The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  There were no new incidents for the patrol during the afternoon, and no restraint on the sergeant’s daydreaming. But a thirst for unexpected rewards, for bounties, for ducats suddenly dropping into his pockets had been aroused within him. It was the thought of his first entry into the room with the mahogany furniture that was the splinter in his flesh around which his desires and lusts festered.

  When towards evening, then, as the squadron, with the horses fed and reasonably rested, was attempting to advance by a roundabout route towards Lodi and the bridge over the Adda, where they could expect to come into contact with the enemy, the sergeant saw a village with a partly ruined bell-tower that lay aside from the main road in a darkening hollow, so heated was his imagination that he found it temptingly suspicious and, signalling dragoons Holl and Scarmolin to accompany him, left the main body of the squadron to ride off into the village, hoping to surprise a general with a modest escort and attack him or somehow or other earn a quite exceptional bonus. When they reached the squalid place, which appeared deserted, he ordered Scarmolin and Holl to ride round outside the houses, the one on the left, the other on the right, whilst he, his pistol in his hand, prepared to gallop down the street. But soon, finding himself on hard flagstones, over which, moreover, some slippery, greasy substance had been poured, he was forced to rein in his horse and continue at a walk. There was a deathly hush in the village; not a child, not a bird, not a breath of air. On either side were small grubby houses from which the plaster had all flaked off; here and there something obscene had been drawn in charcoal on the bare bricks; looking in through doorposts that were devoid of paint, the sergeant saw, here and there, a lazy, half-naked figure lounging on a pallet or dragging itself about the room, as with dislocated hips. His horse seemed heavy-legged and put down its back feet as if they were made of lead. As he was turning round to check its rear shoes, shuffling footsteps emerged from a house, and when he straightened up there was a female, whose face he could not see, crossing right in front of his horse. She was only half dressed; her torn and dirty skirt was dragging in the gutter and she wore dirty slippers on her bare feet; she crossed so close in front of the horse that the breath from its nostrils ruffled the shining, greasy chignon hanging down below an old straw hat over her bare neck, but she did not hurry at all or try to avoid the rider. Two bleeding rats with their teeth sunk into each other rolled out from under a doorway on the left into the middle of the street and the one that was coming off worse gave such a pitiful squeal that the Sergeant’s horse pulled up and stared at the ground, its head to one side and breathing audibly. Slight pressure from the Sergeant’s knees set it moving again, but by that time the woman had disappeared into a house without him having been able to have a look at her face. From the next house a dog rushed out, head raised, dropped a bone in the middle of the street and tried to bury it in a gap between the flagstones. It was a grubby white bitch with drooping dugs; it scraped away with fiendish determination, then grabbed the bone in its teeth and carried it off a little way. By the time it began scraping again, three dogs had already joined it: two were very young, with soft bones and loose skin; without barking or being able bite, they pulled at each other’s chaps with their blunt teeth. The dog that had come at the same time was a light yellow greyhound whose body was so swollen its four thin legs could only carry it along very slowly. At the end of the fat body that was as taut as a drum, the head appeared much too small; its tiny, restless eyes held a horrible expression of pain and apprehension. Immediately two more dogs came running along: a skinny, white one of an exceptionally voracious ugliness, with black furrows running down from its inflamed eyes, and a half-bred dachshund with too-long legs. The latter raised its head and looked at the sergeant. It must have been very old. Its eyes were infinitely tired and sad. But the bitch scurried mindlessly back and forth in front of the rider; the two puppies snapped silently with their soft muzzles at the horse’s fetlocks, while the greyhound dragged its grotesque body close to its hooves. The bay was unable to move. The sergeant drew his pistol to shoot one of the animals, but when it did not go off, he dug in both his spurs and clattered off over the flagstones. After a few steps, however, he had to rein in sharply. His way was barred by a cow that a boy was dragging by a taut rope to the slaughter. But the cow, shrinking back at the reek of blood and the sight of the fresh skin of a black calf nailed to the doorpost, braced its feet, sucked in the sun-kissed evening air though its flared nostrils and, before the boy had time to use the rope or his stick, grabbed with a pitiful look a mouthful of the straw the sergeant had fixed to the front of his saddle. Then he had the last house of the village behind him and, riding between two low, tumbledown walls, could see the road continuing over an old, single-span stone bridge across an apparently dry ditch, but he sensed such an indescribable heaviness in his horse’s gait, such a lack of progress, that each single foot of the walls to his right and left, even each centipede and woodlouse sitting on it, crept past laboriously out of his vision, and he felt as if he had spent an immeasurable time riding through this foul village. His horse now started to breathe with a heavy, rasping sound, but he did not immediately recognise the unaccustomed noise and, as he was looking for the cause of it, at first above or beside him and then in the distance, he noticed on the other side of the stone bridge and, as it happened, at the same distance from it as himself, a soldier from his own regiment approaching, a sergeant on a bay with white socks on its front legs. As he was well aware that there was no such horse in the squadron, apart from the one on which he was himself mounted at that moment, and as he still could not recognise the face of the other rider, he impatiently spurred on his horse to a lively trot, at which the other increased his speed by the same amount, so that now they were only a stone’s throw away from each other; and then, as the two horses, each from its own side, each at the same moment, stepped onto the bridge with the same white-socked forefoot, and the sergeant, with a fixed stare recognising himself in the rider, pulled up his horse and stretched out his right hand with the fingers spread against the apparition, at which the figure, similarly reining in and raising its right hand, was suddenly no longer there, Holl and Scarmolin, looking completely unconcerned, suddenly appeared from the right and the left out of the dry ditch and at the same time, from across the pasture-land, loud and not very far off, came the squadron’s trumpets sounding the attack. Taking a rise in the ground at a full gallop, the sergeant saw the squadron already galloping towards a copse, from which enemy cavalry armed with lances was rapidly pouring out. Then, as he gathered the four loose reins in his left hand, he saw the fourth troop separate from the squadron and slow down, and now he was already galloping across the reverberating ground, already in the choking dust, already in the middle of the enemy, struck at a blue arm holding a lance, saw close beside him the Captain’s face with eyes wide open and teeth bared fiercely, then suddenly he was hemmed in all round by hostile faces and foreign uniforms, plunged into a sea of brandished swords, stabbed the nearest in the neck and off his horse, saw next to him Scarmolin, with a laugh on his face, slash the fingers off a soldier’s rein-hand and cut deep into the horse’s neck, felt the mêlée slacken, and suddenly found himself alone, on the edge of a small stream, chasing an enemy officer on a grey stallion. The officer tried to take the stream, the grey refused. The officer pulled it round, turning his young, very pale face and the mouth of a revolver towards the sergeant at the moment the point of his sabre entered his mouth, the whole force of a galloping horse concentrated in its tiny point. The sergeant pulled out his sword and grabbed, in the place where the officer’s fingers had released it as he fell, the snaffle of the grey, which lifted its hooves, lightly and delicately as a deer, over its dying master.

