Then the Countess, the General’s mother, died, and Nini took a cloth soaked in vinegar and washed the cold, white, sweat-streaked forehead of the corpse. And then one day they brought the father of the General back home on a stretcher, for he had fallen from his horse. He lived for another five years, and Nini took care of him. She read French books aloud to him, saying each letter because she couldn’t speak the language, and stringing them together until the invalid made sense of them. Then the General got married, and when the couple returned from their honeymoon, Nini was standing waiting for them at the entrance. She kissed the hand of the new countess and offered her roses, again with a smile. It was a moment that the General remembered from time to time.
Then after twelve years the new countess died, and Nini tended the grave and the clothes of the dead woman.
She had neither rank nor title in the household. Everyone simply recognized her strength. Aside from the General, nobody knew that she was over ninety. It was never a topic of conversation. Nini’s was a power that surged through the house, the people in it, the walls, the objects, the way some invisible galvanic current animates Punch and the Policeman on the stage at a little traveling puppet show. Sometimes people had the feeling that the house and its contents could, like ancient fabrics, fall apart at a touch and crumble to nothing if Nini were not there to hold them together with her strength. After his wife died, the General went on a long journey. When he returned a year later, he moved into his mother’s room in the old wing of the castle. The new wing, in which he had lived with his wife, the brilliantly colored salons with their French silk wall-coverings already fraying, the great reception room with its fireplace and its books, the staircase with its antlers, stuffed grouse, and mounted chamois heads, the large dining room with its view from the window down the valley and over the little town to the distant silver-blue shapes of the mountains, his wife’s room and his own bedroom next door, were all closed and locked at his orders.
For thirty-two years following the death of his wife and his return from abroad, the only people to enter these rooms were Nini and the servants when they cleaned them every two months.
“Sit down, Nini,” said the General. The nurse sat down. In the last year she had become old. After reaching ninety, one ages differently from the way one aged at fifty or sixty: one ages without bitterness. Nini’s face was rose pink and crumpled-such is the way noble fabrics age, and centuries-old silks that hold woven in their threads the assembled skills and dreams of an entire family. The previous year she had developed a cataract in one eye, leaving it gray and sad. The other eye had remained blue, the timeless blue of a mountain lake in August, and it smiled. Nini was dressed as always in dark blue, dark-blue felt skirt, simple blouse. As if she hadn’t had any new clothes made in the last seventy-five years.
“Konrad has written,’ said the General, holding up the letter. “Do you remember?” “Yes,” said Nini. She remembered it all. “He’s here in the town,” said the General very quietly, the way one conveys a piece of information that is of utmost importance and extremely confidential.
“He’s staying at the White Eagle. He’s coming here tonight, I’m sending the carriage to bring him. He will dine here.” “Where here?” asked Nini calmly, allowing her blue eye, the living, smiling eye, to cast its gaze around the room.
For the last twenty years, no one had been received here. The visitors who sometimes arrived at lunchtime, gentlemen from the regional government and the city council, or guests who had come for one of the great shoots, were received by the steward in the hunting lodge that was kept ready no matter what the time of year; everything was organized for their welcome: bedchambers, bathrooms, kitchen, the large informal hunter’s dining room, the open veranda, the rustic wooden tables. On such occasions the steward presided the head of the table and extended hospitality to hunters and officials in the name of the General. Nobody was in any way offended by this, everyone that the master of the house did not appear in public. The only person to enter the castle was the who came once a year, in winter, to inscribe in chalk the initials of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar on the doorframe. The priest, who had presided at the funerals of the family. Aside from him, no one. Ever.
“The other side,” said the General. “Can that be done?” “We cleaned it a month ago,” said the nurse, “so it surely can be done.” “Eight o’clock.
Can it be done? … ” he asked again anxiously, in an almost childlike way, leaning forward in his chair. “In the great dining hall. It’s noon already.”
“Noon,” said the nurse. “I will give the instructions. Air the rooms until six o’clock, then set the table.” She moved her lips silently, as if counting up the time and the tasks to be completed, then said yes with quick confidence.
Still leaning forward, the General watched her closely. Their two lives were slowly trundling and bumping along their way, inextricably linked in the rhythms of great old age. Each knew everything about the other, more than mother and child, more than husband and wife. The intimacy that bound them was closer than any physical bond. Perhaps it was a matter of mother’s milk. Perhaps because Nini had been the first person to see the General as he was born, at the moment of his delivery, in the blood and slime that accompany all mankind into the world. Perhaps because of the seventy-five years they had lived under the same roof, eating the same food, breathing the same air, sharing slightly musty atmosphere of the house and the same view of the trees outside the windows. And all of it lay too deep for words. They were neither brother and sister nor lovers … But there are other ties, numinous ones, and of these they were aware. There is a kind of consanguinity both closer and more powerful than that of twins in a mother’s womb. Life had melded their days and their nights, each knew the other’s body just as each knew the other’s dreams. The nurse said, “Do it to be the way it used to be?” “Yes,” said the General. “Exactly the same. The way it was last time.”
“Very well,” was all she said.
She went to him, bent down to his old man’s hand — its age spots, its knotted veins and its signet ring, and kissed it.
“Promise me you won’t get upset,” she said. “I promise.” was the General’s soft and docile reply.
Chapter 3
Until five o’clock there was no sign of life from the room. Then he rang for his servant and ordered a cold bath. He had sent back his midday meal and drunk no more than a lukewarm cup of tea. He lay in the dim light of the room on a divan. Beyond the cool walls, summer buzzed and hummed and seethed. Like a spy he took note of the boiling restlessness of the light, the rustle of the hot wind in the desiccated leaves, and the noises of the castle.
Now that the first surprise had passed, he suddenly felt tired. One spends a lifetime preparing for something. First one suffers the wound.
Then one plans revenge. And waits. He had been waiting a long time now.
He no longer knew when it was that the wound had become a thirst for revenge, and the thirsting had waiting. Time preserves everything, but as it does so, it fades things to the colorlessness of ancient photographs fixed on metal plates. Light and time erase the contours and distinctive shading of the faces. One has to angle the image this way and that until it catches the light in a particular way and one can make out the person whose features have been absorbed into the blank surface of the plate. It is the same with our memories. But then one day light strikes from a certain angle and one recaptures a face again. The General had old photographs like that. The one of his Dressed in the uniform of a captain of the guards, with his hair in thick curls, like a girl. Around a white guard’s cape, which he held together against his chest with one hand, rings flashing. tilted to one side with an air of offended pride. He had never spoken of where and how he had been offended. When he returned from Vienna, he went hunting. Day after day, hunt after hunt, no matter what time of year, if it was neither the season for red deer nor other game, he hunted foxes and crows.