But the coachman Manes Reisiger, far from writing a letter of thanks, and wholly unable to see the smile of fortune that had brought him and his son into the proximity of Count Chojnicki and myself, rather assuming that his son Ephraim was so inordinately talented that a Viennese conservatory must count itself lucky to have someone like his son, visited me two days later, and began as follows: “If anyone can do anything in this world, then it is my son Ephraim. I always said so to him. And so it came to pass. He is my only son. His violin playing is extraordinary. You should ask him to play for you one day. But he is proud. Who knows if he will!” It was as though it was for me to thank the coachman Manes for giving me the opportunity to procure his son a place in the conservatory. “I have no more business in Vienna,” so he continued, “I am going home tomorrow.”
“You must call on Count Chojnicki, and thank him,” I told him.
“A fine Count!” said Manes, appreciatively. “I will bid him adieu. Has he heard my Ephraim play?”
“No,” I said, “you should ask him.”
The train of the coachman Manes Reisiger was leaving at eleven at night. At eight he came to me, asking, if not ordering, me to take him to Chojnicki’s hotel.
Very well, I took him there. Chojnicki was grateful, almost delighted. Yes, he was even moved. “How wonderful that he should come to me and thank me,” he said. “I told you right away this is what our Jews are like!”
By the end, he was thanking the coachman Manes for giving him the opportunity of having preserved a genius for the world. It sounded as though for the last decade or more, Chojnicki had been waiting for nothing more than that the son of Manes Reisiger should come to him, and that now a long held and deeply desired wish was finally being fulfilled. In his gratitude, he even offered Manes Reisiger the fare for his return journey. This the coachman Manes declined, but he invited us both to visit him. He had a house, he told us, with three rooms and a kitchen, a stable for his horse, and a garden where he parked his carriage and his sleigh. He wasn’t a poor coachman by any manner of means. He earned as much as fifty crowns a month. And if we visited him, we would have a wonderful time. He would certainly see to it that we lacked for nothing.
Nor did he forget to remind Chojnicki and me that it was positively our duty to look after his son Ephraim. “A genius like that must be looked after!” he said, in leaving. Chojnicki promised to do just that; and also that we would visit him in Zlotogrod next summer, without fail.
VII
At this point, it behoves me to speak of an important matter that I had hoped, as I began writing this book, to avoid. What is at issue is religion.
Like my friends, like all my friends, I had no faith. I never attended Mass. I would accompany my mother as far as the church door, my mother who herself may not have had faith, but who was, as people say, “practicing.” At that time I had a positive hatred of the church. Today, now that I am a believer, I no longer know why I hated it so. It was, so to speak, the “fashion.”
I would have felt ashamed to tell my friends that I had been to church. They were not really opposed to religion as such; it was more that there was a type of arrogance in them towards the tradition in which they had grown up. They didn’t want to renounce the essence of the tradition, but they — and since I went along with them, we — rebelled against the forms, because we didn’t know that true form is inseparable from essence, and that it was childish to try to separate them. It was childish, but as I say, we were children in those days. Death was already crossing his bony hands over the bumpers from which we drank in our childish merriment. We were unaware of him. We were unaware of him because we were unaware of God. Of our number, it was only Count Chojnicki who still observed the forms of religion, not so much from faith, as from a sort of noblesse oblige. The rest of us who disdained them were little better than anarchists in his view. “The Church of Rome,” so he would harangue us, “is the only brace in this rotten world. The only giver and maintainer of form. By enshrining the traditional element ‘handed down’ in its dogmas, as in an icy palace, it obtains and bestows upon its children the licence to play round about this icy palace, which has spacious grounds, to indulge irresponsibility, even to pardon the forbidden, or to enact it. By instituting sin, it forgives sins. It sees that there is no man without flaw: that is the wonderfully humane thing about it. Its flawless children become saints. By that alone, it concedes the flawed nature of mankind. It concedes sinfulness to such a degree even that it refuses to see beings as human if they are not sinful: they will be sainted or holy. In so doing the Church of Rome shows its most exalted tendency, namely to forgive. There is no nobler tendency than forgiveness. And by the same token, there is none more vulgar than to seek revenge. There is no nobility without generosity, just as there is no vengefulness without vulgarity.”
