Embers

Chapter 17

There are two questions you must answer, says the General, also bending forward. He sounds as if he is whispering a confidence. “Two questions I formulated long ago in the years I was waiting for you, and that only you can answer. I can see you think I would like to know if I was wrong or not, that you really did intend to kill me that morning on the hunt.

If it was not just a figment of my imagination, because after all, nothing happened, and even the best huntsman’s instinct may play tricks on him. And you think the second question is: Were you Krisztina’s lover? Did you betray me, as the phrase goes, and did she betray me, in the usual wretched sense of the word? No, my friend, neither of these questions interests me anymore. You have answered them yourself, time has answered them since, even Krisztina answered them in her fashion. I have all your answers. You gave yours when you fled the town the day after the hunt and abandoned the colors, as men used to say when they still believed in the true meaning of those words. I’m not asking that question, because I know for certain that you wanted to kill me that morning. I’m not accusing you-in fact, I sympathize with you. It must be a terrible moment when a man is driven to pick up a gun and kill the person closest to him out of whatever sense of need. That’s what happened to you in that second. You don’t dispute it? … You have nothing to say? It’s too dark for me to see your face, but it hardly makes sense to send for fresh candles now, the time for revenge has come and we can understand and recognize each other even in the shadows. The time has come and we need to get through it. All these years I have never doubted that you wanted to kill me, and I’ve always pitied you. I know what you felt so exactly that I could have been standing in your place during that terrible instant when you were overwhelmed. Night had not yet given up its terrors, the underworld still had an open gateway into our world of day, dawn was just about to break, and for a moment you were transported right out of yourself Such a terrifying temptation.

I recognize it. But that’s all the stuff of a police report, do you see?

… What would I do with the kind of facts required for a day in court, when mine are in my heart and in my head? What would I do with memories of some musty alcove, the sultry secrets of a bachelor’s apartment or the decayed remains of an adultery or the intimate memories of a dead woman and two old men stumbling toward the grave? What a poor, pathetic trial it would be, if now, at the end of our lives, I wanted to take you to court for adultery and attempted murder and I tried to force a confession out of you at a point when the law would regard the act or the not-quite-act as having long since passed the statute of limitations? It would be mortifying, and unworthy of both of us and our youth and our friendship. And perhaps it would make you feel better to recount it all, or what facts there are to recount. But I don’t want you to feel better,” he says calmly. “I want the truth, and that doesn’t lie in a few long-out-of-date facts and the private passions and errors of the body of a woman long dead and turned to dust … What is all that to me anymore, me the husband, you the lover, now that her body no longer exists and we have grown old? We will talk these things through once more, try to establish the truth and then go to our deaths, I in this house, you somewhere else, in London or the tropics. At the end of our lives, what do truth and falsehood count, or deceit, betrayal, attempted murder, or actual murder, or the question of where, when, and how often wife, the love and hope of my life, betrayed me with my closest friend?

You talk about all these sad and demeaning things, you admit everything, you tell exactly how it began, what kind of envy, jealousy, anxiety, and sadness drove you into each other’s arms, what you felt when you embraced her, what feelings of guilt and revenge filled Krisztina’s body and mind all those years … you could d o all that, but what would any of it be worth? At the end it all becomes very simple, what was and what might have been. What was once is not even dust and ashes now. What once made our hearts burn until we thought we would either die or have to kill someone-and I know that feeling, I, too, knew that terrible temptation, shortly after you left, when I was alone with Krisztina-all that is less than the dust the wind blows across the graveyards. It is humiliating and pointless even to mention it. And anyway, I know it all so exactly that I might have read it in a police report. I could recite you the trial evidence like a lawyer at the hearing: And then? What would I do with the secrets of a body that no longer exists? What is fidelity, what do we expect of the woman we love? I am old, and I have thought a great deal about this too. Is the idea of fidelity not an appalling egoism and also as vain as most other human concerns? When we demand fidelity, are we wishing for the other person’s happiness? And if that person cannot be happy in the subtle prison of fidelity, do we really prove our love by demanding fidelity nonetheless? And if we do not love that person in a way that makes her happy, do we have the right to expect fidelity or any other sacrifice? Now, in my old age, I would not dare answer these questions as unequivocally as I would have done forty-one years ago, when Krisztina left me alone in your apartment, where she had been so often before me, where you had assembled all those objects in order to receive her, where two people close to me betrayed and deceived me so vulgarly, so ignominiously, and-as I realize now-with such banality. That is what happened.” His voice is indifferent, almost bored.

“And what people call ‘,’ the sad and banal rebellion of a body against a situation and a third person-in retrospect is almost alarmingly a matter of indifference, almost the source of pity like a quarrel or an accident. I did not understand this back then. I stood in your secret apartment as if I were taking in the details of a crime, I stared at the furniture, the French bed … When one is young and one’s own wife deceives one with the only friend who is closer than a brother, it is natural to feel that the world has crashed around one. It is inevitable, because jealousy, disappointment, and vanity are all excruciating. But it passes … not consciously, and not from one day to the next. Years later, the fury is still there-and yet finally it is over, just as life will be one day. I went back to the castle, to my room, and waited for Krisztina. I waited to kill her or to have her tell me the truth so that I could forgive her. I waited until evening, then I went to the hunting lodge, because she had not come. Which was perhaps childish … Now, looking back, when I want to pass judgment on myself and others, I see this pride, this waiting, this departure, as somewhat childish. But that’s how things are, do you see, and neither reason nor experience can do much to change one’s stubborn nature. You, too, must know this now.

