My grandfather’s brother was the infantry lieutenant who saved the life of Emperor Franz Joseph at the battle of Solferino. The lieutenant was ennobled. For a long time afterwards he was known as the Hero of Solferino, in the army and in the reading primers of the Dual Monarchy, until, in accordance with his own wishes, the shadow of oblivion settled over him. He took his leave. He is buried in Hietzing. On his gravestone are the quiet, defiant words: “Here lies the Hero of Solferino.”
The Imperial grace and favour were extended to his son, who became District Commissioner, and to his grandson, who fell in autumn 1914 at the battle of Krasne-Busk as a lieutenant of the Jägers. I never met him, as indeed I never met any of the ennobled branch of our people. The ennobled Trottas were all loyal servants to Franz Joseph. My father, though, was a rebel.
My father was a rebel and a patriot of a sort that only existed in the old Austria-Hungary. He wanted to reform the Empire and save the Habsburgs. His understanding of the Dual Monarchy was too acute. He therefore aroused suspicion, and was forced to emigrate. As a young man still, he went to America. He became a chemical engineer. In those days they needed people like him in the sprawling dye works of New York and Chicago. When he was still poor, the only sort of homesickness he felt was for the countryside. But once he had made his fortune, he started to feel homesick for Austria. He came home. He settled in Vienna. He had money, and the Austrian police liked people with money. My father was not merely left alone. He was permitted to found a new Slovene party, and bought a couple of newspapers in Zagreb.
He made some influential friends in the circle of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. My father dreamed of a Slavic kingdom under the overall suzerainty of the Habsburgs. He dreamed, if you will, of a Triple Monarchy. And perhaps it is only right for me, his son, to say I like to think that if my father had been spared, he might have changed the course of history. But he died, some eighteen months before Franz Ferdinand was murdered. I am his only son. In his will he bequeathed me his ideas. Not for nothing did he have me christened Franz Ferdinand. But I was young and foolish then, not to say frivolous. I was certainly frivolous as well. I lived, as they say, into the day. No! That’s wrong. I lived into the night; the days were for sleeping.
II
Early one morning — it was in April of 1914, and I was still groggy, having gone to bed only one or two hours before — a visitor was announced, a cousin of mine, by the name of Trotta.
In my dressing gown and slippers I padded out to the antechamber. The windows were open wide. The morning blackbirds in our garden were warbling away. The early sun merrily poured into the room. Our maid, whom I had never seen so early in the day before, looked unfamiliar to me in her blue apron — I only knew her in her formal evening incarnation, assembled from blond, black and white, something like a flag. It was the first time I had seen her in her blue gear, which resembled the sort of thing that engineers and gasmen wear, wielding a purple feather duster — the sight of her alone would have been enough to change my ideas about life. For the first time in years I beheld the morning in my house, and I saw that it was beautiful. I liked the maid. I liked the open windows. I liked the sun. I liked the singing of the blackbirds. It was as golden as the morning sun. Even the girl in her blue outfit was somehow as golden as the sun. There was so much gold about that at first I failed to make out the visitor who was waiting for me. I only noticed him a couple of seconds — or perhaps minutes — later. Lean, swarthy and silent, he was sitting in the only chair our anteroom had to offer, and he didn’t budge when I entered. Even with his black hair and moustache, and his brown skin, he too amidst the matutinal gold of the anteroom was like a piece of the sun, albeit some distant southern sun. He reminded me spontaneously of my late father. He too had been dark and lean, bony and brown, swarthy and a real child of the sun, not like us, its fair-haired stepchildren. I speak Slovene, my father had taught me. I greeted my Trotta cousin in his native tongue. It seemed not to surprise him. What else was I going to do? He didn’t get up, he remained seated. He held out his hand to me. He smiled. His big strong teeth gleamed under his blue-black moustache. He said “Du” to me right away. I felt: he’s not a cousin, he’s my brother! He had my address from the lawyer. “Your father,” he began, “left me 2000 gulden in his will, and I have come to collect them. I want to thank you. Tomorrow I will go home. I have a sister, who will be able to get married now. With a dowry of 500 gulden, she will get the richest farmer in Sipolje.”
“What about the rest of the money?”
“That’s for me,” he said serenely. He smiled, and it seemed to me the sun was pouring into our anteroom even more brightly.
“What will you do with the money?”
