Beware of Pity (42 page)

But perhaps, I remind myself, he isn’t leaving yet. No, he won’t go back to Vienna if something really terrible has happened, not without leaving a message for me. Perhaps I’ll find a note from him at the barracks. He is a man, I know, who won’t do anything without me, at odds with me. He won’t let me down. Now to get back quickly! I am sure I shall find a word, a letter, a note for him in my room. I must hurry!

On reaching the barracks I stable the horse hastily and run up the side staircase, avoiding all idle chatter and congratulations. Sure enough, Kusma is waiting outside the door of my room, and I see from his anxious face and hunched shoulders that something is up. There is a gentleman in civilian clothes waiting in my room, he announces with some dismay, and he didn’t like to turn the gentleman away because he was so very pressing. Kusma really has strict orders not to let anyone into my room, but Condor probably gave him a tip—hence Kusma’s anxiety and uncertainty. That turns to surprise when, instead of bawling him out, I just murmur amiably, “That’s all right,” and make for the door. Thank God, Condor has come! He’ll tell me everything.

When I quickly push the door open, a figure instantly moves as if materialising from the shadows at the far end of the darkened room; Kusma has let down the roller blinds because of the heat. I am about to hurry to welcome Condor when I see that it
isn’t Condor after all. Someone else is waiting for me, the very last person I would have expected to see here. It is Kekesfalva; if the room were even darker I would still know him from his timid way of rising and bowing. And before he clears his throat as a prelude to addressing me I know in advance the humble, diffident voice in which he will speak.

“Forgive me, Lieutenant Hofmiller,” he says, bowing, “for arriving unannounced. But Dr Condor has asked me to give you his warm regards and apologise for not asking the car to stop … it was high time to get to the station, he had to catch the Vienna express, because this evening … and … and so he asked me to tell you immediately how sorry he was … that’s the only reason why I … I mean, why I ventured to come up to see you myself …”

He stands before me, head bent as if an invisible yoke were weighing his shoulders down. In the darkness his bony skull gleams through the sparse hair neatly parted over it. The entirely unnecessary servility of his bearing is beginning to incense me. A sense of discomfort tells me plainly—there’s some definite purpose behind all this awkward beating about the bush. An old man with a weak heart doesn’t climb three floors up just to deliver a civil message. And he could have done that equally well over the telephone, or it could have waited until tomorrow. Careful, I tell myself, Kekesfalva wants you to do something for him. He’s already emerged from the darkness once before, he starts by seeming as humble as a beggar, and finally he forces his will on you like the djinn in your dream, half-strangling the man who takes pity on him. Don’t let yourself in for it! Don’t ask him any questions, don’t try to find out what’s going on, say goodbye and escort him downstairs as soon as you can!

But the man facing me is old, and his head is humbly bowed. I see his thin, white hair, and as if in a dream I remember my grandmother’s white head as she sat knitting, telling me and my siblings fairy tales. One can’t be uncivil enough to send a sick old man away. So I indicate—has experience taught me nothing?—the chair where he can sit.

“Too kind of you to go to all this trouble, Herr von Kekesfalva! It was really very good of you. Won’t you sit down?”

Kekesfalva doesn’t answer. He probably didn’t hear me clearly. But at least he understood my gesture. Hesitantly, he sits down on the very edge of the chair I offered him. It suddenly occurs to me that he must have accepted the charity of strangers in just this intimidated way in his youth. And there he sits now, a millionaire, on the poor, shabby cane-seated chair in my room. He ceremoniously takes off his glasses, gets a handkerchief out of his pocket and begins cleaning both lenses to gain time. You’d like me to speak first, I think, you want me to ask questions, I even know what you want to be asked—is Edith really ill, and why is the trip to Switzerland being put off? But I am on my guard. If you have something to say to me, I think, you can start the ball rolling! I’m not going a step to meet you! No—I’m not to be lured into another trap, I’ve had enough of this damned pity, enough of people wanting more and more from me all the time! Let’s have an end to all this sly obfuscation. If you want me to do something then tell me straight out, but don’t hide behind this silly pretence of polishing your glasses! I’m not taking your bait any more, I’ve had enough of my pity!

