Embers

Chapter 9

It was already past seven o’clock when the General came out of his bedroom. Leaning on his ivory-headed cane, he walked with slow, measured steps down the long corridor that linked this wing of the castle, with its private quarters, to the great public rooms, the reception hall, the music room, the salons. The walls of the corridor were hung with old portraits in gold frames: portraits of ancestors, of great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, of friends, of former servants, of regimental comrades and famous guests. It was a tradition in the General’s family to employ a resident artist: sometimes itinerant painters, but sometimes also better-known men, such as the artist from Prague who had spent eight years here during the General’s grandfather’s time and had painted everyone who came within range of his brushes, including the majordomo and the winning racehorses. His great-grandfather and great-grandmother had fallen victim to the attentions of amateur artists indulging their wanderlust, and stared down from the wall in their robes of state. They were followed by a number of serious, composed male figures-contemporaries of the Officer of the Guards, with Hungarian moustaches and curled forelocks, wearing black formal clothes or dress uniforms. It had been a good generation, the General thought, as he looked at the portraits of his father’s relatives, friends, and military comrades. A good generation, a trifle eccentric, not at ease in society, arrogant, but absolutely dedicated to honor, to the male virtues: silence, solitude, the inviolability of one’s word, and women. If they were let down, they remained silent. Most of them were silent for a lifetime, bound to duty and discretion as if by vows. Toward the far end of the corridor were the French portraits, French ladies with powdered hair, fat bewigged gentlemen with sensual lips, distant relations of his mother, unknown faces looming dimly out of their backgrounds of blue, pink, and dove gray. Then the picture of his father in his Guards’

uniform. Then one of the portraits of his mother, in a feathered hat and carrying a whip like an equestrian in a circus. Then a blank space, about a meter square, with a ghostly gray line marking the perimeter where once a picture had hung. The General walked past the empty space impassively and reached the landscapes.

The nurse was standing at the end of the corridor in a black dress with a freshly starched white cap on her head.

“What are you looking at? The pictures?” she asked.

“Don’t you want us to hang the picture back up?” she asked, pointing directly at the blank space on the wall with the bluntness of the very old.

“Is it still here?” the General asked. The nurse nodded.

“No,” he said, after a short pause. Then, softer, “I did not know you had kept it. I thought you had burned it.”

“There is absolutely no sense,” said the nurse in a high, thin voice, “in burning pictures.” “No,” said the General candidly, the way one would talk to one’s nurse and no one else. “That isn’t what matters.”

They turned toward the grand staircase and looked down into the outer hall, where a manservant and the chambermaid were arranging flowers in crystal vases. In the intervening hours the castle had come to life like a device whose mechanism has been wound up and reset: not only the furniture, chairs, and sofas liberated from their linen shrouds, but also the paintings on the walls, the enormous wrought-iron chandeliers, the ornaments in their glass cabinets and on the mantelpieces. Logs were piled in the hearth ready for a fire, for it was the end of summer and after midnight the cold mist spread a damp breath through the rooms. All of a sudden the objects seemed to take on meaning, as if to prove that everything in the world acquires significance only in relation to human activity and human destiny.

They regarded the outer hall, the flowers on the table which had been set down in front of the fireplace, and the arrangement of the armchairs.

“That leather chair stood on the right,” he said. “You remember so clearly?” asked the nurse, her eyes blinking.

“Yes,” he said. “Konrad sat there in it under the clock, by the fire. I sat in the middle, facing the fire, in the Florentine chair, and Krisztina opposite, in the armchair my mother brought with her.” “You’re so exact,” said the nurse.

“Yes.” The General leaned against the banisters, looking down. “In the blue crystal vase there were dahlias. Forty-one years ago.” “You certainly remember.” The nurse sighed.

“I remember,” he said calmly. “Is the table laid with the French porcelain?” “Yes, the flowered service,” said Nini.

“Good.” He nodded, reassured. Now for a time they both stood silently observing the scene that was displayed before them, the great reception room below, the imposing pieces of furniture which had been guarding a memory, a fateful hour, or even a moment, as if until one particular second these dead objects had had no existence beyond the physical properties of wood, metal, and cloth, and then, suddenly, on a single evening forty-one years ago, they had been filled with life and meaning and had acquired a totally new significance. And now, as they sprang to life again like freshly wound automata, these objects were remembering.

“What will you serve our guest?” “Trout,” said Nini. “Soup and trout. A cut of beef and salad. A guinea-fowl. And a flambéed ice. The cook hasn’t made it for more than ten years. But perhaps it will be good,”

she said, worried.

“Make sure it turns out well. Last time there were also crayfish,” he said quietly, apparently directing his words downstairs. “Yes,” said the nurse calmly. “Krisztina liked cray fish, no matter how they were prepared. There were still crayfish in the stream back then. But not anymore. And I cannot send to town for them at this time of night.”

“Pay attention to the wine,” the General murmured conspiratorialy. The nurse instinctively moved closer and bent her head to hear better, in the intimate way that only longtime servants and family members do.

“Have the ‘86 Pommard brought up from the cellar, and some of the Chablis for the fish. And a bottle of the old Mumm, a magnum. Do you remember?”

“Yes.” The nurse thought for a moment. “But all we have left is the brut. Krisztina drank the demi-sec.”

“One mouthful. Always one mouthful with the roast. She didn’t care for champagne.”

“What do you want from this man?” asked the nurse.

“The truth,” said the General. “You know it perfectly well.”

“I do not know it,” he said loudly, untroubled by the fact that the manservant and the chambermaid stopped arranging the flowers and looked up at him. But then they glanced back down and their hands set to work again automatically.

“The truth is precisely what I don’t know.” “But you know the facts,”

said the nurse sharply. “Facts are not the truth,” retorted the General.

“Facts are only one part of it. Not even Krisztina knew the truth.

Perhaps Konrad … And now I am going to get it from him,” he said calmly.

“What are you going to get from him?”

“The truth,” he said abruptly, and then was silent. When the manservant and the chambermaid had left the hall and they were alone up above, the nurse, too, leaned her forearms against the banisters, as if the two of them were standing on a mountaintop admiring the view. Speaking the words down into the room where three people had sat once in front of the fire, she said, “There is something I must tell you. When Krisztina was dying, she called for you.” “Yes,” said the General. “I was there.”

“You were there and yet you weren’t there. You were so far away you might as well have been on a voyage. You were in your room, and she was dying. Alone with me, round about dawn. And then she asked for you. I am telling you this because you should know it this evening.” The General said nothing.

“I think he has arrived.” He straightened up. “Take care of the wines and keep an eye on everything else, Nini.”

There was the sound of gravel crunching in the driveway, followed by the rumble of wheels outside the doors. The General leaned his stick against the banisters and began to descend the staircase to meet his guest. He paused for a moment near the top. “The candles,” he said. “Do you remember? … The blue candles for the table. Do we still have them?

Light them before we sit down, they should be burning during dinner.” “I hadn’t remembered,” said the nurse.

“But I did,” he replied argumentatively.

Solemnly and in elderly dignity, he walked down the staircase, his back ramrod straight in his black evening clothes. The great glass door to the reception had swung open, and there behind the manservant was an old man.

“You see, I have come back again,” the guest said softly.

“I never doubted that you would,” replied the General, as softly, and smiled. They shook hands with great formality.