Embers

Chapter 14

It was still dark,” he says, when the other man makes no reply, puts up no defense, gives no sign with a movement of the eye or hand that he has heard the accusation. “It was the moment that separates night from day, the underworld from the world above. And perhaps other things separate themselves out, too. It is the last second, when the depths and heights, the dark and the light, of the world and of men still brush against each other, when sleepers waken with a start from troubling dreams, when the sick begin to groan because they sense that the nightly hell is nearing its end and now the more distinct pain will begin again. Light and the natural ordering that accompanies the day will separate and tease out the layers of desire, the secret longings, the twitches of excitement that had been tangled in the darkness of the night. Both huntsmen and their game love this moment. It is no longer dark, it is not yet light.

The forest smells so raw and wild, as if every living thing-plants, animals, people-were slowly coming back to consciousness in the dormitory of the world, exhaling all their secrets and bad thoughts.

“The wind stirs, too, at this moment, gently, carefully, like the sigh of a sleeping man as he senses the return of the earthly reality into which he was born. The scent of wet leaves, of ferns, of crumbling tree trunks, of rotting pine cones, of the soft carpet of fallen leaves and pine needles slippery from the dew, rises up from the earth to assault you like the smell of two lovers locked in sweat-soaked embrace. A magical moment, which our heathen ancestors used to celebrate deep in the forest, worshipfully, arms out-stretched, facing East: earthbound man in the eternally recurring, spellbound expectation of light, insight, reason. This is the time when the game begins to move, heading for water. Night has still not quite ended, things are still happening in the forest, the nocturnal animals are still hunting, still ready, the wildcat is still on the watch, the bear is tearing the last scraps of flesh off his prey, the rutting stag still recalls the fury of the moonlit night and stands in the clearing where the sexual battle took place, raises his wounded head proudly, and surveys the scene with grave, bloodshot eyes, as if to fix the passion of that duel in his memory forever. In the heart of the forest night lives on, as does everything associated with it: prey, animal passion, the freedom to roam, pure love of life and the struggle for survival. It’s the moment when something happens not just deep among the trees but also in the dark interior of the human heart, for the heart, too, has its night and its wild surges, as strong an instinct for the hunt as a wolf or a stag.

The human night is filled with the crouching forms of dreams, desires, vanities, self-interest, mad love, envy, and the thirst for revenge, as the desert night conceals the puma, the hawk and the jackal. It is the moment when it is neither night nor day in man’s heart, because the wild beasts have slunk out of the hidden corners of our souls, and something rouses itself, transmits itself from mind to hand, something we t hought we had tamed and trained to obedience over the course of years, decades even. In vain, we have lied to ourselves about the significance of this feeling, but it has proved stronger than all our intentions, indissolvable, unrelenting. Every human relationship has a tangible core, and we can think about it, analyze it all we want, it is unchangeable. The truth is that for twenty-four years you have hated me with a burning passion akin to the fire of a great affair-even love.

“You have hated me, and when anyone emotion or passion occupies us entirely, the need for revenge crackles and glimmers among the flames that torment us. Passion has no footing in reason. Passion is indifferent to reciprocal emotion, it needs to express itself to the full, live itself to the very end, no matter if all it receives in return is kind feelings, courtesy, friendship, or mere patience. Every great passion is hopeless, if not it would be no passion at all but some cleverly calculated arrangement, an exchange of lukewarm interests. You have hated me, and that makes for as strong a bond as if you had loved me. Why did you hate me? … I have had plenty of time to think about it.

You have never accepted either money from me or presents, you never allowed our friendship to develop into a real relationship of brothers, and if I had not been so young back then, I would have known that this was a danger signal. Whoever refuses to accept a part wants the whole, wants everything. You hated me as a child, from the very first moment we met at the academy, where the best our Empire had to offer were reared and educated; you hated me, because there was something in me that you lacked. What was it? What talent or quality? … You were always the better student, you were always unintentionally a chef d’oeuvre of diligence, goodness, and talent, for you possessed an instrument, in the true sense of that word, you had a secret-music. You were related to Chopin, you were proud and reserved.

