“Nothing!” everyone confirmed.
“The next evening, at the club, Tattenbach is drunk as usual. And when Demant shows up, Tattenbach instantly gets up and says, ‘Oy, hello, Izzy-whizzy!’ That’s how it began.”
“Shoddy!” said two men in unison.
“Shoddy, of course, but he was drunk! What should we do? I say correctly, ‘Good evening, Herr Regimental Surgeon!’ And Demant, in a voice I would never have expected from him, says to Tattenbach, ‘Captain, you know that I am the regimental surgeon!’
“ ‘Then you oughta stay home and watch out,’ says Tattenbach, sticking to his chair. Incidentally, it was his birthday. Did I tell you?”
“No!” they all chorused.
“Well, now you know: it happened to be his birthday,” Taittinger repeated.
They all slurped up the news greedily. It was as if the fact that it had been Tattenbach’s birthday would provide a brand-new positive solution to the dismal affair. Each man privately wondered what benefit could be drawn from Tattenbach’s birthday. And little Count Sternberg, through whose brain thoughts would shoot one at a time like lone birds through empty clouds, without brethren and leaving no trace, instantly stated, with premature jubilation in his voice, “Why, then, everything’s fine! That changes everything! It was his birthday!”
They eyed little Count Sternberg, puzzled and cheerless and yet ready to grasp at that nonsensical straw. Sternberg’s comment was utterly silly, but if you thought about it carefully, couldn’t you cling to it, didn’t it contain some hope, didn’t some solace beckon?
The hollow laugh instantly emitted by Taittinger overwhelmed them with new horror. Their lips parted, with helpless sounds on their mute tongues; their eyes gaping and empty, they kept still—dumbstruck and blinded men who, for an instant, had believed they had heard a comforting sound, had sighted a comforting glint. Deaf and dark was the world around them. In the huge, mute, snowed-in winterly world there was nothing but Taittinger’s eternally unchanging story, which he had already repeated five times. He continued.
“ ‘Then you oughta stay home and watch out,’ says Tattenbach. And the doctor, you know—as if he were examining Tattenbach for being too sick to march, sticks his head out toward him and says, ‘Herr Rittmaster, you are drunk!’
“ ‘You oughta stay home and watch out!’ Tattenbach babbles again. ‘Our kind don’t let a wife go strollin’ at midnight with lootenants!’
“ ‘You’re drunk and you’re a scoundrel!‘says Demant. And just as I’m about to stand up and before I can even move, Tattenbach starts yelling like crazy, ‘Yid, Yid, Yid!’ He says it eight times in a row—I had enough presence of mind to count precisely.”
“Bravo!” said little Sternberg, and Taittinger nodded at him.
“However,” the rittmaster went on, “I had enough presence of mind to issue a command: ‘Orderlies, leave!’ For why should the orderlies be present?”
“Bravo!” little Sternberg shouted once again. And all of them nodded in approval.
They fell silent again. From the nearby kitchen of the pastry shop came the hard clattering of dishes and from the street the bright jingling of a sleigh. Taittinger stuffed another pastry into his mouth.
“Now the fat’s in the fire!” shouted little Sternberg.
Taittinger swallowed the last remnant of his delicacy and only said, “Tomorrow morning, seven-twenty!”
Tomorrow morning, seventy-twenty! They knew the conditions: simultaneous exchange of bullets at ten paces. There was no way for Dr. Demant to use a sword. He couldn’t fence.
Tomorrow morning at seven, the regiment will be marching to the water meadow for a drill. The so-called Green Square behind the old castle, where the duel is to take place, is barely two hundred feet from the water meadow.
Every officer knew that tomorrow, during the drilling, he would hear two shots. Everyone could hear them already—the two shots. With black and red wings, Death rustled over their heads.
“Check!” cried Taittinger. And they left the pastry shop.
It was snowing again. A mute dark-blue pack, they walked through the mute white snow, straggling off in twos or alone. Each was afraid to stay by himself, yet it was not possible for them to be together. They tried to lose themselves in the small streets of the tiny town—and were forced to run into one another within a few seconds. The crooked streets drove them together. They were trapped in the small town and in their great confusion. And whenever any of them came toward another, both were startled, each by the other’s fear. They waited for dinnertime—and they simultaneously feared the imminent evening at the club, where today, already today, not all would be present.
