by Sándor Márai
But when Konrad heard music, he turned pale. Every kind of music, even the simplest, struck him like a physical blow. The color left his face, and his lips trembled. Music communicated something to him that the others could never achieve. It seemed that the melodies did not speak to the rational portion of his mind. The discipline he demanded of himself, which he accepted as both punishment and penance, and by means of which he had achieved a certain status in the world, relaxed at such moments, as if his body too were releasing itself from its rigid posture. It was like the moment on parade when “stand to attention” finally gave way to “at ease.” His lips moved, as if he wanted to say something. At such times he forgot where he was, his eyes sparkled, he stared into the distance, oblivious of his surroundings, his superiors, his companions, the beautiful ladies, the rest of the audience in the theater. When he listened to music, he listened with his whole body, as longingly as a condemned man in his cell aches for the sound of distant feet perhaps bringing news of his release. When spoken to, he didn’t hear. Music dissolved the world around him just as it dissolved the laws of artistic unity, and at such moments Konrad ceased to be a soldier.
One evening in summer, he was playing a four-handed piece with Henrik’s mother, when something happened. It was before dinner, they were in the main reception room, the Officer of the Guards and his son were sitting in a corner listening politely, the way patient and well-intentioned people do, with an attitude of “Life is made up of duties. Music is one of them. Ladies’ wishes are to be obeyed.” They were performing Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie and Henrik’s mother was playing with such passion that the whole room seemed to shimmer and vibrate. As they waited patiently and politely in their corner for the piece finally to end, both father and son had the sensation that some metamorphosis was taking place in Henrik’s mother and in Konrad. It was as if the music were levitating the furniture, as if some mighty force were blowing against the heavy silk curtains, as if every ossified, decayed particle buried deep in the human heart were quickening into life, as if in everyone on earth a fatal rhythm lay dormant, waiting for the predestined moment to begin its fateful beat. The courteous listeners realized that music is dangerous. But the duo at the piano had lost all thought of danger. The Polonaise-Fantaisie was no more than a pretext to loose upon the world those forces that shake and explode the structures of order which man has devised to conceal what lies beneath. They sat straight-backed at the piano, leaning away from the keys a little and yet bound to them, as if music itself were driving an invisible team of fiery mythical horses riding the storm that circled the world, and they were bracing their bodies to maintain a firm grip on the reins in this explosive headlong gallop of unshackled energies. And then, with a single chord, they ended. The evening sun was slanting through the large windows, and motes of gold were spinning in its rays, as if the unearthly racing chariot had stirred up a whirlwind of dust on its way to ruin and the void.
“Chopin,” said the French wife and mother, breathing heavily. “His father was French.”
“And his mother Polish,” said Konrad, turning his head sideways and looking out of the windows. “He was a relative of my mother’s,” he added parenthetically, as if ashamed of this connection.
They all paid attention to his words, because there was a great sadness in his voice; he sounded like an exile speaking of home and the longing to return. The Officer of the Guards bent forward as he stared at his son’s friend; he seemed to be seeing him for the first time. That evening, when he and his son were alone in the smoking room, he said, “Konrad will never make a true soldier.”
“Why?” asked his son, shocked.
But he knew that his father was right. The Officer of the Guards shrugged his shoulders, lit a cigar, stretched his legs toward the fireplace, and watched the curl of smoke. And then calmly, with the assurance of an expert, he said, “Because he is a different kind of man.”
His father was long dead and many years had passed before the General understood what he had meant.
7
The truth, that other truth that lies buried beneath the roles, the costumes, the scenarios of life, is nonetheless never forgotten. The two boys grew to manhood together, swore their oath of allegiance to their Emperor together, and shared quarters together during their years in Vienna, for the Officer of the Guards had arranged for his son and Konrad to serve their first tour of duty in the vicinity of the Imperial court. From the deaf widow of a regimental doctor who lived near the Schönbrunn park they rented three rooms on the second floor of a narrow house with a gray façade and windows that opened onto a long, narrow, overgrown garden thick with greengage trees. Konrad rented a piano but played only rarely; he seemed to fear music. They lived there like brothers, but Henrik sometimes had the uneasy sensation that his friend was concealing a secret.
