B000FBJF64 EBOK (8 page)

“Not as rare as all that,” says Konrad in a professional tone of voice. “It’s quite common in the tropics. Living conditions change and the composition of the blood changes accordingly.”

“It’s possible,” says the General. “Possible that it’s relatively common in Europe, too, if living conditions change. I don’t know anything about these things.”

“Nor I. It’s just that the tropics produce unending physical problems. Everyone becomes something of a quack doctor. Even the Malays play quack healer all the time. So she died in 1907,” he says finally, as if he had been preoccupied with the arithmetic all this time and had finally figured it out. “Were you still in uniform then?”

“Yes, I served for the whole duration of the war.”

“What was it like?”

“The war?” The General’s expression is stiff. “As horrifying as the tropics. The last winter in particular, up in the north. Life is adventurous here in Europe, too.” He smiles.

“Adventurous? . . . Yes, I would suppose so.” The guest nods in agreement. “As you may imagine, I sometimes found it very hard to bear that I wasn’t back here while you were fighting. I thought of coming home and rejoining the regiment.”

“That thought,” says the General calmly and politely, but with a certain emphasis, “also occurred to a number of people in the regiment. But you didn’t come. You must have had other things to do,” he says encouragingly.

“I was an English citizen,” says Konrad, embarrassed. “One cannot keep changing one’s nationality every ten years.”

“No.” The General nods in agreement. “In my opinion, one cannot change one’s nationality at all. All that can be changed are one’s documents, don’t you think?”

“My homeland,” says the guest, “no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away. Into the tropics or even further.”

“Even further? Where?” asks the General coldly.

“Into time.”

“This wine,” says the General, lifting his glass and admiring the deep red of its contents, “is from a year you may remember. Eighty-six, the year we swore our oath to the Emperor and King. To commemorate the day, my father laid down this wine in one section of the cellar. That was many years ago, almost an entire lifetime. It’s an old vintage now.”

“What we swore to uphold no longer exists,” says the guest very seriously as he, too, raises his glass. “Everyone has died, or gone away, or abandoned the things we swore to uphold. There was a world for which it was worth living and dying. That world is dead. The new one means nothing to me. That’s all I can say.”

“For me, that world is still alive, even if in reality it no longer exists. It lives, because I swore an oath to uphold it. That’s all I can say.”

“Yes, you are still a soldier,” replies the guest.

Each at his end of the table, they raise their glasses in silence and drain them.

12

After you went away,” says the General amicably, as if the essentials, the dangerously loaded subjects, had now been disposed of and the two men were simply chatting, “we kept believing you would come back. Everybody here was waiting for you. Everybody was your friend. You were, if you will permit me, an eccentric. We forgave you because we knew that music was all-important to you. We didn’t understand why you went away, but we came to terms with it, because you must have had good reason. We knew that everything was harder for you than it was for us real soldiers. What for you was a situation, for us was our calling. What for you was a disguise, for us was our fate. We were not surprised when you threw off the disguise. But we thought you would come back. Or write. A number of us thought that, myself included, I must admit. And Krisztina. And a number of people inthe regiment, in case you remember.”

“Only vaguely,” says the guest indifferently.

“Yes, you certainly experienced a great deal in the world out there. But it’s quickly forgotten.”

“No,” is the reply. “The world doesn’t count. One never forgets what is important. I learned that only later, when I was somewhat older. Nothing secondary remains—it gets thrown away along with one’s dreams. I have no memory of the regiment,” he says stubbornly. “For some time now all I remember is the essentials.”

“For example Vienna and this house, is that what you mean? . . .”

“Vienna and this house,” the guest echoes mechanically. He stares straight ahead with eyes half-closed, blinking. “Memory has a wonderful way of separating the wheat from the chaff. There can be some great event, and ten, twenty years later one realizes that it had no effect on one whatsoever. And then one day, one remembers a hunt or a passage in a book or this room. Last time we sat here, there were three of us. Krisztina was alive. She sat there in that chair. These ornaments were on the table, too.”

“Yes,” says the General. “East was in front of you, South was in front of Krisztina, and West was in front of me.”

“You remember it down to the details?” asks the guest, astonished.

“I remember everything.”

“Sometimes the details are extremely important. They link everything together into a whole, and bind all the ingredients of memory. I used to think about that sometimes in the tropics, when it rained. That rain!” he says, as if to change the subject. “For months on end, drumming on the tin roof like a machinegun. Steam comes up off the swamps and the rain is warm. Everything is damp, the bedclothes, your underwear, your books, the tobacco in its tin, the bread. Everything feels sticky and greasy. You’re in your house, the Malays are singing. The woman you’ve taken to live with you sits motionless in a corner of the room and watches you. They can sit for hours like that, staring. At first you pay no attention. Then you start to feel nervous, and order them out of the room. But it doesn’t help: They go and sit somewhere else, you know, in another room and stare at you through the partitions. They have huge brown eyes like those Tibetan dogs, the ones that don’t bark, the most subservient animals in the whole world. They look at you with those brilliant, quiet eyes, and no matter where you go, you feel that look pursuing you like some noxious ray. Scream at her and she smiles. Strike her and she smiles. Banish her and she sits on the threshold and looks in until she is called back. They are constantly having children, though nobody ever mentions this, least of all they themselves. It is as if you are sharing quarters with an animal, a murderess, a priestess, a magician and a fanatic all rolled into one. Over time it becomes exhausting; that look is so powerful that it wears down even the strongest man. It is as powerful as the touch of a hand, as if you were constantly being stroked. It drives you mad. Then that, too, begins to leave you indifferent. It rains. You sit in your room, drink one schnapps after another, and smoke sweet tobacco. Sometimes a visitor comes, drinks schnapps, and smokes sweet tobacco. You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain. You would like to play the piano, but the rain comes to sit alongside and play an accompaniment. And then dry weather returns, which is to say there is steam and bright light. People age quickly.”

