B000FBJF64 EBOK

B000FBJF64 EBOK Read Free

Book: B000FBJF64 EBOK Read Free
Author: Sándor Marai
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for something. First one suffers the wound. Then one plans revenge. And waits. He had been waiting a long time now. He no longer knew when it was that the wound had become a thirst for revenge, and the thirsting had turned to waiting. Time preserves everything, but as it does so, it fades things to the colorlessness of ancient photographs fixed on metal plates. Light and time erase the contours and distinctive shading of the faces. One has to angle the image this way and that until it catches the light in a particular way and one can make out the person whose features have been absorbed into the blank surface of the plate. It is the same with our memories. But then one day light strikes from a certain angle and one recaptures a face again. The General had a drawer of old photographs like that. The one of his father. Dressed in the uniform of a captain of the guards, with his hair in thick curls, like a girl. Around his shoulders, a white guard’s cape, which he held together against his chest with one hand, rings flashing. His head tilted to one side with an air of offended pride. He had never spoken of where and how he had been offended. When he returned from Vienna, he went hunting. Day after day, hunt after hunt, no matter what the time of year; if it was neither the season for red deer nor other game, he hunted foxes and crows.
    As if he were set on killing someone and was keeping himself ready at any moment to take his revenge. The Countess, the General’s mother, would not have the huntsmen in the castle, she banned and banished anything and everything associated with hunting—weapons, cartridge pouches, old arrows, stuffed birds and stags’ heads, antlers. That was when the Captain of the Guards had the hunting lodge built. It became the place for everything: great bearskins in front of the fireplace, panels framed in brown wood and draped in white felt on the walls to display weapons. Belgian and Austrian guns. English knives, Russian bullet holders. Something for every type of game. The kennels were nearby, the entire pack and the tracking dogs and the Vizslas and the falconer lived there with his three hooded falcons. Here in the hunting lodge was where the General’s father spent his time. The inhabitants of the castle saw him only at mealtimes. The castle interiors were all in pastels, the walls hung with coverings of pale blue, pale green, and soft rose striped with gold, from workshops near Paris. Every year the Countess herself would select papers and furniture from French manufacturers and shops, when she went to visit her family. She never failed to make this journey, which was guaranteed to her in her marriage contract when she accepted the hand of the foreign Officer of the Guards.
    “Perhaps it was all because of those journeys,” thought the General.
    He thought this because his parents had not had an easy marriage. The Officer of the Guards went hunting, and because he could not destroy the world of other places and other people—foreign cities, Paris, castles,foreign tongues, foreign manners—he slaughtered bears, deer, and stags. Yes, perhaps it was because of the journeys. He got to his feet and stood in front of the sway-bellied white porcelain stove that once had warmed his mother’s bedroom. It was a large stove, at least a century old, and it radiated heat like some indolent corpulent gentleman intent on mitigating his own egoism with an easy act of charity. Clearly his mother had always suffered from the cold here. This castle in the depths of the forest with its vaulted rooms was too dark for her; hence the light-colored silks on the walls. And she froze, because there was always a wind in the forest, even in summer, bringing with it the smell of mountain streams when they fill with the melting snow and run in spates, flooding their banks. She froze, and the white stove was kept burning all the time. She was waiting for a miracle. She had come to Eastern Europe because the passion she

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