Sandor Marai - Embers

“Like the lover, the friend expects no reward for his feelings. He does not wish the performance of any duty in return, he does not view the person he has chosen as his friend with any illusion, he sees his faults and accepts him with all their consequences. Such is the ideal. And without such an ideal, would there be any point to life? And if a friend fails, because he is not a true friend, is one allowed to attack his character and his weaknesses? What is the value of a friendship in which one person loves the other for his virtue, his loyalty, his steadfastness? What is the value of a love that expects loyalty? Isn’t it our duty to accept the faithless friend as we do the faithful one who sacrifices himself? Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship? That the more we give, the less we expect? And if a man gives someone his trust through all the years of his youth and stands ready to make sacrifices for him in manhood because of that blind, unconditional devotion, which is the highest thing anyone person can offer another, only then to witness the faithlessness and base behavior of his friend, is he permitted to rise up in protest and demand vengeance? And if he does rise up and demand vengeance, having been deceived and abandoned, what does that say about the validity of his friendship in the first place? You see, these are the kinds of theoretical questions that have occupied me since I have been alone. Of course, solitude did not provide me with any answers. Nor, in any complete sense, did books, neither the ancient texts of Chinese, Jewish, and classical thinkers, nor contemporary tracts that spell everything out, absolutely bluntly, while all they’re giving you is words and more words and not any articulation of the truth. Is there, in fact, anyone who has ever given words to the truth, and set them on paper? I thought about this a great deal after I began my reading and self-questioning.

Time went by and life around me seemed somehow to darken, and the books and my memories started to mass together and pile up. And for every crumb of truth in any individual book, my memories provided a corresponding retort that human beings may learn everything they want about the true nature of relationships, but this knowledge will make them not one whit the wiser. And that is why we have no right to demand unconditional honor and loyalty from a friend, even when events have shown us that this friend was faithless.” “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 ‘,’ ” says Konrad. “That’s a strong word. In the final analysis, lowed nobody an accounting-1 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 any thing 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 afflicti on, 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.