“In the tropics,” asks the General politely, “didyou sometimes play the Polonaise-Fantaisie?” They arenow eating the beef, savoring it with real appetite,concentrating as they chew in the way of old peoplefor whom eating is no longer merely the ingestion of nourishment but has become a ceremonial and archaic ritual.

They chew and swallow as if deliberately gathering strength, because strength is essential if they are to act, and strength can be drawn from rare-roasted meat and rich, dark wine. Their jaws work audibly and with absolute purpose, as if table manners have ceased to count and what matters is to masticate every shred of beef, draw out its store of energy and put it to use. Their gestures may be elegant, but they eat like tribal elders at a feast: unstoppably and without restraint.

From his corner the majordomo keeps an anxious eye on one of the servants who is in the act of using both hands to balance a large tray laden with chocolate ice cream wreathed in a tongue of bluish-yellow flame from the ignited alcohol.

The other servants pour champagne for the guest and his host. The two old men sniff the wine knowledgeably as it pours from the great bottle that is almost as large as a baby.

The General tastes it, then pushes his glass away and signals that he would like more red wine. The guest watches the gesture, blinking a little. Both men are flushed from all the food and drink.

“In my grandfather’s day,” says the General, looking at the wine, “a quart of ordinary wine was set in front of every guest as his individual portion. Ordinary table wine. My father told me that even the King had his guests served with crystal carafes of ordinary table wine, one each. It was called table wine because it stood on the table and each guest could drink as much as he wanted. Vintage wines were served separately. That was how wines were served at court.”

“Yes,” says Konrad, his face flushed, busy digesting. “Everything was well ordered in those days,” he adds blandly.

“He sat here,” says the General as if in passing, his eyes indicating the King’s place at the center of the table. “My mother to his right, the priest to his left. He sat in this room in the place of honor. He slept upstairs in the yellow bedroom. And after dinner he danced with my mother,” he says softly, his voice passing through old age and back to second childhood as he remembers. “Do you see, there’s no one with whom one can talk about such things anymore. Which is another reason that I’m glad you came back,” he says with utter sincerity. “Once you played the Polonaise-Fantaisie with my mother. Did you not play it again, later, in the tropics?” he asks again, as if he had just remembered what was really important.

The guest thinks for a moment. “No. I never played Chopin in the tropics. You know, this music sets loose a lot of things in me. The tropics make one more vulnerable.”

Now that they have eaten and drunk, the formality and uneasiness of the first half-hour have dissipated. The blood flows hotter in their hardened arteries, and the veins stand out on their temples and foreheads. The servants bring fruit from the hothouse. They eat grapes and medlars. The room has warmed up, and the evening breezes ruffle the gray curtains at the half-open windows.

“We could have our coffee on the other side,” says the General.

At that moment a violent gust of wind pushes open the windows, the curtains begin to blow, and even the heavy crystal chandelier starts swaying as if it is in a ship in a storm. The sky lights up for a moment and a sulfurous yellow bolt of lightning slices down through the night like a golden dagger impaling the body of the sacrifice. The storm is already loose in the room, extinguishing the frantic flames of the candles; suddenly it is dark. The majordomo hurries to the window and, groping in the blackness with the help of two servants, finds and closes both wings of the French doors. Then they see that the town, too, has gone dark.

The lightning has struck the municipal electric station. They sit in silence in the dark, the only light coming from the fireplace and two candles which have not blown out. Then the servants arrive with more lights.

“The other side,” the General repeats, quite untroubled by either the lightning or the darkness.

A servant lifts a candelabra and leads the way. Silently, wobbling a little like shadows on a wall, they walk in this ghostly glow from the dining room through one cold salon after another until they reach a room whose only furniture consists of a grand piano with its lid raised and three chairs around a great-bellied, hot porcelain stove. They sit down and look out through the long, white curtains at the dark landscape. The servant sets the coffee on a small table along with cigars and brandy, then places the silver candelabra with the fat church candles on the ledge of the stove. They each light a cigar, and sit in silence warming themselves. The heat from the logs in the stove pours out in steady waves and the candlelight dances above their heads. The door has been closed. They are alone.

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 all over 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 very strange too . . . and sometimes as filled with dangers and surprises as a virgin forest. I know all its ways. The 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,” he 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 the 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 heart 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.