by Sándor Márai
“You had to come back; you know it. And now I have to say something that only very slowly became clear to me and that I kept denying; I have to acknowledge a discovery that both surprises and disturbs me: we are still, even now, friends.
“Evidently there is no external power that can alter human relationships. You killed something inside me, you ruined my life, but we are still friends. And tonight, I am going to kill something inside you, and then I shall let you go back to London or to the tropics or to hell, and yet still you will be my friend. This too is something we both need to know before we talk about the hunt and everything that happened afterwards. Friendship is no ideal state of mind; it is a law, and a strict one, on which the entire legal systems of great cultures were built. It reaches beyond personal desires and self-regard in men’s hearts, its grip is greater than that of sexual desire, and it is proof against disappointment, because it asks for nothing. One can kill a friend, but death itself cannot undo a friendship that reaches back to childhood; its memory lives on like some act of silent heroism, and indeed there is in friendship an element of ancient heroic feats, not the clash of swords and the rattle of sabers, but the selfless human act. And as you raised the gun to kill me, our friendship was more alive than ever before in the twenty-four years we had known each other. One remembers such moments because they become part of the content and meaning of the rest of one’s life. And I remember. We were standing in the undergrowth between the pines. The clearing opens away from the path there and continues into the dense woodland where the forest is still virgin and dark. I was walking ahead of you and stopped because far ahead, about three hundred paces away, a deer had stepped out from between the trees.
“It was gradually getting light, slowly, as if the sun were stalking the world, feeling it very gently with the tips of its rays. The animal stood still at the edge of the clearing and looked into the undergrowth, sensing danger. Instinct, the sixth sense that is more acute than smell or sight, moved in the nerves of its body. It could not see us and it was upwind from us, so the morning breeze could not warn it; we stood motionless for a long time, already feeling the strain of keeping absolutely still—I in front, between the trees at the edge of the clearing; you behind me. The gamekeeper and the dog were some distance back. We were alone in the forest in the solitude that is part night, part dawn, part trees, and part animals, that gives one the momentary sensation that one has lost one’s way in the world and must someday retrace one’s steps to this wild and dangerous place that is truly home. It’s a feeling I always had when out hunting. I saw the animal and stopped. You saw it, too, and stopped ten paces behind me. That is the moment when both quarry and hunter are utterly alert, sensing the entirety of the situation and the danger, even if it’s dark, even without turning the head. What forces or rays or waves transmit knowledge at such a time? I have no idea. . . . The air was clear. The pines were unruffled by the faint breeze. The animal listened. It did not move a muscle, stood as if spellbound, for every danger contains within it a spell, an enchantment. When fate turns to face us and calls our name, along with the oppression and the fear we feel is a kind of attraction, because we do not only want to live, no matter what the cost, we want to know our fate and accept it, even at the cost of danger and death. That is what the deer must have been experiencing just then.
“Just as I was, as I clearly remember. And you, too, a few paces behind me—you were as mesmerized as the beast and I, both of us in front and in range of you as you lifted the safety catch with that quiet, cold click that is the sound of perfectly tempered steel going about its fatal task, whether it is a dagger crossing another or a fine English rifle being cocked for the kill. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” says the guest.
“A classic moment,” says the General with almost a connoisseur’s pleasure. “I was the only one to hear the click, it was too quiet to carry three hundred paces to the deer, even through the silence of dawn.