“I went to the hunting lodge not far from the house-you know it well-and I did not see Krisztina for eight years. The first time I saw her again one morning was as a corpse, when Nini sent word that I could return to the house because she was dead. I knew that she was ill, and as far as I know she was taken care of by the best doctors, who came and stayed here in the castle for months and did everything to save her. As they put it, “We have done everything within the scope of modern medicine.’ Those are just words. They apparently did everything within their erratic knowledge and the limits of their vanity. Every evening for eight years, I was informed of what was going on in the castle, both before Krisztina was ill and then later, when she decided to become ill and die. I do believe such things can be decided-and now I am quite certain of it. But I couldn’t help Krisztina because there was an unpardonable secret between us of the kind that it is better not to force open prematurely, because there is no telling what still may be hidden underneath. There are worse things than suffering and death … it is worse to lose one’s self-respect. That was why I was so afraid of the secret between the three of us. Self-respect is the irreplaceable foundation of our humanity; wound it, and the hurt, the damage, is so scalding that not even death can ease the torture. Vanity, you say. Yes, vanity … and yet self-respect is what gives a person his or her intrinsic value.

That is why I so feared this secret, that is why people accept the compromises they do, even cheap and cowardly ones.

“Look around you and you will see nothing but partial solutions: this one leaves the woman he loves out of fear of a secret, that one stays and says nothing and waits unceasingly for an answer … I have seen such things. And I have experienced them, too. It is not cowardice, it is one’s will to life summoning its last line of defense. I went home, I waited until evening, then I moved to the hunting lodge and waited eight years for something, anything: a word, a message. But Krisztina did not come. In a carriage, the journey there from the castle takes two hours.

But to me, these two hours, these twelve miles, were a greater distance in time and space than the tropics to you. That is a given in me, that is how I was raised, that is how things unfolded. Had Krisztina sent a message-any message-her wishes would have been granted. Had she wanted me to fetch you back, I would have set out to search the world for you and bring you back. Had she wanted me to kill you, I would have gone to the ends of the world to find you and kill you. Had she wanted a divorce, I would have given her a divorce. But she wanted nothing.

Because she, too, had a strong personality, as a woman, and she, too, had been wounded by those she loved: by this one because he fled from love, not wishing to be consumed by a fateful liaison; by that one because he knew the truth, waited, and said nothing. Krisztina, too, had character, in a different sense of the word from the one we men use. In those years, you and I were not the only ones to whom things happened: they happened to her, too.

“Destiny brushed against me and fulfilled itself, and all three of us had to bear the brunt. For eight years, I did not see her. For eight years, she did not summon me. Just now, while I was waiting for you so that we could discuss what had to be discussed one day, since there is so little time left, I learned something from my nurse: I learned that Krisztina asked for me when she was on her deathbed. Not for you … And I do not say that with satisfaction-nor without it, either, kindly note.

She asked for me, and that is something, if not much … But she was already dead when I saw her again. Beautiful even in death. Still young, unmarred by solitude, not even illness had touched that special beauty or spoiled the reserve and quiet harmony of her face. But that is not your affair,” he says, suddenly haughty. “You were living out there in the world, Krisztina died. I was living in lonely affront, Krisztina died. She answered both of us in her way; because the dying always give the right and the final answer-sometimes I think they are the only ones who can do that. What else could she have said after eight years except by dying? Who could say more? She had answered all the questions you or I could have put to her, should she have wanted to speak to either of us. The dead give the final answer. She did not want to speak to us.

Sometimes I think that of the three of us, she was the one who was betrayed. Not I, whom she deceived with you; not you, who deceived me with her-deceit, what a word! There is a vocabulary that defines a human situation that is so soulless and mechanical, but when it’s allover, as it is for the two of us now, there is not much we can do with such a vocabulary. Deceit, infidelity, betrayal-mere words, when the person involved is dead and has already addressed their true meaning. Beyond words is the mute reality that Krisztina is dead-and we are still alive.

When I understood this, it was already too late. All that was left was the waiting and the thirst for revenge-and now that the waiting is over and the time for revenge is here, I am amazed to feel how hopeless it all is, and the pointlessness of anything we could learn or admit or fight out between us. I understand the reality. Time is a purgatory that has cleansed all fury from my memories. Now I sometimes see Krisztina again when I’m asleep-and also when I’m awake-walking through the garden with a big straw hat, slender, in a white dress, coming out of the greenhouse or talking to her horse. I see her, I saw her this afternoon while I was waiting for you and fell asleep for a moment. I saw her as I was dozing,” he says shamefaced, an old man. “I saw pictures from long, long ago. And this afternoon my mind grasped what my heart has known for a long time: infidelity, deceit, betrayal-I understood them, and what can I say? … We age slowly. First, our pleasure in life and other people declines, everything gradually becomes so real, we understand the significance of everything, everything repeats itself in a kind of troubling boredom. It’s the function of age. We know a glass is only a glass. A man, poor creature, is only a mortal, no matter what he does.

