She asked for me, and that is something, if not much … But she was already dead when I saw her again. Beautiful even in death. Still young, unmarred by solitude, not even illness had touched that special beauty or spoiled the reserve and quiet harmony of her face. But that is not your affair,” he says, suddenly haughty. “You were living out there in the world, Krisztina died. I was living in lonely affront, Krisztina died. She answered both of us in her way; because the dying always give the right and the final answer-sometimes I think they are the only ones who can do that. What else could she have said after eight years except by dying? Who could say more? She had answered all the questions you or I could have put to her, should she have wanted to speak to either of us. The dead give the final answer. She did not want to speak to us.
Sometimes I think that of the three of us, she was the one who was betrayed. Not I, whom she deceived with you; not you, who deceived me with her-deceit, what a word! There is a vocabulary that defines a human situation that is so soulless and mechanical, but when it’s allover, as it is for the two of us now, there is not much we can do with such a vocabulary. Deceit, infidelity, betrayal-mere words, when the person involved is dead and has already addressed their true meaning. Beyond words is the mute reality that Krisztina is dead-and we are still alive.
When I understood this, it was already too late. All that was left was the waiting and the thirst for revenge-and now that the waiting is over and the time for revenge is here, I am amazed to feel how hopeless it all is, and the pointlessness of anything we could learn or admit or fight out between us. I understand the reality. Time is a purgatory that has cleansed all fury from my memories. Now I sometimes see Krisztina again when I’m asleep-and also when I’m awake-walking through the garden with a big straw hat, slender, in a white dress, coming out of the greenhouse or talking to her horse. I see her, I saw her this afternoon while I was waiting for you and fell asleep for a moment. I saw her as I was dozing,” he says shamefaced, an old man. “I saw pictures from long, long ago. And this afternoon my mind grasped what my heart has known for a long time: infidelity, deceit, betrayal-I understood them, and what can I say? … We age slowly. First, our pleasure in life and other people declines, everything gradually becomes so real, we understand the significance of everything, everything repeats itself in a kind of troubling boredom. It’s the function of age. We know a glass is only a glass. A man, poor creature, is only a mortal, no matter what he does.
Then our bodies age: not all at once. First, it is the eyes, or the legs, or the heart. We age by installments. And then suddenly our spirits begin to age: the body may have grown old, but our souls still yearn and remember and search and celebrate and long for joy. And when the longing for joy disappears, all that are left are memories or vanity, and then, finally, we are truly old. One day we wake up and rub our eyes and do not know why we have woken. We know all too well what the day offers: spring or winter, the surface of life, the weather, the daily routine. Nothing surprising can ever happen again: not even the unexpected, the unusual, the dreadful can surprise us, because we know all the probabilities, we anticipate everything, there’s nothing we want anymore, either good or bad. That is old age. There’s still some spark inside us, a memory, a goal, someone we would like to see again, something we would like to say or learn, and we know the time will come, but then suddenly it is no longer as important to learn the truth and answer to it as we had assumed in all the decades of waiting. Gradually we understand the world and then we die. We understand phenomena and the motive forces of men and the sign language of the unconscious. People communicate their thoughts in sign language, have you noticed? As if they were discussing important matters in a foreign language like Chinese, which had to be translated into the language of reality. They have no self-knowledge. All they talk about is what they want, thereby exposing themselves unconsciously in all their hopelessness.
“Life becomes almost interesting once one has learned to recognize people’s lies, and one starts to enjoy the comedy as people keep saying things other than they think and really want … That is how we arrive at the truth, and truth is synonymous with old age and death. But it doesn’t hurt anymore. Krisztina deceived me, what a foolish word! And with you of all people, what a pitiful rebellion! Don’t look at me like that: I’m saying it in sympathy. “Later, when I had more experience and understood everything, because time washed up the telltale flotsam of this shipwreck onto my lonely island, I looked back into the past with pity and saw you two rebels, my wife and my friend, wracked with guilt and self-recrimination, wretchedly unhappy in the heat of your defiant passion, rise up against me, in a life-and-death struggle.
“Poor things! I thought, more than once. And I imagined the details of your rendezvous in a house on the edge of a small town, where secret meetings are almost impossible, being penned together as if onboard a ship, while at the same time being painfully on view. A love that knows no moment of peace, because every step, every glance, is watched with concealed distrust by lackeys, servants, and everyone around you. The trembling, the constant game of hide-and-seek with me, those fifteen stolen minutes under the pretext of a ride or a game of tennis or music, those walks in the forest where my gamekeepers keep watch over every kind of game … I imagine the hatred in your hearts when you think of me, when every step you take brings you up against my authority, the authority of a husband and landowner and aristocrat, against my social and financial ascendancy, against the whole crowd of my servants, and against the strongest force of alclass="underline" the dependence that forces you to acknowledge, beyond love and hate, that without me you can neither live nor die. You unhappy lovers, you could deceive me, but you could not elude me: I may be a different kind of man, and yet the three of us are as inextricably attached as crystals in the laws of physics. And your hand on the gun goes weak one morning when you want to kill me, for you can no longer bear all this torment, all the hiding, all the misery.
… what else could you do? Run off with Krisztina? You would have to resign your commission, Krisztina is also poor, you cannot accept anything from me. No, you cannot run away with her, you cannot live with her, you cannot marry her, to remain her lover is to be exposed to a danger worse than death, because you must constantly anticipate being denounced and unmasked, you must fear having to fight a duel with me, your friend and your brother. You will not hold out for long against such danger. And so, one day when the time is ripe and somehow palpable between us, you raise your gun; and later, whenever I think of that t moment, I feel genuine pity for you. It must be the hardest and most agonizing of tasks to kill someone dear to you,” he says parenthetically.
“You are not strong enough to do it. Or the ideal moment passes and you can no longer do it. There is such a thing as the perfect moment-time brings things of its own accord, we do not merely insert acts and phenomena into time. A single moment, a particular point in time may offer a possibility-and then it’s gone and there’s nothing more you can do. You let the hand holding the gun drop. And next day you leave for the tropics.”
He inspects his fingernails with care. “But we stay here,” he says, still looking at his fingernails, as if this were the important thing, “we, Krisztina and I, stay here. We are here, and everything comes to light in the secret but orderly way that messages travel between people, in waves, even when nobody mentions the secret or betrays it. Everything comes to light because you have gone away and we have stayed here, alive, I because you missed your moment or your moment missed you-it comes to the same thing-and Krisztina because, first of all, there is nothing else she can do, she has to wait, if only to find out whether we have kept silent, you and I, the two men to whom she is bound and who are avoiding her: she waits to find out the meaning of this silence, and to understand. And then she dies. But I remain here, and I know everything, and yet there is one thing I do not know. And now, the time has come for me to have a response. Answer, please.