Sandor Marai - Embers

“And sometimes, I’ve thought that friendship is formed of links as fateful as those between twins.

“A strange identity of impulses, sympathies, tasks, temperaments, and cultural formation binds two people together in a single fate. It does not matter what one of them may do against the other, that fate will remain the same. One of them may flee the other, but each will still know the other’s essence. One of them may find a new friend or a new lover, but without the other’s tacit consent this doesn’t release their bond. Their lives will unfold along similar paths whether one of them goes far away or not, even as far as the tropics. These were some of the things I was thinking as I stood in your room the day you ran away. “I still see that moment with absolute clarity. I still smell that smell of heavy English tobacco, I still see the furniture, the divan with the big oriental rug, and the equestrian pictures on the walls. And a dark red leather armchair, the kind you usually find in smoking rooms. The divan was very large, and you had obviously had it made to your own specifications, because there was nothing resembling it to be bought in the area. In fact, it wasn’t a divan, more a French bed, large enough for two people.” He watches the smoke from his cigar.

“The window overlooked the garden, if I remember correctly … It was the first and last time I was ever there; you never wanted me to visit you. And it was only by chance that you mentioned that you had rented a house on the outskirts of town in a deserted neighborhood, a house with a garden. That was three years before you fled-forgive me, I see that the word disturbs you.” “Please continue,” says the guest. “Words are not the issue here.” “Do you think so?” asks the General innocently.

“Are words not the issue? I would not be bold enough to assert such a thing. Sometimes it seems to me that it is precisely the words one utters, or stifles, or writes, that are the issue, if not the only issue. Yes, I am sure,” he continues firmly, “you had not ever invited me to this apartment, and without an invitation, I could not visit you.

If I’m honest, I thought you were ashamed of letting me see this apartment you had furnished yourself, because I was a rich man …

Perhaps it seemed wanting … You were a very proud,” he says, in the same firm voice. “The only thing that came between us when we were young was money. You were proud, and could not forgive that I am rich. Later in life I came to think that perhaps wealth is indeed unforgivable. To find oneself constantly the guest of a financial fortune … and on such a scale. I was born into it, and even I had the feeling from time to time that it was impermissible.

And you were always painfully intent on underlining the financial imbalance between us. The poor, particularly the poor among the upper classes of society, do not forgive,” he says with a strange tone of satisfaction. “And that is why I thought that perhaps you were hiding the apartment from me, perhaps you were ashamed of its simple furnishings. A foolish supposition, as I now know, but your pride was truly boundless. And so one day I find myself standing in the home that you had rented and furnished and never shown to me. And I do not believe my eyes. This apartment, as you well know, was a work of art. Nothing large, one generous room on the ground floor, two small ones upstairs, and yet everything-furniture, rooms, garden-arranged as only an artist could. That was when I understood that you really are an artist. And I also understood to what extent you were a stranger among the rest of us ordinary people. And also what wrong was done to you when, out of love and pride, you were given to the military life. No, you were never r a soldier-and I could feel, in retrospect, the profound loneliness you felt among us. But this home served you as a refuge, just as in the Middle Ages a fortress or a cloister sheltered those who had renounced the world. And like a brigand you used this place to hoard everything of beauty and noble quality: curtains and carpets, silver, ancient bronzes, crystal and furniture, rare woven materials. I know that your mother died at some point during those years, and that you also must have received inheritances from your Polish relatives. Once you mentioned a piece of property on the border with Russia, and the fact that you would inherit it. And now here it was, in these three rooms, exchanged for furniture and pictures. And in the middle of the main room downstairs, a piano, with a piece of ancient brocade thrown across it, and set on top, a crystal vase holding three orchids. The only place they grow in this region is in my greenhouse. I walked through the rooms and took mental inventory of everything. I grasped that you had lived among us and yet never belonged with us. I grasped that you had created this masterpiece of a rare and hidden retreat in secret, defiantly, as a great act of will, in order to conceal it from the world, as a place where you could live only for yourself and your art. Because you are an artist, and perhaps you could have created true art-works,” he says, in a tone that brooks no contradiction. “That is what I read in the perfect selection of the furnishings in your abandoned apartment. And in that Krisztina stepped through the door.” He crosses his arms again and speaks so dispassionately and deliberately that he might be dictating the details of an accident to a policeman.

“I was standing in front of the piano, looking at the orchids,” he says.

The apartment was like a disguise.

Or was, perhaps, our uniform your disguise? Only you can answer that question, and now … everything is over, you have in fact provided the answer in the life you chose. One’s life, viewed as a whole, is always the answer to the most important questions. Along the way, does it matter what one says, what words and principles one chooses to justify oneself? At the very end, one’s answers to the questions the world has posed with such relentlessness are to be found in the facts of one’s life. Questions such as: Who are you? …’ What did you actually want?

… What could you actually achieve? … At what points were you loyal or disloyal or brave or a coward? And one answers as best one can, honestly or dishonestly; that’s not so important. What’s important is that finally one answers with one’s life. You set aside your uniform because you saw it as a disguise, that much is already clear. I, on the other t wore mine for as long as duty and the world demanded it; that was my answer. So that settles one question. The other one is: What were you to me? Were you my friend? Because you fled without saying farewell although not entirely, because the previous day something happened during the hunt, and it was only later that its meaning dawned on me: that it had been: your farewell. One rarely knows when a word or an act trigger some final, irreversible alteration in any relationship.

Why did I go to your apartment that day?

You did not ask me to come, you did not say your farewells, you left no word behind you. What was I doing-there in a place to which I had never been invited, on the very same day that you left us? What presentiment made me take the carriage and drive into town as fast as I could, to look for you in your apartment, which was already empty of life? …

What was it that I had learned the previous day during the hunt? Has some piece of information been left out? … Did I have no confidential tip, no hint, no word that you were preparing to flee? … No, everyone was silent, even Nini … You remember my old nurse, she knew everything there was to know about us. Is she still alive? Yes, in her own fashion.

She lives like that tree there outside the window, the one planted by my great-grandfather. Like all of us, she has her allotted span of years, and hers is not yet complete. Nini knew. But not even she said anything.