‘Mariella is doing well, isn’t she?’ he said. ‘It’s the soup, I think, not the medicine.’
‘Would you like some?’ asked Pia.
‘Thank you, I would,’ he said, ‘though I don’t think it will make me as pretty as Mariella.’
Mariella giggled. He patted her hand and went back to his room. Pia called to him as he reached the door.
‘You would really like some soup now?’
‘If it’s to spare. Then I shall go to bed.’
She knew what it was like in ordinary times out there on those precipitous slopes, that it must be far worse as a theatre of war. She was an Austrian subject, but her sympathies were all with the Italian troops. But it was suddenly difficult to look into the face of this man who had been fighting the mountains and the Italians for years. It was all in his eyes. Again she felt the weakness of compassion. His empire was battling for its life and he was asking only for some hot soup.
‘I will bring it myself,’ she said.
She hurried downstairs and hustled Maria into filling a bowl from the saucepan simmering on the stove. It must be just right, she said. She would taste it and did, making Maria grumble that no one had ever had to taste her soups before. Pia patted her arm and said it was delicious. It must be put on its plate on a tray, with a fresh napkin—
‘I know, I know,’ said Maria, ‘but whether she’ll want it, however much we fuss, I don’t know. She had some only half an hour ago.’
‘It’s for Major Korvacs, not Mariella,’ said Pia and astonished Maria by taking it up herself, for everyone knew the last person Pia Amaraldi would run about for was an Austrian officer.
Carl was already in bed, sitting up but leaning back, his hands behind his head, his eyes on the ceiling.
‘Thank you,’ he said as she put the tray down on the bedside table.
‘It’s very hot,’ she said and wondered why she felt she would like to stay and talk to him.
‘Thank you,’ he said again. He was so detached she felt absurdly offended. She swept stiffly out.
He slept well, up to the dinner hour and past it. Pia suggested to her mother that they put the meal time back. Her mother pointed out it was already back and that Maria wanted to go home.
‘Should we wake him?’ asked Pia.
‘Let him sleep.’
‘But he should have something to eat.’
‘You’re concerned for him?’ Signora Amaraldi raised a dark eyebrow.
‘Mama, I’m not as unsympathetic as you imagine. It’s not against my principles to have Major Korvacs eat a little food.’
‘Good,’ said Signora Amaraldi.
Corporal Jaafe arrived from the barracks, refreshed after several hours’ sleep. Pia asked him to go up and see whether Major Korvacs was awake and whether he wished to dine. Jaafe went up and came down again. Major Korvacs, he said, presented his compliments and apologies, the ladies were to proceed with their meal and he would go down to the officers’ club later. He would have a light meal there.
Mariella having had her meal off a tray upstairs, Pia and her mother dined alone. Pia was simmering with resentment.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked her mother.
‘What’s wrong with our food, that’s more to the point,’ said Pia.
‘I’ve known better,’ said her mother, ‘but so has everyone else.’
‘It isn’t that,’ said Pia, ‘it’s because we’re proud to be Italian. So he would rather not eat our food.’
‘He was grateful for the soup, wasn’t he?’ Signora Amaraldi looked sensibly at the matter. ‘And he has sat down with us at other times.’
Pia shrugged very expressively. She had said all she wanted to say.
Her mother looked at her with a smile when Carl appeared for breakfast the next morning. He was spruce, polite. Signora Amaraldi exchanged some pleasant words with him, but Pia was more polite than he was, refraining from bothering him at all. She did, however, ask him aloofly in the end if he enjoyed his meal at the officers’ club last night.
‘I ate it,’ said Carl, observing a portrait that hung on the wall behind her. It was of a rosy face and black beard. Another relative, no doubt. ‘It wasn’t the worst meal I’ve had, but very near it. The best meals I’ve had in a year have been here.’
‘Oh!’ Pia’s little exclamation of self-reproach was almost anguished.
Her mother said calmly, ‘But, Major Korvacs, our food is so modest.’
