A Writer’s Life Readings Week 3: Embers by Sandor Marai
Curated and read by Beena Kamlani.
4th May, 2020
In last week’s reading we walked the streets of London, where, with Virginia Woolf, we saw the tall ships on the Thames and the crowds with whom Woolf shared a sense of community. Today’s reading takes us to a room in a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains in Hungary. In Embers by Sandor Marai, The General, now in his seventies, has been ensconced in a single room within the castle for forty-one years, while its many rooms lie covered in dustsheets. When, either voluntarily or involuntarily, we are denied or relieved from access to the world outside our doors, our one rooms become the world, the light, smells, and sounds within it evoking times past, cherished memories. The enlivening uplift in that room comes in the form of a letter from a once-beloved friend, Konrad, whom the General has known since they were both ten, and whose presence in his castle became permanent after they met. There is a deep betrayal at the heart of this friendship, which severed it. The General responds to Konrad’s letter with an invitation to dinner. The two men have not met for forty-one years. Across a beautifully laid table, over a sumptuous dinner and the best wines produced for the occasion, the men feast and talk till dawn. The passage I’ve chosen is about the power of words, of what is said and also of what is left unsaid, of what is there, but also of what isn’t there. Now is the moment of reckoning for these two friends.
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[The General]: “One day, after her death, I found the diary bound in yellow velvet that I had searched for that night—the night after the hunt that was the turning point in your life—in the drawer of her desk. The book had vanished, you left the next day, and I never exchanged a word with Krisztina again. Then she died. You were living in some far-off place, and I was living here in this house, because after her death I moved back so I could live and die in the rooms where I had been born and where my ancestors had lived and died before me. That is how it will be, for things have a rhythm and order of their own, regardless of our wishes. And even the book in its yellow velvet binding, Krisztina’s strange ‘book of honor’ with its alarming evidence of her inner self and her love and her doubts, went on living in its mysterious way, right out there in the open….
“Here it is,” [the General] says, pulling it out of his jacket and holding it out to his friend. “This is what remains of Krisztina. I have never cut the ribbon, because she left no written authorization for me to do so, and so I had no means to know whether her confession from the other side of the grave was addressed to me or to you. It is to be assumed that the book contains the truth, because Krisztina never lied.” His voice is severe, and respectful.
But his friend does not reach for the book.
Head in hands, he sits motionless, staring at the thin, yellow-velvet-bound book with the blue ribbon and the blue-wax seal. His body is absolutely still; not even an eyelid flickers.
‘Would you like us to read Krisztina’s message together?” asks the General.
“No,” says Konrad.
“Would you not like to, or would you not dare to?” the General says with the cold arrogance of a superior officer addressing his junior.
Their eyes meet over the book and stay locked. The General keeps holding it out to Konrad, and there is no tremor in his hand.
“I decline to answer this question,” says the guest.
“I understand,” says the General, and in his voice there is a strange satisfaction.
With an almost lazy gesture, he throws the little book into the embers of the fire, which begins to glow darkly as it receives its sacrifice, then slowly absorbs it in a welling haze of smoke as tiny flames lick up out of the ashes. They sit and watch, still as statues, as the fire comes to life, flares as if in pleasure at the unexpected booty, then begins to pant and gnaw at it until suddenly the flames burst upwards, the wax seal is melted, the yellow velvet burns in an acrid cloud, and the pages, aged to the color of ancient parchment, are riffled by an unseen hand; there, suddenly, in the blaze is Krisztina’s handwriting, the spiky letters once set on paper by fingers now long since dead, and then letters, paper, book, all turn to ashes like the hand that once inscribed them. All that is left in the embers is ash, black ash, with the sheen of a mourning veil of watered silk.
They watch, wordless, the play of light on the blackness of the ash.”
•
Thanks very much for listening. Feel those words and also the spaces between them. Until next week.
This passage was taken from Embers, by Sandor Marai, translated by Carol Brown Janeway, and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2001.