“Are you quite certain,” asks the guest, “that this friend was faithless?”
There is a long moment of silence. In the deep shadows of the room and the uneasy flickering of the candlelight, they seem small: two wizened old men looking at each other, almost invisible in the darkness.
“I am not quite certain,” says the General. “That is also why you’re here. It’s what we are discussing.” He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms calmly and with military precision. He says, “There is such a thing as factual truth. This and this happened. These things happened in this and this fashion and at this and this time. It isn’t hard to establish these things. The facts speak for themselves, as the saying goes; in the last years of our lives, facts confess themselves in ways that scream more loudly than a victim being tortured on the rack. By the end, everything has happened and the sum total is clear. And yet, sometimes facts are no more than pitiful consequences, because guilt does not reside in our acts but in the intentions that give rise to our acts. Everything turns on our intentions. The great, ancient systems of religious law I have studied all know and preach this. A man may commit a disloyal or base act, even the worst, even murder, and yet remain blameless. The act does not constitute the whole truth, it is always and only a consequence, and if one day any of us has to become a judge and pronounce sentence, it is not enough for us to content ourselves with the facts in the police report, we also have to acquaint ourselves with motive. The fact of your flight is easy to establish. But not your motive. Believe me, I have spent the last forty-one years turning over every possible reason for your incomprehensible act. No single examination of it led me to an answer. Only the truth can do that now.”
“You said ‘flight,’ ” says Konrad. “That’s a strong word. In the final analysis, I owed nobody an accounting—I had resigned my commission in the proper fashion, I left behind no messy debts, I had made no promise to anyone which I failed to fulfill. Flight, that’s a strong word.” His voice is grave as he straightens a little in his chair, but it also betrays a tremor that seems to suggest that the force of this declaration is not entirely sincere.
“Perhaps the word is too strong.” The General nods. “But when you look at what happened from a certain distance, you must admit that it’s not easy to find a less harsh one. You say you didn’t owe anyone anything. That is, and is not, true. Of course you didn’t owe anything to your tailor or to the moneylenders in town. Nor did you owe me money or the fulfillment of any promise. And still, that July—you see, I remember everything, even the day, it was a Wednesday—when you left town, you knew that you were leaving behind a debt. That evening, I went to your apartment, because I had heard that you had gone away. I heard it at dusk, under peculiar circumstances. We can talk about those, too, sometime, if you would care to. I went to your apartment, where the only person to receive me was your manservant. I asked him to leave me alone in the room where you lived those last years when you were serving in the city.” He falls silent, leans back and puts a hand over his eyes, as if looking back into the past. Then, calmly, in an even tone, he continues. “Of course, the manservant did as asked—what else could he do? I was alone in the room where you had lived. I took a good look at everything—you must excuse this tactless curiosity, but somehow I was incapable of accepting the fact, just could not believe that the person with whom I had spent the greater and the best part of my life, twenty-four years from childhood through youth and into adulthood, had simply bolted. I tried to justify it. I thought: Maybe he’s seriously ill. Then I hoped perhaps you had temporarily lost your mind, or maybe someone had come after you because you had lost at cards or done something against the regiment, or the flag, or you’d broken your word or betrayed your honor. That sort of thing. You should not be surprised that any of these things struck me as less of a transgression than what you had actually done. Any of them would have had some justification, some explanation, even the betrayal of the ideals that shaped our world. Only one thing was incomprehensible: that you had committed a sin against me. You ran away like a swindler or a thief, you ran a matter of hours after leaving the castle where you had been with Krisztina and me, the three of us spending our days together, sometimes long into the night, as we had done for years, in mutual friendship and the brotherly trust that only twins can share, because they are sports of nature, bound together in life and death, aware, even when they are grown up and separated by great distances, of everything about each other. It doesn’t matter if one lives in London and the other in a foreign country, both will fall ill at the same moment, and of the same disease. They don’t talk to each other, they don’t write, they live in different circumstances, they eat different foods, they are thousands of miles apart, and yet when they are thirty or forty years old they suffer the same affliction, be it in the gallbladder or the appendix, and their chances of survival will be the same. Their two bodies are as organically linked as they were in the womb. And they love or hate the same people. It is a phenomenon of nature, not that common, but then again, not as rare as is usually thought.
“And sometimes, I’ve thought that friendship is formed of links as fateful as those between twins.
“A strange identity of impulses, sympathies, tasks, temperaments, and cultural formation binds two people together in a single fate. It does not matter what one of them may do against the other, that fate will remain the same. One of them may flee the other, but each will still know the other’s essence. One of them may find a new friend or a new lover, but without the other’s tacit consent this doesn’t release their bond. Their lives will unfold along similar paths whether one of them goes far away or not, even as far as the tropics. These were some of the things I was thinking as I stood in your room the day you ran away.