As if he had heard the unspoken words behind my closed lips, the old man finally, with a look of resignation, puts his now spotlessly shiny glasses down in front of him. He obviously
senses that I am not going to help him, and he will have to begin himself. Head still bowed, he begins to speak without turning his eyes to look at me. He speaks to the tabletop as if hoping for more pity from the hard, cracked wood than I shall give.

“I know, Lieutenant Hofmiller,” he begins uneasily, “I know I have no right—I certainly have no right to take up your time. But what am I to do, what are we to do? I can’t go on, we can none of us go on like this—God knows what’s come over her, I can’t talk to her any more, she won’t listen to anyone … and yet I know she doesn’t mean any harm, she’s just … just unhappy, dreadfully unhappy … she does these things only out of despair, believe me, only out of despair.”

I wait. What does he mean?
What
things does she do? What exactly? Come on, out with it! Don’t keep havering like that, why don’t you just tell me what’s wrong?

But the old man stares blankly at the table. “And we’d talked it all over, the whole thing was prepared in advance. The sleeping car ordered, good rooms reserved for us, and yesterday afternoon she was still full of impatience to be off. She herself chose the books she wanted to take, she tried on her new clothes and the fur coat I’d ordered from Vienna, and now suddenly she took this idea into her head, I don’t understand it. Yesterday evening after dinner—you remember how upset she was. Ilona doesn’t understand it, no one understands what’s suddenly come over her. But she says—she screams and shouts—that she’s not going away, not for anything, no power on earth can induce her to go away. She’s going to stay here, she says, she’ll stay here even if the house burns down over her head. She won’t go along with this pretence, she’s not deceived, she tells us. The idea of this course of treatment is just to get her
to go away, to be rid of her. But we’re all wrong, she says, she is simply not going away, she is staying, staying, staying.”

A cold shudder runs down my back. So that’s what was behind yesterday’s angry laughter. Has she noticed that I can’t go on like this myself, and is she staging these scenes to make me promise to go to Switzerland too?

Don’t agree to any such thing, I tell myself. Don’t show that this upsets you. Don’t let the old man know that the idea of her staying wears your nerves to shreds! So I intentionally pretend not to understand, and say very casually, “Oh, that will soon pass off! You know better than anyone how changeable her moods are. And Ilona telephoned me to say the trip was only being put off for a few days.”

The old man sighs, and that sigh breaks out of him with a dull sound as if he were vomiting something up. You might have thought that the abrupt effort of sighing tears the last of his strength out of him.

“Oh God, if only that were true! But the terrible thing is, I think—we all think—that she will never want to go away again at all. I don’t know … I don’t understand it—but suddenly she doesn’t seem to mind about the new treatment and whether it will cure her or not. ‘I’m not going to let this torture me any more,’ she says ‘I’m not letting anyone try ideas out on me, none of it makes any sense!’ She says such things, says them in a way that makes the heart stand still. ‘I won’t be deceived any more,’ she says, and then she screams and sobs, ‘I can see through it all—all of it!’”

I think quickly. For God’s sake, did she notice something? Have I given myself away? Has Condor done something incautious? Can she have deduced, from some careless remark, that this new Swiss course of treatment is not all she expects? Has
her quick perception, her terribly distrustful perception, shown her that we are really sending her away to no good purpose? I approach the subject cautiously.

“I don’t understand that … when your daughter has always had such complete faith in Dr Condor. If he has recommended this course of treatment so warmly … then no, I simply don’t understand it.”

“Yes, but that’s just the point! That’s the crazy part of it—she doesn’t
want
to have the treatment any more, she doesn’t want to be cured. What do you think she said? ‘I’m not going away, not for anything, I’m sick and tired of all these lies! I’d rather be the cripple I am and stay here … I don’t want to be cured any more, I don’t want to be cured, there’s no point in it now.’”

“No point in it?” I repeat, at a loss.

But the old man bows his head even lower. I don’t see his eyes swimming with tears any more, and it is only from his sparse white hair that I can tell he has begun trembling violently. Then he murmurs, almost inaudibly, “‘There’s no point in getting better,’ she said, sobbing, ‘because he … he …’”

The old man takes a deep breath as you might before making an enormous effort. Then finally he comes out with it. “‘Because he … he feels nothing but pity for me,’ that’s what she said.”

