Embers

Chapter 16

“Things do not simply happen to one,” he says-, his voice firmer now as he looks up. Above their heads the candles burn with high, guttering, smoky flames; the hollows surrounding the wicks are quite black.

Outside, beyond the windows, the landscape and the town are invisible in the darkness; not a single lantern is burning in the night. “One can also shape what happens to one. One shapes it, summons it, takes hold of the inevitable. It’s the human condition. A man acts, even when he knows from the very onset that his act will be fatal. He and his fate are inseparable, they have a pact with each other that molds them both.

It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps in through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter. No one is strong enough or cunning enough to avert by word or deed the misfortune that is rooted in the iron laws of his character and his life. Did I know about you and Krisztina? I mean from the start, the beginning of our story a trois? … It was you who introduced me to Krisztina. You knew her as a child, it was you who used to have scores copied by her father when he was an old man who could still use his crippled hands to write out music but could no longer hold a violin and bow and coax rich tones out of them, so that he had to abandon his career in the concert hall for a small-town conservatory, where he taught all the unmusical or at best marginally musical pupils, and picked up an additional pittance by correcting and improving the compositions of gifted amateur dabblers … That was how you met him and his daughter, who was then seventeen. Her mother died in the southern Tyrol, where she had gone to a sanitarium near her birthplace to receive care for her heart condition.

“Later, at the end of our honeymoon, we went to this spa town to find the sanitarium, because Krisztina wanted to see the room where her mother had died.

“We arrive in Arco one afternoon in an automobile, after driving along the shores of Lake Garda in a drift of the scents of flowers and orange trees. We stop in Riva and that afternoon we go over to Arco. The countryside is silver-gray, as if covered in olive groves. High above is a fortress, and hidden in the warm, misty air between the cliffs is the sanitarium. There are palm trees everywhere, and the light is so delicately hazy that it is like being in a greenhouse. In the stillness, the pale-yellow building where Krisztina’s mother spent her last years looks mysterious, as if it were home to all the sadness that can afflict the human heart, and as if heart disease itself were the consequence of the disappointments and incomparable misfortunes of the world that were lived out here in silence. Krisztina walks around the house. The silence, the scent of the thorny southern plants, the warm, sweet-smelling haze that envelops everything like a linen bandage for damaged souls, all this moves me deeply, too. For the first time, I sense that Krisztina is not totally with me, and from somewhere far, far away, at the beginning of time, I hear the wise, sad voice of my father, and it’s speaking of you, Konrad.” For the first time he utters the name of his guest, without anger, without agitation, in a tone of neutral courtesy. “And the voice is saying you are not a real soldier, you are another kind of man. I do not understand, I still don’t know what being different means … it takes a long time, many lonely hours, to teach myself that it is always and exclusively about the fact that between men and women, friends and acquaintances, there is this question of otherness, and that the human race is divided into two camps. Sometimes I think these two camps are what define the entire world, and that all class distinctions, all shades of opinion and all variations in power relations are simply variants of this otherness. So just as it is blood alone that binds people to defend one another in the face of dange r, on the spiritual plane one person will struggle to help another only if this person is not ‘,’ and if quite aside from opinions and convictions they share similar natures at the deepest level … “There in Arco I understood that the celebrations were over, and that Krisztina too was ‘.’ And I remember the words of my father, who was not a great reader of books, but whom loneliness had taught to recognize the truth; he knew about this duality, he too had met a woman whom he loved profoundly but at whose side nonetheless he remained alone because they were two different people-for my mother, too, was ‘,’ just as you and Krisztina are … And in Arco something else became clear to me, as well. The feeling that bound me to my mother and to you and to Krisztina was always the same, a longing, a hope in search of something, a helpless, sad yearning. For we always love the ‘,’ we always seek it out, no matter what the circumstances and sudden changes in our lives … The greatest secret and the greatest gift any of us can be offered is the chance for two ” people to meet. It happens so rarely-it must be because nature uses all its force and cunning to prevent such harmony-perhaps it’s that creation and the renewal of life need the tension that is generated between two people of opposite temperaments who seek each other out. Like an alternating current … an exchange of energy between positive and negative poles, think of all the despair and the blind hope that lie behind this duality.

“In Arco I heard my father’s voice and understood that I had inherited his fate, that I was of the same kind he was, whereas my mother, you, and Krisztina stood on the far bank beyond our reach … One can achieve everything in life, wrestle everything around one to the ground, life can offer up every gift, or one can seize them all for oneself, but one cannot change another’s tastes or inclinations or rhythms, that essential otherness, no matter how close or how important the bond. That is what I feel for the first time in Arco as Krisztina is walking around the house in which her mother died.”

Ie, He lets his head drop, leaning his forehead on his hand with the gesture of helpless resignation of a man finally faced with the evidence of the intractability of human relations. “Then we come home from Arco and start our lives here,” he says, “The rest you know. It was you who introduced me to Krisztina. You never let drop the slightest hint that you were interested in her yourself.

