Beware of Pity (7 page)

To my surprise, the decision was taken out of my own hands, for three days later I found a letter from Kekesfalva on my table asking if I would care to dine with them on Sunday. The only guests this time were to be gentlemen, including Lieutenant Colonel von F of the War Ministry, to whom he had mentioned me, and of course his daughter and Ilona would also be particularly pleased to see me after dinner. I am not ashamed to admit that, diffident as I then was, I was very proud of this invitation. So I had not been forgotten, and that remark about Lieutenant Colonel von F even seemed to suggest that in this discreet way Kekesfalva (out of a sense of gratitude that I immediately understood), was trying to make me a friend who would be useful in my military career.

And sure enough, I had no reason to regret my instant acceptance of the invitation. It was a very pleasant evening, and as a junior officer of whom no one in the regiment took much notice, I felt that I met with special and unusually warm treatment from these older, more sophisticated gentlemen. Obviously Kekesfalva had made a point of drawing me to their attention. For the first time in my life, a superior officer was treating me without any of the condescension of his
higher rank. Was I happy with my regiment, he asked, what were my prospects of promotion? He encouraged me to get in touch with him if I came to Vienna, or let him know if there was anything else I needed. Another of the guests, a cheerful, bald-headed notary with a kindly, shining moon face, invited me to his house, the director of the local sugar factory kept turning to ask my opinion—this was a very different kind of conversation from our talk in the officers’ mess, where I had to respond with great deference to any remark by a superior officer! I felt a pleasant sense of confidence sooner than might have been expected, and after half-an-hour I was already talking entirely at my ease.

Once again the two servants waiting at table handed round wonderful dishes previously known to me only by hearsay and from the boasting of more prosperous comrades: chilled caviar—delicious; it was the first time I had tasted it—venison pie, pheasants, and all accompanied by those wines that so pleasingly delighted the senses. I know it’s stupid to be impressed by such things. But why deny it? As an insignificant young
lieutenant,
unused to indulgence, I felt a positively childish vanity to be eating at so lavish a table with such distinguished older men. Good heavens, I kept thinking, good heavens, I wish Vavreschka could see this, and that pasty-faced volunteer who’s always showing off about the magnificent dinners he’s had at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna! They ought to be in a house like this some day, then their eyes would widen and their jaws would drop. Ah yes, if those envious fellows could see me sitting here at my ease, with the Lieutenant Colonel from the War Ministry raising his glass to me, if only they could see me in friendly discussion with the director of the sugar factory, and hear him say, meaning it, “I’m surprised to find you know so much about all this.”

Then black coffee is served in the boudoir, cognac is brought in large, chilled, balloon-shaped glasses, and once again that kaleidoscope of liqueurs is on offer. So, of course, are the fat cigars with showy bands around them. In the middle of the conversation Kekesfalva leans over to me and asks discreetly whether I would rather join the card party or talk to the ladies. The latter, of course, I am quick to say, because I am not entirely happy with the idea of risking a rubber with a Lieutenant Colonel from the War Ministry. If I were to win it might annoy him; if I were to lose, there went my budget for the rest of this month. Moreover, I remind myself, I have only twenty crowns in my wallet at the most.

So while the card table is set up in the room next door, I sit down with the two girls, and strange to say—is it the wine, or does my good mood transfigure everything before my eyes?—they both strike me as particularly pretty today. Edith doesn’t look as pale, sallow and sickly as last time I saw her—perhaps she has applied a little rouge, or is it really just her animation that brings the colour to her cheeks? Whatever the answer, the tense, nervous twitch of that line around her mouth is gone, and so is the arrogant lift of her eyebrows. She is wearing a long pink dress, with no fur or rug to hide her lame legs, and yet it seems to me that in our present cheerful mood none of us is thinking of ‘that’. In Ilona’s case, I even suspect, from the way her eyes are flashing, that she is slightly tipsy, and when she throws back her beautiful white shoulders, laughing, I have to move away if I am to resist the temptation of touching her bare arms as if by chance!

