by Joseph Roth
So I paid my call on Lieutenant Colonel Stellmacher. In the old Monarchy a transfer from the army to the Yeomanry, or even from the Jägers to the infantry was a bureaucratic procedure just as complicated and certainly more arcane than filling the command of a division. Even so, in that bygone world of mine, of the old Monarchy, there existed certain delicate, exquisite, unwritten, unknown, ungraspable laws familiar only to insiders that were more inviolable and lasting than the written ones that proclaimed that of every hundred petitions, just seven would be answered swiftly, easily and silently in the affirmative. I know that the barbarians of absolute justice are still up in arms about this today. They scold us for aristocrats and aesthetes, even now; and all the time I can see how they, the egalitarians and anti-aesthetes, have prepared the way for their brothers, the barbarians of a stupid and plebeian injustice. Absolute justice is a sowing of dragon’s teeth.
But just then I had no inclination or leisure to reflect. I went straight to Stellmacher, down the corridor stuffed with patiently waiting Captains, Majors and Colonels, straight through the door that had “Private. No Entry” on it — me, a wretched little Jäger Ensign. “Servus!” Sitting hunched over his papers, Stellmacher greeted me, before raising his eyes to see who it was. He knew how familiarly one had to greet people who enter through prohibited doors. I took in his bristly grey hair, the yellowish forehead with its thousand creases, the tiny, deeply buried lidless eyes, the thin bony cheeks and the great drooping, dyed, almost Saracen moustache in which was vested the entire vanity of the man, so that it didn’t disturb him otherwise (either in private life or at work). The last time I had seen him was in the Konditorei Demel at five in the afternoon, with Court Councillor Sorgsam from the Ballhausplatz. We hadn’t the least intimation of war, and May, the urbane May of Vienna, swam in the little silver-rimmed coffee cups, floated over the place settings, the narrow, stuffed chocolate eclairs, the pink and green pastries that suggested edible jewels, and Count Councillor Sorgsam gave it as his opinion, smack into the middle of May: “I tell you, gentlemen, there won’t be any war!” And now a harassed looking Stellmacher was looking up from his papers; he didn’t see my face to begin with, just uniform, sword knot, sabre, enough to repeat his opening “Servus!” and thereupon, “Have a seat, I’ll be with you in a moment!” Finally he looked at me closely: “You’re smart!” and “I almost didn’t recognize you! The uniform’s made a man of you!” But it wasn’t the usual, low sonorous voice of Stellmacher’s I’d known for years — even his little joke seemed forced. Never before had a flip word emerged from Stellmacher’s mouth. It would have been caught in the glossy hedge of the dyed moustaches, and there silently perished.
Quickly I told him what I’d come for. I also tried to explain why I wanted to join the Thirty-Fifth in particular. “I only hope you can still find them!” said Stellmacher. “The news isn’t good! Two regiments cut to ribbons, in full retreat. Our idiots of generals had us in such a beautiful state of readiness. But very well. Go, and see if you can find your Thirty-Fifth! Pick up a couple of stars. You’ll be transferred as a lieutenant. Servus! Dismiss!” He extended his hand to me across his desk. His light, almost lidless eyes — of which one refused to believe they were ever victim to sleep, drowsiness or even fatigue — fixed me, distantly, strangely, from a glassy distance — by no means sad, no, sadder than sad, in other words hopelessly. He attempted a smile. His big false teeth shimmered in two white rows under the Saracen moustache. “Send me a postcard!” he said, and bent over his papers again.
XVII
The priests in those days worked as quickly as the bakers, gunsmiths, railway company directors, cap-makers and military outfitters. We were to get married in the church in Döbling; the man who had christened my bride was still alive, and my father-in-law, like most army contractors, was a sentimental johnnie. My bridal present was strictly speaking my mother’s. It hadn’t occurred to me that presents for the bride were called for. When I arrived for lunch — I’d also forgotten about there being dumplings — my mother was already sitting at table. As ever, I kissed her hand, and she kissed my forehead. I told the man to pick up my dark green cuffs and stars at Urban’s in the Tuchlauben. “Are you being transferred?” asked my mother. “Yes, Mama, to the Thirty-Fifth!” “Where are they stationed?” “In Galicia.” — “Are you going tomorrow?” “The day after!” “The wedding is tomorrow?” “That’s right, Mama!”
