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“In Arco I heard my father’s voice and understood that I had inherited his fate, that I was of the same kind he was, whereas my mother, you, and Krisztina stood on the far bank beyond our reach. . . . One can achieve everything in life, wrestle everything around one to the ground, life can offer up every gift, or one can seize them all for oneself, but one cannot change another’s tastes or inclinations or rhythms, that essential otherness, no matter how close or how important the bond. That is what I feel for the first time in Arco as Krisztina is walking around the house in which her mother died.”

He lets his head drop, leaning his forehead on his hand with the gesture of helpless resignation of a man finally faced with the evidence of the intractability of human relations.

“Then we come home from Arco and start our lives here,” he says. “The rest you know. It was you who introduced me to Krisztina. You never let drop the slightest hint that you were interested in her yourself. Our meeting, to me, was unmistakably the most significant thing that had ever happened to me. She was of very mixed descent, with German, Italian, and Hungarian blood in her veins. Perhaps also a trace of Polish, on her father’s side of the family . . . she was quite uncategorizable, beyond race or class, as if nature for once had tried to create a self-sufficient, independent, free creature untrammeled by family or social position. She was like an animal: her protected upbringing, her boarding school, her father’s culture and delicacy, had all shaped her behavior, but underneath she was wild and untamable. Everything that I could give her, my fortune and social position, was really not of great importance to her, and because of her need for freedom, which was so fundamental, she could not make herself a part of my social world. . . . Her pride, which was quite different from that of people who parade their position, their family ties, their wealth, their place in society, or their particular personal talents—Krisztina’s pride rested on her splendid independence, which coursed in her as both an inheritance and a poison. She was, as you well know, an inborn aristocrat, and that is something very rare these days: you find it as seldom in men as in women. It is not a question of family or social position. It was impossible to offend her, there was no situation from which she shrank, she tolerated no kind of limitations. And there was something else that is rare in women: she understood the responsibility to which she was committed by her own inner sense of self. Do you remember—yes, of course you do—our first meeting in the room with the table where her father’s music sheets lay: Krisztina came in, and the little room was filled with light. She didn’t just bring youth with her, she brought passion and pride and the sovereign self-confidence of her unsuppressed nature. Since then I have never met a single person who responded so completely to everything: music, an early morning walk in the woods, the color and scent of a flower, the well-chosen words of an intelligent companion. Nobody could stroke a beautiful piece of cloth or an animal like Krisztina. Nobody took such pleasure in the world’s simple gifts: people, animals, stars, books—everything interested her, not in any exaggerated way, not with a pedantic outpouring of learning, but with the unprejudiced joy of a child reaching for everything there is to see and do. As if everything in the world was relevant to her, you know? Yes, you do know. . . . She was unprejudiced and open and humble because she recognized what a blessing life was. I still see her face sometimes,” he says confidingly.

“You won’t find any portrait of her in this house, there are no photographs of her, and the large painting of her done by the Austrian, which used to hang between the portraits of my parents, has been taken down. No, you will not find any picture of her here anymore,” he says, with a kind of satisfaction, as if reporting on a small act of heroism. “But sometimes I still see her face when I’m half asleep, or when I walk into a room. And now, while we’re talking about her, we two who knew her so well, I see her face as clearlyas I did forty-one years ago, on that last evening as she sat between us. For you know, that was the last evening that Krisztina and I dined together. Not only wasit your last dinner with Krisztina, it was mine also. That was the day when everything happened that was inevitable between the three of us. And as we both knew Krisztina, certain decisions were inevitable: you left for the tropics, Krisztina and I did not speak again. Yes, she lived for another eight years. We both lived here under one roof, but we could no longer talk with each other,” he says calmly, and looks into the fire.

“That is how we were,” he says simply. “Gradually I came to understand a part of what had gone on. There was the music. There are certain elements that recur in people’s lives, and music in my life was one. Music was the bond between my mother, Krisztina, and you. It must have spoken to you in some way that is beyond words or actions, and it also must have been the conduit through which you communicated with each other—and this conversation, this language of music which the three of you shared, was inaudible to us others, to my father and me. That is why we were lonely even when we were with you. But because music spoke to both you and Krisztina, you could continue to communicate with each other even after all conversation between her and me had been silenced. I hate music.” His voice rises, and for the first time this evening he speaks with a hoarse intensity. “I hate this incomprehensible, melodious language which select people can understand and use to say uninhibited, irregular things that are also probably indecent and immoral. Watch their faces and see how strangely they change when they’re listening to music. You and Krisztina never sought out music—I do not remember you ever playing four-handed together, you never sat down at the piano in front of Krisztina, at least not in my presence. Evidently her sense of tact and shame restrained her from listening to music with you while I was there. And because music’s power is inexpressible, it seems to carry a larger danger in that it has the power to arouse the deepest emotions in people who come together to listen to it and discover that it is their fate to belong to each other. Do you not agree?”

“Yes, I do,” says the guest.

