Embers

Chapter 12

“After you went away,” says the General amicably, as if the essentials, the dangerously loaded subjects, had now been disposed of and the two men were simply chatting, “we kept believing you would come back.

Everybody here was waiting for you. Everybody was your friend. You were, if you will permit me, an eccentric. We forgave you because we knew that music was all-important to you. We didn’t understand why you went away, but we came to terms with it, because you must have had good reason. We knew that everything was harder for you than it was for us real soldiers. What for you was a situation, for us was our calling. What for you was a disguise, for us was our fate. We were not surprised when you threw off the disguise. But we thought you would come back. Or write. A number of us thought that, myself included, I must admit … And Krisztina.

And a number of people in the regiment, in case you remember.” “Only vaguely,” says the guest indifferently.

“Yes, you certainly experienced a great deal in the world out there. But it’s quickly forgotten.”

“No,” is the reply. “The world doesn’t count. One never forgets what is important. I learned that only later, when I was somewhat older. Nothing secondary remains-it gets thrown away along with one’s dreams. I have no memory of the regiment,” he says stubbornly. “For some time now all I remember is the essentials.”

“For example Vienna and this house, is that what you mean.? … “

“Vienna and this house,” the guest echoes mechanically. He stares straight ahead with eyes half blinking. “Memory has a wonderful way of separating the wheat from the chaff. There can be some great event, and ten, twenty years later one realizes that it had no effect on one whatsoever. And then one day, one remembers a hunt or a passage in a book or this room. Last time we sat here, there were three of us.

Krisztina was alive. She sat there in that chair. These ornaments were on the table, too.”

“Yes,” says the General. “East was in front of you, South was in front of Krisztina, and West was in front of me.”

You remember it down to the details?” asks the guest, astonished.

“I remember everything.”

“Sometimes the details are extremely important. They link everything together into a whole, and bind all the ingredients of memory. I used to think about that sometimes in the tropics, when it rained. That rain!”

he says, as if to change the subject. “For months on end, drumming on the tin roof like a machine gun. Steam comes up off the swamps and the rain is warm. Everything is damp, the bedclothes, your underwear, your books, the tobacco in its tin, the bread. Everything feels sticky and greasy. You’rein your house, the Malays are singing. The woman you’ve taken to live with you sits motionless in a corner of the room and watches you. They can sit for hours like that, staring. At first you pay no attention. Then you start to feel nervous, and order them out of the room. But it doesn’t help: They go and sit somewhere else, you know, in another room and stare at you through the partitions. They have huge brown eyes like those Tibetan dogs, the ones that don’t bark, the most subservient animals in the whole world. They look at you with those brilliant, quiet eyes, and no matter where you go, you feel that look pursuing you like some noxious ray. Scream at her and she smiles. Strike her and she smiles. Banish her and she sits on the threshold and looks in until she is called back. They are constantly having children, though nobody ever mentions this, least of all they themselves. It is as if you are sharing quarters with an animal, a murderess, a priestess, a magician and a fanatic all rolled into one. Over time it becomes exhausting; that look is so powerful that it wears down even the strongest man. It is as powerful as the touch of a hand, as if you were constantly being stroked. It drives you mad. Then that, too, begins to leave you indifferent. It rains. You sit in your room, drink one schnapps after another, and smoke sweet tobacco. Sometimes a visitor comes, drinks schnapps, and smokes sweet tobacco. You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain. You would like to play the piano, but the rain comes to sit alongside and play an accompaniment. And then dry weather returns, which is to say there is steam and bright light. People age quickly.”

“In the tropics,” asks the General politely, “did you sometimes play the Polonaise-Fantaisie?” They are now eating the beef, savoring it with real appetite, concentrating as they chew in the way of old for whom eating is no longer merely the ingestion of nourishment but has become a ceremonial and archaic ritual.

They chew and swallow as if deliberately gathering strength, because strength is essential if they are to act, and strength can be drawn from rare-roasted meat and rich, dark wine. Their jaws work audibly and with absolute purpose, as if table manners have ceased to count and what matters is to masticate every shred of beef, draw out its store of energy and put it to use. Their gestures may be elegant, but they eat like tribal elders at a feast: unstoppably and without restraint.

From his corner the majordomo keeps an anxious eye on one of the servants who is in the act of using both hands to balance a large tray laden with chocolate ice cream wreathed in a tongue of bluish-yellow flame from the ignited alcohol.

The other servants pour champagne for the guest and his host. The two old men sniff the wine knowledgeably as it pours from the great bottle that is almost as large as a baby.

The General tastes it, then pushes his glass away and signals that he would like more red wine. The guest watches the gesture, blinking a little. Both men are flushed from all the food and drink.

“In my grandfather’s day,” says the General, looking at the wine, “a quart of ordinary wine was set in front of every guest as his individual portion. Ordinary table wine. My father told me that even the King had his guests served with crystal carafes of ordinary table wine, one each.

It was called table wine because it stood on the table and each guest could drink as much as he wanted. Vintage wines were served separately.

That was how wines were served at court.”

“Yes,” says Konrad, his face flushed, busy digesting “Everything was well ordered in those days,” he add blandly.

“He sat here,” says the General as if in passing, his eyes indicating the King’s place at the center of the table. “My mother to his right, the priest to his left. He sat in this room in the place of honor. He slept upstairs in the yellow bedroom. And after dinner he danced with my mother,” he says softly, his voice passing through old age and back to second childhood as h remembers. “Do you see, there’s no one with whom one can talk about such things anymore. Which is another reason that I’m glad you came back,” he says with utter sincerity. “Once you played the Polonaise-Fantaisie with my mother. Did you not play it again later, in the tropics?” he asks again, as if he had just remembered what was really important.

The guest thinks for a moment. “No. I never played Chopin in the tropics. You know, this music sets loose lot of things in me. The tropics make one more vulnerable.” Now that they have eaten and drunk, the formality and uneasiness of the first half-hour have dissipated.

The blood flows hotter in their hardened arteries, and the veins stand out on their temples and foreheads. The servants bring fruit from the hothouse. They eat grapes and medlars. The room has warmed up, and the evening breezes ruffle the gray curtains at the half-open windows.

“We could have our coffee on the other side,” says the General. At that moment a violent gust of wind pushes open the windows, the curtains begin to blow, and even the heavy crystal chandelier starts swaying as if it is in a ship in a storm. The sky lights up for a moment and a sulfurous yellow bolt of lightning slices down through the night like a golden dagger impaling the body of the sacrifice. The storm is already loose in the room, extinguishing the frantic flames of the candles; suddenly it is dark. The majordomo hurries to the window and, groping in the blackness with the help of two servants, finds and closes both wings of the French doors. Then they see that the town, too, has gone dark.

The lightning has struck the municipal electric station. They sit in silence in the dark, the only light coming from the fireplace and two candles which have not blown out. Then the servants arrive with more lights.

“The other side,” the General repeats, quite untroubled by either the lightning or the darkness.

A servant lifts a candelabra and leads the way.

Silently, wobbling a little like shadows on a wall, they walk in this ghostly glow from the dining room through one cold salon after another until they reach: a room whose only furniture consists of a grand piano with its lid raised and three chairs around a great-bellied, hot porcelain stove. They sit down and look out through the long, white curtains at the dark landscape. The servant sets the coffee on a small table along with cigars and brandy, then places the silver candelabra with the fat church candles on the ledge of the stove. They each light a cigar, and sit in silence warming themselves. The heat from the logs in the stove pours out in steady waves and the candlelight dances above their heads. The door has been closed. They a re alone.