A couple of hours later. The wood fire blazes and a number of blue candles have been lit, since the electricity has not yet come back on. Konrad is installed in the brown leather armchair with a cigar and a glass of brandy, while Henrik is more mobile, alternating between the Florentine chair, where he sips at a tiny glass of deep red liqueur, and a restless pacing around the room. Konrad seems calm, but remains tense and watchful, never taking his eyes off Henrik. On one of the occasional tables, someone has placed a blue crystal vase full of dahlias.

Henrik   My father was passionate about hunting: he went out every day, whatever the weather; and if it wasn’t the season for deer or pheasant, he would be quite content hunting foxes or even crows. My mother detested the whole process. Nothing associated with hunting was allowed in the house; and eventually my father was obliged to have our hunting lodge built, to house his weapons and trophies and accommodate his dogs and falcons. I inherited his enthusiasm, I loved hunting as well; whereas you, of course, were never a huntsman.

Konrad   I hunted.

Henrik   Only as a social duty: it was like riding, you had no instinctive feel for it. You always looked rather disdainful and you carried your gun casually, as if it were a walking stick. Anyway: I wanted to speak to you about the hunt we went on, that hot summer’s day, the last year of the last century, the day before you ran away. As it happens, it was the last time I ever went hunting in my forest: because something happened on that hunt, something which I only understood in retrospect, your goodbye in fact, something which helped me begin to understand.

Konrad   Understand what?

Henrik   It was the most beautiful day. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anything in my whole life as much as the first light of dawn on the day of the hunt. It’s dark when you get up, you put on clothes which smell of the forest, wet leaves and air and blood, you eat cold meat and swallow a glass of schnapps, you pick up your gun and inhale the scent of oil and metal. I loved every second of it. The clean taste of the breeze, the bumping of the shooting brake, the leaves slippery underfoot, the birds singing as the light peels back the sky and drops through the trees as if the curtain has just gone up in some enchanted theatre. Actually, at the moment I’m referring to, it was still dark: or to put it more accurately, it was not yet light, it was the precise moment that separates night from day. I was leading, the two of us already far ahead of the gamekeeper and his dog, when suddenly, about three hundred yards away down the forest path, a deer stepped out of the undergrowth. It paused on the path. It couldn’t smell us because the wind was blowing towards us; but it tensed and lifted its head and stood there, as if it were somehow paralysed by the inevitable, brought to this exact spot by incalculable but inescapable circumstances.
   It’s at such a moment you begin to feel that forbidden pleasure experienced at one time or another by all living creatures, perhaps the most intense of all the passions: the urge to be the stronger. It’s what the leopard feels as he crouches to spring; or the falcon as it launches into its dive. A man feels it when he has his quarry in his sights. And it’s what you felt, Konrad, who knows, possibly for the first time in your life, when you raised your rifle to your shoulder and took aim at me.

The truth is, you hated me; you’d hated me for twenty-four years with a passion more or less indistinguishable from love. Passion is not amenable to reason and eventually it has to find some way of expressing itself. Every great passion is hopeless, of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be a passion, it would just be a lukewarm inclination or a clever calculation. But you hated me and that made for as strong a bond as if you’d loved me. Now why did you hate me?

As I said, you would never agree to take money from me; and you would never allow our friendship to develop into a genuinely fraternal give and take. I should have taken that as a warning sign: when someone refuses to accept a part of something, it’s often because he wants everything. You hated me as a child, from the first moment we met, because there was something in me you wanted and couldn’t have. I don’t mean you were aware of this at the time: on the contrary, as children, we enjoyed the great gift of a magical friendship: until your character formed and you found you couldn’t bear the fact you lacked something I had. What was it? You were a far better student than I was, far more diligent and talented, and, of course, you had your secret feeling for music, your relationship with Chopin. But all along you had some frantic ambition to be something other than what you are; which is the worst and most painful punishment a man can possibly suffer. Life only becomes bearable when you’ve come to terms with who you are, accepted your own vanity or selfishness or bald head and pot belly, without expecting a pat on the back for acquiring such enlightenment. You have to learn that your desires will never be entirely reciprocated and accept that the people you love will never love you back in quite the way you would hope. You have to accept betrayal; and, hardest of all, you have to accept there are others more intelligent, more admirable and more deserving than you. This is what you couldn’t accept. You couldn’t accept that for those ten wonderful years in Vienna – and it’s so long ago now I can speak of it quite objectively – first at the Academy and then in the regiment, I was so popular and indulged and happy. You thought anybody who was so generally liked must have something whorish about them, that I was so self-assured I actually assumed I must be one of the elect. But if that is what you thought you were mistaken: what came to me came because I was so trusting; I genuinely believed the best of everyone, especially you, and that was what everybody responded to, except perhaps you. I thought I was truly blessed.
   But of course the world spares nobody. Those who stay modest and humble can have a better run than most, but it won’t last for ever. And as youth began to slip away, things started to cool between us. There’s nothing sadder, there’s no feeling more hopeless, than the cooling of a deep friendship between men. With women, there’s always some sense of delicate negotiation; but men have no aim beyond trying to preserve an unwritten pact. I had hoped you might be happy that I moved so easily through the world, just as I admired your bitter intelligence. I thought as I basked in the sunshine of life, you simply chose, of your own free will, to stay in the shadows. Did you share any of these feelings?

