by Sándor Márai
8
The General dressed himself without summoning the servant. He took his dress uniform out of the wardrobe and gazed at it for a long time. It had been decades since he had worn it. He opened a drawer, took out his decorations, and lifted them from their boxes lined in red, white, and green silk. As he held the medals of bronze, silver, and gold in his hand and ran his fingers over them, he saw in his mind’s eye a bridge-head over the Dnieper, or a parade in Vienna, or a reception in Buda’s royal palace. He shrugged. What had life brought him? Duties and idle pleasures. Like a card player absentmindedly gathering up his chips after a big game, he let the decorations slide back into the drawer.
He dressed in black, tied his tie of white piqué, and ran a wet brush through his white, close-cropped hair. In the last years these austere, almost priestly clothes had become his uniform. He went to his desk, fumbled in his portfolio with trembling old fingers for a tiny key, and unlocked a long, deep drawer. From its secret compartment he removed a number of different objects: a Belgian revolver, a little packet of letters tied with blue ribbon, and a book bound in yellow velvet with the word “souvenir” imprinted on the cover. The book was also closed with a blue ribbon and the knot had been stamped with a seal. The General held it in his hand for a long time. Then he checked the weapon with expert attention. It was an old revolver with six chambers. All six had bullets in them. With a casual flick of the wrist he dropped the revolver back into the drawer, and shrugged again, then slipped the yellow-velvet-bound book deep into the pocket of his jacket.
He stepped to the windows and opened the shutters. While he had been asleep there had been a sudden cloudburst. A cool breeze was moving between the plane trees, and the wet leaves glistened as if they had been oiled. It was already dusk. He stood motionless at the window, arms crossed over his chest, looking out at the landscape, the valley, the forest, the yellow road far below, the distant outline of the town. His farsighted eyes picked up the movement of a steadily advancing carriage. His guest was en route.
Face expressionless, body motionless, he followed the rapidly moving target. Then he closed one eye as a hunter does when taking aim.
9
It was already past seven o’clock when the General came out of his bedroom. Leaning on his ivory-headed cane, he walked with slow, measured steps down the long corridor that linked this wing of the castle, with its private quarters, to the great public rooms, the reception hall, the music room, the salons. The walls of the corridor were hung with old portraits in gold frames: portraits of ancestors, of great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, of friends, of former servants, of regimental comrades and famous guests. It was a tradition in the General’s family to employ a resident artist: sometimes itinerant painters, but sometimes also better-known men, such as the artist from Prague who had spent eight years here during the General’s grandfather’s time and had painted everyone who came within range of his brushes, including the majordomo and the winning racehorses. His great-grandfather and great-grandmother had fallen victim to the attentions of amateur artists indulging their wanderlust, and stared down from the wall in their robes of state. They were followed by a number of serious, composed male figures—contemporaries of the Officer of the Guards, with Hungarian moustaches and curled forelocks, wearing black formal clothes or dress uniforms. It had been a good generation, the General thought, as he looked at the portraits of his father’s relatives, friends, and military comrades. A good generation, a trifle eccentric, not at ease in society, arrogant, but absolutely dedicated to honor, to the male virtues: silence, solitude, the inviolability of one’s word, and women. If they were let down, they remained silent. Most of them were silent for a lifetime, bound to duty and discretion as if by vows. Toward the far end of the corridor were the French portraits, French ladies with powdered hair, fat bewigged gentlemen with sensual lips, distant relations of his mother, unknown faces looming dimly out of their backgrounds of blue, pink, and dove gray. Then the picture of his father in his Guards’ uniform. Then one of the portraits of his mother, in a feathered hat and carrying a whip like an equestrian in a circus. Then a blank space, about a meter square, with a ghostly gray line marking the perimeter where once a picture had hung. The General walked past the empty space impassively and reached the landscapes.
The nurse was standing at the end of the corridor in a black dress with a freshly starched white cap on her head.
“What are you looking at? The pictures?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you want us to hang the picture back up?” she asked, pointing directly at the blank space on the wall with the bluntness of the very old.
“Is it still here?” the General asked. The nurse nodded.
“No,” he said, after a short pause. Then, softer, “I did not know you had kept it. I thought you had burned it.”
“There is absolutely no sense,” said the nurse in a high, thin voice, “in burning pictures.”
“No,” said the General candidly, the way one would talk to one’s nurse and no one else. “That isn’t what matters.”
They turned toward the grand staircase and looked down into the outer hall, where a manservant and the chambermaid were arranging flowers in crystal vases.
In the intervening hours the castle had come to life like a device whose mechanism has been wound up and reset: not only the furniture, chairs, and sofas liberated from their linen shrouds, but also the paintings on the walls, the enormous wrought-iron chandeliers, the ornaments in their glass cabinets and on the mantelpieces. Logs were piled in the hearth ready for a fire, for it was the end of summer and after midnight the cold mist spread a damp breath through the rooms. All of a sudden the objects seemed to take on meaning, as if to prove that everything in the world acquires significance only in relation to human activity and human destiny.
They regarded the outer hall, the flowers on the table which had been set down in front of the fireplace, and the arrangement of the armchairs.
“That leather chair stood on the right,” he said.
