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It was a feeling that communicated itself to them both just then: that during all these decades they had drawn their strength from waiting itself, as if an entire life had been mere preparation for a single task.

Konrad had known that one day he would have to come back, just as the General had known that someday this moment would arrive. It was what both had lived for.

Konrad was as pale as he had been in his youth, and it was evident that he still led an indoor life and avoided fresh air. He, too, was wearing dark clothes of sober but very fine material.

He must be rich, thought the General. They looked at each other for a long moment without speaking. Then the manservant came with absinthe and schnapps.

“Where have you come from?” asked the General.

“From London.”

“Do you live there?”

“Close by. I have a small house near London. When I came back from the tropics I settled there.”

“Where in the tropics?”

“In Singapore.” He lifted a pale hand and pointed vaguely to a spot in the air as if to locate the place in the universe where he had once lived. “But only at the end. Before that, I was far inland on the peninsula, with the Malays.”

“They say,” said the General, raising his glass of absinthe to the light in the gesture of a welcoming toast, “that the tropics use people up and make them old.”

“They’re terrible,” said Konrad. “They take ten years off a man’s life.”

“But it doesn’t show. Welcome!”

They emptied their glasses and sat down.

“Really not?” asked the guest as he settled himself in the armchair beside the fire, under the clock. The General watched his movements with care. Now that his friend had chosen to sit in the armchair—exactly where he had last sat forty-one years ago, as if he were involuntarily obeying the local magic—the General blinked in relief. He felt the way a hunter feels when he finally sees the game in the position it has been carefully avoiding. Now everything had fallen into place.

“The tropics are terrible,” Konrad said again. “People like us cannot tolerate them. They use up the body and destroy the constitution. They kill some part of you.”

“Is that why you went?” asked the General almost as an aside, giving no particular emphasis to the words. “To kill something in yourself?”

His tone was polite and conversational, and he took his seat facing the fireplace in the old armchair known in the family as the “Florentine Chair,” where he had sat in the evenings forty-one years ago talking with Krisztina and Konrad. Now the two of them glanced at the third chair, upholstered in French silk, and empty.

“Yes,” said Konrad calmly.

“And were you successful?”

“I am already old,” said Konrad, looking into the fire, not answering the question.

They both sat in silence, watching the flames, until the manservant came to announce dinner.

11

It’s like this,” said Konrad after the trout. “At first you think you can get used to it.” He was speaking of the tropics. “I was still young when I arrived, thirty-two, you remember. I went straight out into the swamps. You live out there in little huts with tin roofs. I had no money—everything was paid by the Colonial Company. At night you lie in bed and it is like lying in a warm mist. By day the mist is thicker and scalding hot. Soon you become quite apathetic. Everyone drinks, everyone’s eyes are bloodshot. In the first year, you think you will die. In the third year, you realize that you are no longer the person you were, and that the rhythm of life has changed. You live faster, something inside you burns, your heart beats differently and at the same time, you become indifferent to everything. Absolutely everything, for months at a time. Then there comes a moment when you no longer have any idea what is happening either inside you or around you. Sometimes that takes five years, sometimes it happens in the first few months. That’s when the rage comes. A lot of people become murderous, others kill themselves.”

“Even the English?”

“Less often. But even they get infected with this fever of rage, as if it were a bacillus, though it isn’t. And yet I’m convinced it is a form of illness. It’s just that no one has found the cause yet. Maybe it comes from the water. Or the plants. Or love affairs. You cannot get used to Malaysian women. Some of them are extraordinarily beautiful. They smile, their skin is so smooth, their bodies are so supple when they serve you at table or in bed . . . and yet you cannot get used to them. The English know how to defend themselves. They arrive with England in their suitcases. Their courteous arrogance. Their reserve. Their golf courses and their tennis courts. Their whisky. Their evening dress, that they change into every night in their tin-roofed houses out in the middle of the swamps. Not all of them, of course. That’s just a legend. Most of them turn brutal after four or five years just like the others, the Belgians, the French, the Dutch. The tropics eat away their college manners the way leprosy eats away skin. Oxford and Cambridge rot down. Back home in the British Isles, everyone who has spent time in the tropics is suspect. They may be respected and honored, but they are also suspect. I’m convinced that their entries in the security files are annotated with the word ‘tropics,’ the way others would be stamped ‘blood disease’ or ‘spying.’ Everyone who has spent extended time in the tropics is suspect, no matter whether they’ve played golf and tennis, drunk whisky in the clubs in Singapore, appeared at the Governor’s receptions in evening dress or in uniform and decorations, they’re still suspect. Because they have experienced the tropics. Because they carry this alarming contagious disease, and there’s no known defense against it, and yet it’s somehow both deadly and seductive. The tropics are a disease. Tropical diseases have a cure, but the tropics themselves do not.”

