Embers

Chapter 13

We don’t have long to live,” the General says abruptly, as if he were pronouncing the clinching statement in an unvoiced argument. “Another year, maybe two, perhaps not even that much. We don’t have long to live, because you came back. As you are well aware. You had plenty of time to think, in the tropics and then in your house near London. Forty-one years is a long time. You thought it all over, didn’t you? … But then you came back, because you couldn’t do anything else. And I’ve been waiting for you, because I couldn’t do anything else. And we’ve both known that we would meet again, and then it would be allover with life and everything that gave our existence meaning and tension. A secret of the kind that lurks between the two of us has extraordinary power. It burns through the fabric of life like a scorching beam, and yet at the same time it also gives it tensile strength. It forces us to live …

For as long as we still have things to do here on earth, we’ll stay alive. I am going to tell you what I went through, alone in this forest for forty-one years while you were out in the world and the tropics.

Solitude is strange too … and sometimes as filled with dangers and surprises as a virgin forest. I know all its ways. boredom against which you mount a hopeless struggle by means of an ordered life. The sudden moments of revolt. Solitude is as full of secrets as the jungle, repeats stubbornly. “You live a perfectly ordered existence, and one day you run amok, like those Malays; of yours. You have a house, a title and a rank, and a way of life that is painfully exact. And one day you run away from it all with a weapon in your hand, or not-which may be even more dangerous. You run out into world, wild-eyed, and your old friends and comrades get out of your way. You go to a city, you buy yourself women, everything around you turns to chaos, you look for fights everywhere and you find them. And, as I said, that is by no means the worst of it.

Maybe you are struck down as you run like a mangy, rabid dog. Maybe you run full-tilt into a wall, against all life’s obstacles and break every bone in your body. What’s even worse is if you take this upsurge of feeling, which has accumulated in your heart over so many lonely years, and you push it back inside. And you don’t run. And you don’t kill anyone. And what do you do instead? You live, you maintain discipline.

You live like a monk of some heathen worldly order.

But it’s easy for a real monk, because he has his belief. A man who has signed away his soul and his fate to solitude is incapable of faith. He can only wait. For the day or the hour when he can talk about everything that forced him into solitude with the man or men who forced him into that condition. He prepares himself for that moment for ten or forty or forty-one years the way one prepares for a duel. He brings his affairs into order in case he dies in the duel. And he practices every day, as professional duelists do. And what weapon does he practice with?

With his memories, so that he will not allow solitude and time to cloud his sight and weaken his hea rt and his soul. There is one duel in life, fought without sabers, that nonetheless is worth preparing for with all one’s strength. And it is the most dangerous. And one day the moment comes. What do you think?” he asks courteously.

“I quite agree,” says the guest, and looks at the ash of his cigar.

“I’m so glad you take the same view,” says the General. “The anticipation keeps one alive. Of course, it, too, has its limits, like everything in life. If I hadn’t known that you would come back one day, I would have probably set out myself to find you, in your house near London or in the tropics or in the bowels of hell. You know I would have come looking for you. Clearly one knows everything of real importance, and-you’re right-one knows it without benefit of radio or telephone.

Here in my house I have no telephone, only the steward has one down in the office, nor do I have a radio, as I have forbidden any of the stupid, sordid daily noise of the outside world in the rooms where I make my home.

“The world holds no further threat for me. Some new world order may remove the way of life into which I was born and in which I have lived, forces of aggression may foment some revolution that will take both my freedom and my life. None of it matters. What matters is that I do not make any compromises with a world that I have judged and banished from my existence. Without the aid of any modern appliances, I knew that one day you would come to me again. I waited you out, because everything that is worth waiting for has its own season and its own logic. And now the moment has come.”

“What do you mean by that? Asked Konrad. “I went away, which was my right. And it might be said I also had just cause. It is true that I went away without forewarning and without farewell. But I am sure you sensed and understood that I had no choice, and that it was the right thing to do.” “That you had no choice?” says the General, glancing up.

His eyes are blade-sharp and they reduce his guest to the status of an object. “That is the heart of the matter. I have been breaking my head over it for a considerable time now. Forty-one years in fact, if I am not mistaken.”