“But deep inside you was a frantic longing to be something or someone other than you are. It is the greatest scourge a man can suffer, and the most painful. Life becomes bearable only when one has come to terms with who one is, both in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of the world. We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our pot-belly. No, the secret is that there’s no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.

“Over the course of my seventy-five years here in the middle of the forest, I have learned this much. But you have not been able to accept it,” he says softly, definitively. Then he stops, and his eyes stare blindly into the half-darkness.

After a pause, as if to excuse his guest, he starts again: “Of course, you didn’t know any of this when you were a child. That was a magical time. With age, memory enlarges every detail and presents it in the sharpest outline. We were children and we were friends: that is a great gift and we should thank fate for it. But then your character took shape and you found it intolerable that something inside you was lacking, something that I had, whether it was in the genes, or came from my upbringing, or maybe the good Lord God … so what was this something?

Was it some talent? Or was it just that people were indifferent to you, or occasionally hostile, whereas they smiled at me and gave me their trust? You despised this trust and these friendships, but at the same time you envied them desperately. You must have sensed-not in so many words, of course, but in some inchoate way-that anyone who is a general favorite is in some fashion a whore.

“There are people who are loved by everyone, who are always being spoiled and forgiven with a smile, and who are indeed too willing to please, a little whorish.

“You see, I’m no longer afraid of words,” he says and smiles, as if to encourage similar candor in his guest.

“Solitude brings knowledge, and then there is nothing to fear anymore.

Those who have, in fact, been singled out as the favorites of the gods really do consider them selves to be the elect, and they present themselves to the world with overweening assurance. But if that is how you saw me, then you were mistaken, and your envy distorted your vision.

I do not wish to defend myself, because what I want is the truth, and whoever does that must start the search inside himself. What you took to be God-given favor in me and around me was nothing more than instinctive trust. I believed the best of the world until the day … well, the day I stood in the room you had abandoned. Maybe it was that very trustingness that made people wish me well, trust me in turn, and offer me their friendship. There was something in me then-I am speaking of the past and of something so far away that I might as well be discussing a stranger or someone long dead-some kind of lightness and lack of preconceptions that disarmed people. There was a period of my life, ten years of my youth, when the world was tolerant of my presence and my needs. A time of grace. Everyone comes rushing toward you as if you are a conqueror to be fęted with wine and wreaths of flowers and girls. And indeed throughout that decade in Vienna, in the academy and then the regiment, I never once lost the certainty that the gods had set a secret invisible ring on my finger that would always bring me luck and protect me from severe disappointments, and that I was surrounded by trust and affection. No one could ask more of life, it is the greatest blessing of all.” He pauses, and his tone darkens.

“But if anyone allows it to go to his head, or becomes presumptuous or arrogant, or loses the humility to remember that fate is indulging him, or fails to understand that this golden situation can last only as long as we refrain from turning the gold into cheap coin and squandering it, he will go under. The world spares only those who remain modest and humble-and even then only for an interval, no more. You hated me,” he says flatly. “As youth slowly passed, as the magic childhood faded, our relationship began to cool. There is no feeling sadder or more hopeless than the cooling of a friendship between two men. Between a man and a woman a delicate web of terms and conditions is always negotiated.

Between men, on the other hand, the deep sense of friendship rests on its selflessness: we expect no sacrifices, no tenderness from each other, all we want is to preserve a pact wordlessly made between us.

Perhaps I was really the guilty one, because I did not know you well enough. I accepted that you did not reveal yourself completely to me, I admired your intelligence and your strange, bitter pride, I wanted to believe that you would forgive me as other people did because of this happy capacity I had to circulate in the world and to be welcomed, while you were only tolerated-I hoped for your forbearance of the fact that I was on easy terms with others, and I thought you might be pleased on my behalf. Ours was a friendship out of the ancient sagas. And while I walked in the sun-shine of life, you chose to remain in the shadows. Is that also how you see it?” “You were speaking of the hunt,” says Konrad evasively.

