They knew from the first moment that their meeting would impose upon them lifetime obligations. The young Hungarian boy was tall and slender in those days, and frail, and received weekly visits from the doctor.
There was concern about his lungs. At the request of the head of the academy, a colonel from Moravia, the Officer of the Guards came to Vienna for a long conference with the doctors. In all their pronouncements he understood one single word: “Danger.” The boy is not really ill, they said, but he has a predisposition to illness. “There’s a danger,” was the gist of it. The Officer of the Guards had gone to the King of Hungary Hotel in a dark side street in the shadow of St.
Stephen’s Cathedral; his grandfather had stayed there before him. The corridors were hung with antlers. The hotel manservant bowed and kissed the Officer’s hand in greeting. The Officer took two large, dark, vaulted rooms filled with furniture upholstered in yellow silk, and brought the child to stay with him for the duration of his visit; they lived together in the hotel, where above every door stood the names of favorite regular guests, as if the place were a worldly retreat for lonely servants of the monarchy.
In the mornings they took the carriage and drove out to the Prater. It was the beginning of November and the air was already cool. In the evenings they went to the theater, where heroes gesticulated and declaimed on stage before throwing themselves on their swords and expiring with a death rattle. Afterwards, they ate in a private room in a restaurant, attended by countless waiters. The child sat wordlessly beside his father, conducting himself with precocious good breeding, as if there were something he must bear and forgive.
“They talk about danger,” his father said, half to himself, after dinner was over and he was lighting himself a thick black cigar. “If you like, you can come home. But I would prefer it if no danger had the power to make you afraid.”
“I’m not afraid, Father,” said the child. “But I would like to have Konrad stay with us always. They’re poor. I would like him to spend his summers with us.” “Is he your friend?” asked his father?”
“Yes.” “Then he is my friend too,” said his father seriously.
He was wearing tails and a shirt with a pleated front. In recent times he had set aside his uniform. The boy fell silent, relieved. His father’s word was to be trusted. Wherever they went in Vienna, no matter to which shop, he was known: at the tailor’s, the glover’s, the shirtmaker’s, in restaurants where imposing maîtres d’hotel reigned over the tables and on the street, where gentlemen and ladies waved to him warmly from their carriages.
“Are you going to the Emperor?” the child asked one day shortly before his father was due to depart.
“The King,” his father corrected him severely. Then he said, “I don’t go to him anymore,” and the boy understood that something must have happened between the two of them. On the day his father was leaving, he introduced Konrad to his father. The evening before, he had fallen asleep with a pounding heart: it was like a betrothal.” One may not mention the King in his presence ” he warned his friend. But his father was amiable, the perfect gentleman. He welcomed Konrad — with one single handshake.
From that day on, the boy coughed less. He was no longer alone. To be alone among people was unbearable to him.
Everything-his life at home, the forest, Paris, his mother’s temperament-had fed into his very bloodstream the tendency never to speak of whatever caused him pain but to bear it in silence. He had learned that words are best avoided. But he could not live without love, either, and that was also part of his inheritance. Perhaps it was his French mother who had brought with her the yearning to share her feelings if even with only one other human being. In his father’s family, one never spoke of such things. The boy needed someone to love, whether it be Nini or Konrad. His fever went away, as did his cough, and his thin pale child’s face flushed with delight and rewarded trust. They were at an age when boys have not yet developed any pronounced sexual identity: it is as if they have not yet chosen. He hated his soft blond hair, because he considered it girlish, and he had the barber cut it short every two weeks. Konrad was more masculine, more composed.
Childhood was no longer a cramped place, it no longer intimidated them, because they were no longer alone.
At the end of the first summer, when the boys climbed into the carriage for the journey back to Vienna, the French maman stood in the gateway of the castle, looking after them. Then she smiled and said to Nini, “At last-a happy marriage!”
But Nini didn’t smile back. Each summer, the boys arrived together.
Later they also spent Christmas at the castle. Everything they had was the same: clothes, underwear, they slept in the same room, they read the same books, together they discovered Vienna and the forest, books and hunting, riding and the military virtues, the life of society and love.
Nini worried, and perhaps she was also a little jealous. When the friendship was four years old, the boys began to shut themselves off from other people and to have their own secrets. The relationship steadily deepened, and also became more hermetic. The boy made clear that he wished he could present Konrad to the whole world as his own creation, his masterpiece, yet at other times he watched over him jealously, afraid that someone could rob him of the person he loved.
“It’s too much,” said Nini to his mother. “One day Konrad will leave him, and he will suffer dreadfully.” “That is our human fate,” said his mother. She was sitting at her mirror, staring at her fading beauty.
“One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy.”
In the academy, the boys’ friendship soon ceased to be a subject for mockery; it became accepted as a natural phenomenon. They were given a single name, “the Henriks,” like a married couple, but nobody laughed at the relationship; there was some quality-a gentleness, a seriousness, an unconditional generosity-that radiated from it and silenced all tormentors. All societies recognize these relationships instinctively and envy them; men yearn for disinterested friendship and usually they yearn in vain. The boys in the academy took refuge in family pride or in their studies, in precocious debauchery or physical prowess, in the confusions of premature and painful infatuations. In this emotional turbulence the friendship between Konrad and Henrik had the glow of a quiet and ceremonial oath of loyalty in the Middle Ages. Nothing is so rare in the young as a disinterested bond that demands neither aid nor sacrifice. Boys always expect a sacrifice from those who are the standard-bearers of their hopes. The two friends felt that they were living in a miraculous and unnamable state of grace.
There is nothing to equal the delicacy of such a relationship.
Everything that life has to offer later, sentimental yearnings or raw desire, intense feelings and eventually the bonds of passion, will all be coarser, more barbaric. Konrad was as serious and as discreet at the age of ten as a full-grown man. As the boys grew older and more aware and tried to put on airs and uncover the grown-ups’ secrets, Konrad made his friend swear that they would remain chaste. They remained true to this vow for a long time. It was not easy. Every two weeks they went to confession with a list they had compiled together of their sins. Carnal appetites were stirring in blood and nerves, the boys were pale, as the seasons changed they felt dizzy. But they remained chaste, as if their friendship, which lay like a magic cape over their young lives, was a replacement for everything that tormented the others in their curiosity and restlessness and drove them toward the darker, lower sides of life.