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 o 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 expresses the satisfaction of an old man who has just successfully delivered an exact report, a systematic recapitulation that commands attention.
Chapter 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 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 l andscape 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?