And indeed, they were not all present. Tattenbach was missing, so were Major Prohaska, the doctor, First Lieutenant Zander, and Lieutenant Christ, and indeed all the seconds. Taittinger did not eat. He sat at a chessboard, playing against himself. No one spoke. The orderlies stood, silent and stony, at the doors; everyone heard the slow, hard ticking of the big grandfather clock; to its left, the Supreme Commander in Chief stared with cold china-blue eyes at his taciturn officers. No one had the nerve to leave by himself or to take his neighbor along. And so they lingered, each at his place. If two or three men sat together, their words dripped in single heavy drops from their mouths, and a huge leaden hush weighed between question and answer. Everyone felt the hush on his back.
They thought about the men who were not there, as if the absent were already corpses. They all remembered Dr. Demant’s arrival several weeks ago, after a long medical furlough. They could see his faltering steps and his sparkling glasses. They could see Count Tattenbach, his short rotund body on bandy equestrian legs, the eternally red skull with the close-shorn clear-blond hair parted down the middle and his pale, beady, red-rimmed little eyes. They could hear the physician’s gentle voice and the rittmaster’s thunderous voice. And even though the words “honor” and “dying,” “shooting” and “fighting,” “death” and “grave” had been at home in their hearts and minds ever since they could think and feel, it struck them today as incomprehensible that they might be separated forever from the rittmaster’s thunderous voice and the physician’s gentle one. Whenever the doleful chimes of the large wall clock rang out, the men believed that their own final hour had struck. Unwilling to trust their ears, they looked at the wall. No doubt about it: time had not paused. Seven-twenty, seven-twenty, seven-twenty: it hammered in all brains.
They stood up, one by one, hesitant and shamefaced; as they went their separate ways, they felt they were betraying one another. Their steps were almost soundless. Their spurs did not jingle, their swords did not clatter, their soles numbly struck a numb floor. By midnight the club was empty. And at a quarter to midnight, First Lieutenant Schlegel and Lieutenant Kindermann reached the barracks where they lived. One flight up, where the officers’ rooms were located, a single bright window cast a yellow rectangle into the square darkness of the parade ground. Both men looked up at the window together.
“That’s Trotta!” said Kindermann.
“That’s Trotta!” Schlegel echoed.
“We ought to look in on him.”
“He won’t like it!”
They jingled through the corridor, halted at Lieutenant Trotta’s door, and listened. Nothing stirred. First Lieutenant Schlegel reached for the knob but did not turn it. He withdrew his hand, and the two men walked off. They exchanged nods and entered their rooms.
Lieutenant Trotta had indeed not heard them. For the past four hours, he had been struggling to write his father a detailed letter. He could not get beyond the opening lines.
Dear Father, he began, I have innocently and unintentionally been the cause of a tragic affair of honor. His hand was heavy. A dead, useless tool, it hovered with the trembling pen over the paper. This was the first difficult letter in his life. The lieutenant felt he could not possibly wait for the outcome of the affair before writing to the district captain. Ever since the disastrous q
uarrel between Tattenbach and Demant, Trotta had been putting off the letter from one day to the next. But there was no possibility of not sending it today. Today, before the duel. What would the Hero of Solferino have done in his place? Carl Joseph felt his grandfather’s imperious gaze on the back of his neck. The Hero of Solferino dictated terse resoluteness to the timid grandson. He must write, instantly, on the spot. Why, he should have gone straight to his father. Between the dead Hero of Solferino and the wavering grandson stood the father, the district captain, the guardian of honor, the custodian of the legacy. The blood of the Hero of Solferino rolled alive and red in the district captain’s veins. By not telling his father in time, Carl Joseph would appear to be hiding something from his grandfather as well.
But in order to write this letter, he had to be as strong as his grandfather, as simple, as resolute, as close to the peasants of Sipolje. Trotta was only the grandson! This letter was a dreadful interruption in the leisurely routine of weekly reports that all sounded alike and that the sons in the Trotta family had always written to their fathers. A gory letter; it had to be written.