“Yes, I was,” says the General. “But all this is part of it. When one man decides to kill another, much has happened already; he does not simply load his gun and take aim. For example, what happens may be what I have been talking about, namely that you couldn’t forgive me. What happened was that once upon a time two children had a friendship that bound them so delicately together, that they might have been living cradled in the huge dreaming pads of a great water lily-do you remember how for years I grew those rare-flowering ‘ Reginas’ here in the greenhouse? — and then one day suddenly their bond cracked and broke.

The magical time of childhood was over, and two grown men stood there in their place, enmeshed in a complicated and enigmatic relationship commonly covered by the word ‘.’ We have to acknowledge this before we can talk about the hunt. One is not most guilty in the moment when one aims a weapon to kill someone. The guilt already exists, the guilt is in the intention. And if I say that this bond broke one day, then I have to know whether that is really true or not, and if it is, then I have to know who or what broke it. We were quite different, but we belonged together, we were more than the sum of our two selves, we were allies, we made our own community, and that is rare in life.

Whatever fundamental thing was lacking in you was counterbalanced by the overabundance the world gave me. We were friends.” He says this very loudly.

“Understand, if you don’t know it already. But you must have known it, both early on and then later, in the tropics or wherever else. We were friends, and the word carries a meaning only men understand. It is time you learned its full implication. We weren’t comrades or companions or fellow-sufferers. Nothing in life can replace what we had. No all-consuming love could offer the pleasures that friendship brings to those it touches. If we had not been friends, you would not have raised your gun against me that morning on the hunt in the forest. And if we had not been friends, I would not have gone next day to the apartment to which you had never invited me, where you hoarded the dark incomprehensible secret that poisoned things between us. And if you were not my friend, you would not have fled the city that day, fled my presence and the scene of the crime like a murderer and a criminal; you would have stayed, you would have deceived and betrayed me, and that might well have hurt me deeply, wounded my vanity and my sense of self, but none of that would have been as terrible as what you did. Because you were my friend. And if that had not been true, you would not have come back after forty-one years, again like a murderer or a criminal stealing back to the scene of the crime.

“You had to come back; you know it. And now I have to say something that only very slowly became clear to me and that I kept denying; I have to acknowledge a discovery that both surprises and disturbs me: we are still, even now, friends.

“Evidently there is no external power that can alter human relationships. You killed something inside me, you ruined my life, but we are still friends. And tonight, I am going to kill something inside you, and then I shall let you go back to London or to the tropics or to hell, and yet still you will be my friend. This too is something we both need to know before we talk about the hunt and everything that happened afterwards. Friendship is no ideal state of mind; it is a law, and a strict one, on which the entire legal systems of great were built. It reaches beyond personal desires self-regard in men’s hearts, its grip is greater than that of sexual desire, and it is proof against disappointment-because it asks for nothing. One can kill a friend, death itself cannot undo a friendship that reaches back to childhood; its memory lives on like some act of silent heroism, and indeed there is in friendship an element of ancient heroic feats, not the clash of swords and the rattle of sabers, but the selfless human act. And as you raised the gun to kill me, our friendship was more alive than ever before in the twenty-four years we had known each other. One remembers such moments because they become part of the content and meaning of the rest of one’s life. And I remember. We were standing in the undergrowth between the pines. The clearing opens away from the path there and continues into the dense woodland where the forest is still virgin and dark. I was walking ahead of you and stopped because far ahead, about three hundred paces away, a deer had stepped out from between the trees.

“It was gradually getting light, slowly, as if the sun were stalking the world, feeling it very gently with the tips of its rays. The animal stood still at the edge of the clearing and looked into the undergrowth, sensing danger. Instinct, the sixth sense that is more acute than smell or sight, moved in the nerves of its body. It could not see us and it was upwind from us, so the morning breeze could not warn it; we stood motionless for a long time, already feeling the strain of keeping absolutely still-I in front, between the trees at the edge of the clearing; you behind me. The gamekeeper and the dog were some distance back. We were alone in the forest in the solitude that is part night, part dawn, part trees, and part animals, that gives one the momentary sensation that one has lost one’s way in the world and must someday retrace one’s steps to this wild and dangerous place that is truly home.

