B000FBJF64 EBOK (13 page)

“Women sense these things, I thought. Then you come, in evening dress, and we go in to table. We chat as we did on other evenings. We talk about the hunt, about the beaters’ report, about the error made by one of the huntsmen who had shot a buck he had no right to shoot . . . but we do not say a single word all evening about those strange, questionable seconds. You do not mention your own hunting adventure with the magnificent deer you failed to kill. Such a story requires a telling, even when one is less than an expert huntsman. You don’t say a word about missing the game and leaving the hunt early without explanation and going back to town, not to reappear until evening, although it is all very irregular and a breach of etiquette. You could mention the morning in a single word . . . but you don’t. It’s as if we had not gone on the hunt at all. You talk about other things. You ask Krisztina what she was reading as you came into the salon to join us. You and she have a long discussion about it, you ask Krisztina what the title is, you want to know what impression she has of the text, you have her tell you what life in the tropics is like, you behave as if this subject matter is of burning interest to you—and it is not until later that I learn from the bookseller in town that this book and others on the same subject were ordered by you, and that you had lent it to Krisztina a few days before. I know none of that yet. You both cut me out of the conversation, because I know nothing about the tropics. Later, when I realize that you had been deceiving me that night, I think back to this scene, I hear the words, even though they faded long ago, and I am forced to admit, in genuine admiration, that the two of you played your roles perfectly. I, the uninitiated, can find nothing suspicious in your words: you talk about the tropics, about a book, about an ordinary piece of reading. You want to know what Krisztina thinks, you are particularly interested in whether someone born and raised in another part of the world could tolerate the conditions in the tropics . . . what does she think? (You don’t ask me.) And could she herself tolerate the rain, the warm haze, the suffocating hot mists, the loneliness in the swamps and the primeval forest . . . you see, the words come back of their own accord. The last time you sat in this armchair, forty-one years ago, you talked about the tropics, the swamps, the warm mists, and the rain. And just now, when you returned to this house, there they were again, words like swamp, and the tropics, and rain, and hot mist. Yes, words come back. Everything comes back, words and things go round in a circle, sometimes they circle the entire globe and then they finally return to their starting point and something is completed,” he says calmly. “That was what you talked about, the last time you spoke to Krisztina. Around midnight, you order the carriage and are driven back to town. Those were the events on the day of the hunt,” he says, and his voice expresses the satisfaction of an old man who has just successfully delivered an exact report, a systematic recapitulation that commands attention.

15

When you leave, Krisztina also withdraws,” he says after a moment. “I remain alone in this room. She has left the English book on the tropics lying on her chair. I have no desire to go to sleep, so I pick up the book and thumb through it. I look at the pictures, and try to involve myself with its statistics about the economy and public health. It surprises me that Krisztina is reading such a book. All this won’t concern her very much, I think, the mathematical curve of rubber production on the peninsula can’t be that interesting to her, nor the general health problems of the natives. It’s just not Krisztina, I think. But the book has something to say, not just in English and not just about living conditions on the peninsula. As I am sitting there, book in hand, after midnight, alone in the room after the two people who have meant the most to me, aside from my father, have left, it suddenly dawns on me that the book is another signal. And I realize something else. During the day, things have finally begun to impose themselves on my attention, something has happened, life has turned eloquent. At such moments, I think, great care is required, because on such days life is speaking to us in mute signs, everything suddenly makes us alert, everything is a proof and a symbol, all we need to do is understand. One day things mature and we can put words to them. And, as I think this, I suddenly understand that this book is both a sign and an answer. It is saying: Krisztina wants to leave here. She is thinking about strange worlds, which means she must want something other than this world. Perhaps she wants to run away from here, from something or someone—and this someone can be me, but it can also be you. It is as clear as daylight, I think, Krisztina feels and knows something, and she wants to get away from here, and that’s why she is reading a study of the tropics. I sense a great many things, and I feel that I also understand them. I feel and I understand what happened today: my life has split in two, like a landscape torn apart by an earthquake. On the one side is childhood, you and everything that the past has meant, and on the other is a dark place through which I cannot see, but through which I must find my way: the remainder of my life. And the two parts of this life are no longer in contact with each other. What happened? I cannot say. I have spent the whole day in an effort to appear calm and in control of myself, and I succeeded; Krisztina could not yet know anything as she looked at me, her face pale and with that strange questioning stare. She could not know, could not read on my face, what had happened on the hunt. . . . And indeed, what
had
happened? Am I not just imagining all this? Is the whole thing not just a figment of my imagination? If I tell it to anyone, he or she will probably laugh in my face. I have nothing, no proof, in my hand. . . . All I have is a voice inside me, stronger than any proof, crying out unmistakably, incontrovertibly, beyond all doubt, that I am not deceiving myself, and that I know the truth. And the truth is that in the dawn, my friend wanted to kill me. What a ridiculous accusation, out of the empty air, isn’t it? Can I ever speak about this conviction, which is even more horrifying than the thing itself, to another human being? No. But now that I am in possession of this knowledge, with that calm certainty that accompanies our recognition of simple facts, how am I to imagine our future lives together? Can I look you in the eye, or should all three of us, Krisztina, you, and I, play the game and turn our friendship into pure theater while we all watch one another?