Konrad was “another kind of man,” and his secret was not one that yielded to questioning. He was always calm, always peaceable. He performed his duties, spent time with his comrades, and went out in society all as if military service were a constant, as if all of life were a single uninterrupted tour of duty, both day and night. They were young officers, and Henrik was concerned that Konrad was living like a monk. Like someone who did not belong to this world. After his hours of duty, it seemed that another duty began that was more demanding and more complicated, just as a young monk dedicates himself not only to the prayers and rituals that are his form of duty, but also to solitude, contemplation, even mystical dreams. Konrad feared music and the secret bond between them that laid claim not only to his mind but to his body; he feared that it had the power to command his fate, throw him off course and crush him. In the mornings the two friends went riding together in the Prater or in the riding school, then Konrad was on duty, after which he returned to the apartment in Hietzing; sometimes weeks went by without his making any evening engagement. The old house was still lit by oil lamps and candles; the son of the Officer of the Guards almost always returned home after midnight from a ball or an evening entertainment, and while he was still in his cab on the street he could see the despondent, reproachful glimmer of the dim flickering light. The glow in the window seemed a signal of rebuke. The son of the Officer of the Guards handed the coachman a coin, paused in the silent street in front of the old door, took off his gloves, reached for the key, and had a faint sense that once again this evening he had betrayed his friend. He came from the world where soft music lilted through dining rooms and ballrooms and salons, but not the way his friend liked it. It was played to make life sweeter and more festive, to make women’s eyes flash and men’s vanity throw sparks; that was its raison d’être throughout the city, wherever the son of the Officer of the Guards whiled away the nights of his youth. Konrad’s music, on the other hand, didn’t offer forgetfulness; it aroused people to feelings of passion and guilt, and demanded that people be truer to themselves in heart and mind. Such music is upsetting, the son of the Officer of the Guards thought to himself, and began rebelliously to whistle a waltz. That year the fashionable composer being whistled by all Vienna was the younger Strauss. He took the key and opened the ancient gate which slowly creaked ajar, crossed the wide vestibule at the foot of the musty, vaulted stairwell lit by oil lamps in uneven glass shades, paused for a moment, and glanced out at the snow-covered garden in the moonlight, looking as if it had been filled in with a stick of white chalk between the dark outlines of things. Everything was peaceful. Vienna was sound asleep under the falling snow. The Emperor was asleep in the Hofburg and fifty million of his subjects were asleep in his lands. The son of the Officer of the Guards felt that this silence was also in part his responsibility, that he, too, was keeping watch over the sleep and safety of the Emperor and his fifty million subjects, even when he was doing no more than wearing his uniform with honor, going out in the evening, listening to waltzes, drinking French red wine, and saying to ladies and gentlemen exactly what they wished to hear from him. He felt that he obeyed a strict regime of laws
, both written and unwritten, and that this obedience was also a duty which he fulfilled in the salons just as he fulfilled it in the barracks or on the drill ground. Fifty million people found their security in the feeling that their Emperor was in bed every night before midnight and up again before five, sitting by candlelight at his desk in an American rush-bottomed chair, while everyone else who had pledged their loyalty to him was obeying the customs and the laws. Naturally true obedience required a deeper commitment than that prescribed by laws. Obedience had to be rooted in the heart: that was what really counted. People had to be certain that everything was in its place. That was the year that the son of the Officer of the Guards and his friend turned twenty-two.
