Beware of Pity (33 page)

I read and read. I kept going back to begin again at the beginning. My hands were shaking, the thudding in my temples grew louder and louder, so horrified, so shaken was I to find that I was loved with such desperation.

“Good heavens, look at you, still loafing about in your underwear while everyone’s waiting impatiently. The whole lot of them are sitting down, keen to start dinner, including Balinkay, the Colonel’s due to arrive any moment now, and you know what a fuss the old boy kicks up if one of us is late. Ferdl sent me off specially to see if anything had happened to you, and here you are reading sweet nothings from some girl, I suppose. Come along, get a move on, and look lively or we’ll both be for it!”

This is Ferencz, bursting into my room. I don’t even notice him until he brings his heavy paw down on my shoulder in fraternal fashion. At first I can’t take in any of what he’s saying. The Colonel? Ferdl sent Ferencz over? Balinkay? Oh yes, now I remember, Balinkay’s convivial evening! I swiftly snatch up my trousers and coat, and with the speed I learnt at military academy fling them on automatically, without really being aware what I’m doing. Ferencz gives me an odd look.

“What the devil’s wrong with you? You’re not yourself. Not bad news from somewhere, I hope?”

I’m quick to dismiss this idea. “No, nothing like that. I’m coming.” And in a trice we’re on the stairs, but then I suddenly turn back.

“Oh, for God’s sake, what is it now?” Ferencz shouts after me, exasperated. But I am only picking up the letter that I left lying on the table, and I tuck it away in my breast pocket. We
do indeed get to the big dining room of the Red Lion at the last minute. The whole company has gathered at the long table, which is shaped like a horseshoe, but no one quite likes to start laughing and joking until the senior officers are seated. We are like schoolboys when the bell has just rung and their teacher is expected to appear at any moment.

And the orderlies are already opening the door for the staff officers, who come in with spurs clinking. We all rise from our chairs and stand briefly to attention. The Colonel sits down to Balinkay’s right, the highest-ranking major to his left, and at once the table becomes animated, plates clink, spoons clatter, everyone is eating and drinking, they’re all talking at once, deep in lively conversation. Only I sit among my cheerful comrades almost as if I weren’t there at all, putting my hand to my tunic over the place where something thuds and hammers like a second heart. Whenever I do so I feel the letter rustling through the soft, yielding fabric as if a fire were being fanned; yes, there it is, moving close to my breast like something alive, and while the others talk and feast at their leisure, all I can do is think of that letter, and the desperate distress of the girl who wrote it.

The waiter serves me, but I leave the food untouched. I am deep in thought, dazed, it’s like being asleep with my eyes open. I vaguely hear words around me, to right and left, without understanding them. My comrades might as well be speaking a foreign language. I look ahead of me, I see faces beside me, moustaches, eyes, noses, lips, uniforms, but all dull and muted, like items on display seen through a shop window. I am here yet not here, fixed where I sit yet with my mind elsewhere. Soundlessly, I am murmuring phrases from the letter in my mind, and sometimes, when I can’t remember how it goes on, or I get confused, my hand itches to reach for my breast pocket,
just as we surreptitiously used to read forbidden books during tactics lessons at military academy.

Then a knife strikes a glass energetically, and there is sudden silence, as if the sharp steel cut through the noise. The Colonel has risen to his feet and is embarking on a speech. He leans both hands on the table to steady himself as he speaks, and his sturdy body moves back and forth rhythmically as if he were on horseback. He opens by barking out the word “Comrades!” with the letter
r
rolled like a drum beating for the attack, and then launches into his well-prepared address to us. I listen hard, but my mind refuses to take it in. I hear only a few phrases, emphatically spoken and with further rolling of the r-sound: “ … honour of the arrrmy … the spirit of the Austrrrian cavalrrry … loyalty to the rrregiment.” But in between I hear the ghostly whisper of other words, soft, pleading, loving, as if they came from another world. The letter is speaking to me at the same time: “My very dearly beloved … don’t be afraid … I will not, cannot go on living if you refuse me the right to love you …” Then the Colonel’s rolling r intrudes again: “ … he has not forgotten his comrrrades while far away … nor his Austrrrian fatherland …” The other voice comes in again like a sob, a muffled cry: “Tell me at once … a single word will do … that I am not repellent to you …”