“I understand,” said the General. “Did you catch it too?”

“Everyone does.” The guest savored the Chablis with his head tilted back, tasting it in small mouthfuls like a connoisseur. “To become an alcoholic is to get off lightly. Passions swirl out there like the tornados in the forests and mountains beyond the swamps. All sorts of passions. Which is why the English are suspicious of everyone who comes back from the tropics. Nobody knows what’s in their blood or their nerves or their hearts. What’s certain is that they’re no longer Europeans. Not quite. They may have had the European newspapers delivered by mail, they may have read everything that has been thought and read in this part of the world for the last decades and longer, they may have maintained all the strange formalities that whitesin the tropics observe among themselves the way drunkards conduct themselves with excessive precision in society: they hold themselves too strictly, so that nobody will detect their chaotic feelings, they’re as smooth as eels and utterly correct and perfectly mannered . . . and inside everything looks different.”

“Really?” said the General, holding his glass of white wine to the light. “Tell me what’s inside.” And when the other said nothing, “I think you came here this evening to tell me.”

They are sitting at the long table in the great dining room where no guest has sat since Krisztina’s death, where no one has eaten for decades, and the room is like a museum of furniture and household objects from a bygone era. The walls are covered with old French paneling, the furniture is from Versailles. They sit at either end of the long table, separated by crystal vases of orchids in the center of the damask cloth. Interspersed with the arrangement of flowers are four porcelain figures of the finest Sèvres: exquisitely charming allegories of North, South, East, and West. West is pointing toward the General, while Konrad’s figure is the East, a grinning little saracen with a palm tree and a camel.

A row of porcelain candlesticks stands the length of the table, holding thick, blue religious candles. The only other light comes from hidden points in the four corners of the room. The candles burn high with a flickering light in the surrounding dimness. Logs glow darkly in the gray marble fireplace. The French doors stand open a little, the gray silk curtains are not quite closed, and the summer evening breezes come through the windows from time to time, while the thin curtains reveal the moonlit landscape and the glimmering lights of the little town in the distance.

At the midpoint of the long table with its flowers and candles is another chair, covered in Gobelin tapestry work, its back to the fireplace. It was where Krisztina, the General’s wife, sat. Where the place setting should be is the allegorical figure of the South: a lion, with an elephant and a black-skinned man in a burnous, all occupying a space no bigger than a side plate and keeping watch over something in companionable harmony. The majordomo in his black frock coat stands motionless in the background, keeping watch over the serving table and directing the servants—dressed tonight in knee breeches and black tailcoats in the French manner—simply by moving his eyes. The General’s mother was the one who had established French customs here as the order of the household, and whenever she ate in this room—whose furniture, plates, gold cutlery, glasses, crystal vases, and paneling had all come with her from her foreign homeland—she had always insisted that the servants dress and serve accordingly. It is so quiet in the room that even the faint crackling of the logs is audible. The two men are speaking in hushed tones and yet their voices echo: like stringed instruments, the ancient wooden panels covering the walls also vibrate to the muffled words, amplifying them.

“No,” says Konrad, who has been thinking as he was eating. “I came because I was in Vienna.”

He eats quickly, with neat movements but the greediness of old age. Now he lays down his fork, bends forward a little and raises his voice as he almost calls down the table to his host sitting far away at the other end: “I came because I wanted to see you one more time. Isn’t it natural?”

“Nothing could be more natural,” the General replies courteously. “So you were in Vienna. After the tropics and their passions, it must have been a great experience. Is it a long time since you were last there?”

He asks politely, without a trace of irony in his voice. The guest looks at him distrustfully from the other end of the table. They sit there a little lost, the two old men in the large room, so far from each other.

“Yes, a long time.” Konrad replies. “Forty years. It was when . . .” He speaks uncertainly, stumbling involuntarily in his embarrassment. “It was when I was on my way to Singapore.”

“I understand,” says the General. “And this time, what did you find in Vienna?”

“Change,” says Konrad. “At my age and in my circumstances, all one encounters wherever one goes is change. Admittedly, I did not set foot on the continent of Europe for forty years. I only spent the occasional hour in one French port or another en route from Singapore to London. But I wanted to see Vienna again. And this house.”

“Is that why you made the trip?” asks the General. “To see Vienna and this house? Or do you have business on the Continent?”

“I am no longer active in any way whatever,” Konrad answers. “Like you, I’m seventy-five years old. I shall die soon. That’s why I made the trip. That’s why I’m here.”

“They say,” says the General politely and encouragingly, “that when one reaches our age, one lives until one is tired of it. Don’t you find?”