“And then something happened that I could never prove in a court of law, but that I can tell you because you know it already—it was a little thing, I felt you move, more clearly than if I’d been watching you. You were close behind me, and a fraction to the side. I felt you raise your gun, set it to your shoulder, take aim, and close one eye. I felt the gun slowly swivel. My head and the deer’s head were in the exact same line of fire, and at the exact same height; at most there may have been four inches between the two targets. I felt your hand tremble, and I knew as surely as only the hunter can assess a particular situation in the woods, that from where you were standing you could not be taking aim at the deer. Please understand me: it was the hunting aspect, not the human, that held my attention right then. I was, after all, a devotee of hunting, with some expertise in its technical problems, such as the angle at which one must position oneself in relation to a deer standing unsuspecting at a distance of three hundred paces. Given the geometrical arrangement of the marksman and the two targets, the whole thing was quite clear, and I could calculate what was going on in the mind of the person behind my back. You took aim for half a minute, and I knew that down to the second, without a watch. I knew you were not a fine shot and that all I had to do was move my head a fraction and the bullet would whistle past my ear and maybe hit the deer. I knew that one movement would suffice and the bullet would remain in the barrel of your gun. But I also knew I couldn’t move because my fate was no longer mine to control: some moment had come, something was going to happen of its own volition. And I stood there, waiting for the shot, waiting for you to pull the trigger and put a bullet through the head of your friend. It was a perfect situation: no witnesses, the gamekeeper and the dogs were a long way back, it was one of those well-known ‘tragic accidents’ that are detailed every year in the newspapers. The half minute passed and still there was no shot. Suddenly the deer smelled danger and exploded into motion with a single bound that took him out of our sight to safety in the undergrowth. We still didn’t move. And then, very slowly, you let the gun sink.
“I could not see or hear that movement, either, but I knew it as well as if I were facing you. You lowered the gun so carefully in case even the air moving over the barrel might make a whisper and betray you, now that the moment to take the shot was gone and the deer had vanished.
“You see, the interesting thing is that you still could have killed me, there were no witnesses, and no judge would have convicted you, everyone would have rushed to surround you with sympathy, because we were the legendary friends, Castor and Pollux, together for twenty-four years through thick and thin, we were their reincarnation. If you had killed me, everyone would have reached out to you, everyone would have mourned with you, because the world believes there could be no more tragic figure than someone who accidentally kills his friend. What man, what prosecutor, what lunatic would make the unbelievable accusation that you had done it deliberately? There is absolutely no proof that you were harboring any deadly animosity toward me. The previous evening, we had all dined together—my wife, my relations, our hunt-ing comrades—as a friendly circle in the castle where you had been welcome, no matter what the day, for decades, everyone had seen us together just as we always were, in the regiment and in society, as warm and affectionate as ever. You did not owe me any money, you lived in my house like a member of the family, who could imagine you would do such a thing? No one. What cause would you have to murder me? Who could be inhuman enough to imagine that you, my friend-of-friends, would kill me, your friend-of-friends, when you could ask anything in life of me, receive anything you needed by way of psychological or material support, treat my house as yours, my fortune as yours to share, my family as your second family?
“Any accusation would have rebounded on whoever made it; the world would have punished it as a piece of insolence, and then rushed to comfort you again.
“That is how things stood. And yet you didn’t fire. Why? What happened in that moment? Was it just that the deer sensed the danger and fled, whereas human n
ature is constructed in such a way that when we have to accomplish some action that is utterly abnormal, we need some objective pretext? Your plan was the right one, it was both precise and perfect, but perhaps it required the presence of the deer; the scene had come apart, and you let your gun drop. It was a matter of fractions of a second; who could divide everything up into its constituent parts, see them separately and make a judgment? And it’s really not important. The fact is what matters, even if it would not determine a trial. You wanted to kill me, and when something unanticipated disrupted the moment, your hand began to tremble and you didn’t do it. The deer was already out of sight between the trees, we didn’t move, I didn’t turn around. We stood like that for some seconds. If I had looked you in the face just then, I might have seen it all. But I didn’t dare. There’s a feeling of shame that is more painful than any other in life; it’s the shame felt by the victim who is forced to look his killer in the eyes, as if he were the creature bowing before its creator. That’s why I didn’t look at you, and as the paralysis left us, I started to walk across the clearing toward the top of the hill. You started mechanically to move behind me. As we went, without turning around, I said, ‘You missed your shot.’
“You didn’t say a word, and your silence was its own admission. At times like that, anyone would start talking, either ashamed or worked up, trying to explain himself, making jokes or sounding insulted: every huntsman wants to prove that he was right, that the animal was a poor specimen, that the distance was too great, that the shot was too risky . . . but you said nothing. And your silence meant, ‘Yes, I missed the shot that should have killed you.’ We reached the top of the hill without a word being exchanged. The gamekeeper was already up there with the dogs, the valley was echoing with shots, the hunt had begun. Our paths separated. When midday came and it was time to eat—a table and food for the huntsmen had been set up under the trees—your beater told me you had left for town.”