Then there is a crashing like an artillery salvo. “Hip, hip, hooray!” They are all on their feet as if in obedience to the raising aloft of the Colonel’s glass, and there’s a prearranged cry of “Three cheers for Balinkay!” We all clink glasses and drink the health of Balinkay, who is waiting for the torrent of cheering to die down before replying in relaxed, easy and humorous tones—he’ll say only a few words, he assures us, nothing too taxing, he’d just like to say that in spite of everything and everyone he
never feels as happy anywhere in the world as among his old comrades. And he ends with a toast. “Here’s to the regiment! Long live His Majesty our gracious commander-in-chief the Emperor!” Steinhübel signals to the bugler to play another bugle call, and everyone sings the national anthem in chorus, followed as always by the song familiar to all regiments of the Austrian army. You simply insert your own regiment’s name at the appropriate spot.

Then Balinkay walks up and down the table, glass in hand, drinking a separate toast with every one of us. Suddenly, feeling my neighbour nudge me hard, I meet a pair of bright grey eyes. “Hello there, friend!” Bemused, I return his nod, and only when Balinkay stops at the next man along do I realise that I forgot to clink glasses with him. But it has all disappeared again into a multicoloured fog, through which I see faces and uniforms merging in a curious blur. Good heavens—what’s that blue mist in front of my eyes all of a sudden? Have the others already begun smoking, is that why I feel it’s so hot and stuffy in here? Quick, I must drink something. I gulp down the contents of one, two, three glasses without even knowing what is in them. I just have to rid my throat of that foul, bitter taste. And I must smoke a cigarette quickly myself. But when my hand goes to my pocket for my cigarette case, I feel the faint rustle of the letter again, and I snatch my hand back. Once again, through the cheerful noise, I hear only the sobbing, pleading words: “I do know, what a mad delusion it would be to force myself on you …”

But then a fork is tapped on a glass once more, requesting silence. This time it is Major Wondraczek, who never misses a chance to air his poetic talents in humorous verse and comic song. We all know when Wondraczek gets to his feet, propping his imposing paunch against the table with a roguish, meaning leer on his face, that the risqué part of the evening’s festivities is inevitably about to begin.

And there he is in position, his pince-nez over his rather long-sighted eyes, and he unfolds a sheet of foolscap with much ceremony. It is the obligatory piece that he feels it his duty to deliver to enliven any party, and this time it sets out to embellish Balinkay’s life story with a series of double entendres. Several of my neighbours dutifully laugh along with him at every allusion, whether out of politeness to a superior officer or because they are slightly tipsy themselves. Finally he concludes the whole performance, and shouts of “Bravo!” ring out from the assembled company.

But I am suddenly overcome by horror. The coarse laughter is like a claw tightening on my heart. How can they laugh like that when someone, somewhere, is crying out and suffering in unimaginable pain? How can they joke and tell dirty stories while another human being is in a state of desperation? I know that once Wondraczek has finished his comic turn the evening will lapse into horseplay. There will be singing, they’ll sing the latest hilarious verses of the song about ‘The Landlady on the River Lahn’, they’ll crack jokes and fall about with uproarious laughter. Suddenly I can’t stand the sight of their well-meaning, cheerful faces. Didn’t she ask me to send her a note, a single word? Why don’t I go to the telephone and call Kekesfalva’s house? I can’t keep another human being waiting like that! I have to say something, I have to …

“
Bravo, bravissimo!
” Everyone is applauding, chair legs scrape the floor as they are pushed back and crash down again, the floor itself echoes with the sudden impact of forty or fifty cheerful and slightly befuddled men getting to their feet, and dust rises from the floorboards. The Major beams proudly, takes off his pince-nez and folds up the paper, nodding to the officers kindly and with a touch of vanity as they crowd around him with their congratulations. As for me, I seize my chance to leave the room at this moment of uproar without a word to anyone. Perhaps they won’t notice. And if they do, I don’t care, I can’t bear that laughter any more, that self-satisfied merriment, as if they were all slapping themselves on their well-filled stomachs. I can’t, I cannot stand it any more!

