Sandor Marai - Embers

“The news that revolution had broken out in Russia. A man called Lenin, which is all that anyone knew about him, had gone back to Russia in a sealed train, taking bolshevism in his luggage. The news reached London the same day it reached my coolies in the middle of a primeval forest without any radio or telephone. It was incomprehensible. But then I understood. People don’t need machines to learn what is important to them.” “Do you think?” asked the General.

“I know,” the other replies. Then, without a pause, “When did Krisztina die?”

“How did you know about Krisztina’s death?” the General asks tonelessly.

“You’ve been living in the tropics, you haven’t set foot on the Continent for forty-one years. Did you sense it, the way your coolies sensed the Revolution?”

“Did I sense it? Perhaps. But she’s not sitting here with us. Where else could she be, except in her grave?”

“Yes,” said the General. “She’s buried in the park, not far from the hothouses, in a spot she chose.”

“Did she die a long time ago?”

“Eight years after you went away.” “Eight years,” says the guest, and his pale lips move and his false teeth close as though he were chewing, or counting. “That’s thirty-three years ago.” Now he’s counting half under his breath. “If she were still alive she’d be sixty-three.”

“Yes, she’d be an old woman, just as we’ve become old men.”

“Of what did she die?”

“Anemia. A quite rare form of the disease.”

“Not as rare as all that,” says Konrad in a professional tone of voice.

“It’s quite common in the tropics. Living conditions change and the composition of, blood changes accordingly.” “It’s possible,” says the General. “Possible that it’s relatively common in Europe, too, if living conditions change. I don’t know anything about these things.”

“Nor I. It’s just that the tropics produce unending physical problems.

Everyone becomes something c quack doctor. Even the Malays play quack healer all time. So she died in 1907,” he says finally, as if he had been preoccupied with the arithmetic all this time ~ had finally figured it out. “Were you still in uniform then?”

“Yes, I served for the whole duration of the war.”

“What was it like?”

“The war?” The General’s expression is stiff. “As horrifying as the tropics. The last winter in particular up in the north. Life is adventurous here in Europe too.” He smiles.

“Adventurous? … Yes, I would suppose so.” The guest nods in agreement.

“As you may imagine, I sometimes found it very hard to bear that I wasn’t back here while you were fighting. I thought of coming home and rejoining the regiment.” “That thought,” says the General calmly and politely, but with a certain emphasis, “also occurred to a number of people in the regiment. But you didn’t come. You must have had other things to do,” he says encouragingly. “I was an English citizen,” says Konrad, embarrassed.

“One cannot keep changing one’s nationality every ten years.”

“No.” The General nods in agreement. “In my opinion, one cannot change one’s nationality at all. All that can be changed are one’s documents, don’t you think?” “My homeland,” says the guest, “no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away. Into the tropics or even further.”

“Even further? Where?” asks the General coldly.

“Into time.” “This wine,” says the General, lifting his glass and admiring the deep red of its contents, “is from a you may remember.

Eighty-six, the year we swore oath to the Emperor and King. To commemorate the day, my father laid down this wine in one section of the cellar. That was many years ago, almost an lifetime. It’s an old vintage now.”

“What we swore to uphold no longer exists,” the guest very seriously as he, too, raises his glass. “Everyone has died, or gone away, or abandoned things we swore to uphold. There was a world for which it was worth living and dying. That world is dead. The new one means nothing to me. That’s all I can say.”

“For me, that world is still alive, even if in reality it no longer exists. It lives, because I swore an oath to uphold it. That’s all I can say.”

“Yes, you are still a soldier,” replies the guest. Each at his end of the table, they raise their glasses in silence and drain them.

“After you went away,” says the General amicably, as if the essentials, the dangerously loaded subjects, had now been disposed of and the two men were simply chatting, “we kept believing you would come back.

Everybody here was waiting for you. Everybody was your friend. You were, if you will permit me, an eccentric. We forgave you because we knew that music was all-important to you. We didn’t understand why you went away, but we came to terms with it, because you must have had good reason. We knew that everything was harder for you than it was for us real soldiers. What for you was a situation, for us was our calling. What for you was a disguise, for us was our fate. We were not surprised when you threw off the disguise. But we thought you would come back. Or write. A number of us thought that, myself included, I must admit … And Krisztina.

And a number of people in the regiment, in case you remember.” “Only vaguely,” says the guest indifferently.

“Yes, you certainly experienced a great deal in the world out there. But it’s quickly forgotten.”

“No,” is the reply. “The world doesn’t count. One never forgets what is important. I learned that only later, when I was somewhat older. Nothing secondary remains-it gets thrown away along with one’s dreams. I have no memory of the regiment,” he says stubbornly. “For some time now all I remember is the essentials.”

“For example Vienna and this house, is that what you mean.? … “

“Vienna and this house,” the guest echoes mechanically. He stares straight ahead with eyes half blinking. “Memory has a wonderful way of separating the wheat from the chaff. There can be some great event, and ten, twenty years later one realizes that it had no effect on one whatsoever. And then one day, one remembers a hunt or a passage in a book or this room. Last time we sat here, there were three of us.

Krisztina was alive. She sat there in that chair. These ornaments were on the table, too.”

“Yes,” says the General. “East was in front of you, South was in front of Krisztina, and West was in front of me.”

You remember it down to the details?” asks the guest, astonished.

“I remember everything.”

“Sometimes the details are extremely important. They link everything together into a whole, and bind all the ingredients of memory. I used to think about that sometimes in the tropics, when it rained. That rain!”

he says, as if to change the subject. “For months on end, drumming on the tin roof like a machine gun. Steam comes up off the swamps and the rain is warm. Everything is damp, the bedclothes, your underwear, your books, the tobacco in its tin, the bread. Everything feels sticky and greasy. You’rein your house, the Malays are singing. The woman you’ve taken to live with you sits motionless in a corner of the room and watches you. They can sit for hours like that, staring. At first you pay no attention. Then you start to feel nervous, and order them out of the room. But it doesn’t help: They go and sit somewhere else, you know, in another room and stare at you through the partitions. They have huge brown eyes like those Tibetan dogs, the ones that don’t bark, the most subservient animals in the whole world. They look at you with those brilliant, quiet eyes, and no matter where you go, you feel that look pursuing you like some noxious ray. Scream at her and she smiles. Strike her and she smiles. Banish her and she sits on the threshold and looks in until she is called back. They are constantly having children, though nobody ever mentions this, least of all they themselves. It is as if you are sharing quarters with an animal, a murderess, a priestess, a magician and a fanatic all rolled into one. Over time it becomes exhausting; that look is so powerful that it wears down even the strongest man. It is as powerful as the touch of a hand, as if you were constantly being stroked. It drives you mad. Then that, too, begins to leave you indifferent. It rains. You sit in your room, drink one schnapps after another, and smoke sweet tobacco. Sometimes a visitor comes, drinks schnapps, and smokes sweet tobacco. You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain. You would like to play the piano, but the rain comes to sit alongside and play an accompaniment. And then dry weather returns, which is to say there is steam and bright light. People age quickly.”