Embers

Chapter 5

It is the kind of idea that comes later to most people. Decades pass, one walks through a darkened room in which someone has died, and suddenly one recalls long forgotten words and the roar of the sea. It’s as if those few words had captured the whole meaning of life, but afterwards one always talks about something else.

When they made the journey home from Brittany in the fall, the Officer of the Guards was waiting for them in Vienna. The child was enrolled in the military academy. He received a little sword, long trousers, and a shako. The sword was buckled onto him, and on Sundays he and the other cadets were taken for walks along the Graben in their dark-blue tunics.

They looked like children playing soldiers. They wore white gloves and gave charming salutes.

The military academy was situated on a hill just outside Vienna. It was a yellow-painted building, and from the windows on the third floor one could see the old city with its streets running straight as a die, and the Emperor’s summer palace, the roofs of Schonbrunn, and the paths bordered by pleached trees. In the white corridors with their vaulted ceilings, in the classrooms, the dining hall, and the dormitories, everything was so reassuringly there that this seemed to be the only place on earth where every object that otherwise was disorderly or superfluous in life finally was brought into harmony and proper function. The instructors were old officers. Everything smelled of saltpeter. Every dormitory housed thirty children of roughly the same age who slept on narrow iron beds, just like the Emperor. Over the door hung a crucifix decorated with a twig of willow blessed with holy water.

A blue night-light burned in the darkness. In the mornings, they were wakened by a bugle call. In winter, the water in the tin washbasins was sometimes frozen over; when that happened, the adjutants fetched cans of warm water from the kitchen.

They learned Greek, and ballistics, and the proper comportment of a soldier in battle, and history. The child was pale, and coughed. In fall the chaplain took him for a walk each afternoon in Schonbrunn, strolling down the allee. Where a fountain gushed out of crumbling moss-covered moldered stones, the water made a stream of gold in the sun. They walked between the rows of pleached trees, the boy conscious of his bearing, raising his white gloved hand in a stiff, correct salute to the veterans who came by in their dress uniforms as if every day were the Emperor’s birthday. Once, a woman came from the opposite direction, head bare, a white lace parasol on her shoulder; she was walking rapidly, and as she passed them the chaplain bowed deeply.

“The Empress,” he whispered to the child. The woman was very pale and she wore her heavy black hair in a plait that was wound three times round her head. She was followed, three steps behind, by a lady dressed in black and a little hunched, as if she were exhausted by the pace that had been set.

“The Empress,” the chaplain said again, reverently. The child looked after the tall lady who was almost running down the allee of the great park as if she were fleeing something. “She looks like Mama,” said the child, thinking of the portrait that hung in his father’s study over the table.

“One may not say such things,” replied the chaplain reproachfully.

From morning until night, they learned what may and may not be said. The academy with its four hundred pupils was like an infernal machine whose silence presages the explosion to come. They had all been gathered here, the sandy-haired snub-nosed boys with limp white hands from Czech palaces, boys from Moravian estates, boys from fortresses in Tyrol and hunting lodges in Steiermark, from shuttered palaces in Vienna and country seats in Hungary. All of them bore long names with many consonants and Christian names, titles, and indicators of rank, which had to be given up and handed over in the cloakroom of the academy along with the beautifully tailored civilian clothes made in Vienna and London and the fine underwear from Holland. All that was left was a name and the child belonging to that name, who now must learn what may and may not be said. There were young Slavs with narrow foreheads, whose blood mingled all the human particularities of the Empire, there were blue-eyed weary ten-year-old aristocrats who stared into the distance as if their ancestors had already done all their seeing for them, and there was a Tyrolean duke who shot himself at the age of twelve because he was in love with his cousin.

Konrad slept in the next bed. They were ten years old when they met.

He was squarely built and yet thin, in the manner of those ancient races in which the building of bone mass has taken precedence over the flesh.

He was slow moving but not lazy, and he had a rhythm-self-aware yet reserved-all his own. His father, an official in Galicia, had been made a baron; his mother was Polish. When he laughed, his mouth became wide and childlike, giving a slightly Slav cast to his face. But he laughed seldom. He was silent and watchful.

