Beware of Pity (6 page)

“Help me,” she orders him, throwing off the fur rug. Ilona bends down to whisper something to her, but Edith, visibly annoyed, snaps an angry “No!” at her friend. “I only want Josef to support me,” she adds. “I can manage on my own.”

What follows is a painful sight. The servant bends over her and, with an obviously practised grip, lifts her slight body with his two hands under her armpits. As she stands upright, both her own hands holding the back of her chair, she sizes us all up,
one by one, with a challenging look. Then she reaches for the crutches that were hidden under the rug, presses her lips firmly together, braces herself on the crutches and—click-clack, click-clack—trudges, sways, forces herself forward, stooping like a witch, while the servant is on the alert behind her with his arms outspread, ready to catch her at once if she slips or if her feet give way under her. Click-clack click-clack, a step and then another, and as she moves there is the faint clinking, grinding sound of metal and tautly stretched leather. I dare not look at her poor legs, but she must be wearing devices of some kind on her ankle joints to support her. My heart contracts as if an icy hand had closed around it at the sight of her setting out on this forced march, for I immediately understand her obvious purpose—she won’t let anyone help her to walk or take her out of the room in a wheelchair; she wants to demonstrate her crippled condition to all of us, and me in particular. Out of some mysterious, desperate desire for revenge, she wants to torment us with her own torment, complaining of her fate not to God but to us, the hale and hearty. In itself, this dreadful challenge makes me feel—and feel a thousand times more strongly than her earlier outburst when I asked her to dance—how much she must suffer from her helplessness. At last, after what seems an eternity, she has gone the few steps to the door, swaying back and forth, forcibly shifting the full weight of her slender, shaking body from one crutch to the other as she flings herself forward between them. I cannot bring myself to look straight at her even once. The mere hard, sharp click of her crutches as she pushes herself along, the grinding, dragging sound of the braces supporting her joints, accompanied by the low gasping she makes in her physical effort upsets and agitates me so much that I feel my heart thudding against the fabric of my uniform. She has already left the room,
but I still listen, holding my breath, as the dreadful sound grows softer, finally dying away on the other side of the closed door.

Not until a welcome silence has descended do I dare to look up again. The old man, as I notice only now, has risen quietly to his feet and is staring intently out of the window—rather too intently. As the light is in front of him, I can make out only his shadowy outline, but the shoulders of his bowed figure are shaking. He himself, her father, who sees his child torment herself like that daily, he too is shattered by the sight.

All is perfectly still in the room between the two of us. After a few minutes his dark figure finally turns and comes unsteadily over to me, as if he were walking over a slippery surface.

“Please don’t blame the child for being a little brusque, Lieutenant Hofmiller. You don’t know how she has been tormented all these years … always some new treatment, and progress is so terribly slow that I can understand her impatience. But what are we to do? We must try everything, we have to.”

The old man is standing beside the abandoned tea trolley. He does not look at me as he speaks. Standing very still, he keeps his eyes, almost hidden by their grey lids, bent on the trolley. As if in a dream he puts his fingers into the sugar bowl and takes out a cube, which he turns this way and that, staring at it pointlessly and then putting it down again, with something of the demeanour of a drunk. He still cannot look up from the tea trolley, as if something on it held him spellbound. Abstractedly, he touches a spoon, picks it up, and then speaks again,
apparently
to the spoon.

“If you knew what the child used to be like! Upstairs and downstairs all day long, running up and down steps and through all the rooms, oh, she terrified us. At the age of eleven she was riding her pony full tilt in the meadows, no one could keep up
with her. We often feared for her, my late wife and I, she was so reckless, so high-spirited and agile, everything came so easily to her. You felt she had only to spread out her arms to be able to fly … and the accident had to happen to her, of all people …”

The parting in his sparse white hair is bent lower and lower over the table. His nervous hand is still fiddling with all the items strewn around the tea trolley, not a spoon now but a pair of sugar tongs, and he traces curious round runes on the trolley with the little tongs. I know it is out of shame and embarrassment; he is afraid to look at me.