And, because the other man remains silent, “Now that I am old, I spend a lot of time thinking about my childhood. Apparently this is normal. One remembers the beginning more clearly, the closer one comes to the end. I see faces and I hear voices. I see the moment when I introduced you to my father in the garden of the academy. Because you were my friend, he accepted you as his. He was not a man who was quick to accept someone as a friend, but once he gave his word, it was for life. Do you remember that moment? We were standing under the chestnut tree at the great entrance, and my father gave you his hand. ‘ are my son’s friend,’ he said. ‘ must both honor this friendship,’ he added earnestly. I think nothing in life was as important to him as this. Are you listening to me? … Thank you. I want to tell you what happened, and to make sure I get it all in the correct order. Please do not worry, the carriage is waiting and will take you back to town whenever you would care to leave.

And do not be concerned that you might have to sleep here even if you don’t wish it. I could imagine that this might be uncomfortable for you.

But of course if you would care to do so, you can spend the night,” he adds. And as the other makes a gesture of refusal: “As you wish. The carriage is outside. It will take you back to town and in the morning you can set off for your house near London, or the tropics, or wherever you choose. But before then I ask you to listen to me.” “I am listening,” says the guest.

“Good,” answers the General in a lighter tone of voice. “We could also talk of other things. Two old friends on whom the sun is setting have much to remember. However, since you are here, let us speak only of the truth. So: I have begun by reminding you that my father accepted you as his friend. You know exactly what that signified to him, you knew then that any person to whom he had given his hand could count on him, no matter what blows of fate, or suffering, or need, life brought. He did not often give his hand, it is true, but once done it was without any reservation. That was how he gave you his hand in the courtyard of the academy under the chestnut trees. We were twelve years old, and it was the last moment of our childhood. Sometimes at night I see him with absolute clarity, the way I see everything really important. To my father, friendship meant the same as honor. You knew that, because you knew him. And allow me to tell you that it may have meant even more to me. Forgive me if what I am telling you makes you uncomfortable,” he says softly, almost affectionately.

“I am not uncomfortable,” says Konrad, just as softly. “Tell me.” “It would be good to know,” the General says, as if debating with himself, “whether such a thing as friend ship actually exists. I do not mean the opportunistic pleasure that two people experience in encountering each other when they think the same way about certain things at certain moments of their lives, when they share the same tasks or the same needs. None of that is friendship. Sometimes I almost believe it is the most powerful bond in life and consequently the rarest. What is its basis? Sympathy? A hollow, empty word, too weak to express the idea that in the worst times two people will stand up for each other. Or perhaps it’s something else … perhaps buried deep in every relationship between two people is some tiny spark of erotic attraction. Here alone in the forest, trying to make sense of life, I thought about that now and then. Friendship, of course, is quite different from the affairs of those driven by morbid impulses to satisfy themselves in some fashion with others of the same sex. The eros of friendship has no need of the body … That would be more of a disturbance than an arousal. And yet, it is eros all the same. Eros is present in love just as it is present in every mutual relationship. You know, I have done a great deal of reading,” he says, as if to excuse himself. “These days such things are written about much more freely. But I have also repeatedly reread Plato, because in school I wasn’t yet ready to understand him.

Friendship, I thought-and you who have seen the world certainly know this better than I do alone here in my village-is the noblest relationship that can exist between human beings. And it is interesting that it also exists among animals. Animals are capable of friendship, selflessness, and the desire to help others.

“A Russian prince-I’ve forgotten his name-has written about it. Lions, grouse, all sorts of creatures of every species have apparently come to the aid of others of their breed in trouble, and I’ve seen this for myself even when the animals are completely unrelated. Did you ever witness something of the kind on your travels? … Friendship out there must surely be different, more advanced, more contemporary than it is here in our backward world. Kindred species organize mutual assistance.

… Occasionally they have to struggle desperately against the obstacles they encounter, but there are always strong members in every community, well disposed to help. The animal world has shown me hundreds of such examples. Not so the human world. I have seen sympathy build between people, but it has always foundered in a morass of vanity and egoism.

Sometimes camaraderie and fellowship look like friendship; common interests can bring about relationships akin to friendship, and in an attempt to escape loneliness, people are only too happy to involve themselves in confidences that they will later regret, but that temporarily may appear to be a variety of friendship. None of it is genuine. It is far more the case-my father knew it to be so-that friendship is a duty.

