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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.

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 only earthly 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 overcharge 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.

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 kettledrum 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. Sometimes it was high-spirited, sometimes pompous or solemn. Beyond that, nobody paid any attention.

But when Konrad heard music, he turned pale. Every kind of music, even the simplest, struck him like a physical blow. The color left his face, and his lips trembled. Music communicated something to him that the others could never achieve. It seemed that the melodies did not speak to the rational portion of his mind. The discipline he demanded of himself, which he accepted as both punishment and penance, and by means of which he had achieved a certain status in the world, relaxed at such moments, as if his body too were releasing itself from its rigid posture. It was like the moment on parade when “stand to attention” finally gave way to “at ease.” His lips moved, as if he wanted to say something. At such times he forgot where he was, his eyes sparkled, he stared into the distance, oblivious of his surroundings, his superiors, his companions, the beautiful ladies, the rest of the audience in the theater. When he listened to music, he listened with his whole body, as longingly as a condemned man in his cell aches for the sound of distant feet perhaps bringing news of his release. When spoken to, he didn’t hear. Music dissolved the world around him just as it dissolved the laws of artistic unity, and at such moments Konrad ceased to be a soldier.

One evening in summer, he was playing a four-handed piece with Henrik’s mother, when something happened. It was before dinner, they were in the main reception room, the Officer of the Guards and his son were sitting in a corner listening politely, the way patient and well-intentioned people do, with an attitude of “Life is made up of duties. Music is one of them. Ladies’ wishes are to be obeyed.” They were performing Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie and Henrik’s mother was playing with such passion that the whole room seemed to shimmer and vibrate. As they waited patiently and politely in their corner for the piece finally to end, both father and son had the sensation that some metamorphosis was taking place in Henrik’s mother and in Konrad. It was as if the music were levitating the furniture, as if some mighty force were blowing against the heavy silk curtains, as if every ossified, decayed particle buried deep in the human heart were quickening into life, as if in everyone on earth a fatal rhythm lay dormant, waiting for the predestined moment to begin its fateful beat. The courteous listeners realized that music is dangerous. But the duo at the piano had lost all thought of danger. The Polonaise-Fantaisie was no more than a pretext to loose upon the world those forces that shake and explode the structures of order which man has devised to conceal what lies beneath. They sat straight-backed at the piano, leaning away from the keys a little and yet bound to them, as if music itself were driving an invisible team of fiery mythical horses riding the storm that circled the world, and they were bracing their bodies to maintain a firm grip on the reins in this explosive headlong gallop of unshackled energies. And then, with a single chord, they ended. The evening sun was slanting through the large windows, and motes of gold were spinning in its rays, as if the unearthly racing chariot had stirred up a whirlwind of dust on its way to ruin and the void.