‘So it is everywhere,’ said Carl, ‘but here you manage to make it enjoyable.’ He looked at Pia, whose mouth was trembling. ‘Have I said anything to offend you, signorina?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I am upset through my own fault. I thought you chose not to dine with us last night because you had found us too Italian.’
Carl’s darkly tanned face expressed mild astonishment.
‘Our argument?’ he said, stirring his coffee substitute. ‘There are all kinds of arguments these days. None of them means very much to me. Not compared with the argument of war. That takes up all my interest. When it’s over I wish only to go home and mind my own business for the rest of my life. If other people still have arguments to settle, I ask only that they leave me out of them. I did not dine with you last night because it would have meant keeping you waiting. You have your times for your meals and I don’t wish you to alter them to suit me.’
‘But you had been out there on those mountains,’ said Pia. ‘We did not mind waiting. Mama will tell you so.’
Signora Amaraldi would have liked to advise her daughter not to press the matter. It was so obviously not important to Major Korvacs.
‘Signorina,’ he said, ‘I appreciate your kindness, but it’s quite wrong to think I did not want to dine with you.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Pia quietly.
He remembered something.
‘The soup was excellent,’ he said.
‘Oh, the soup, yes,’ she said.
He asked how Mariella was and if he could see her before he went out.
‘She is almost herself again,’ said Signora Amaraldi, ‘and she will like to have you look in on her.’ After he had gone upstairs she said to Pia, ‘Why are you so upset?’
‘Who is upset?’ Pia was quickly on the defensive.
‘First you’re silly and unfriendly, now you don’t know what to be. You’re used to men flattering you. Major Korvacs is too frank for you one day, too casual the next.’
‘Mama, I simply wish he would go. I’m all nerves while he’s here.’
‘But he spends little time in the house and you’ve not been troubled by your nerves before. Well, he’ll be gone soon enough, I expect. Those guns sounded so angry yesterday that I shouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had blown him up. That would have settled your nerves, girl.’
‘Oh, that’s a wicked thing to say,’ said Pia in distress.
‘But isn’t that what you like, hearing about Austrians being blown up?’
‘Stop it!’ cried Pia.
‘Major Korvacs isn’t going to live for ever. None of them do. He’s already a man on borrowed time.’
‘Stop it!’
‘I tell you, girl,’ said Signora Amaraldi warningly, ‘no one is going to get much out of this war. Your father thinks we will enter paradise if the Italians win. Paradise, ha! It’s likely that the soldiers who have died will be better off than some of those who survive. There’s a look about Major Korvacs. Perhaps that is what he is thinking.’
‘Mama, what are you doing?’ cried Pia. ‘You’re hurting me. I won’t listen, I won’t.’ And she flung her napkin down and rushed from the room. It left her mother wondering if Pia was at last finding there was more to life than Italian patriotism. Major Korvacs was a disturbing man. Some women would want to break down that hard shell of his.
Mariella told Pia that she would like Major Korvacs to be her best friend. Pia responded by telling Mariella not to be silly.
‘He’s Austrian, remem
ber,’ she said, vigorously reshaping the girl’s pillows.
‘He’s nice,’ said Mariella.
‘He’s arrogant.’
‘He isn’t.’
‘He has beastly cold eyes.’
‘No.’ Mariella’s eyes began to brim. Pia swooped, put her arms around her sister and hugged her.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mariella. There, forgive me, it’s my stupid nerves. He’s quite nice, yes, but it’s no good wanting him for your friend, he’ll be gone soon.’
‘Yes, he’ll go back to the war.’
‘So you see, then?’
‘Why don’t you like him, Pia?’ The young brown eyes were searching.
‘It’s not that. You know what it is. And I don’t like him talking so much with you.’
‘I won’t say anything,’ said Mariella, sinking comfortably back on the puffed-up pillows. The Madonna, pictured in sombre tints except for the glowing halo, looked down on her.
‘Yes, but we had soldiers here once, looking. We don’t want them again, do we?’
