Flight Without End

XXII

At that time I was living in Berlin. One day M. said to me: ‘I ran into Irene Hartmann. I greeted her. But she did not recognize me. I turned back, thinking I might have made a mistake, and greeted her again. But she did not recognize me.’

‘You’re sure you weren’t mistaken?’

‘Yes!’ said M.

I thereupon wrote to Franz Tunda.

‘Dear friend,’ I wrote, ‘I am not sure that I understand the reasons for your return. Perhaps you don’t know yourself. But if it is because you want to find Irene, Herr M. came across her in Berlin recently.’

Tunda arrived a few days later.

I liked him enormously.

It takes a long time for men to acquire their particular countenances. It is as if they were born without their faces, their foreheads, their noses or their eyes. They acquire all these with the passage of time, and one must be patient; it takes time before everything is properly assembled. Tunda had only now achieved his countenance. His right eyebrow was higher than the left. This gave him an expression of permanent surprise, of a man arrogantly astonished at the singular circumstances of this world; he had the face of a very aristocratic man compelled to sit at table with ill-mannered persons and observing their conduct with condescending, patient but in no way indulgent curiosity. His glance was at once shrewd and tolerant. He had the look of a man who puts up with much suffering in order to gain experience. He seemed so sagacious that one might almost take him for benevolent. But, in reality, he seemed to me already to possess that degree of sagacity that makes a man truly indifferent.

‘Then you want to see Irene?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When I got your letter I wanted to see her. Now I feel less certain about it again. Maybe it would be enough just to look at her and then go away satisfied.’

‘Let’s assume that you do meet up with her. She is happily married, probably loves her husband with the kind of love which is composed of habit, gratitude, shared experiences — the physical experience that results from many hours of intimacy — occasional eruptions of passion, the familiarity that no longer has a place for modesty. Do you believe that she would fling her arms around your neck simply out of the grateful recollection of an engagement which didn’t come off? Do you love her with the passion to which she would be entitled? Above all, would it be what you really want?’

‘These are things,’ said Tunda, ‘which have to happen before I can tell whether there is any basis for them. If I had gone straight home to Irene, my life would have taken another turn. A chain of circumstances prevented me from doing so. I will admit to you that I reproach myself. I reproach myself for having submitted to circumstances without putting up a fight. I now feel that I must seek out Irene in order to rehabilitate myself. The fact is that I don’t know what I should do. Should one not have an aim in life?’

‘An aim in life,’ I replied, ‘is always better than a so-called ideal.’

‘Always better,’ said Tunda, ‘if it is really an aim.’

We discovered that Irene had stayed at the Bellevue Hotel for three weeks and had then left for Paris.

‘I shall go there,’ said Tunda.