by Leo Perutz
Emperger was late. He appeared on the platform only minutes before the train pulled out, waving and smiling as he came. Agreeably surprised to find Vit¬torin in the company of a young woman, he kissed Franzi's fingertips with exaggerated gallantry.
The three of them stood outside the compartment in which Vit¬torin had successfully battled for his seats.
"It was a real struggle to get here in time," Emperger reported. "I'm much too much in demand, I'm afraid. At half-past ten I had to collect a young lady from the opera and escort her home - not my type at all, incidentally, but one can't shirk one's obligations. She lives in the suburbs, to make matters worse, but luckily I borrowed a car. Some friends are expecting me at twelve. I simply couldn't cry off- one doesn't like to hurt people's feelings. And so it goes on, night after night. It's a mystery to me how I ever manage to get any sleep."
In token that he really wasn't exaggerating, Emperger loosened his silk scarf to reveal the dinner-jacket under his opera cloak.
Vit¬torin drew him aside.
"Will you inform the others that I've gone to Moscow?" he asked.
"Of course, tomorrow without fail," Emperger assured him. "That's to say, I'm rather out of contact with the Professor. Incredible how quickly one loses touch with people -it's simply that they all have interests of their own. So you're really serious, eh? You're off to Russia to carry on the war single-handed, pour ainsi dire. My respects, Vit¬torin, I envy your determination and strength of character. As to the practical value of your mission, everyone's entitled to his own opinion ..."
A menacing scowl appeared on Vit¬torin's face.
"But speaking for myself," Emperger said hastily, "I'm behind you all the way. A man's word is his bond, and when I think what that swine Selyukov . . . What a delightful girlfriend you have, Vit¬torin - a pleasure to behold. A recent acquisition? I congratulate you on your good taste, anyway. From the way you spoke, I always assumed you were a recluse."
Vit¬torin had ceased to listen. In his mind's eye, he had just brushed past Grisha, Selyukov's orderly, and marched into the staff captain's office to demand satisfaction. He could picture the uniform, the St George's Cross, the cigarette between the slender, faintly tanned fingers, the smoke rings, the fire on the hearth, the books on the desk. All these he could visualize quite clearly, but Selyukov's face remained vague and insubstantial. He searched his memory in vain: he had forgotten the face of his mortal foe. Just as this agonizing realization dawned on him, the locomotive emitted a shrill whistle. He jumped on to the step and the train got under way. Franzi clung to his hand for a moment longer.
"Will you write to me?" she asked, sounding as if she had just emerged from the depths of a dream.
"I'll write you from Moscow," he called. He felt a sudden, burning desire to say something loving and affectionate, but the distance between them was already infinite.
He lingered on the step. It struck him as odd that the other two, who had only met a few minutes ago, should be standing side by side and waving to him as if they belonged together, but he didn't dwell on the thought. He turned away, content beyond measure to be leaving a city in which his life had become no more than a shadowy limbo.
He made his way to the compartment. Kohout was already there and had put his army suitcase, which was adorned with painted tulips and roses, on the luggage rack.
"Well, that's that," said Kohout. He drew a deep breath and mopped his perspiring brow. "All's well. We'll be over the border in another few hours."
Emperger insisted on driving Franzi home. It would give him the greatest pleasure, he assured her. He had time enough, and besides, he wasn't in the habit of letting young women walk home unescorted at this late hour.
Franzi remained thoroughly monosyllabic, so the task of making conversation devolved on him alone. He shone a torch in her face, pointed to her eyes, and quoted Shakespeare:
Here did she fall a tear. Here in this place
I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace . . .
Seeing that she knew no English, he changed the subject. He was on the threshold of a brilliant career in banking, he announced. He might even have a car of his own in a few months' time - quite something, eh? - but hadn't yet decided on any particular make. He had a nice little bachelor apartment, not that he was entirely satisfied with it, of course - he needed more room for his books, and besides, one liked to spread oneself- but it wasn't easy to find anything suitable in these dreary, Bolshevik-ridden days. He was no bourgeois - far from it: he found the right-wing politicos a trifle stupid, and he certainly wasn't "behind the times" - he used the English phrase - but he could not raise any enthusiasm for the left-wing extremists either.
Franzi was then informed that he had until recently been involved with an actress - a very well-known one, what was more. Relationships of that kind had their drawbacks, of course. Celebrated artistes tended to be capricious and one didn't always find it easy to indulge their more outrageous whims, so he'd broken it off with her. But although he was in the thick of society life - never a day without some invitation or other - he often felt extremely lonely.