Then our bodies age: not all at once. First, it is the eyes, or the legs, or the heart. We age by installments. And then suddenly our spirits begin to age: the body may have grown old, but our souls still yearn and remember and search and celebrate and long for joy. And when the longing for joy disappears, all that are left are memories or vanity, and then, finally, we are truly old. One day we wake up and rub our eyes and do not know why we have woken. We know all too well what the day offers: spring or winter, the surface of life, the weather, the daily routine. Nothing surprising can ever happen again: not even the unexpected, the unusual, the dreadful can surprise us, because we know all the probabilities, we anticipate everything, there’s nothing we want anymore, either good or bad. That is old age. There’s still some spark inside us, a memory, a goal, someone we would like to see again, something we would like to say or learn, and we know the time will come, but then suddenly it is no longer as important to learn the truth and answer to it as we had assumed in all the decades of waiting. Gradually we understand the world and then we die. We understand phenomena and the motive forces of men and the sign language of the unconscious. People communicate their thoughts in sign language, have you noticed? As if they were discussing important matters in a foreign language like Chinese, which had to be translated into the language of reality. They have no self-knowledge. All they talk about is what they want, thereby exposing themselves unconsciously in all their hopelessness.

“Life becomes almost interesting once one has learned to recognize people’s lies, and one starts to enjoy the comedy as people keep saying things other than they think and really want … That is how we arrive at the truth, and truth is synonymous with old age and death. But it doesn’t hurt anymore. Krisztina deceived me, what a foolish word! And with you of all people, what a pitiful rebellion! Don’t look at me like that: I’m saying it in sympathy. “Later, when I had more experience and understood everything, because time washed up the telltale flotsam of this shipwreck onto my lonely island, I looked back into the past with pity and saw you two rebels, my wife and my friend, wracked with guilt and self-recrimination, wretchedly unhappy in the heat of your defiant passion, rise up against me, in a life-and-death struggle.

“Poor things! I thought, more than once. And I imagined the details of your rendezvous in a house on the edge of a small town, where secret meetings are almost impossible, being penned together as if onboard a ship, while at the same time being painfully on view. A love that knows no moment of peace, because every step, every glance, is watched with concealed distrust by lackeys, servants, and everyone around you. The trembling, the constant game of hide-and-seek with me, those fifteen stolen minutes under the pretext of a ride or a game of tennis or music, those walks in the forest where my gamekeepers keep watch over every kind of game … I imagine the hatred in your hearts when you think of me, when every step you take brings you up against my authority, the authority of a husband and landowner and aristocrat, against my social and financial ascendancy, against the whole crowd of my servants, and against the strongest force of all: the dependence that forces you to acknowledge, beyond love and hate, that without me you can neither live nor die. You unhappy lovers, you could deceive me, but you could not elude me: I may be a different kind of man, and yet the three of us are as inextricably attached as crystals in the laws of physics. And your hand on the gun goes weak one morning when you want to kill me, for you can no longer bear all this torment, all the hiding, all the misery.

… what else could you do? Run off with Krisztina? You would have to resign your commission, Krisztina is also poor, you cannot accept anything from me. No, you cannot run away with her, you cannot live with her, you cannot marry her, to remain her lover is to be exposed to a danger worse than death, because you must constantly anticipate being denounced and unmasked, you must fear having to fight a duel with me, your friend and your brother. You will not hold out for long against such danger. And so, one day when the time is ripe and somehow palpable between us, you raise your gun; and later, whenever I think of that t moment, I feel genuine pity for you. It must be the hardest and most agonizing of tasks to kill someone dear to you,” he says parenthetically.

“You are not strong enough to do it. Or the ideal moment passes and you can no longer do it. There is such a thing as the perfect moment-time brings things of its own accord, we do not merely insert acts and phenomena into time. A single moment, a particular point in time may offer a possibility-and then it’s gone and there’s nothing more you can do. You let the hand holding the gun drop. And next day you leave for the tropics.”

He inspects his fingernails with care. “But we stay here,” he says, still looking at his fingernails, as if this were the important thing, “we, Krisztina and I, stay here. We are here, and everything comes to light in the secret but orderly way that messages travel between people, in waves, even when nobody mentions the secret or betrays it. Everything comes to light because you have gone away and we have stayed here, alive, I because you missed your moment or your moment missed you-it comes to the same thing-and Krisztina because, first of all, there is nothing else she can do, she has to wait, if only to find out whether we have kept silent, you and I, the two men to whom she is bound and who are avoiding her: she waits to find out the meaning of this silence, and to understand. And then she dies. But I remain here, and I know everything, and yet there is one thing I do not know. And now, the time has come for me to have a response. Answer, please.

“Did Krisztina know, that morning on the hunt, that you wanted to kill me?”

The question is framed matter-of-factly, but there is a pitch of tightly wound curiosity in his voice, like that of children begging the grown-ups to tell them the secrets of the stars and other worlds.