It’s a feeling I always had when out hunting. I saw the animal and stopped. You saw it, too, and stopped ten paces behind me. That is the moment when both quarry and hunter are utterly alert, sensing the entirety of the situation and the danger, even if it’s dark, even without turning the head. What forces or rays or waves transmit knowledge at such a time? I have no idea … The air was clear. The pines were unruffled by the faint breeze. The animal listened. It did not move a muscle, stood as if spellbound, for every danger contains within it a spell, an enchantment. When fate turns to face us and calls our name, along with the oppression and the fear we feel is a kind of attraction, because we do not only want to live, no matter what the cost, we want to know our fate and accept it, even at the cost of danger and death. That is what the deer must have been experiencing just then.

“Just as I was, as I clearly remember. And you, too, a few paces behind me-you were as mesmerized as the beast and I, both of us in front and in range of you as you lifted the safety catch with that quiet, cold click that is the sound of perfectly tempered steel going about its fatal task, whether it is a dagger crossing another or a fine English rifle being cocked for the kill. Do you remember?” “Yes,” says the guest. “A classic moment,” says the General with almost a connoisseur’s pleasure.

“I was the only one to hear the click, it was too quiet to carry three hundred paces to the deer, even through the silence of dawn.

“And then something happened that I could never prove in a court of law, but that I can tell you because you know it already-it was a little thing, I felt you move, more clearly than if I’d been watching you. You were close behind me, and a fraction to the side. I felt you raise your gun, set it to your shoulder, take aim, and close one eye. I felt the gun slowly swivel. My head and the deer’s head were in the exact same line of fire, and at the exact same height; at most there may have been four inches between the two targets. I felt your hand tremble, and I knew as surely as only the hunter can assess a particular situation in the woods, that from where you were standing you could not be taking aim at the deer. Please understand me: it was the hunting aspect, not the human, that held my attention right then. I was, after all, a devotee of hunting, with some expertise in its technical problems, such as the angle at which one must position oneself in relation to a deer standing unsuspecting at a distance of three hundred paces. Given the geometrical arrangement of the marksman and the two targets, the whole thing was quite clear, and I could calculate what was going on in the mind of the person behind my back. You took aim for half a minute, and I knew that down to the second, without a watch. I knew you were not a fine shot and that all I had to do was move my head a fraction and the bullet would whistle past my ear and maybe hit the deer. I knew that one movement would suffice and the bullet would remain in the barrel of your gun. But I also knew I couldn’t move because my fate was no longer mine to control: some moment had come, something was going to happen of its own volition. And I stood there, waiting for the shot, waiting for you to pull the trigger and put a bullet through the head of your friend. It was a perfect situation: no witnesses, the gamekeeper and the dogs were a long way back, it was one of those well-known ‘ accidents’ that are detailed every year in the newspapers. The half minute passed and still there was no shot. Suddenly the deer smelled danger and exploded into motion with a single bound that took him out of our sight to safety in the undergrowth. We still didn’t move. And then, very slowly, you let the gun sink.

“I could not see or hear that movement, either, but I knew it as well as if I were facing you. You lowered the gun so carefully in case even the air moving over the barrel might make a whisper and betray you, now that the moment to take the shot was gone and the deer had vanished.

“You see, the interesting thing is that you still could have killed me, there were no witnesses, and no judge would have convicted you, everyone would have rushed to surround you with sympathy, because we were the legendary friends, Castor and Pollux, together for twenty-four years through thick and thin, we were their reincarnation. If you had killed me, everyone would have reached out to you, everyone would have mourned with you, because the world believes there could be no more tragic figure than someone who accidentally kills his friend. What man, what prosecutor, what lunatic would make the unbelievable accusation that you had done it deliberately? There is absolutely no proof that you were harboring any deadly animosity toward me. The previous evening, we had all dined together-my wife, my relations, our hunting comrades-as a friendly circle in the castle where you had been welcome, no matter what the day, for decades, everyone had seen us together just as we always were, in the regiment and in society, as warm and affectionate as ever.

