The Countess kneeled outside the door, weeping and praying. Everyone was with her-the French grandmother, the servants, a young priest with slanted eyebrows who came and went at all hours.
The doctors’ visits tapered off. The mother left for Brittany, taking Nini, but leaving the grandmother behind in Paris, shocked and hurt. 0f course, nobody uttered a word about the cause of the illness, but everybody knew: the boy need love, and when all the strangers had bent over him and. the unbearable smell had surrounded him on all sides, he had chosen death. In Brittany the wind sang and the waves churned against the age-old rocks. Red cliffs rose up out of the sea. Nini, calm and assured, smiled at the ocean and the sky as if they were already familiar to her. The four corners of the castle were surmounted by ancient turrets of undressed stone from which the Countess’s ancestors had kept watch against Surcouf the pirate. The boy was soon brown from the sun and full of laughter. He was no longer afraid: he knew that the two of them, he and Nini, were the strong ones. They sat on the sand, the frills on Nini’s dress blew in the wind, and everything smelled of salt, not just the air but the flowers, too. When the tide went out in the mornings, they found sea spiders with hairy legs in the crevices of the red rocks, and crabs with red stomachs and star-shaped jelly fish.
In the castle courtyard there was an incredibly ancient fig tree that looked like some oriental sage who only had the simplest of stories left to tell. Its leaves made a thick canopy for the cool, sweet air underneath.
In the middle of the day, when the sea was no more than a muffled grumble, the nurse would sit here quietly with the child.
“I want to be a poet,” the boy said once, glancing up obliquely.
He stared at the sea, his blond curls stirring in the warm wind and his eyes, half-closed, interrogating the horizon. The nurse put her arms around him and squeezed his head against her breast. “No, you’re going to be a soldier.”
“Like Father?” The child shook his head. “Father is a poet too, didn’t you know? He’s always thinking about something else.” “That’s true,”
said the nurse with a sigh. “Don’t go into the sun, my angel, it’ll give you a headache.”
They sat for a long time under the fig tree, listening to the familiar roaring of the sea. It was the same sound made by the forest back home.
The child and the nurse thought about the world and how everything in it is related. ~B
~
Chapter 5
It is the kind of idea that comes later to most people. Decades pass, one walks through a darkened room in which someone has died, and suddenly one recalls long forgotten words and the roar of the sea. It’s as if those few words had captured the whole meaning of life, but afterwards one always talks about something else.
When they made the journey home from Brittany in the fall, the Officer of the Guards was waiting for them in Vienna. The child was enrolled in the military academy. He received a little sword, long trousers, and a shako. The sword was buckled onto him, and on Sundays he and the other cadets were taken for walks along the Graben in their dark-blue tunics.
They looked like children playing soldiers. They wore white gloves and gave charming salutes.
The military academy was situated on a hill just outside Vienna. It was a yellow-painted building, and from the windows on the third floor one could see the old city with its streets running straight as a die, and the Emperor’s summer palace, the roofs of Schonbrunn, and the paths bordered by pleached trees. In the white corridors with their vaulted ceilings, in the classrooms, the dining hall, and the dormitories, everything was so reassuringly there that this seemed to be the only place on earth where every object that otherwise was disorderly or superfluous in life finally was brought into harmony and proper function. The instructors were old officers. Everything smelled of saltpeter. Every dormitory housed thirty children of roughly the same age who slept on narrow iron beds, just like the Emperor. Over the door hung a crucifix decorated with a twig of willow blessed with holy water.
A blue night-light burned in the darkness. In the mornings, they were wakened by a bugle call. In winter, the water in the tin washbasins was sometimes frozen over; when that happened, the adjutants fetched cans of warm water from the kitchen.
They learned Greek, and ballistics, and the proper comportment of a soldier in battle, and history. The child was pale, and coughed. In fall the chaplain took him for a walk each afternoon in Schonbrunn, strolling down the allee. Where a fountain gushed out of crumbling moss-covered moldered stones, the water made a stream of gold in the sun. They walked between the rows of pleached trees, the boy conscious of his bearing, raising his white gloved hand in a stiff, correct salute to the veterans who came by in their dress uniforms as if every day were the Emperor’s birthday. Once, a woman came from the opposite direction, head bare, a white lace parasol on her shoulder; she was walking rapidly, and as she passed them the chaplain bowed deeply.
“The Empress,” he whispered to the child. The woman was very pale and she wore her heavy black hair in a plait that was wound three times round her head. She was followed, three steps behind, by a lady dressed in black and a little hunched, as if she were exhausted by the pace that had been set.
“The Empress,” the chaplain said again, reverently. The child looked after the tall lady who was almost running down the allee of the great park as if she were fleeing something. “She looks like Mama,” said the child, thinking of the portrait that hung in his father’s study over the table.
“One may not say such things,” replied the chaplain reproachfully.
From morning until night, they learned what may and may not be said. The academy with its four hundred pupils was like an infernal machine whose silence presages the explosion to come. They had all been gathered here, the sandy-haired snub-nosed boys with limp white hands from Czech palaces, boys from Moravian estates, boys from fortresses in Tyrol and hunting lodges in Steiermark, from shuttered palaces in Vienna and country seats in Hungary. All of them bore long names with many consonants and Christian names, titles, and indicators of rank, which had to be given up and handed over in the cloakroom of the academy along with the beautifully tailored civilian clothes made in Vienna and London and the fine underwear from Holland. All that was left was a name and the child belonging to that name, who now must learn what may and may not be said. There were young Slavs with narrow foreheads, whose blood mingled all the human particularities of the Empire, there were blue-eyed weary ten-year-old aristocrats who stared into the distance as if their ancestors had already done all their seeing for them, and there was a Tyrolean duke who shot himself at the age of twelve because he was in love with his cousin.
Konrad slept in the next bed. They were ten years old when they met.
He was squarely built and yet thin, in the manner of those ancient races in which the building of bone mass has taken precedence over the flesh.
He was slow moving but not lazy, and he had a rhythm-self-aware yet reserved-all his own. His father, an official in Galicia, had been made a baron; his mother was Polish. When he laughed, his mouth became wide and childlike, giving a slightly Slav cast to his face. But he laughed seldom. He was silent and watchful.
From the first moment, they lived together like twins in their mother’s womb. For this they had no need of one of those pacts of the kind that is common among boys of their age, who swear friendship with comical solemn rituals and the sort of portentous intensity invoked by people when for the first time they experience, in unconscious and distorted form, the need to remove another human being from the world, body and soul, and make him uniquely theirs. For that is the hidden force within both friendship and love. Their friendship was deep and wordless, as are all the emotions that will last a lifetime. And like all great emotions, this one contained within itself both shame and a sense of guilt, for no one may isolate one of his fellows from the rest of humanity with impunity.