I went back inside. A single lamp was still burning. It didn’t light the room so much as refine its darkness. It was the tiny luminous kernel of a heavy, orbic darkness. I sat down beside the lamp. Suddenly a couple of shots rang out. I ran outside. The shots hadn’t finished echoing away. They were still rolling around under the huge, icy sky. I listened. Nothing moved, nothing except the steady arctic wind. I could stand it no longer, and went back inside.
Shortly afterwards, the lieutenant came in, pale, cap in hand in spite of the wind, his pistol half out of its holster.
He sat down right away, breathing hard, unbuttoned his tunic, and looked at me with staring eyes, as though he didn’t know me, as though he had forgotten who I was and was straining to identify me. He swept the cards off the table with his sleeve. He took a long pull from his flask, lowered his head, and suddenly, rapidly said: “I only hit one of them.” “Poor aim,” I said. But he meant it differently.
“You’re right. I aimed badly. I had them form up in a line. I only wanted to give them a fright. I fired into the air. The last shot, it was as though something was pressing my arm down. I don’t know how it happened. The man is dead. My men can’t understand me any more.”
The soldier was buried that same night. The lieutenant accorded him full military honours. He never laughed again. He was reflecting about something that seemed to be preoccupying him.
We covered another ten versts or so under his command. Two days before the next commander was due to take over from him, he asked me to join him in his sleigh, and said: “This sleigh now belongs to you and your two friends. The Jew is a coachman, he’ll know his business. Here’s my map. I marked the point where you get off. You will be expected. The man is a friend of mine. Trustworthy. No one will come after you. I will report all three of you as fugitives. I will shoot you and have you buried.” He pressed my hand, and got out.
That night we set off. The trip was just a couple of hours. The man was there, waiting. We felt right away that we were safe with him. A new life began.
XXII
Our host belonged to the long-established community of Siberian Poles. He was a trapper by profession. He lived on his own, with a dog of no certifiable breed, a couple of hunting rifles, a number of homemade pipes, in two spacious rooms full of scruffy furs. His name was Baranovich, first name of Jan. He hardly spoke. A full black beard enjoined him to silence. We did all sorts of work for him, repairing his fence, splitting firewood, greasing the runners on his sleigh, sorting furs. These were all useful occupations for us to learn. But even after a week there, it was clear to us that he only allowed us to work for him out of a sense of tact, and so that in the isolation we didn’t quarrel with him or each other. He was right. He carved pipes and canes out of the limbs of a tough shrub he called nastorka, I don’t remember why. He broke in a new pipe every week. I never heard him tell a joke or anecdote. At the most he would take the pipe out of his mouth to smile at one or the other of us. Every two months someone would come from the nearest hamlet, bringing an old Russian newspaper. Baranovich didn’t even look at it. I learned a lot from it, but not about the war. Once, I read that the Cossacks were about to invade Silesia. My cousin Joseph Branco believed it, Manes Reisiger didn’t. They started to quarrel. For the first time they quarrelled. In the end, they too were in the grip of that madness that is the inevitable outcome of isolation. Joseph Branco, younger and more hot-tempered, grabbed at Reisiger’s beard. I was just washing up in the kitchen when it happened. When I heard the quarrel, I dashed into the room, plate in hand. My friends had neither eyes nor ears for me. For the first time, even though I was shocked by the violence of two people I loved, I was struck also by the sudden understanding which came to me: namely the revelation that I was no longer one of them. I stood before them, like a hapless umpire, no longer their friend, and even though I was perfectly sure that a kind of cabin fever had them in its grip, I believed I was somehow immune to it. A kind of hateful indifference filled me. I went back into the kitchen to finish the washing up. They went wild. But, as though I expressly wanted not to disturb them in their crazed fight, in the way that you try not to disturb people when they’re asleep, I put the plates down very quietly, one on top of the other, to avoid making the least noise. After I was done, I sat down on the kitchen stool, and waited patiently.
