“I was standing in front of the piano, looking at the orchids,” he says.
The apartment was like a disguise.
Or was, perhaps, our uniform your disguise? Only you can answer that question, and now … everything is over, you have in fact provided the answer in the life you chose. One’s life, viewed as a whole, is always the answer to the most important questions. Along the way, does it matter what one says, what words and principles one chooses to justify oneself? At the very end, one’s answers to the questions the world has posed with such relentlessness are to be found in the facts of one’s life. Questions such as: Who are you? …’ What did you actually want?
… What could you actually achieve? … At what points were you loyal or disloyal or brave or a coward? And one answers as best one can, honestly or dishonestly; that’s not so important. What’s important is that finally one answers with one’s life. You set aside your uniform because you saw it as a disguise, that much is already clear. I, on the other t wore mine for as long as duty and the world demanded it; that was my answer. So that settles one question. The other one is: What were you to me? Were you my friend? Because you fled without saying farewell although not entirely, because the previous day something happened during the hunt, and it was only later that its meaning dawned on me: that it had been: your farewell. One rarely knows when a word or an act trigger some final, irreversible alteration in any relationship.
Why did I go to your apartment that day?
You did not ask me to come, you did not say your farewells, you left no word behind you. What was I doing-there in a place to which I had never been invited, on the very same day that you left us? What presentiment made me take the carriage and drive into town as fast as I could, to look for you in your apartment, which was already empty of life? …
What was it that I had learned the previous day during the hunt? Has some piece of information been left out? … Did I have no confidential tip, no hint, no word that you were preparing to flee? … No, everyone was silent, even Nini … You remember my old nurse, she knew everything there was to know about us. Is she still alive? Yes, in her own fashion.
She lives like that tree there outside the window, the one planted by my great-grandfather. Like all of us, she has her allotted span of years, and hers is not yet complete. Nini knew. But not even she said anything.
“During those days, I was quite alone. And yet I knew that it was the moment when the time had come for everything to become clear and fall into place, you, me, everybody. Yes, that’s what I understood out on the hunt,” he says, lost in his memories and also answering a question he must often have asked himself.
“What did you understand?” asked Konrad.
“It was a beautiful hunt,” says the General, his voice almost warm, as if he is reliving the particulars of a favorite memory. favorite memory.
“The last big hunt in this forest. There were huntsmen then, real huntsmen … perhaps they still exist today, I don’t know. That was the last time I went hunting in my forest. Since that time only people who come are Sunday hunters, guests, who are received and taken care of by the steward and play around with their guns among the trees. The real hunt was something else entirely. You won’t be able to understand that, because you were never a huntsman. It was just another duty, one of those professional duties appropriate to your rank, like riding and attending social gatherings. You were a huntsman, but only in the way of someone bowing to social customs.
“When you were out hunting, there would be a scornful look on your face, and you always carried your gun carelessly, as if it were a walking stick. You are a stranger to this oddest of passions, the most secret of in a man’s life, that burns deep inside him like magma, deeper than any role he plays, or clothes he wears, refinements he learns. It’s the passion for killing. We are human beings, and it is part of our human condition to kill. It’s an imperative … we kill to protect, we kill to keep hold, we kill in revenge. You’re smiling in scorn … You were an artist, and these base, raw instincts had been refined out of your artist’s soul. Maybe you think you never killed a living creature.
Bu that is by no means certain.” His voice is stern and precise.
“This is the evening when there is no point in discussing anything but the essentials and the truth, because there will be no second such meeting, and maybe there are not many evenings and days left to either of us … I am sure there will never be another one with greater significance. Perhaps you remember I, too, was once in the Orient a long time ago; it was on my honeymoon with Krisztina. We traveled all through the Arabian lands, and in Baghdad we were the guests of an Arabian family. They are the most distinguished people, as you, after all your travels, certainly know for yourself. Their pride, their hauteur, their bearing, their fiery natures and their calm, their disciplined bodies and confident movements, their games, the flash in their eyes, all demonstrate a primeval sense of rank, not social rank but man’s first awakening in the chaos of creation to an understanding of his human dignity. “There is a theory that at the beginning of time, long before the formation of peoples and tribes and cultures, the human species came into being there, deep in the Arabian world. Perhaps that explains their pride, I don’t know. I’m not well-versed in these matters … but I do understand something about pride. And in the way one can sense, without any external evidence, that someone is of the same race and social rank, I sensed during those weeks in the Orient that the people there have a grandeur, including even the dirtiest camel driver. As I said, we were living with a local family, in a house that was like a palace; our ambassador had been kind enough to arrange the invitation. Those cool, white houses … do you know them? Each with its central courtyard, where the whole life of the family and the clan is conducted, so it is like a weekly market, a parliament, and a temple forecourt all rolled into one.
..the way they saunter, their eagerness to play that shows in all their movements. And that dignified, determined idleness, behind which their exuberance and passions lurk like snakes behind stones in the hot sun.
“One evening our hosts invited Arab guests in our honor. Until then, their hospitality had been more or less in the European style; the owner of the house was both a judge and a dealer in contraband, one of the wealthiest men in the city. The guest rooms had English furniture, the bathtub was made of solid silver. But on this particular evening we saw something quite other. The guests arrived after sundown, only men, grand gentlemen with their servants. In the middle of the courtyard the fire was already lit, burning with that acrid smoke that comes from camel dung. Everyone sat down around it in silence. Krisztina was the only woman present. A lamb was brought, a white lamb, and our host took his knife and killed it with a movement I shall never forget … a movement like that is not something one learns, it is an Oriental movement straight out of the time when the act of killing still had a symbolic and religious significance, when it denoted sacrifice. That was how Abraham lifted the knife over Isaac when he was preparing to sacrifice him, that was the movement in the ancient temples when the sacrifice was made at the altar before the idols or the image of the godhead, and that was the movement that struck John the Baptist’s head from his body …