The two of them, young officers in Vienna. The son of the Officer of the Guards climbed the rotted stairs, whistling his waltz half under his breath. Everything in this house smelled a little musty, the stairs, the rooms, and yet it was somehow a pleasant smell, as if the interior retained a lingering odor of fruit preserves. That winter, carnival season broke out like a happy epidemic. Every evening in the white-and-gold salons there was dancing under the flickering tongues of flame in the gaslit chandeliers. Snow kept falling, and coachmen drove pairs of lovers silently through the white air. All Vienna danced in the snowflakes and every morning the son of the Officer of the Guards went to the old indoor riding ring to watch the Spanish riders and their Lippizaners going through their paces. Riders and horses shared a nobility and distinction, an almost guilty ease and rhythm inborn in soul and body. Then, because he was young, he went walking. As he sauntered past the shops in the center of the city in the company of other strollers, he would occasionally be greeted by a waiter or the driver of a hansom cab because he looked so like his father. Vienna and the monarchy made up one enormous family of Hungarians, Germans, Moravians, Czechs, Serbs, Croats, and Italians, all of whom secretly understood that the only person who could keep order among this fantastical welter of longings, impulses, and emotions was the Emperor, in his capacity of Sergeant Major and Imperial Majesty, government clerk in sleeve protectors and Grand Seigneur, unmannerly clod and absolute ruler. Vienna was in high, good mood. The stuffy high-vaulted taverns in the old city served the best beer in the world, and as the bells chimed midday the streets filled with the rich smells of goulash, spreading friendliness and goodwill as if there were eternal peace on earth. Women carried fur muffs and wore hats with feathers, and veils that they pulled down over their faces against the snow, leaving a glimpse of nose and flashing eyes. At four in the afternoon the gaslights were lit in the cafés and coffee with whipped cream was served to the generals and officials at their regular tables while, outside, blushing women shrank into the corners of hired carriages as they raced toward bachelor apartments where the log fires were already lit, for it was carnival and there was an uprising of love throughout the city, as if the agents of some giant conspiracy were goading and inflaming hearts across all levels of society.
In the hour before curtain time in the theaters, vinophiles met discreetly in the cellars of Prince Esterhazy’s palace, tables were being laid for archdukes in the private rooms at the Sacher, and in the hot, smoky rooms of the wine cellar next to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, restless, unhappy Polish gentlemen drank schnapps, for things in their country were not going well. But there were hours that winter in Vienna when it seemed that everyone was happy, which was what the son of the Officer of the Guards was thinking as he contentedly whistled his half-stifled tune. In the vestibule the warmth from the tiled stove reached out to welcome him like a handshake from a trusted friend. Everything in this city was laid out so generously, and everything was in its perfect place. If the archdukes for their part were a trifle uncouth, the caretakers were the secret beneficiaries in this all-inclusive hierarchy. The servant jumped up from his place next to the stove to take his master’s coat, shako, and gloves even as his other hand was reaching for the bottle of burgundy in its warming place; the son of the Officer of the Guards was in the habit of slowly sipping a glass every night before he went to bed, as if each swallow were a weighty word that distanced him from the frivolous memories of the day and the evening. The man was already following him into Konrad’s dimly lit room, bearing the bottle on a silver tray.
Sometimes they sat talking there until dawn, while the stove cooled and the son of the Officer of the Guards worked his way to the end of the bottle. Konrad talked about his reading; Henrik talked about life. Konrad couldn’t afford life, for him military service was a career involving a rank, a uniform, and a wide range of the most intricate and subtle consequences. The son of the Officer of the Guards sensed that their bond of friendship, fragile and complex in the way of all significant relationships between people, must be protected from the influence of money and any slightest hint of envy or tactlessness. It was not easy. The sonof the Officer of the Guards begged Konrad to accept some portion of his fortune, since he truly had no idea what to do with it. Konrad told him he could not accept so much as a filler. And both knew that this was how things must be: the son of the Officer of the Guards could not give Konrad money, and he also had to accept that he would go out in society and live a life appropriate to his rank while Konrad remained at home in Hietzing, ate scrambled eggs five nights a week, and personally tallied his underwear when it was returned from the laundry. But that was not what was important: what was much more alarming was that this friendship, despite the discrepancy in their wealth, must be protected for a lifetime.
Konrad aged quickly. At twenty-five he needed reading glasses. When his friend returned at night from Vienna and the world, smelling of tobacco and perfume, a little tipsy and in a boyish fashion a sophisticate, they talked long and quietly, like conspirators, as if Konrad were a magician sitting by the hearth ruminating on the meaning of existence, while his amanuensis busied himself out there among men, lying in wait to steal life’s secrets. Konrad preferred reading English books, studies in social history and social progress. The son of the Officer of the Guards only read books about horses and great journeys. And because of their friendship, each forgave the other’s original sin: wealth on the one hand and poverty on the other.