“And yet it’s still so easy to make her happy. She can rejoice like a child at the least little thing. She will laugh at the silliest joke and immerse herself enthusiastically in a book—I wish you could have seen how delighted she was when your flowers arrived, and she felt free of her fear that she had offended you. You have no idea how intensely she feels everything, far more strongly than the rest of us. I know very well that she is more distressed than anyone else when she knows she has lost control of herself. But how can anyone … how
could
anyone exercise such self-control? How can a child always be patient when progress is so slow, hold her tongue when God has inflicted such a blow on her, and she has done nothing to deserve it … she never hurt a soul!”

He was still staring at the imaginary figures traced with the sugar tongs in the empty air by his trembling hand. Suddenly he put the tongs down with a little clink, as if alarmed. It was as if he were waking up, and only now realised that he was speaking not to himself alone but to a total stranger. In a very different voice, wakeful if dejected, he awkwardly began to apologise.

“Forgive me, Lieutenant Hofmiller, what must you think of my unburdening myself to you, telling you our troubles? It was only
that … it just came over me, I wanted to explain … I wouldn’t like you to think too badly of her, I wouldn’t want you to—”

I don’t know how I found the courage to interrupt the awkwardly stammering voice and go towards him. But suddenly I took the old man’s hand—the hand of a perfect stranger—in both of mine. I said nothing. I just held his cold, bony hand as it instinctively flinched, and pressed it firmly. He stared at me in surprise, the lenses of his glasses glinting, and behind them an uncertain gaze gently and shyly sought mine. I was afraid he would say something now, but he did not. His round black pupils grew wider and wider, that was all, as if they were brimming over. I myself felt the rise of an emotion that I had never known before, and to escape it I quickly bowed and left.

Out in the front hall, as the manservant was helping me into my coat, I suddenly felt a draught of air behind me. Without even turning to look, I knew that the old man had followed me and was standing in the doorway, feeling a need to thank me. But I did not want to be put to shame. I acted as if I didn’t notice him there behind me. Quickly, my pulse beating fast, I left that house of tragedy.

Next morning—with a pale mist still hanging over the houses, and the shutters over the windows all closed so that good
citizens
can sleep soundly—our squadron rides out to the parade ground as it does every day. First we cross the cobblestones, uncomfortable going for the horses; at a brisk walking pace, my lancers, still drowsy from sleep, stiff and morose, sway in their saddles. Soon we have gone down the four or five streets to the broad main road, where we change pace to a light trot, and
then we turn off right to the open meadows. I give my squadron the command “Gallop!” and away go the horses, snorting in unison. They know the soft, green, broad fields, clever animals; there is no need for us to urge them on now, we can hold the reins loosely, because as soon as they feel the pressure of their riders’ thighs the horses will be off as fast as they can go. They too feel the pleasure of excitement and physical relaxation.

I am in the lead. I am passionately fond of riding. I feel a rush of blood rising from my waist as it carries the warmth of life circulating through my relaxed body, while cold air whistles around my face. Wonderful morning air; you can still taste last night’s dew in it, the breath of the turned soil, the scent of fields in flower, and at the same time you are surrounded by the warm, sensuous moisture from the horses’ nostrils as they breathe out. I always love this first morning gallop that does the lethargic, still sleepy body such good, shaking it up, snatching away drowsiness like a dull mist. Instinctively, my parted lips drink in the air rushing by as a sense of being weightless carries me forward and my chest expands. “Gallop! Gallop!” I feel that my eyes are brighter, my senses livelier, and behind me the men’s swords clink in a regular rhythm, the horses snort, there’s a soft squeal and squeak from the saddles, the beat of hoofs falling in time. This swift group of men and horses is a single centaur-like body, carried away by the same verve. On, on, on, gallop, gallop, gallop! Oh, to ride like this to the ends of the earth! With the secret pride of being master and creator of this pleasure, I sometimes turn in the saddle to look back at my men. And suddenly I see that the faces of all my fine lancers have changed. Gone is their heavy Ruthenian air of morose depression, they are wide awake now, the drowsiness wiped from their eyes as if it were soot.
Aware that I am observing them, they straighten themselves in the saddle and smile back, in response to the pleasure in my own gaze. I sense that even these dull-witted peasant lads are full of the joy of swift movement, a dreamlike anticipation of human flight. All of them feel as blessed as I do in the animal pleasure of youth, in exerting and releasing their strength.