The lieutenant went on:
I had gone on a harmless stroll—albeit around midnight—with the wife of our regimental surgeon. The circumstances left me no choice. We were seen by other officers. Captain Tattenbach, who, unfortunately, is often drunk, made a shoddy insinuation aimed at the physician. Tomorrow morning at seven-twenty, the two men are shooting it out. I will probably be forced to challenge Tattenbach if he survives, as I hope he does. The conditions are stringent.
Your dutiful son,
Carl Joseph Trotta, Lieutenant
P.S. I may even have to leave the regiment.
Now the lieutenant felt the worst was over. But when his eyes wandered across the shadowy ceiling, he suddenly saw his grandfather’s admonishing face. Next to the Hero of Solferino he believed he also saw the white-bearded face of the Jewish tavern keeper, whose grandson was Regimental Surgeon Dr. Demant. The dead seemed to be calling the living, and it was as if he himself would be reporting for the duel by tomorrow morning, at seven-twenty. Reporting for the duel and falling. Falling! Falling and dying!
On those long-vanished Sundays when Carl Joseph had stood on his father’s balcony while Herr Nechwal’s military band had intoned “The Radetzky March,” it would have been a bagatelle to fall and die. The cadet at the Imperial and Royal Military Academy had been intimate with the notion of death, but it had been a very remote death. Tomorrow morning, seven-twenty, Death was waiting for his friend, Dr. Demant; the day after tomorrow, or in a few days, for Lieutenant Carl Joseph von Trotta. Oh, horror and darkness! To be the cause of Death’s black arrival and finally to be his victim! And should he not become his victim, how many corpses still lined the roadway? Like milestones on other men’s roads, the gravestones lay along Trotta’s road. He was certain he would never see his friend again, just as he had never seen Katharina again. Never again! In front of Carl Joseph’s eyes, this word stretched out without shore or limit, a dead sea of numb eternity. The little lieutenant clenched his white weak fist against the grand black law, which rolled up the headstones but set no dam against the relentlessness of never and refused to illuminate the everlasting darkness. He clenched his fist; he stepped over to the window to raise his fist against heaven. But he raised only his eyes. He saw the cold twinkling of the winter stars. He remembered the night, the last time he had walked with Dr. Demant, from the barracks to the town. The last time, he had known then.
Suddenly he felt a longing for his friend and also the hope that it was still possible to save the doctor. It was one-twenty. Dr. Demant had six more hours to live, six big hours. Now this time span seemed almost as mighty to the lieutenant as the shoreless eternity had seemed. He dashed over to the clothes hook, strapped on his saber and yanked on his coat, hurried along the corridor and practically soared down the stairs, raced across the nocturnal rectangle of the parade ground, out the gates, past the sentry, ran through the silent landscape, reached the little town in ten minutes and, a while later, the only sleigh that was on lonely night duty; and he glided amid the comforting jingling toward the southern edge of the town, toward the physician’s house. Behind the gate the small house slept with sightless windows. Trotta rang the bell. The hush continued. He shouted Dr. Demant’s name. Nothing stirred. He waited. He told the coachmen to crack his whip. No one responded.
Had he been looking for Count Tattenbach, it would have been easy The night before his duel he was probably at Frau Resi’s, drinking his own health. But there was no guessing where Dr. Demant might be. Perhaps he was walking the streets of the town. Perhaps he was strolling among the familiar graves, already seeking his own.
“The cemetery!” the lieutenant ordered the startled coachman.
Not far from here the cemeteries lay side by side. The sleigh halted at the old wall and the locked gate. Trotta got out. He walked over to the gate. Heeding the crazy whim that had driven him here, he cupped his hands on his mouth and in an alien voice, which came like a wailing from his heart, he called Dr. Demant’s name to the graves. He himself believed, while shouting, that he was already calling the dead man and no longer the living man; and he took fright and began trembling like one of the naked shrubs between the graves, over which the winter night storm was now whistling; and the saber rattled on the lieutenant’s hip.
The coachman, on the box of the sleigh, was terrified of his passenger. He thought, simple as he was, that the officer was either a ghost or a madman. But he was too scared to whip his horse and drive off. His teeth chattered; his heart raced wildly against the thick coat of cat fur.
“Please get in, Herr Officer,” he said.