“I still see that moment with absolute clarity. I still smell that smell of heavy English tobacco, I still see the furniture, the divan with the big oriental rug, and the equestrian pictures on the walls. And a dark red leather armchair, the kind you usually find in smoking rooms. The divan was very large, and you had obviously had it made to your own specifications, because there was nothing resembling it to be bought in the area. In fact, it wasn’t a divan, more a French bed, large enough for two people.”
He watches the smoke from his cigar.
“The window overlooked the garden, if I remember correctly. . . . It was the first and last time I was ever there; you never wanted me to visit you. And it was only by chance that you mentioned that you had rented a house on the outskirts of town in a deserted neighborhood, a house with a garden. That was three years before you fled—forgive me, I see that the word disturbs you.”
“Please continue,” says the guest. “Words are not the issue here.”
“Do you think so?” asks the General innocently. “Are words not the issue? I would not be bold enough to assert such a thing. Sometimes it seems to me that it is precisely the words one utters, or stifles, or writes, that are the issue, if not the only issue. Yes, I am sure,” he continues firmly, “you had not ever invited me to this apartment, and without an invitation, I could not visit you. If I’m honest, I thought you were ashamed of letting me see this apartment you had furnished yourself, because I was a rich man. . . . Perhaps it seemed wanting. . . . You were a very proud man,” he says, in the same firm voice. “The only thing that came between us when we were young was money. You were proud, and could not forgive that I am rich. Later in life I came to think that perhaps wealth is indeed unforgivable. To find oneself constantly the guest of a financial fortune . . . and on such a scale. I was born into it, and even I had the feeling from time to time that it was impermissible. And you were always painfully intent on underlining the financial imbalance between us. The poor, particularly the poor among the upper classes of society, do not forgive,” he says with a strange tone of satisfaction. “And that is why I thought that perhaps you were hiding the apartment from me, perhaps you were ashamed of its simple furnishings. A foolish supposition, as I now
know, but your pride was truly boundless. And so one day I find myself standing in the home that you had rented and furnished and never shown to me. And I do not believe my eyes. This apartment, as you well know, was a work of art. Nothing large, one generous room on the ground floor, two small ones upstairs, and yet everything—furniture, rooms, garden—arranged as only an artist could. That was when I understood that you really are an artist. And I also understood to what extent you were a stranger among the rest of us ordinary people. And also what wrong was done to you when, out of love and pride, you were given to the military life. No, you were never a soldier—and I could feel, in retrospect, the profound loneliness you felt among us. But this home served you as a refuge, just as in the Middle Ages a fortress or a cloister sheltered those who had renounced the world. And like a brigand you used this place to hoard everything of beauty and noble quality: curtains and carpets, silver, ancient bronzes, crystal and furniture, rare woven materials. . . . I know that your mother died at some point during those years, and that you also must have received inheritances from your Polish relatives. Once you mentioned a piece of property on the border with Russia, and the fact that you would inherit it. And now here it was, in these three rooms, exchanged for furniture and pictures. And in the middle of the main room downstairs, a piano, with a piece of ancient brocade thrown across it, and set on top, a crystal vase holding three orchids. The only place they grow in this region is in my greenhouse. I walked through the rooms and took mental inventory of everything. I grasped that you had lived among us and yet never belonged with us. I grasped that you had created this masterpiece of a rare and hidden retreat in secret, defiantly, as a great act of will, in order to conceal it from the world, as a place where you could live only for yourself and your art. Because you are an artist, and perhaps you could have created true artworks,” he says, in a tone that brooks no contradiction. “That is what I read in the perfect selection of the furnishings in your abandoned apartment. And in that moment, Krisztina stepped through the door.” He crosses his arms again and speaks so dispassionately and deliberately that he might be dictating the details of an accident to a policeman.
“I was standing in front of the piano, looking at the orchids,” he says. “The apartment was like a disguise. Or was, perhaps, our uniform your disguise? Only you can answer that question, and now . . . everything is over, you have in fact provided the answer in the life you chose. One’s life, viewed as a whole, is always the answer to the most important questions. Along the way, does it matter what one says, what words and principles one chooses to justify oneself? At the very end, one’s answers to the questions the world has posed with such relentlessness are to be found in the facts of one’s life. Questions such as: Who are you? . . . What did you actually want? . . . What could you actually achieve? . . . At what points were you loyal or disloyal or brave or a coward? And one answers as best one can, honestly or dishonestly; that’s not so important. What’s important is that finally one answers with one’s life. You set aside your uniform because you saw it as a disguise, that much is already clear. I, on the other hand, wore mine for as long as duty and the world demanded it; that was my answer. So that settles one question. The other one is: What were you to me? Were you my friend? Because you fled without saying farewell—although not entirely, because the previous day something happened during the hunt, and it was only later that its meaning dawned on me: that it had been your farewell. One rarely knows when a word or an act will trigger some final, irreversible alteration in any relationship. Why did I go to your apartment that day? You did not ask me to come, you did not say your farewells, you left no word behind you. What was I doing—there in a place to which I had never been invited, on the very same day that you left us? What presentiment made me take the carriage and drive into town as fast as I could, to look for you in your apartment, which was already empty of life? . . . What was it that I had learned the previous day during the hunt? Has some piece of information been left out? . . . Did I have no confidential tip, no hint, no word that you were preparing to flee? . . . No, everyone was silent, even Nini. . . . You remember my old nurse, she knew everything there was to know about us. Is she still alive? Yes, in her own fashion. She lives like that tree there outside the window, the one planted by my great-grandfather. Like all of us, she has her allotted span of years, and hers is not yet complete. Nini knew. But not even she said anything.