“Is it possible to live in such a way? As I said before, I think that perhaps you have gone mad. I think, perhaps it is the music. One cannot be a musician and a relative of Chopin and escape unpunished. But at the same time, I know that this hope is both cowardly and foolish: I have to look truth in the face, I must not imagine things, you are not mad, there is no relief, no way out. You have a reason to hate me and to want to kill me. I cannot grasp what that reason is. There is one simple, natural explanation, namely that you have been smitten with a sudden, wild passion for Krisztina, and this, too, could be a form of madness. But this assumption is so implausible—there has been no trace, no sign whatever in the life the three of us have led together—that I have to discard it. I know Krisztina, I know you, and I know myself—at least I think I do. Our entire lives, our first acquaintance with Krisztina, my marriage, our friendship, it’s all so open, so clean, so transparent, the personalities and the circumstances are so unambiguous, that I would have to be insane to believe any such thing even for a second. Passions, no matter how perverse, cannot be concealed; a passion that compels the man possessed by it to pick up his weapon one day and turn it against his closest friend cannot be hidden from the world for months on end. Even I, the perpetually blind and deaf third party, would have had to pick up some sign of it—we virtually live together; no week goes by in which you do not dine with me three or four times; during the day I am in town, in the barracks, serving alongside you; we know everything about each other. And I know Krisztina’s days and nights, her body and her soul, as well as I know my own. It’s a crazy notion, that you and Krisztina . . . and I am almost relieved when I make myself examine this notion. It must be something else. What happened is deeper, more mysterious, less comprehensible. I have to talk to you. Should I have someone observe you? Like the jealous husband in a comedy? I am not a jealous husband. Suspicion has trouble taking hold in my nervous system, I am calm when I think about Krisztina, whom I found the way a collector finds the prize of his life, the rarest, most perfect object in his collection, the masterpiece, the goal and meaning of his existence. Krisztina does not lie, Krisztina is not unfaithful, I know all her thoughts, even the secret ones that are thought only in dreams. The diary bound in yellow velvet that I gave her in the first days of our marriage tells everything, because we had agreed that she would write about her feelings and thoughts forme and for herself—her longings, her emotions, all theby-products of the soul that one dares not speak aloud because one is ashamed or sees them as irrelevant. She would sketch these out in the diary, share with me in a few words what she thought and felt under the influence of a particular person or a situation. . . . That is how deeply we trust each other. And the secret diary is always in the drawer of a desk to which only the two of us have keys. This diary is the most confidential thing there can be between a man and a woman. If there is a secret in Krisztina’s life, it would have shown itself already in her diary. However, I realize, for some time now we have forgotten this secret game . . . and I stand up and walk through the dark house to Krisztina’s study and look for the yellow diary. The drawer is empty.”

