“Perhaps the word is too strong.” The General nods. “But when you look at what happened from a certain distance, you must admit that it’s not easy to find a less harsh one. You say you didn’t owe anyone anything.
That is, and is not, true. Of course you didn’t owe any thing to your tailor or to the moneylenders in town. Nor did you owe me money or the fulfillment of any promise. And still, that July-you see, I remember everything, even the day, it was a Wednesday-when you left town, you knew that you were leaving behind a debt. That evening, I went to your apartment, because I had heard that you had gone away. I heard it at dusk, under peculiar circumstances. We can talk about those, too, sometime, if you would care to. I went to your apartment, where the only person to receive me was your manservant. I asked him to leave me alone in the room where you lived those last years when you were serving in the city.”
He falls silent, leans back and puts a hand over his eyes, as if looking back into the past. Then, calmly, in an even tone, he continues. “Of course, the manservant did as asked-what else could he do? I was alone in the room where you had lived. I took a good look at everything-you must excuse this tactless curiosity, but somehow I was incapable of accepting the fact, just could not believe that the person with whom I had spent the greater and the best part of my life, twenty-four years from childhood through youth and into adulthood, had simply bolted. I tried to justify it. I thought: Maybe he’s seriously ill. Then I hoped perhaps you had temporarily lost your mind, or maybe someone had come after you because you had lost at cards or done something against the regiment, or the flag, or you’d broken your word or betrayed your honor.
That sort of thing. You should not be surprised that any of these things struck me as less of a transgression than what you had actually done.
Any of them would have had some justification, some explanation, even the betrayal of the ideals that shaped our world. Only one thing was incomprehensible: that you had committed a sin against me. You ran away like a swindler or a thief, you ran a matter of hours after leaving the castle where you had been with Krisztina and me, the three of us spending our days together, sometimes long into the night, as we had done for years, in mutual friendship and the brotherly trust that only twins can share, because they are sports of nature, bound together in life and death, aware, even when they are grown up and separated by great distances, of everything about each other. It doesn’t matter if one lives in London and the other in a foreign country, both will fall ill at the same moment, and of the same disease. They don’t talk to each other, they don’t write, they live in different circumstances, they eat different foods, they are thousands of miles apart, and yet when they are thirty or forty years old they suffer the same afflicti on, be it in the gallbladder or the appendix, and their chances of survival will be the same. Their two bodies are as organically linked as they were in the womb. And they love or hate the same people. It is a phenomenon of nature, not that common, but then again, not as rare as is usually thought.
“And sometimes, I’ve thought that friendship is formed of links as fateful as those between twins.
“A strange identity of impulses, sympathies, tasks, temperaments, and cultural formation binds two people together in a single fate. It does not matter what one of them may do against the other, that fate will remain the same. One of them may flee the other, but each will still know the other’s essence. One of them may find a new friend or a new lover, but without the other’s tacit consent this doesn’t release their bond. Their lives will unfold along similar paths whether one of them goes far away or not, even as far as the tropics. These were some of the things I was thinking as I stood in your room the day you ran away. “I still see that moment with absolute clarity. I still smell that smell of heavy English tobacco, I still see the furniture, the divan with the big oriental rug, and the equestrian pictures on the walls. And a dark red leather armchair, the kind you usually find in smoking rooms. The divan was very large, and you had obviously had it made to your own specifications, because there was nothing resembling it to be bought in the area. In fact, it wasn’t a divan, more a French bed, large enough for two people.” He watches the smoke from his cigar.
“The window overlooked the garden, if I remember correctly … It was the first and last time I was ever there; you never wanted me to visit you. And it was only by chance that you mentioned that you had rented a house on the outskirts of town in a deserted neighborhood, a house with a garden. That was three years before you fled-forgive me, I see that the word disturbs you.” “Please continue,” says the guest. “Words are not the issue here.” “Do you think so?” asks the General innocently.
“Are words not the issue? I would not be bold enough to assert such a thing. Sometimes it seems to me that it is precisely the words one utters, or stifles, or writes, that are the issue, if not the only issue. Yes, I am sure,” he continues firmly, “you had not ever invited me to this apartment, and without an invitation, I could not visit you.
If I’m honest, I thought you were ashamed of letting me see this apartment you had furnished yourself, because I was a rich man …
Perhaps it seemed wanting … You were a very proud,” he says, in the same firm voice. “The only thing that came between us when we were young was money. You were proud, and could not forgive that I am rich. Later in life I came to think that perhaps wealth is indeed unforgivable. To find oneself constantly the guest of a financial fortune … and on such a scale. I was born into it, and even I had the feeling from time to time that it was impermissible.
And you were always painfully intent on underlining the financial imbalance between us. The poor, particularly the poor among the upper classes of society, do not forgive,” he says with a strange tone of satisfaction. “And that is why I thought that perhaps you were hiding the apartment from me, perhaps you were ashamed of its simple furnishings. A foolish supposition, as I now know, but your pride was truly boundless. And so one day I find myself standing in the home that you had rented and furnished and never shown to me. And I do not believe my eyes. This apartment, as you well know, was a work of art. Nothing large, one generous room on the ground floor, two small ones upstairs, and yet everything-furniture, rooms, garden-arranged as only an artist could. That was when I understood that you really are an artist. And I also understood to what extent you were a stranger among the rest of us ordinary people. And also what wrong was done to you when, out of love and pride, you were given to the military life. No, you were never r a soldier-and I could feel, in retrospect, the profound loneliness you felt among us. But this home served you as a refuge, just as in the Middle Ages a fortress or a cloister sheltered those who had renounced the world. And like a brigand you used this place to hoard everything of beauty and noble quality: curtains and carpets, silver, ancient bronzes, crystal and furniture, rare woven materials. I know that your mother died at some point during those years, and that you also must have received inheritances from your Polish relatives. Once you mentioned a piece of property on the border with Russia, and the fact that you would inherit it. And now here it was, in these three rooms, exchanged for furniture and pictures. And in the middle of the main room downstairs, a piano, with a piece of ancient brocade thrown across it, and set on top, a crystal vase holding three orchids. The only place they grow in this region is in my greenhouse. I walked through the rooms and took mental inventory of everything. I grasped that you had lived among us and yet never belonged with us. I grasped that you had created this masterpiece of a rare and hidden retreat in secret, defiantly, as a great act of will, in order to conceal it from the world, as a place where you could live only for yourself and your art. Because you are an artist, and perhaps you could have created true art-works,” he says, in a tone that brooks no contradiction. “That is what I read in the perfect selection of the furnishings in your abandoned apartment. And in that Krisztina stepped through the door.” He crosses his arms again and speaks so dispassionately and deliberately that he might be dictating the details of an accident to a policeman.