Konrad   I thought you were talking about the hunt.

Henrik   I was, yes. But all this is connected. After all, if you decide to kill someone, the decision doesn’t arrive out of nowhere, you don’t just take aim and blast away. You need to feel you’re avenging something unforgivable. How else do you travel from the inseparable bonds of childhood friendship to that forest path? That’s what has to be decided before we can go on to talk about the hunt. The moment you point a rifle at someone’s head is not the moment of maximum guilt; the guilt, as I’ve said, is in the intention. And if I say that one day the bonds of friendship between us broke, I need to know if that really is the case; and if it is, I need to know when and why. We were two very different people but we were friends!

We were friends. Not good companions or comrades or fellow-sufferers. What we had was irreplaceable. If we hadn’t been friends, you would never have raised your gun against me. And if we hadn’t been friends, I wouldn’t have gone to the apartment you’d never invited me to. And if you hadn’t been my friend, you’d never have run away that day, like a criminal, like a murderer. You’d have stayed and deceived me and undermined me and hurt me, none of which would have been anything like as terrible as what you actually did. Because you were my friend. If you weren’t, why would you have come creeping back after forty-one years to the scene of the crime? And here’s something surprising and disturbing which has slowly been dawning on me this evening: we’re still friends.
   You ruined my life. You killed something inside me. And we’re still friends. And tonight, I’m going to kill something inside you and then you can go back to London or the tropics or wherever the hell you want to go: and we’ll still be friends. Friendship is a very strict obligation: the entire legal systems of great cultures were founded on its laws. It’s stronger than ambition or self-regard or even sexual desire; and it cannot be disappointed, because it makes no demands. Even if you kill your friend, death will not dissolve your friendship. In fact, as you raised your rifle to kill me, our friendship was more alive, in that moment, than it had ever been.
   I stopped when I saw the deer; and ten paces behind me, you stopped as well. The deer was listening, not moving a muscle, somehow sensing danger: yet taking no evasive action, because somewhere in the heart of mortal danger lies a kind of attraction. I certainly felt it, when I heard the cold click of perfectly tempered English steel, as you released the safety catch. You remember?

Konrad   Yes. Yes, I do.