The guest picks up another cigar. His hands betray no tremor, he calmly cuts the tip. The General leans forward, holding a candle, to light it for him.
“Thank you,” says the guest.
“But that evening, you came to dinner,” says the General. “As you always did, every evening. You came at the usual time, seven-thirty, in the carriage. And as on so many evenings we dined à trois with Krisztina.
“The table was laid in the great dining room, as it was tonight, and with the same ornamental figures, and Krisztina sat between us. There were blue candles burning. She liked candlelight, she liked everything that echoed tradition, and times past, and a nobler form of human discourse. After the hunt was over, I had gone directly to my rooms to change, and had not seen Krisztina that afternoon. The manservant had told me that she had left after luncheon for town. As I came into the room, Krisztina was sitting in front of the fireplace with a light Indian shawl around her shoulders, for the weather was misty and damp. A fire had been lit; she was reading and did not hear me. Perhaps the rugs absorbed the sound of my footsteps, perhaps she was simply too absorbed in the text—it was an English book, a traveler’s description of the tropics—but in any case she did not become aware of me until I was standing right in front of her. Then she looked up—do you remember her eyes? She had a way of looking up that turned the world to brilliant daylight—and maybe it was the effect of the candlelight, but I was shocked by her pallor. ‘Are you feeling unwell?’ I asked her. She said nothing. She stared at me for a long moment, wide-eyed, and those seconds were almost as drawn out and as eloquent as the moments that morning in the forest when I stood still, waiting to see whether you would say something or squeeze the trigger. She scrutinized my face as if her life depended on finding out what I was thinking if I was thinking . . . if there was something I knew. . . . At that moment, knowledge was more important than life itself. The thing that is always the most important—more important than the outcome, more important than the prey—is to know what the creature we have chosen as our victim thinks of us. . . . She looked into my eyes as if she were conducting an interrogation. I believe I returned her gaze steadily. During those seconds, and later, I was calm, and my face betrayed nothing to her. Indeed, during that morning and afternoon, on that strange hunt in which I had become the game, I had struggled to reach the decision that, no matter what life brought, I would remain silent and I would never, ever, speak either to Krisztina or to Nini, the two people who were my confidantes, of what I had been forced to realize in the dawn out in the woods. I had also decided to have a doctor observe you as unobtrusively as possible, since some demon of insanity seemed to have taken hold of your brain. I could think of no other explanation. The man closest to my heart has gone mad, is what I kept repeating to myself, constantly, obstinately, despairingly, all morning, all afternoon, and that is how I saw you when you came in. I was trying to preserve human dignity in general and yours in particular, for if you were the master of your faculties and had a reason—no matter what it was—to take up a weapon against me, then every one of us who lived in this house had lost our human dignity, including Krisztina and myself. That is also how I interpreted the look of shock and astonishment in Krisztina’s eyes when I stood before her after the hunt. That she intuited the secret that had bound you and me since the morning.