The “difference” that Henrik’s father had mentioned when the Countess and Konrad were playing the Polonaise-Fantaisie gave the latter a power over the soul of his friend.
Of what did this consist? Every exercise of power incorporates a faint, almost imperceptible, element of contempt for those over whom the power is exercised. One can only dominate another human soul if one knows, understands, and with the utmost tact despises the person one is subjugating. As time went on, the nightly conversations in Hietzing took on the tone of conversations between master and pupil. Like all those compelled by inclination and external circumstances to premature solitude, Konrad’s tone as he spoke of the world was gently ironic, gently disdainful, and yet in some involuntary fashion full of curiosity, as if the events that presumably took place over there on the other side were of interest only to children and those even less experienced than they. But his voice betrayed a certain homesickness: youth always yearns for that terrifying, suspect, indifferent homeland known as the world. And when Konrad amicably, jokingly, casually, condescendingly teased the son of the Officer of the Guards about his adventures in that world, one could hear in his voice the need of a thirsty man yearning to drain life dry.
They lived in this fashion in the flickering dazzle of youth, fulfilling a role that was also a profession, and that gave their lives both a sense of real tension and of inner stability. Sometimes it was a woman’s hand that knocked gently, with sweet excitement, on the door of the apartment in Hietzing. One day the hand belonged to Veronika, the dancer—the memory of this name makes the General rub his eyes as if he had just been jolted awake out of a deep sleep with shreds of dreams still lingering in his head. Yes, Veronika. And then Angela, the young widow of the medical officer, who was obsessed with horse-racing. No, rather, Veronika, the dancer. She lived in the attic apart
ment of an ancient house in Three-Horseshoe Lane; it was a single large studio, and impossible to heat properly. But it was the only place she could live, given the space she required for her exercises and steps.
The echoing room was decorated with dusty bouquets of dried flowers and animal portraits done by a painter from Steiermark who had left them for the landlord in lieu of rent. Sheep had been his favorite subject, and it was gloomy sheep with damp,vacant, questioning eyes that stared at the visitorfrom all corners of the room. Veronika lived in all this while surrounded by dust-laden curtains and worn-out furniture.
As one came up the stairs, one could already smell the strong scents she wore, attar of roses and French perfumes. One summer evening, all three of them went out to dinner together. The General remembers it well, as if he were inspecting a painting with a magnifying glass. It was in a little country tavern in the woods near Vienna. They had ridden out there in a carriage through the fragrant trees. The dancer wore a wide-brimmed hat of Florentine straw, white elbow-length crocheted gloves, a tight-fitting dress of rose silk, and black silk shoes. Even her bad taste was perfect. She teetered uncertainly across the gravel under the trees as if every footstep taken on bare ground in the direction of the tavern were unworthy of her. As one would preserve a Stradivarius from having to play mere drinking songs, she preserved the masterpieces that were her legs, dedicated as they were to the art of the dance and the suspension of earth’s gravity, from the tragic limitations of the body. They ate in the courtyardof the simple tavern overgrown with wild vines bythe light of candles set in glass shades. They drank a light red wine and the young woman laughed a great deal. On the way home, as they crested a hill and looked down at the city shimmering in the moonlight, Veronika spontaneously threw her arms around their necks. It was a moment of pure happiness, pure being. Silently they accompanied the dancer to her door and kissed her hand in farewell. Veronika. And Angela with her horses. And all the others, with flowers in their hair, circling past in a dance, scattering blossoms, notes, ribbons, and long gloves in their wake. These women had brought the intoxication of love’s first adventures into their lives, and with it all its companions: desire, jealousy, and the struggle with loneliness. And yet, beyond their roles and their lives in society, beyond the women, something else, something more powerful made itself felt. A feeling known only to men. A feeling called friendship.
