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linens, damasks, engravings, even a spinet, because she wished to tame the wild beasts with music. The first snow was already on the mountains as they finally settled in and began to live their lives there; it surrounded the castle and laid siege to it like a grim northern army. At night deer and stags slipped out of the forest to stand motionless under the moonlight in the snow, heads cocked as they observed the lighted windows with their grave animal eyes that gave back a mysterious blue glow, and the music escaping from the castle reached their ears. “Do you see them?” said the young woman as she sat at the keyboard, and laughed. In February the cold drove the wolves down out of the mountains; the servants and the huntsmen built a bonfire of brushwood in the park, and the wolves, under its spell, circled it and howled. The Officer of the Guards drew a knife and went after them; his wife watched from the window. There was something insurmountable between them. But they loved each other.
    The General moved to stand before the portrait of his mother. It was the work of a Viennese artist who had also painted the Empress with her hair down, gathered into loose plaits. The Officer of the Guards had seen this portrait in the Emperor’s study in the Hofburg. In the portrait the Countess was wearing a rose-colored straw hat decorated with flowers, the kind of hat the girls of Florence wear in the summer. The painting in its gold frame hung over the cherry-wood chest with its many drawers, which had also belonged to his mother. The General set both hands on it as he leaned to look up at the work of the Viennese artist. The young woman held her head to one side, gazing gravely and softly into the distance as if posing a question that was in itself the message of the picture. Her features were noble, her neck, her hands in their crocheted gloves and her forearms as sensual as her white shoulders and the sweep of her décolleté. She did not belong here. The battle between husband and wife was fought without words. Their weapons were music, hunting, travels, and evening receptions, when the castle was lit up as if it were on fire, the stables were jammed with horses and carriages, and on every fourth step of the great staircase a
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stood as stiff as a mannequin holding up a twelve-armed silver candelabrum, while melodies, light, voices and the scent of bodies swirled through the rooms as if life itself were a desperate feast, a sublime and tragic celebration that would end when the horns rang out to announce an unholy summons to the assembled guests. The General could remember evenings like that. Sometimes the coachmen and their horses had to make camp around the bonfires in the snowy park because the stables were full. And once even the Emperor came, although in this country he bore the title of King. He came in a carriage, escorted by horsemen with white plumes in their helmets. He stayed for two days, went hunting in the forest, lived in the other wing of the castle, slept in an iron bedstead, and danced with the lady of the house. As they danced, they talked together and the young wife’s eyes filled with tears. The King stopped dancing, bowed, kissed her hand, and led her into the next room, where his entourage was standing in a semicircle. He led her to the Officer of the Guards and kissed her hand again.
    “What did you talk about?” the Officer of the Guards asked his wife later, much later.
    But his wife did not say. Nobody ever learned what the King had said to the young wife who had come from a foreign country and wept as she danced. It went on being a local topic of conversation for a long time.
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    The castle was a closed world, like a great granite mausoleum full of the moldering bones of generations of men and women from earlier times, in their shrouds of slowly disintegrating gray silk or black cloth. It enclosed silence itself as if it were a prisoner persecuted for his beliefs, wasting away numbly,