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Later, lime-blossom tisane was brought. Everything smelled so strange that the child felt faint. Round about midnight he began to weep and vomit. “I want Nini,” he cried, his voice choked with sobs as he lay in bed, deathly pale.

Next day, he was running a high fever and was incoherent. Solemn doctors arrived wearing black frock coats with watch chains fixed into the middle buttonhole of their white waistcoats; as they bent over the child, their beards and clothes exuded the same smell as the furnishings of the palace, which was also the smell of his grandmother’s hair and the smell on her breath. He thought he would die if the smell didn’t go away. By the end of the week his fever still had not abated and his pulse was weakening. That was when they telegraphed for Nini.

It took four days for the nurse to reach Paris.

The muttonchop-whiskered majordomo failed to recognize her at the station, and so she set off on foot to the palace, carrying her traveling bag made of crochet work. She arrived like a migrating bird. She spoke no French, she did not know the streets, and she was never able to explain how in the middle of the strange city she had found the palace and her sick charge. She came into the room and lifted the dying child out of his bed; his body was no longer moving, only his eyes glittered. She set him in her lap, held him tight in her arms and gently began to rock him. On the third day he was given extreme unction. That evening, Nini came out of the sickroom and said in Hungarian to the Countess, “I think he is going to pull through.”

She shed no tears, she was merely exhausted after six nights without sleep. She took some food from home out of the crocheted bag and began to eat. For six days she kept the child alive by the power of her breath. The Countess kneeled outside the door, weeping and praying. Everyone was with her—the French grandmother, the servants, a young priest with slanted eyebrows who came and went at all hours.

The doctors’ visits tapered off. The mother and son left for Brittany, taking Nini, but leaving the grandmother behind in Paris, shocked and hurt. Of course, nobody uttered a word about the cause of the child’s illness, but everybody knew: the boy needed love, and when all the strangers had bent over him and the unbearable smell had surrounded him on all sides, he had chosen death. In Brittany the wind sang and the waves churned against the age-old rocks. Red cliffs rose up out of the sea. Nini, calm and assured, smiled at the ocean and the sky as if they were already familiar to her. The four corners of the castle were surmounted by ancient turrets of undressed stone from which the Countess’s ancestors had kept watch against Surcouf the pirate. The boy was soon brown from the sun and full of laughter. He was no longer afraid: he knew that the two of them, he and Nini, were the strong ones. They sat on the sand, the frills on Nini’s dress blew in the wind, and everything smelled of salt, not just the air but the flowers, too. When the tide went out in the mornings, they found sea spiders with hairy legs in the crevices of the red rocks, and crabs with red stomachs and star-shaped jelly fish.

In the castle courtyard there was an incredibly ancient fig tree that looked like some oriental sage who only had the simplest of stories left to tell. Its leaves made a thick canopy for the cool, sweet air underneath.

In the middle of the day, when the sea was no more than a muffled grumble, the nurse would sit here quietly with the child.

“I want to be a poet,” the boy said once, glancing up obliquely.

He stared at the sea, his blond curls stirring in the warm wind and his eyes, half-closed, interrogating the horizon. The nurse put her arms around him and squeezed his head against her breast. “No, you’re going to be a soldier.”

“Like Father?” The child shook his head. “Father is a poet too, didn’t you know? He’s always thinking about something else.”

“That’s true,” said the nurse with a sigh. “Don’t go into the sun, my angel, it’ll give you a headache.”

They sat for a long time under the fig tree, listening to the familiar roaring of the sea. It was the same sound made by the forest back home. The child and the nurse thought about the world and how everything in it is related.

5

It is the kind of idea that comes later to most people. Decades pass, one walks through a darkened room in which someone has died, and suddenly one recalls long forgotten words and the roar of the sea. It’s as if those few words had captured the whole meaning of life, but afterwards one always talks about something else.

