Sandor Marai - Embers

It was a feeling that communicated itself to them both just then: that during all these decades they had drawn their strength from waiting itself, as if an entire life had been mere preparation for a single task.

Konrad had known that one day he would have to come back, just as the General had known that someday this moment would arrive. It was what both had lived for. Konrad was as pale as he had been in his youth, and it was evident that he still led an indoor life and avoided fresh air.

He, too, was wearing dark clothes of sober but very fine material.

He must be rich, thought the General. They looked at each other for a long moment without speaking. Then the manservant came with absinthe and schnapps.

“Where have you come from?” asked the General. ” From London”

“Do you live there?”

“Close by. I have a small house near London. When I came back from the tropics I settled there.”

“Where in the tropics?”

“In Singapore.” He lifted a pale hand and pointed vaguely to a spot in the air as if to locate the place in the universe where he had once lived.

“But only at the end. Before that, I was far inland on the peninsula, with the Malays.” “They say,” said the General, raising his glass of absinthe to the light in the gesture of a welcoming toast, “that the tropics use people up and make them old.”

“They’re terrible,” said Konrad. “They take ten years off a man’s life.”

“But it doesn’t show.

Welcome!” They emptied their glasses and sat down. “Really not?” asked the guest as he settled himself in the armchair beside the fire, under the clock. The General watched his movements with care. Now that his friend had chosen to sit in the armchair-exactly where he had last sat forty-one years ago, as if he were involuntarily obeying the local magic-the General blinked in relief. He felt the way a hunter feels when he finally sees the game in the position it has been carefully avoiding. Now everything had fallen into place.

“Where have you come from?” asked the General. “From London.”

“Do you live there?”

“Close by. I have a small house near London. When I came back from the tropics I settled there.”

“Where in the tropics?”

“In Singapore.” He lifted a pale hand and pointed vaguely to a spot in the air as if to locate the place in the universe where he had once lived.

“But only at the end. Before that, I was far inland on the peninsula, with the Malays.” “They say,” said the General, raising his glass of absinnthe to the light in the gesture of a welcoming toast, “that the tropics use people up and make them old.”

“They’re terrible,” said Konrad. “They take ten years off a man’s life.”

“But it doesn’t show. Welcome!”

I They emptied their glasses and sat down.

“Really not?” asked the guest as he settled himself in the armchair beside the fire, under the clock. The General watched his movements with care. Now that his fiend had chosen to sit in the armchair — exactly where he had last sat forty-one years ago, as if he were involuntarily obeying the local magic-the General blinked in relief. He felt the way a hunter feels when he finally sees the game in the position it has been carefully avoiding. Now everything had fallen into place.

“The tropics are terrible,” Konrad said again. “People like us cannot tolerate them. They use up the body and destroy the constitution. They kill some part of you.”

“Is that why you went?” asked the General almost as an aside, giving no particular emphasis to the words. “To kill something in yourself?”

His tone was polite and conversational, and he took his seat facing the fireplace in the old armchair known in the family as the “Florentine Chair,” where he had sat in the evenings forty-one years ago talking with Krisztina and Konrad. Now the two of them glanced at the third chair, upholstered in French silk, and empty.

“Yes,” said Konrad calmly. “And were you successful?”

“I am already old,” said Konrad, looking into the fire, not answering the question.

They both sat in silence, watching the flames, until the manservant came to announce dinner.

I’t’s like this,” said Konrad after the trout. “At first you think you can get used to it.” He was speaking of the tropics. “I was still young when I arrived, thirty-two, you remember. I went straight out into the swamps. You live out there in little huts with tin roofs. I had no money-everything was paid by the Colonial Company. At night you lie in bed and it is like lying in a warm mist. By day the mist is thicker and scalding hot. Soon you become quite apathetic. Everyone drinks, everyone’s eyes are bloodshot. In the first year, you think you will die. In the third year, you realize that you are no longer the person you were, and that the rhythm of life has changed. You live faster, something inside you burns, your heart beats differently and at the same time, you become indifferent to everything.

Absolutely everything, for months at a time. The there comes a moment when you no longer have any idea what is happening either inside you or around you. Sometimes that takes five years, sometimes it ha] pens in the first few months. That’s when the r~ comes. A lot of people become murderous, others k themselves.”

“Even the English?”

“Less often. But even they get infected with this fever of rage, as if it were a bacillus, though it isn’t. And yet I’m convinced it is a form of illness. It’s just that no one has found the cause yet. Maybe it comes from the water. Or the plants. Or love affairs. You cannot get used to Malaysian women. Some of them are extraordinarily beautiful.

They smile, their skin is so smooth, their bodies are so supple when they serve you at table or in bed … and yet you cannot get used to them. The English know how to defend themselves.

They arrive with England in their suitcases. Their courteous arrogance.

Their reserve. Their golf courses and their tennis courts. Their whisky.

Their evening dress, that they change into every night in their tin-roofed houses out in the middle of the swamps. Not all of them, course. That’s just a legend. Most of them turn brutal after four or five years just like the others, the Belgians, the French, the Dutch.

The tropics eat away their college manners the way leprosy eats away skin. Oxford and Cambridge rot down. Back home in the British Isles, everyone who has spent time in the tropics is suspect. They may be respected and honored, but they are also suspect. I’m convinced that their entries in the security files are annotated with the word ‘tropics,’ the way others would be stamped ‘ disease’ or ‘.”

Everyone who has spent extended time in the tropics is suspect, no matter whether they’ve played golf and tennis, drunk whisky in the clubs in Singapore, appeared at the Governor’s receptions in evening dress or in uniform and decorations, they’re still suspect. Because they have experienced the tropics. Because they carry this alarming contagious disease, and there’s no known defense against it, and yet it’s somehow both deadly and seductive. The tropics are a disease. Tropical diseases have a cure, but the tropics themselves do not.”

“I understand,” said the General. “Did you catch it too?”

Everyone does.” The guest savored the Chablis with his head tilted back, tasting it in small mouthfuls like a connoisseur. “To become an alcoholic is to get off lightly. Passions swirl out there like the tornados in the forests and mountains beyond the swamps. All sorts of passions. Which is why the English are suspicious of everyone who comes back from the tropics. Nobody knows what’s in their blood or their nerves or their hearts. What’s certain is that they’reno longer Europeans. Not quite. They may have had the European newspapers delivered by mail, they may have read everything that has been thought and read in this part of the world for the last decades and longer, they ma have maintained all the strange formalities that whites in the tropics observe among themselves the way drunkards conduct themselves with excessive precision in society: they hold themselves too strictly, so that nobody will detect their chaotic feelings, they’re as smooth as eels and utterly correct and perfectly mannered … and inside everything looks different.” “Really?” said the General, holding his glass I white wine to the light.