Count Luna

by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

  When he came into the nursery for this purpose, he would drop heavily into the most comfortable chair and cross his legs, and the chair would give a loud crack. The child was annoyed by that cracking of the chair under the weight of his father who, though a handsome man, in recent years put on weight. He also felt an intense dislike for the crossing of those shapely legs. For, although the colonel had for a long time worn civilian clothes, they somehow seemed still to be cased in military breeches. What annoyed Alexander was that his father’s robust thighs were so much in evidence in this position. It disturbed the boy because, although he knew very well that at the beginning of his career his father had marched on foot at the head of an infantry company and later sat around at various General Staff desks, his son could not dispel the notion that this overdeveloped bottom was the result of a great deal of riding, of a continual grinding, rubbing, and kneading of the horse beneath the colonel. Furthermore, Adam Jessiersky — so his son could not help imagining — had on occasion not merely followed some general out to the Vienna parade ground on horseback, but regularly galloped over the undulating hills of Poland at the head of thundering squadrons of uhlans. Like the general staff, the uhlans wore dark green uniforms — dark green tunics with red facings and with golden cords dangling from the officers’ shoulders. The lances in the front ranks swayed in the wind like spikes of wheat, the small black and yellow pennons fluttering gaily. To accompany that spectacle, Chopin himself — whose music little Alexander had to practice on the piano — seemed to play his wild, revolutionary fantasies. There was always some sort of insurrection seething beneath the surface among those outwardly tamed Poles.

  With his beautiful beringed hand, which always seemed to emerge from the narrow sleeve of an uhlan’s tunic, Alexander’s father would reach for a textbook and begin to examine him. Where on earth had the colonel picked up this indescribably nonchalant gesture? Perhaps he had copied it from some archduke, while serving as a member of the suite, for he always displayed an unusual aptitude for imitating the manners of those above him and also for inducing people who would otherwise never have thought of entering his house to associate with him.

  The colonel was the product of a no longer wholly comprehensible past. Perhaps to compensate for this fact, he prided himself on being a child of his own age. He believed that it was of the utmost importance to master such sciences as mathematics, geography, or physics. Disciplines, such as literature or the fine arts, he deemed useful only to the extent that they would, say, enable an officer to compose a patriotic speech, or see that the birthday banquet for a superior was properly laid by the mess orderlies. Concerning philosophy and religion, he preserved a discreet silence. He liked to put in an appearance at the so-called Society Mass and to see who was there. But he considered superstition more useful than any faith, and the Devil figured far more prominently in his conversation than his own Maker.

  His son, however, for some reason, had already gone far beyond this kind of thinking. He felt that instead of becoming enmeshed in the material world, one should leave it to those who were already enmeshed in it, like old Fries, for example, and his employees, so that one could lead one’s own life. Where Brussels was situated and what sort of goods were consumed there was, after all, of no importance; moreover, once you had learned about Brussels, you had to find out about Bucharest or Oslo, and so forth. And while it might be important for a bookkeeper to be able to do arithmetic, what need was there for his father to examine him in arithmetic? To a large number of questions, and often quite deliberately, in fact, the son gave no answer. But when his father, who had an excellent command of French, made French conversation, and his son did not reply like a Parisian, a violent quarrel would break out in the nursery, and the colonel would lay the responsibility for the boy’s apparent lack of talent squarely at the door of the Fries family. For old Fries and his daughter Gabriele spoke French with what might be described as bourgeois coyness. In reality, however, the son spoke French poorly only because his father wanted him to speak it fluently and without an accent; and as time went on, the son spoke worse and worse French until finally, with a nonchalant wave of his hand, Adam Jessiersky gave him up. He rose from his chair, thereby causing it to crack loudly once again, and, with an air of insulting indifference, left the room. There was absolutely nothing to be done, he implied, with the young people of the present who were so puny physically and mentally. Nor could anything better be expected in the future.

