Beware of Pity (9 page)

At my request, the chauffeur stops in the town-hall square, two streets away from the barracks. I get out, turn up my coat collar and am about to cross the wide square. But just at that moment the storm breaks again with redoubled fury, and the wind blows rain straight into my face. Better to wait in the
entrance
to a building for a few minutes before walking back to the barracks. Or perhaps the café is still open, and I can sit in shelter there until the heavens have finished pouring the
contents
of their largest watering can over us. The café is only six buildings away, and I’m glad to see the gaslight glowing faintly behind the streaming wet windowpanes. My comrades may still be at their regular table in there, a good opportunity to make up for various omissions. It’s high time I kept them company again. Yesterday, the day before, all week and all last week too, I’ve been away from our regular table. They’d be justified in feeling annoyed with me; if you’re going to be unfaithful you should at least observe the proprieties.

I lift the latch. At the front of the café the lights are already extinguished to save on expense, the newspapers lie around open, and Eugen the waiter is cashing up for the night. However, I can still see light and a glint of shiny uniform buttons in the card room at the back. Sure enough, there they are, the usual card-players, Jozsi the first
lieutenant,
Ferencz the second lieutenant, and the regimental doctor Goldbaum. It looks as if their game finished long ago, and now they are just lounging around in the torpor typical of the café. I’m familiar with it, it sets in when no one wants to go to the trouble of standing up. It’s a real stroke of good luck for them when my appearance rouses them from apathy.

“Hey, if it isn’t Toni!” Ferencz announces to the others, and, “What a great honour for our humble home!” declaims
the regimental doctor, quoting Schiller. We often accuse him of suffering from chronic quotationitis. Six sleepy eyes blink cheerfully at me. “Hello there!”

I’m glad they are pleased to see me. They’re good fellows, I think. They don’t think any worse of me for staying away from them all this time without any apology or explanation.

“A black coffee,” I tell the sleepy waiter who comes wearily over, and I pull out a chair with the inevitable, “Well, what’s the latest news?” that opens all our gatherings.

Ferencz’s smile stretches his broad face, making it even broader, his twinkling eyes almost disappear into his rosy apple cheeks, his doughy mouth opens.

“The very latest news,” he says with that slow grin of his, “is that your distinguished self has condescended to put in an appearance here again.”

And the regimental doctor leans back in his chair and begins reciting, this time turning to Goethe’s ballad ‘The God and the Dancing Girl’, “Mahadöh, lord of the earth—when he came down here below—assumed a form of human birth—here to share our joys and woe.”

All three of them are looking at me with amusement, and I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Better start
talking
myself, I think, before they ask where I’ve been all this time and where I’ve just come from. But before I can get a word in Ferencz is winking and nudging Jozsi.

“Look at that, will you?” he says, pointing at my feet under the table. “How about that? Patent-leather shoes in a
downpour
like this, and those smart clothes! Our friend Toni has found a home from home! I hear they really live it up at the old Manichaean’s place! Five courses every evening, so the pharmacist says, caviar and capons, genuine Bols and the best
of cigars—unlike our pigswill at the Red Lion. I tell you what, we’ve all underestimated our Toni, he knows which side his bread is buttered!”

Joszi joins in at once. “A little short on good comradeship, though, our Toni. Yes, Toni, I suppose you don’t think of telling the old boy up there, ‘Hey, old fellow, I have a couple of good friends, smartly turned out, splendid chaps, they don’t eat with their knives, why don’t I bring them along?’ No, not he, let the rest of ’em drink sour Pilsner and eat the same old beef goulash! A fine sort of friend he is, I must say! All for him, nothing for the rest of us! Did you at least bring back a nice fat Upmann cigar? If so you’re forgiven, for now.”

They all three roar with laughter. My blood suddenly rises from my collar to my ears. How the devil could Jozsi guess that Kekesfalva really did put one of his excellent cigars in my pocket as I was leaving—he always does! Is it sticking out between the two buttons on the breast of my coat? I just hope they don’t notice anything! Embarrassed, I force a smile.