From the first moment, they lived together like twins in their mother’s womb. For this they had no need of one of those pacts of the kind that is common among boys of their age, who swear friendship with comical solemn rituals and the sort of portentous intensity invoked by people when for the first time they experience, in unconscious and distorted form, the need to remove another human being from the world, body and soul, and make him uniquely theirs. For that is the hidden force within both friendship and love. Their friendship was deep and wordless, as are all the emotions that will last a lifetime. And like all great emotions, this one contained within itself both shame and a sense of guilt, for no one may isolate one of his fellows from the rest of humanity with impunity.

They knew from the first moment that their meeting would impose upon them lifetime obligations. The young Hungarian boy was tall and slender in those days, and frail, and received weekly visits from the doctor.

There was concern about his lungs. At the request of the head of the academy, a colonel from Moravia, the Officer of the Guards came to Vienna for a long conference with the doctors. In all their pronouncements he understood one single word: “Danger.” The boy is not really ill, they said, but he has a predisposition to illness. “There’s a danger,” was the gist of it. The Officer of the Guards had gone to the King of Hungary Hotel in a dark side street in the shadow of St.

Stephen’s Cathedral; his grandfather had stayed there before him. The corridors were hung with antlers. The hotel manservant bowed and kissed the Officer’s hand in greeting. The Officer took two large, dark, vaulted rooms filled with furniture upholstered in yellow silk, and brought the child to stay with him for the duration of his visit; they lived together in the hotel, where above every door stood the names of favorite regular guests, as if the place were a worldly retreat for lonely servants of the monarchy.

In the mornings they took the carriage and drove out to the Prater. It was the beginning of November and the air was already cool. In the evenings they went to the theater, where heroes gesticulated and declaimed on stage before throwing themselves on their swords and expiring with a death rattle. Afterwards, they ate in a private room in a restaurant, attended by countless waiters. The child sat wordlessly beside his father, conducting himself with precocious good breeding, as if there were something he must bear and forgive.

“They talk about danger,” his father said, half to himself, after dinner was over and he was lighting himself a thick black cigar. “If you like, you can come home. But I would prefer it if no danger had the power to make you afraid.”

“I’m not afraid, Father,” said the child. “But I would like to have Konrad stay with us always. They’re poor. I would like him to spend his summers with us.” “Is he your friend?” asked his father?”

“Yes.” “Then he is my friend too,” said his father seriously.

He was wearing tails and a shirt with a pleated front. In recent times he had set aside his uniform. The boy fell silent, relieved. His father’s word was to be trusted. Wherever they went in Vienna, no matter to which shop, he was known: at the tailor’s, the glover’s, the shirtmaker’s, in restaurants where imposing maîtres d’hotel reigned over the tables and on the street, where gentlemen and ladies waved to him warmly from their carriages.

“Are you going to the Emperor?” the child asked one day shortly before his father was due to depart.

“The King,” his father corrected him severely. Then he said, “I don’t go to him anymore,” and the boy understood that something must have happened between the two of them. On the day his father was leaving, he introduced Konrad to his father. The evening before, he had fallen asleep with a pounding heart: it was like a betrothal.” One may not mention the King in his presence ” he warned his friend. But his father was amiable, the perfect gentleman. He welcomed Konrad — with one single handshake.

From that day on, the boy coughed less. He was no longer alone. To be alone among people was unbearable to him.

Everything-his life at home, the forest, Paris, his mother’s temperament-had fed into his very bloodstream the tendency never to speak of whatever caused him pain but to bear it in silence. He had learned that words are best avoided. But he could not live without love, either, and that was also part of his inheritance. Perhaps it was his French mother who had brought with her the yearning to share her feelings if even with only one other human being. In his father’s family, one never spoke of such things. The boy needed someone to love, whether it be Nini or Konrad. His fever went away, as did his cough, and his thin pale child’s face flushed with delight and rewarded trust. They were at an age when boys have not yet developed any pronounced sexual identity: it is as if they have not yet chosen. He hated his soft blond hair, because he considered it girlish, and he had the barber cut it short every two weeks. Konrad was more masculine, more composed.