‘Oh, no. Can I get up later?’
‘We’ll see,’ smiled Pia.
Chapter Five
The day was fine. But Austria was reeling. And to make things worse, the Italians in concert with the British were attacking along the line of the Piave. Some units had crossed the river. The whole of the Tyrol, the southern bastion of the empire, was in jeopardy. At which the Austrians in Oberstein made a typical gesture of gay defiance. An orchestra of regimental musicians took over the town bandstand and in the bright morning sunshine played the popular airs of Vienna. The music drew soldiers and civilians alike. It was splendidly melodious, full of infectious Austrian bravura, and it made the listeners, Austrian and Italian, tap their feet.
Carl, hearing it, strolled into the little square. The bandstand, its octagonal roof shining in the light, was alive with the colour of uniforms, the glitter of instruments and the lilt of music. He stopped on the edge of the crowd to listen. The sky was palely blue, the Alpine sun warm, and the absurdly brave melody was like sparkling light in a world dark with suffering.
He had never consciously dwelt on what the masters of light music meant to Vienna and Austria. Their compositions had been part of so much else one took for granted. The Strausses were indivisible from everyday Vienna. So had been the imperishable Franz Josef, who had perished, after all. So had been the beauty of the Ringstrasse at night and the loveliness of elegant women.
He stood, he listened and he remembered.
He remembered the extravagant excitement of crowded life, the reckless devouring of days because the years seemed inexhaustible, and the splendour of his parents at a Hofburg ball. The endearing charm of his sisters. It all seemed so long ago. But how permanent in its magnificence had the empire appeared to be then. How merciless now was the Allied desire to destroy it. Only Franz Josef, whose imagination inspired the Ringstrasse, had known how to keep the empire in being. What would follow its disintegration Carl did not know. Nothing that could match it, he thought. He smiled to himself. It was on the cards that if he lived to be an old man he would bore the young with tales of things he had never really noticed when he was young himself.
They were playing ‘Vienna Woods’ now. It was descriptive, it was also sad and bitter-sweet. He had never before realized the haunting quality of Johann Strauss’s music, he supposed he had never really listened to it in the past. It had never been more than a pleasant accompaniment to happenings, to the flirtatious smile in the eyes of a girl or the laughter of his sisters.
Anne and Sophie. He wished them well.
Carl felt an intense desire to start again, to go back, to undo all that had happened since that day in Sarajevo, to have the world as it had been then, for all its faults. But, of course, in that world he had been one of the privileged. In today’s world he was faced by the fact that Austria was losing the war. And whatever the outcome, however intense one’s wish, nothing would ever be the same. He himself would never be the same, and even a mechanical marvel like the Benz would become utilitarian. Millions might benefit from the change, but thousands would be unable to adapt themselves to the new world or cease to regret the demise of the old.
He felt so old, though he was not yet thirty. He had seen so many comrades die, so many enemies fall. One went to war a naive young man and in the first battle became a seared old one. After the first battle one felt there could never be others like it, but there were, and with each battle the body and the mind both grew their armour.
He turned, brushing the arm of a young woman in a dark blue coat and hat. He murmured an apology. She saw his face beneath his cap, his features a finely drawn sadness, his eyes grey with the years he had lost. It made Pia catch her breath a little. And he was looking at her and not even seeing her.
‘Major Korvacs?’
Yes, that was his name. He had contrived to drop the use of ‘von’.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, recognizing her.
‘You were dreaming,’ said Pia, who looked a warm glow of wideawake life herself.
‘Not of anything important.’ His smile was polite. ‘Will you listen to that? They’re finishing with the Radetzky March.’
He laughed. There they were, the empire’s bandsmen, with Austria almost on her knees, playing the march composed by Strauss the father in honour of Marshal Radetzky for his great victory over Italy in 1849. That was the final trumpet note of defiance by Austria in this Italian-dominated region of the Tyrol.
It upset Pia. It upset her because it was so futile, because he was able to laugh with defeat staring him in the face and she could not, despite the promise of Italian victory.