“Oh, of course, an Upmann! Won’t you be happy with anything less? I can offer you one of our ordinary cigarettes.” And I open my cigarette case and hold it out to him. At the same moment my hand suddenly jerks back—the day before yesterday happened to be my twenty-fifth birthday, and somehow or other the two girls had worked that out. When I took the napkin off my plate at dinner, I felt something heavy folded into it—a birthday present of a cigarette case. But Ferencz has already noticed my new acquisition—the least little thing is a great event in our closed circle.

“Hello, what’s that?” he growls. “Something new!” He simply takes the cigarette case from my hand (what can I do to stop
him?), feels it, examines it, and finally weighs it up in the palm of his hand. “Hey, seems to me,” he says, leaning over the table to the regimental doctor, “seems to me this is the genuine article. Take a look, will you? Your worthy papa deals in such items, right? You’ll know more about them than I do.”

Dr Goldbaum, who is indeed the son of a goldsmith in Drohobycz, puts his pince-nez on his rather fleshy nose, picks up the cigarette case, weighs it in his own hand, examines it from all angles and taps it expertly with a knuckle.

“Yes, the genuine article,” is his final diagnosis. “Pure gold, hallmarked and damn heavy. We could fill the entire regiment’s teeth with this. Price range around seven to eight hundred crowns.”

After delivering this verdict, which startles me, too (I had honestly thought it was just gilt), he hands the case on to Jozsi, who treats it with much more respect than the other two (how highly we young men think of anything valuable!). He looks at it, inspects his reflection in it, feels it, finally opens the clasp and says in surprise, “Hello—there’s an inscription! Hey, listen to this! ‘To our dear friend Anton Hofmiller on his birthday. Ilona and Edith.’”

All three are now staring at me. “Good heavens,” says Ferencsz at last, “you choose your friends well these days. My respects! You’d have got a brass matchbox from me at the most.”

My throat feels tight. Tomorrow the whole regiment will hear the embarrassing news of the gold cigarette case, my birthday present from the Kekesfalvas, and everyone will know the
inscription
by heart. “Let’s have a look at that showy cigarette case of yours,” Ferencz will say in the officers’ mess, to show off, and I shall have to show it to the riding master, the Major, maybe even the Colonel. They’ll all weigh it up in their hands,
estimate its value, grin knowingly at the inscription, and then, inevitably, there’ll be questions and jokes, and I can’t be uncivil to my superior officers.

In my anxiety to put an end to this conversation quickly, I say, “Well, does anyone fancy another game of cards?”

But at once their kindly grins become loud laughter. “Ever heard the like of that, Ferencz?” says Jozsi, nudging him. “Wants a game of cards now, at half-past midnight, when the place is about to close!”

And the regimental doctor leans back lazily, very much at his ease. “Lucky fellow, doesn’t have to take any notice of the time of day!”

They go on laughing at this poor joke for some time, but the waiter Eugen is civilly pointing out that it’s time he closed. Police regulations. We leave—the rain has stopped—and walk back to barracks together, where we shake hands and say goodnight. Ferencz claps me on the shoulder. “Good to have you back.” And I can tell that he really means it. So why was I so angry with them? They’re all decent fellows without a trace of envy or malice in them. And if they laughed at me a little, they bore me no ill will.

They certainly didn’t bear me any ill will, good fellows that they were—but with their silly marvelling and whispering they irretrievably destroyed my sense of security. For before this happened my curious relationship with the Kekesfalvas had increased my self-confidence wonderfully. I had felt, for the first time in my life, that I was the one with something to give, the one offering help. Now I realised how others saw this relationship, or rather
how any outsider, unaware of all the hidden convolutions, would inevitably see it. What could strangers know about the subtle desire to show pity to which I had fallen prey—I can’t think how else to put it—as if it were some dark passion? They were bound to suppose that I had made myself at home in that
generously
hospitable house only to curry favour with the rich, save the price of an evening meal, and get presents. And they really don’t mean ill, I think; they’re my friends, they don’t grudge me a warm place to sit, fine cigars to smoke. Undoubtedly—and this is just what irks me—they see nothing in the least wrong or dishonourable in my allowing such people to make much of me, because cavalry officers like us, as they see it, do a moneybags like Kekesfalva honour by sitting at his table. There was not the slightest disapproval in the way Ferencz and Jozsi admired the gold cigarette case—on the contrary, it even made them feel a certain respect for my ability to get such things out of my patrons. But what annoys me so much now is that I am
beginning
to feel uncertain about myself. Am I really just sponging on the Kekesfalvas? As an officer, a grown man, can I allow myself to be courted like this and keep every evening free? The gold cigarette case, for instance—I ought never to have accepted it, any more than I should have accepted the silk scarf they gave me recently when it was stormy weather outside. A cavalry
officer
doesn’t let people put cigars in his pocket to take home, and what’s more—for God’s sake, I must talk Kekesfalva out of this tomorrow—there’s the business of the horse! Only now do I remember that the day before yesterday he was murmuring something to the effect that my bay gelding (for which of course I was paying by instalments) was not in very good shape, and he was right there. But his idea of lending me a three-year-old from his own stud farm, a famous former racehorse that would
do me credit, really won’t do. Yes, “lend”, I understand what he means by that! Just as he has promised Ilona a dowry, only to keep her as companion to poor Edith, he wants to buy me too, pay me cash down for my sympathy, for my jokes, my social skills! And idiot that I am, I nearly fell for it, without noticing that I was degrading myself to the status of a sponger!