“Like the lover, the friend expects no reward for his feelings. He does not wish the performance of any duty in return, he does not view the person he has chosen as his friend with any illusion, he sees his faults and accepts him with all their consequences. Such is the ideal. And without such an ideal, would there be any point to life? And if a friend fails, because he is not a true friend, is one allowed to attack his character and his weaknesses? What is the value of a friendship in which one person loves the other for his virtue, his loyalty, his steadfastness? What is the value of a love that expects loyalty? Isn’t it our duty to accept the faithless friend as we do the faithful one who sacrifices himself? Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship? That the more we give, the less we expect? And if a man gives someone his trust through all the years of his youth and stands ready to make sacrifices for him in manhood because of that blind, unconditional devotion, which is the highest thing anyone person can offer another, only then to witness the faithlessness and base behavior of his friend, is he permitted to rise up in protest and demand vengeance? And if he does rise up and demand vengeance, having been deceived and abandoned, what does that say about the validity of his friendship in the first place? You see, these are the kinds of theoretical questions that have occupied me since I have been alone. Of course, solitude did not provide me with any answers. Nor, in any complete sense, did books, neither the ancient texts of Chinese, Jewish, and classical thinkers, nor contemporary tracts that spell everything out, absolutely bluntly, while all they’re giving you is words and more words and not any articulation of the truth. Is there, in fact, anyone who has ever given words to the truth, and set them on paper? I thought about this a great deal after I began my reading and self-questioning.

Time went by and life around me seemed somehow to darken, and the books and my memories started to mass together and pile up. And for every crumb of truth in any individual book, my memories provided a corresponding retort that human beings may learn everything they want about the true nature of relationships, but this knowledge will make them not one whit the wiser. And that is why we have no right to demand unconditional honor and loyalty from a friend, even when events have shown us that this friend was faithless.” “Are you quite certain,” asks the guest, “that this friend was faithless?” There is a long moment of silence. In the deep shadows of the room and the uneasy flickering of the candlelight, they seem small: two wizened old men looking at each other, almost invisible in the darkness.

“I am not quite certain,” says the General. “That is also why you’re here. It’s what we are discussing.” He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms calmly and with military precision. He says, “There is such a thing as factual truth. This and this happened. These things happened in this and this fashion and at this and this time. It isn’t hard to establish these things. The facts speak for themselves, as the saying goes; in the last years of our lives, facts confess themselves in ways that scream more loudly than a victim being tortured on the rack.

By the end, everything has happened and the sum total is clear. And yet, sometimes facts are no more than pitiful consequences, because guilt does not reside in our acts but in the intentions that give rise to our acts. Everything turns on our intentions. The great, ancient systems of religious law I have studied all know and preach this. A man may commit a disloyal or base act, even the worst, even murder, and yet remain blameless. The act does not constitute the whole truth, it is always and only a consequence, and if one day any of us has to become a judge and pronounce sentence, it is not enough for us to content ourselves with the facts in the police report, we also have to acquaint ourselves with motive. The fact of your flight is easy to establish. But not your motive. Believe me, I have spent the last forty-one years turning over every possible reason for your incomprehensible act. No single examination of it led me to an answer. Only the truth can do that now.”

“You said ‘,’ ” says Konrad. “That’s a strong word. In the final analysis, lowed nobody an accounting-1 had resigned my commission in the proper fashion, I left behind no messy debts, I had made no promise to anyone which I failed to fulfill. Flight, that’s a strong word.” His voice is grave as he straightens a little in his chair, but it also betrays a tremor that seems to suggest that the force of this declaration is not entirely sincere.

“Perhaps the word is too strong.” The General nods. “But when you look at what happened from a certain distance, you must admit that it’s not easy to find a less harsh one. You say you didn’t owe anyone anything.

That is, and is not, true. Of course you didn’t owe any thing to your tailor or to the moneylenders in town. Nor did you owe me money or the fulfillment of any promise. And still, that July-you see, I remember everything, even the day, it was a Wednesday-when you left town, you knew that you were leaving behind a debt. That evening, I went to your apartment, because I had heard that you had gone away. I heard it at dusk, under peculiar circumstances. We can talk about those, too, sometime, if you would care to. I went to your apartment, where the only person to receive me was your manservant. I asked him to leave me alone in the room where you lived those last years when you were serving in the city.”