  Adam Jessiersky’s stoutness came to a sudden end when he fell ill with cancer. He grew exceedingly thin, then terrifyingly thin, and if children were able to feel pity, which, however, they are not, his son could not have helped pitying his father although he did not like him. But he did not pity him. Another emotion took possession of him. The more the father’s illness increased, the more firmly did the notion become entrenched in the mind of the son that it was not really a disease, but a pretext. His father, the boy thought, was quite deliberately withdrawing into himself in order later on to join his ancestors who were far superior to the Fries family with whom he had been thrown. Then at last he would be able to live where he belonged — in a place from which the son, along with his mother and his grandfather, were and would forever be excluded.

  The son, fourteen years old at that time, had even then gathered that the Jessierskys had been disreputable; he no longer had any illusions regarding his family. But whether they had been disreputable or not, or perhaps just because they had been, he felt that the family extended down as far as his father but not to him, the son! Between this father and this son something the two were unaware, or scarcely aware, of had taken place, and as a result, the son no longer belonged to his father. That estrangement in itself did not matter to the boy. In fact, it gave him great satisfaction. But because of it, he no longer belonged to his father’s, that is, to his own, ancestors, and this, inexplicably, saddened him. He might tell himself a hundred times that they had been shady, in fact, downright corrupt, men — their fortune-hunting, their rascality, and perfidiousness did not make up to him for the fact that they had, as he firmly believed, rejected him. How, being dead, they had managed to do this, and why they had done it, he did not know.

  Adam Jessiersky, however, who still belonged to them, now readied himself to return to them; and to the son it was as though the hearse would be taking his father not to the Trieste cemetery, but to Poland, or perhaps Russia. At his death, the colonel, disgusted with his son, with the Fries family, and possibly even with the general staff, would make preparations for the journey back to his true home. That, at least in his particular case, was the meaning of death.

  Gabriele Jessiersky, who was still hopelessly in love with her husband, was with him day and night. Old Fries shoved up his shirt cuffs, wrung his hands, and went about bemoaning the fact that now, in addition to his two sons, he was about to lose his son-in-law. But all that seemed ridiculous and insignificant in comparison with Adam Jessiersky’s death itself. When it came, this man, who had had so little to recommend him in life, displayed greatness in his manner of dying. The boy was very well aware of this, and the dying man also seemed to sense it. He was conscious of it and felt obligated to carry through with it.

  The colonel’s hands had become extremely emaciated. As they lay on the coverlet, they seemed made of transparent alabaster like the hands of a corpse. His feeble head, resting against the pillows, looked astoundingly aristocratic. It might have been assumed that this member of the general staff, who had sent so many to their death in order to escape it himself, would die without dignity. But he died with a dignity which was, to say the least, far more than merely military.

  He had already lost consciousness when a priest appeared to perform the last offices, one of which was to anoint his feet for the road to eternity. When the covers were pulled back, it was revealed that the once shapely legs were now frightfully wasted.

  They were quite unfit to carry him to his destinat
ion. But actually he would not have to go on foot like any peasant or tramp. He would be driven. And he would not have to depend on the hearse either! For the dead Jessierskys or even the Bielskis — having forgotten their annoyance with him because, like his father, he had annexed their name — would certainly send a carriage or a sleigh for him from the Beyond. And the Galician half bloods, by which the sleigh was drawn, with their ornamented head gear jingling and fluttering in the wind, would dash away with him into Eternity.

  When Alexander Jessiersky thought back later on this death, it always seemed to him that his father, despite all the ill-feeling between them, ought to have told him how he had managed to die like that. But his father had died without telling him.

  For months, even years, an unusually long time, at any rate, for a boy, he thought about his father’s death. And instead of feeling relieved, as might have been expected in view of the uncomfortable relationship between them, he felt lonely and forsaken. He had never been to Poland, but now in his imagination he pictured a fantastic Poland, a kind of Beyond, in which the dead Jessierskys dwelt and from which the death sleigh had been sent. Beneath a gray sky, from which snow never fell but which held the constant threat of snow, there were always gay parties on the estates where the departed lived in death. Often the ghostly festivities would go on all night and into the next day, which would dawn as gray as the preceding one over the endless landscape with its blanket of old snow.

