He pulled off his shirt and washed himself at the well. He spluttered and snorted as he did so, spat, howled and roared, it really was like the primitive invading our time. Then he pulled on his coarse shirt, and we each advanced to exchange greetings. Our greetings were in equal part formal and heartfelt. There was a kind of ceremony about them, though we saw each other almost every morning, a tacit assurance that to me he was more than a Jewish coachman, while for him I was more than a young whippersnapper from the capital, with influential friends. Sometimes he asked me to read the rare letters his son wrote him from the conservatory. They were short letters, but since in the first place he didn’t have a very good grasp of the German in which his son felt obliged to write — goodness only knows why — and secondly because his tender father’s heart wanted these letters to be a little less short than they were, he made sure I read them to him very slowly. Often he would ask me to repeat a sentence two or three times.
The chickens in his little shed started to cluck as soon as he set foot in the yard. The horses whinnied, almost lustfully, to the morning and to Manes the coachman. First, he unlocked the stable, and both greys put out their heads at once. He kissed them both, as a man kisses a woman. Then he went into the shed to get out the carriage. Thereupon, he put the horses to. Then he opened the henhouse, and with much squawking and flapping of wings the fowls scattered. It was as though an invisible hand had dispersed them across the yard.
I also saw the wife of the coachman Manes Reisiger. She got up about half an hour after her husband, and asked me in to tea. I drank it, from the great tin samovar in their blue kitchen, while Manes ate his bread and onion with grated radish and cucumbers. It smelled strong, but secret, almost homely. I had never breakfasted in this way before, but I loved it, I was young, really I was just young.
I even liked the wife of my friend Manes Reisiger, though she was what in common parlance is called plain, red-haired, freckled, looking like a puffed-up bread roll. In spite of that, and in spite of her fat fingers, there was something dainty about the way she poured my tea and prepared her husband’s breakfast. She had given him three children. Two had died of smallpox. She would talk about the dead children sometimes, as though they were still alive. She seemed not to distinguish between those of her children who were in the ground and her son who had gone off to the conservatory in Vienna; perhaps to her he was as good as dead. Certainly, he was no longer present in her life.
Someone who was eminently alive to her and always present in her imagination was my cousin, the chestnut roaster. I drew my own conclusions. In another week he would be with us, my cousin Joseph Branco Trotta.
X
And in another week, he arrived.
He arrived with his mule, his leather sack and his chestnuts. He was dark and tan and jovial, just as he was when I had last seen him in Vienna. It felt perfectly normal to him to see me here. The proper chestnut season was still a while off. My cousin had simply come a couple of weeks early on my account. On the way from the station into town, he sat on the box alongside our mutual friend, the coachman Manes Reisiger. He had tethered his mule to the cab. His leather sack, his pan and his chestnuts were strapped to either side. And so we made our entry into the little town of Zlotogrod, but we aroused no interest. The people of Zlotogrod were used to seeing my cousin Joseph Branco turning up every other year. And they seemed to have already got used to me, the stranger in their midst.
As usual, my cousin Joseph Branco stayed with Manes Reisiger. Mindful of the deals he had struck with me the previous summer for his watch and chain, he had packed a few more knick-knacks for me, for instance an embossed silver ashtray with two crossed daggers and a St Nicodemus (who had nothing to do with them), also a brass mug that seemed to me to smell of sour dough, and a painted wooden cuckoo. All these, thus Joseph Branco, were presents for me, “in consideration of” his travel expenses. And I understood what he meant by “in consideration of.” I bought the ashtray, the mug and the wooden bird from him on the evening of his arrival. He was happy.
To while away the time, as he claimed, but in fact to take every opportunity of earning a little money, he made occasional attempts to persuade the coachman Manes that he, Joseph Branco, was a skilled coachman, better than Manes, and better able too to find customers. But Reisiger paid no attention. Without bothering about Joseph Branco, he put his horses to early in the morning, and drove off to the station and to the market place, where his colleagues, the other coachmen waited.
It was a fine, sunny summer. Even though Zlotogrod wasn’t a proper “little town” at all, being rather more of a village in disguise; and even though it gave off the fresh breath of nature, to such an extent that the forests, swamps and hills that surrounded it almost seemed to cluster round the marketplace, and you got the impression that forest, swamp and hill might just as easily and naturally march into town as any traveller arriving at the station to put up at the Golden Bear; my friends, the officials in the District Commissioner’s office, and the gentlemen of the Ninth Dragoons were of the view that Zlotogrod was a real town, because they needed to think they hadn’t been banished to the end of the earth, and the mere fact that there was a railway station in Zlotogrod gave them the assurance that they didn’t live remote from the civilisation they had grown up in and that had pampered them. The result was that once or twice a week they claimed to have to leave the unbreathable town air, pile into carriages, and head for the forests, swamps and hills that in actual fact were on their way into town to them. Because not only was Zlotogrod full of nature, it also seemed to be under siege from its surroundings. So it happened that once or twice a week I and my friends went out in Manes Reisiger’s cab into the so-called “environs” of Zlotogrod. We referred to these trips as “outings.” Often we would stop at Jadlowker’s frontier tavern. Old Jadlowker, an ancient, silver-bearded Jew, sat outside the mighty arch of his broad, grass-green double-doors, stiff and half-paralysed. He resembled winter who wanted to enjoy the last fine days of autumn and take them with him into the rapidly approaching eternity that would know no more seasons. He couldn’t hear, not one word, he was deaf as a post. But from his large, sad, black eyes I thought I could tell that everything that younger men took in with their ears, he was able to see, and that his deafness was a chosen deafness that he was happy in. The threads of gossamer flew gently and tenderly past him. The silvery, but still warm autumn sun shone on the old man as he sat facing west, facing the evening and the sunset, the terrestrial emblems of death, as though he expected that the eternity to which he would soon be consigned would come to him, rather than he go out to it. The crickets shrilled incessantly. The frogs croaked incessantly. A deep peace ruled over the world, the bitter peace of autumn.
