Sandor Marai - Embers

… That is how deeply we trust each other. And the secret diary is always in the drawer of a desk to which only the two of us have keys.

This diary is the most confidential thing there can be between a man and a woman. If there is a secret in Krisztina’s life, it would have shown itself already in her diary. However, I realize, for some time now we have forgotten this secret game … and I stand up and walk through the dark house to Krisztina’s study and look for the yellow diary. The drawer is empty.”

He closes his eyes and sits there like that for some time, his face expressionless like a blind man’s. He seems to be searching for a word.

“It is already after midnight, the house is asleep. Krisztina is tired, I don’t want to disturb her. She has probably taken the diary with her to her room, I think to myself,” he says amicably. “I don’t want to disturb her, I will ask her tomorrow whether she was telling me something with the diary, in our secret sign language. For you see, this confidential little book which we do not discuss-we are each a little ashamed in front of the other about this silent confidence we share-is like a declaration of love that repeats itself again and again. Such things are hard to discuss. It was Krisztina’s idea, she asked me for it in Paris, on our honeymoon, she was the one who wanted to make the confession-and it was only later, much later, after she had died, that I understood that one only prepares oneself so consciously to confess, to hew to the utmost honesty, if one knows that one day there will actually be something that requires confession. For a long time, I did not understand this diary, I thought these secret written messages, this Morse Code of her life, were a little exaggerated, a woman’s whim. She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable. Krisztina wants to give me everything, her body, her soul, her feelings, and her innermost thoughts … We are on our honeymoon, Krisztina is in love, think where she comes from, and what it means to her that I offer her my name, this castle, the palace in Paris, the wide world, all things she could not even have dreamed of a few months before in her small-town surroundings and in the modest house where she spent her days alone with a silent, sick old man who lived only for his instrument, his notebooks and his memories … and suddenly life gives her every thing with open hands, marriage, a year-long honey moon, Paris, London, Rome, then the East, months in oases, the sea. Of course, Krisztina believes she is in love. Later she reaches the understanding that she is not in love, nor had she been, even back then. She is merely grateful.”

He links his fingers, rests his arms on his knees and leans forward.

“She is grateful, very grateful, in her way, the way of a young woman on her honeymoon with her husband, a rich, distinguished young man.” He tightens the grip of his fingers and stares at the pattern in the carpet, sunk in thought. “She is determined to show her gratitude, and that is why she has the idea of the diary. This extraordinary present.

For from the very first moment, it is filled with surprising admissions.

Krisztina is not courting me, and her confessions are sometimes disturbingly candid. She describes me just as she sees me, in a few words, but to the point. She describes what doesn’t please her about me, the way I am far too open with everyone in the world. She feels I lack modesty, which, with her religious temperament, she believes to be the greatest virtue. No, it is quite true that in those years I am not modest. The world is mine, I have found the woman who in every word, every movement of her body, every leap of her mind calls forth a complete echo in me, I am rich, I have position, the future opens itself before me like a shining path, I am thirty years old, I love life, I love military service, I love my career. Now, in retrospect, this hearty self-satisfaction and sense of good fortune make my head spin. And like everyone whom the gods spoil without reason, I feel a kind of anxiety buried at the heart of my happiness. It is all too beautiful, too flawless, too complete. Such unbroken happiness always arouses fear. I would like to make a sacrifice to fate, I would be glad if, coming into some new harbor, I were to receive mail from home, informing me of some financial or other unpleasantness. For example, that the castle had burned to the ground or that an investment had gone sour or that my banker had bad news for me or some such thing … One always wants to repay the gods with some of one’s good fortune. For it is well known that the gods are jealous, and that if they give a mortal a year of happiness, they immediately enter this debt on the ledger and demand repayment at the end of life with crippling interest. But everything around me is in perfect order. Krisztina writes short entries in her diary that read as if they had been composed in a dream. Sometimes she writes no more than a line or even just one word. For example: ‘ are beyond hope, because you are vain.’ Then nothing for weeks. Or she writes that she has seen a man in Algiers who has followed her in an alley and spoken to her, and she had the feeling she could go away with him. “Krisztina is a restless, scintillating spirit, I think. But I am happy and even these strange disquieting outbursts of honesty are unable to disturb that happiness.

It does not occur to me that someone who is so compulsive about revealing everything to another person is perhaps this honest precisely because she wishes to avoid having to confess something that to her is even more important and fundamental. I do not think of such a thing on my honeymoon; nor later, when I read the diary. But then comes that day and that night, the day of the hunt, when I feel as if your gun had gone off and the bullet had whistled past my ear. And then the night, when you leave us, but not before discussing the tropics with Krisztina in some detail. And I remain alone with the memory of that day and that evening. And I do not find the diary in its usual place in the drawer of Krisztina’s desk. I decide to find you in town next day and ask … “

He falls silent, and shakes his head in the manner of old people exclaiming over some piece of childishness.

“Ask what? … ” he says quietly and dismissively, as if to mock himself “What can one ask people with words? And what is the value of an answer given in words instead of in the coin of one’s entire life? … Not much,” he says firmly. “There are very few people whose words correspond exactly to the reality of their lives. It may be the rarest thing there is. But I did not know that then. I am not thinking now about pitiful liars. I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is to take the givens of one’s fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can.

That is the most we can accomplish. And it does not make us any the cleverer, or any the less vulnerable … so I want to talk to you, and I still do not know that everything I can ask you and everything you can answer will not change the facts. Nevertheless, one can get closer to reality and the facts by using words, questions and answers, and that is why I want to talk to you. I go to sleep, exhausted, and sleep deeply, as if I had completed some great physical effort, a long ride, a long walk … Once I carried a bear down from the mountains on my back. I know that I was exceptionally strong during those years, and yet I am still astonished in retrospect at how I managed to carry this great weight across slopes and through gullies. Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal. Back then I went to sleep in the snow in a similar state of exhaustion after I had reached the valley with the bear; my gamekeepers found me half-frozen next to its dead body. That was how I slept that night. Deep and dreamlessly … After I wake up, I order the carriage and drive into town to your apartment. I stand in the room and realize that you have gone away. It is only next day that we receive your letters at the regimental barracks telling us that you are resigning your commission and going abroad. At that moment, all I understand is the fact of your flight, because now it is certain that you wanted to kill me, that something has happened and is still happening whose true significance I do not yet grasp, and it is also certain that it all has to do with me personally, that it’s all happening to me as well as to you. So I stand in that mysterious room filled with beautiful objects as the door opens and in walks Krisztina.”