Free B000FBJF64 EBOK by Sándor Marai Page A

mildew in the riding school. I remember all of it exactly, and I wanted to see it again,” he says softly, almost ashamed.
    “And after forty-one years, what did you find?” the General asks again.
    “A city,” says Konrad with a shrug. “Change.”
    “Here at least,” says the General, “you won’t be disappointed. Almost nothing has changed here.”
    “Did you ever travel in recent years?”
    “Rarely.” The General stares into the candle flame. “Only on military duty. For a time, I thought of resigning my commission, like you, and traveling out in the world to look around and find something or someone.”
    They do not look at each other: the guest fixes his eyes on the golden liquid in his glass, the General on the candle flame. “And then finally I stayed here. One’s military service, you know. One becomes rigid, obdurate. I promised my father I would serve out my time. That’s why I stayed. Though I did take early retirement. When I was fifty, they wanted to put me in charge of an army. I felt I was too young for that, so I resigned. They understood. Besides,” he gestures to the servant to pour the red wine, “it was a time when military service offered no satisfaction anymore. The revolution. The end of the monarchy.”
    “Yes,” says the guest. “I’ve heard about that.”
    “Only heard about it? We lived through it,” says the General severely.
    “Perhaps a little more,” the other says now. “It was in ’17. I was back in the tropics for the second time. I was working out in the swamplands with Chinese and Malay coolies. The Chinese are the best. They gamble away everything they’ve got, but they’re the best. We were living in virgin forest in the middle of the swamps. No telephone. No radio. War was raging in the world outside. I was already a British citizen, but the authorities were very understanding: I could not fight against my former homeland. They comprehend such things. Which was why I was allowed to return to the tropics. Out there, we knew absolutely nothing, the coolies least of all. Yet, one day, in the middle of the swamps, minus newspapers or radio, several weeks’ journey away from all sources of news from the wider world, they stopped work. At twelve noon. Without any reason whatever. Nothing around them had changed, not the conditions of their work nor the discipline nor their provisions. None of it was particularly good or bad, it all depended on circumstances, the way it always did out there. And one day in ’17 at twelve noon, they announce that they’re not going to work any more. They came out of the jungle, four thousand coolies, mud up to their hips, naked to the waist, laid down their tools, their axes, and mattocks, and said: Enough. And made this and that demand. The landowners should no longer have disciplinary authority. They wanted more money. Longer rest periods. It was absolutely impossible to know what had got into them. Four thousand coolies transformed themselves before my very eyes into four thousand yellow and brown devils. That afternoon, I rode for Singapore. That was where I heard it. I was one of the first on the whole peninsula to get the news.”
    “What news?” asked the General, leaning forward.
    “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