When they made the journey home from Brittany in the fall, the Officer of the Guards was waiting for them in Vienna. The child was enrolled in the military academy. He received a little sword, long trousers, and a shako. The sword was buckled onto him, and on Sundays he and the other cadets were taken for walks along the Graben in their dark-blue tunics. They looked like children playing soldiers. They wore white gloves and gave charming salutes.

The military academy was situated on a hill just outside Vienna. It was a yellow-painted building, and from the windows on the third floor one could see the old city with its streets running straight as a die, and the Emperor’s summer palace, the roofs of Schönbrunn, and the paths bordered by pleached trees. In the white corridors with their vaulted ceilings, in the classrooms, the dining hall, and the dormitories, everything was so reassuringly
there
that this seemed to be the only place on earth where every object that otherwise was disorderly or superfluous in life finally was brought into harmony and proper function. The instructors were old officers. Everything smelled of saltpeter. Every dormitory housed thirty children of roughly the same age who slept on narrow iron beds, just like the Emperor. Over the door hung a crucifix decorated with a twig of willow blessed with holy water. A blue night-light burned in the darkness. In the mornings, they were wakened by a bugle call. In winter, the water in the tin washbasins was sometimes frozen over; when that happened, the adjutants fetched cans of warm water from the kitchen.

They learned Greek, and ballistics, and the proper comportment of a soldier in battle, and history. The child was pale, and coughed. In fall the chaplain took him for a walk each afternoon in Schönbrunn, strolling down the allée. Where a fountain gushed out of crumbling moss-covered moldered stones, the water made a stream of gold in the sun. They walked between the rows of pleached trees, the boy conscious of his bearing, raising his white gloved hand in a stiff, correct salute to the veterans who came by in their dress uniforms as if every day were the Emperor’s birthday. Once, a woman came from the opposite direction, head bare, a white lace parasol on her shoulder; she was walking rapidly, and as she passed them the chaplain bowed deeply.

“The Empress,” he whispered to the child. The woman was very pale and she wore her heavy black hair in a plait that was wound three times round her head. She was followed, three steps behind, by a lady dressed in black and a little hunched, as if she were exhausted by the pace that had been set.

“The Empress,” the chaplain said again, reverently. The child looked after the tall lady who was almost running down the allée of the great park as if she were fleeing something.

“She looks like Mama,” said the child, thinking of the portrait that hung in his father’s study over the table.

“One may not say such things,” replied the chaplain reproachfully.

From morning until night, they learned what may and may not be said. The academy with its four hundred pupils was like an infernal machine whose silence presages the explosion to come. They had allbeen gathered here, the sandy-haired snub-nosed boys with limp white hands from Czech palaces, boys from Moravian estates, boys from fortresses in Tyrol and hunting lodges in Steiermark, from shuttered palaces in Vienna and country seats in Hungary. All of them bore long names with many consonants and Christian names, titles, and indicators of rank, which had to be given up and handed over in the cloakroom of the academy along with the beautifully tailored civilian clothes made in Vienna and London and the fine underwear from Holland. All that was left was a name and the child belonging to that name, who now must learn what may and may not be said. There were young Slavs with narrow foreheads, whose blood mingled all the human particularities of the Empire, there were blue-eyed weary ten-year-old aristocrats who stared into the distance as if their ancestors had already done all their seeing for them, and there was a Tyrolean duke who shot himself at the age of twelve because he was in love with his cousin.

Konrad slept in the next bed. They were ten years old when they met.

He was squarely built and yet thin, in the manner of those ancient races in which the building of bone mass has taken precedence over the flesh. He was slow moving but not lazy, and he had a rhythm—self-aware yet reserved—all his own. His father, an official in Galicia, had been made a baron; his mother was Polish. When he laughed, his mouth became wide and childlike, giving a slightly Slav cast to his face. But he laughed seldom. He was silent and watchful.

