Embers

Chapter 18

The guest does not move. His elbows are on the chair arms, and he’s holding his head in his hands. Finally, he takes a deep breath, bends forward, and rubs a hand over his brow. He is preparing to speak, but the General cuts him off.

“Forgive me,” he says. “You see, now I’ve said it.” He rushes on, as if to excuse himself. “I needed to say it, and now that I’ve done so I feel that I’m not asking the right question and that I’m making things painfully awkward for you, because you want to tell me the truth but I have phrased the question incorrectly. It sounds like an accusation. And I am obliged to admit that, as the decades passed, I could not shake the suspicion that the moment in the forest at dawn was neither the result of sheer chance nor an opportunistic impulse nor a consequence of urgings from the other world.

“No, what torments me is the suspicion that other moments preceded this one, and that they were moments of absolutely sober calculation in the clear light of day.

“Because when Krisztina learned that you had fled, what she said was, “Coward.’ That was all, and it was the last word I ever heard her utter; it is also her final judgment on you. And I am left with this word.

Coward. Why? … I rack my brains, later, much later. A coward about what? About life? About our life as a trio or about your separate life together? Too much of a coward to die? Too much of a coward to live with Krisztina and too much of a coward to die with her? Not enough will power? … My mind goes around and around. Or too much of a coward about something else? Not life or death or flight or betrayal or stealing Krisztina from me or renouncing her-no, simply to much of a coward to commit a straightforward act worked out in discussions between my wife and my best friend but likely to be uncovered by the police? And did the plan fail because you were too much of coward? … That is the question to which I would like an answer before I die. But I did not ask it correctly just now, forgive me; it’s why I did not allow you to speak when I saw that you wanted to answer me. From the standpoint of humanity and the universe it’s insignificant, but to me it is of capital importance. I am one solitary human being, the person who accused you of cowardice is now mere ashes and dust, and I would like to know, once and for all, what it was that you were too much of a coward to do. Your answer will draw a line under my questions and allow me to know the truth, and if I do not know the absolute truth about this one detail, then I know nothing at all. “For forty-one years my life has been suspended between an everything and a nothing, and the only person who can help me is you. I do not wish to die like this. And it would have been better, and more worthy, if forty-one years ago you had not been a coward, as Krisztina made clear; it would have been more worthy if a bullet had extinguished what time could not, namely the suspicion that the two of you colluded in a plan to murder me but that you were too much of a coward to carry it out. This is what I would like to know.

Everything else is mere words, deceptive shapes: ‘,’ ‘,” ‘,’ ‘,” all of them pale under the intense light of this question, bleached of life like the bodies of the dead or pictures subject to the ravages of time.

None of it interests me anymore, I have no desire to know the truth about your relationship, any of the details, the ” and the ‘.”

I do not care. Between any two people, a woman and a man, the ” and the ” are always so lamentably the same … the entire constellation is despicably straightforward. ” and ‘ that’-something could happen, something did-that is what makes the truth. Finally, there is no sense in investigating the details. But one has an obligation to seek out the essentials, the truth of things, because otherwise, why has one lived at all? Why has one endured these forty-one years? Why, otherwise, would I have waited for you-not in your guise of a faithless brother or a runaway friend but in mine of both judge and victim, expecting the return of the accused? And now the accused is sitting here, and I pose my question, and he wishes to answer. But, have I posed it correctly, have I said everything he needs to know, as both perpetrator and accused, if he is to speak the truth? Because, you know, Krisztina gave her own answer, and I don’t mean the act of dying.

“One day, years after her death, I found the diary bound in yellow velvet that I had searched for that night-the night after the hunt that was the turning point in your life-in the drawer of her desk. The book had vanished, you left the next day, and I never exchanged a word with Krisztina again. Then she died. You were living in some far-off place, and I was living here in this house, because after her death I moved back so that I could live and die in the rooms where I had been born and where my ancestors had lived and died before me. That is how it will be, for things have a rhythm and order of their own, regardless of our wishes. And even the book in its yellow velvet binding, Krisztina’s strange ‘ of honor’ with its alarming evidence of her inner self and her love and her doubts, went on living in its mysterious way, right out there in the open. It lived on, and I found it one day, much later, among her things, in a box in which she had put the ivory miniature of her mother, her father’s signet ring, a dried orchid that I had given her, and this little book tied in a blue ribbon and sealed with her father’s ring.

“Here it is,” he says, pulling it out of his jacket and holding it out to his friend. “This is what remains of Krisztina. I have never cut the ribbon, because she left no written authorization for me to do so, and so I had no means to know whether her confession from the other side of the grave was addressed to me or to you. It is to be assumed that the book contains the truth, because Krisztina never lied.” His voice is severe, and respectful.

But his friend does not reach for the book. Head in hands, he sits motionless, staring at the thin, yellow-velvet-bound book with the blue ribbon and the blue-wax seal. His body is absolutely still; not even an eyelid flickers.

“Would you like us to read Krisztina’s message together?” asks the General.

“No,” says Konrad. “Would you not like to, or would you not dare to?”

the General says with the cold arrogance of a superior officer addressing his junior.

Their eyes meet over the book and stay locked. The General keeps holding it out to Konrad, and there is no tremor in his hand. “I decline to answer this question,” says the guest. “I understand,” says the General, and in his voice there is a strange hint of satisfaction.

With an almost lazy gesture, he throws the little book into the embers of the fire, which begins to glow darkly as it receives its sacrifice, then slowly absorbs it in a welling haze of smoke as tiny flames lick up out of the ashes. They sit and watch, still as statues, as the fire comes to life, flares as if in pleasure at the unexpected booty, then begins to pant and gnaw at it until suddenly the flames burst upwards, the wax seal is melted, the yellow velvet burns in an acrid cloud, and the pages, aged to the color of ancient parchment, are riffled by an unseen hand; there, suddenly, in the blaze is Krisztina’s handwriting, the spiky letters once set on paper by fingers now long since dead, and then letters, paper, book, all turn to ashes like the hand that once inscribed them. All that is left in the embers is ash, black ash, with the sheen of a mourning veil of watered silk.

They watch, wordless, the play of light on the blackness of the ash.

“And now,” says the General, “you may answer my question. There are no witnesses anymore who could testify against you. Did Krisztina know that you wanted to kill me that day in the forest? Will you give me an answer?”

“No, I shall no longer answer that question either,” said Konrad.

“Good,” says the General dully, almost with indifference.