You did not owe me any money, you lived in my house like a member of the family, who could imagine you would do such a thing? No one. What cause would you have to murder me?

Who could be inhuman enough to imagine that you, my friend-of-friends, would kill me, your friend-of- friends, when you could ask anything in life of me, receive anything you needed by way of psychological or material support, treat my house as yours, my fortune as yours to share, my family as your second family?

“Any accusation would have rebounded on whoever made it; the world would have punished it as a piece of insolence, and then rushed to comfort you again.

“That is how things stood. And yet you didn’t fire. Why? What happened in that moment? Was it just that the deer sensed the danger and fled, whereas human nature is constructed in such a way that when we have to accomplish some action that is utterly abnormal, we need some objective pretext? Your plan was the right one, it was both precise and perfect, but perhaps it required the presence of the deer; the scene had come apart, and you let your gun drop. It was a matter of fractions of a second; who could divide everything up into its constituent parts, see them separately and make a judgment? And it’s really not important. The fact is what matters, even if it would not determine a trial. You wanted to kill me, and when something unanticipated disrupted the moment, your hand began to tremble and you didn’t do it. The deer was already out of sight between the trees, we didn’t move, I didn’t turn around. We stood like that for some seconds. If I had looked you in the face just then, I might have seen it all. But I didn’t dare. There’s a feeling of shame that is more painful than any other in life; it’s the shame felt by the victim who is forced to look his killer in the eyes, as if he were the creature bowing before its creator. That’s why I didn’t look at you, and as the paralysis left us, I started to walk across the clearing toward the top of the hill. You started mechanically to move behind me. As we went, without turning around, I said, ‘ missed your shot.”

“You didn’t say a word, and your silence was its own admission. At times like that, anyone would start talking, either ashamed or worked up, trying to explain himself, making jokes or sounding insulted: every huntsman wants to prove that he was right, that the animal was a poor specimen, that the distance was too great, that the shot was too risky.

..but you said nothing. And your silence meant, ‘, I missed the shot that should have killed you.’ We reached the top of the hill without a word being exchanged. The gamekeeper was already up there with the dogs, the valley was echoing with shots, the hunt had begun. Our paths separated. When midday came and it was time to eat-a table and food for the huntsmen had been set up under the trees-your beater told me you had left for town.”

The guest picks up another cigar. His hands betray no tremor, he calmly cuts the tip. The General leans forward, holding a candle, to light it for him.

“Thank you,” says the guest. “But that evening, you came to dinner,”

says the General. “As you always did, every evening. You came at the usual time, seven-thirty, in the carriage. And as on so many evenings we dined ŕ trois with Krisztina.

“The table was laid in the great dining room, as it was tonight, and with the same ornamental figures, and Krisztina sat between us. There were blue candles burning. She liked candlelight, she liked everything that echoed tradition, and times past, and a nobler form of human discourse. After the hunt was over, I had gone directly to my rooms to change, and had not seen Krisztina that afternoon. The manservant had told me that she had left after luncheon for town. As I came into the room, Krisztina was sitting in front of the fireplace with a light Indian shawl around her shoulders, for the weather was misty and damp. A fire had been lit; she was reading and did not hear me. Perhaps the rugs absorbed the sound of my footsteps, perhaps she was simply too absorbed in the text-it was an English book, a traveler’s description of the tropics-but in any case she did not become aware of me until I was standing right in front of her. Then she looked up-do you remember her eyes? She had a way of looking up that turned the world to brilliant daylight-and maybe it was the effect of the candlelight, but I was shocked by her pallor. ‘ you feeling unwell?’ I asked her. She said nothing. She stared at me for a long moment, wide-eyed, and those seconds were almost as drawn out and as eloquent as the moments that morning in the forest when I stood still, waiting to see whether you would say something or squeeze the trigger. She scrutinized my face as if her life depended on finding out what I was thinking if I was thinking … if there was something I knew … At that moment, knowledge was more important than life itself. The thing that is always the most important-more important than the outcome, more important than the prey-is to know what the creature we have chosen as our victim thinks of us … She looked into my eyes as if she were conducting an interrogation. I believe I returned her gaze steadily. During those seconds, and later, I was calm, and my face betrayed nothing to her.