In our house the custom at mealtimes was to praise the food, even if it was badly cooked, and not to talk about anything else. Nor should the praise be perfunctory or banal, a certain extravagance was de rigueur. So I would say for instance that the meat reminded me of an occasion some six or eight years ago, also a Tuesday, and the cabbage with dill, today as then, was a match made in heaven for the boiled beef. When faced with the plum dumplings I was affected by utter speechlessness. “Please, more of the same, just like these, the moment I’m back!” I said to Jacques. “As you say, sir!” replied the old fellow. My mother rose, even before coffee, which was most unusual. She took out of her armoire two dark red morocco leather boxes which I had often had occasion to see and admire and puzzle over, but never dared to ask her about. I had always been curious, but at the same time delighted that there were two sealed mysteries in my proximity.
Now all would be revealed. The smaller box contained an enamel miniature of my father, framed in a thin circlet of gold. His big moustaches, his dark, gleaming, almost fanatical eyes, the heavy, carefully and intricately knotted tie round the strikingly high wing collar made him strange to me. Perhaps that was how he looked before I was born. That was how he was alive and dear and familiar to my mother. I am blond and blue-eyed, my eyes were always sceptical, sad, knowing eyes, never the fanatical eyes of a believer. But my mother said: “You’re exactly like him, take his picture with you!” I thanked her and took it. My mother was a clever, clear-sighted woman. Now it became clear to me that she had never seen me properly. Certainly, she loved me deeply. But she was a woman; she loved the son of her husband, not her child. I was the progeny of her beloved: decisively sprung from his loins; and in some secondary way, the fruit of her womb as well.
She opened the second box. There, bedded on snow white velvet lay a large hexagonal amethyst, clasped in a delicately braided gold chain, which made the stone look coarse, almost crude. It wasn’t that it was on a chain, more as though it had got the chain into its possession, and dragged it around everywhere like a weak and submissive female slave. “For your bride!” said my mother. “Give it to her today!” I kissed my mother’s hand, and slipped the second box into my pocket as well.
Just then our manservant announced visitors, my father-in-law and Elisabeth. “In the drawing-room,” decreed my mother. “My mirror!” Jacques brought her the oval hand-mirror. She studied her face in it for a long time, impassively. The women of that time did not need to adjust their dress, complexions or hair by means of make-up, powder, combs, or even by running their fingers through their hair. It was as though my mother was using the mirror to command everything she saw in it — hair, face, dress — to the most punctilious discipline. Without her having raised a finger, all intimacy and closeness suddenly disappeared, and I felt almost like the guest of an elderly lady I didn’t know very well. “Come!” she said. “My cane!” Her cane, a thin wand of ebony, leaned against her chair. She needed it not for support but as a prop for her dignity.
My father-in-law in a morning-coat and not so much wearing gloves as issued with them, Elisabeth in a high-necked silver-grey dress, a diamond cross on her bosom, looking taller than usual, and as pale as the dull silver clasp at her left hip, were both standing almost rigidly upright as we entered. My father-in-law bowed, Elisabeth performed a slight curtsey. Unbothered, I kissed her. The war rendered all ceremonial obligations superfluous. “Forgive the ambush!” said my father-in-law. “You mean the pleasant surprise,” my mother corrected him. She was eyeing Elisabeth as she spoke. Well, in a couple of weeks,
I’d be home again, joked my father-in-law. My mother sat bolt upright on a hard, narrow rococo chair. “People,” she said, “sometimes know when they’re leaving. They never know when they’re returning.” She eyed Elisabeth. She ordered coffee, cognac and liqueurs. Not for a second did she smile. At a certain moment she looked hard at my tunic pocket, where I had stashed the box with the amethyst. I understood. Without a word, I looped the chain round Elisabeth’s neck. The stone hung over the cross. Elisabeth smiled, walked over to the mirror, and my mother nodded
at her; Elisabeth took off the cross. The crude purple amethyst shimmered on her silver-grey dress. It looked like frozen blood on frozen ground. I turned away.
