The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  The dead Emperor’s withered old body even lay between us in bed that evening. We would normally have fallen into one another’s arms with joy. I had been away for two months now and I had been scrupulously faithful to my wedding vows. But when we held one another it was not the embrace of lovers reunited so much as the clinging together of two children lost in a dark wood.

  “Oh Otto,” she said at last, “is it my lump? There, let me move over if it gets in the way.”

  “No dearest, it’s not that.”

  “Why, don’t you like pregnant ladies then?”

  “It’s not that either: you know you’re more beautiful to me now than ever. No, I don’t know why . . .”

  She gazed into my eyes. “Oh surely not. You don’t mean you’re up­set over the Old Man? Really, I don’t believe it: not in the twentieth century, surely.”

  “It’s not that, Liserl, not really. But try to understand: I’ve been a ser­vant of the House of Austria for sixteen years now, and I’ve hardly ever met anyone who could remember when the old boy wasn’t Emperor. I don’t know why, but it just makes me feel odd inside. Perhaps it’s the war and all I’ve seen these past four months. But I’m still bound by oath to the House of Habsburg.”

  “And you’re bound by oath to me, and to the child you’ve planted inside me.” She took my hand and placed it on her satin-smooth belly. “There, feel. It’s life in there: a living child who’ll be breathing in a few months and walking not long after that. Why grieve for the dead? There’s simply too many of them: the whole of Europe turned into one vast bone- yard by Franz Joseph and his like. Let all the kings and generals rot, like the millions of young men they’ve sent to moulder into the earth. Come my Maria-Theresien Ritter, forget about Maria Theresa and Franz Joseph and all the dead emperors and dying empires. Long live life! Let’s make love and create a dozen children: it’s the only way people like us can get back at the rotten sods.”

  “Liserl, are you quite mad? Have you no respect for the departed, to talk like that? ”

  She laughed. “Yes, I think perhaps I am a little crazy now. After what I’ve had to look at these past two years I’m not surprised: all the maimed bodies and damaged minds. Respect for the departed? If we could I’d take you now to Schonbrunn and make love on top of his coffin.”

  In the years since, I must have read or listened to several dozen eye-witness accounts of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph. I am sure that you too will be familiar with the solemn pageantry of that grey November day; the muffled hoofs of the horses; the nodding black plumes on the cata­falque; the thirty-four reigning monarchs following bare-headed behind the hearse as the cortege wound its way along streets lined with stunned, grieving people; and of course the traditional exchange at the door of the Capuchin Crypt:

  “Who seeks to enter? ”

  The Court Chamberlain reeling off the Emperor’s name and his fifty or sixty titles. Then the reply:

  “We know of none such here. I ask again, who seeks to enter?” “Franz Joseph, a poor servant of God seeking burial.”

  “Enter then,” and the doors slowly swinging open to admit the coffin. No, I shall not bother you yet again by giving a detailed account of what happened. I have found that the aforementioned eye-witness ac­counts usually come either from people who were not there at all, or who were tiny children at the time, or who could not possibly have seen more than a small part of the ceremony if they were indeed present. The reports generally disagree on certain major details, while in other particulars they often show unmistakable signs of having been cribbed one from another. In any case, they almost always compress the two funeral processions into one: the cortege along the Mariahilferstrasse from Schonbrunn on 27 November, and the shorter journey three days later through the Karntnerstrasse to the Capuchin Crypt after the lying in state in St Stephen’s Cathedral.

  As to the famous traditional exchange outside the crypt, by the way, while I hate to cast doubt upon a cherished legend, I once discussed this in detail with a Polish general, the very soul of veracity, while we were sitting in a shelter near Victoria Station during a prolonged and noisy air-raid one night in 1941. He had actually been within earshot of the crypt door that day, as a young Rittmeister in an Uhlan regiment, and he assured me upon his honour that no such ritual ever took place. He thought that it might once have done, perhaps back in the eighteenth century; but certainly by 1916 it had long since fallen into disuse. As to the thirty-four crowned heads, neither of us had the slightest idea how that total had been calculated. True, the usual mob of small-time German royalty had turned up—probably more for a free meal than anything else—but Kaiser Wilhelm had pleaded other engagements and there was a war on, so in the end only Ferdinand of Bulgaria had appeared for the non-German monarchies.