From the first moment, they lived together like twins in their mother’s womb. For this they had no need of one of those pacts of the kind that is common among boys of their age, who swear friendship with comical solemn rituals and the sort of portentous intensity invoked by people when for the first time they experience, in unconscious and distorted form, the need to remove another human being from the world, body and soul, and make him uniquely theirs. For that is the hidden force within both friendship and love. Their friendship was deep and wordless, as are all the emotions that will last a lifetime. And like all great emotions, this one contained within itself both shame and a sense of guilt, for no one may isolate one of his fellows from the rest of humanity with impunity.

They knew from the first moment that their meeting would impose upon them lifetime obligations. The young Hungarian boy was tall and slender in those days, and frail, and received weekly visits from the doctor. There was concern about his lungs. At the request of the head of the academy, a colonel from Moravia, the Officer of the Guards came to Vienna for a long conference with the doctors. In all their pronouncements he understood one single word: “Danger.” The boy is not really ill, they said, but he has a predisposition to illness. “There’s a danger,” was the gist of it. The Officer of the Guards had gone to the King of Hungary Hotel in a dark side street in the shadow of St. Stephen’s Cathedral; his grandfather had stayed there before him. The corridors were hung with antlers. The hotel manservant bowed and kissed the Officer’s hand in greeting. The Officer took two large, dark, vaulted rooms filled with furniture upholstered in yellow silk, and brought the child to stay with him for the duration of his visit; they lived together in the hotel, where above every door stood the names of favorite regular guests, as if the place were a worldly retreat for lonely servants of the monarchy.

In the mornings they took the carriage and drove out to the Prater. It was the beginning of November and the air was already cool. In the evenings they went to the theater, where heroes gesticulated and declaimed onstage before throwing themselves on their swords and expiring with a death rattle. Afterwards, they ate in a private room in a restaurant, attended by countless waiters. The child sat wordlessly beside his father, conducting himself with precocious good breeding, as if there were something he must bear and forgive.

“They talk about danger,” his father said, half to himself, after dinner was over and he was lighting himself a thick black cigar. “If you like, you can come home. But I would prefer it if no danger had the power to make you afraid.”

“I’m not afraid, Father,” said the child. “But I would like to have Konrad stay with us always. They’re poor. I would like him to spend his summers with us.”

“Is he your friend?” asked his father.

“Yes.”

“Then he is my friend too,” said his father seriously.

He was wearing tails and a shirt with a pleated front. In recent times he had set aside his uniform. The boy fell silent, relieved. His father’s word was to be trusted. Wherever they went in Vienna, no matter to which shop, he was known: at the tailor’s, the glover’s, the shirtmaker’s, in restaurants where imposing maîtres d’hôtel reigned over the tables and on the street, where gentlemen and ladies waved to him warmly from their carriages.

“Are you going to the Emperor?” the child asked one day shortly before his father was due to depart.

“The King,” his father corrected him severely. Then he said, “I don’t go to him anymore,” and the boy understood that something must have happened between the two of them. On the day his father was leaving, he introduced Konrad to his father. The evening before, he had fallen asleep with a pounding heart: it was like a betrothal. “One may not mention the King in his presence,” he warned his friend. But his father was amiable, warm, the perfect gentleman. He welcomed Konrad into the family with one single handshake.

From that day on, the boy coughed less. He was no longer alone. To be alone among people was unbearable to him.

Everything—his life at home, the forest, Paris, his mother’s temperament—had fed into his very bloodstream the tendency never to speak of whatever caused him pain but to bear it in silence. He had learned that words are best avoided. But he could not live without love, either, and that was also part of his inheritance. Perhaps it was his French mother who had brought with her the yearning to share her feelings if even with only one other human being. In his father’s family, one never spoke of such things. The boy needed someone to love, whether it be Nini or Konrad. His fever went away, as did his cough, and his thin pale child’s face flushed with delight and rewarded trust. They were at an age when boys have not yet developed any pronounced sexual identity: it is as if they have not yet chosen. He hated his soft blond hair, because he considered it girlish, and he had the barber cut it short every two weeks. Konrad was more masculine, more composed. Childhood was no longer a cramped place, it no longer intimidated them, because they were no longer alone.