“I will invest it in my business,” he replied. And as though the moment to introduce himself had finally come, he got up from his chair, there was a confident swagger as he stood there, and a touching formality with which he introduced himself. “Joseph Branco’s the name,” he said. Only then did I remember I was standing in front of my visitor in dressing-gown and slippers. I asked him to wait, and went back into my room to dress.
III
It was no later than seven o’clock when we strolled into the Café Magerl. The first of the baker’s delivery boys were just arriving, snow white and smelling of crisp rolls and poppy seed biscuits and salt sticks. The day’s first freshly roasted coffee, virginal and spicy, smelled like a morning within a morning. My cousin Joseph Branco was sitting beside me, swarthy and southern, merry, healthy and alert. I felt ashamed of my haggardness and my almost colourless pallor. I was a little uncomfortable as well. What was I going to talk to him about? It made me a little more uncomfortable when he said: “I don’t drink coffee in the morning. I want soup.” Of course. In Sipolje the peasants started the day with potato soup.
So I ordered potato soup for him. It was a long time coming, and in the meantime I was bashfully dipping my almond croissant in my coffee. Finally it did come, a steaming bowlful. My cousin Joseph Branco disregarded his spoon. He raised the steaming bowl to his mouth in his black-haired brown hands. While he drank his soup, he seemed to have forgotten about me. Completely concentrating on his steaming bowl, supported on the tips of his strong, slim fingers, he looked like a person in whom appetite is a noble thing, and who disdained a spoon because it is nobler to drink straight from the bowl. Yes, while I watched him drinking his soup, I was almost perplexed by the fact that people had bothered to invent something as ridiculous as spoons. My cousin set down his bowl, and I could see that it was smooth and empty and clean as if it had just been wiped and washed.
“This afternoon,” he said, “I will collect the money.” What sort of business was it, I asked him, that he was planning to invest in. “Oh,” he said, “a very small business, but something that will keep a man fed through the winter.”
And so I learned that in spring, summer and autumn my cousin Joseph Branco was a farmer, tending his fields, but in winter he was a chestnut-roaster. He had a sheepskin, a mule, a small cart, a roasting-pan and five sacks of chestnuts. Thus equipped, he set off every year at the beginning of November through some of the Monarchy’s Crown Lands. If he happened to like it in one particular place, he would spend the whole winter there until the storks came. Then he would tie the empty sacks round the mule and go to the nearest railway station. He put the mule in a cattle car, boarded the train, went home and became a farmer again.
I asked him how it was possible to expand such a small business, and he indicated there were various possibilities. For instance, one might offer a sideline in baked apples and baked potatoes, in addition to the chestnuts. Also, his mule was old and feeble, and it was almost time to buy a new one. He had a couple of hundred crowns already saved up.
He wore a shimmering satin jacket, a flowery velvet waistcoat with coloured-glass buttons and a heavy, braided gold watch chain looped round his neck. And I, who had been raised by my father to love the Slavs of our Empire, and w
ho was therefore apt to take any sort of folkloric detail for a totem, straightaway fell for the chain. I wanted to have it. I asked my cousin how much it cost. “I don’t know,” he said. “I got it from my father, and he got it from his father, it’s not the sort of thing you can buy. But seeing as you’re my cousin, I’ll sell it to you.” “How much is it, then?” I asked. And there I was, mindful of everything my father had inculcated into me, thinking to myself that a Slovene farmer is far too noble to think of money and prices. My cousin Joseph Branco thought for a long time, and finally he said: “Twenty-three crowns.” I didn’t ask how he arrived at this particular figure. I gave him twenty-five. He counted them out, made no move to give me two crowns’ change, pulled out a great red-and-blue checked handkerchief, and wrapped the money in that. Only then, after twice knotting the handkerchief, did he take off the chain, pull the watch out of his waistcoat pocket, and lay watch and chain on the table. It was an old-fashioned heavy silver watch, with a little key to wind it. My cousin seemed a little reluctant to detach it from the chain, looked at it tenderly, almost devoutly, for a long time, and finally said, “Well, seeing as you’re my cousin! If you give me another three crowns, you can have the watch as well!” I gave him a whole five-crown piece. He didn’t give me any change this time either. Once again, he produced his handkerchief, unpicked the double knot, put the new coin in with the other money, stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and looked at me with his big brown eyes.
