Scenting the storm

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).