B000FBJF64 EBOK by Sándor Marai Read Free Book Online

apartment in Hietzing; sometimes weeks went by without his making any evening engagement. The old house was still lit by oil lamps and candles; the son of the Officer of the Guards almost always returned home after midnight from a ball or an evening entertainment, and while he was still in his cab on the street he could see the despondent, reproachful glimmer of the dim flickering light. The glow in the window seemed a signal of rebuke. The son of the Officer of the Guards handed the coachman a coin, paused in the silent street in front of the old door, took off his gloves, reached for the key, and had a faint sense that once again this evening he had betrayed his friend. He came from the world where soft music lilted through dining rooms and ballrooms and salons, but not the way his friend liked it. It was played to make life sweeter and more festive, to make women’s eyes flash and men’s vanity throw sparks; that was its raison d’être throughout the city, wherever the son of the Officer of the Guards whiled away the nights of his youth. Konrad’s music, on the other hand, didn’t offer forgetfulness; it aroused people to feelings of passion and guilt, and demanded that people be truer to themselves in heart and mind. Such music is upsetting, the son of the Officer of the Guards thought to himself, and began rebelliously to whistle a waltz. That year the fashionable composer being whistled by all Vienna was the younger Strauss. He took the key and opened the ancient gate which slowly creaked ajar, crossed the wide vestibule at the foot of the musty, vaulted stairwell lit by oil lamps in uneven glass shades, paused for a moment, and glanced out at the snow-covered garden in the moonlight, looking as if it had been filled in with a stick of white chalk between the dark outlines of things. Everything was peaceful. Vienna was sound asleep under the falling snow. The Emperor was asleep in the Hofburg and fifty million of his subjects were asleep in his lands. The son of the Officer of the Guards felt that this silence was also in part his responsibility, that he, too, was keeping watch over the sleep and safety of the Emperor and his fifty million subjects, even when he was doing no more than wearing his uniform with honor, going out in the evening, listening to waltzes, drinking French red wine, and saying to ladies and gentlemen exactly what they wished to hear from him. He felt that he obeyed a strict regime of laws, both written and unwritten, and that this obedience was also a duty which he fulfilled in the salons just as he fulfilled it in the barracks or on the drill ground. Fifty million people found their security in the feeling that their Emperor was in bed every night before midnight and up again before five, sitting by candlelight at his desk in an American rush-bottomed chair, while everyone else who had pledged their loyalty to him was obeying the customs and the laws. Naturally true obedience required a deeper commitment than that prescribed by laws. Obedience had to be rooted in the heart: that was what really counted. People had to be certain that everything was in its place. That was the year that the son of the Officer of the Guards and his friend turned twenty-two.
    The two of them, young officers in Vienna. The son of the Officer of the Guards climbed the rotted stairs, whistling his waltz half under his breath. Everything in this house smelled a little musty, the stairs, the rooms, and yet it was somehow a pleasant smell, as if the interior retained a lingering odor of fruit preserves. That winter, carnival season broke out like a happy epidemic. Every evening in the white-and-gold salons there was dancing under the flickering tongues of flame in the gaslit chandeliers. Snow kept falling, and coachmen drove pairs of lovers silently through the white air. All Vienna danced in the snowflakes and every morning the son of the Officer of the Guards went to the old indoor riding ring to watch the Spanish