little ashamed in front of the other about this silent confidence we share-is like a declaration of love that repeats itself again and again. Such things are hard to discuss. It was Krisztina’s idea, she asked me for it in Paris, on our honeymoon, she was the one who wanted to make the confession-and it was only later, much later, after she had died, that I understood that one only prepares oneself so consciously to confess, to hew to the utmost honesty, if one knows that one day there will actually be something that requires confession. For a long time, I did not understand this diary, I thought these secret written messages, this Morse Code of her life, were a little exaggerated, a woman’s whim. She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable. Krisztina wants to give me everything, her body, her soul, her feelings, and her innermost thoughts … We are on our honeymoon, Krisztina is in love, think where she comes from, and what it means to her that I offer her my name, this castle, the palace in Paris, the wide world, all things she could not even have dreamed of a few months before in her small-town surroundings and in the modest house where she spent her days alone with a silent, sick old man who lived only for his instrument, his notebooks and his memories … and suddenly life gives her every thing with open hands, marriage, a year-long honey moon, Paris, London, Rome, then the East, months in oases, the sea. Of course, Krisztina believes she is in love. Later she reaches the understanding that she is not in love, nor had she been, even back then. She is merely grateful.”

He links his fingers, rests his arms on his knees and leans forward.

“She is grateful, very grateful, in her way, the way of a young woman on her honeymoon with her husband, a rich, distinguished young man.” He tightens the grip of his fingers and stares at the pattern in the carpet, sunk in thought. “She is determined to show her gratitude, and that is why she has the idea of the diary. This extraordinary present.

For from the very first moment, it is filled with surprising admissions.

Krisztina is not courting me, and her confessions are sometimes disturbingly candid. She describes me just as she sees me, in a few words, but to the point. She describes what doesn’t please her about me, the way I am far too open with everyone in the world. She feels I lack modesty, which, with her religious temperament, she believes to be the greatest virtue. No, it is quite true that in those years I am not modest. The world is mine, I have found the woman who in every word, every movement of her body, every leap of her mind calls forth a complete echo in me, I am rich, I have position, the future opens itself before me like a shining path, I am thirty years old, I love life, I love military service, I love my career. Now, in retrospect, this hearty self-satisfaction and sense of good fortune make my head spin. And like everyone whom the gods spoil without reason, I feel a kind of anxiety buried at the heart of my happiness. It is all too beautiful, too flawless, too complete. Such unbroken happiness always arouses fear. I would like to make a sacrifice to fate, I would be glad if, coming into some new harbor, I were to receive mail from home, informing me of some financial or other unpleasantness. For example, that the castle had burned to the ground or that an investment had gone sour or that my banker had bad news for me or some such thing … One always wants to repay the gods with some of one’s good fortune. For it is well known that the gods are jealous, and that if they give a mortal a year of happiness, they immediately enter this debt on the ledger and demand repayment at the end of life with crippling interest. But everything around me is in perfect order. Krisztina writes short entries in her diary that read as if they had been composed in a dream. Sometimes she writes no more than a line or even just one word. For example: ‘ are beyond hope, because you are vain.’ Then nothing for weeks. Or she writes that she has seen a man in Algiers who has followed her in an alley and spoken to her, and she had the feeling she could go away with him. “Krisztina is a restless, scintillating spirit, I think. But I am happy and even these strange disquieting outbursts of honesty are unable to disturb that happiness.

It does not occur to me that someone who is so compulsive about revealing everything to another person is perhaps this honest precisely because she wishes to avoid having to confess something that to her is even more important and fundamental. I do not think of such a thing on my honeymoon; nor later, when I read the diary. But then comes that day and that night, the day of the hunt, when I feel as if your gun had gone off and the bullet had whistled past my ear. And then the night, when you leave us, but not before discussing the tropics with Krisztina in some detail. And I remain alone with the memory of that day and that evening. And I do not find the diary in its usual place in the drawer of Krisztina’s desk. I decide to find you in town next day and ask … “

He falls silent, and shakes his head in the manner of old people exclaiming over some piece of childishness.

“Ask what? … ” he says quietly and dismissively, as if to mock himself “What can one ask people with words? And what is the value of an answer given in words instead of in the coin of one’s entire life? … Not much,” he says firmly. “There are very few people whose words correspond exactly to the reality of their lives. It may be the rarest thing there is. But I did not know that then. I am not thinking now about pitiful liars. I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is to take the givens of one’s fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can.

That is the most we can accomplish. And it does not make us any the cleverer, or any the less vulnerable … so I want to talk to you, and I still do not know that everything I can ask you and everything you can answer will not change the facts. Nevertheless, one can get closer to reality and the facts by using words, questions and answers, and that is why I want to talk to you. I go to sleep, exhausted, and sleep deeply, as if I had completed some great physical effort, a long ride, a long walk … Once I carried a bear down from the mountains on my back. I know that I was exceptionally strong during those years, and yet I am still astonished in retrospect at how I managed to carry this great weight across slopes and through gullies. Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal. Back then I went to sleep in the snow in a similar state of exhaustion after I had reached the valley with the bear; my gamekeepers found me half-frozen next to its dead body. That was how I slept that night. Deep and dreamlessly … After I wake up, I order the carriage and drive into town to your apartment. I stand in the room and realize that you have gone away. It is only next day that we receive your letters at the regimental barracks telling us that you are resigning your commission and going abroad. At that moment, all I understand is the fact of your flight, because now it is certain that you wanted to kill me, that something has happened and is still happening whose true significance I do not yet grasp, and it is also certain that it all has to do with me personally, that it’s all happening to me as well as to you. So I stand in that mysterious room filled with beautiful objects as the door opens and in walks Krisztina.”