Eventually, they both came out, one after the other. They wouldn’t look at me. It seemed each of them separately — seeing as they were now enemies — wanted to make me feel his disapproval because I hadn’t intervened in their quarrel. Both turned to some needless task or other. One ground the knives, but it didn’t look at all menacing. The other collected snow in a pan, lit a fire, threw in little pieces of kindling, and stared concentratedly into the flames. It got warm. The warmth reached the opposite window, the ice-flowers turning reddish, blue, sometimes violet in the reflection of the blaze. Little ice-patches that had formed on the floor under the leaky window started to melt.
Evening was at hand, the water was bubbling away in the pan. Baranovich was due back from one of his wanderings that he would undertake on certain days, we never knew when or why. He walked in, with his stick in his hand, and his mittens stuck inside his belt. (He had the habit of taking them off outside, a kind of etiquette.) He shook hands with each of us with the familiar greeting: “God give you health.” Then he took off his fur cap and crossed himself. He walked into the sitting room.
Later, the four of us ate together, as usual. No one spoke. We listened to the hour striking on the cuckoo clock, which made me think of a bird that had lost its way from some other distant country: I was surprised it hadn’t frozen. Baranovich, who was used to our customary evening chitchat, looked covertly into each of our faces. At last he got up, not slowly as usual, but suddenly, and seemingly disappointed with us, called “Good night!” and went into the other room. I cleared the table, and blew out the oil lamp. Night glimmered through the icy panes. We lay down to sleep. “Good night!” I said, as always. No reply.
In the morning, while I was splitting wood for kindling to light the samovar, Baranovich came into the kitchen. Unwontedly quickly, he started speaking: “So there was a fight,” he said. “I saw the wounds, I heard the silence. I can’t keep them here any longer. This house needs to be at peace. I’ve had guests before. They were always welcome to stay as long as they kept the peace. I never asked anyone where he was from. He could have been a murderer for all I cared. To me he was a guest. I have the watchword: a guest in the house is God in the house. The lieutenant who sent you to me I have known for a long time. I had to throw him out once too for fighting. He wasn’t upset. I’d like to keep you. You didn’t fight. But the other two will report you. So you’ll have to leave as well.” He stopped. I tossed the burning kindling into the samovar pan, and stuffed some loose newspaper over it to keep it from blowing out. When the samovar started to sing, Baranovich resumed: “You can’t run away. In this region, in this season it’s impossible for a wanderer to stay alive. There’s nothing for you but to go back to Viatka. To Viatka,” he said again, hesitated, and spelled it out: “to the camp. You may be punished gravely, lightly, or not at all. Then again, there’s no shortage of other trouble, the Tsar is far away, his laws are a mess. Report to Sergeant Kumin. He has more power than the camp commandment. I’ll give you some tea and makhorka for him. Remember: Kumin.” The water was boiling, I tipped some tea into the chajnik, poured boiling water on it, and put the chajnik on the samovar fire. For the last time! I thought. I wasn’t afraid of the camp. It was war, and that’s what happened to prisoners: they were put in camps. But I now understood that Baranovich was a sort of father, that I felt at home in his house, and that his bread was the bread of home. The previous day I’d lost my friends. Today I was losing my home. At that time, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t the last time I would lose my home. The likes of us is marked down by fate.
When I brought the tea in, Reisiger and Joseph Branco were already seated at
opposite ends of the table. Baranovich was leaning in the doorway. He didn’t sit down, not even when I poured his tea. I cut the bread myself, and doled it out. He stood by the table, drank his tea standing up, standing up he ate his bread. Then he said: “My friends, I’ve talked to your lieutenant. It’s impossible for me to keep you here any longer. Take your sleigh, stuff a few furs under your coats, they will warm you. I’ll take you back to the place where I first met you.”
Manes Reisiger went out; I could hear him towing the sleigh across the crisp snow in the yard. At first Branco didn’t realize what was happening. “All right, let’s pack up!” I said. For the first time, I was upset at having to take command.