Even the dullest of men would not find it hard to talk agreeably with a cognac inside him, warming him very pleasantly, with the smoke of a fine fat cigar delicately tickling his nostrils, with two
pretty, lively girls beside him, and after such a succulent dinner. I know that I can generally tell a story well unless my wretched tendency to shyness overcomes me. But this time I am on particularly good form, and I talk with genuine vivacity. Of course I tell only silly little stories, the latest incident to have happened at the barracks, for instance how our colonel wanted to send an express letter off by the fast train to Vienna last week before the post office closed, summoned one of our lancers, a typical rustic Ruthenian lad, and impressed it upon him that the letter must go off to Vienna at once, whereupon the silly fellow runs straight off to the stables, saddles his horse, and gallops down the road to Vienna. If we hadn’t been able to get in touch by telephone with the garrison nearest to ours, that idiot really would have spent eighteen hours riding the whole way. I am not, Heaven knows, taxing myself and my companions with words of great wisdom, just telling everyday anecdotes, tales of the barracks square both old and new, but to my own amazement they amuse the two girls enormously, and both are kept in fits of mirth. Edith’s laughter is
particularly
high-spirited, with a pretty silvery note that sometimes breaks into a descant, and her amusement must be genuine and spontaneous, for the thin, translucent porcelain skin of her cheeks shows more and more colour, a touch of good health and even beauty lights up her face, and her grey eyes, usually rather sharp and steely, sparkle with childlike delight. It is pleasant to look at her when she forgets her crippled body and her movements are easier, freer, her gestures less constrained, she leans back in a perfectly natural way, she laughs, she drinks, she draws Ilona to her and puts an arm around her shoulders. In fact, the two girls are really enjoying my trifling anecdotes. Success in storytelling always gratifies the storyteller. I recollect a great many stories that I had forgotten long ago. Although I
am usually rather timid and awkward, I find new courage in myself. I laugh with the girls, and make them laugh. The three of us sit comfortably together there in the corner like high-spirited children.

And yet as I crack joke after joke, apparently entirely absorbed in our cheerful little company, I am half aware of a gaze resting on me. It comes from above the frame of a pair of glasses, that glance, it comes from the card table, and it is a warm, happy expression that increases my own happiness yet further. In secret (I think he is ashamed of it in front of the others) and very cautiously, the old man is peering at us from time to time over his cards, and once, when I catch his eye, he gives me a confidential look. At that moment his face has the concentrated, radiant glow of a man hearing music.

This goes on almost until midnight, and not once does our cheerful conversation flag. Once again we are served something delicious to eat—excellent sandwiches—and surprisingly, I am not the only one to fall upon them. The two girls help themselves as well, and they too are drinking a good deal of the fine, heavy, dark old English port. But finally we have to wish one another goodnight. Edith and Ilona shake hands with me as they would with an old friend, a dear, reliable comrade. Of course I have to promise them to come again soon, perhaps tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Then I go out into the hall with the three other gentlemen. The car is to take us home. I fetch my own coat while the manservant is busy helping the Lieutenant Colonel into his. Then, as I fling the coat on, I suddenly feel someone trying to help me; it is Herr von Kekesfalva, and while I resist, horrified—how can I let him play the part of a servant, an old gentleman helping a callow lad like me?—he comes close to me, speaking in a whisper.

“Lieutenant Hofmiller,” says the old man shyly, low-voiced. “Oh, Lieutenant Hofmiller, you have no idea, you can’t imagine how happy it has made me to hear the child laugh properly again. She has no pleasures usually, but today she was almost back to what she was in the old days when …”

At this moment the Lieutenant Colonel approaches us. “Well, shall we be off?” he says, addressing me with a friendly smile. Of course Kekesfalva does not venture to contradict him, but I feel the old man’s hand stroking my sleeve, stroking it very, very lightly and timidly, as you might caress a child or a woman. There is infinite liking and gratitude in the hidden, surreptitious nature of this shy touch; I sense such mingled happiness and despair in it that I am deeply moved once again, and as I go down the three steps to the car with the Lieutenant Colonel, bearing myself with proper military deference, I have to take care that no one notices my bemused state of mind.