“I like your waistcoat too!” I said after an interval of a few seconds. “I’ll buy that off you as well.”
“Because you’re my cousin,” he replied, “I’ll sell you my waistcoat as well.” And, not hesitating for a moment, he pulled off his jacket, took off his waistcoat and passed it across the table to me. “It’s good material,” said Joseph Branco, “and the buttons are pretty. Because it’s you, I’ll only ask two fifty.” I gave him three crowns, and in his eyes I could clearly see disappointment that it wasn’t five again. He seemed disgruntled, stopped smiling, but in the end he stowed the money away just as carefully and elaborately as he had done with the rest.
So now I had, as I saw it, the most important attributes of a proper Slovene: an old watch-chain, a brightly coloured waistcoat and a heavy lump of a watch, stopped, with a key to wind it. I didn’t hesitate. I put on all three items on the spot, paid, and ordered up a fiacre. I accompanied my cousin to his hotel; he was staying at the Green Huntsman. I asked him to wait for me tonight, so that I could collect him. I wanted to introduce him to my friends.
IV
For form’s sake, and to calm my anxious mother, I was enrolled as a law student. I did no studying. All of life lay spread out in front of me like a flowery meadow, barely confined by the rim of a very, very distant horizon. I lived in the merry, even uproarious society of young aristocrats, the class that, along with artists, I liked best in the old Empire. I shared their sceptical frivolity, their resourceful melancholy, their sinful negligence, their proud sense of doom — all of them signs of the end which we failed to see coming. Over the glasses from which we drank to excess, an invisible Death was already crossing his bony hands. We chuntered away, we even blasphemed mindlessly. Alone and old, almost petrified in his remoteness, but still close to us and ubiquitous in the great and colourful Empire lived and ruled the old Emperor Franz Joseph. It was possible that in the misty depths of our souls there slumbered those certainties called instincts, the certainty above all that with each passing day the old Emperor was dying, and with him the monarchy, not so much a fatherland as an empire, something greater, wider, more spacious and all-encompassing than just a fatherland. From out of our heavy hearts there bubbled forth the light witticisms, from our sense of doom a foolish pleasure in every affirmation of life: in balls, in Heurigen wine taverns, in girls, in food, in coach rides and follies of all sorts, in silly japes and suicidal ironies, vehemence and outspokenness, in the Prater, in the big wheel and puppet shows, in masquerade balls and ballets, in risky flirtations in the silent boxes of the Hofoper, in manoeuvres we slept through and even in those infections we sometimes caught from love.
The reader will understand that the unexpected arrival of my cousin was welcome to me. None of my frivolous friends could boast of a cousin like that, a waistcoat like that, a watch-chain like that, such a close tie to the semi-mythical soil of the Slovene village of Sipolje, the home of the then not yet forgotten, but already legendary Hero of Solferino.
In the evening, I collected my cousin. His shining satin jacket made a great impression on all my friends. He babbled away in an incomprehensible German, laughed a lot with his strong white teeth, allowed us all to buy him drinks, promised to kit out my friends with new waistcoats and watch-chains from Slovenia, and was happy to accept down-payments. Everyone envied me my waistcoat, watch and chain. If they could, they would have happily bought my whole cousin off me, my relations and my Sipolje.
My cousin promised to be back in the autumn. We all trooped off to the station. I bought him a second-class ticket. He took it to the ticket office, and managed to swap it for a third-class one. Then he proceeded to wave to us. We were all heartbroken when the train rumbled out of the station; because we were as prone to melancholy as we were avid for pleasure.
V
We went on talking about my cousin Joseph Branco for at least another day or two. Then we forgot about him again, or, if you like, we set him aside for the time being. Because we had other, more current follies that wanted to be aired and celebrated.
It wasn’t until late summer, on or about August 20, that I received a letter from Joseph Branco, written in Slovene, which that same evening I translated to my friends. It described the Veterans’ Association’s celebration of the Emperor’s birthday in Sipolje. Branco himself was a reservist; he was still too young to belong to the Association. Even so, he marched with them to the forest clearing where they held a big party every 18th August, simply because none of the oldsters was up to carrying the big side drum. There were five brass players and three clarinettists. But what good is a marching band without a big side drum?
“I don’t understand those peculiar Slovenes,” said young Festetics. “The Hungarians rob them of their most basic national rights, and they retaliate, they even rebel, or it looks like they might rebel, and then they go and celebrate the King’s birthday.”