“Leaving already, sir?” asks the orderly on cloakroom duty in surprise. Oh, go to hell, I mutter silently to myself, pushing my way past him without a word. Now down the street, around the corner, up the stairs of the barracks to my floor, and I’ll be alone!

The corridors are empty, somewhere a sentry is pacing up and down, water runs from a tap, a boot falls to the floor. But a soft, strange sound comes from one of the men’s dormitories, where lights have been put out according to the rules. Instinctively, I prick up my ears—a couple of the Ruthenians are singing or humming a melancholy song quietly in unison. After undoing the brass buttons of the brightly coloured uniforms so foreign to them and taking them off at night, when they are nothing but naked men who used to lie in the straw at home, they sing these melancholy ditties before going to sleep, remembering their homes, the fields, perhaps girls they had liked. Usually I take no notice of this humming and singing because I don’t understand the words, but this time their sadness inspires a sense of fraternity in me. I would like to sit down with one of them and
talk to him, although he wouldn’t really understand what I was saying—yet it was possible that all the same he would give me a sympathetic look from his mild, cow-like eyes, understanding me better than the merrymakers around the horseshoe-shaped table of the Red Lion. Oh, to have someone to help me out of the hopeless tangle I’m in!

On tiptoe so as not to wake my batman Kusma, asleep in the room outside mine and snorting heavily, I steal into my room, throw down my cap in the dark, and take off my sword and collar, which has felt as if it were choking me for some time. Then I put on the light and go over to the table—at long last I will re-read that letter at my leisure, the first deeply moving letter that a woman had ever written the man I was then, so young and uncertain of myself.

But next moment I shrink back with alarm. There on the table is the letter—how is that possible? In the circle of
lamplight
, there lies the letter that I thought I had put safely in my breast pocket—yes, there it is, rectangular blue envelope, the now familiar handwriting.

For a moment my senses reel. Am I drunk? Am I dreaming with my eyes open? Have I lost my mind? Only just now, taking off my tunic, I heard the rustle of the letter in my breast pocket. Am I so distracted that I put it down here and forgot about it a minute later? I put my hand in that pocket. No—anything else really
was
impossible—there it still is. So now I understand what’s going on. Only now am I really wide awake. The letter on the table must be another, a second letter that arrived later, and my good batman Kusma carefully put it there for me next to the Thermos flask, so that I would see it as soon as I came home.

Another letter! A second letter within two hours! My throat instantly tightens with foreboding. I suppose it will go on like
this every day now, every day and every night, letter after letter, one after the other. If I write to her she will write back; if I don’t answer her she will demand an answer. She’ll always be wanting something from me, every day, every day! She will send me messages and telephone me, she will lie in wait for me, listen for my every footstep, will want to know when I go out and when I come back, who I am with and what I am saying and doing. I can see already that I’m lost—they will never let me go again—oh, the djinn, the djinn, the old man and the cripple! I’ll never be free again, that desperate, needy girl will never let me go, not until one of us is destroyed, she or I, by this senseless, unhappy passion.

Don’t read it, I tell myself. Certainly don’t read it tonight. Don’t let yourself in for anything else! You’re not strong enough to stand up to that pushing and pulling, it will tear you apart. Better just destroy the letter, or send it back unopened! Whatever you do, don’t let the fact that some perfect stranger loves you weigh on your mind, your awareness, your conscience! To the devil with the Kekesfalvas! I didn’t know them before, and I don’t want to know them any longer. But then a thought suddenly shakes me—suppose she has done some kind of harm to herself because I didn’t send an answer? Or perhaps she
will
do herself some harm. I can’t leave a desperate human being entirely without an answer! Just don’t feel guilty, I tell myself, don’t feel guilty! So I tear the envelope open. Thank God, this one is only a short letter. A single page, ten lines or so, and no signature.