  The other reason for my not wishing to bore you with yet another account of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph is the simple fact that I was not actually present at either part of the ceremony. I had been due to walk in the cortege from Schonbrunn on the 27th, representing the Knights of the Military Order of Maria Theresa; but at the very last moment I had received a telephone call instructing me to report imme­diately to Aspern flying field. It appeared that the Italian poet-aviator and daredevil Gabriele d’Annunzio had given a newspaper interview in which he had announced his intention of flying to Vienna on the day and bombing the catafalque as it passed through the streets, hoping thus to distribute the Emperor’s embalmed remains among his griev­ing subjects. As an airman I found the whole idea quite preposterous: if d’Annunzio was prepared to fly a six-hour round trip across the Alps and back in winter then in my opinion he was even more intrepid than the Italian press made him out to be. But the local military command had taken alarm and a scratch air-defence squadron had been assembled at Aspern from aircraft out of the workshops and a collection of test-pilots and convalescents. So that is how I spent the afternoon of 27 November, sitting on the field at Aspern in the cockpit of a Brandenburger waiting for the telephone to ring. We were not finally stood down until dusk, so I missed it all.

  As to the interment itself, it was the last day of my leave and my pres­ence had not been requested either in the procession or as a pilot. The weather was fine for Vienna in late November, so Elisabeth and I decided to take advantage of the fact that the trams were running and spend the day walking in the Wienerwald: not far, because her waist was beginning to get cumbersome, but enough to get some fresh air and just be together alone before I returned to duty. We kicked up the autumn leaves as we walked arm in arm along the woodland paths, talking of this and that and just luxuriating in one another’s nearness. We drank tea in a little cafe near Grinzing, then climbed up on to the wooded Kahlenberg to look out over the distant city. Despite the anaemic sunshine a light November mist filled the bowl in which Vienna lies, so that only the needle spire of the cathe­dral and a couple of the higher buildings protruded from the golden haze. Then it began, drifting up to us where we sat: the tolling of all the city’s remaining church bells. And above them all rang the sonorous booming of the Pummerin, the great bell of the cathedral cast from Turkish can­non captured in 1683. We both tried hard not to be affected by it all, but it would have taken a heart of granite not to be moved by the sound of a venerable and once-great empire pulling its own passing-bell. We did not speak to one another: there was no need. We merely sat holding hands, acutely aware that the world in which we had been born and grown up was now slipping away for ever.

  When it was all over, after a quarter of an hour or so when the last tolling had died away, we got up to make our way home while the trams were still running. As we descended the slope of the hill through the beech woods we saw that others had also given the funeral of their late master a miss. Ragged and thin-faced, dressed in sacking and fragments of army uniform, women and children from the Vienna slums were out gathering wood to keep themselves warm—and berries and mushrooms to eat.

  I returned to Pola that evening to catc
h the boat for Lussin. On my way to the Sudbahnhof I had made a detour to a military outfitters on the Graben, then to the Marine Section of the War Ministry on the Zollamt- strasse to collect a small parcel. Before I kissed Elisabeth goodbye on the station platform I had gone into a cloakroom and removed the Fjl rosette from my cap, replacing it with one purchased that afternoon. It was em­broidered in a dubious-looking wartime gold thread and read simply Kl, cipher of our new Emperor Karl the First—or Karl the Last, as people were already calling him. The parcel contained similar rosettes for my brother-officers at Lussin, and also forty or so of the other-ranks version: a disc of black-japanned metal with the letters embossed in gilt.