Henrik   And this is when something happened, something you know as well as I do, but which could never be proved in a court of law. I felt you move behind me, just as if I’d been watching you. You raised the gun, tucked it into your shoulder, closed one eye and took aim: and then I felt the gun gradually swivel until my head was in the line of fire. I felt your hand tremble; and all my hunter’s experience told me that from where you were standing, you could not have been aiming at the deer. You understand, at that moment, as a hunter, it was the technical aspect that preoccupied me the most: the angles, the geometrical disposition of the targets, one of which was me. You took aim for thirty seconds precisely, I knew that without looking at a watch. I couldn’t move, because I knew my fate was no longer mine to control: whatever was going to happen would happen of its own volition. It was a perfect opportunity: no witnesses, one of those tragic hunting accidents you read about every year in the newspapers; but no shot was fired. Suddenly the deer smelled danger and with a single bound leapt into the undergrowth. We still didn’t move. Then, very slowly, you lowered the rifle. You lowered it with enormous care, in case the air moving round the barrel might whisper to me and betray you; but even so, I knew what you were doing.
   What’s interesting, of course, is that you still could have killed me, no one would have known the difference, no judge would ever have convicted you; our friendship was legendary, you would have generated nothing but total sympathy. There’s no more tragic figure than a man who has accidentally killed his friend. Nobody could have been crazy enough to suggest you’d done it on purpose. You didn’t owe me money, you were always treated like a member of the family, everyone knew you were my absolute closest friend.
   And yet you didn’t pull the trigger. Why? What stopped you? Was it really that the disappearance of the deer robbed you of your objective pretext? Well, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you wanted to kill me, your hand started to shake, the deer vanished and the moment passed. I didn’t turn around. If I had, if I’d looked you in the eye, everything might have been revealed. But I didn’t dare. I felt the shame of the victim, the most overwhelming sense of shame you can ever feel. And after a while I just resumed walking down the path; you followed automatically, and I said, without turning, ‘You missed your shot.’
   You didn’t answer. That’s when I knew for certain. Any huntsman would have justified himself, said the deer wasn’t worth killing, that the shot would have been too risky. But you said nothing. And your silence meant yes, you’d missed the shot that should have killed me. Neither of us said another word. The hunt began; we were separated; and at noon when we stopped for lunch, your beater told me you’d left and gone into town.

Konrad   Thank you.

Henrik   That evening you came to dinner as usual, at seven-thirty. Blue candles on the table. We sat at either end with Krisztina between us. I hadn’t seen her that afternoon; apparently she’d gone into town directly after lunch. I found her in the salon shortly before you arrived, sitting in that chair. She was wearing her Indian shawl, even though it was a warm evening. She was reading a book, an English travel book about the tropics; and I suppose she must have been absorbed in it, because she didn’t become aware of me until I was right beside her. She looked up at me, startled, and I was shocked by how pale she was. I asked her if she was feeling all right. She didn’t answer. She just stared up at me for a long moment, almost as long as the moment I had spent waiting to see if you were going to squeeze the trigger; and the silence was almost as eloquent. She looked into my eyes as if her life depended on finding out what I was thinking, if I was thinking. I think I returned her gaze quite calmly. In the course of the day, I had made the decision never to tell Krisztina or anyone else what had happened at dawn out in the forest. I’d also decided to have a doctor observe you secretly since it seemed to me likely that you were in the grip of some temporary insanity. And I thought the important thing was to maintain dignity, yours in particular, in spite of the fact that if you were not insane, if you’d had some cogent reason to aim your rifle at me, then all three of us had already lost our dignity.
   We did discuss the hunt at dinner, but not a word was said about the magnificent deer you’d failed to kill at the beginning of the day; nor did you say anything about leaving the hunt early, which was, to say the least of it, a breach of etiquette. Instead, you asked Krisztina about the book she was reading, you had a long conversation about it, what was it called, what did she think of it, was it interesting – which is curious, because I later discovered it was your book and you had lent it to her. I must say, you both played your roles brilliantly. I remember you asked her if she thought a European could tolerate life in the tropics, if she herself could put up with the rain and the swamps and the jungle, and nothing seemed in the least suspicious. Strange, isn’t it, you talked about all that the last time you were here, and now, all these years later, here you are again, still talking about rain and swamps and jungles. Everything goes in circles, I suppose it has to, if it’s to be completed. Anyway, you left, as usual, around midnight. And that’s my account of the day of the hunt.
   Once you’d left, Krisztina went to bed. I picked up the English book and started looking at it. It certainly wasn’t her usual kind of thing. I couldn’t imagine what interest she might have in the statistics of rubber production in the Malay peninsula. But suddenly I realised the book did have something to say to me: sitting there, holding it, after midnight, when the two people who’d meant most to me in the world had left the room, I understood that it carried a clear, unmistakable message. Krisztina wanted to leave. She wanted to run away from something or someone: and the someone might very well be me.
   That was the moment my life split in two: on one side, my childhood, you, my marriage, my happiness; and on the other, the darkness through which I would have to make my way for the rest of my days. I was still very confused. What exactly had happened that morning on the hunt? Had I perhaps imagined the whole thing? Had you, my best friend, really wanted to kill me? And if so, why? Of course, the implication must be that there is something between you and Krisztina, but this is such an unlikely notion, I have to rule it out. I know in these situations the third party is always the last to know, but really I would have to have picked up some indication of it along the way. We all have dinner together three or four times a week: and when I’m not with you at the barracks, I’m generally with Krisztina here in the castle. I just have to think about this for a moment and I feel a sense of relief, it’s so profoundly implausible. No, there has to be some other explanation. I’m not going to have you watched, like some jealous husband in a farce: all I have to do is talk to you.
   I thought about Krisztina for a few minutes and felt even more reassured. Krisztina couldn’t be unfaithful, she was incapable of lying, I knew everything there was to know about her. Soon after we married, I gave her a diary bound in yellow velvet, in which we agreed she would write all her most private thoughts and emotions, all the things she felt unable to speak out loud, on condition, and it was her condition, that I could read it whenever I liked or whenever she wanted me to. It was kept in a secret drawer in her dressing room to which she had a key and I had a key. As it happened, it had been some time since I’d last looked at it. So I went upstairs, took out my key and opened the drawer. It was empty.