Our meeting, to me, was unmistakably the most significant thing that had ever happened to me. She was of very mixed descent, with German, Italian, and Hungarian blood in her veins. Perhaps also a trace of Polish, on her father’s side of the family … she was quite uncategorizable, beyond race or class, as if nature for once had tried to create a self-sufficient, independent, free creature untrammeled by family or social position. She was like an animal: her protected upbringing, her boarding school, her father’s culture and delicacy, had all shaped her behavior, but underneath she was wild and untamable.

Everything that I could give her, my fortune and social position, was really not of great importance to her, and because of her need for freedom, which was so fundamental, she could not make herself a part of my social world … Her pride, which was quite different from that of people who parade their position, their family ties, their wealth, their place in society, or their particular personal talents-Krisztina’s pride rested on her splendid independence, which coursed in her as both an inheritance and a poison. She was, as you well know, an inborn aristocrat, and that is something very rare these days: you find it as seldom in men as in women. It is not a question of family or social position. It was impossible to offend her, there was no situation from which she shrank, she tolerated no kind of limitations. And there was something else that is rare in women: she understood the responsibility to which she was committed by her own inner sense of self Do you remember-yes, of course you do — our first meeting in the room with the table where her father’s music sheets lay: Krisztina came in, and the little room was filled with light. She didn’t just bring youth with her, she brought passion and pride and the sovereign self-confidence of her unsuppressed nature. Since then I have never met a single person who responded so completely to everything: music, an early morning walk in the woods, the color and scent of a flower, the well-chosen words of an intelligent companion. Nobody could stroke a beautiful piece of cloth or an animal like Krisztina. Nobody took such pleasure in the world’s simple gifts: people, animals, stars, books — everything interested her, not in any exaggerated way, not with a pedantic outpouring of learning, but with the unprejudiced joy of a child reaching for everything there is to see and do. As if everything in the world was relevant to her, you know? Yes, you do know … She was unprejudiced and open and humble because she recognized what a blessing life was. I still see her face sometimes,” he says confidingly.

“You won’t find any portrait of her in this house, there are no photographs of her, and the large painting of her done by the Austrian, which used to hang between the portraits of my parents, has been taken down. No, you will not find any picture of her here anymore,” he says, with a kind of satisfaction, as if reporting on a small act of heroism.

“But sometimes I still see her face when I’m half asleep, or when I walk into a room. And now, while we’re talking about her, we two who knew her so well, I see her face as clearly as I did forty-one years ago, on that last evening as she sat between us. For you know, that was the last evening that Krisztina and I dined together. Not only was it your last dinner with Krisztina, it was mine also. That was the day when everything happened that was inevitable between the three of us. And as we both knew Krisztina, certain decisions were inevitable: you left for the tropics, Krisztina and I did not speak again. Yes, she lived for another eight years. We both lived here under one roof, but we could no longer talk with each other,” he says calmly, and looks into the fire.

“That is how we were,” he says simply. “Gradually I came to understand a part of what had gone on. There was the music. There are certain elements that recur in people’s lives, and music in my life was one.

Music was the bond between my mother, Krisztina, and you. It must have spoken to you in some way that is beyond words or actions, and it also must have been the conduit through which you communicated with each other-and this conversation, this language of music which the three of you shared, was inaudible to us others, to my father and me. That is why we were lonely even when we were with you. But because music spoke to both you and Krisztina, you could continue to communicate with each other even after all conversation between her and me had been silenced.

I hate music.” His voice rises, and for the first time this evening he speaks with a hoarse intensity. “I hate this incomprehensible, melodious language which select people can understand and use to say uninhibited, irregular things that are also probably indecent and immoral. Watch their faces and see how strangely they change when they’re listening to music. You and Krisztina never sought out music-I do not remember you ever playing four-handed together, you never sat down at the piano in front of Krisztina, at least not in my presence. Evidently her sense of tact and shame restrained her from listening to music with you while I was there. And because music’s power is inexpressible, it seems to carry a larger danger in that it has the power to arouse the deepest emotions in people who come together to listen to it and discover that it is their fate to belong to each other. Do you not agree?” “Yes, I do,” says the guest. “That eases my mind,” says the General politely. “Krisztina’s father also thought so, and he really was a connoisseur of music. He was the only person to whom I once, just once, spoke about all this, about music, about you and Krisztina. He was already very old; he died shortly afterwards. I had returned from the war. Krisztina had already been dead for ten years. Everyone who had ever mattered to me-my father, my mother, you, Krisztina-was gone. The only two people still alive were Nini, my nurse, and Krisztina’s father, both of them with that remarkable strength and indifference that old people have, and some mysterious purpose still in life … like the two of us today. Everyone was dead, I myself was no longer young, more than fifty years old, and as lonely as that tree in the clearing in my forest, the one left standing when a storm felled all the surrounding timber on the day before war broke out. That one tree remained standing in the clearing, near the hunting lodge. Now, almost fifty years later, a new forest has grown up around it. It, too, is one of the ancients, after an act of will, which nature calls a storm, destroyed everything that had once surrounded it. And out of sheer will, inexplicably, the tree is still alive. “What is its purpose? … It has none. It wants to stay alive.

