It does not occur to me that someone who is so compulsive about revealing everything to another person is perhaps this honest precisely because she wishes to avoid having to confess something that to her is even more important and fundamental. I do not think of such a thing on my honeymoon; nor later, when I read the diary. But then comes that day and that night, the day of the hunt, when I feel as if your gun had gone off and the bullet had whistled past my ear. And then the night, when you leave us, but not before discussing the tropics with Krisztina in some detail. And I remain alone with the memory of that day and that evening. And I do not find the diary in its usual place in the drawer of Krisztina’s desk. I decide to find you in town next day and ask … “
He falls silent, and shakes his head in the manner of old people exclaiming over some piece of childishness.
“Ask what? … ” he says quietly and dismissively, as if to mock himself “What can one ask people with words? And what is the value of an answer given in words instead of in the coin of one’s entire life? … Not much,” he says firmly. “There are very few people whose words correspond exactly to the reality of their lives. It may be the rarest thing there is. But I did not know that then. I am not thinking now about pitiful liars. I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is to take the givens of one’s fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can.
That is the most we can accomplish. And it does not make us any the cleverer, or any the less vulnerable … so I want to talk to you, and I still do not know that everything I can ask you and everything you can answer will not change the facts. Nevertheless, one can get closer to reality and the facts by using words, questions and answers, and that is why I want to talk to you. I go to sleep, exhausted, and sleep deeply, as if I had completed some great physical effort, a long ride, a long walk … Once I carried a bear down from the mountains on my back. I know that I was exceptionally strong during those years, and yet I am still astonished in retrospect at how I managed to carry this great weight across slopes and through gullies. Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal. Back then I went to sleep in the snow in a similar state of exhaustion after I had reached the valley with the bear; my gamekeepers found me half-frozen next to its dead body. That was how I slept that night. Deep and dreamlessly … After I wake up, I order the carriage and drive into town to your apartment. I stand in the room and realize that you have gone away. It is only next day that we receive your letters at the regimental barracks telling us that you are resigning your commission and going abroad. At that moment, all I understand is the fact of your flight, because now it is certain that you wanted to kill me, that something has happened and is still happening whose true significance I do not yet grasp, and it is also certain that it all has to do with me personally, that it’s all happening to me as well as to you. So I stand in that mysterious room filled with beautiful objects as the door opens and in walks Krisztina.”
He says all this as if he were spinning a tale, sweetly, amicably, to entertain his friend, now finally returned home from a far country and a distant time, with the more interesting parts of an old story.
Konrad listens without moving. His cigar has gone out and he has set it on the rim of the glass ashtray, he sits, arms folded, quite still, his posture stiff and correct, the perfect officer conversing pleasantly with another of higher rank.
“She opens the door and stops on the threshold,” says the General. “She is not wearing a hat, she has come from home and has harnessed the light trap herself ‘ he gone?’ she asks. Her voice is strangely hoarse. I nod, yes, he has gone. Krisztina stands in the door, straight and slender, perhaps she was never so beautiful as in that moment. She has the pallor of the wounded who have lost a great deal of blood; only her eyes were fever-bright, as they had been the evening before, when I came up to her while she was reading. ‘ has fled,’ she says, and does not wait for an answer; she says it to herself, it’s a statement of fact.
“The coward,’ she adds softly and calmly.” “She said that?” asks the guest, abandoning his statuelike stillness and clearing his throat.
“Yes,” says the General. “That is all. Nor do I ask her anything. We stand silently in the room. Then Krisztina begins to look around, she takes in the furniture, the paintings, the art objects one by one. I watch her. She looks around the room as if saying goodbye.
She looks at it as if she had seen it all already and now she wants to take leave of every object in it. As you know, one can look at things or a room in one of two ways: as if seeing them for the first time or seeing them for the last. Krisztina’s eyes show none of the curiosity of discovery. They move calmly, assuredly, through this room the way one checks a room at home to be sure that everything is in its place. Her eyes are shining like an invalid’s and yet are strangely veiled. She doesn’t say a word, and she is in control of herself, but I feel that this woman has been thrown out of the safe course of her life and that she is about to lose herself and you and me. One look, one unexpected movement, and she will do or say something that can never be repaired.
… She looks at the pictures, calmly, without curiosity, as if to impress on her memory things she has often seen before and now sees one last time. She looks at the wide bed with a proud look and blinks, then shuts her eyes for a moment. Then she turns, as wordless as she was on arrival, and leaves the room. I remain. Through the open window I watch her walk through between the standard roses which have just begun to flower. She seats herself in the little trap which is waiting for her behind the fence, picks up the reins, and departs. A moment later the carriage has disappeared around the bend in the street.” He stops talking and looks over at his guest. “Am I not tiring you?” he asks politely. “No,” says Konrad hoarsely. “Absolutely not. Please go on.”
“I am going into quite a lot of detail,” he says as if to himself. “But it’s not possible any other way: only in the details can we understand the essential, as books and life have taught me. One needs to know every detail, since one can never be sure which of them is important, and which word shines out from behind things. But I don’t have much more to say. You have fled, Krisztina has driven home in the trap. And I, what is there left for me to do at this moment, and for the rest of my life?