When they pulled up outside Franzi's apartment, Emperger told her that he didn't really feel like going on to his party after all. To put it crudely, the people who were expecting him could lump it. He thought it would be far more amusing to go to a bar - in congenial company, of course, because drinking alone was no fun. Although his manner cooled perceptibly when Franzi ignored this hint, he prefaced his farewells by asking permission to look her up from time to time in his friend Vit¬torin's absence, inquired where she worked during the day, and made a note of her telephone number.
Once upstairs in the living-room Franzi slumped into a chair, buried her face in her hands, and wept with noisy abandon. Racked with sobs, she gave free rein to her bitter disappointment. At length, feeling better, she wiped away her tears and went over to the mirror, where she inspected her red and swollen eyes with a kind of wry satisfaction.
A defiant, despairing exuberance overcame her. She yearned for a wild orgy, a frenzied, self-destructive bacchanalia. Her eyes still brimming with tears, she hurried to the kitchen and made a bowl of punch. When it was standing ready on the table, she played the gramophone with a total disregard for the neighbours, who were, she told herself, welcome to hear what a good time she was having. And while the gramophone churned out operetta hits, jazz, and the overture from Die Meistersinger, she chain-smoked and drank punch - glass after glass of it - even though it turned out that she'd forgotten to add any sugar.
What with all the punch she'd drunk and all the crying she'd done, Franzi became drowsy. Around two in the morning she fell asleep on the sofa, fully dressed, between the Baron and the young man from Agram, whose umbrella had slid to the floor.
The train pulled into the frontier station three hours late. Vit¬torin awoke from a restless sleep, aching in every limb, to find that Kohout had climbed on the seat and was getting his case down.
"Where are we?" he asked, still half dreaming. "What time is it?"
"Five a.m.," Kohout replied hoarsely. "Neither night nor day. I've got a headache - do I look as if I hadn't slept a wink? Hurry up, we have to get out here. Passport control, customs inspection."
Carrying their luggage, they trudged across the track and joined a long line of waiting figures. The queue progressed slowly, step by step. The man at the door admitted only a handful of passengers at a time.
"Got any cigarettes with you?" Kohout whispered. "Here, stick a few of mine in your pocket. Twenty's the limit, and I don't want any trouble."
They had to wait half an hour before their turn came. The immigration officer was sitting in a kind of booth just inside the door. Kohout handed him his passport and stood there hunched up against the cold.
The official took the passport and studied the particulars. He glanced at Kohout's face for a moment and exchanged a few words with a uniformed figure beside him, then pointed to a bench in the background.
"Go over there and wait," he said.
Kohout turned as white as the wall.
"But my suitcase," he stammered. "I have to get it checked by customs. What's the matter?"
"You'll find out in due course," the official said calmly. "Go over there and wait for me."
"What's wrong?" Vit¬torin demanded anxiously. "Aren't our passports in order? We're together."
The man looked up.
"Together, eh? In that case, wait over there too. I won't be long."
He nodded to his colleague, who shut the outside door. Then he examined the other passengers' passports.
Vit¬torin deposited his knapsack on the bench beside Kohout's wooden suitcase.
"What have you been up to?" he hissed. "Is there something wrong with my passport? If so, I'd sooner you told me right away."
Kohout leaned his head against the wall and said nothing.
Meanwhile, the official had finished checking the other passports. He stood up and beckoned to them.
"You two, come with me."
"Where to?" asked Vit¬torin.
"You'll see. Don't make a fuss, just come along."
Vit¬torin was told to wait outside an office while Kohout and the official went in. The sign on the door read: "Inspector, Frontier Security Service."
Their passports were forgeries - that was the only explanation. Vit¬torin gritted his teeth and longed for it to be over: the waiting, the interminable waiting, the questioning, the return journey. The return journey? No! He was determined not to go back. If they confiscated his passport he would have to sneak across the frontier on foot.
The door opened and Kohout emerged. Behind him came a man carrying his wooden suitcase.
"It's all a misunderstanding," Kohout said in a hoarse voice. He blinked nervously. "It'll be sorted out in no time. You go on ahead, I'll catch you up."
"Go in," the man with the suitcase told Vit¬torin, "the inspector's waiting. You can talk afterwards."