He falls silent, leans back and puts a hand over his eyes, as if looking back into the past. Then, calmly, in an even tone, he continues. “Of course, the manservant did as asked-what else could he do? I was alone in the room where you had lived. I took a good look at everything-you must excuse this tactless curiosity, but somehow I was incapable of accepting the fact, just could not believe that the person with whom I had spent the greater and the best part of my life, twenty-four years from childhood through youth and into adulthood, had simply bolted. I tried to justify it. I thought: Maybe he’s seriously ill. Then I hoped perhaps you had temporarily lost your mind, or maybe someone had come after you because you had lost at cards or done something against the regiment, or the flag, or you’d broken your word or betrayed your honor.

That sort of thing. You should not be surprised that any of these things struck me as less of a transgression than what you had actually done.

Any of them would have had some justification, some explanation, even the betrayal of the ideals that shaped our world. Only one thing was incomprehensible: that you had committed a sin against me. You ran away like a swindler or a thief, you ran a matter of hours after leaving the castle where you had been with Krisztina and me, the three of us spending our days together, sometimes long into the night, as we had done for years, in mutual friendship and the brotherly trust that only twins can share, because they are sports of nature, bound together in life and death, aware, even when they are grown up and separated by great distances, of everything about each other. It doesn’t matter if one lives in London and the other in a foreign country, both will fall ill at the same moment, and of the same disease. They don’t talk to each other, they don’t write, they live in different circumstances, they eat different foods, they are thousands of miles apart, and yet when they are thirty or forty years old they suffer the same afflicti on, be it in the gallbladder or the appendix, and their chances of survival will be the same. Their two bodies are as organically linked as they were in the womb. And they love or hate the same people. It is a phenomenon of nature, not that common, but then again, not as rare as is usually thought.

“And sometimes, I’ve thought that friendship is formed of links as fateful as those between twins.

“A strange identity of impulses, sympathies, tasks, temperaments, and cultural formation binds two people together in a single fate. It does not matter what one of them may do against the other, that fate will remain the same. One of them may flee the other, but each will still know the other’s essence. One of them may find a new friend or a new lover, but without the other’s tacit consent this doesn’t release their bond. Their lives will unfold along similar paths whether one of them goes far away or not, even as far as the tropics. These were some of the things I was thinking as I stood in your room the day you ran away. “I still see that moment with absolute clarity. I still smell that smell of heavy English tobacco, I still see the furniture, the divan with the big oriental rug, and the equestrian pictures on the walls. And a dark red leather armchair, the kind you usually find in smoking rooms. The divan was very large, and you had obviously had it made to your own specifications, because there was nothing resembling it to be bought in the area. In fact, it wasn’t a divan, more a French bed, large enough for two people.” He watches the smoke from his cigar.

“The window overlooked the garden, if I remember correctly … It was the first and last time I was ever there; you never wanted me to visit you. And it was only by chance that you mentioned that you had rented a house on the outskirts of town in a deserted neighborhood, a house with a garden. That was three years before you fled-forgive me, I see that the word disturbs you.” “Please continue,” says the guest. “Words are not the issue here.” “Do you think so?” asks the General innocently.

“Are words not the issue? I would not be bold enough to assert such a thing. Sometimes it seems to me that it is precisely the words one utters, or stifles, or writes, that are the issue, if not the only issue. Yes, I am sure,” he continues firmly, “you had not ever invited me to this apartment, and without an invitation, I could not visit you.

If I’m honest, I thought you were ashamed of letting me see this apartment you had furnished yourself, because I was a rich man …

Perhaps it seemed wanting … You were a very proud,” he says, in the same firm voice. “The only thing that came between us when we were young was money. You were proud, and could not forgive that I am rich. Later in life I came to think that perhaps wealth is indeed unforgivable. To find oneself constantly the guest of a financial fortune … and on such a scale. I was born into it, and even I had the feeling from time to time that it was impermissible.