  To the dreamer, translating space into time, this endlessness of the landscape seemed like eternity. But he, the dreamer, had not been invited to share this eternal life and would probably never be. Never would he drive, in one of those sleighs drawn by Galician half bloods, up to the door at Dobrovlany or Borek Stary, or whatever the estates were called, his feet in a fur bag, leaning back against a robe of twenty fox pelts, with the twenty sewn-on tails flapping about him in the wind. The Szoldrskis and Bielskis, the Przezdziekis and the Koscielez-Dzialynskis would wait for him in vain. Or rather they would not wait for him at all, for they had not invited him, still less had it occurred to the Jessierskys themselves to invite their descendant. In fact, the curious thing about this Eternity was that it was not God who sent people there, but the deceased themselves who decided who was to be allowed to enter and who was not. Like the wolves, of which there were still many in Poland, which would not permit the wolfhounds to approach them, though they were descended from them, these wolfish dead bit off their descendants. This was true not only of the Jessierskys, who after all came from the wolves’ country, Russia, but also of their more civilized Polish relatives.

  However, to the brooding boy, the only really savage, as it were, rapacious dead were the Jessierskys, and he began to deplore the fact that nothing was known about them before the Alexander Jezierskij he himself had been named for. Already the outlines of this same ancestor, whose patronymic had been forgotten, had become blurred in the twilight of the past, scarcely distinguishable from the background of his dead forebears. And farther back in the dusk were still more obscure ancestors. They were not standing in single file, like people waiting for a descendant to be born to them so that they themselves, in a way, might be able to go on existing. They were spread out like an open fan, growing dimmer and dimmer, and vanishing in all directions of oblivion; and the distance, which in Austria would have been scarcely two or three centuries away, was boundless in Russia and made them seem infinitely alien to the boy.

  Alexander Jessiersky felt very much forsaken when the last real Jessiersky had departed, and it may well have been this feeling which led him to marry so early. At twenty-four he married a Baroness Pilas, who brought him as her dowry the estates of Hradek and Sossnowetz in Bohemia (1550 acres in all). But like Pavel Alexandrovich, who had squandered the property of his wife, Alexander Jessiersky was also unable to retain his wife’s dowry: when the Czechoslovakian People’s Republic took over all private property in 1948, the land was confiscated without compensation.

  When Alexander Jessiersky married, his mother, Gabriele, née Fries, was still living in the former Strattmann Palace in Vienna. She still showed some traces of her former beauty and more than her share of insignificance. Her daughter-in-law, who brought one child after another into the world, handed them over to her, one after another, and then turned her attention to producing new children. Three died, although, in view of the progress of modern medicine, this was no longer customary.

  In his last years, Alexander’s grandfather Fries, the uninteresting businessman, had tried to make himself more important in the eyes of his grandson by confiding to him that the Fries family was probably related to the famous eighteenth-century bankers of the same name who had been made counts. But although old Fries, in his curiously belated urge to assert himself, brought up the subject again and again, Alexander Jessiersky never listened; nor did he think of the story after old Fries had died.

  He lived entirely in a world of his own, though what kind of a world it was, no one — probably not even he himself — really knew. By day, he bestowed a modicum of attention upon the transport business, whose president he had become though his mother had inherited most of the company’s stock. By night, he produced one child after another, less out of conviction than out of absentmindedness and because his wife set such great store by it. It must be said, however, that she remained pretty for a long time and did not make it difficult for him.

  Chapter 3

  Alexander Jessiersky, as we have said, did not devote very much time to his business. The company followed more or less of itself the course old Fries had laid down for it; transport business was about the only field in which that self-styled relative of the late Counts Fries had been competent.