  As sergeant Anton Lerch rode back with his handsome prize the sun, setting into a thick haze, cast an intense red glow over the pasture-land. Even places with no hoof-marks seemed covered in pools of blood. The red glow was reflected back onto the white uniforms and laugh
ing faces, their cuirasses and saddle-cloths glistened and gleamed, and reddest of all were three small fig trees on which the laughing cavalrymen had wiped the grooves of their sabres clean. To the side of the red-stained trees stood the captain, and beside him the squadron trumpeter; his trumpet looked as if it had been dipped in red juice as he raised it to his lips and sounded the roll call. The sergeant rode past each platoon and saw that the squadron had not lost one single man and captured nine extra mounts. He rode up to the captain to report, the grey still by his side, its head raised, stepping lightly and sniffing the air like the handsome, vain young horse it was. The captain had only half an ear for his report. He beckoned over Lieutenant Count Trautsohn, who immediately dismounted and, with six dragoons who had similarly dismounted, went behind the line of the squadron to unhitch the light howitzer they had captured, and had the six men drag it to one side and drop it into a marshy place formed by the stream, after which he remounted and, first driving off the now superfluous two draught-horses by hitting them with the flat of his sword, silently resumed his place at the front of the first platoon. Whilst this was being done, the squadron, which had formed up in two sections, was not actually restless, but there was a somewhat unusual atmosphere, that might be explained by four victorious skirmishes in one day, and that surfaced in soft outbreaks of repressed laughter as well as muttered calls to each other. The horses were not standing still either, especially those which had the captured mounts inserted between them. After such good fortune all felt the space to line up in was too restricted, such victorious cavalry should be charging in open formation against new opponents, slashing at them and seizing new prize horses. At that moment the captain, Baron Rofrano, rode close up to the front of the squadron and, opening wide the large lids of his rather sleepy blue eyes, ordered clearly, though without raising his voice, ‘Release the extra mounts.’ There was a deathly hush throughout the squadron. Only the grey beside the sergeant stretched its neck and almost touched the forehead of the horse on which the captain was sitting with its nostrils. The captain put away his sabre, drew one of his pistols from its holster and, wiping away a speck of dust from the shining barrel with the hand holding the reins, repeated his order in a slightly louder voice and immediately afterwards counted ‘One’ and ‘Two.’ After he had counted ‘Two’ he fastened his clouded gaze on the sergeant, who was sitting motionless in the saddle in front of him, staring fixedly at his face. Whilst Anton Lerch’s fixed, unflinching gaze, in which there was just an occasional flicker of dog-like anguish which immediately died away, seemed to express a kind of fawning trust, which was the result of many years under the Captain’s command, it was not the immense tension of this moment which filled his consciousness, but a diverse flood of images of an alien comfort, and from depths of his being of which he himself was completely unaware there rose a bestial rage directed at the man before him who was going to take away his horse, such a terrible rage at the face, voice, posture and whole being of the man, as can only be created in some mysterious way by years of living in close proximity. Whether something similar was going on inside the captain, or whether he felt the whole silently infectious peril of critical situations was concentrated in this moment of mute insubordination is uncertain: with a casual, almost affected movement, he raised his arm and, curling his lip contemptuously, counted ‘Three.’ The shot rang out and the sergeant, hit through the forehead, slumped forward onto the neck of his horse and then fell to the ground between the bay and the grey stallion. But his body had not struck the ground before all the NCOs and men had got rid of their captured horses with a kick or a tug of the reins, and the captain, calmly putting his pistol away, was once more able to lead the squadron, still quivering as if from a bolt of lightning, against the enemy, which appeared to be rallying in the blurred, twilit distance. But the enemy declined the renewed attack, and shortly afterwards the patrol reached the southern outpost of their own army without further incident.