  We held the oath-taking ceremony the morning after I got back: put on our best uniforms and paraded in the December drizzle, caps under left arms and right hands raised with first and second fingers together, stand­ing before our commanding officer dozing in a chair, a military chaplain and a petty officer bearing the red-white-red naval ensign on a staff. There we swore undying loyalty to our prince and lord Karl, by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Croatia . . . and so on through a list of thirty-something fairy-book titles like Illyria and Lodomeria, finishing for good measure with “. . . and King of Jerusalem.” Mass was celebrated by the chaplain. Then the Petty Officer roared “Abtreten sofort!” Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch woke with a start to enquire what was the matter, we dispersed to our duties, and that was that: the Emperor was dead, long live the Emperor.

  I was called from the Adjutant’s office half an hour later. There was trouble in the ratings’ mess hut and would I please come over, since they wished to see an officer? I put my cap and sword on and hurried across the rain-lashed square of cinders. I entered the hut to be greeted by si­lence. The men did not rise to attention but sat at the trestle tables, plates before them. I was met by that month’s president of the messing com­mission, a Slovak telegraphist rating called Kucar. He stood stony-faced, holding out a plate bearing two oblong slabs of gritty-looking yellowish- grey substance.

  “Well Kucar, what’s the trouble? Why aren’t the men eating their dinner? ”

  “Obediently report that we aren’t going to eat this stuff, Herr Schiffs- leutnant. It’s polenta.”

  I looked closely at the unappetising slabs on the plate. It was indeed polenta, that sad pudding of boiled corn-meal that weighs down so many a table in northern Italy. As an accompaniment to something else—for example fried and served with jugged hare in Friuli—polenta is at least tolerable, if an acquired taste, by which I mean that it is rather horrid but that one can get hardened to it in time. But served on its own it is undeni­ably a most depressing dish, rather like cold slices of congealed porridge only with less flavour. I prodded it with my finger.

  “Nonsense Kucar, that’s perfectly good polenta.”

  “With respect Herr Schiffsleutnant, we couldn’t care less whether it’s perfectly good or perfectly bad: it’s polenta and we’re not going to eat it. Only the shit-poor eat polenta.”

  And he was more or less right there of course: along the Dalmatian coast poverty and polenta went together like twin brothers. For the people of the port towns and the islands the consumption of polenta marked the final slide into indigence, rather as eating horsemeat would for the English or setting down black-eye peas and chitterlings in front of poor white people in Mississippi. In the end we had to get the Proviantmeister to open his stores and serve out bread and bacon to the men. But there would come a time not very far into the future when they would eat even polenta and be glad of it.

  16 LAST FLIGHT

  Fregattenleutnant Franz Nechledil and I made our first flight on behalf of the Emperor Karl on the morning of 4 December. For once it was not the usual business of convoy es­cort. We had been preparing to take off on the customary Lunga-and-back run, but at the last moment an orderly came running from the air-station Kanzlei hut. A telephone call had just been received from the Naval Air Station at Pola, our parent unit. One of their flying-boats had reported sight­ing a submarine about thirty miles west of Sansego Island. The aeroplane had been returning to Pola and was running low on petrol, and had anyway lost contact with the mystery vessel in a rain squall. Now we were to fly out and see whether we could catch the thing unawares before it gave us the slip. Our convoy escort would be taken over by an aeroplane from Fiume.

  Well, we were bombed-up and ready for submarine hunting, so what were we waiting for? I doubted very much whether we would catch the prowler, who would certainly have sighted the Pola aeroplane and turned around if he had any sense at all. But this promised to be a welcome break from the monotony of circling endlessly above a flock of worn-out mer­chant steamers. Submarines, I knew from experience, had a way of turn­ing out to be floating logs or dolphins or upturned lifeboats; but there was always just a slim chance that one day it might be the real thing. As Nechledil warmed up the engine I turned quickly to check the four anti­submarine bombs slung beneath the wings just behind the cockpit. They were 20kg contact-fuse bombs, but with an additional calcium fuse which would detonate them at about four metres’ depth if the submarine had dived by the time they hit the water. One of them exploding alongside would be quite enough to do for any submarine afloat.

