Free B000FBJF64 EBOK by Sándor Marai Page B

sense it, the way your coolies sensed the Revolution?”
    “Did I sense it? Perhaps. But she’s not sitting here with us. Where else could she be, except in her grave?”
    “Yes,” said the General. “She’s buried in the park, not far from the hothouses, in a spot she chose.”
    “Did she die a long time ago?”
    “Eight years after you went away.”
    “Eight years,” says the guest, and his pale lips move and his false teeth close as though he were chewing, or counting. “That’s thirty-three years ago.” Now he’s counting half under his breath. “If she were still alive, she’d be sixty-three.”
    “Yes, she’d be an old woman, just as we’ve become old men.”
    “Of what did she die?”
    “Anemia. A quite rare form of the disease.”
    “Not as rare as all that,” says Konrad in a professional tone of voice. “It’s quite common in the tropics. Living conditions change and the composition of the blood changes accordingly.”
    “It’s possible,” says the General. “Possible that it’s relatively common in Europe, too, if living conditions change. I don’t know anything about these things.”
    “Nor I. It’s just that the tropics produce unending physical problems. Everyone becomes something of a quack doctor. Even the Malays play quack healer all the time. So she died in 1907,” he says finally, as if he had been preoccupied with the arithmetic all this time and had finally figured it out. “Were you still in uniform then?”
    “Yes, I served for the whole duration of the war.”
    “What was it like?”
    “The war?” The General’s expression is stiff. “As horrifying as the tropics. The last winter in particular, up in the north. Life is adventurous here in Europe, too.” He smiles.
    “Adventurous? . . . Yes, I would suppose so.” The guest nods in agreement. “As you may imagine, I sometimes found it very hard to bear that I wasn’t back here while you were fighting. I thought of coming home and rejoining the regiment.”
    “That thought,” says the General calmly and politely, but with a certain emphasis, “also occurred to a number of people in the regiment. But you didn’t come. You must have had other things to do,” he says encouragingly.
    “I was an English citizen,” says Konrad, embarrassed. “One cannot keep changing one’s nationality every ten years.”
    “No.” The General nods in agreement. “In my opinion, one cannot change one’s nationality at all. All that can be changed are one’s documents, don’t you think?”
    “My homeland,” says the guest, “no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away. Into the tropics or even further.”
    “Even further? Where?” asks the General coldly.
    “Into time.”
    “This wine,” says the General, lifting his glass and admiring the deep red of its contents, “is from a year you may remember. Eighty-six, the year we swore our oath to the Emperor and King. To commemorate the day, my father laid down this wine in one section of the cellar. That was many years ago, almost an entire lifetime. It’s an old vintage now.”
    “What we swore to uphold no longer exists,” says the guest very seriously as he, too, raises his glass. “Everyone has died, or gone away, or abandoned the things we swore to uphold. There was a world for which it was worth living and dying. That world is dead. The new one means nothing to me. That’s all I can say.”
    “For me, that world is still alive, even if in reality it no longer exists. It lives, because I swore an oath to uphold it. That’s all I can say.”
    “Yes, you are still a soldier,” replies the guest.
    Each at his end of the table, they raise their glasses in silence and