“During those days, I was quite alone. And yet I knew that it was the moment when the time had come for everything to become clear and fall into place, you, me, everybody. Yes, that’s what I understood out on the hunt,” he says, lost in his memories and also answering a question he must often have asked himself.
“What did you understand?” asked Konrad.
“It was a beautiful hunt,” says the General, his voice almost warm, as if he is reliving the particulars of a favorite memory. “The last big hunt in this forest. There were huntsmen then, real huntsmen . . . perhaps they still exist today, I don’t know. That was the last time I went hunting in my forest. Since that time the only people who come are Sunday hunters, guests, who are received and taken care of by the steward and play around with their guns among the trees. The real hunt was something else entirely. You won’t be able to understand that, because you were never a huntsman. It was just another duty, one of those professional duties appropriate to your rank, like riding and attending social gatherings. You were a huntsman, but only in the way of someone bowing to social customs.
“When you were out hunting, there would be a scornful look on your face, and you always carried your gun carelessly, as if it were a walking stick. You are a stranger to this oddest of passions, the most secret of all in a man’s life, that burns deep inside him like magma, deeper than any role he plays, or clothes he wears, or refinements he learns. It’s the passion for killing. We are human beings, and it is part of our human condition to kill. It’s an imperative . . . we kill to protect, we kill to keep hold, we kill in revenge. You’re smiling in scorn. . . . You were an artist, and these base, raw instincts had been refined out of your artist’s soul? Maybe you think you never killed a living creature. But that is by no means certain.” His voice is stern and precise. “This is the evening when there is no point in discussing anything but the essentials and the truth, because there will be no second such meeting, and maybe there are not many evenings and days left to either of us. . . . I am sure there will never be another one with greater significance. Perhaps you remember I, too, was once in the Orient a long time ago; it was on my honeymoon with Krisztina. We traveled all through the Arabian lands, and in Baghdad we were the guests of an Arabian family. They are the most distinguished people, as you, after all your travels, certainly know for yourself. Their pride, their hauteur, their bearing, their fiery natures and their calm, their disciplined bodies and confident movements, their games, the flash in their eyes, all demonstrate a primeval sense of rank, not social rank but man’s first awakening in the chaos of creation to an understanding of his human dignity.
“There is a theory that at the beginning of time, long before the formation of peoples and tribes and cultures, the human species came into being there, deep in the Arabian world. Perhaps that explains their pride, I don’t know. I’m not well-versed in these matters . . . but I do understand something about pride. And in the way one can sense, without any external evidence, that someone is of the same race and social rank, I sensed during those weeks in the Orient that the people there have a grandeur, including even the dirtiest camel driver. As I said, we were living with a local family, in a house that was like a palace; our ambassador had been kind enough to arrange the invitation. Those cool, white houses . . . do you know them? Each with its central courtyard, where the whole life of the family and the clan is conducted, so it is like a weekly market, a parliament, and a temple forecourt all rolled into one . . . the way they saunter, their eagerness to play that shows in all their movements. And that dignified, determined idleness
, behind which their exuberance and passions lurk like snakes behind stones in the hot sun.
“One evening our hosts invited Arab guests in our honor. Until then, their hospitality had been more or less in the European style; the owner of the house was both a judge and a dealer in contraband, one of the wealthiest men in the city. The guest rooms had English furniture, the bathtub was made of solid silver. But on this particular evening we saw something quite other. The guests arrived after sundown, only men, grand gentlemen with their servants. In the middle of the courtyard the fire was already lit, burning with that acrid smoke that comes from camel dung. Everyone sat down around it in silence. Krisztina was the only woman present. A lamb was brought, a white lamb, and our host took his knife and killed it with a movement I shall never forget . . . a movement like that is not something one learns, it is an Oriental movement straight out of the time when the act of killing still had a symbolic and religious significance, when it denoted sacrifice. That was how Abraham lifted the knife over Isaac when he was preparing to sacrifice him, that was the movement in the ancient temples when the sacrifice was made at the altar before the idols or the image of the godhead, and that was the movement that struck John the Baptist’s head from his body . . . it is utterly ancient. In the Orient it is innate to every man. Perhaps it is what first distinguished humans as a species, after the interval when they were part human, part animal. . . .