I had fathered the child, demanded it, ordered it, insisted on it. Elisabeth had wanted it. I was in love with Elisabeth at that time, and was therefore jealous. I couldn’t — as I imagined — expunge Professor Jolanth Szatmary from Elisabeth’s memory, or in another way remove her, except by giving her a baby: the visible proof of my superior power. Professor Jolanth Szatmary was forgotten and expunged. But I too, old Trotta, was half-forgotten and half-expunged.
I was no longer Trotta, I was the father of my son. I had him baptized Franz Joseph Eugen.
It would be true to say that I changed completely from the moment my son was born. Chojnicki and all the friends who lived in our boarding house were waiting for me in my room on the ground floor, as excited as though they were to become fathers themselves. At four in the morning, the child was born. My mother brought me the news.
There was my son, a blood-red ugly creature, with far too big a head and flipper-like limbs. The creature cried all the time. It was the fruit of my loins, and I instantly fell in love with it, I even fell for the easy pride that I had sired a son and not a daughter. Yes, to get a better view of it, I even bent down over his tiny penis, which looked like a negligible red comma. No question: this was my son. No question: I was his father.
There have been millions and billions of fathers since the beginning of the world. Among these billions I now duly took my place. But from the moment I held my son in my arms, I experienced a dim version of that incomprehensibly lofty satisfaction that the Creator of the world must have felt when he saw his incomplete work nevertheless as done. When I held the tiny, bawling, ugly, scarlet thing in my arms, I could clearly feel what a change was taking place in me. However small and ugly and scarlet the thing in my arms: he still radiated an inexpressible strength. Or more: it was as though that soft, pathetic little body was a repository of all my strength, as though I was holding myself in my hands, and the best of myself at that.
The maternal quality of women is boundless. My mother reacted to her new grandson as though she had borne him herself, and the rest of whatever love she still had in her went to Elisabeth. It was only once she had a son from me, from my loins, that she accepted her as a daughter. In reality, Elisabeth was never more than the mother of her grandson.
It was as though she had only been waiting for this grandson to prepare for her own death. She started slowly to die, as she had all her life been slow. One afternoon she no longer came down to our room on the ground floor. One of the maids announced my mother had a headache. It wasn’t a headache: my mother had had a stroke. She was left half-paralysed.
Over the years she remained a dearly loved, tenderly cared-for burden. I rejoiced each morning to see her still alive. She was an old lady, how easily she might die!
My son, her grandson, was brought to her every day. All she could do was blurt, “Li’l fellow!” Her right side was paralysed.
XXXII
To me my mother was a tenderly cared-for, dearly loved burden. I, who all my life, had never been drawn to any calling, now found myself suddenly with two: I was a son, and I was a father. I sat at my mother’s bedside for hours on end. We had to take on a male nurse, the old lady was heavy. She had to be carried into the dining room every day, to table. Even sitting her down was a job. Sometimes she would ask me to wheel her through the rooms. She wanted to see and hear. Ever since she had become an invalid, she had the feeling she was missing out on a lot, really on everything. Her right eye drooped. When she parted her lips, it was as though she had an iron bracket clamped round the right half of her mouth. She could manage no more than the odd word at a time, usually nouns. Sometimes it almost seemed as if she was hoarding her vocabulary.
Straight after leaving my mother, I went into the room of my son. Elisabeth, who had been a devoted mother during the first few months, was slowly distancing herself from our son. I had given him the name Franz Joseph Eugen, among ourselves we called him Geni. Elisabeth started to leave the house frequently and for no reason. I didn’t know where she was going, and I didn’t ask her. She went, let her go! I even enjoyed being on my own without her, just me and my son. “Geni!” I would call out, and his round, brown face would light up. I became more and more possessive of him. Not content with having sired him, ideally I would have been pregnant with him as well, and given birth to him. He crawled through our rooms, as swift as a weasel. He was already a human being — and still an animal and still an angel. I could see him changing by the day — if not by the hour. His brown curls grew thicker, the look in his large pale grey eyes was steadier, his eyelashes blacker and denser, the little hands themselves seemed to acquire a face, his little fingers grew strong and slender. His lips moved more eagerly, and his little tongue burbled more rapidly and meaningfully. I saw his first teeth appear, I saw Geni’s first conscious smile, I was there on the day he took his first steps, towards the window, the light, the sun, with a sudden burst as though of inspiration; it was more like a brainwave than a physiological action. God Himself had given him the idea that man could walk on two feet. And lo and behold: my boy was walking on two feet.