The inspector, a fair-haired, middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed moustache, gestured to Vit¬torin to sit down. The immigration officer was standing beside his superior's desk in an attitude of attention.
"Georg Vit¬torin, commercial employee," the inspector began. He handed Vit¬torin's passport to his subordinate. "Read me out the particulars."
He then proceeded to ask Vit¬torin a number of questions concerning his destination, his connection with Kohout, the amount of money in his possession and how he had come by it. His answers were taken down in writing.
"Isn't my passport in order?" Vit¬torin asked.
"Your passport is quite in order," the inspector told him. "There's nothing to prevent you from continuing your journey. As soon as you've signed this, you may go."
Vit¬torin breathed a sigh of relief.
"I'd like to wait for my friend," he said. "We're travelling together."
The inspector stroked his blond moustache.
"Your friend is under arrest and will be brought before the relevant district court," he announced. "He admits to having embezzled the following sums from his employer, Dr Sigis-mund Eichkatz of No. n Grosse Mohrengasse, Vienna II: 270 lire, 118 reichsmarks, 420 lei, and i860 kronen. The money was found in his possession."
"I had nothing to do with it," Vit¬torin exclaimed in horror, "-absolutely nothing, I swear. I give you my word of honour!"
The inspector raised his hand.
"Had you been in any way compromised by circumstantial evidence or your friend's statements," he said, "I should have ordered your arrest. Please sign this declaration. If you hurry, you can still catch the train."
Kohout wasn't on the platform. It was only when the train pulled out that Vit¬torin caught a final glimpse of his friend.
He was standing near the boiler-house, flanked by two policemen and staring at the ground. Vit¬torin waved goodbye as he passed, but Kohout didn't notice. He was engaged in an animated soliloquy, from the look of him, because he was shifting from foot to foot and wringing his hands.
NO-MAN'S-LAND
Novokhlovinsk, a town some twelve miles south of Berdichev, consisted of three or four mean little streets and a marketplace. The handful of fishermen's huts near the river were grandly referred to by the local inhabitants as "the suburbs". When the Austrians withdrew, the inn in the marketplace, the "Hotel Moskva", had been requisitioned by the staff of the 3rd Ukrainian Volunteers as officers' quarters and orderly rooms. The staff telegraph office was installed in the schoolhouse, which had served as a quartermaster's store during the war. The station lay outside town, and anyone trying to reach it on foot in winter had to wade there through knee-deep snow.
This was the limit of Vit¬torin's progress to date, it having proved impossible to go any farther. The Ukrainian Volunteers were holding a line between Novokhlovinsk and Berdichev, and facing them was the Red Army's 2nd Lettish Rifle Regiment.
Vit¬torin had rented lodgings in a cobbler's house and seldom ventured out. His room, which was dark, shabby and ill-furnished, did duty as a bedroom, living-room and kitchen combined. The cobbler himself had taken his tools and retired to a sort of lumber-room.
On the fourth night after his arrival he was roused by someone hammering loudly on the front door. He pulled on his coat and made his way down the creaking stairs. The cobbler opened the door. The tall, gaunt, bushy-eyed man standing outside wore neither overcoat nor fur jacket in spite of the cold.
Huddled in the snow beside him and muttering incessantly was a figure swathed in a brown leather trenchcoat.
Raising his lantern, the cobbler saw at a glance that the tall man was a Russian officer. He was about to slam the door and bolt it when Vit¬torin intervened.
"Who are you?" he asked. "What do you want?"
The stranger raised a hand to his astrakhan cap in salute.
"Captain Stackelberg of the Nizhgorod Dragoons," he said in a hoarse voice. "I'm looking for lodgings for myself and my brother officer."
"Lodgings? There are rooms for Russian officers at the Hotel Moskva."
The captain shook his head.
"Not for us - we don't belong to the volunteer army. My comrade is sick. Unless I find him a warm room and some dry clothes soon, he'll die on me here in the snow. I can't carry him any further."
"What's the matter with him?"
"I don't know - a fever of some kind. You see? He's delirious. He's just completed a very taxing journey. He needs rest, a warm room, and a bed."
There was only one bed in the house, but Vit¬torin didn't hesitate.
"He can have mine," he said. "There'll still be room for the two of us - we'll manage somehow. Come inside."
The captain saluted again.
"Thank you," he said, and turned to his friend. "Mitya, on your feet! Do you hear me, Mitya? That's wonderful - now you want to spend the night in the snow! Get up, there's a fire burning inside."