“That eases my mind,” says the General politely. “Krisztina’s father also thought so, and he really was a connoisseur of music. He was the only person to whom I once, just once, spoke about all this, about music, about you and Krisztina. He was already very old; he died shortly afterwards. I had returned from the war. Krisztina had already been dead for ten years. Everyone who had ever mattered to me—my father, my mother, you, Krisztina—was gone. The only two people still alive were Nini, my nurse, and Krisztina’s father, both of them with that remarkable strength and indifference that old people have, and some mysterious purpose still in life . . . like the two of us today. Everyone was dead, I myself was no longer young, more than fifty years old, and as lonely as that tree in the clearing in my forest, the one left standing when a storm felled all the surrounding timber on the day before war broke out. That one tree remained standing in the clearing, near the hunting lodge. Now, almost fifty years later, a new forest has grown up around it. It, too, is one of the ancients, after an act of will, which nature calls a storm, destroyed everything that had once surrounded it. And out of sheer will, inexplicably, the tree is still alive.

“What is its purpose? . . . It has none. It wants to stay alive. Maybe life and every living thing have no other purpose than to live as long as possible and renew themselves. So I came back from the war, and I talked to Krisztina’s father. What did he know about the three of us? Everything. And he was the only one to whom I ever told everything that was possible to tell. We sat in his dark room, surrounded by old furniture and instruments, there were bookshelves and cupboards bursting with scores, music fixed in sign language, trumpet blasts in print, drum rolls on paper, all the music in the world was lying silently in wait in that room, which smelled so old, as if all human life had been sucked out of it. . . . He listened to me, and then he said, ‘What do you want? You survived.’ He spoke like a judge pronouncing sentence and also bringing an accusation . . . staring half-blind into the room; he was already very old, over eighty. Then I understood that a survivor has no right to bring a complaint. Whoever survives has won his case, he has no right and no cause to bring charges; he has emerged the stronger, the more cunning, the more obstinate, from the struggle. Just as we have,” he says dryly.

They measure each other in a glance.

“Then he died, too, Krisztina’s father. There was only my nurse and you, somewhere out there in the world, and this castle, and the forest.

“I had also survived the war,” he says with satisfaction. “I didn’t seek out death, I never went to meet it: that is the truth, there’s no other way I can say it. Evidently I still had things I wanted to settle,” he continues reflectively. “People were dying all around me, I have seen every variety of death, and sometimes I was amazed at its endless possibilities, for death has its element of fantasy, just as life does. By official count, ten million people died in the war. A world-engulfing fire had broken out and blazed and roared until one sometimes thought that all personal doubts and questions and struggles must be entirely consumed in it . . . but that was not the case. In the midst of this immense human agony, I knew that I still had something private to settle, and that is why I was neither a coward nor a hero, as the book says; I was calm both in storm and in battle, because I knew that nothing bad could happen to me. And one day I came home from the war, and then I waited. Time passed, the world has exploded in a new conflagration and I am certain that it is the same torch as before that has suddenly flamed up again . . . and what smouldered on in my heart was the question that neither the soot nor the ashes of time and war could cover. People by the millions are dying again, and yet you found your way from that far bank where you belong and through this world gone mad to come home and settle the things with me that we could not settle forty-one years ago. Such is the force of human nature—it must provide or receive an answer to whatever is the defining question of a lifetime. That is why you have come back, and that is why I have waited for you.

“Perhaps this world is coming to its end,” he says quietly, drawing an arc through the air with his hand. “Perhaps lights are going out all over the world just as they did today across this little part of it; perhaps some elemental event has taken place that is not merely the war, but something more; perhaps something has found its time in us as well, and now it’s being settled with steel and fire, where once it was settled with words. There are many signs. . . . Perhaps,” he says matter-of-factly. “Perhaps this entire way of life which we have known since birth, this house, this dinner, even the words we have used this evening to discuss the questions of our lives, perhaps they all belong to the past. There’s too much tension, too much animosity, too much craving for revenge in us all. We look inside ourselves and what do we find? An animosity that time damped down for a while but now is bursting out again. So why should we expect anything else of our fellow men? And you and I, too, old and wise, at the end of our lives, we, too, want revenge. . . . Against whom? Each other? Or against the memory of someone who is no longer with us? Pointless. And yet it burns on in our hearts. Why should we expect better of the world, when it teems with unconscious desires and their all-too-deliberate consequences, and young men are bayoneting the hands of young men of other nations, and strangers are hacking each other’s backs to ribbons, and all laws and conventions have been voided and instinct rules, and the universe is on fire? . . . Revenge. I came back from a war in which I could have died, yet didn’t, because I was waiting for my opportunity to take revenge. ‘How?’ you may ask. ‘What kind of revenge?’ I can see from your face that you do not understand this need. ‘What revenge is still possible between two old men who are already waiting for death? Everyone is dead, what point is there in revenge?’ you seem to be saying. And this is my answer: Yes—revenge. That is what I have lived for, for forty-one years, that is why I neither killed myself nor allowed others to kill me, and that is why I have not killed anyone myself, thank heaven. The time for revenge has come, just as I have wished for so long. My revenge is that you have come here across the world, through the war, over mine-infested seas, to the scene of the crime, to answer to me and to uncover the truth together. That is my revenge. And now you must answer.”