Count Chojnicki was the oldest and wisest of us, but we were too young and foolish to give his superiority the attention it merited. We listened to him, complaisantly, and even imagined we were doing him a favour. To us, so-called young people, he was an elderly gentleman. Only later, in the War, did we come to see how much younger he truly was than we were.
It was only afterwards, and far too late, that we grasped that we were not younger than him, but quite simply ageless: unnatural, if you will, without age. While he, of course, in keeping with his years, was authentic and blessed.
VIII
A few months later, I received the following letter from the coachman Manes Reisiger:
Dear Sir,
After the great honour and service you did me, I humbly permit myself to inform you that I am very, very grateful to you. My son writes to tell me he is doing well at the conservatory, and I owe you thanks for his genius. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. At the same time, I humbly permit myself to ask you to do me the great kindness of paying me a visit. Your cousin, the chestnut roaster Trotta, always — which is to say, for the past ten years — stays with me in the autumn. I imagine that you too might find pleasure in staying with me. My house is poor, but spacious.
Esteemed sir! Don’t despise this invitation. I am so small, and you are so great. Dear sir! I also beg your forgiveness for having this letter written. I cannot write, except my own name. The present letter is written on my instructions by the official public scribe of our town, Hirsch Kiniower, who is a dependable, tidy, and officially licensed individual. Signed, your obedient servant:
Manes Reisiger, Coachman, Zlotogrod
The whole letter was written in a careful, calligraphic hand, of the sort that was then described as “like a book.” Only the writing of the name, the signature, betrayed the enchanting clumsiness of the coachman’s hand. That signature alone would have been sufficient to decide me to keep my word, and travel to Zlotogrod in early autumn. All of us in those days were carefree, and I was as carefree as any of the others. Our life before the Great War was idyllic, and a journey to the faraway town of Zlotogrod seemed like an adventure to all of us.
And the fact that I was to be the hero of this adventure was a splendid opportunity to strike a pose before my friends. And even though this adventurous journey was so far in the future, and even though I was going alone, we talked about it every evening, as though there was only a week between me and Zlotogrod, and as though it wasn’t just me alone, but all of us who were going. Gradually the journey became a passion for us, an obsession even. And we started to paint an imaginary picture of the remote little town of Zlotogrod, to such a degree that even while we were describing it, we were convinced we were painting wholly inaccurate pictures; and we couldn’t stop distorting this place none of us had ever seen. I mean: giving it all sorts of attributes of which we were sure in advance that they were products of our imagination, and not at all the real properties of the little town.
Untroubled times! Death was already crossing his bony hands over the glass bumpers from which we drank. We didn’t see him; we didn’t even see his hands. We talked so long and so intently about
Zlotogrod that I began to be afraid it might suddenly disappear, or that my friends might come to the conclusion that it was all talk, and that such a Zlotogrod didn’t in fact exist and that it was a figment of my imagination. Suddenly I was seized with an impatient longing for Zlotogrod, and for the coachman by the name of Reisiger.
In the middle of the summer of 1914 I went there, having first written to my cousin Trotta in Sipolje that I hoped to meet him there.
IX
So, in the middle of the summer of 1914, I went to Zlotogrod. I put up at the Golden Bear, the only hotel in the little town, so I was told, that was up to European standards.
The station was tiny, just like the station in Sipolje, which I had dutifully committed to memory. All the stations in the old Dual Monarchy resembled each other, all the little stations in the little provincial towns. Yellow and tiny, they were like lazy cats that in winter lay in the snow, in summer in the sun, sheltering under the crystal glass roofs over the platform, and guarded by the emblem of the black double eagle on yellow ground. All over, in Sipolje as in Zlotogrod, there was the same porter, the same porter with the impressive belly, the peaceable dark blue uniform, the black sash diagonally across the chest, the sash in which the bell was stuck, the bell from which issued the threefold official ring that was the signal for departure; on the platform in Zlotogrod, over the door to the stationmaster’s office, as in Sipolje and everywhere else, hung that black iron instrument that so miraculously produced the distant silver tinkle of the distant telephone, douce and frail signals from other worlds, so that one was surprised that they had found a home in such a heavy, albeit small earpiece; on the station in Zlotogrod, as on the station in Sipolje, the porter saluted the arrivals and the departures, and his saluting conferred a sort of military benediction; in the station in Zlotogrod, as in the station in Sipolje, there was the same “first and second class waiting room,” the same station buffet, with the row of schnapps bottles and the bosomy blonde cashier and the two gigantic potted palms either side of the bar, that were equally reminiscent of primitive vegetation and cardboard beer-mats. And outside the station, exactly as in Sipolje, stood three coaches. And I straightaway recognized the unmistakeable coachman, Manes Reisiger.
