If there were just one sentence remaining at the end, as far as I am concerned, dear lady, it could only be that nothing, absolutely nothing made sense, Korin remarked next morning after his usual period of silence, then stared out of the window at the firewalls, the roofs, and the dark threatening clouds in the sky, eventually adding a single sentence: But there are a lot of sentences left yet and it has begun to snow.
Snow, Korin explained in Hungarian, snow, he pointed to the swirling flakes outside, but he had left the dictionary in his room so had to go and fetch it in order to find the word in English, and having done so, repeating the words, snow, snow, he finally succeeded in attracting the woman’s attention to the degree that she turned her head, and having adjusted the gas under the pans, and washing and putting away the wooden spoon, she came over to him, bent down and took a look out of the window herself then sat down at the table opposite him and they gazed at the roofs together, facing each other for the first time across the table as, little by little, snow covered the roofs, she on one side he on the other for the first time, though pretty soon Korin was no longer gazing at the snow but at the woman whose face at this distance simply startled him so much he was unable to turn his head away and not just on account of a fresh swelling that practically closed her left eye but because the whole face was close enough now for him to see the mass of earlier bruises and signs of beating, bruises that had healed but had left a permanent mark on her brow, her chin and cheekbone, bruises that horrified him and made him feel awkward for staring at her, though he could not help but stare at her, and when this became clearly unavoidable and likely to remain the state of affairs, the sight of her face drawing him back time and again, he tried to break the spell by getting up, going over to the sink and filling himself a glass of water, having drunk which he felt able to return to the table and not stare at the face with its dreadful injuries but concentrate on the story of the carriage, concentrating his gaze not on the woman but on the ever thicker snow, telling himself that while it was winter here it was spring back there,
Spring in Veneto, the loveliest part of the season in fact, the sun shining but not too hot, the wind blowing but not at gale force, the sky a calm clear blue, the woods covered in dense green on the surrounding hills, in other words perfect weather for the journey, so that Mastemann’s silence no longer weighed on them, for they had accepted that this was how he wanted to proceed and no longer felt inclined to wonder why, content to sit quietly while the carriage swayed gently along the well-worn road, until Kasser picked up the subject of pure love, that wholly pure love, the clear love, said Korin, and what was more, he added, spoke only about that, not about the lesser kinds of love, the wholly pure love of which he spoke being resistance, the deepest and perhaps only noble form of revolt, because only love of this kind allowed a person to become perfectly, unconditionally, and in all respects free, and therefore, naturally, dangerous in the eyes of this world, for this was the way things were, Falke added, and if we looked at love from this point of view, seeing the man of love as the sole dangerous thing in the world, the man of love being one who shrinks in disgust from lies and becomes incapable of lying, and is conscious to an unprecedented extent of the scandalous distance between the pure love of his own constitution and the irredeemably impure order of the world’s constitution, since in his eyes it isn’t even a matter of love being perfect freedom, the perfect freedom, but that love, this particular love, made any lack of freedom completely unbearable, which is what Kasser too had said though he had put it slightly differently, but in any case, Kasser resumed, what this meant was that the freedom produced by love was the highest condition available in the given order of things, and given that, how strange it was that such love seemed to be characteristic of lonely people who were condemned to live in perpetual isolation, that love was one of the aspects of loneliness most difficult to resolve, and therefore all those millions on millions of individual loves and individual rebellions could never add up to a single love or rebellion, and that because all those millions upon millions of individual experiences testified to the unbearable fact of the world’s ideological opposition to this love and rebellion, the world could never transcend its own first great act of rebellion, because such was the nature of things, it was what was bound to follow any major act of rebellion in a world that really existed and was actually set in ideological opposition, that is to say it did not happen and did not follow, and now would never come to be, said Kasser, dropping his voice at the end, then it was silence and for a long time no one spoke, and there was only the voice of the driver in the seat above as he exhorted the horses up the hill, then just the rattle of the wheels as the carriage rolled and sped along the Brenta valley a long way from Bassano.