Embers

Chapter 4

The castle was a closed world, like a great granite mausoleum full of the moldering bones of generations of men and women from earlier times, in their shrouds of slowly disintegrating gray silk or black cloth. It enclosed silence itself as if it were a prisoner persecuted for his beliefs, wasting away numbly, unshaven and in rags on a pile of musty rotting straw in a dungeon. It also enclosed memories as if they were the dead, memories that lurked in damp corners the way mushrooms, bats, rats, and beetles lurk in the mildewed cellars of old houses.

Door-latches gave off the traces of a once-trembling hand, the excitement of a moment long gone, so that even now another hand hesitated to press down on them. Every house in which passion has loosed itself on people in all its fury exudes such intangible presences.

The General looked at the portrait of his mother. He knew every feature of the narrow, fine-boned face. The eyes gazed down through time with sad and somnolent disdain. It was the look with which women of.

earlier era had mounted the scaffold, scorning both those for whom they were giving their lives and those who were taking their lives from them.

His mother’s family owned a castle in Brittany, by the sea. The General must have been about eight years old the summer he was taken there. By this time they were able to travel by train, albeit very slowly. The suitcases in their linen covers embroidered with his mother’s initials swayed in the luggage nets. In Paris, it was raining. The child sat in a carriage upholstered in blue silk, looking through the hazy glass of the windows at the city glistening in the raindrops like the slippery underbelly of a great fish. He saw the rearing outlines of roofs and great chimneys that slanted up against the dirty curtains of wet sky, seeming to prophesy the secret truths of unfamiliar and unknowable fates. Women walked laughing through the downpour, lifting their skirts with one hand, their teeth glinting as if the rain, the strange city, and the French language were something both wonderful and comic that only the child failed to comprehend. He was eight years old and sat gravely in the coach beside his mother, facing the maid and the governess, sensing that some task had been imposed Everyone’s eyes were on him, the little savage from a faraway country, from the forest with the bears. He articulated his French words with circumspect deliberation and care. He was aware that now that he spoke for his father, the castle, the hounds, the forest and the entire homeland he had left behind. A great gate opened, the carriage entered a large courtyard, French servants made their bows in front of a broad staircase. It all felt a little hostile. He was led through rooms in which everything occupied its own painfully meticulous and intimidating space. In the large salon on. the second floor he was received by his French grandmother. Her eyes were gray and there was a black shadow on her upper lip; her hair, which must once have been red but now was a dirty non-color, as if time itself had forgotten to wash it, was piled on her head. She kissed the child and with her bony white hands tilted his head back a little so that she could gaze down into his face. “Tout de męme,”

she said to his mother, who was standing beside him anxiously, as if he were taking an examination that was about to reveal something.

Later, lime-blossom tisane was brought. Everything smelled so strange that the child felt faint. Round about midnight he began to weep and vomit. “I want Nini,” he cried, his voice choked with sobs as he lay in bed, deathly pale. Next day, he was running a high fever and was incoherent. Solemn doctors arrived wearing black frock coats with watch chains fixed into the middle button-hole of their white waistcoats; as they bent over the child, their beards and clothes exuded the same smell as the furnishings of the palace, which was also the smell of his grandmother’s hair and the smell on her breath. He thought he would die if the smell didn’t go away. By the end of the week his fever still had not abated and his pulse was weakening. That was when they telegraphed for Nini.

It took four days for the nurse to reach Paris. The muttonchop-whiskered majordomo failed to recognize her at the station, and so she set off on foot to the palace, carrying her traveling bag made of crochet work. She arrived like a migrating bird. She spoke no French, she did not know the streets, and she was never able to explain how in the middle of the strange city she had found the palace and her sick charge. She came into the room and lifted the dying child out of his bed; his body was no longer moving, only his eyes glittered. She set him in her lap, held him tight in her arms and gently began to rock him. On the third day he was given extreme unction. That evening, Nini came out of the sickroom and said in Hungarian to the Countess, “I think he is going to pull through.”

She shed no tears, she was merely exhausted after six nights without sleep. She took some food from out of the crocheted bag and began to eat. For six days she kept the child alive by the power of her breath.

The Countess kneeled outside the door, weeping and praying. Everyone was with her-the French grandmother, the servants, a young priest with slanted eyebrows who came and went at all hours.

The doctors’ visits tapered off. The mother left for Brittany, taking Nini, but leaving the grandmother behind in Paris, shocked and hurt. 0f course, nobody uttered a word about the cause of the illness, but everybody knew: the boy need love, and when all the strangers had bent over him and. the unbearable smell had surrounded him on all sides, he had chosen death. In Brittany the wind sang and the waves churned against the age-old rocks. Red cliffs rose up out of the sea. Nini, calm and assured, smiled at the ocean and the sky as if they were already familiar to her. The four corners of the castle were surmounted by ancient turrets of undressed stone from which the Countess’s ancestors had kept watch against Surcouf the pirate. The boy was soon brown from the sun and full of laughter. He was no longer afraid: he knew that the two of them, he and Nini, were the strong ones. They sat on the sand, the frills on Nini’s dress blew in the wind, and everything smelled of salt, not just the air but the flowers, too. When the tide went out in the mornings, they found sea spiders with hairy legs in the crevices of the red rocks, and crabs with red stomachs and star-shaped jelly fish.

In the castle courtyard there was an incredibly ancient fig tree that looked like some oriental sage who only had the simplest of stories left to tell. Its leaves made a thick canopy for the cool, sweet air underneath.

In the middle of the day, when the sea was no more than a muffled grumble, the nurse would sit here quietly with the child.

“I want to be a poet,” the boy said once, glancing up obliquely.

He stared at the sea, his blond curls stirring in the warm wind and his eyes, half-closed, interrogating the horizon. The nurse put her arms around him and squeezed his head against her breast. “No, you’re going to be a soldier.”

“Like Father?” The child shook his head. “Father is a poet too, didn’t you know? He’s always thinking about something else.” “That’s true,”

said the nurse with a sigh. “Don’t go into the sun, my angel, it’ll give you a headache.”

They sat for a long time under the fig tree, listening to the familiar roaring of the sea. It was the same sound made by the forest back home.

The child and the nurse thought about the world and how everything in it is related. ~B

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