When Kekesfalva says
he
I suddenly feel cold as ice. This is the first time he has alluded to his daughter’s feelings in front of me. I noticed some time ago that he had obviously taken to avoiding me, and indeed hardly dared to look at me, whereas he used to show me such affectionate concern. But I knew it was shame keeping him away from me; it must have been dreadful for old Kekesfalva to see his daughter making advances to a man who didn’t want them. Her secret confessions must have tormented him, he must have felt deeply ashamed of her
unconcealed longings. We had both lost the ability to behave easily and naturally in each other’s company. If you have something to hide, or something that you
must
hide, it is difficult to be frank and unselfconscious.

But now he has put it into words, and we are both stricken to the heart. After those revealing remarks we sit there, mute, avoiding each other’s eyes. There is silence in the air above the table between us in the small room. Gradually that silence spreads, rising to the ceiling like a black gas, filling the whole room from above, from below, a void pressing in on us from all sides, and the old man’s difficult breathing tells me how the silence is choking him. Another moment and the pressure will stifle us both—unless one of us breaks it, destroys that oppressive, murderous void with a word.

Suddenly, something happens. At first I notice only that he makes a movement, a curiously clumsy, awkward movement. Then I see the old man fall forward abruptly in a soft heap as the chair tumbles to the floor behind him with a clatter.

My first reaction is—it’s a heart attack. A stroke or a heart attack; after all, Condor told me he has a weak heart. Horrified, I make haste to help him up. But next moment I realise that the old man didn’t fall off the chair, he pushed himself off it. As I moved quickly to help him, I failed to notice it at first, but he sank from the chair to his knees on purpose and now, as I try to raise him, he moves closer to me, takes my hands and begs me, “You must help her … you are the only one who can help her … Condor says so too, only you, no one else! I beg you to show mercy … it can’t go on like this … she’ll do herself harm, this will kill her!”

Although my hands are shaking, I haul the kneeling man forcibly up again. But he clasps my hands as they help him up,
I feel his fingers press desperately like claws into my flesh—the djinn, the djinn of my dream strangling the man who pitied him. “Help her,” he gasps. “For Heaven’s sake help her … we can’t leave the child in such a state … I swear this is a matter of life or death … you can’t imagine what terrible things she says in her despair … she must do away with herself, she whispers, she sobs, so that you can be rid of her and at peace, we can all be rid of her at last … And she isn’t just saying it, she means it in deadly earnest … She’s already tried twice, once by cutting her wrists, the second time with sleeping tablets. When she really sets out to do something no one can make her change her mind, no one but you, only you can save her now. Only you, I swear, no one but you …”

“But of course, Herr von Kekesfalva … please calm yourself … of course I’ll do everything in my power. If you like we can go back to your house at once, and I’ll try talking to her, persuading her. I’ll come with you at once. You decide what I must say to her, what I must do …”

At this point he suddenly let go of my arm and stared at me. “What you must do? Don’t you really understand, or don’t you
want
to understand? She has opened her heart to you, offered herself to you, and now she’s mortally ashamed of it. She wrote to you, and you didn’t reply, and now she is tormenting herself day and night thinking you want to send her away, get rid of her, because you despise her … she is out of her mind with the fear that you feel revulsion for her because she … because she … Don’t you understand that being kept on tenterhooks like that will kill a proud, passionate girl like my child? Why don’t you give her some confidence in herself? Why don’t you say a word, why are you so cruel to her, so heartless? Why are you torturing that poor innocent child so horribly?”

“But I’ve done all I could to reassure her … I told her—”

“You didn’t tell her anything! Don’t you see for yourself that you are sending her out of her mind with your visits and your silence, when she’s waiting for just one thing … the one word that every woman wants to hear from the man she loves … she would never have dared to hope for anything while she was still so frail … but now that she is sure to get better, now that she’ll be perfectly healthy again in just a few weeks’ time, why can’t she hope for the same as any other young girl, why not? She has shown you, told you how impatiently she’s waiting for a word from you … she
can’t
do more than she has already done … she can’t beg in front of you … and you never say a word, you never say the only thing that can make her happy! Is the idea really so terrible to you? You would have everything a man can desire. I’m old and sick, I’ll leave all I possess to you, the castle and the estate and the six or seven million I’ve made over forty years. It will all be yours … you can have it tomorrow, any day, any hour, I don’t want anything for myself any more … all I want is for someone to care for my child when I’m gone. And I know you’re a good man, a decent man, you will spare her, you will be good to her!”