“There’s nothing peculiar about the Monarchy,” replied Count Chojnicki, the oldest of our group. “But for our moronic government” (he was given to strong expressions), “nothing would look at all out of the way. By which I mean that so far as Austria-Hungary is concerned, the ostensibly peculiar is perfectly natural. It’s only in this crazy Europe of nation-states and nationalists that the natural looks peculiar. Of course it’s the Slovenes and Poles and the Ruthenian Galicians, and the kaftan Jews from Boryslaw, the horse-dealers from Bačka, the Moslems from Sarajevo and the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing the ‘Gott erhalte.’ While the German students from Brünn and Eger, the dentists, apothecaries, hairdressers’ apprentices, photographers from Linz, Graz, Knittelfeld, the goitres from the Alpine valleys, they all sing the ‘Wacht am Rhein.’ Gentlemen, I predict that Austria will be destroyed by that Nibelung tendency! The heart of Austria is not the centre, but the periphery. You won’t find Austria in the Alps — chamois, yes, and edelweiss and gentians but barely a hint of the double-headed eagle. The substance of Austria is drawn and replenished from the Crown Lands.”
Baron Kovacs, recent military nobility of Hungarian descent, screwed in his monocle, as was his wont when he thought he had something especially important to say. He spoke in the harsh and melodious German of the Magyars, not so much out of necessity as from a dissenter’s pride. As he did, his crumpled face that looked like dough that has failed to rise flushed violently. “It is the Hungarians who have most to suffer in this Double Monarchy,” he said. It was his statement of faith; the words might have been graven in bronze. He bored all of us and he infuri
ated Chojnicki, the oldest and most highly strung of our little group. Chojnicki’s standard riposte inevitably followed. As ever, he recited: “The Hungarians, my dear Kovacs, are responsible for oppressing the following peoples: the Slovaks, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Ruthenians, Bosnians, the Swabians of the Bačka, and the Saxons of Timisoara.” He counted them on the spread fingers of his fine, strong, slender hands.
Kovacs laid his monocle on the table. Chojnicki’s words seemed to have made no impression on him. I know what I know, he thought, as he always did. Sometimes he said it aloud too.
He was a harmless, on occasion even a good young man; I couldn’t bear him. Even so, I strove to generate a friendly feeling for him. I suffered because I didn’t like him, and for a reason: I was in love with his sister. Her name was Elisabeth, and she was all of nineteen.
I’d been fighting against the feeling for a long time in vain, not so much because I felt at risk, but because I dreaded the silent mockery of my cynical friends. Back then, before the Great War, the fashion was for arrogance and cynicism, a silly genuflection to the so-called “décadence,” a lassitude that was half-affected and half-genuine, and a groundless boredom. This was the atmosphere in which I spent my best years. It was an atmosphere that had little use for emotions, while passion was positively scorned. My friends had inconsequential little “liaisons,” women you set aside and occasionally loaned out like macs; women you accidentally forgot, like umbrellas, or on purpose, like boring parcels you didn’t go back for, for fear of being re-attached to them. In the circles in which I moved love was accounted an aberration, an engagement was like an apoplexy, and a marriage something like a long illness. We were young. We accepted that sometime in the course of our lives we would probably get married, but we felt similarly about the arterial sclerosis that would probably befall us in twenty or thirty years as well. I had numerous opportunities for being alone with the girl, though at that time it was by no means accepted that young ladies could consort with young gentlemen for longer than an hour without some fitting, positively legitimate pretext. I only took advantage of a handful of such opportunities. As I say, I would have been ashamed to use all of them, because of my friends. Yes, I was scrupulously careful that my feeling didn’t show, and I was often worried that someone or other in my circle might have got wind of it, because of some indiscretion of mine. When I ran into my friends unexpectedly from time to time, their sudden silence left me convinced that they had just been talking about my love of Elisabeth Kovacs, and I felt all glum about it, as though I’d been caught doing something bad, as though some nasty, despicable weakness had been discovered in me. But during the few hours I spent alone with Elisabeth, I thought I could feel how shallow and unworthy the mockery of my friends was, their cynicism and their affected “décadence.” At the same time, however, I felt a little guilty too, as though I had betrayed their high and holy principles. In a way I was leading a kind of double life, and I didn’t feel very good about it.