He patted the snow off his friend's leather coat and re-addressed himself to Vit¬torin.
"My comrade's name is Dimitri Alexeevich Gagarin. Those people over there" - he gestured toward the east - "they shot his father, Count Gagarin. You aren't Russian, but the name may be familiar to you."
They lodged together in the cobbler's room for three whole weeks. Stackelberg slept on the floor, Vit¬torin on a makeshift bed consisting of two chairs and a fur jacket. The nursing and housework they shared between them. In the morning Vit¬torin set off for "the suburbs" in quest of bread, flour, eggs, sheeps' cheese, or fish. Meanwhile, Stackelberg swept the room and lit the stove. The local physician, an elderly man who had once been the medical officer of a Volhynian regiment, looked in on his patient every evening. When they were alone again, Gagarin, his sunken cheeks still flushed with fever, would sit up in bed and listen in silence while Vit¬torin and Stackelberg engaged in endless conversations about Europe, Russia, and their personal experiences.
"Why should I keep anything from you, after all you've done for us?" Stackelberg sai
d one evening. "You'd guess the truth anyway, sooner or later. This was Mitya's third trip through the lines from Moscow, carrying certain papers and documents. I take delivery of them on behalf of the legitimate government. Sometimes I act as a courier myself."
"Is it that simple?" Vit¬torin asked eagerly. "I mean, is it as easy as all that, sneaking through the front line? Your friend is little more than a boy - he can't be eighteen yet - and it must take some nerve ..." He broke off, reduced to silence by a hoarse bark of laughter.
"Nerve?" said Stackelberg. "He's so brave it's positively sinful, but the front line, as you call it, is a myth."
"Seryosha," the sick man called feebly, "when do I get my tea?"
"It won't be long, Mitya, just be patient," Stackelberg told him, and a gentle note crept into his gruff voice. "In Moscow they make tea out of turnips, but this is the real thing. You don't believe me? Ah, Mitya, you don't believe a thing unless it's staring you in the face, that's the kind of fellow you are."
He sliced some bread before turning back to Vit¬torin.
"Yes, the front line is a myth. There aren't any trenches. The Reds occupy the occasional farmhouse, post a lookout on the roof and a machine-gun in a window embrasure, and there's their front line for you. As for the Ukrainian Volunteers, they make speeches, wrangle over whether their officers should wear epaulettes, hold meeting after meeting, elect a regimental commander one day and dismiss him the next. They put up posters: 'The Volunteer Army is fighting for democracy. Join our ranks, help defend Russia!' Fine words, my friend, but they don't wash with me. That's not the Russia I'm ready to die for."
A vigorous shake of the head betokened that the subject was closed. He took the patient some tea and a boiled egg.
"There, look," he said, indicating the egg with a tobacco-stained fingertip, "I've brought you a little barrel with two kinds of beer in it. Now eat and drink up, Mitya, and be thankful you've kept body and soul together."
Whenever Vit¬torin headed for "the suburbs" in the morning, his route took him past a snowed-up timber yard. The plank fence enclosing it was covered with posters printed by the counter-revolutionary government. Sheets of blue, green and white paper bearing proclamations addressed to the Ukrainian people rubbed shoulders with caricatures of Lenin, Yoffe, Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka boss, and Sverdlov, the Tsar's murderer. Also to be seen were gory, garishly coloured illustrations of Bolshevik atrocities. One of these, which depicted a raid on a village, showed Red Guards with repulsively brutish faces mowing down peasants as they fled from their blazing cottages, seizing their womenfolk and driving off their livestock. Standing in the foreground in red-braided breeches and glossy riding boots, the sleeves of his leather jacket adorned with the Soviet star, was a Red Army officer whom the artist had endowed with a resemblance to General Voroshilov. He was leaning on his sabre and looking down, with an air of diabolical triumph, at the bloodstained corpse of the village priest. Beneath, in flamboyant red letters, was the caption: "This is how they liberate our Russian brothers." Vit¬torin lingered in front of this poster whenever he passed the fence. The Red officer's arrogant smile held him in thrall, filled him with impotent rage. The way he stands there in his patent leather boots and riding breeches - well-groomed to his fingertips, the perfumed murderer. At home he washes his hands in eau de cologne and reads French novels, and the women are for ever chasing him. And I – I'm still stuck here in this godforsaken hole, getting nowhere fast . . .