I thought she was most probably writing in it in her bedroom. I didn’t want to disturb her: I thought I’d ask her where it was the next day. You see, the whole thing had been Krisztina’s idea in the first place, when we were on our honeymoon in Paris: she said it would be like a perpetual declaration of love. It was only much, much later, long after she was dead, that I realised you only make such careful preparations to confess if you somehow know that one day there will be something that actually has to be confessed. She said she wanted me to have everything: her body, her soul and her innermost thoughts. But she was on honeymoon. She’d gone from a modest house in a small town nursing her sick old musician father, to this castle, a long honeymoon in Paris, London and Rome, a sea voyage, things she could never have dreamed of. Of course she thought she was in love. It was only later that she understood she had only been grateful.
   From the beginning, she filled her diary with the most surprising confessions, some of which were disturbingly candid and not at all flattering to me. The thing was, I was happy, I was rich, I was in love, I was thirty years old, I loved my career. No wonder she found me lacking in modesty, rather self-satisfied even: I was. Not that I didn’t feel, like everyone who is unreasonably happy, a kind of anxiety at the heart of my happiness, a fear that this couldn’t possibly last. But for the moment everything was perfect. Despite the things Krisztina wrote in her diary. ‘You are irredeemably vain,’ she would say; or she would describe being followed by a man in Algiers who spoke to her in an alley and made her feel for a moment that she wanted to go away with him. But maybe my formula was wrong just now: maybe you confess certain things in order to avoid having to confess what’s genuinely fundamental to your life. In any event, I had felt certain that day that you had intended to kill me; I had listened to you discussing the tropics in some detail with Krisztina; and now the diary was gone. And so I decided to travel into town the next day, to go to your apartment and ask you …

Ask you what? I still hadn’t understood that whatever I asked you and whatever you may have answered could not in any way alter the facts. Still, the next day, I ordered the carriage and drove into town. I stood in your apartment coming to terms with the fact that you had run away. I stood in that mysterious room full of beautiful objects, trying to understand what had happened and what was happening, when the door opened and Krisztina appeared.

She saw me and stopped in the doorway. She said: ‘Has he gone?’ Her voice was uncharacteristically hoarse. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s gone.’ I’d never seen her look so beautiful. Her eyes were bright and she was so pale, she looked as if she’d lost a gallon of blood. ‘He’s run away,’ she said, ‘the coward.’

Konrad   She said that?

Henrik   Yes. And that’s all she said. I said nothing more either. We stood in silence for a moment. Then Krisztina began to look around the room. I watched her. As you probably know, you can look at things in a room in one of two ways: as if seeing them for the first time; and as if seeing them for the last. Krisztina was looking at the room as if to check that everything was in its place. I had the sense that if I made one unexpected movement, something would be done or said that could never be mended … She looked around as if to commit to memory things she had often seen before: the pictures, the objects, finally the wide French bed. Then she closed her eyes for a moment; turned; and left. I watched her walk down the garden path, between the rose bushes, climb into her trap, pick up the reins and go.

I hope I’m not tiring you.

Konrad   No. Not at all. Please go on.