For a long time I remained ignorant of where Elisabeth spent hours and sometimes whole days. She would talk of a friend, a seamstress, a bridge club. Our boarders, Hallersberg apart, paid infrequently and inadequately. When Chojnicki once in a blue moon received money from Poland, he would straightaway pay the rent for three or four boarders. Our credit in the area was unlimited. I didn’t understand bills, and Elisabeth claimed to be keeping accounts. But one day, while she was gone, the butcher, the baker, the coffee merchant came to me, asking to be paid. I only had my allowance; every day before she went out Elisabeth left me some spare change. Sometimes we didn’t see each other for days on end. I went to the Café Wimmerl with my friends. Among Chojnicki’s duties was reading the newspaper, and giving lectures on politics. Every Sunday he went out to Steinhof, to visit his insane brother. He would talk to him about politics. Chojnicki would tell us: “In general, my brother is barking mad, but where politics are concerned no one is as wise as he is. Today, for instance, he said to me, ‘Austria isn’t a state, or a homeland, or a nation. It’s a religion. The clerics and the clerical idiots who are governing us now, are making a so-called nation of us; of us, a supra-nation, the only supra-nation the world has ever seen.’ Another time he laid his hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘We are Polish, apparently, and always were. Why shouldn’t we be? And we are Austrians too: why not? But there is a special idiocy of nationalists. The Social Democrats, who are the repulsive inventors of so-called nationalities, were the first to claim that Austria belongs to the German Republic. Now the cretinous Christian parties are taking their lead from the Social Democrats. The mountains always were the home of stupidity, so say I, Josef Chojnicki.’ And to maintain,” Chojnicki continued, “that such a man is deranged! I am convinced: he isn’t in the least bit deranged. But for the end of the Monarchy, he wouldn’t have become unhinged!” and so he ended his oration. No one spoke after such speeches. A heavy silence settled over our table, it didn’t come from within us, it came from above. We didn’t bewail our lost fatherland, we kept a respectful silence for it. Then sometimes, without any prior signal, we would start to sing old Army songs. We were all present and correct. But in reality we were all dead.
One day I accompanied Chojnicki on his weekly visit to his brother in Steinhof. The mad Chojnicki went walking in the courtyard; he lived in the locked ward, even though he showed no inclination to violence at all. He didn’t recognize his brother. But when I told him my name, Trotta, he was straightaway lucid. “Trotta,” he said. “His father was here a week ago. The old District Commissioner Trotta. My friend, Lieutenant Trotta, lost his life at Krasne-Busk. Well, you are all dear to my heart! All you Trottas are.” And he embraced me. “My address is Steinhof,” he continued. “Since I moved here, it has become the capital city and residence of Austria. I keep the crown here. I am authorized to do so. My uncle Ledochovsky used to sa
y: that little Josef will one day be a great man. Now I am. He was right.”
Chojnicki was now talking nonsense. He called for his socks. When he was confined to the asylum, he became an enthusiastic knitter. “I am knitting the Monarchy,” he would say from time to time. When I tried to take my leave, he said: “I don’t have the honour of knowing you.” “My name is Trotta,” I said. “Trotta,” he replied, “was the Hero of Solferino. He saved the life of the Emperor Franz Joseph. That Trotta is long dead. It seems to me, sir, that you are a deceiver.”
It was on that same day that I learned what kept my wife away from home so often and for such long periods, why she left our boy alone, and my poor crippled mother. When I got home, I ran into the only two people in the world I really hated: Professor Jolanth Szatmary and Kurt von Stettenheim.
It turned out that they had been back in Vienna for ages. It turned out that they had abandoned arts and crafts. They were now utterly devoted to the cinema. Alexander Rabinovich — “the renowned Alexander Rabinovich, have you not heard of him?” thus Herr von Stettenheim — had started a “production company” in Vienna; another company! It turned out that Elisabeth had no intention of remaining a mother, no, she was dead set on becoming an actress. Film was calling her, and she felt a calling to go into film.
