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maîtres d’hôtel reigned over the tables and on the street, where gentlemen and ladies waved to him warmly from their carriages.
    “Are you going to the Emperor?” the child asked one day shortly before his father was due to depart.
    “The King,” his father corrected him severely. Then he said, “I don’t go to him anymore,” and the boy understood that something must have happened between the two of them. On the day his father was leaving, he introduced Konrad to his father. The evening before, he had fallen asleep with a pounding heart: it was like a betrothal. “One may not mention the King in his presence,” he warned his friend. But his father was amiable, warm, the perfect gentleman. He welcomed Konrad into the family with one single handshake.
    From that day on, the boy coughed less. He was no longer alone. To be alone among people was unbearable to him.
    Everything—his life at home, the forest, Paris, his mother’s temperament—had fed into his very bloodstream the tendency never to speak of whatever caused him pain but to bear it in silence. He had learned that words are best avoided. But he could not live without love, either, and that was also part of his inheritance. Perhaps it was his French mother who had brought with her the yearning to share her feelings if even with only one other human being. In his father’s family, one never spoke of such things. The boy needed someone to love, whether it be Nini or Konrad. His fever went away, as did his cough, and his thin pale child’s face flushed with delight and rewarded trust. They were at an age when boys have not yet developed any pronounced sexual identity: it is as if they have not yet chosen. He hated his soft blond hair, because he considered it girlish, and he had the barber cut it short every two weeks. Konrad was more masculine, more composed. Childhood was no longer a cramped place, it no longer intimidated them, because they were no longer alone.
    At the end of the first summer, when the boys climbed into the carriage for the journey back to Vienna, the French
maman
stood in the gateway of the castle, looking after them. Then she smiled and said to Nini, “At last—a happy marriage!”
    But Nini didn’t smile back. Each summer, the boys arrived together. Later they also spent Christmas at the castle. Everything they had was the same: clothes, underwear, they slept in the same room, they read the same books, together they discovered Vienna and the forest, books and hunting, riding and the military virtues, the life of society and love. Nini worried, and perhaps she was also a little jealous. When the friendship was four years old, the boys began to shut themselves off from other people and to have their own secrets. The relationship steadily deepened, and also became more hermetic. The boy made clear that he wished he could present Konrad to the whole world as his own creation, his masterpiece, yet at other times he watched over him jealously, afraid that someone could rob him of the person he loved.
    “It’s too much,” said Nini to his mother. “One day Konrad will leave him, and he will suffer dreadfully.”
    “That is our human fate,” said his mother. She was sitting at her mirror, staring at her fading beauty. “One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy.”
    In the academy, the boys’ friendship soon ceased to be a subject for mockery; it became accepted as a natural phenomenon. They were given a single name, “the Henriks,” like a married couple, but nobody laughed at the relationship; there was some quality—a gentleness, a seriousness, an unconditional generosity—that radiated from it and silenced all tormentors.
    All societies recognize these relationships instinctively and envy them; men yearn for disinterested friendship and usually they yearn in vain. The boys in the academy took refuge in family pride or in their