Maybe life and every living thing have no other purpose than to live as long as possible and renew themselves. So I came back from the war, and I talked to Krisztina’s father. What did he know about the three of us?

Everything. And he was the only one to whom I ever told everything that was possible to tell. We sat in his dark room, surrounded by old furniture and instruments, there were bookshelves and cupboards bursting with scores, music fixed in sign language, trumpet blasts in print, drum rolls on paper, all the music in the world was lying silently in wait in that room, which smelled so old, as if all human life had been sucked out of it … He listened to me, and then he said, ‘ do you want?

You survived.’ He spoke like a judge pronouncing sentence and also bringing an accusation … staring half-blind into the room; he was already very old, over eighty. Then I understood that a survivor has no right to bring a complaint. Whoever survives has won his case, he has no right and no cause to bring charges; he has emerged the stronger, the more cunning, the more obstinate, from the struggle. Just as we have,”

he says dryly. They measure each other in a glance. “Then he died, too, Krisztina’s father.

There was only my nurse and you, somewhere out there in the world, and this castle, and the forest. “I had also survived the war,” he says with satisfaction. “I didn’t seek out death, I never went to meet it: that is the truth, there’s no other way I can say it. Evidently I still had things I wanted to settle,” he continues reflectively. “People were dying all around me, I have seen every variety of death, and sometimes I was amazed at its endless possibilities, for death has its element of fantasy, just as life does. By official count, ten million people died in the war. A world-engulfing fire had broken out and blazed and roared until one sometimes thought that all personal doubts and questions and struggles must be entirely consumed in it … but that was not the case.

In the midst of this immense human agony, I knew that I still had something private to settle, and that is why I was neither a coward nor a hero, as the book says; I was calm both in storm and in battle, because I knew that nothing bad could happen to me. And one day I came home from the war, and then I waited. Time passed, the world has exploded in a new conflagration and I am certain that it is the same torch as before that has suddenly flamed up again … and what smouldered on in my heart was the question that neither the soot nor the ashes of time and war could cover. People by the millions are dying again, and yet you found your way from that far bank where you belong and through this world gone mad to come home and settle the things with me that we could not settle forty-one years ago. Such is the force of human nature-it must provide or receive an answer to whatever is the defining question of a lifetime. That is why you have come back, and that is why I have waited for you.

“Perhaps this world is coming to its end,” he says quietly, drawing an arc through the air with his hand. “Perhaps lights are going out allover the world just as they did today across this little part of it; perhaps some elemental event has taken place that is not merely the war, but something more; perhaps something has found its time in us as well, and now it’s being settled with steel and fire, where once it was settled with words. There are many signs … Perhaps,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Perhaps this entire way of life which we have known since birth, this house, this dinner, even the words we have used this evening to discuss the questions of our lives, perhaps they all belong to the past. There’s too much tension, too much animosity, too much craving for revenge in us all. We look inside ourselves and what do we find? An animosity that time damped down for a while but now is bursting out again. So why should we expect anything else of our fellow men? And you and I, too, old and wise, at the end of our lives, we, too, want revenge … Against whom? Each other? Or against the memory of someone who is no longer with us? Pointless. And yet it burns on in our hearts. Why should we expect better of the world, when it teems with unconscious desires and their all-too-deliberate consequences, and young men are bayoneting the hands of young men of other nations, and strangers are hacking each other’s backs to ribbons, and all laws and conventions have been voided and instinct rules, and the universe is on fire? … Revenge. I came back from a war in which I could have died, yet didn’t, because I was waiting for my opportunity to take revenge. ‘?’ you may ask. ‘ kind of revenge?’ I can see from your face that you do not understand this need.

‘ revenge is still possible between two old men who are already waiting for death? Everyone is dead, what point is there in revenge?’ you seem to be saying. And this is my answer: Yes-revenge.

That is what I have lived for, for forty-one years, that is why I neither killed myself nor allowed others to kill me, and that is why I have not killed anyone myself, thank heaven. The time for revenge has come, just as I have wished for so long. My revenge is that you have come here across the world, through the war, over mine-infested seas, to the scene of the crime, to answer to me and to uncover the truth together. That is my revenge. And now you must answer.”

The last words are almost whispered. The guest has to lean forward in order to hear properly.

“It may be that you are right. Ask. Perhaps I can answer you.”

The candles dim, and the dawn wind rustles through the great trees in the garden. The room is now almost completely dark.