  We arrived in the search area about 8:30. The cloud had lifted some­what, but occasional curtains of drizzle still drifted slowly across the winter sea. For over an hour we quartered and requartered the twenty- kilometre square where I thought the submarine might be lurking, hav­ing first circled it several times to make sure that the thing was not trying to escape on the surface, where its speed would be much higher. I tried to work out what I would do as a U-Boat commander if I thought that an aeroplane was prowling above me: probably idle around at a couple of knots about ten metres below the surface, conserving batteries as much as possible and hoping that the aeroplane would run low on fuel and patience after about an hour and go home. As for us, our only chance of getting at him would be if he came up to periscope depth and lay there, dimly visible from above like a pike lurking just below the surface of a pond. In that case we had him: prismatic periscopes to search the sky for aircraft were still well into the future in 1916, and if our luck was in, the first that he would know of our presence would be the crash of a bomb alongside and the sudden rush of water as the hull plating blew in.

  We were flying about fifty metres up as I scanned the sea through my binoculars. We reached the end of one of our sweeps and turned to make the next one, like a man ploughing a field. Suddenly Nechledil caught my arm and pointed excitedly below. I leant over him at the controls to look. It was an oil slick, spreading across the surface of the sea and reflecting the pallid light with the iridescent gleam of a peacock’s feather. Well, that settled it: our submarine was somewhere below us with one of his tanks seeping oil. All that we had to do now was to track him until he came up to the surface. I checked our petrol gauge: three-quarters full. That gave us a good four hours. We were both filled now with the lust of the chase. As for myself, I was determined if need be to follow him like a bloodhound until our tanks ran dry, even if it meant landing on the sea and being towed back in. I was not going to let a chance like this pass us by because of any old-womanish concern about getting back home after­wards. Nechledil checked the compass bearing as I tapped out a message: “L149—8:56 a.m.—Field 167—Just sighted oil slick from submarine. In pursuit. Send assistance.” A few minutes later back came the reply, “Good luck and good hunting. Torpedo-boat on way from Lussin.”

  By now we were intent on following the oil slick. It could only be coming from a submarine, spreading across the sea like a snail track, mile after mile, marking on the surface the boat’s silent progress down in the depths. We held our breath, expecting any moment to see the dim outline as the vessel came up to take a look around. But after some forty minutes of this, doubts began to creep in. Surely we had flown over that patch of seaweed before? I checked the compass bea
ring. The same thought had just occurred to Nechledil, and I saw him peer as well at his notepad, then at the compass on the dashboard. The realisation hit us both at the same moment: that for the past three-quarters of an hour we had in fact been flying round and round in the same huge circle about four miles across, by now on about our eighth or ninth lap. I glanced astern—and saw to my horror what was the real cause of the circular oil slick! A thin black dribble was trickling from beneath the engine and being blown astern by the slipstream to be beaten to spray by the propeller. We had been follow­ing our own track, like a dog chasing a tin can tied to its tail.

  I stared at the oil-pressure gauge—and saw that the pointer had dropped almost to zero. The Mercedes 160hp engine contained eight litres of oil in its sump and had a fresh oil tank in the upper wing contain­ing a further sixteen litres. A pump sucked oil out of this tank at each turn of the crankshaft and returned an equal amount of used oil back into the tank. The drain-tap beneath the sump had clearly shaken itself open in flight, so that instead of circulating the oil, the pump was squirting out a little of the engine’s heart’s blood at each stroke. It was too late to do anything now: after an hour or more of this both sump and tank must be nearly dry. I checked the cooling-water thermometer and saw that it was nearly boiling as the engine overheated. Already I heard it beginning to seize up. The best that we could do now was to thank the kind fates that we were in a flying-boat and that there was only a light swell running: also that there was a torpedo-boat already on its way.