Childhood was no longer a cramped place, it no longer intimidated them, because they were no longer alone.

At the end of the first summer, when the boys climbed into the carriage for the journey back to Vienna, the French maman stood in the gateway of the castle, looking after them. Then she smiled and said to Nini, “At last-a happy marriage!”

But Nini didn’t smile back. Each summer, the boys arrived together.

Later they also spent Christmas at the castle. Everything they had was the same: clothes, underwear, they slept in the same room, they read the same books, together they discovered Vienna and the forest, books and hunting, riding and the military virtues, the life of society and love.

Nini worried, and perhaps she was also a little jealous. When the friendship was four years old, the boys began to shut themselves off from other people and to have their own secrets. The relationship steadily deepened, and also became more hermetic. The boy made clear that he wished he could present Konrad to the whole world as his own creation, his masterpiece, yet at other times he watched over him jealously, afraid that someone could rob him of the person he loved.

“It’s too much,” said Nini to his mother. “One day Konrad will leave him, and he will suffer dreadfully.” “That is our human fate,” said his mother. She was sitting at her mirror, staring at her fading beauty.

“One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy.”

In the academy, the boys’ friendship soon ceased to be a subject for mockery; it became accepted as a natural phenomenon. They were given a single name, “the Henriks,” like a married couple, but nobody laughed at the relationship; there was some quality-a gentleness, a seriousness, an unconditional generosity-that radiated from it and silenced all tormentors. All societies recognize these relationships instinctively and envy them; men yearn for disinterested friendship and usually they yearn in vain. The boys in the academy took refuge in family pride or in their studies, in precocious debauchery or physical prowess, in the confusions of premature and painful infatuations. In this emotional turbulence the friendship between Konrad and Henrik had the glow of a quiet and ceremonial oath of loyalty in the Middle Ages. Nothing is so rare in the young as a disinterested bond that demands neither aid nor sacrifice. Boys always expect a sacrifice from those who are the standard-bearers of their hopes. The two friends felt that they were living in a miraculous and unnamable state of grace.

There is nothing to equal the delicacy of such a relationship.

Everything that life has to offer later, sentimental yearnings or raw desire, intense feelings and eventually the bonds of passion, will all be coarser, more barbaric. Konrad was as serious and as discreet at the age of ten as a full-grown man. As the boys grew older and more aware and tried to put on airs and uncover the grown-ups’ secrets, Konrad made his friend swear that they would remain chaste. They remained true to this vow for a long time. It was not easy. Every two weeks they went to confession with a list they had compiled together of their sins. Carnal appetites were stirring in blood and nerves, the boys were pale, as the seasons changed they felt dizzy. But they remained chaste, as if their friendship, which lay like a magic cape over their young lives, was a replacement for everything that tormented the others in their curiosity and restlessness and drove them toward the darker, lower sides of life.

They lived in a discipline whose roots were deep in centuries-old experience and practice. Every morning they fenced for an hour in the academy gymnasium, bare-chested with masks and bandages. Then they went riding. Henrik was a good horseman, Konrad struggled desperately to keep his seat and his balance, having no inherited physical skill in the saddle. Henrik learned easily, Konrad with difficulty, but whatever he learned he husbanded with almost desperate zeal; he seemed to know that this would be his on possession. In society, Henrik moved with easy grace and the inner assurance of one whom nothing can surprise; Konrad was awkward and excessively correct. One summer when they were already young men, they traveled to Galicia to visit Konrad’s parents. The Baron, a bald, modest old man, worn down by forty years of service in the province and the disappointed social ambitions of his aristocratic Polish wife, endeavored with perplexed eagerness to entertain the young men. The town was depressing with its old towers, its fountain in the center of the rectangular main square, and its dark, vaulted interiors.

