Embers

Chapter 2

Nini was ninety-one years old. She came at once. rocked the General in his cradle in this room-had stood in this room as the General was. She had been sixteen then, and very beautiful. Small, but so well-muscled and calm that her, possessed of a secret, as if her bones, her blood concealed within them some essence, secret that could neither be told nor translated into any language, since it words. She was the daughter of the village postmaster, she was sixteen when she gave birth to a child, and no one ever discovered the identity of the father. When her father beat her and threw her out of the house, she came to the castle and suckled the newborn child, because her milk was plentiful.

She came with no possessions other than the dress on her back and a lock of hair, tucked in an envelope, from her dead baby. That was how she presented herself at the castle. She came in time for the birth. The General had his first taste of milk at Nini’s breast.

So she lived in the castle silently for seventy-five years. Silent and smiling. Her name flew through the rooms as if the inhabitants of the castle were trying to draw one another’s attention to something. “Nini,”

they said, as if to say, “How extraordinary that there’s more in the world than egoism, passion, vanity. Nini … ” And because she was always in the right place, nobody ever saw her; and because she was always good-humored, nobody ever asked her how it was that she could always be good-humored when the man she loved had abandoned her and the child who should have drunk her milk was dead. She suckled the General and raised him, and seventy-five years went by. From time to time the sun shone over the castle and the family, and at such moments of universal well-being people were surprised to notice that Nini was smiling too.

Then the Countess, the General’s mother, died, and Nini took a cloth soaked in vinegar and washed the cold, white, sweat-streaked forehead of the corpse. And then one day they brought the father of the General back home on a stretcher, for he had fallen from his horse. He lived for another five years, and Nini took care of him. She read French books aloud to him, saying each letter because she couldn’t speak the language, and stringing them together until the invalid made sense of them. Then the General got married, and when the couple returned from their honeymoon, Nini was standing waiting for them at the entrance. She kissed the hand of the new countess and offered her roses, again with a smile. It was a moment that the General remembered from time to time.

Then after twelve years the new countess died, and Nini tended the grave and the clothes of the dead woman.

She had neither rank nor title in the household. Everyone simply recognized her strength. Aside from the General, nobody knew that she was over ninety. It was never a topic of conversation. Nini’s was a power that surged through the house, the people in it, the walls, the objects, the way some invisible galvanic current animates Punch and the Policeman on the stage at a little traveling puppet show. Sometimes people had the feeling that the house and its contents could, like ancient fabrics, fall apart at a touch and crumble to nothing if Nini were not there to hold them together with her strength. After his wife died, the General went on a long journey. When he returned a year later, he moved into his mother’s room in the old wing of the castle. The new wing, in which he had lived with his wife, the brilliantly colored salons with their French silk wall-coverings already fraying, the great reception room with its fireplace and its books, the staircase with its antlers, stuffed grouse, and mounted chamois heads, the large dining room with its view from the window down the valley and over the little town to the distant silver-blue shapes of the mountains, his wife’s room and his own bedroom next door, were all closed and locked at his orders.

For thirty-two years following the death of his wife and his return from abroad, the only people to enter these rooms were Nini and the servants when they cleaned them every two months.

“Sit down, Nini,” said the General. The nurse sat down. In the last year she had become old. After reaching ninety, one ages differently from the way one aged at fifty or sixty: one ages without bitterness. Nini’s face was rose pink and crumpled-such is the way noble fabrics age, and centuries-old silks that hold woven in their threads the assembled skills and dreams of an entire family. The previous year she had developed a cataract in one eye, leaving it gray and sad. The other eye had remained blue, the timeless blue of a mountain lake in August, and it smiled. Nini was dressed as always in dark blue, dark-blue felt skirt, simple blouse. As if she hadn’t had any new clothes made in the last seventy-five years.

“Konrad has written,’ said the General, holding up the letter. “Do you remember?” “Yes,” said Nini. She remembered it all. “He’s here in the town,” said the General very quietly, the way one conveys a piece of information that is of utmost importance and extremely confidential.

“He’s staying at the White Eagle. He’s coming here tonight, I’m sending the carriage to bring him. He will dine here.” “Where here?” asked Nini calmly, allowing her blue eye, the living, smiling eye, to cast its gaze around the room.

For the last twenty years, no one had been received here. The visitors who sometimes arrived at lunchtime, gentlemen from the regional government and the city council, or guests who had come for one of the great shoots, were received by the steward in the hunting lodge that was kept ready no matter what the time of year; everything was organized for their welcome: bedchambers, bathrooms, kitchen, the large informal hunter’s dining room, the open veranda, the rustic wooden tables. On such occasions the steward presided the head of the table and extended hospitality to hunters and officials in the name of the General. Nobody was in any way offended by this, everyone that the master of the house did not appear in public. The only person to enter the castle was the who came once a year, in winter, to inscribe in chalk the initials of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar on the doorframe. The priest, who had presided at the funerals of the family. Aside from him, no one. Ever.

“The other side,” said the General. “Can that be done?” “We cleaned it a month ago,” said the nurse, “so it surely can be done.” “Eight o’clock.

Can it be done? … ” he asked again anxiously, in an almost childlike way, leaning forward in his chair. “In the great dining hall. It’s noon already.”

“Noon,” said the nurse. “I will give the instructions. Air the rooms until six o’clock, then set the table.” She moved her lips silently, as if counting up the time and the tasks to be completed, then said yes with quick confidence.

Still leaning forward, the General watched her closely. Their two lives were slowly trundling and bumping along their way, inextricably linked in the rhythms of great old age. Each knew everything about the other, more than mother and child, more than husband and wife. The intimacy that bound them was closer than any physical bond. Perhaps it was a matter of mother’s milk. Perhaps because Nini had been the first person to see the General as he was born, at the moment of his delivery, in the blood and slime that accompany all mankind into the world. Perhaps because of the seventy-five years they had lived under the same roof, eating the same food, breathing the same air, sharing slightly musty atmosphere of the house and the same view of the trees outside the windows. And all of it lay too deep for words. They were neither brother and sister nor lovers … But there are other ties, numinous ones, and of these they were aware. There is a kind of consanguinity both closer and more powerful than that of twins in a mother’s womb. Life had melded their days and their nights, each knew the other’s body just as each knew the other’s dreams. The nurse said, “Do it to be the way it used to be?” “Yes,” said the General. “Exactly the same. The way it was last time.”

“Very well,” was all she said.

She went to him, bent down to his old man’s hand — its age spots, its knotted veins and its signet ring, and kissed it.

“Promise me you won’t get upset,” she said. “I promise.” was the General’s soft and docile reply.