When we were finished, and were sitting squeezed together in the narrow sleigh, Baranovich said to me: “Get down, there’s something I’ve forgotten.” We walked back into the house. For the last time, I sneaked a look at kitchen, parlour, window, knife, cutlery, the tied-up dog, the two shotguns, the stacks of furs. My discretion was futile, because Baranovich saw everything. “Here,” he said, and gave me a revolver. “Your friends will—” he didn’t complete the sentence. I pocketed the revolver. “Kumin won’t search you. Just give him the tea and the makhorka.” I wanted to thank him, but how pitiful thanks would have sounded, thanks from my mouth! It occurred to me how often in my life I had mechanically uttered the word thanks. I had disallowed it. How hollow it would have sounded to Baranovich’s ears, my weightless thank you, and even my handshake would have been something lightweight — and he was just pulling on his mittens anyway. Only when we got to the place from where he had collected us the first time did he pull off his right mitten, shake our hands, and give us his usual: “God give you good health!” Then he called out a loud “Vyo!” to the grey, as though afraid we might stay on the spot. He turned his back on us. It was snowing. He disappeared into the dense whiteness, a ghost in a hurry.
We drove to the camp. Kumin asked no questions. He accepted tea and makhorka and asked no questions. He separated us. I went to the officers’ barracks. I saw Manes and Joseph Branco twice a week during exercise. They never looked at each other. When I sometimes went to one of them to give him a little of my tobacco, whichever of them it was would say, formally and in German: “Thank you, sir!” “Everything all right?” “Yes, sir!” One day at roll call they were both missing. That evening I found a note under my pillow. On it was written, in Joseph Branco’s hand: “We’ve gone. We’re going to Vienna.”
XXIII
And Vienna is where I saw them again, four years later.
I got home on Christmas Eve of 1918. The clock on the Westbahnhof showed eleven o’clock. I walked along the Mariahilfer Strasse. A rough sleet, failed snow and wretched brother to hail, slanted down from an inclement sky. My cap was bare, the pips had been torn off it. My collar was bare, the stars had been torn off it. I myself was bare. The stones were bare, and the walls and roofs likewise. Bare the sparse streetlamps. The sleet scrabbled against their dull glass, as though the heavens were chucking handfuls of grit at helpless glass marbles. The coattails of the sentries outside the public buildings were flapping, and their skirts bellied out, even though they were sodden. The fixed bayonets didn’t look real, the rifles were curled against their shoulders. It was as though the rifles wanted to go to sleep, tired like us from four years of shooting. I wasn’t in the least surprised that no one saluted me, my naked cap and naked tunic collar gave no one cause. I wasn’t a rebel. I was just a poor wretch. It was the end. I thought of my father’s old dream of the triple monarchy, which he had given into my keeping. My father lay buried in the cemetery at Hietzing, and Emperor Franz Joseph, whose dissident loyalist he had been, in the Kapuzinergruft. I was the heir, and the sleet fell on me, and I trudged to the house of my father and mother. I made a detour via the Kapuzinergruft. There too a sentry was going up and down. What did he have to guard? The tomb? The memory? History itself?! I, an heir, stopped in front of the church for a while. The sentry ignored me. I doffed my cap. Then I wandered on, from one house to the next, back to the house of my father. Was my mother still alive? Twice on my way I had sent her word of my return. I walked faster. Was my mother still alive? I stood in front of our house. I rang the bell. I waited a long time. Our old concierge opened the gate. “Frau Fanny!” I cried. She recognized me right away by my voice. The candle flickered in her hand. “We’re waiting for you, we’re waiting for you, young master. We haven’t slept for days, neither of us, madam upstairs hasn’t neither.” She was indeed dressed as I had only ever seen her on Sunday mornings, never at night after the police curfew hour. I took the stairs two at a time.