And you were always painfully intent on underlining the financial imbalance between us. The poor, particularly the poor among the upper classes of society, do not forgive,” he says with a strange tone of satisfaction. “And that is why I thought that perhaps you were hiding the apartment from me, perhaps you were ashamed of its simple furnishings. A foolish supposition, as I now know, but your pride was truly boundless. And so one day I find myself standing in the home that you had rented and furnished and never shown to me. And I do not believe my eyes. This apartment, as you well know, was a work of art. Nothing large, one generous room on the ground floor, two small ones upstairs, and yet everything-furniture, rooms, garden-arranged as only an artist could. That was when I understood that you really are an artist. And I also understood to what extent you were a stranger among the rest of us ordinary people. And also what wrong was done to you when, out of love and pride, you were given to the military life. No, you were never r a soldier-and I could feel, in retrospect, the profound loneliness you felt among us. But this home served you as a refuge, just as in the Middle Ages a fortress or a cloister sheltered those who had renounced the world. And like a brigand you used this place to hoard everything of beauty and noble quality: curtains and carpets, silver, ancient bronzes, crystal and furniture, rare woven materials. I know that your mother died at some point during those years, and that you also must have received inheritances from your Polish relatives. Once you mentioned a piece of property on the border with Russia, and the fact that you would inherit it. And now here it was, in these three rooms, exchanged for furniture and pictures. And in the middle of the main room downstairs, a piano, with a piece of ancient brocade thrown across it, and set on top, a crystal vase holding three orchids. The only place they grow in this region is in my greenhouse. I walked through the rooms and took mental inventory of everything. I grasped that you had lived among us and yet never belonged with us. I grasped that you had created this masterpiece of a rare and hidden retreat in secret, defiantly, as a great act of will, in order to conceal it from the world, as a place where you could live only for yourself and your art. Because you are an artist, and perhaps you could have created true art-works,” he says, in a tone that brooks no contradiction. “That is what I read in the perfect selection of the furnishings in your abandoned apartment. And in that Krisztina stepped through the door.” He crosses his arms again and speaks so dispassionately and deliberately that he might be dictating the details of an accident to a policeman.

“I was standing in front of the piano, looking at the orchids,” he says.

The apartment was like a disguise.

Or was, perhaps, our uniform your disguise? Only you can answer that question, and now … everything is over, you have in fact provided the answer in the life you chose. One’s life, viewed as a whole, is always the answer to the most important questions. Along the way, does it matter what one says, what words and principles one chooses to justify oneself? At the very end, one’s answers to the questions the world has posed with such relentlessness are to be found in the facts of one’s life. Questions such as: Who are you? …’ What did you actually want?

… What could you actually achieve? … At what points were you loyal or disloyal or brave or a coward? And one answers as best one can, honestly or dishonestly; that’s not so important. What’s important is that finally one answers with one’s life. You set aside your uniform because you saw it as a disguise, that much is already clear. I, on the other t wore mine for as long as duty and the world demanded it; that was my answer. So that settles one question. The other one is: What were you to me? Were you my friend? Because you fled without saying farewell although not entirely, because the previous day something happened during the hunt, and it was only later that its meaning dawned on me: that it had been: your farewell. One rarely knows when a word or an act trigger some final, irreversible alteration in any relationship.

Why did I go to your apartment that day?

You did not ask me to come, you did not say your farewells, you left no word behind you. What was I doing-there in a place to which I had never been invited, on the very same day that you left us? What presentiment made me take the carriage and drive into town as fast as I could, to look for you in your apartment, which was already empty of life? …

What was it that I had learned the previous day during the hunt? Has some piece of information been left out? … Did I have no confidential tip, no hint, no word that you were preparing to flee? … No, everyone was silent, even Nini … You remember my old nurse, she knew everything there was to know about us. Is she still alive? Yes, in her own fashion.

She lives like that tree there outside the window, the one planted by my great-grandfather. Like all of us, she has her allotted span of years, and hers is not yet complete. Nini knew. But not even she said anything.

“During those days, I was quite alone. And yet I knew that it was the moment when the time had come for everything to become clear and fall into place, you, me, everybody. Yes, that’s what I understood out on the hunt,” he says, lost in his memories and also answering a question he must often have asked himself.

“What did you understand?” asked Konrad.

“It was a beautiful hunt,” says the General, his voice almost warm, as if he is reliving the particulars of a favorite memory. favorite memory.

“The last big hunt in this forest. There were huntsmen then, real huntsmen … perhaps they still exist today, I don’t know. That was the last time I went hunting in my forest. Since that time only people who come are Sunday hunters, guests, who are received and taken care of by the steward and play around with their guns among the trees. The real hunt was something else entirely. You won’t be able to understand that, because you were never a huntsman. It was just another duty, one of those professional duties appropriate to your rank, like riding and attending social gatherings. You were a huntsman, but only in the way of someone bowing to social customs.

