Sandor Marai - Embers

He says all this as if he were spinning a tale, sweetly, amicably, to entertain his friend, now finally returned home from a far country and a distant time, with the more interesting parts of an old story.

Konrad listens without moving. His cigar has gone out and he has set it on the rim of the glass ashtray, he sits, arms folded, quite still, his posture stiff and correct, the perfect officer conversing pleasantly with another of higher rank.

“She opens the door and stops on the threshold,” says the General. “She is not wearing a hat, she has come from home and has harnessed the light trap herself ‘ he gone?’ she asks. Her voice is strangely hoarse. I nod, yes, he has gone. Krisztina stands in the door, straight and slender, perhaps she was never so beautiful as in that moment. She has the pallor of the wounded who have lost a great deal of blood; only her eyes were fever-bright, as they had been the evening before, when I came up to her while she was reading. ‘ has fled,’ she says, and does not wait for an answer; she says it to herself, it’s a statement of fact.

“The coward,’ she adds softly and calmly.” “She said that?” asks the guest, abandoning his statuelike stillness and clearing his throat.

“Yes,” says the General. “That is all. Nor do I ask her anything. We stand silently in the room. Then Krisztina begins to look around, she takes in the furniture, the paintings, the art objects one by one. I watch her. She looks around the room as if saying goodbye.

She looks at it as if she had seen it all already and now she wants to take leave of every object in it. As you know, one can look at things or a room in one of two ways: as if seeing them for the first time or seeing them for the last. Krisztina’s eyes show none of the curiosity of discovery. They move calmly, assuredly, through this room the way one checks a room at home to be sure that everything is in its place. Her eyes are shining like an invalid’s and yet are strangely veiled. She doesn’t say a word, and she is in control of herself, but I feel that this woman has been thrown out of the safe course of her life and that she is about to lose herself and you and me. One look, one unexpected movement, and she will do or say something that can never be repaired.

… She looks at the pictures, calmly, without curiosity, as if to impress on her memory things she has often seen before and now sees one last time. She looks at the wide bed with a proud look and blinks, then shuts her eyes for a moment. Then she turns, as wordless as she was on arrival, and leaves the room. I remain. Through the open window I watch her walk through between the standard roses which have just begun to flower. She seats herself in the little trap which is waiting for her behind the fence, picks up the reins, and departs. A moment later the carriage has disappeared around the bend in the street.” He stops talking and looks over at his guest. “Am I not tiring you?” he asks politely. “No,” says Konrad hoarsely. “Absolutely not. Please go on.”

“I am going into quite a lot of detail,” he says as if to himself. “But it’s not possible any other way: only in the details can we understand the essential, as books and life have taught me. One needs to know every detail, since one can never be sure which of them is important, and which word shines out from behind things. But I don’t have much more to say. You have fled, Krisztina has driven home in the trap. And I, what is there left for me to do at this moment, and for the rest of my life?

… I look at the room and then after the vanished Krisztina. I know that your manservant is standing at attention out in the hall. I call his name, he comes in and salutes. ‘ your orders,’ he says.

” ‘ did the Captain leave?’…‘With the early express.’ That’s the train to the capital. ‘ he take much luggage?’ ‘, only a few civilian clothes.’ ‘ he leave any orders or any message?’ ‘, this apartment is to be given up. The furniture is to be sold. The lawyer is to take care of it. I am to return to the unit,’ he says. Nothing more.

“We look at each other. And then comes the moment that is not easy to forget. The fellow-a twenty-year-old farm boy, I’m sure you remember his good-humored, intelligent face-abandons his military posture and his straight-ahead parade ground stare, and he’s no longer the common soldier standing in front of his superior, he’s a man who knows something in front of a man he pities. There is something so human and sympathetic in his glance that I turn white, then red … now-for the first and only time in my life-I lose control, too. I step up to him, seize the front of his jacket, and almost lift him off his feet. We are breathing into each other’s faces and looking straight into each other’s eyes. The boy’s are full of horror and, again, sympathy. You know how, back then, it was better for me never to seize hold of people or things; if I didn’t touch things carefully, they broke … I know that, too, and I sense that both of us, the boy and I, are in danger. So I let him down again, set him back on the floor rather like a lead soldier; his boots land with a thump on the parquet and he stands stiffly at attention again as if on parade. I take out my handkerchief and wipe my brow.

There is only one question, and this person could answer it immediately: Has the lady who just left been here at other times? If he does not answer, I will kill him. But if he answers, perhaps I will also kill him, and perhaps not just him … at such times one does not know one’s friends anymore. But in the same moment I know that it is superfluous. I know that Krisztina has been here before, not just once but many times.”

He leans back and lets his arms drop wearily. “Now there is no further point in asking anything. A stranger cannot betray what one still needs to know. One would need to know why all this happened. And where the boundary lies between two people. The boundary of betrayal. That is what one would need to know. And also, where in all this my guilt lies? … “

He asks this very quietly, and his voice is uncertain. It is evident from his words that this is the first time he has uttered them aloud, after he has carried them in his soul for forty-one years and until now has found no answer.

“Things do not simply happen to one,” he says-, his voice firmer now as he looks up. Above their heads the candles burn with high, guttering, smoky flames; the hollows surrounding the wicks are quite black.

Outside, beyond the windows, the landscape and the town are invisible in the darkness; not a single lantern is burning in the night. “One can also shape what happens to one. One shapes it, summons it, takes hold of the inevitable. It’s the human condition. A man acts, even when he knows from the very onset that his act will be fatal. He and his fate are inseparable, they have a pact with each other that molds them both.

It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps in through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter. No one is strong enough or cunning enough to avert by word or deed the misfortune that is rooted in the iron laws of his character and his life. Did I know about you and Krisztina? I mean from the start, the beginning of our story a trois? … It was you who introduced me to Krisztina. You knew her as a child, it was you who used to have scores copied by her father when he was an old man who could still use his crippled hands to write out music but could no longer hold a violin and bow and coax rich tones out of them, so that he had to abandon his career in the concert hall for a small-town conservatory, where he taught all the unmusical or at best marginally musical pupils, and picked up an additional pittance by correcting and improving the compositions of gifted amateur dabblers … That was how you met him and his daughter, who was then seventeen. Her mother died in the southern Tyrol, where she had gone to a sanitarium near her birthplace to receive care for her heart condition.