“Women sense these things, I thought. Then you come, in evening dress, and we go in to table. We chat as we did on other evenings. We talk about the hunt, about the beaters’ report, about the error made by one of the huntsmen who had shot a buck he had no right to shoot . . . but we do not say a single word all evening about those strange, questionable seconds. You do not mention your own hunting adventure with the magnificent deer you failed to kill. Such a story requires a telling, even when one is less than an expert huntsman. You don’t say a word about missing the game and leaving the hunt early without explanation and going back to town, not to reappear until evening, although it is all very irregular and a breach of etiquette. You could mention the morning in a single word . . . but you don’t. It’s as if we had not gone on the hunt at all. You talk about other things. You ask Krisztina what she was reading as you came into the salon to join us. You and she have a long discussion about it, you ask Krisztina what the title is, you want to know what impression she has of the text, you have her tell you what life in the tropics is like, you behave as if this subject matter is of burning interest to you—and it is not until later that I learn from the bookseller in town that this book and others on the same subject were ordered by you, and that you had lent it to Krisztina a few days before. I know none of that yet. You both cut me out of the conversation, because I know nothing about the tropics. Later, when I realize that you had been deceiving me that night, I think back to this scene, I hear the words, even though they faded long ago, and I am forced to admit, in genuine admiration, that the two of you played your roles perfectly. I, the uninitiated, can find nothing suspicious in your words: you talk about the tropics, about a book, about an ordinary piece of reading. You want to know what Krisztina thinks, you are particularly interested in whether someone born and raised in another part of the world could tolerate the conditions in the tropics . . . what does she think? (You don’t ask me.) And could she herself tolerate the rain, the warm haze, the suffocating hot mists, the loneliness in the swamps and the primeval forest . . . you see, the words come back of their own accord. The last time you sat in this armchair, forty-one years ago, you talked about the tropics, the swamps, the warm mists, and the rain. And just now, when you returned to this house, there they were again, words like swamp, and the tropics, and rain, and hot mist. Yes, words come back. Everything comes back, words and things go round in a circle, sometimes they circle the entire globe and then they finally return to their starting point and something is completed,” he says calmly. “That was what you talked about, the last time you spoke to Krisztina. Around midnight, you order the carriage and are driven back to town. Those were the events on the day of the hunt,” he says, and his voice express
es the satisfaction of an old man who has just successfully delivered an exact report, a systematic recapitulation that commands attention.
15
When you leave, Krisztina also withdraws,” he says after a moment. “I remain alone in this room. She has left the English book on the tropics lying on her chair. I have no desire to go to sleep, so I pick up the book and thumb through it. I look at the pictures, and try to involve myself with its statistics about the economy and public health. It surprises me that Krisztina is reading such a book. All this won’t concern her very much, I think, the mathematical curve of rubber production on the peninsula can’t be that interesting to her, nor the general health problems of the natives. It’s just not Krisztina, I think. But the book has something to say, not just in English and not just about living conditions on the peninsula. As I am sitting there, book in hand, after midnight, alone in the room after the two people who have meant the most to me, aside from my father, have left, it suddenly dawns on me that the book is another signal. And I realize something else. During the day, things have finally begun to impose themselves on my attention, something has happened, life has turned eloquent. At such moments, I think, great care is required, because on such days life is speaking to us in mute signs, everything suddenly makes us alert, everything is a proof and a symbol, all we need to do is understand. One day things mature and we can put words to them. And, as I think this, I suddenly understand that this book is both a sign and an answer. It is saying: Krisztina wants to leave here. She is thinking about strange worlds, which means she must want something other than this world. Perhaps she wants to run away from here, from something or someone—and this someone can be me, but it can also be you. It is as clear as daylight, I think, Krisztina feels and knows something, and she wants to get away from here, and that’s why she is reading a study of the tropics. I sense a great many things, and I feel that I also understand them. I feel and I understand what happened today: my life has split in two, like a landscape torn apart by an earthquake. On the one side is childhood, you and everything that the past has meant, and on the other is a dark place through which I cannot see, but through which I must find my way: the remainder of my life. And the two parts of this life are no longer in contact with each other. What happened? I cannot say. I have spent the whole day in an effort to appear calm and in control of myself, and I succeeded; Krisztina could not yet know anything as she looked at me, her face pale and with that strange questioning stare. She could not know, could not read on my face, what had happened on the hunt. . . . And indeed, what had happened? Am I not just imagining all this? Is the whole thing not just a figment of my imagination? If I tell it to anyone, he or she will probably laugh in my face. I have nothing, no proof, in my hand. . . . All I have is a voice inside me, stronger than any proof, crying out unmistakably, incontrovertibly, beyond all doubt, that I am not deceiving myself, and that I know the truth. And the truth is that in the dawn, my friend wanted to kill me. What a ridiculous accusation, out of the empty air, isn’t it? Can I ever speak about this conviction, which is even more horrifying than the thing itself, to another human being? No. But now that I am in possession of this knowledge, with that calm certainty that accompanies our recognition of simple facts, how am I to imagine our future lives together? Can I look you in the eye, or should all three of us, Krisztina, you, and I, play the game and turn our friendship into pure theater while we all watch one another?