Henrik   I’m sorry to go into so much detail: but, as you said yourself, the details are crucial. And I don’t have very much more to say. You’d run away, Krisztina had ridden off in the trap and I … I was standing there, wondering what I could possibly do for the rest of my life. I summoned your orderly and asked him when you had left. On the early express, he said, which meant you’d left for Vienna. Had you taken much luggage? Just a few civilian clothes. What orders had you left? To give up the apartment and sell the furniture. Anything else? Nothing. We looked at each other. He was a boy of no more than twenty … and he was looking at me with such pity that quite suddenly I lost control. I grabbed him by the lapels and almost jerked him off his feet. You know it was always best for me never to grab hold of people or things: I generally tended to break them; so I released him and heard his boots smack down on the parquet. There was only one question on the tip of my tongue: the lady who’s just left, how many other times has she been here? But I knew if he refused to answer, I might kill him; and if he did answer, I might also kill him, and possibly not only him. And in any case the question was unnecessary, because I knew Krisztina must have been there any number of times.

And what’s more it was the wrong question. The real question was why all this had happened in the first place; and to what extent the guilt was mine.

One is responsible for one’s fate, don’t you think? Or rather, something in our character causes us to open a particular door and invite our fate to step in. No one is strong or cunning enough to avoid the disaster provoked by the iron laws of his character. Of course, it was you who introduced me to Krisztina without letting drop the slightest hint you might be interested in her yourself. You used to have your scores copied by her father, after his arthritis had put an end to his concert career …
   As our honeymoon was coming to an end, we went down to Lake Garda, because Krisztina wanted to pay a visit to the sanatorium where her mother had died. It was surrounded by palm trees, and the light was so delicately hazy, it was like standing in one of our greenhouses. Krisztina walked around these melancholy pale-yellow buildings; and for the first time I sensed that she and I might not be entirely compatible. At the same moment, as if calling from far, far away, I heard my father’s sad voice speaking of you, Konrad: saying to me that you were a different breed; and there, in that misty park above Lake Garda, I began to realise that Krisztina might also be a different breed. Perhaps, like my father, I had met a woman I loved profoundly, but at whose side I would always remain alone. I began to understand that the feelings which bound me to Krisztina, to my mother and to you were similar, a hopeless longing for otherness, that fundamental otherness of taste or rhythm or desire that is impossible to acquire, but which the other person can never shed, however close or loving the relationship might be.
   Krisztina’s essential quality was her absolute independence, which I suppose was both an inheritance and a curse. She was something very rare, a natural aristocrat, self-sufficient, unprejudiced and entirely responsive: to music, to the forest, to intelligence and wit. I’ve never known anyone else take such pleasure in the world’s simplest blessings. Well, you know all of this …
   I still see her face sometimes.

There used to be a painting of her up there; I had it taken down and you won’t even find a photograph of her anywhere in the house: but I often see her face when I’m half-asleep or when I walk into a room. And talking about her now, I can see her as clearly as I did that evening, sitting in that chair.

The fact is, that was the last time I ever had dinner with her. The next day, certain inevitable decisions were taken: you left for the tropics and Krisztina and I never spoke to one another again.

Music: that was the language you used to communicate with my mother and Krisztina, was it not? A language incomprehensible to my father and to me. I detest music. I hate the way certain people can use it to send uninhibited and very likely immoral messages to one another. It has the power to arouse the deepest emotions in those who are sensitive to it, don’t you agree?

Konrad   I do.

Henrik   Good. Krisztina’s father pointed this out to me. He was the only person I ever spoke to, just once, about you and Krisztina. Very near the end of his life, ten years or more after Krisztina died. When I came back from the war. It turned out he knew everything there was to know about the three of us. We sat there, in that dark room full of musical instruments, he listened to everything I had to say, and then he said: ‘What do you have to complain about? You’re still alive.’ He was right. If you survive, you have no right to make accusations: you’re the stronger, you’ve come out on top, you’ve won your case. As we have.
   Of course, I had also survived the Great War. I made no special effort to do so, men were dying all around me, millions of them, but I somehow knew I would come through, because I had unfinished business. So I came home and waited. Now another war has started, millions are dying all over again, and yet you’ve been able to make your way through this insane conflagration, in order to settle what needs to be settled between us once and for all. Because human nature demands an answer to whatever may be the defining question of a lifetime. And revenge.
   I imagine the whole way of life we were brought up to is finally in the process of being swept away: but still, for some absurd reason, the craving for revenge persists. You look as if you have no idea what I’m talking about. Revenge? Between two old men who are half-dead already? Or against the memory of a woman who died more than thirty years ago? What could be more pointless? Nevertheless, it’s what I’ve been waiting for all this time. My revenge is that you should have made your way here across mine-infested seas and barbarously occupied countries, back to the scene of the crime, to reveal the truth and to answer my questions. To answer to me.

