… I look at the room and then after the vanished Krisztina. I know that your manservant is standing at attention out in the hall. I call his name, he comes in and salutes. ‘ your orders,’ he says.
” ‘ did the Captain leave?’…‘With the early express.’ That’s the train to the capital. ‘ he take much luggage?’ ‘, only a few civilian clothes.’ ‘ he leave any orders or any message?’ ‘, this apartment is to be given up. The furniture is to be sold. The lawyer is to take care of it. I am to return to the unit,’ he says. Nothing more.
“We look at each other. And then comes the moment that is not easy to forget. The fellow-a twenty-year-old farm boy, I’m sure you remember his good-humored, intelligent face-abandons his military posture and his straight-ahead parade ground stare, and he’s no longer the common soldier standing in front of his superior, he’s a man who knows something in front of a man he pities. There is something so human and sympathetic in his glance that I turn white, then red … now-for the first and only time in my life-I lose control, too. I step up to him, seize the front of his jacket, and almost lift him off his feet. We are breathing into each other’s faces and looking straight into each other’s eyes. The boy’s are full of horror and, again, sympathy. You know how, back then, it was better for me never to seize hold of people or things; if I didn’t touch things carefully, they broke … I know that, too, and I sense that both of us, the boy and I, are in danger. So I let him down again, set him back on the floor rather like a lead soldier; his boots land with a thump on the parquet and he stands stiffly at attention again as if on parade. I take out my handkerchief and wipe my brow.
There is only one question, and this person could answer it immediately: Has the lady who just left been here at other times? If he does not answer, I will kill him. But if he answers, perhaps I will also kill him, and perhaps not just him … at such times one does not know one’s friends anymore. But in the same moment I know that it is superfluous. I know that Krisztina has been here before, not just once but many times.”
He leans back and lets his arms drop wearily. “Now there is no further point in asking anything. A stranger cannot betray what one still needs to know. One would need to know why all this happened. And where the boundary lies between two people. The boundary of betrayal. That is what one would need to know. And also, where in all this my guilt lies? … “
He asks this very quietly, and his voice is uncertain. It is evident from his words that this is the first time he has uttered them aloud, after he has carried them in his soul for forty-one years and until now has found no answer.
Chapter 16
“Things do not simply happen to one,” he says-, his voice firmer now as he looks up. Above their heads the candles burn with high, guttering, smoky flames; the hollows surrounding the wicks are quite black.
Outside, beyond the windows, the landscape and the town are invisible in the darkness; not a single lantern is burning in the night. “One can also shape what happens to one. One shapes it, summons it, takes hold of the inevitable. It’s the human condition. A man acts, even when he knows from the very onset that his act will be fatal. He and his fate are inseparable, they have a pact with each other that molds them both.
It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps in through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter. No one is strong enough or cunning enough to avert by word or deed the misfortune that is rooted in the iron laws of his character and his life. Did I know about you and Krisztina? I mean from the start, the beginning of our story a trois? … It was you who introduced me to Krisztina. You knew her as a child, it was you who used to have scores copied by her father when he was an old man who could still use his crippled hands to write out music but could no longer hold a violin and bow and coax rich tones out of them, so that he had to abandon his career in the concert hall for a small-town conservatory, where he taught all the unmusical or at best marginally musical pupils, and picked up an additional pittance by correcting and improving the compositions of gifted amateur dabblers … That was how you met him and his daughter, who was then seventeen. Her mother died in the southern Tyrol, where she had gone to a sanitarium near her birthplace to receive care for her heart condition.
“Later, at the end of our honeymoon, we went to this spa town to find the sanitarium, because Krisztina wanted to see the room where her mother had died.
“We arrive in Arco one afternoon in an automobile, after driving along the shores of Lake Garda in a drift of the scents of flowers and orange trees. We stop in Riva and that afternoon we go over to Arco. The countryside is silver-gray, as if covered in olive groves. High above is a fortress, and hidden in the warm, misty air between the cliffs is the sanitarium. There are palm trees everywhere, and the light is so delicately hazy that it is like being in a greenhouse. In the stillness, the pale-yellow building where Krisztina’s mother spent her last years looks mysterious, as if it were home to all the sadness that can afflict the human heart, and as if heart disease itself were the consequence of the disappointments and incomparable misfortunes of the world that were lived out here in silence. Krisztina walks around the house. The silence, the scent of the thorny southern plants, the warm, sweet-smelling haze that envelops everything like a linen bandage for damaged souls, all this moves me deeply, too. For the first time, I sense that Krisztina is not totally with me, and from somewhere far, far away, at the beginning of time, I hear the wise, sad voice of my father, and it’s speaking of you, Konrad.” For the first time he utters the name of his guest, without anger, without agitation, in a tone of neutral courtesy. “And the voice is saying you are not a real soldier, you are another kind of man. I do not understand, I still don’t know what being different means … it takes a long time, many lonely hours, to teach myself that it is always and exclusively about the fact that between men and women, friends and acquaintances, there is this question of otherness, and that the human race is divided into two camps. Sometimes I think these two camps are what define the entire world, and that all class distinctions, all shades of opinion and all variations in power relations are simply variants of this otherness. So just as it is blood alone that binds people to defend one another in the face of dange r, on the spiritual plane one person will struggle to help another only if this person is not ‘,’ and if quite aside from opinions and convictions they share similar natures at the deepest level … “There in Arco I understood that the celebrations were over, and that Krisztina too was ‘.’ And I remember the words of my father, who was not a great reader of books, but whom loneliness had taught to recognize the truth; he knew about this duality, he too had met a woman whom he loved profoundly but at whose side nonetheless he remained alone because they were two different people-for my mother, too, was ‘,’ just as you and Krisztina are … And in Arco something else became clear to me, as well. The feeling that bound me to my mother and to you and to Krisztina was always the same, a longing, a hope in search of something, a helpless, sad yearning. For we always love the ‘,’ we always seek it out, no matter what the circumstances and sudden changes in our lives … The greatest secret and the greatest gift any of us can be offered is the chance for two ” people to meet. It happens so rarely-it must be because nature uses all its force and cunning to prevent such harmony-perhaps it’s that creation and the renewal of life need the tension that is generated between two people of opposite temperaments who seek each other out. Like an alternating current … an exchange of energy between positive and negative poles, think of all the despair and the blind hope that lie behind this duality.