B000FBJF64 EBOK Read Online Free PDF Page B

studies, in precocious debauchery or physical prowess, in the confusions of premature and painful infatuations. In this emotional turbulence the friendship between Konrad and Henrik had the glow of a quiet and ceremonial oath of loyalty in the Middle Ages.
    Nothing is so rare in the young as a disinterested bond that demands neither aid nor sacrifice. Boys always expect a sacrifice from those who are the standard-bearers of their hopes. The two friends felt that they were living in a miraculous and unnamable state of grace.
    There is nothing to equal the delicacy of such a relationship. Everything that life has to offer later, sentimental yearnings or raw desire, intense feelings and eventually the bonds of passion, will all be coarser, more barbaric. Konrad was as serious and as discreet at the age of ten as a full-grown man. As the boys grew older and more aware and tried to put on airs and uncover the grown-ups’ secrets, Konrad made his friend swear that they would remain chaste. They remained true to this vow for a long time. It was not easy. Every two weeks they went to confession with a list they had compiled together of their sins. Carnal appetites were stirring in blood and nerves, the boys were pale, as the seasons changed they felt dizzy. But they remained chaste, as if their friendship, which lay like a magic cape over their young lives, was a replacement for everything that tormented the others in their curiosity and restlessness and drove them toward the darker, lower sides of life.
    They lived in a discipline whose roots were deep in centuries-old experience and practice. Every morning they fenced for an hour in the academy gymnasium, bare-chested with masks and bandages. Then they went riding. Henrik was a good horseman, Konrad struggled desperately to keep his seat and his balance, having no inherited physical skill in the saddle. Henrik learned easily, Konrad with difficulty, but whatever he learned he husbanded with almost desperate zeal; he seemed to know that this would be his only earthly possession. In society, Henrik moved with easy grace and the inner assurance of one whom nothing can surprise; Konrad was awkward and excessively correct. One summer when they were already young men, they traveled to Galicia to visit Konrad’s parents. The Baron, a bald, modest old man, worn down by forty years of service in the province and the disappointed social ambitions of his aristocratic Polish wife, endeavored with perplexed eagerness to entertain the young men. The town was depressing with its old towers, its fountain in the center of the rectangular main square, and its dark, vaulted interiors. The inhabitants—Ukrainians, Germans, Jews, Russians—lived in a kind of turmoil that was continually being smothered and contained by the authorities; something seemed to be fermenting in the dimly lit, airless apartments, some uprising or perhaps just an ongoing seditious muttering and wretched discontent, or perhaps not even that, merely the uneasy disorder and permanent restlessness of a caravanserai. It made itself felt in the houses, in the streets, in the entire public life of the town. Only the cathedral with its great tower and its broad arches soared calmly over the hubbub of calls and yells and whispers, as if a single law had once solemnly imposed itself—irreversibly, incontrovertibly, conclusively—on the community. The youths were staying at the inn, for the Baron’s apartment contained only three small rooms. The first evening, after the elaborate dinner with its rich meat dishes and heavy aromatic wines, which Konrad’s father, the elderly official, and his sad Polish wife—who had painted her face with lilac shadows and powdered blush to overcome her faded looks until she took on the air of a tropical bird—had had served in the humble apartment with touching solicitude, as if the fortunes of their son, who so rarely returned home, depended on the quality of the meal, the young officers