He closes his eyes and sits there like that for some time, his face expressionless like a blind man’s. He seems to be searching for a word.

“It is already after midnight, the house is asleep. Krisztina is tired, I don’t want to disturb her. She has probably taken the diary with her to her room, I think to myself,” he says amicably. “I don’t want to disturb her, I will ask her tomorrow whether she was telling me something with the diary, in our secret sign language. For you see, this confidential little book which we do not discuss—we are each a little ashamed in front of the other about this silent confidence we share—is like a declaration of love that repeats itself again and again. Such things are hard to discuss. It was Krisztina’s idea, she asked me for it in Paris, on our honeymoon, she was the one who wanted to make the confession—and it was only later, much later, after she had died, that I understood that one only prepares oneself so consciously to confess, to hew to the utmost honesty, if one knows that one day there will actually be something that requires confession. For a long time, I did not understand this diary, I thought these secret written messages, this Morse Code of her life, were a little exaggerated, a woman’s whim. She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable. Krisztina wants to give me everything, her body, her soul, her feelings, and her innermost thoughts. . . . We are on our honeymoon, Krisztina is in love, think where she comes from, and what it means to her that I offer her my name, this castle, the palace in Paris, the wide world, all things she could not even have dreamed of a few months before in her small-town surroundings and in the modest house where she spent her days alone with a silent, sick old man who lived only for his instrument, his notebooks, and his memories . . . and suddenly life gives her everything with open hands, marriage, a year-long honeymoon, Paris, London, Rome, then the East, months in oases, the sea. Of course, Krisztina believes she is in love. Later she reaches the understanding that she is not in love, nor had she been, even back then. She is merely grateful.”

He links his fingers, rests his arms on his knees and leans forward. “She is grateful, very grateful, in her way, the way of a young woman on her honeymoon with her husband, a rich, distinguished young man.” He tightens the grip of his fingers and stares at the pattern in the carpet, sunk in thought. “She is determined to show her gratitude, and that is why she has the idea of the diary. This extraordinary present. For from the very first moment, it is filled with surprising admissions. Krisztina is not courting me, and her confessions are sometimes disturbingly candid. She describes me just as she sees me, in a few words, but to the point. She describes what doesn’t please her about me, the way I am far too open with everyone in the world. She feels I lack modesty, which, with her religious temperament, she believes to be the greatest virtue. No, it is quite true that in those years I am not modest. The world is mine, I have found the woman who in every word, every movement of her body, every leap of her mind calls forth a complete echo in me, I am rich, I have position, the future opens itself before me like a shining path, I am thirty years old, I love life, I love military service, I love my career. Now, in retrospect, this hearty self-satisfaction and sense of good fortune make my head spin. And like everyone whom the gods spoil without reason, I feel a kind of anxiety buried at the heart of my happiness. It is all too beautiful, too flawless, too complete. Such unbroken happiness always arouses fear. I would like to make a sacrifice to fate, I would be glad if, coming into some new harbor, I were to receive mail from home, informing me of some financial or other unpleasantness. For example, that the castle had burned to the ground or that an investment had gone sour or that my banker had bad news for me or some such thing. . . . One always wants to repay the gods with some of one’s good fortune. For it is well known that the gods are jealous, and that if they give a mortal a year of happiness, they immediately enter this debt on the ledger and demand repayment at the end of life with crippling interest. But everything around me is in perfect order. Krisztina writes short entries in her diary that read as if they had been composed in a dream. Sometimes she writes no more than a line or even just one word. For example: ‘You are beyond hope, because you are vain.’ Then nothing for weeks. Or she writes that she has seen a man in Algiers who has followed her in an alley and spoken to her, and she had the feeling she could go away with him.