The General moved to stand before the portrait of his mother. It was the work of a Viennese artist who had also painted the Empress with her hair down, gathered into loose plaits. The Officer of the Guards had seen this portrait in the Emperor’s study in the Hofburg. In the portrait the Countess was wearing a rose-colored straw hat decorated with flowers, the kind of hat the girls of Florence wear in the summer. The painting in its gold frame hung over the cherry-wood chest with its many drawers, which had also belonged to his mother. The General set both hands on it as he leaned to look up at the work of the Viennese artist. The young woman held her head to one side, gazing gravely and softly into the distance as if posing a question that was in itself the message of the picture. Her features were noble, her neck, her hands in their crocheted gloves and her forearms as sensual as her white shoulders and the sweep of her décolleté. She did not belong here. The battle between husband and wife was fought without words. Their weapons were music, hunting, travels, and evening receptions, when the castle was lit up as if it were on fire, the stables were jammed with horses and carriages, and on every fourth step of the great staircase a heiduch stood as stiff as a mannequin holding up a twelve-armed silver candelabrum, while melodies, light, voices and the scent of bodies swirled through the rooms as if life itself were a desperate feast, a sublime and tragic celebration that would end when the horns rang out to announce an unholy summons to the assembled guests. The General could remember evenings like that.
Sometimes the coachmen and their horses had to make camp around the bonfires in the snowy park because the stables were full. And once even the Emperor came, although in this country he bore the title of King. He came in a carriage, escorted by horsemen with white plumes in their helmets. He stayed for two days, went hunting in the forest, lived in the other wing of the castle, slept in an iron b edstead, and danced with the lady of the house. As they danced, they talked together and the young wife’s eyes filled with tears. The King stopped dancing, bowed, kissed her hand, and led her into the next room, where his entourage was standing in a semicircle. He led her to the Officer of the Guards and kissed her hand again.
“What did you talk about?” the Officer of the Guards asked his wife later, much later. But his wife did not say. Nobody ever learned what the King had said to the young wife who had come from a foreign country and wept as she danced. It went on being a local topic of conversation for a long time.
Chapter 4
The castle was a closed world, like a great granite mausoleum full of the moldering bones of generations of men and women from earlier times, in their shrouds of slowly disintegrating gray silk or black cloth. It enclosed silence itself as if it were a prisoner persecuted for his beliefs, wasting away numbly, unshaven and in rags on a pile of musty rotting straw in a dungeon. It also enclosed memories as if they were the dead, memories that lurked in damp corners the way mushrooms, bats, rats, and beetles lurk in the mildewed cellars of old houses.
Door-latches gave off the traces of a once-trembling hand, the excitement of a moment long gone, so that even now another hand hesitated to press down on them. Every house in which passion has loosed itself on people in all its fury exudes such intangible presences.
The General looked at the portrait of his mother. He knew every feature of the narrow, fine-boned face. The eyes gazed down through time with sad and somnolent disdain. It was the look with which women of.
earlier era had mounted the scaffold, scorning both those for whom they were giving their lives and those who were taking their lives from them.
His mother’s family owned a castle in Brittany, by the sea. The General must have been about eight years old the summer he was taken there. By this time they were able to travel by train, albeit very slowly. The suitcases in their linen covers embroidered with his mother’s initials swayed in the luggage nets. In Paris, it was raining. The child sat in a carriage upholstered in blue silk, looking through the hazy glass of the windows at the city glistening in the raindrops like the slippery underbelly of a great fish. He saw the rearing outlines of roofs and great chimneys that slanted up against the dirty curtains of wet sky, seeming to prophesy the secret truths of unfamiliar and unknowable fates. Women walked laughing through the downpour, lifting their skirts with one hand, their teeth glinting as if the rain, the strange city, and the French language were something both wonderful and comic that only the child failed to comprehend. He was eight years old and sat gravely in the coach beside his mother, facing the maid and the governess, sensing that some task had been imposed Everyone’s eyes were on him, the little savage from a faraway country, from the forest with the bears. He articulated his French words with circumspect deliberation and care. He was aware that now that he spoke for his father, the castle, the hounds, the forest and the entire homeland he had left behind. A great gate opened, the carriage entered a large courtyard, French servants made their bows in front of a broad staircase. It all felt a little hostile. He was led through rooms in which everything occupied its own painfully meticulous and intimidating space. In the large salon on. the second floor he was received by his French grandmother. Her eyes were gray and there was a black shadow on her upper lip; her hair, which must once have been red but now was a dirty non-color, as if time itself had forgotten to wash it, was piled on her head. She kissed the child and with her bony white hands tilted his head back a little so that she could gaze down into his face. “Tout de męme,”
she said to his mother, who was standing beside him anxiously, as if he were taking an examination that was about to reveal something.
Later, lime-blossom tisane was brought. Everything smelled so strange that the child felt faint. Round about midnight he began to weep and vomit. “I want Nini,” he cried, his voice choked with sobs as he lay in bed, deathly pale. Next day, he was running a high fever and was incoherent. Solemn doctors arrived wearing black frock coats with watch chains fixed into the middle button-hole of their white waistcoats; as they bent over the child, their beards and clothes exuded the same smell as the furnishings of the palace, which was also the smell of his grandmother’s hair and the smell on her breath. He thought he would die if the smell didn’t go away. By the end of the week his fever still had not abated and his pulse was weakening. That was when they telegraphed for Nini.
It took four days for the nurse to reach Paris. The muttonchop-whiskered majordomo failed to recognize her at the station, and so she set off on foot to the palace, carrying her traveling bag made of crochet work. She arrived like a migrating bird. She spoke no French, she did not know the streets, and she was never able to explain how in the middle of the strange city she had found the palace and her sick charge. She came into the room and lifted the dying child out of his bed; his body was no longer moving, only his eyes glittered. She set him in her lap, held him tight in her arms and gently began to rock him. On the third day he was given extreme unction. That evening, Nini came out of the sickroom and said in Hungarian to the Countess, “I think he is going to pull through.”
She shed no tears, she was merely exhausted after six nights without sleep. She took some food from out of the crocheted bag and began to eat. For six days she kept the child alive by the power of her breath.