“When you were out hunting, there would be a scornful look on your face, and you always carried your gun carelessly, as if it were a walking stick. You are a stranger to this oddest of passions, the most secret of in a man’s life, that burns deep inside him like magma, deeper than any role he plays, or clothes he wears, refinements he learns. It’s the passion for killing. We are human beings, and it is part of our human condition to kill. It’s an imperative … we kill to protect, we kill to keep hold, we kill in revenge. You’re smiling in scorn … You were an artist, and these base, raw instincts had been refined out of your artist’s soul. Maybe you think you never killed a living creature.

Bu that is by no means certain.” His voice is stern and precise.

“This is the evening when there is no point in discussing anything but the essentials and the truth, because there will be no second such meeting, and maybe there are not many evenings and days left to either of us … I am sure there will never be another one with greater significance. Perhaps you remember I, too, was once in the Orient a long time ago; it was on my honeymoon with Krisztina. We traveled all through the Arabian lands, and in Baghdad we were the guests of an Arabian family. They are the most distinguished people, as you, after all your travels, certainly know for yourself. Their pride, their hauteur, their bearing, their fiery natures and their calm, their disciplined bodies and confident movements, their games, the flash in their eyes, all demonstrate a primeval sense of rank, not social rank but man’s first awakening in the chaos of creation to an understanding of his human dignity. “There is a theory that at the beginning of time, long before the formation of peoples and tribes and cultures, the human species came into being there, deep in the Arabian world. Perhaps that explains their pride, I don’t know. I’m not well-versed in these matters … but I do understand something about pride. And in the way one can sense, without any external evidence, that someone is of the same race and social rank, I sensed during those weeks in the Orient that the people there have a grandeur, including even the dirtiest camel driver. As I said, we were living with a local family, in a house that was like a palace; our ambassador had been kind enough to arrange the invitation. Those cool, white houses … do you know them? Each with its central courtyard, where the whole life of the family and the clan is conducted, so it is like a weekly market, a parliament, and a temple forecourt all rolled into one.

..the way they saunter, their eagerness to play that shows in all their movements. And that dignified, determined idleness, behind which their exuberance and passions lurk like snakes behind stones in the hot sun.

“One evening our hosts invited Arab guests in our honor. Until then, their hospitality had been more or less in the European style; the owner of the house was both a judge and a dealer in contraband, one of the wealthiest men in the city. The guest rooms had English furniture, the bathtub was made of solid silver. But on this particular evening we saw something quite other. The guests arrived after sundown, only men, grand gentlemen with their servants. In the middle of the courtyard the fire was already lit, burning with that acrid smoke that comes from camel dung. Everyone sat down around it in silence. Krisztina was the only woman present. A lamb was brought, a white lamb, and our host took his knife and killed it with a movement I shall never forget … a movement like that is not something one learns, it is an Oriental movement straight out of the time when the act of killing still had a symbolic and religious significance, when it denoted sacrifice. That was how Abraham lifted the knife over Isaac when he was preparing to sacrifice him, that was the movement in the ancient temples when the sacrifice was made at the altar before the idols or the image of the godhead, and that was the movement that struck John the Baptist’s head from his body …

it is utterly ancient. In the Orient it is innate to every man. Perhaps it is what first distinguished humans as a species, after the interval when they were part human, part animal … “According to current wisdom, being human began with the opposable thumb, which made it possible to pick up a weapon or a tool. But perhaps being human begins with the soul and not the thumb. I don’t know … The Arab slaughtered the lamb, and as he did so, this old man in his white burnous, which remained unspotted by blood, was like an oriental high priest performing the sacrifice. His eyes gleamed, for a moment he was young again, and all around him there was absolute silence. They sat around the fire, they watched the act of killing, the flash of the knife, the twitching of the lamb, the jet of blood, and their eyes gleamed also. And then I realized that these people are still intimately familiar with the act of killing, blood is something they know well, and the flash of the knife is as natural to them as the smile of a woman, or the rain. We understood-and I think Krisztina did, too, because at that moment she was seized with emotion, she blushed, then went white, breathed with difficulty, and turned her head away, as if she were witness to some passionate encounter-we understood that people in the East still retain their knowledge of the sacred symbolism of killing and its inner spiritual meaning. These dark, noble faces were all smiling, they pursed their lips and grinned in a kind of ecstasy as they watched, as if the killing were a warm, happy event, like an embrace. Curious, that in Hungarian our words for killing and embracing echo and heighten each other. 1