Then I tell myself that this is nonsense, and remember, moved, how the old man caressed my sleeve, how his face always
brightens
as soon as I come through the door. I remember the warm fraternal friendship between me and the two girls; they certainly are not watching to see if I drink a glass too many of the good wine, and if they do notice any such thing then they are just glad that I feel at my ease with them. Nonsense, pure nonsense, I keep telling myself. That old man feels more for me than my own father does.

But what use is all this persuading and encouraging myself now that I have been knocked off balance? I can tell that the lip-smacking astonishment of Jozsi and Ferencz has destroyed my peace of mind. Do you really go to see these rich people, I ask myself suspiciously, only out of sympathy, out of pity? Isn’t there a good deal of vanity and self-indulgence in it as well? I have to clear this up. And for a start I decide to visit less regularly from now on. Tomorrow I won’t go to see the Kekesfalvas in the afternoon as usual.

So I stay away next day. As soon as duty hours are over I stroll off to the café with Ferencz and Jozsi. We read the paper and begin the usual game of taroc. But I play my cards shockingly badly, because right opposite me a round clock is fitted into
the panelling on the wall. Four-twenty, four-thirty, four-forty, four-fifty. Instead of paying attention to the game, I am
counting
down the time. At four-thirty I am usually approaching the villa, where tea will be ready and waiting, and if I’m even fifteen minutes late they’ll be wondering why, asking each other, “What’s happened to him today?” My punctual arrival has already become such a habit that they expect it, as if it were an obligation. I haven’t missed a single afternoon for two and a half weeks, and they are probably looking as uneasily at the time as I am, waiting and waiting. Wouldn’t it be proper for me at least to telephone and explain that I won’t be coming? Or maybe better, I could send my batman with the message …

“Come on, Toni, your play is a disgrace today. Watch what you’re doing, can’t you?” says Jozsi in annoyance, looking at me quite angrily. My absence of mind has cost him, as my partner, a game. I pull myself together.

“Look, can I change places with you?”

“Of course, but why?”

“I don’t know,” I say, untruthfully. “I think all the noise in here is putting me off my stroke.”

It is really that I don’t want to see the clock as the minutes tick steadily by. My nerves are on edge, my ideas keep scattering hither and thither, I wonder again and again whether I ought not to go to the telephone and apologise. For the first time I begin to realise that true sympathy can’t be turned on and off like an electric switch, and when you really share someone else’s fate it means giving up some of your own freedom.

But damn it all, I snap at myself, I’m not in duty bound to spend half-an-hour trudging out there every day. And in line with the secret law of transference, whereby a man who feels annoyed unconsciously takes his annoyance out on perfectly
innocent parties, like a billiard ball speeding this way and that, I turn my irritation not on Jozsi and Ferencz but on the Kekesfalvas. Let them wait for me in vain for once! Let them see that I’m not to be bought with presents and kind attentions, that I don’t turn up on the dot like the masseur or the gymnastics instructor. I’m not going to set a precedent, I won’t be bound to a habit, or tied down in any way. So in my stupidly defiant mood I sit in the café for three and a half hours, until seven-thirty, solely to prove to myself that I am entirely free, I can come and go as I please, and the Kekesfalvas’ good food and fine cigars are a matter of
indifference
to me.