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 couldn fight against my former homeland. They comprehend such things. Which was why I was allowed to return 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 wide 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.”
“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, 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 c quack doctor. Even the Malays play quack healer all time. So she died in 1907,” he says finally, as if he had been preoccupied with the arithmetic all this time ~ 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 you may remember.
Eighty-six, the year we swore 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 lifetime. It’s an old vintage now.”
“What we swore to uphold no longer exists,” the guest very seriously as he, too, raises his glass. “Everyone has died, or gone away, or abandoned 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.
Chapter 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 in the regiment, in case you remember.” “Only vaguely,” says the guest indifferently.