We rose. My mother embraced Elisabeth without kissing her. “Leave now with our visitors!” she told me. “Come back tonight!” she added. “I want to know when the wedding is to be. We’re having trout, bleu!” She waved her hand, as crowned heads wave with their fans. She left the room.
Downstairs, in the car (my father-in-law told me the make, I forgot it), I learned that everything in the Döbling church was ready. The hour was not yet fixed, but would probably be ten o’clock. Our witnesses were Zelinsky and Heidegger. Simple ceremony. “Martial,” said my father-in-law.
That evening, while we slowly and carefully ate our trout, bleu, my mother, probably for the first time since she had taken over the household, started to talk of so-called serious subjects during a meal. I was just launching into praise of the trout. She interrupted me. “Perhaps this is the last time we will sit together!” she said. Nothing more. “You’ll be going out tonight to say your goodbyes?” “Yes, Mama!” “Till tomorrow, then!” She left without turning round.
Yes, I went out to say my goodbyes. Or rather, I wandered around, trying to. Here and there I ran into someone I knew. The people on the pavements blurted out incomprehensible cries. It took me some time before I had understood what they were saying. Bands were playing the Radetzky March, the Deutschmeister March, or Heil du, mein Österreich! There were gypsy bands, Heurigen bands, in bourgeois establishments. People were drinking beer. Wherever I walked in, a couple of NCOs would get to their feet to salute, and civilians would wave their beer mugs in my direction. I had the feeling I was the only sober man in the whole city, and that made me feel odd. Yes, my city was withdrawing from me, moving away from me, further with each passing minute, and the streets and lanes and gardens, however noisy and crowded they were, seemed to me to have died out, just as I would see them later, after the war and after coming home. I wandered around into the small hours, took a room in the old Bristol, had a couple of hours’ sleep, wrestling the while with plans and thoughts and memories, went to the War Ministry, received my confirmation, drove to our old barracks on the Landstrasser Hauptstrasse, said goodbye to Major Pauli our commanding officer, received “open orders” telling me to join the Thirty-Fifth, hurried to Döbling, heard that I was to be married at half past ten, returned to my mother to give her the news, and then to Elisabeth.
We let it be known that Elisabeth would accompany me a ways. My mother kissed me, as per usual, on the forehead, got into her cab quick and cold and brisk, in spite of her slow air. It was a sealed carriage. Even before it started to move, I could see her hurriedly pull down the blinds in the little window in the back. And I knew that within, in the gloom of the little compartment, she was just starting to cry. My father-in-law kissed both of us blithely and cheerily. He had dozens of platitudes for the occasion, and they came tumbling out of him, and, like smells, were quickly dispelled. We left him, somewhat brusquely. “I’ll just let you get on with it, then!” he called out after us.
Elisabeth wasn’t accompanying me to the East. Rather, we were going to Baden together. We had sixteen hours ahead of us, sixteen long, full, replete, fleeting, inadequate hours.
XVIII
Sixteen hours! I had been in love with Elisabeth for three years, but those three years struck me as brief compared to the sixteen hours, when surely it should have been the other way around. Forbidden things are rushed, while what is sanctioned has a certain built-in longevity. Besides, while Elisabeth didn’t seem changed to me, she seemed at least to be on the way to change. I thought about my father-in-law, and detected similarities between him and her. A few of her hand gestures were clearly his; they were like distant and refined echoes of gestures of her father’s. Some of the things she did on the little electric train to Baden almost offended me. For example, barely ten minutes after we had started moving, she took a book out of her little valise. There it was, between her cosmetics bag and her underthings — the bridal robe, I was thinking — and the very fact that a book of all things could presume to rest on such a near-sacramental garment seemed outrageous to me. (The book, incidentally, was a collection of gags of one of those North German humorists who at that time, along with our Nibelung tendency, the German Schulverein, and itinerant lecturers from Pomerania, Danzig, Mecklenburg and Königsberg, were just beginning to spread their drizzly good humour and their noisome expansiveness over Vienna.) Elisabeth looked up from her book, looked at me, looked out of the window, stifled a yawn, and went back to her book. She had a