Konrad   Very well. Perhaps you’re right. Ask away.

Henrik   There are two questions I want you to answer. I expect you think you know what they are. You think I want to ask you whether or not you really did intend to kill me on the hunt that day. And you think the second question must be: were you and Krisztina lovers? But neither of these questions really interests me any more. And anyway I know the answers to them: the answers you gave the day after the hunt when you ran away. I know you wanted to kill me that morning: it’s not an accusation, I’m sorry for you, it must be terrible to feel driven to kill the person closest to you in the world. Anyway, you don’t deny it, do you?

I’m not trying to force a confession out of you; what do you think: you think I want to take you to court for adultery and attempted murder? What a shabby betrayal of our friendship that would be. It may be you’d feel better if you told me whatever there is to tell; but I’m not interested in making you feel better. The truth doesn’t sit in a few long-forgotten facts or the physical passions of a long-dead woman. We’re old and her body has turned to dust. You think I want to know where, when and how often my wife, the love of my life, betrayed me with my closest friend? You could tell me the whole story, but what would be the point? Everything that once made our hearts burst until we thought we would either die or have to kill someone: it’s all less than the dust the wind blows across the graveyard. Poking into the secrets of a body which no longer exists: it would just be humiliating for both of us.
   Don’t you think the idea of fidelity is appallingly selfish? Do we prove our love by demanding fidelity, if our partner finds it nothing more than a subtle prison, in which it’s impossible for her to be happy? And if our love fails to make her happy, what gives us the right to expect fidelity? My answers to these questions now I’m old would be quite different to what they were that day when Krisztina left me alone in your apartment and I looked at that bed where the two of you had betrayed me so ignominiously and so unoriginally.
   I came back here and waited for Krisztina. I wanted to kill her and I wanted her to beg my forgiveness. But it got dark and she hadn’t arrived: so, rather childishly, I took myself over to the hunting lodge. I went to the hunting lodge twelve miles away and I didn’t see her again until eight years later, when she was a corpse. Every evening, I had myself informed of what was going on here in the castle; and I waited, I waited eight years for a message, something, anything. But there was no message and I felt as if I were further away from her than you were, out in the tropics. If Krisztina had sent me a message, any message, I would have done anything she asked. If she’d asked for you, I would have crossed the world to bring you back; if she’d wanted you dead, I’d have killed you; and if she’d wanted a divorce, I’d have given her one. But she asked for nothing. Because she too had a strong personality; and she too had been gravely wounded by those she had loved.
   By the way, I learned something new this evening from my nurse, from Nini. I’m sure you remember her: she told me Krisztina had asked for me, when she was on her deathbed. She asked for me, not for you; I don’t say this with satisfaction – or without it for that matter – merely for your information. She asked for me. It’s not much, but it’s something. But as I said, by the time I saw her, she was dead. Still extremely beautiful. Not that it’s any of your business.

You know, sitting in the hunting lodge in my self-righteous isolation, I began to pity the two of you. I imagined you wracked with guilt and self-reproach, organising your secret meetings in that small town, wretchedly aware of every move being observed by servants and neighbours. The amount of labour for every fifteen stolen minutes on the pretext of a tennis match or a music lesson. Creeping around in the forest, all that miserable ducking and diving, because what else could you do? You had no money, Krisztina had no money, you couldn’t run off with her, you couldn’t live with her, you couldn’t marry her, any moment you could have been exposed, forced to fight a duel with me. No wonder you finally raised that rifle: but the perfect moment arrived and you failed to act on it.

I knew almost everything, you see: but there was one thing that tormented me all those years; and this is the first of my questions. I need an answer, please. The morning of the hunt, did Krisztina know that you intended to kill me?