“Well, of course we are westerners,” he says in another voice, sounding suddenly professional. “Westerners, or at least immigrants who settled here. For us, killing is a question of law and morality, or medicine, at any rate a sanctioned or prohibited act that is very precisely delineated within our system of thought. We kill, too, but in a more complicated way; we kill according to the dictates and authorization of the law. We kill to protect high principles and important human values, we kill to preserve the social order. It cannot be any other way. We are Christians, we have a sense of guilt, we are the product of Western civilization. Our history, right up to the present, is filled with mass murder, but whenever we speak of killing, it is with eyes lowered and in tones of pious horror; we cannot do otherwise, it is our prescribed role. There is only the hunt,” he says, suddenly sounding almost happy.

“Even then, we observe rules that are both chivalrous and practical, we protect the game according to the demands of the situation in any particular area, but the hunt is still a sacrifice, a distorted residue of what can still be recognized as a ritual that once formed part of a most ancient religious act. It is not true that the huntsman kills for the prize. That has never been the case, not even in prehistoric times, when hunting was one of the few ways to obtain food. The hunt was always surrounded by religious tribal ritual. The good huntsman was always the leader of his tribe and also in some fashion a priest. Over the course of time, all that has naturally faded, but even in their faded form, the rituals are still with us. In my whole life I think I have loved nothing so much as the first light of dawn on the day of a hunt. You get up in darkness, you put on clothes quite different from those you wear every day, and clothes that have been selected for a purpose, in a lamplit room you eat a breakfast that is quite different from the usual breakfast: you fortify your heart with schnapps and e at a slice of cold meat with it. I loved the smell of hunting clothes; the felt was impregnated with scents of the forest, the leaves, the air and blood, because you had hung the birds you had shot from your belt, and their blood had dirtied the jacket. But is blood dirty? … I don’t believe so.

It is the most noble substance in the world, and in all eras the man who wished to say something inexpressibly grand to his God made a blood sacrifice. And the oily, metallic smell of the gun. And the raw, sour smell of the leather. I loved all of it,” he says, sounding suddenly like an old man and almost ashamed, as if admitting to a weakness. ‘~d then you step out of the house, your hunting comrades are already waiting, the sun isn’t up yet, the gamekeeper is holding the dogs on the lead and gives a murmured report on the events of the previous night.

You take your place in the shooting brake, and it starts to move. The countryside is beginning to stir, the forest stretches and rubs its eyes sleepily. Everything smells so clean, as if you have entered another homeland that existed once before, at the beginning of the world. The brake comes to a halt at the edge of the forest, you get out, your dog and your gamekeeper follow you silently. The wet leaves under the soles of your boots make almost no noise. The clearings are full of animal tracks. Now everything is coming to life around you. The light lifts and opens the roof of sky over the forest, as if the secret mechanism in the rigging-loft of a fairy-tale theater has begun to function. Now the birds are beginning to sing and a deer crosses the forest path a long way ahead, about three hundred paces in front of you. You pull back into the undergrowth, and watch … The animal stands still: it cannot see you, it cannot smell you because the wind is in your face, and yet it knows that its fate is awaiting it somewhere close. It lifts its head, turns its delicate neck, its body tenses, for a few moments it stands motionless, rooted to the spot, the way o the can be paralyzed by the inevitable, absolutely helpless, because one knows that the menace is no accidental piece of bad luck but the necessary consequence of incalculable and incomprehensible circumstances. Now you are already regretting that you are not carrying a cartridge pouch. You, too, stand frozen to the spot in the undergrowth; you, too, are bound inextricably to the moment; you, the huntsman. And you feel the tremor in your hands that is as old as man himself, you prepare for the kill and feel the forbidden joy, the strongest of all passions, the urge, neither good nor evil, that is part of all living creatures: the urge to be stronger, more skilled than your opponent, to preserve your concentration, to make no mistakes. The leopard feels it as he tenses for the spring, the snake feels it as she rears to strike among the rocks, the falcon feels it in his plummeting dive, and a man feels it when he has his quarry in his sights. And you felt it, Konrad, perhaps for the first time in your life, when you shouldered your gun and took aim, intending to kill me.”

He bends over the little table that stands between them in front of the fireplace. He pours himself a sweet liqueur in a tiny glass and tests the surface of the crimson, syrupy liquid with the tip of his tongue, then, satisfied, sets the glass back down on the table again.