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the age of twelve because he was in love with his cousin.
    Konrad slept in the next bed. They were ten years old when they met.
    He was squarely built and yet thin, in the manner of those ancient races in which the building of bone mass has taken precedence over the flesh. He was slow moving but not lazy, and he had a rhythm—self-aware yet reserved—all his own. His father, an official in Galicia, had been made a baron; his mother was Polish. When he laughed, his mouth became wide and childlike, giving a slightly Slav cast to his face. But he laughed seldom. He was silent and watchful.
    From the first moment, they lived together like twins in their mother’s womb. For this they had no need of one of those pacts of the kind that is common among boys of their age, who swear friendship with comical solemn rituals and the sort of portentous intensity invoked by people when for the first time they experience, in unconscious and distorted form, the need to remove another human being from the world, body and soul, and make him uniquely theirs. For that is the hidden force within both friendship and love. Their friendship was deep and wordless, as are all the emotions that will last a lifetime. And like all great emotions, this one contained within itself both shame and a sense of guilt, for no one may isolate one of his fellows from the rest of humanity with impunity.
    They knew from the first moment that their meeting would impose upon them lifetime obligations. The young Hungarian boy was tall and slender in those days, and frail, and received weekly visits from the doctor. There was concern about his lungs. At the request of the head of the academy, a colonel from Moravia, the Officer of the Guards came to Vienna for a long conference with the doctors. In all their pronouncements he understood one single word: “Danger.” The boy is not really ill, they said, but he has a predisposition to illness. “There’s a danger,” was the gist of it. The Officer of the Guards had gone to the King of Hungary Hotel in a dark side street in the shadow of St. Stephen’s Cathedral; his grandfather had stayed there before him. The corridors were hung with antlers. The hotel manservant bowed and kissed the Officer’s hand in greeting. The Officer took two large, dark, vaulted rooms filled with furniture upholstered in yellow silk, and brought the child to stay with him for the duration of his visit; they lived together in the hotel, where above every door stood the names of favorite regular guests, as if the place were a worldly retreat for lonely servants of the monarchy.
    In the mornings they took the carriage and drove out to the Prater. It was the beginning of November and the air was already cool. In the evenings they went to the theater, where heroes gesticulated and declaimed onstage before throwing themselves on their swords and expiring with a death rattle. Afterwards, they ate in a private room in a restaurant, attended by countless waiters. The child sat wordlessly beside his father, conducting himself with precocious good breeding, as if there were something he must bear and forgive.
    “They talk about danger,” his father said, half to himself, after dinner was over and he was lighting himself a thick black cigar. “If you like, you can come home. But I would prefer it if no danger had the power to make you afraid.”
    “I’m not afraid, Father,” said the child. “But I would like to have Konrad stay with us always. They’re poor. I would like him to spend his summers with us.”
    “Is he your friend?” asked his father.
    “Yes.”
    “Then he is my friend too,” said his father seriously.
    He was wearing tails and a shirt with a pleated front. In recent times he had set aside his uniform. The boy fell silent, relieved. His father’s word was to be trusted. Wherever they went in Vienna, no matter to which shop, he was known: at the tailor’s, the glover’s, the shirtmaker’s, in restaurants where imposing