At about this time, my cousin Joseph Branco, following an old-established tradition among the chestnut roasters of Austria-Hungary, would open his stall on the Ring of Zlotogrod. For two days the warm, chewy smell of baked apples wafted through the little town.
It began to rain. It was a Thursday. The following day, a Friday therefore, the news was on all street-corners.
It was a proclamation from our old Emperor Franz Joseph, and it was addressed: “To my peoples.”
XI
I was an ensign in the Reserve. It was only two years previously that I had left my battalion, the Twenty-First Jägers. At the time it seemed to me that the war had come at a good moment. Now that it was there and inevitable, I saw right away — and it seems to me my friends will have seen it just as spontaneously — that even a meaningless death was better than a meaningless life. I was afraid of death. No question. I didn’t want to die. All I wanted was the certainty that I would know how to die.
My friend Joseph Branco and his friend the cabbie Manes were both reservists. They were drafted. On the evening of the Friday when the Emperor’s proclamation was put up on walls everywhere, I went, as usual, to the officers’ mess, to eat with my friends in the Ninth Dragoons. I couldn’t understand their heal
thy appetite, their standard good cheer, their foolish equanimity in view of their orders to attack the Russian frontier town of Radziwillow to the northeast. I was the only one among them who saw the signs of death in their harmless, even cheerful, certainly unmoved expressions. It was as though they were in that state of euphoria that is sometimes experienced by people near death, and that is itself an avatar of death. And even though they were healthy and alert as they sat at their tables drinking their schnapps and their beer, and even though I pretended to take part in their tomfooleries and japes, yet I felt more like a doctor or medical orderly who sees his patient dying, thankful only that the dying man seems unaware of his imminent death. And yet in the long run I still felt unease of a kind that the doctor or orderly may feel when confronted with death and the dying man’s euphoria, at that instant when they are not quite sure whether it might not be better to tell the doomed man what awaits him, instead of feeling relief that he might depart without guessing.
As a result I quickly left the gentlemen of the Ninth Dragoons, and set off on my way to Manes the cabbie, with whom, as already said, my cousin Joseph Branco was staying.
How different was the feeling there, and how salutary it was for me after that evening in the mess of the Ninth Dragoons! Maybe it was the ritual candles in the blue parlour of the Jewish cabbie Manes, burning almost cheerfully, but in any case stolidly and fearlessly, towards their extinction; three candles, golden yellow, stuck in green beer bottles; the cabbie Manes was too poor even to buy himself brass candlesticks. They were little more than stumps of candles, and they seemed to me to symbolize the end of the world, which I knew was now at hand. The tablecloth was white, the bottles of that cheap green glass that seems to proclaim its refreshing contents in a plebeian and exuberant manner, and the flickering candle ends were golden yellow. They were guttering. They cast a restless light over the table, and projected equally restless, flickering shadows on the dark blue walls. At the head of the table sat Manes the cabbie, not in his usual cabbie’s gear of belted sheepskin and corduroy cap, but in a shiny three-quarter-length coat and a black velvet cap. My cousin Joseph Branco wore the greasy leather jerkin he always wore, and, out of respect for his Jewish host, a green Tyrolean hat on his head. Somewhere a cricket was chirruping shrilly.
“The time has come for us all to say our goodbyes,” began Manes the cabbie. And, much more clear-sighted than my friends in the Ninth Dragoons, and yet with an almost aristocratic touch of equanimity, because of the way death exalts every man who is both prepared for it and worthy of it, he continued: “It will be a great war, a long war, and there is no knowing which of us may one day come home from it. For the last time I am sitting here, at the side of my wife, at the Friday table, with the Sabbath candles. Let us take a proper farewell, my friends: you, Branco, and you, sir!” And, in order to take a truly proper farewell, we decided, the three of us, to go to Jadlowker’s border tavern.
XII
Jadlowker’s border tavern was always open, at all times of day and night. It was the bar for Russian deserters, those of the Tsar’s soldiers, that is, who could be persuaded, cajoled or threatened by the numerous agents of the American shipping lines to leave the army, and take ship for Canada. Many more, admittedly, quit voluntarily. They paid the agents the last money they had; they or their relations. Jadlowker’s border tavern had the reputation of a disorderly house. But, like all the other disorderly houses in the area, it was commended to the favour of the Austrian border police, and thus in a manner of speaking enjoyed simultaneously the protection and the suspicion of the authorities.