  But with the German occupation business suddenly boomed. To his credit, be it said that Alexander Jessiersky, little though he knew about business, did not particularly like this boom. For while he had little connection with his “shop,” he was also sufficiently detached from it to mistrust the sudden spurt of activity. “Why,” he asked himself, “should we go to the trouble of expanding when we can only do business that leads nowhere, since the profits cannot be used for our benefit, but are taken from us in taxes or must be reinvested in bad business? It is ridiculous to do a thing merely because others have become the slaves of the idea that one has to be ‘active.’ Are there not a thousand things to be attended to which, though much more important, are left undone? And does no one realize that all this frantic activity will result only in disaster — that disaster, in fact, has already overtaken us?”

  But in the long run even this stubbornly inactive man could not escape the universal mania for activity. Early in 1940, his directors persuaded him that a certain property situated on the Southern Railroad had to be purchased in order to build new warehouses for the expanding concern. This property, however, belonged to a Count Luna. He had inherited it from his mother who, in a manner of speaking, had been a kind of Fries, that is, the stepdaughter of a manufacturer. Luna himself, however, had already gone one step beyond Alexander Jessiersky. Although he was not engaged in business, he did not want to sell the property because he had no confidence in the new currency introduced two years before.

  “All right then,” said Jessiersky to his directors. “That ends the matter. As you can see, he simply refuses to sell.”

  Then he would have to be made to hand it over, the directors told him. For what, after all, was one man’s wish to hang onto idle real estate compared with the expansion needs of a big company?

  With that he did not agree, returned Jessiersky. But, probably out of sheer laziness, he allowed his subordinates to do as they chose.

  It was one of those periods when everything and anything could be taken away from a person, as long as it was declared to be to the advantage of the general public. And though the expropriation in the present case was rather to the advantage of a transport business which, to be sure, served the general public, the recalcitrant
owner, Luna, was accused of belonging to certain monarchistic and, therefore, anti-German circles and put under arrest.

  At this point Jessiersky awakened out of his indifference, but it was already too late. Luna was forced to hand over the property, and Jessiersky, although of course he no longer wanted to take the land, was forced to take it anyway. The maneuver should now have accomplished its purpose. But the Secret Police had become seriously interested in Luna’s monarchism. They seized not only the proceeds from the forced sale, but all of his remaining possessions as well and sent him to the concentration camp at Mauthausen.

  Jessiersky found the whole episode extremely painful. He told himself that, though he himself had not done anything, he had, out of his very inactivity, failed to do what should have been done. The few decent people still around began to avoid him. They did not, of course, dare to give him the cold shoulder for long, for they were afraid that he might make trouble for them through the connections that he so obviously possessed; they, therefore, soon sought him out once again. But Jessiersky was anything but relieved. That a misunderstanding could have such consequences, that the world was apparently ruled by misunderstandings, was profoundly distressing to him. All his efforts to get Luna out of Mauthausen proved unsuccessful, and it turned out that his supposed connections were not real connections after all. Luna remained in Mauthausen, and because Luna remained in Mauthausen, Jessiersky acquired the reputation of having really formidable connections. For at that time no one could believe that he might have used them, if he used them at all, not to keep a man in a concentration camp but to secure his release.

  Faced with this miserable situation, in which his father, now reposing — as the son imagined — not in God, but in Poland, would have been quite in his element, Jessiersky was utterly bewildered and turned upon his directors who had got him into this affair. But he discovered that he did not even have the right to fire them. He then left no stone unturned in an effort to get them called up for army service; and in the case of two of them who, although overage, were reserve officers, he was successful. But his success gave him little cause for rejoicing, for both were delighted at the prospect of joining up or, at least, pretended they were. It was not until one of them was killed in France that Jessiersky experienced a measure of satisfaction; the more he thought about it, in fact, the more it pleased him. For this strange son of a colonel had a deep hatred of everything military, and death in action seemed to him the worst possible fate. He regarded it as the individual’s ultimate betrayal by the community.