  The Death of Christoph Detlev Brigge of Ulsgard

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  From: The Papers of Malte Laurids Brigge

  Whenever I think of home, where there is no one left any more, then I imagine it must have been different in former times. In those days people knew (or at least they sensed) that they had death inside them, as the fruit has its seed. Children had a small death inside them, adults a large one. The women had it in their womb and the men in their chest. They had it there, and that gave them a peculiar dignity and quiet pride.

  With my grandfather, the old chamberlain, you could still tell just by looking at him that he bore his death within him. And what a death it was: it lasted for two months, and was so loud that it could be heard on the outlying parts of the estate.

  The long, narrow manor house was too small for this death, it looked as if we would have to add wings, for the chamberlain’s body grew bigger and bigger and he was constantly demanding to be carried from one room to another and would fall into a dreadful rage if the day was not yet over and there was no room left in which he had not already lain. Then off up the stairs went the whole procession – servants, maids and dogs, which he always had about him – led by the steward, into the room in which his mother had died, which had been kept exactly in the state in which she had left it, twenty-three years ago, and which no one had been allowed to enter since. The curtains were opened, and the sturdy light of a summer afternoon examined all the shy, startled objects and pirouetted clumsily in the gaping mirrors. And the people were just the same. There were lady’s maids whose curiosity was so aroused that they had no idea where their hands were, young servants who stared at everything, and old servants who went round trying to remember all the things they had been told about this locked room, where they now had the good fortune to find themselves.

  But it was the dogs above all, who seemed to be uncommonly excited at being in a room in which all the things smelt. The tall, slender Russian greyhounds ran busily to and fro behind the armchairs, traversed the chamber with their long, rocking dance-steps, stood up like dogs on a coat of arms and, resting their slim paws on the white and gold windowsill, looked with pointed, expectant faces and receding foreheads to the right and to the left down into the courtyard. Little dachshunds, the colour of new gloves, sat in the broad, silk-covered chair by the window, an expression on their faces as if everything was as usual, and a bristle-haired, grumpy-looking pointer rubbed its back against the edge of a gold-legged table whilst on the painted top the Sèvres cups trembled.

  It was a terrible time for those absent-minded, sleepy objects. It sometimes happened that books would be opened clumsily by some hasty hand and rose petals would tumble out, to be trampled underfoot; tiny, delicate things were grasped and, when they immediately broke, were quickly put back down again, some objects that had been bent were put behind curtains, or even thrown behind the golden trellis of the fireguard. And from time to time something fell, fell with a dull thud onto the carpet, with a ringing crack onto the parquet, but it broke on the spot, it shattered with a sharp crash or split almost noiselessly, for these things, pampered as they were, could not stand the least fall.

  And had it occurred to anyone to ask what was the cause of all this, what had called down this wealth of destruction on that room, that had been so anxiously guarded, then there would have been one answer alone: death.

  The death of the chamberlain, Christoph Detlev Brigge of Ulsgard. For he, bulging hugely out of his dark blue uniform, was lying in the middle of the floor and not moving. The eyes in his large, alien, unrecognisable face were closed; he did not see what was happening. At first they had tried to lay him on the bed, but he had resisted, for he had come to hate beds since those first nights in which his illness had grown. Also, the bed up in that room had turned out to be too small, and there had been nothing left for it but to put him down on the carpet; he had refused to go downstairs again.