way of crossing her legs that struck me as positively indecent. Was she enjoying her book, I asked. “Funny!” she observed. She passed it to me, so that I might see for myself. I started reading one of the silly tales halfway through; it was about the delicious humour of August the Strong, and a relationship with a cheeky lady-in-waiting. The two epithets, to my mind indicative of Prussian and Saxon souls on their day off, were enough for me. “Delicious,” I said, “delicious and cheeky!” Elisabeth smiled, and read on. We had a reservation at the Golden Lion hotel. Our old servant was in attendance, the only person who had been made privy to our Baden plan. He confessed to me right away that he had betrayed it to my mother. He stood there, at the terminus of the electrical suburban line, holding in his hand the stiff bowler hat that my father had probably left him, and presented my wife with a bouquet of dark red roses. He kept his head bowed, the reflection of the sun left a speck of silver on his bald pate, like a little star. Elisabeth was silent. If only she would say something! I thought. Nothing came. The silent ceremony went on forever. Our two little cases stood together on the pavement. Elisabeth clutched her roses to her, along with her handbag. The old fellow asked us if there was anything he could do for us. He conveyed greetings from my mother. My trunk with my spare uniform and my linens was already in the hotel. “Thank you!” I said. I observed how Elisabeth flinched and moved a little to the side. This flinching, this desertion provoked me. I told Jacques: “Accompany us to the hotel, will you! I want to talk to you still.” “Very good, sir!” he said, and he picked up our cases and toddled off after us.
“I need to have a chat with the old man!” I said to Elisabeth. “I’ll be up in half an hour!”
I went with Jacques to the café. He kept his bowler hat on his lap; gently I took it away from him, and set it on the chair next to us. All of Jacques’s tenderness seemed to flow to me from the distant, pale blue, slightly moist old eyes; it was as though my mother had left one last maternal message for me in those eyes. His gouty hands (it was a long time since I had last seen them bare, they were only ever in white gloves) trembled as they picked up his coffee cup. They were good faithful servant’s hands. Why had I never looked at them before? Blue knots sat atop the crooked joints of the fingers, the nails were flat, fissured and blunt, the bump of bone at the wrist was askew and seemed unwillingly to suffer the stiff edge of the old-fashioned cuffs, and innumerable pale-blue veins, like tiny rivulets, made their laborious way under the cracked skin of the back of the hand.
We sat in the garden of the Astoria Café. A dry, golden chestnut leaf sailed down and settled on Jacques’s bald skull; he didn’t feel it, his skin had grown leathery and insensitive; I let the leaf lie. “How old are you?” I asked him. “Seventy-eight, young master!” he replied, and I saw a single, large, yellow snaggle-tooth under the thick, white mousta
che. “It should be me going to war now, not the youngsters!” he went on. “I was there in ’66, against the Prussians, with the Fifteenth.” “Where were you born?” I asked. “In Sipolje!” said Jacques. “Do you know the Trottas?” “Of course I do, all of them!” “And can you still speak Slovene?” “I’ve forgotten, young master!”
“Half an hour!” I had told Elisabeth. I was reluctant to take out my watch. More than an hour might have passed, but I couldn’t tear myself away from Jacques’s pale blue eyes, in which dwelt his pain and my mother’s. I felt somehow as though in the space of this single hour I could atone for the past twenty-three years of my facile and loveless life, and instead of embarking on my so-called new life in the traditional manner of a newly-wed, I bent my mind to try to correct the one that was behind me. Ideally, I would have started again with my birth. It was clear to me that I had made a mess of the most important things. Too late. And now I was standing
before death and before love. For an instant — I admit — I even considered a scandalous, disgraceful ruse. I could send Elisabeth a message that I had to leave instantly for the Front. Or I could tell it to her face, embrace her, mime the despairing, the inconsolable. It was just a momentary confusion. I got over it right away.
I left the Astoria. Loyally, half a step behind me, went Jacques. Just before the entrance to the hotel, as I was about to turn and say goodbye to him, I heard a faint gurgle. I half-turned and spread my arms. The old fellow slumped against my shoulder. His bowler hat rolled over the cobbles. The hotel porter came running out. Jacques was unconscious. We carried him into the lobby. I sent for the doctor, and ran up to tell Elisabeth.