The last words are almost whispered. The guest has to lean forward in order to hear properly.

“It may be that you are right. Ask. Perhaps I can answer you.”

The candles dim, and the dawn wind rustles through the great trees in the garden. The room is now almost completely dark.

17

There are two questions you must answer,” says the General, also bending forward. He sounds as if he is whispering a confidence. “Two questions I formulated long ago in the years I was waiting for you, and that only you can answer. I can see you think I would like to know if I was wrong or not, that you really did intend to kill me that morning on the hunt. If it was not just a figment of my imagination, because after all, nothing happened, and even the best huntsman’s instinct may play tricks on him. And you think the second question is: Were you Krisztina’s lover? Did you betray me, as the phrase goes, and did she betray me, in the usual wretched sense of the word? No, my friend, neither of these questions interests me anymore. You have answered them yourself, time has answered them since, even Krisztina answered them in her fashion. I have all your answers. You gave yours when you fled the town the day after the hunt and abandoned the colors, as men used to say when they still believed in the true meaning of those words. I’m not asking that question, because I know for certain that you wanted to kill me that morning. I’m not accusing you—in fact, I sympathize with you. It must be a terrible moment when a man is driven to pick up a gun and kill the person closest to him out of whatever sense of need. That’s what happened to you in that second. You don’t dispute it? . . . You have nothing to say? It’s too dark for me to see your face, but it hardly makes sense to send for fresh candles now, the time for revenge has come and we can understand and recognize each other even in the shadows. The time has come and we need to get through it. All these years I have never doubted that you wanted to kill me, and I’ve always pitied you. I know what you felt so exactly that I could have been standing in your place during that terrible instant when you were overwhelmed. Night had not yet given up its terrors, the underworld still had an open gateway into our world of day, dawn was just about to break, and for a moment you were transported right out of yourself. Such a terrifying temptation. I recognize it. But that’s all the stuff of a police report, do you see? . . . What would I do with the kind of facts required for a day in court, when mine are in my heart and in my head? What would I do with memories of some musty alcove, the sultry secrets of a bachelor’s apartment or the decayed remains of an adultery or the intimate memories of a dead woman and two old men stumbling toward the grave? What a poor, pathetic trial it would be, if now, at the end of our lives, I wanted to take you to court for adultery and attempted murder and I tried to force a confession out of you at a point when the law would regard the act or the not-quite-act as having long since passed the statute of limitations? It would be mortifying, and unworthy of both of us and our youth and our friendship. And perhaps it would make you feel better to recount it all, or what facts there are to recount. But I don’t want you to feel better,” he says calmly. “I want the truth, and that doesn’t lie in a few long-out-of-date facts and the private passions and errors of the body of a woman long since dead and turned to dust. . . . What is all that to me anymore, me the husband, you the lover, now that her body no longer exists and we have grown old? We will talk these things through once more, try to establish the truth and then go to our deaths, I in this house, you somewhere else, in London or the tropics. At the end of our lives, what do truth and falsehood count, or deceit, betrayal, attempted murder, or actual murder, or the question of where, when, and how often my wife, the love and hope of my life, betrayed me with my closest friend? You talk about all these sad and demeaning things, you admit everything, you tell exactly how it began, what kind of envy, jealousy, anxiety, and sadness drove you into each other’s arms, what you felt when you embraced her, what feelings of guilt and revenge filled Krisztina’s body and mind all those years . . . you could do all that, but what would any of it be worth? At the end it all becomes very simple, what was and what might have been. What was once is not even dust and ashes now. What once made our hearts burn until we thought we would either die or have to kill someone—and I know that feeling, I, too, knew that terrible temptation, shortly after you left, when I was alone with Krisztina—all that is less than the dust the wind blows across the graveyards. It is humiliating and pointless even to mention it. And anyway, I know it all so exactly that I might have read it in a police report. I could recite you the trial evidence like a lawyer at the hearing: And then? What would I do with the secrets of a body that no longer exists? What is fidelity, what do we expect of the woman we love? I am old, and I have thought a great deal about this too. Is the idea of fidelity not an appalling egoism and also as vain as most other human concerns? When we demand fidelity, are we wishing for the other person’s happiness? And if that person cannot be happy in the subtle prison of fidelity, do we really prove our love by demanding fidelity nonetheless? And if we do not love that person in a way that makes her happy, do we have the right to expect fidelity or any other sacrifice? Now, in my old age, I would not dare answer these questions as unequivocally as I would have done forty-one years ago, when Krisztina left me alone in your apartment, where she had been so often before me, where you had assembled all those objects in order to receive her, where two people close to me betrayed and deceived me so vulgarly, so ignominiously, and—as I realize now—with such banality. That is what happened.” His voice is indifferent, almost bored.