Maybe life and every living thing have no other purpose than to live as long as possible and renew themselves. So I came back from the war, and I talked to Krisztina’s father. What did he know about the three of us?
Everything. And he was the only one to whom I ever told everything that was possible to tell. We sat in his dark room, surrounded by old furniture and instruments, there were bookshelves and cupboards bursting with scores, music fixed in sign language, trumpet blasts in print, drum rolls on paper, all the music in the world was lying silently in wait in that room, which smelled so old, as if all human life had been sucked out of it … He listened to me, and then he said, ‘ do you want?
You survived.’ He spoke like a judge pronouncing sentence and also bringing an accusation … staring half-blind into the room; he was already very old, over eighty. Then I understood that a survivor has no right to bring a complaint. Whoever survives has won his case, he has no right and no cause to bring charges; he has emerged the stronger, the more cunning, the more obstinate, from the struggle. Just as we have,”
he says dryly. They measure each other in a glance. “Then he died, too, Krisztina’s father.
There was only my nurse and you, somewhere out there in the world, and this castle, and the forest. “I had also survived the war,” he says with satisfaction. “I didn’t seek out death, I never went to meet it: that is the truth, there’s no other way I can say it. Evidently I still had things I wanted to settle,” he continues reflectively. “People were dying all around me, I have seen every variety of death, and sometimes I was amazed at its endless possibilities, for death has its element of fantasy, just as life does. By official count, ten million people died in the war. A world-engulfing fire had broken out and blazed and roared until one sometimes thought that all personal doubts and questions and struggles must be entirely consumed in it … but that was not the case.
In the midst of this immense human agony, I knew that I still had something private to settle, and that is why I was neither a coward nor a hero, as the book says; I was calm both in storm and in battle, because I knew that nothing bad could happen to me. And one day I came home from the war, and then I waited. Time passed, the world has exploded in a new conflagration and I am certain that it is the same torch as before that has suddenly flamed up again … and what smouldered on in my heart was the question that neither the soot nor the ashes of time and war could cover. People by the millions are dying again, and yet you found your way from that far bank where you belong and through this world gone mad to come home and settle the things with me that we could not settle forty-one years ago. Such is the force of human nature-it must provide or receive an answer to whatever is the defining question of a lifetime. That is why you have come back, and that is why I have waited for you.
“Perhaps this world is coming to its end,” he says quietly, drawing an arc through the air with his hand. “Perhaps lights are going out allover the world just as they did today across this little part of it; perhaps some elemental event has taken place that is not merely the war, but something more; perhaps something has found its time in us as well, and now it’s being settled with steel and fire, where once it was settled with words. There are many signs … Perhaps,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Perhaps this entire way of life which we have known since birth, this house, this dinner, even the words we have used this evening to discuss the questions of our lives, perhaps they all belong to the past. There’s too much tension, too much animosity, too much craving for revenge in us all. We look inside ourselves and what do we find? An animosity that time damped down for a while but now is bursting out again. So why should we expect anything else of our fellow men? And you and I, too, old and wise, at the end of our lives, we, too, want revenge … Against whom? Each other? Or against the memory of someone who is no longer with us? Pointless. And yet it burns on in our hearts. Why should we expect better of the world, when it teems with unconscious desires and their all-too-deliberate consequences, and young men are bayoneting the hands of young men of other nations, and strangers are hacking each other’s backs to ribbons, and all laws and conventions have been voided and instinct rules, and the universe is on fire? … Revenge. I came back from a war in which I could have died, yet didn’t, because I was waiting for my opportunity to take revenge. ‘?’ you may ask. ‘ kind of revenge?’ I can see from your face that you do not understand this need.
‘ revenge is still possible between two old men who are already waiting for death? Everyone is dead, what point is there in revenge?’ you seem to be saying. And this is my answer: Yes-revenge.
That is what I have lived for, for forty-one years, that is why I neither killed myself nor allowed others to kill me, and that is why I have not killed anyone myself, thank heaven. The time for revenge has come, just as I have wished for so long. My revenge is that you have come here across the world, through the war, over mine-infested seas, to the scene of the crime, to answer to me and to uncover the truth together. That is my revenge. And now you must answer.”
The last words are almost whispered. The guest has to lean forward in order to hear properly.
“It may be that you are right. Ask. Perhaps I can answer you.”
The candles dim, and the dawn wind rustles through the great trees in the garden. The room is now almost completely dark.
Chapter 17
There are two questions you must answer, says the General, also bending forward. He sounds as if he is whispering a confidence. “Two questions I formulated long ago in the years I was waiting for you, and that only you can answer. I can see you think I would like to know if I was wrong or not, that you really did intend to kill me that morning on the hunt.
If it was not just a figment of my imagination, because after all, nothing happened, and even the best huntsman’s instinct may play tricks on him. And you think the second question is: Were you Krisztina’s lover? Did you betray me, as the phrase goes, and did she betray me, in the usual wretched sense of the word? No, my friend, neither of these questions interests me anymore. You have answered them yourself, time has answered them since, even Krisztina answered them in her fashion. I have all your answers. You gave yours when you fled the town the day after the hunt and abandoned the colors, as men used to say when they still believed in the true meaning of those words. I’m not asking that question, because I know for certain that you wanted to kill me that morning. I’m not accusing you-in fact, I sympathize with you. It must be a terrible moment when a man is driven to pick up a gun and kill the person closest to him out of whatever sense of need. That’s what happened to you in that second. You don’t dispute it? … You have nothing to say? It’s too dark for me to see your face, but it hardly makes sense to send for fresh candles now, the time for revenge has come and we can understand and recognize each other even in the shadows. The time has come and we need to get through it. All these years I have never doubted that you wanted to kill me, and I’ve always pitied you. I know what you felt so exactly that I could have been standing in your place during that terrible instant when you were overwhelmed. Night had not yet given up its terrors, the underworld still had an open gateway into our world of day, dawn was just about to break, and for a moment you were transported right out of yourself Such a terrifying temptation.
I recognize it. But that’s all the stuff of a police report, do you see?