But then I suddenly order them, “Haaalt! Trot!” Surprised, they all rein in their horses with a sudden jolt. As if an engine had been sharply braked, the whole column falls into the more sedate pace of a trot. They glance at me, slightly puzzled, for they know me well, and my delight in riding headlong, and we usually race across the meadows at a rapid gallop until we reach the area marked off as a parade ground. But I feel as if a strange hand had suddenly seized my reins; I have remembered
something
. I must unconsciously have caught sight of the rectangular white wall around the Kekesfalva villa on the rim of the horizon over to the left, the trees in its garden, the tower on the roof, and a thought has flashed into my mind—perhaps someone is watching you from there! Someone whose feelings you hurt with your pleasure in dancing, and you may be hurting them again now with your pleasure in riding. Someone immobilised by her lame legs who may be envying you for racing away as light as a bird in the air. At least, suddenly I am ashamed of my good health, my ability to gallop full tilt, intoxicated by speed; I am ashamed of my all too physical pleasure as if it were a privilege that I do not deserve. Slowly, at a heavy, lethargic pace, I get my disappointed men trotting through the meadows after me. I can tell, even without looking at them, that they are waiting in vain for a command to send them galloping away again.

It is true that, at the same moment as this strange inhibition affects me, I know that such self-chastisement is stupid and
pointless. I know there is no sense in denying myself a pleasure because it is denied to others, forbidding myself enjoyment because someone else is unhappy. I know that, in every second when we are laughing and cracking silly jokes, somewhere or other another human being is breathing stertorously on his deathbed, I know that misery lies hidden behind thousands of windows and men and women go hungry, that there are hospitals, stone quarries and coalmines, that countless drudges work themselves to the bone in factories and offices, countless prisoners do forced labour at every hour of the day, and it does none of them any good in their hour of need for another man to torment himself for no good reason. I realise that if you were to begin thinking in detail of all the misery present in the world at one and the same time, you would never be able to sleep, and all laughter would die in your throat. But theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you. In the middle of my passionate elation I had thought I suddenly saw, as close and natural as if in a vision, that pale, distorted face as she dragged herself through the salon on her crutches, at the same time hearing their click-clack and the squealing and clinking of the hidden devices on her poor joints. I have reined in my horse as if in alarm, without thinking about it. It is useless for me to say now, in retrospect—what good are you doing anyone by adopting this stupid, heavy trotting pace instead of the thrill and excitement of a gallop? For all that, a blow has struck some part of my heart lying close to my conscience, and I no longer feel bold enough to enjoy my own strong, free, healthy physical pleasure in life. Slowly and apathetically, we trot as far as the outskirts of the parade ground, and only when we are entirely 
out of sight of the villa do I pull myself together. Nonsense. I think, stop wallowing in sentimentality! And I give the order, “Forward—at the gallop!” 

It began with that one sudden moment when I reined in my mount. That was what you might call the first symptom of my strange case of poisoning by pity. First I felt only vaguely—as you do when you are ill and wake feeling bemused—that something had happened or was happening to me. Until now I had lived a carefree life in my own narrowly circumscribed circle, I had thought only of what seemed important or amusing to my comrades and my superior officers; I had never taken a personal interest in anything, nor had anyone taken such an interest in me. I had never been deeply moved by anything. My family circumstances were well-ordered, the course of my professional career was all marked out and subject to rules and regulations, and my carefree attitude—as I realise only now—had made my heart thoughtless. Now, all of a sudden, something had happened to change me—nothing outwardly visible, nothing of any apparent importance. But that one angry look, when I had seen hitherto unsuspected depths of human suffering in the lame girl’s eyes, had split something apart in me, and now sudden warmth was streaming through me, causing mysterious fever that seemed to me inexplicable, as his illness always does to a sick man. All I understood of it at first was that I had broken out of the charmed circle within which I had lived at my ease until now, and I was on new ground which, like everything new, was both exciting and disturbing. For the first time I saw an abyss of feeling open up, and in some way that, again, I could not
explain, the prospect of exploring it, plunging into it, seemed enticing. Yet at the same time instinct warned me against giving way to this rash curiosity. “That’s enough,” it warned me. “You have apologised, you’ve settled the whole stupid business.” But then another voice whispered, “Go there again! Feel that shudder, that sense of fear and tension run down your spine once more.” To which the warning voice replied, “Don’t do it. Don’t force your way in, don’t intrude. You foolish young man, you don’t know how to deal with such an excess of emotion, and you’ll only make worse mistakes than you did that first time.”