Konrad   I …

Henrik   Wait, just a moment, I’m not sure I phrased that correctly, it sounded like an accusation, that’s not how I meant it. The reason this idea of a premeditated plan occurred to me is that when Krisztina heard that you had run away, what she said was: ‘Coward.’ As a matter of fact, that was the last word I heard her utter. Coward. What did she mean? Too much of a coward to run away with her? Or too much of a coward to go on the way you had been? Or, as it later suggested itself to me, too much of a coward to go through with a straightforward plan discussed in advance by the two of you?
   This is the question I need to have answered before I die. But it wasn’t phrased correctly, that’s why I interrupted you. No, more accurately, the question is: what was it that you were too much of a coward to do? It’s an insignificant enough question, but I feel that if I fail to discover the answer to it, I know nothing. I’m not interested any more in the details of your relationship; between any woman and man they’re pathetically similar; but this goes to the heart of everything.
   There is, in fact, another way, I’m almost sure of it, to find the answer I’m looking for. Long after Krisztina died, I found a box with a few scraps in it: an ivory miniature of her mother, her father’s signet ring, an orchid I once gave her, dried and pressed … and this.

You see, she’s tied a ribbon around it and sealed it with her father’s ring. I never broke the seal, because I had no means of knowing whether her confession from beyond the grave was addressed to me or to you. All the same, I assume whatever it contains will be the truth. Krisztina never lied.

Shall we read Krisztina’s message together? Would you like that?

Konrad   No.

Henrik   You don’t want to read it? Or you don’t dare to read it?

Konrad   I refuse to answer the question.

Henrik   I see.

Now answer my original question: that day in the forest, did Krisztina know you intended to kill me?

Konrad   I also refuse to answer that question.

Henrik   Good. Very good.

Konrad   I think that’s probably everything. I expect it’s time I went.

Henrik   The carriage is outside.

You’ll be going back to London?

Konrad   Yes.

Henrik   You’re going to stay there?

Konrad   Yes, for the rest of my life.

Henrik   You wouldn’t care to stay overnight? Visit the grave? Or have a word with Nini? I don’t believe you’ve seen her yet.

Konrad   No: no, I haven’t.

Henrik   When I was eight, my mother took me to France for the first time, to stay with her mother. I was desperately homesick, everything smelled peculiar, and quite soon after I arrived I went down with a raging fever. I was delirious, but it seems I kept asking for Nini. She had been my wet-nurse, you know, she’d lost her own child, she’d always refused to reveal the identity of the father, and her own father had beaten her and thrown her out of the house. Anyway, my illness became worse and worse and eventually they sent for her: it took her four days to get to Paris, by which time I had been given the last rites. She came straight to me, scooped me out of bed, sat me in her lap and began to rock me in her arms. And I started to get better. She saved my life. For this, as it turns out.

Konrad   I won’t stay the night, if you don’t mind. Please give my best to Nini.

Henrik   Thank you. I will.

Konrad   Two questions.

Henrik   What?

Konrad   You said you had two questions. What was the other one?

Henrik   The other one? I don’t know if I should ask you, since you refused to answer the first question. Krisztina’s father’s reproach was that I had survived. We both did. You by leaving, I by staying. Since she was worth both of us put together, do you think we were justified? Don’t you think we have a responsibility to her beyond the grave? You must know she died because you went away and because I stayed and never went near her, because the two of us were more cowardly and despicable than a woman can bear. We were traitors: we ran away from her. That’s what you need to know in London, through all the last hours of your lonely life. I already know it. Surviving a woman you loved enough to consider killing for may not be a capital offence but it’s undoubtedly a criminal act. She’s dead and we’re alive. What did we possibly hope to achieve by surviving her? Wasn’t the central truth of your existence that somewhere in the world there was a woman you loved and that she was the wife of a man you also loved? Nothing else counts, does it, but what remains in our hearts?

Konrad   In our hearts?

Henrik   So, the second question has to do with the true meaning of our lives. Was the true meaning of our lives not to be found in the pain of longing for a dead woman? I don’t know the answer, it’s a difficult question. What do you think? Do you believe, as I do, that what gives our life its meaning is a passion that burns in us for ever, no matter what else may happen, war or peace or the decay of empire? And that if we’ve experienced such a passion, we may not have lived in vain? I’m talking about a passion for one particular person, one single, mysterious other, good or bad, a passion that bears no relation whatsoever to that person’s moral qualities or conduct. And this time, if you can manage it, I would like an answer.

Konrad   I don’t understand why you’re asking me: when you know very well the answer is yes.