One day she disappeared, leaving me the following note:
Dear husband, your mother hates me, and you don’t love me either. I feel a calling. I will go with Jolanth and Stettenheim. Forgive me. The call of art is powerful. Elisabeth.
I showed this note to my crippled mother. She read it twice over. Then she took my head in her still hale left hand, and said: “Boy! B-b-boy!” she said. It was as though she was congratulating me and pitying me, both.
Who can say what clever things she might have said, if she hadn’t been paralysed.
My son no longer had a mother. The mother of my son was an actress in Hollywood. The grandmother of my son was an old crippled woman.
She died in February.
XXXIII
My mother died during the first days of February. She died as she had lived, quietly and aristocratically. To the priest who had come to give her the last rites, she said: “Please hurry, Your Reverence! God doesn’t have as much time as the church sometimes likes to imagine.” The priest was accordingly quick about it. Then my mother called for me. She was no longer babbling. She spoke fluently, as before, as if her tongue had never been paralysed. “If you should ever see Elisabeth again,” she said to me, “I don’t think it’s very likely, but tell her if you do that I never cared for her. I am dying now, but I don’t think much of those devout individuals who even on their deathbeds are still lying and come over all magnanimous. Now bring me your son, so that I can see him once more.”
I went downstairs, I picked up my son, who was big and already quite a weight; I was happy that he was so solid as I carried him up the stairs. My mother hugged him and kissed him, and gave him back to me.
“Send him away,” she said, “far away! He’s not to grow up here. Go away now!” she added, “I want to die by myself.”
She died that same night, it was the night of the Revolution. Shots rang out through the city, and Chojnicki told us over dinner that the government was shooting at the workers. “Dollfuss,” thus Chojnicki, “wants to kill the proletariat. God forgive me, I really can’t stand him. He is digging his own grave. The world has never seen the like! . . .”
When my mother was buried, in the Central Cemetery, Second Gate, there was still shooting throughout the city. All my friends — which is to say, all our lodgers — accompanied my mother and me. It was hailing, just as it was on the night of my return from the War. It was the same vicious stony hail.
We buried my mother at ten in the morning.
When we emerged from the Second Gate of the Central Cemetery, I saw Manes Reisiger. He was following a coffin, and I went with him, without a word. The coffin was taken to the Third Gate, to the Jewish section.
I stood over the open grave. After the Rabbi had spoken the prayer, Manes Reisiger stepped up and said: “The Lord hath given him, the Lord hath taken him away, praised be His Name in all eternity. The Cabinet Minister has shed blood, and his blood, too, shall be shed. It shall flow like a rushing torrent.” People tried to restrain Manes Reisiger, but he carried on in a strong voice: “Whoever lives by the sword,” he said, “shall die by the sword. God is great and just.” And then he broke down. We took him aside, while his gifted son Ephraim was buried. He was a rebel, he had taken up arms and been killed.
Joseph Branco still came to our house occasionally. His chestnuts were now his only interest in life. They were mouldy this year and wormy, and he, Joseph Branco, could only sell roasted apples.
I sold the house. I kept the bed and breakfast.
It was as though the death of my mother had driven all my friends out of our house. They moved away, one after the other. We met in the Café Wimmerl.
Only my son was still alive for me. “Whoever kills,” said Manes Reisiger, “shall be killed.”
I had no more interest in the world. I sent my son away to my friend Laveraville in Paris.
I was alone, alone, alone.
I went to the Kapuzinergruft.
XXXIV
That Friday too I was waiting for evening to fall. It was only in my dearly loved evenings that I still felt at home, since I no longer had a house and a home. I waited, as usual, to commit myself into its care, which was kindlier in Vienna than the silence of the nights once the cafés have shut, once the lamp posts are tired, worn out from their pointless illumination. They longed for the tardy morning, and their own extinction. Yes, they were tired, the insomniac streetlights, they waited for morning, so that they could sleep.