“You remember so clearly?” asked the nurse, her eyes blinking.
“Yes,” he said. “Konrad sat there in it under the clock, by the fire. I sat in the middle, facing the fire, in the Florentine chair, and Krisztina opposite, in the armchair my mother brought with her.”
“You’re so exact,” said the nurse.
“Yes.” The General leaned against the banisters, looking down. “In the blue crystal vase there were dahlias. Forty-one years ago.”
“You certainly remember.” The nurse sighed.
“I remember,” he said calmly. “Is the table laid with the French porcelain?”
“Yes, the flowered service,” said Nini.
“Good.” He nodded, reassured. Now for a time they both stood silently observing the scene that was displayed before them, the great reception room below, the imposing pieces of furniture which had been guarding a memory, a fateful hour, or even a moment, as if until one particular second these dead objects had had no existence beyond the physical properties of wood, metal, and cloth, and then, suddenly, on a single evening forty-one years ago, they had been filled with life and meaning and had acquired a totally new significance. And now, as they sprang to life again like freshly wound automata, these objects were remembering.
“What will you serve our guest?”
“Trout,” said Nini. “Soup and trout. A cut of beef and salad. A guinea-fowl. And a flambéed ice. The cook hasn’t made it for more than ten years. But perhaps it will be good,” she said, worried.
“Make sure it turns out well. Last time there were also crayfish,” he said quietly, apparently directing his words downstairs.
“Yes,” said the nurse calmly. “Krisztina liked crayfish, no matter how they were prepared. There were still crayfish in the stream back then. But not anymore. And I cannot send to town for them at this time of night.”
“Pay attention to the wine,” the General murmured conspirator
ialy. The nurse instinctively moved closer and bent her head to hear better, in the intimate way that only longtime servants and family members do. “Have the ’86 Pommard brought up from the cellar, and some of the Chablis for the fish. And a bottle of the old Mumm, a magnum. Do you remember?”
“Yes.” The nurse thought for a moment. “But all we have left is the brut. Krisztina drank the demi-sec.”
“One mouthful. Always one mouthful with the roast. She didn’t care for champagne.”
“What do you want from this man?” asked the nurse.
“The truth,” said the General.
“You know it perfectly well.”
“I do not know it,” he said loudly, untroubled by the fact that the manservant and the chambermaid stopped arranging the flowers and looked up at him. But then they glanced back down and their hands set to work again automatically.
“The truth is precisely what I don’t know.”
“But you know the facts,” said the nurse sharply.
“Facts are not the truth,” retorted the General. “Facts are only one part of it. Not even Krisztina knew the truth. Perhaps Konrad. . . . And now I am going to get it from him,” he said calmly.
“What are you going to get from him?”
“The truth,” he said abruptly, and then was silent.
When the manservant and the chambermaid had left the hall and they were alone up above, the nurse, too, leaned her forearms against the banisters, as if the two of them were standing on a mountaintop admiring the view. Speaking the words down into the room where three people had sat once in front of the fire, she said, “There is something I must tell you. When Krisztina was dying, she called for you.”
“Yes,” said the General. “I was there.”
“You were there and yet you weren’t there. You were so far away you might as well have been on a voyage. You were in your room, and she was dying. Alone with me, round about dawn. And then she asked for you. I am telling you this because you should know it this evening.”
The General said nothing.
“I think he has arrived.” He straightened up. “Take care of the wines and keep an eye on everything else, Nini.”
There was the sound of gravel crunching in the driveway, followed by the rumble of wheels outside the doors. The General leaned his stick against the banisters and began to descend the staircase to meet his guest. He paused for a moment near the top. “The candles,” he said. “Do you remember? . . . The blue candles for the table. Do we still have them? Light them before we sit down, they should be burning during dinner.”
“I hadn’t remembered,” said the nurse.
“But I did,” he replied argumentatively.
Solemnly and in elderly dignity, he walked down the staircase, his back ramrod straight in his black evening clothes. The great glass door to the reception hall swung open, and there behind the manservant was an old man.
“You see, I have come back again,” the guest said softly.
“I never doubted that you would,” replied the General, as softly, and smiled.
They shook hands with great formality.
10
They walked over to the fireplace and in the cold glow cast by the wall lights they subjected each other, in the blink of an eye, to a sharp and expert appraisal.
Konrad was a few months older than the General; he had turned seventy-five in the spring. The two old men looked at each other with the knowledge that only the aged can bring to the vagaries of the body: with an absolute attention to physical evidence, seeking the remaining signs of vital energy, the faint traces of joie de vivre still illuminating their faces and energizing their bearing.
“No,” said Konrad seriously. “Neither of us is getting any younger.”
Yet both of them experienced the same flash of envious but joyful surprise as they recognized that the other had passed the hard test: the forty-one years that had elapsed, the time of their separation in which they had not seen each other and yet had known of each other at every hour, had not broken them. We endured, thought the General. And his guest felt a strange sensation of peace, mingled with both disappointment and pleasure—disappointment, because the other man was standing there alert and healthy, pleasure because he himself had managed to return here in full possession of his powers—as he thought, “He’s been waiting for me, and that’s what’s kept him strong.”
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, som
ething 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.”