My mother stood next to her old chair, in her buttoned-up black dress, her silver hair swept back. Over the crown of two braids lay the broad ridge of her comb, as grey as her hair. The collar and narrow cuffs of her dress were set off by the familiar narrow white lace borders. In conjuration, she raised her old stick with the silver crutch aloft, she raised it to the heavens, as though her arm alone wasn’t enough for the thanks she wanted to give. She didn’t move, she stayed where she was, and her waiting for me seemed to me like a striding. She bent down over me. This time she didn’t even kiss me on the forehead. She raised my chin on two of her fingers so that I lifted my face and saw for the first time that she was much bigger than I was. She looked at me for a long time. Then something unlikely happened, something alarming, extraordinary, almost unreal: my mother picked up my hand, bent down, and kissed it twice. Quickly and in embarrassment I took off my coat. “The tunic as well,” she said, “it’s all wet.” I took the tunic off as well. My mother saw that my right sleeve had a long rip in it. “Take your shirt off, I’ll sew it for you,” she said. “No, don’t,” I said, “it’s not clean.” Never could I have dreamed of saying of anything in our house that it was dirty or soiled. How quickly these ceremonial usages returned! Only now was I truly back.
I didn’t speak, I just watched my mother and ate and drank the things she had prepared for me, had probably in a hundred different ways managed to acquire. Lots of things that were completely unobtainable in Vienna: salted almonds, white bread, a couple of bars of chocolate, a miniature of cognac, and proper coffee. She sat down at the piano. It was open. It might have been like that for days, perhaps since the day I first let her know I was on my way back. She probably wanted to play some Chopin for me. She knew that my love of him was one of the few tastes I had inherited from my father. I could tell from the thick, yellow, half-burned candles in the bronze candelabra on the piano that my mother hadn’t touched the piano for years. She once played every evening, only in the evening and only by candlelight. They were still the good stout, almost succulent candles from the old times, nothing like that would have been available during the war. My mother asked me for the matches. There was a matchbox on the mantel. Brown and vulgar as it was, beside the little clock with the delicate girlish face it looked out of place in the room, an intruder. They were sulphur matches, you had to wait a little while their blue flame turned into a healthy, normal one. The smell was intrusive, too. Our living-room had always had a particular smell, a mix of remote, already fading violets, and the bitter spice of fresh, strong coffee. What was sulphur doing here?
My mother placed her dear, old, white hands on the keys. I leaned against her. Her fingers slid over the keys, but there was no sound from the interior of the instrument. It was silent, inert. I couldn’t understand. It must be a strange phenomenon; and I didn’t understand the first thing about physics. I tried a few notes myself. Nothing. It was ghostly. In curiosity, I lifted the lid of the piano. It was hollow inside: there weren’t any strings. “But it’s empty, Mama!” I said. She inclined her head. “I’d quite forgotten,” she said quietly. “A few days after you left, I had a strange idea. I wanted to force myself to stop playing. I had the strings removed. I don’t know what was going on in my head. I really can’t say. I was confused, perhaps even a little unhinged. It’s only just come back to me.”
/> My mother looked at me. There were tears in her eyes, not the flowing kind, but the ones that brim like pools. I threw my arms around her. She patted my head. “Your hair is full of soot,” she said. She repeated it twice more. “Your hair is full of soot! Go and wash it!”
“When I go to bed!” I said. “I don’t want to go to bed just yet,” I said, as if I was still a child. “Let me stay up a bit longer, Mama!”
We sat at the little table in front of the fireplace. “While I was tidying, I found some cigarettes of yours, two boxes of those Egyptians you liked to smoke. I wrapped them in some damp blotting paper. I’m sure they’re perfectly good. Do you want to smoke? They’re by the window.”
Yes, they were the old packs of a hundred! I looked at them from all sides. On the lid of one of them I saw, in my handwriting, almost entirely faded, the name: Friedl Reichner, Hohenstaufengasse. I remembered straightaway. It was the name of an attractive girl who worked in the Trafik where I must have bought these cigarettes. The old lady smiled. “Who is she?” she asked. “A nice girl, Mama! I never tried to look her up again.” “And now you’re too old,” she said, “to go around picking up girls in Trafiks. Anyway, they’ve stopped making those cigarettes . . .” It was the first time I’d heard my mother trying herself at a sort of joke.