As if he were set on killing someone and was keeping himself ready at any moment to take his revenge. The Countess, the General’s mother, would not have the huntsmen in the castle, she banned and banished anything and everything associated with hunting-weapons, cartridge pouches, old arrows, stuffed birds and stags’ heads, antlers. That was when the Captain of the Guards had the hunting lodge built. It became the place for everything: great bearskins in front of the fireplace, panels framed in brown wood and draped in white felt on the walls to display weapons. Belgian and Austrian guns. English knives, Russian bullet holders. Something for every type of game. The kennels were nearby, the entire pack and the tracking dogs and the Vizslas and the falconer lived there with his three hooded falcons. Here in the hunting lodge was where the General’s father spent his time. The inhabitants of the castle saw him only at mealtimes. The castle interiors were all in pastels, the walls hung with coverings of pale blue, pale green, and soft rose striped with gold, from workshops near Paris. Every year the Countess herself would select papers and furniture from French manufacturers and shops, when she went to visit her family. She never failed to make this journey, which was guaranteed to her in her marriage contract when she accepted the hand of the foreign Officer of the Guards.
“Perhaps it was all because of those journeys,” thought the General.
He thought this because his parents had not had an easy marriage. The Officer of the Guards went hunting, and because he could not destroy the world of other places and other people-foreign cities, Paris, castles, foreign tongues, foreign manners-he slaughtered bears, deer, and stags.
Yes, perhaps it was because of the journeys. He got to his feet and stood in front of the sway-bellied white porcelain stove that once had warmed his.. It was a large stove, at least a century old, and it radiated heat like some indolent corpulent gentleman intent on mitigating his own egoism with an easy act of charity. Clearly his mother had always suffered from the cold here. This castle in the depths of the forest with its vaulted rooms was too dark for her; hence the light-colored silks on the walls. And she froze, because there was always a wind in the forest, even in summer, bringing with it the smell of mountain streams when they fill with the melting snow and run in spates, flooding their banks. She froze, and the white stove was kept burning all the time. She was waiting for a miracle. She had come to Eastern Europe because the passion she felt had overwhelmed her reason.
The Officer of the Guards had made her acquaintance on a tour of duty when he was diplomatic courier at the embassy in Paris in the 1850s.
They were introduced to each other at a ball, and somehow this meeting had an aura of inevitability. The music played and the Officer of the Guards said in French to the Count’s daughter “In our country feelings are more intense and. decisive.” It was the embassy ball. Outside, the street was white; it was snowing. At this moment the Emperor of France made his entrance into the ballroom. Everyone made a deep obeisance. The Emperor’s dress coat was blue and his waistcoat white; slowly he raised his gold lorgnon to his eyes. As they both straightened up again, their eyes met. Already they knew that their lives must be together. Pale and self-conscious, they smiled at each other. Music could be heard from the next room. The young French girl said, “Your country-where is it?”
and smiled again with a faraway look. The Officer of the Guards told her the name of his homeland. It was the first intimate word to pass between them.
It was autumn when they came home, almost a year later. The foreign lady sat deep inside the coach, swathed in veils and coverlets. They took the mountain route across Switzerland and the Tyrol. In Vienna they were received by the Emperor and Empress. The Emperor was benevolent, just the way he was always described in children’s textbooks. “Beware,” he said. “In the forest where he’s taking you, there are bears. He’s a bear too.” And he smiled. Everyone smiled. It was a sign of great favor that the Emperor should joke with the French wife of the Hungarian Officer of the Guards. “Majesty,” she replied, “I shall tame him with music, as Orpheus tamed the wild beast.” They journeyed on through fruit-scented meadows and woods. After they crossed the frontier, mountains and cities dwindled away, and the lady began to weep. “Darling, I feel dizzy. There is no end to all of this.” It was the Puszta that made her dizzy, the deserted plain stretching away under the numbing, shimmering blanket of autumn air, now bare after the harvest, transected by primitive roads along which they jolted for hour after hour, while cranes wheeled in the empty sky and the fields of maize on either side lay plundered and broken as if a retreating army had passed through at the end of a war, leaving the landscape a wasteland. The Officer of the Guards sat silently in the coach, his arms crossed. From time to time he ordered a horse to be brought, and he rode for long distances alongside the carriage, observing his native land as if he were seeing it for the first time. He looked at the low houses, with their green shutters and white verandas, where they spent the nights, Magyar houses with their thick-planted gardens all around them, the cool rooms in which every piece of furniture, even the smell in the cupboards, was familiar to him, and the landscape whose melancholy solitude moved him as never before. He saw with his wife’s eyes the wells with their hanging buckets, the parched fields, the rosy clouds above the plain in t he sunset. His homeland opened itself before them, and with a beating heart the officer sensed that the landscape that now embraced them also held the secret of their fate. His wife sat in the coach and said nothing.
Sometimes she raised a handkerchief to her face, and as she did so, her husband would bend down toward her out of the saddle and cast a questioning glance into her tear-filled eyes. But with a gesture she signaled that they should continue. Their lives were joined together now.
At first the castle was a comfort to her. It was so large, and the forest and the mountains wrapped themselves around it to isolate it so completely from the plain that it seemed to her to be a home within a new and foreign homeland. And every month a wagon from Paris, from Vienna, would arrive bringing furniture, linens, damasks, engravings, even a spinet, because she wished to tame the wild beasts with music.
The first snow was already on the mountains as they finally settled in and began to live their lives there; it surrounded the castle and laid siege to it like a grim northern army. At night deer and stags slipped out of the forest to stand motionless under the moonlight in the snow, heads cocked as they observed the lighted windows with their grave animal eyes that gave back a mysterious blue glow, and the music escaping from the castle reached their ears. “Do you see them?” said the young woman as she sat at the keyboard, and laughed. In February the cold drove the wolves down out of the mountains; the servants and the huntsmen built a bonfire of brushwood in the park, and the wolves, under its spell, circled it and howled. The Officer of the Guards drew a knife and went after them; his wife watched from the window. There was something insurmountable between them. But they loved each other.