I could not drop off to sleep at once that evening; I was too excited. Slight as the cause of that might seem to outward view—an old man’s hand touching my arm with affection, nothing more—that single restrained sign of fervent gratitude had been enough to flood my heart to overflowing. I had sensed more pure yet
passionate
feeling in that touch than I had known before, even from a woman, and it bowled me over. Young as I was, this was the first time in my life that I had been aware of having helped someone else, and I was astonished to think that an insignificant, ordinary young officer like me, still uncertain of himself, really had the power to make someone so happy. To account for the intoxicating emotion that I felt in that abrupt discovery, perhaps I ought
to explain, and indeed remind myself, that ever since childhood nothing had weighed on my mind more than my conviction that I was an entirely superfluous person, of no interest at all to anyone else, or at the best a matter of indifference to others. At cadet school and then the military academy, I had always been one of those average students who attracted no attention, never one of the popular or especially privileged young men, and it was the same in the regiment. I was therefore absolutely convinced that if I suddenly suffered a fatal accident, say I fell off my horse and broke my neck, my comrades might perhaps say, “What a shame about him,” or, “Poor old Hofmiller,” but by the time a month was up no one would really miss me. It had been just the same with the relationships I struck up with a couple of girls in the two garrisons where I had been stationed. There was a dentist’s assistant in Jaroslav, and in Vienna Neustadt just south of the capital I used to go out with a little seamstress. On Annerl’s day off we would go to her room, I gave her a little coral necklace for her birthday, we exchanged the usual loving words, and she probably genuinely meant them. But when the regiment was stationed elsewhere we had both been quick to console ourselves. For the first three months we wrote the obligatory letters to one another from time to time, and then found other partners, and the only difference was that in tender moments she said Ferdi to her new friend instead of Toni. All over and forgotten. So far, however, and I was now twenty-five years old, I had never felt that I was the cause of any strong, passionate emotion, and at heart all that I myself expected and wanted of life was to do my duty properly and not incur disapproval.

But now the unexpected had happened, and I examined myself with surprise and curiosity. Did I, an ordinary young man, really have power over other people? I had hardly fifty
crowns in the world, and could I make a rich man happier than any of his friends? Could I, Lieutenant Hofmiller, help and console someone else? If I sat talking to a crippled, disturbed girl for an evening or two, did my presence really brighten her eyes, make her face come to life, and bring light to the whole gloomy house?

In my agitation I walked so fast through the dark streets that I felt quite warm. I wanted to fling my coat open as my heart expanded in my chest. For a new, second and even more intoxicating notion unexpectedly mingled with my astonishment—the thought that it was so easy, so incredibly easy to make these people my friends. And what exactly had I done? I had shown a little sympathy, I had spent two evenings in the house—two cheerful, animated, lively evenings—and was that really enough to do it? Then how stupid it would be to spend all my leisure time sitting apathetically in the café playing dull games of cards with my tedious comrades, or strolling up and down the promenade. Well, there’d be no more of that tedium from now on, no more wasting my time so stupidly! I would go to the café less often, would stop playing tarot and billiards, draw a firm line under all those ways of killing time that did no one any good and merely stupefied my own mind. I would rather go and visit the sick girl, I would even make preparations beforehand so that I always had something new and amusing to tell her and Ilona, we would play chess or indulge in some other agreeable pastime together. In itself, my resolve to make myself useful to others from now on aroused a kind of enthusiasm in me. I felt like singing, I felt like doing something ridiculous in my elation. Only when we know that we mean something to other people do we feel that there is point and purpose in our own existence.

So it was that over the next few weeks I spent my late afternoons, and usually my evenings as well, at the Villa Kekesfalva. Soon those friendly hours of talk became a habit, even an indulgence that had a touch of danger in it. But how enticing it also was for a young man who, from his boyhood years, had been passed from one military institution to another to find a home so unexpectedly, a home after his own heart instead of cold barrack rooms and the smoke-filled officers’ mess. When the day’s duties were over, and I strolled out to the villa, my hand was hardly on the knocker before the manservant was opening the door to me with a cordial expression, as if he had seen me coming through a magical peephole. Everything showed clearly and affectionately how naturally I was regarded as part of the family; special attention born of familiarity was taken of all my little weaknesses and preferences. The brand of cigarettes that I particularly liked was always there; if on my last visit I had happened to mention a book that I would like to read some day, there was a copy—new, but with the pages carefully cut—lying as if by chance on the little stool; a certain armchair opposite Edith’s chaise longue was always regarded as ‘my’ place—small, trifling things, all of them, but perfectly calculated to warm a strange room pleasantly with a sense that I was at home, to cheer and raise the spirits imperceptibly. I sat there more confidently than I ever did among my military comrades, talking and joking just as the fancy took me, perceiving for the first time that any form of compulsion binds the real powers of the mind, and the true qualities of a human being come to light only when he is at ease.