They lived in a discipline whose roots were deep in centuries-old experience and practice. Every morning they fenced for an hour in the academy gymnasium, bare-chested with masks and bandages. Then they went riding. Henrik was a good horseman, Konrad struggled desperately to keep his seat and his balance, having no inherited physical skill in the saddle. Henrik learned easily, Konrad with difficulty, but whatever he learned he husbanded with almost desperate zeal; he seemed to know that this would be his on possession. In society, Henrik moved with easy grace and the inner assurance of one whom nothing can surprise; Konrad was awkward and excessively correct. One summer when they were already young men, they traveled to Galicia to visit Konrad’s parents. The Baron, a bald, modest old man, worn down by forty years of service in the province and the disappointed social ambitions of his aristocratic Polish wife, endeavored with perplexed eagerness to entertain the young men. The town was depressing with its old towers, its fountain in the center of the rectangular main square, and its dark, vaulted interiors.
The inhabitants-Ukrainians, Germans, Jews, Russians-lived in a kind of turmoil that was continually being smothered and contained by the authorities; something seemed to be fermenting in the dimly lit, airless apartments, some uprising or perhaps just an ongoing seditious muttering and wretched discontent, or perhaps not even that, merely the uneasy disorder and permanent restlessness of a caravanserai. It made itself felt in the houses, in the streets, in the entire public life of the town. Only the cathedral with its great tower and its broad arches soared calmly over the hubbub of calls and yells and whispers, as if a single law had once solemnly imposed itself-irreversibly, incontrovertibly, conclusively — on the community. The youths were staying at the inn, for the Baron’s apartment contained only three small rooms. The first evening, after the elaborate dinner with its rich meat dishes and heavy aromatic wines, which Konrad’s father, the elderly official, and his sad Polish wife-who had painted her face with lilac shadows and powdered blush to overcome her faded looks until she took on the air of a tropical bird-had had served in the humble apartment with touching solicitude, as if the fortunes of their son, who so rarely returned home, depended on the quality of the meal, the young officers returned to their Galician guesthouse and sat for a long time in a dark corner of the dining room with its dust-covered ornamental palms.
“Now you have seen them,” said Konrad.
“Yes,” said the son of the Officer of the Guards, conscience-stricken “So now you know,” the other replied, softly and earnestly. “Now you can have some idea of what has been done here for the last twenty-two years for my sake.”
“Yes,” said the son of the Officer of the Guards, and something in his throat tightened.
“Every pair of gloves,” said Konrad, “that I have to buy when we all go to the Burg Theater, comes from here. If I need a new bridle, they do not eat meat for three days. If I leave a tip at an evening party, my father gives up his cigars for a week. That is how it has been for twenty-two years. And I have never lacked for anything. Somewhere, far away in Poland, we had a farmstead. I have never seen it. It belonged to my mother. It was the source of everything: the uniform, school fees, the money for theater tickets, the bouquet I sent to your mother when she passed through Vienna, the entry fees for exams, the costs of the duel I had to fight with that Bavarian. Twenty-two years-all of it.
First, they sold the furniture, then the garden, then the surrounding land, then the house. Then, they sacrificed their health, their comfort, their peace, their old age, and my mother’s social ambition, which was to have an extra room in this rat-hole of a town, a room with nice furniture where they could receive people from time to time. Do you understand?” “I ask your pardon,” said Henrik, white and shaken.
“I am not angry at you,” said his friend with emphatic seriousness. “I only wanted you to see it all once, and understand. When the Bavarian came at me with his drawn sword and started lunging and feinting in all directions like a lunatic, as if he were entertaining himself and as if our attempts to slash and cripple each other out of pure vanity were nothing but a huge joke, I suddenly saw my mother’s face, saw her walking to the market every day for fear that the cook might over-charge her by two fillers, because at the end of a year the two fillers all add up to five florins, which she can send me in an envelope … and I literally wanted to kill the Bavarian who wanted to injure me out of sheer bravado, and had no idea that anything he might do to me would be a mortal offense against two people in Galicia who have sacrificed their lives for me without a word. When I’m staying with you and I tip one of the servants, I am expending a portion of their lives. It is very hard to live in such a way,” he said, and blushed.
“Why?” the other asked softly. “Do you not think that it does them good?
Perhaps, for them, perhaps, it does.”
The young man fell silent. He had never spoken about any of this before.
Now, faltering, without looking up, he said, “It is very hard for me to live in this fashion. It is as if I do not belong to myself. If I fall ill, I am hounded by the feeling that I am squandering someone else’s property, something that is not fully mine, namely my health. I am a soldier, I have been trained to kill and be killed. I have sworn an oath. But why have they assumed this whole burden, if I am to be killed?
Do you understand me now? … For twenty-two years they have been living in this town which reeks like some squalid den where passing traders spend the night-a smell of cooking and cheap perfume and sour bedding.
Here they live, and never utter a word of complaint. For twenty-two years my father has not set foot in Vienna, where he was born and brought up. Twenty-two years and never a journey, never a new piece of clothing, never a summer outing, because I must be made into the masterpiece that they in their weakness failed to achieve in their own lives. Sometimes when I am about to do something, my hand stops in midair. This eternal responsibility. I have even wished them dead,” he said very softly.
“Yes,” said Henrik.
They stayed in the town for four days. As they left, for the first time in their lives, they felt that something had come between them. As if one of them were in the other’s debt. It could not be put into words.
Chapter 6
And yet Konrad had a refuge which was closed to his friend: music. It was like a secret hideout, where the world could not reach him. Henrik was not musical, and was content with Gypsy tunes and Viennese waltzes.
Music was not a topic in the academy, it was something regarded by both instructors and cadets as a kind of youthful sin to be tolerated and forgiven. Each man has his weaknesses: one breeds dogs, no matter what the cost, another is obsessed with riding. Better than taking up cards, was the general opinion. And less dangerous than women.
But slowly the suspicion took hold of Henrik that music was not such a harmless pleasure after all. Naturally the academy did not tolerate real music, with its power to arouse and erupt into naked emotion. The curriculum certainly included musical instruction, but only in its most basic aspects.
The boys did learn that music required brass, and a drum major to march in front and throw his silver staff periodically into the air, and a pony to carry the kettle-drum behind the band. That was proper music-loud, regular music that set the pace for the troops, brought the civilians out into the streets, and was the unalterable ornament of every parade. Men stepped out more smartly to music, and that was that.