When we got there — at the end of a silent and depressed half-hour walk — the great, brown double-doors were already locked. Even the lantern that hung there was out. We were forced to knock, and the boy Onufri came to let us in. I knew Jadlowker’s tavern, I had been there a couple of times, and I was familiar with the usual commotion of the place, that particular type of noise that is made by people who have suddenly become homeless or stateless, who have no present, because they are transiting from the past into the future, from a familiar past to a highly doubtful future, like ship’s passengers at the moment that they leave terra firma to board an unfamiliar ship by way of a wobbling gangplank.
Today, though, was quiet. It was eerily quiet. Even little Kapturak, one of the keenest and noisiest agents, whose preferred way of hiding all the many things he was professionally and personally obliged to hide was by means of an extreme garrulousness, today sat silently in the corner, on the bench by the stove, small, tinier than he was already, and thus doubly inconspicuous, a silent shadow of his otherwise self. Only the day before yesterday he had escorted a group of deserters, or as they like to say in his calling, a “consignment,” over the frontier, and now the Emperor’s proclamation was on every wall, the war was there, even the mighty shipping agency was powerless, the mighty thunder of world history silenced the chattersome little Kapturak, and its violent lightning reduced him to a shadow. The deserters, Kapturak’s victims, sat with dull and glazed expressions in front of their half-filled glasses. Each time I’d gone to Jadlowker’s tavern before, it had been a particular pleasure of mine — as a young, glib person, who sees in the foolish behaviour of others, even the most exotic and alien, due confirmation of his own thoughtlessness — to spectate at the insouciance of those recently become stateless, the way they drained one glass after another, and ordered one glass after another. The landlord Jadlowker sat behind his bar like an omen, not a messenger of doom, but its bearer; he looked as though he didn’t have the least inclination to fill any glasses, even if his customers had called for it. What was the point of it all? Tomorrow or the day after, the Russians might be here. Poor Jadlowker, who even a week ago had sat there so majestically with his silver beard, like a lord mayor among the barmen, shadowed and shielded as much by the discreet protection of the authorities as by their creditable mistrust, today looked like a human being who is obliged to liquidize his entire existence: a victim of world history. And the heavy blonde barmaid at his side behind the bar had also just been terminated by world history, and given in her brief notice. Everything private was suddenly out in the open. It represented the public world, it stood in for and symbolized it. That was why our farewells were so misguided and so brief. We drank three glasses of mead, and with them we silently munched salted peas. Suddenly my cousin Joseph Branco said: “I’m not going back to Sarajevo. I’m going to report here in Zloczow, together with Manes!” “Bravo!” I exclaimed. And as I did, I knew I would have liked to do exactly the same thing.
But I was thinking about Elisabeth.
XIII
I was thinking about Elisabeth. Ever since I had read the Emperor’s proclamation, I had only two thoughts in my head: one was of death, and the other was of Elisabeth. To this day I don’t know which of them was stronger.
Faced with death, all my foolish anxieties about the foolish jeers of my friends vanished and were forgotten. All at once, I felt brave, for the first time in my life I had courage to own up to my so-called “weakness.” I sensed that the facile exuberance of my friends in Vienna would have recoiled before the black gleam of death, and that in the hour of farewell — of such a farewell — there could be no space for any sort of mockery.
I too could have reported for duty to the local recruiting office in Zloczow, where the cabbie Manes was expected and where my cousin Joseph Branco was also going. In fact, it was my intention to forget Elisabeth and my friends in Vienna and my mother, and deliver myself as soon as possible to the nearest receiving station of death, which is to say, the local recruiting office in Zloczow. Strong feelings bound me to my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend the cabbie Manes Reisiger. Given the nearness of death, my feelings became purer and clearer, just as sometimes, with the onset of a grave illness, clear insights and priorities emerge, so that, for all one’s apprehension and anxiety and sense of suffering to come, a sort of proud satisfaction sets in that one has understood something
; the happiness one has identified in suffering, and a sort of serenity because one has been presented with the bill in advance. We are almost happy in our illness. I was just as happy in contemplation of the great illness that was breaking out in the world, which is to say the World War. I could allow my fever dreams their course, which otherwise I tried to suppress. I was in equal measure liberated and endangered.
I already knew that my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend Manes Reisiger were dearer to me than all my erstwhile friends, with the exception of Count Chojnicki. People’s notions of the war ahead were simplistic and for the most part ridiculous. I myself supposed we would march by garrisons, probably in closed ranks, and if not side by side, then at least remain in hailing distance. I pictured myself as I wished to be: in close proximity to my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend, the cabbie Manes.
But there was no time to lose. In fact, what chiefly oppressed us in those days was haste: there was no more time to fill the negligible amount of space left us by our lives, not even time to ready ourselves to die. We didn’t really know whether to yearn for death or hope to escape with our lives. For me and the likes of me these were hours of utmost tension: hours in which death no longer looked like an abyss that you plunge into one day, more like a further shore that you try to leap across to, and you know how long the seconds feel before you leap.