The inhabitants-Ukrainians, Germans, Jews, Russians-lived in a kind of turmoil that was continually being smothered and contained by the authorities; something seemed to be fermenting in the dimly lit, airless apartments, some uprising or perhaps just an ongoing seditious muttering and wretched discontent, or perhaps not even that, merely the uneasy disorder and permanent restlessness of a caravanserai. It made itself felt in the houses, in the streets, in the entire public life of the town. Only the cathedral with its great tower and its broad arches soared calmly over the hubbub of calls and yells and whispers, as if a single law had once solemnly imposed itself-irreversibly, incontrovertibly, conclusively — on the community. The youths were staying at the inn, for the Baron’s apartment contained only three small rooms. The first evening, after the elaborate dinner with its rich meat dishes and heavy aromatic wines, which Konrad’s father, the elderly official, and his sad Polish wife-who had painted her face with lilac shadows and powdered blush to overcome her faded looks until she took on the air of a tropical bird-had had served in the humble apartment with touching solicitude, as if the fortunes of their son, who so rarely returned home, depended on the quality of the meal, the young officers returned to their Galician guesthouse and sat for a long time in a dark corner of the dining room with its dust-covered ornamental palms.

“Now you have seen them,” said Konrad.

“Yes,” said the son of the Officer of the Guards, conscience-stricken “So now you know,” the other replied, softly and earnestly. “Now you can have some idea of what has been done here for the last twenty-two years for my sake.”

“Yes,” said the son of the Officer of the Guards, and something in his throat tightened.

“Every pair of gloves,” said Konrad, “that I have to buy when we all go to the Burg Theater, comes from here. If I need a new bridle, they do not eat meat for three days. If I leave a tip at an evening party, my father gives up his cigars for a week. That is how it has been for twenty-two years. And I have never lacked for anything. Somewhere, far away in Poland, we had a farmstead. I have never seen it. It belonged to my mother. It was the source of everything: the uniform, school fees, the money for theater tickets, the bouquet I sent to your mother when she passed through Vienna, the entry fees for exams, the costs of the duel I had to fight with that Bavarian. Twenty-two years-all of it.

First, they sold the furniture, then the garden, then the surrounding land, then the house. Then, they sacrificed their health, their comfort, their peace, their old age, and my mother’s social ambition, which was to have an extra room in this rat-hole of a town, a room with nice furniture where they could receive people from time to time. Do you understand?” “I ask your pardon,” said Henrik, white and shaken.

“I am not angry at you,” said his friend with emphatic seriousness. “I only wanted you to see it all once, and understand. When the Bavarian came at me with his drawn sword and started lunging and feinting in all directions like a lunatic, as if he were entertaining himself and as if our attempts to slash and cripple each other out of pure vanity were nothing but a huge joke, I suddenly saw my mother’s face, saw her walking to the market every day for fear that the cook might over-charge her by two fillers, because at the end of a year the two fillers all add up to five florins, which she can send me in an envelope … and I literally wanted to kill the Bavarian who wanted to injure me out of sheer bravado, and had no idea that anything he might do to me would be a mortal offense against two people in Galicia who have sacrificed their lives for me without a word. When I’m staying with you and I tip one of the servants, I am expending a portion of their lives. It is very hard to live in such a way,” he said, and blushed.

“Why?” the other asked softly. “Do you not think that it does them good?

Perhaps, for them, perhaps, it does.”

The young man fell silent. He had never spoken about any of this before.

Now, faltering, without looking up, he said, “It is very hard for me to live in this fashion. It is as if I do not belong to myself. If I fall ill, I am hounded by the feeling that I am squandering someone else’s property, something that is not fully mine, namely my health. I am a soldier, I have been trained to kill and be killed. I have sworn an oath. But why have they assumed this whole burden, if I am to be killed?

Do you understand me now? … For twenty-two years they have been living in this town which reeks like some squalid den where passing traders spend the night-a smell of cooking and cheap perfume and sour bedding.

Here they live, and never utter a word of complaint. For twenty-two years my father has not set foot in Vienna, where he was born and brought up. Twenty-two years and never a journey, never a new piece of clothing, never a summer outing, because I must be made into the masterpiece that they in their weakness failed to achieve in their own lives. Sometimes when I am about to do something, my hand stops in midair. This eternal responsibility. I have even wished them dead,” he said very softly.

“Yes,” said Henrik.

They stayed in the town for four days. As they left, for the first time in their lives, they felt that something had come between them. As if one of them were in the other’s debt. It could not be put into words.