Oh, I remembered how they had silvered the nights of my youth, the kindly sons and daughters of the heavens, suns and stars that had agreed to come down to light the city of Vienna. The skirts of the girls on the game in Kärntnerstrasse still went down to their ankles. When it rained, the sweet creatures picked them up, and I saw their exciting button-boots. Then I went to Sacher’s to see my friend Sternberg. He was sitting in a corner, always the same one, and he was always the last one there. I picked him up. We meant to go home together, but we were young, and the night was young (although the hour was advanced), and the streetwalkers were young, especially the older ones, and the lanterns were young too . . .
So we strolled through our own youth, and the youthful night. The houses we stayed in seemed to us like tombs, or at best shelters. The night watchmen saluted us, Count Sternberg gave them cigarettes. Often we patrolled with the constables
through the pallid and deserted city centre, and sometimes one of the sweet creatures would walk with us, with a different walk to the one she had on her beat. At that time, the streetlights were rarer and more modest, but they shed a stronger light, and some of them even swayed in the wind . . .
Later on, when I returned from the war, not just older, but positively antique, the Viennese nights were wrinkled and withered, like ancient drabs; evening didn’t slip into night as it had once done, but avoided it, turned pale, and ran off as soon as it saw night coming. You had to grab these shy, fleeting evenings before they disappeared, and what I liked best was to catch them in the parks, the Volksgarten or the Prater, and then to savour the last sweetest lingering of them in a café, where they seeped in, gentle and mild, like a fragrance.
That evening too I went to the Café Lindhammer, and I conducted myself as though I was by no means as agitated as the other customers. For a long time now, ever since my return from the war, I had seen myself as someone who had no right to be alive. I had long since got used to viewing events that the newspapers blazoned as “historic” with the piercing regard of one no longer of this world. I was on extended leave from death. Death could end my furlough at any moment. Of what interest to me were the things of this world? . . .
Still, they preoccupied me, and especially th
ey preoccupied me on that Friday. What was at issue was whether I, retired from life, could go on drawing my retirement pension, as hitherto, in an embittered tranquillity; or if that too, my poor embittered tranquillity, or the resignation I had got used to calling “peace” was to be taken from me. Of late, whenever one or other of my friends came to tell me the time had come for me to take an interest in the fate of my country, I would say my usual piece: “Leave me alone!” — but I knew that what I should have said was: “Leave me to despair!” My sweet despair! It too is all gone. Gone the way of my unfulfilled desires and hopes . . .
So I sat in the café and while my friends at my table still were talking about their personal lives, I, who had seen the elimination by a merciful and implacable fate of all possibility of personal life, had only the collective to commune with, which all my life had concerned me least, and which all my life I had sought to elude . . .
It was weeks since I had last read a newspaper, and the conversation of my friends who seemed to live off newspapers, yes, to be kept alive by news and rumours, washed past me with no effect, like the waves of the Danube when I sometimes sat on the Franz-Josefs-Kai, or on the Elisabeth Promenade. I was switched off; switched off. To be switched off among the living means something like exterritorial. I was an exterritorial among the living.
And the agitation of my friends on that Friday evening struck me as unnecessary; until that instant when the café door was yanked open, and a young man stood in the doorway in unusual dress. He wore leather gaiters, a white shirt, and a sort of forage cap that looked to me like a cross between a bedpan and our good old army caps, in a word, a sub-Prussian item of headgear. (Because on their heads the Prussians wear neither hats nor caps but headgear.) Remote from the world as I was, and the Hell that it represented to me, I was hardly likely to distinguish among the new caps and uniforms, much less to identify any of them. There were white, blue, green and red shirts; trousers in black, brown, green or sky blue; boots and spurs, leather and straps and belts and daggers in sheaths of all kinds. I at any rate had decided for myself long ago, when I returned from the War, that I was not going to interest myself in them any more, and not to learn any. And so I was initially more surprised than my friends at this person, who, to judge from his appearance, looked as though he might have come up from the toilets in the basement, and yet had walked in the street door. For a few seconds I actually thought the downstairs toilets, with which I was perfectly familiar, had been rehoused, and were now outside, and one of the men who worked there as attendants had just stepped in to let us know that they were all occupied. Instead the man said: “Fellow countrymen! The government has fallen! A new German people’s government has been established.”