One of the stories that haunted my childhood (I can’t remember where it came from) was the ancient conundrum of the mandarin, which I later found retold by Eça de Queiroz and Ursula K. Le Guin and goes like this: If you can get anything you want by pressing a bell and killing an unknown mandarin in China, would you do it? Moral qualms aside, what terrified me was the idea that a seemingly innocuous act could have such far-reaching consequences. Because if pressing a bell could fatally touch someone oceans away, what trite and distant event might affect my own life without my knowing it? I think this was the first inkling I had of the peculiar notion we call Fate.
The story of the mandarin (with an important twist) is buried somewhere in the last third of Sándor Márai’s The Rebels, first published in 1930 and now available in English, in a superb translation by George Szirtes (whose name, alas, is shamefully absent from the book’s cover). Here it is not the mandarin who is killed; instead, the presser of the bell (a sickly youth called Abel) imagines that he can make the faraway mandarin condemn to death whoever has offended him. In this way, both the desirable and the regrettable consequences of the act are conveniently rolled into one. Abel imagines that he can control the workings of Fate.
The time is May 1918, the place Hungary. The war has not yet ended and the empire has not yet collapsed. A group of boys who are almost young men (Abel among them) wait uncertainly for their graduation from school or conscription into the army. While the world of their elders is crumbling, the group decides to establish something like a secret society with meaningless rules and pointless rituals, a decoy world that might magically draw away from reality the fatal outcome.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in