Of course, it was he who took me to the Golden Bear. He had a fine carriage drawn by a pair of silvery greys, the spokes of the wheels were painted yellow, and the tyres were rubber, just as Manes had seen them in Vienna, on the so-called “rubber-wheelers.”
He admitted to me as we drove that he had reconditioned his coach, not so much for my comfort and in my honour, as out of a sort of collective zeal that compelled him to take a leaf out of the book of his colleagues, the Viennese coachmen, and sacrifice his savings to the god of progress, and invest in two greys, and put rubber tyres on his wheels.
From the station to the town was a substantial distance, and Manes Reisiger had plenty of time to tell me the things that were on his mind. As he did so, he held the reins in his left hand. On his right, the whip stayed in its case. The greys needed no instruction, seeming to know the way. Manes didn’t need to do anything. So he sat there casually on the box, with the reins in a loose grip in his left hand, half-turned towards me while he talked. The two greys had cost just one hundred and twenty-five crowns. They were army horses, both blind in one eye, and so no longer useful for military purposes, and sold cheap by the Ninth Dragoons, who were stationed in Zlotogrod. Admittedly he, the coachman Manes Reisiger, would never have been able to buy them so easily, if he hadn’t happened to be a favourite of the Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons. In the little town of Zlotogrod there were no fewer than five coachmen. The other four, Reisiger’s colleagues, had dirty cabs, lazy, hobbling old mares, crooked wheels, and scabbed leather benches. The stuffing swelled up out of the patched and holey leather, and no gentleman, much less a Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons, could be expected to sit in such a coach.
I had letters from Chojnicki to the commanding officer of the local garrison, Colonel Földes of the Ninth, and also to the District Commissioner, Baron Grappik. The following morning, on the first full day of my stay, I proposed to pay calls on both men. The coachman Manes Reisiger fell silent, he had nothing more to say, having already told me everything important in his life. Even so, he left the whip in its case, still held the reins nice and loose, still sat half-turned towards me on the box. The steady smile on his wide mouth, with the strong white teeth against the night-black, almost blue-black blackness of his beard and moustaches suggested a milky moon between forests, between agreeable forests. There was so much cheer, so much goodness in that smile, that it even contrived to dominate the flat, melancholy landscape I was driving through. Wide fields on my right, and wide swamps on my left bordered the road between the Zlotogrod railway station and the little town of Zlotogrod itself — it was as though it had taken some vow of chastity and sworn to keep away from the station that connected it to the world at large. It was a rainy afternoon, and, as I say, early autumn. The rubber tyres of Manes’s carriage rolled soundlessly along the sodden, unpaved road, while the heavy hooves of the ex-Army greys smacked rhythmically into the dark grey mud, sending great clumps of it flying through the air. Darkness was falling when we reached the first houses. In the middle of the Ring, facing the little church, its presence marked by a solitary sorry lantern, stood Zlotogrod’s one and only two-storey building: it was the Golden Bear. The solitary lantern was like an orphan child, vainly trying to smile through its tears.