The lieutenant obeyed. “Back to town!” he said. In the town, he got out and trudged conscientiously through the narrow winding alleys and across the small squares. The tinny strains of a pianola blaring somewhere through the nocturnal hush gave him a momentary goal; he hurried toward the metallic rattle. It resounded through the dimly lit glass door of a tavern near Frau Resi’s establishment, a tavern patronized by the troops but off limits to officers. The lieutenant stepped up to the brightly glowing window and peered over the reddish curtain into the taproom. He could see the counter and the haggard proprietor in shirtsleeves. At one table, three men, likewise in shirtsleeves, were playing cards; at another table, a corporal was sitting, with a girl at his side and beer glasses in front of them. In the corner, a man sat alone, holding a pencil, hunched over a sheet of paper. He wrote something, broke off, sipped a drink, and stared into space. All at once his glasses focused on the window. Carl Joseph recognized him: it was Dr. Demant in mufti.
Carl Joseph knocked on the glass door; the tavern keeper came over; Carl Joseph asked him to send out the gentleman sitting alone. The regimental surgeon stepped into the street.
“It’s me, Trotta!” said the lieutenant, holding out his hand.
“So you’ve found me,” said the doctor. He spoke softly, as was his wont, but more distinctly than usual—or so it appeared to the lieutenant—for in some enigmatic way his quiet words drowned out the blaring pianola. This was the first time Trotta had ever seen him in civilian attire. The familiar voice emerging from the physician’s altered appearance came toward the lieutenant like a warm greeting from home. Indeed, the voice sounded all the more familiar because Demant looked so alien. All the terrors that had confused the lieutenant during this night dissolved under his friend’s voice, which Carl Joseph had not heard for many long weeks and which he had missed. Yes, he had missed it; now he knew. The pianola stopped blaring. They could hear the night wind howl from time to time, and their faces felt the snowy powder that it whirled up.
The lieutenant took one step closer to the doctor—he could not get close enough. You are not to die! he wanted to say. He realized that Demant was standing in front of him without a coat, in the snow, in the wind. If you’re in civvies, it’s not so obvious, he thought. And in a tender voice he sai
d, “You’re going to catch cold.”
Dr. Demant’s face promptly lit up with the old familiar smile, which gathered up his lips somewhat, raised his black moustache slightly. Carl Joseph reddened. Why, he won’t be able to catch cold, the lieutenant thought. At the same time, he heard Dr. Demant’s gentle voice. “I have no time left to get sick, my dear friend.” He spoke while smiling. The doctor’s words went right through the old smile, and yet it remained whole all the same; a small sad white veil, it hung before his lips. “But let’s go inside,” the physician continued.
He stood, a black, immobile shadow, outside the dimly lit door, casting a second, paler shadow on the snowy street. The silvery snow powdered his black hair, which was lit by the dim glow from the tavern. The heavenly world already shimmered over his head, and Trotta was almost ready to turn back. Good night! he wanted to say and hurry off.
“Let’s go inside,” the doctor repeated. “I’ll ask whether you can slip in unnoticed.”
He entered, leaving Trotta outside. Then he returned with the proprietor. After cutting through a hallway and across a yard, they reached the tavern kitchen.
“Do people know you here?” asked Trotta.
“I sometimes come here,” replied the physician. “That is, I used to come here a lot.”
Carl Joseph stared at the doctor.
“You’re surprised? Well, I had my particular habits.”
Why does he say “had”? thought the lieutenant and remembered from his schooldays that this was called the past tense. “Had”! Why did the regimental surgeon say “had”?
The tavern keeper brought a small table and two chairs to the kitchen and lit a greenish gas lamp. In the taproom, the pianola blared away again—a potpourri of familiar marches, among which the opening drumbeats of “The Radetzky March,” distorted by hoarse crackling but still recognizable, boomed at specific intervals. In the greenish shadows that the lampshade drew across the whitewashed kitchen walls, the familiar portrait of the Supreme Commander in Chief in the sparkling white uniform surfaced between two gigantic pans of reddish copper. The Kaiser’s white uniform was densely flyblown as if riddled by minute grapeshot, and Franz Joseph’s eyes, undoubtedly painted china blue as a matter of course, were snuffed in the shadow of the lampshade. The doctor stretched his finger toward the imperial image.