‘You are laughing at nothing,’ she said.
‘We’re still sitting on our side of the pass. That’s not nothing. Are you shopping, signorina?’
He had come round to calling her that and not fräulein, she noticed.
‘No.’ She had no bag so could not say she was. Her outing had no real purpose to it. She had left the house because she was so restless. ‘There’s not much to shop for, is there?’
‘Ah,’ said Carl as he stood in the sunshine with her, ‘but when Italy takes over an abundance of goods and riches will fill the shops, and who knows, everything may even be free. Only to good Italians, of course.’
The music was behind them as they moved out of the square, the last notes of the march hanging in the air. Pia, flushed with anger, said, ‘Please spare me your burning arrows, you are not the only one to have found war cruel and unkind.’
‘Oh, it isn’t over yet,’ said Carl, ‘we may yet confound the Jeremiahs. Since you aren’t shopping, Signorina Amaraldi, will you join me in a cognac?’
‘Do you wish to drink with someone you dislike so much?’ she asked bitterly.
‘I’m afraid you are suffering from my bad manners,’ said Carl, ‘I’ve forgotten how to be civilized. I don’t ask you to forgive me but to take no notice. A man sorry for himself should have his self-pity ignored. It’s the best way to bring him out of it. You’re not a person anyone could dislike. There, that is a respectable café and we might have a cognac there. Signorina?’
She did not answer, though she walked with him to the café and sat down with him in the sunshine. The vista of mountains and sky was washed in white and blue, and the snow-capped roofs of the houses were brilliant. Carl ordered cognac, then asked Pia if that was what she wanted.
‘I should not dare to say no,’ she said stiffly, ‘I don’t like having my head bitten off.’
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ said Carl. ‘You and I have a frank understanding of each other. We established our clearly divided relationship on the day we met. You have been rude to me and I—’
‘I have not!’ She was so angry that it almost shocked her.
‘Very well, signorina.’ Carl regarded her thoughtfully. Her temper made her eyes look fiercely luminous. Her blue fur hat had a ridiculous feather stuck in it. Her mouth was moistly mutinous. R
eady to spit? She was not like Anne or Sophie. She was lushly, smoulderingly Italian. He supposed some men liked that type. ‘Shall we simply accept that we’ve been a little intolerant of each other and that we’ll set the world a good example by leaving it at that? Signorina, a feather in a fur hat, that’s the fashion now?’
Furious, she flushed, ‘How dare you!’ To be ridiculed on top of everything else was too much.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Carl.
‘What is wrong with it?’
‘Wrong? Nothing,’ said Carl, ‘the feather makes the hat look delicious. Quite the thing when everything else is so dire. Ah, the cognac.’ The waiter set the glasses down. Pia, fury reduced to confusion, stared helplessly into Carl’s eyes as he said, ‘What shall we drink to, signorina?’
‘I don’t drink cognac in public,’ said Pia.
Carl called the waiter back. Pia asked for a glass of white wine. Carl tipped the unwanted brandy into his own glass.
‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ he asked.
‘You gave me no chance. You were too busy cutting me down.’
‘What a miserable devil I am,’ said Carl, but she thought for once that his bleak eyes held a glint of amusement. The light was on his face. And Pia felt a sense of shock at her reaction. She dropped her eyes, her gloved hands clasped tightly in her lap. The wine came. She took it up. Her body felt heated. The wine danced palely and pictures shimmered on its surface. She realized her hand was trembling.
‘Signorina, what then shall we drink to?’ His voice re-engaged her consciousness.
‘Major Korvacs, please let us be friends.’
‘We are friends, then,’ said Carl, ‘let us drink to that.’
He sipped his cognac, she her wine.
‘Your family, they live in Vienna?’ she asked.
‘My family?’
‘Your wife?’ she said, eyes on her glass.
‘My wife?’ He seemed curious. ‘You’re interested in my wife?’
The Longest Winter Page 29