“I’m tired of it already,” says the guest. His voice is composed, uninflected. “Vienna,” he says. “To me it was the tuning fork for the entire world. Saying the word Vienna was like striking a tuning fork and then listening to find out what tone it called forth in the person I was talking to. It was how I tested people. If there was no response, this was not the kind of person I liked.

“Vienna wasn’t just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one’s soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life. I was poor, but I was not alone, because I had a friend. And Vienna was like another friend. When it rained in the tropics, I always heard the voice of Vienna. And at other times too. Sometimes deep in the virgin forests I smelled the musty smell of the entrance hall in the house in Hietzing. Music and everything I loved was in the stones of Vienna, and in people’s glances and their behavior, the way pure feelings are part of one’s very heart. You know when the feelings stop hurting. Vienna in winter and spring. The allées in Schönbrunn. The blue light in the dormitory at the academy, the great white stairwell with the baroque statue. Mornings riding in the Prater. The mildew in the riding school. I remember all of it exactly, and I wanted to see it again,” he says softly, almost ashamed.

“And after forty-one years, what did you find?” the General asks again.

“A city,” says Konrad with a shrug. “Change.”

“Here at least,” says the General, “you won’t be disappointed. Almost nothing has changed here.”

“Did you ever travel in recent years?”

“Rarely.” The General stares into the candle flame. “Only on military duty. For a time, I thought of resigning my commission, like you, and traveling out in the world to look around and find something or someone.”

They do not look at each other: the guest fixes his eyes on the golden liquid in his glass, the General on the candle flame. “And then finally I stayed here. One’s military service, you know. One becomes rigid, obdurate. I promised my father I would serve out my time. That’s why I stayed. Though I did take early retirement. When I was fifty, they wanted to put me in charge of an army. I felt I was too young for that, so I resigned. They understood. Besides,” he gestures to the servant to pour the red wine, “it was a time when military service offered no satisfaction anymore. The revolution. The end of the monarchy.”

“Yes,” says the guest. “I’ve heard about that.”

“Only heard about it? We lived through it,” says the General severely.

“Perhaps a little more,” the other says now. “It was in ’17. I was back in the tropics for the second time. I was working out in the swamplands with Chinese and Malay coolies. The Chinese are the best. They gamble away everything they’ve got, but they’re the best. We were living in virgin forest in the middle of the swamps. No telephone. No radio. War was raging in the world outside. I was already a British citizen, but the authorities were very understanding: I could not fight against my former homeland. They comprehend such things. Which was why I was allowed to return to the tropics. Out there, we knew absolutely nothing, the coolies least of all. Yet, one day, in the middle of the swamps, minus newspapers or radio, several weeks’ journey away from all sources of news from the wider world, they stopped work. At twelve noon. Without any reason whatever. Nothing around them had changed, not the conditions of their work nor the discipline nor their provisions. None of it was particularly good or bad, it all depended on circumstances, the way it always did out there. And one day in ’17 at twelve noon, they announce that they’re not going to work any more. They came out of the jungle, four thousand coolies, mud up to their hips, naked to the waist, laid down their tools, their axes, and mattocks, and said: Enough. And made this and that demand. The landowners should no longer have disciplinary authority. They wanted more money. Longer rest periods. It was absolutely impossible to know what had got into them. Four thousand coolies transformed themselves before my very eyes into four thousand yellow and brown devils. That afternoon, I rode for Singapore. That was where I heard it. I was one of the first on the whole peninsula to get the news.”

“What news?” asked the General, leaning forward.

“The news that revolution had broken out in Russia. A man called Lenin, which is all that anyone knew about him, had gone back to Russia in a sealed train, taking bolshevism in his luggage. The news reached London the same day it reached my coolies in the middle of a primeval forest without any radio or telephone. It was incomprehensible. But then I understood. People don’t need machines to learn what is important to them.”

“Do you think?” asked the General.

“I know,” the other replies. Then, without a pause, “When did Krisztina die?”

“How did you know about Krisztina’s death?” the General asks tonelessly. “You’ve been living in the tropics, you haven’t set foot on the Continent for forty-one years. Did you sense it, the way your coolies sensed the Revolution?”

“Did I sense it? Perhaps. But she’s not sitting here with us. Where else could she be, except in her grave?”

“Yes,” said the General. “She’s buried in the park, not far from the hothouses, in a spot she chose.”

“Did she die a long time ago?”

“Eight years after you went away.”

“Eight years,” says the guest, and his pale lips move and his false teeth close as though he were chewing, or counting. “That’s thirty-three years ago.” Now he’s counting half under his breath. “If she were still alive, she’d be sixty-three.”

“Yes, she’d be an old woman, just as we’ve become old men.”

“Of what did she die?”

“Anemia. A quite rare form of the disease.”