Indeed, during that morning and afternoon, on that strange hunt in which I had become the game, I had struggled to reach the decision that, no matter what life brought, I would remain silent and I would never, ever, speak either to Krisztina or to Nini, the two people who were my confidantes, of what I had been forced to realize in the dawn out in the woods. I had also decided to have a doctor observe you as unobtrusively as possible, since some demon of insanity seemed to have taken hold of your brain. I could think of no other explanation. The man closest to my heart has gone mad, is what I kept repeating to myself, constantly, obstinately, despairingly, all morning, all afternoon, and that is how I saw you when you came in. I was trying to preserve human dignity in general and yours in particular, for if you were the master of your faculties and had a reason-no matter what it was-to take up a weapon against me, then every one of us who lived in this house had lost our human dignity, including Krisztina and myself. That is also how I interpreted the look of shock and astonishment in Krisztina’s eyes when I stood before her after the hunt. That she intuited the secret that had bound you and me since the morning.

“Women sense these things, I thought. Then you come, in evening dress, and we go in to table. We chat as we did on other evenings. We talk about the hunt, about the beaters’ report, about the error made by one of the huntsmen who had shot a buck he had no right to shoot … but we do not say a single word all evening about those strange, questionable seconds. You do not mention your own hunting adventure with the magnificent deer you failed to kill. Such a story requires a telling, even when one is less than an expert huntsman. You don’t say a word about missing the game and leaving the hunt early without explanation and going back o town, not to reappear until evening, although it is all very irregular and a breach of etiquette. You could mention the morning in a single word … but you don’t. It’s as if we had not gone on the hunt at all. You talk about other things. You ask Krisztina what she was reading as you came into the salon to join us. You and she have a long discussion about it, you ask Krisztina what the title is, you want to know what impression she has of the text, you have her tell you what life in the tropics is like, you behave as if this subject matter is of burning interest to you-and it is not until later that I learn from the bookseller in town that this book and others on the same subject were ordered by you, and that you had lent it to Krisztina a few days before.

I know none of that yet. You both cut me out of the conversation, because I know nothing about the tropics. Later, when I realize that you had been deceiving me that night, I think back to this scene, I hear the words, even though they faded long ago, and I am forced to admit, in genuine admiration, that the two of you played your roles perfectly. I, the uninitiated, can find nothing suspicious in your words: you talk about the tropics, about a book, about an ordinary piece of reading. You want to know what Krisztina thinks, you are particularly interested in whether someone born and raised in another part of the world could tolerate the conditions in the tropics … what does she think? (You don’t ask me.) And could she herself tolerate the rain, the warm haze, the suffocating hot mists, the loneliness in the swamps and the primeval forest … you see, the words come back of their own accord. The last time you sat in this armchair, forty-one years ago, you talked about the tropics, the swamps, the warm mists, and the rain. And just now, when you returned to this house, there they were again, words like swamp, and the tropics, and rain, and hot mist. Yes, words come back. Everything comes back, words and things go round in a circle, sometimes they circle the entire globe and then they finally return to their starting point and something is completed,” he says calmly. “That was what you talked about, the last time you spoke to Krisztina. Around midnight, you order the carriage and are driven back to town. Those were the events on the day of the hunt,” he says, and his voice expresses the satisfaction of an old man who has just successfully delivered an exact report, a systematic recapitulation that commands attention.