He says all this as if he were spinning a tale, sweetly, amicably, to entertain his friend, now finally returned home from a far country and a distant time, with the more interesting parts of an old story.

Konrad listens without moving. His cigar has gone out and he has set it on the rim of the glass ashtray, he sits, arms folded, quite still, his posture stiff and correct, the perfect officer conversing pleasantly with another of higher rank.

“She opens the door and stops on the threshold,” says the General. “She is not wearing a hat, she has come from home and has harnessed the light trap herself ‘ he gone?’ she asks. Her voice is strangely hoarse. I nod, yes, he has gone. Krisztina stands in the door, straight and slender, perhaps she was never so beautiful as in that moment. She has the pallor of the wounded who have lost a great deal of blood; only her eyes were fever-bright, as they had been the evening before, when I came up to her while she was reading. ‘ has fled,’ she says, and does not wait for an answer; she says it to herself, it’s a statement of fact.

“The coward,’ she adds softly and calmly.” “She said that?” asks the guest, abandoning his statuelike stillness and clearing his throat.

“Yes,” says the General. “That is all. Nor do I ask her anything. We stand silently in the room. Then Krisztina begins to look around, she takes in the furniture, the paintings, the art objects one by one. I watch her. She looks around the room as if saying goodbye.

She looks at it as if she had seen it all already and now she wants to take leave of every object in it. As you know, one can look at things or a room in one of two ways: as if seeing them for the first time or seeing them for the last. Krisztina’s eyes show none of the curiosity of discovery. They move calmly, assuredly, through this room the way one checks a room at home to be sure that everything is in its place. Her eyes are shining like an invalid’s and yet are strangely veiled. She doesn’t say a word, and she is in control of herself, but I feel that this woman has been thrown out of the safe course of her life and that she is about to lose herself and you and me. One look, one unexpected movement, and she will do or say something that can never be repaired.

… She looks at the pictures, calmly, without curiosity, as if to impress on her memory things she has often seen before and now sees one last time. She looks at the wide bed with a proud look and blinks, then shuts her eyes for a moment. Then she turns, as wordless as she was on arrival, and leaves the room. I remain. Through the open window I watch her walk through between the standard roses which have just begun to flower. She seats herself in the little trap which is waiting for her behind the fence, picks up the reins, and departs. A moment later the carriage has disappeared around the bend in the street.” He stops talking and looks over at his guest. “Am I not tiring you?” he asks politely. “No,” says Konrad hoarsely. “Absolutely not. Please go on.”

“I am going into quite a lot of detail,” he says as if to himself. “But it’s not possible any other way: only in the details can we understand the essential, as books and life have taught me. One needs to know every detail, since one can never be sure which of them is important, and which word shines out from behind things. But I don’t have much more to say. You have fled, Krisztina has driven home in the trap. And I, what is there left for me to do at this moment, and for the rest of my life?

… I look at the room and then after the vanished Krisztina. I know that your manservant is standing at attention out in the hall. I call his name, he comes in and salutes. ‘ your orders,’ he says.

” ‘ did the Captain leave?’…‘With the early express.’ That’s the train to the capital. ‘ he take much luggage?’ ‘, only a few civilian clothes.’ ‘ he leave any orders or any message?’ ‘, this apartment is to be given up. The furniture is to be sold. The lawyer is to take care of it. I am to return to the unit,’ he says. Nothing more.

“We look at each other. And then comes the moment that is not easy to forget. The fellow-a twenty-year-old farm boy, I’m sure you remember his good-humored, intelligent face-abandons his military posture and his straight-ahead parade ground stare, and he’s no longer the common soldier standing in front of his superior, he’s a man who knows something in front of a man he pities. There is something so human and sympathetic in his glance that I turn white, then red … now-for the first and only time in my life-I lose control, too. I step up to him, seize the front of his jacket, and almost lift him off his feet. We are breathing into each other’s faces and looking straight into each other’s eyes. The boy’s are full of horror and, again, sympathy. You know how, back then, it was better for me never to seize hold of people or things; if I didn’t touch things carefully, they broke … I know that, too, and I sense that both of us, the boy and I, are in danger. So I let him down again, set him back on the floor rather like a lead soldier; his boots land with a thump on the parquet and he stands stiffly at attention again as if on parade. I take out my handkerchief and wipe my brow.

There is only one question, and this person could answer it immediately: Has the lady who just left been here at other times? If he does not answer, I will kill him. But if he answers, perhaps I will also kill him, and perhaps not just him … at such times one does not know one’s friends anymore. But in the same moment I know that it is superfluous. I know that Krisztina has been here before, not just once but many times.”

He leans back and lets his arms drop wearily. “Now there is no further point in asking anything. A stranger cannot betray what one still needs to know. One would need to know why all this happened. And where the boundary lies between two people. The boundary of betrayal. That is what one would need to know. And also, where in all this my guilt lies? … “

He asks this very quietly, and his voice is uncertain. It is evident from his words that this is the first time he has uttered them aloud, after he has carried them in his soul for forty-one years and until now has found no answer.