Even with so much that was unfamiliar, or more, that was remote and distant for which I had prepared myself, most of what I saw was homely and familiar. It wasn’t till much later — long after the Great War, which people call the “World War,” and in my view rightly, and not for the usual reason, that the whole world was involved in it, but rather because as a result of it we lost a whole world, our world — not till much later, then, was it that I would see that even landscapes, fields, nations, races, huts and cafés of all sorts and origins must follow the natural law of a strong spirit that is capable of bringing the far near, making the exotic familiar, and bringing together things that are pulling apart. I am referring to the misunderstood and maligned spirit of the old Monarchy, which allowed me to feel every bit as much at home in Zlotogrod as I did in Sipolje, or in Vienna for that matter. The only café in Zlotogrod, the Café Habsburg, situated on the ground floor of the hotel where I was staying, the Golden Bear, looked not a whit different from the Café Wimmerl in Josefstadt, where I was in the habit of meeting my friends in the afternoons. Here too behind the bar sat the familiar figure of the cashier, a voluptuous blonde of a type that seemed to be the exclusive preserve of cashiers in my time, a stolid goddess of vice, a seductress so obvious — lustful, destructive and professionally patient — that she contented herself with mere hints. I had seen her like in Agram, in Olmütz, in Brünn, in Kecskemet, in Szombathely, in Ödenburg, in Sternberg, in Müglitz. The chessboards and dominoes, the smoke-stained walls, the gaslights, the kitchen table in the corner by the door to the toilets, the maid in her blue apron, the local constable with his clay-coloured helmet stepping in for a break, equally sheepish and intimidating, leaving his rifle with fixed bayonet almost shyly in the umbrella holder, and the tarock players with their Franz Joseph mutton-chops and their round cuffs, foregathering every day at the same time — all this was home and it was more than country or fatherland, it was a wide and varied expanse, but it was still familiar and homely: it was the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. District Commissioner Baron Grappik and Colonel Földes of the Ninth both spoke the same nasal army German of the better classes, a language that was harsh and soft at the same time, as though it had been sired by Slavs and Italians, a language full of discreet irony and ornate assurances of beholdenness, and of gossip, and even of mild nonsense. Before a week was out, I felt as much at home in Zlotogrod as I had in Sipolje, or Müglitz, or Brünn, or in our Café Wimmerl in the Josefstadt.
Of course I went for rides every da
y in the cab of my friend Manes Reisiger. The country was in actual fact poor, but it looked blithe and flush. Even the expanse of swamp where nothing grew looked juicy and bountiful to me, and the good-natured chorus of frogs that emanated from it was a hymn of praise from creatures who happened to have an acuter understanding than I did of the purpose for which the Almighty had created their home, the swamps.
At night I sometimes heard the hoarse, broken cries of the wild geese flying high above. There was still plenty of green on the willows and birches, but the magnificent chestnuts were already shedding their tough, bronze, precisely silhouetted leaves. The ducks chattered in the middle of the road, where the silver-grey mud, never completely dry, was punctuated by occasional ponds.
I usually ate my dinner with the officers of the Ninth Dragoons; or, more accurately, drank it. Over the glass bumpers from which we drank, an invisible Death was already crossing his bony hands. We didn’t sense them. Sometimes we sat together till late. Out of an inexplicable fear of the night, we stayed up till dawn.
An inexplicable fear, I say, though to us at the time it seemed rational; we sought an explanation in the claim that we were too young to neglect the nights. In fact, as I saw later, it was our fear of the day, more precisely, our fear of morning, the clearest portion of the day. That’s when a man can see and is himself seen with the greatest clarity. And we had no desire either to see, or to be seen clearly.
In the morning, then, to escape that clarity, and also the dull, unrefreshing sleep that I knew all too well, and that overcomes a man after a night on the tiles like a false friend, a quack doctor, a treacherous well-wisher, or a supposed benefactor, I took refuge with Manes, the coachman. I often turned up around six in the morning, just as he was getting up. He lived outside the town, close to the cemetery. It took me half an hour to get there on foot. I would arrive sometimes just as he had got out of bed. His little house stood there all by itself, surrounded by fields and meadows that didn’t belong to him, painted blue, and with a grey black shingled roof, not unlike a living creature that seemed not to stand, but to be in motion. So strong was the deep blue of the walls against the slowly waning yellow-green that surrounded it on all sides. When I pushed open the red gate that barred the way to the coachman Manes’s residence, I sometimes caught him standing in his doorway. He would be standing in front of the brown door, in his homespun shirt and drawers, barefoot and bareheaded, holding a large brown can in his hand. He would take a sup from it, then spit out the water in a great arc. With his great black beard, staring into the rising sun, in his coarse linens, with his wild and woolly hair, he was redolent of jungle, primitive, primordial, confused and misplaced, who knew why.