But here too the soldiers drilled, as in any other garrison of the empire. Every day the rifle battalion, splattered with springtime mire, gray mud on their boots, marched back to the barracks. Major Zoglauer rode at their head. The second platoon of the first company was led by Lieutenant Trotta. The beat to which the riflemen marched was set by the bugler’s long, sober signal, not the haughty fanfare that marshaled, interrupted, and blared at the clattering hooves of the lancer horses. Carl Joseph trudged along, pretending to himself that he felt better on foot. All around him the riflemen’s hobnailed boots crunched over the sharp-edged gravel that, at the behest of the military authorities, was sacrificed constantly—in spring, weekly—to the swampy roads. All the stones, millions of stones, were swallowed up by the insatiable ground. And more and more victorious, shimmering, silvery-gray layers of mud welled up from the depths, ate stone and gravel, and slapped together over the stamping boots of the soldiers.
The barracks lay behind the town park. To the left of the barracks stood the District Court, faced by the district captain’s office, behind whose festive and ramshackle wall stood two churches, a Roman Catholic and a Greek Orthodox; and to the right of the barracks loomed the high school. The town was so tiny that one could walk across it in twenty minutes. Its important buildings crowded together as irksome neighbors. Every evening the strollers, like convicts in a prison yard, did their regular round of the park. It took a good half hour to walk to the train depot.
The rifle officers’ mess hall was located in two small rooms of a private home. Most of the officers ate at the station restaurant. So did Carl Joseph. He liked to march through the slapping mire just to see the station. It was the last of all the monarchy’s stations; nevertheless, it too displayed two pairs of glittering rails ribboning uninterruptedly into the core of the empire. This station too had not only bright, glassy, cheerful signals jingling with soft echoes of calls from home but also an incessantly ticking Morse apparatus on which the lovely, confused voices of a lost and distant world were diligently hammered out, stitched out as if on a bustling sewing machine. This station too had a stationmaster, and this master swung a jangling bell, and the bell signified, All aboard! All aboard! Once a day, at the stroke of noon, the stationmaster swung his bell at the train heading west, toward Crakow, Bogumin, Vienna. A good, dear train! It lingered almost until the end of lunch, outside the windows of the first-class dining room where the officers sat. The engine did not whistle until the coffee arrived. The gray steam billowed against the panes. By the time the damp beads began streaking the glass, the train was gone. The bleak group of diners drank their coffee and slowly straggled back through the silvery-gray mud. Not even generals on tours of inspection cared to come this far. They did not come. Nobody came. At the small town’s only hotel, where most of the officers resided as permanent tenants, the rich hops dealers from Nuremberg and Prague and Zatec would stay only twice a year. Once they completed their inscrutable deals, they would send for musicians and play cards at the only café, which belonged to the hotel.
Carl Joseph could take in the entire small town from the third floor of the Hotel Brodnitzer. He could see the gabled roof of the District Court, the white turret of the district captain’s office, the black-and-yellow flag over the barracks, the twofold cross of the Greek church, the weathercock on the town hall, and all the dark-gray shingle roofs of the small one-story houses. The Hotel Brodnitzer was the highest building in town. It was as much a landmark as the church, the town hall, or any other municipal structures. The streets had no names and the cottages no numbers, and if anyone asked how to reach a specific place, he would have to go by the vague directions he was offered. So-and-so lived behind the church, so-and-so opposite the town jail, someone else to the right of the District Court. People lived as if in a hamlet.
And the secrets of the people in these low cottages, under the dark-gray shingle roofs, behind the small square windowpanes and the wooden doors, oozed through chinks and rafters into the miry streets and even into the large, eternally remote barracks yard. One man had been cuckolded, another had sold his daughter to the Russian captain; someone was vending rotten eggs, someone else was regularly living off contraband; one man was an ex-convict, another had just barely avoided prison; this one lent money to officers, and his neighbor pocketed one third of the profits. The officers, nonaristocrats mostly and from a German-speaking background, had been stationed in this garrison for years and years; it had become both their home and their fate. Cut off from their homeland customs, from their German mother tongue (which had become an officialese here), at the mercy of the unending bleakness of the swamps, they fell prey to gambling and to the sharp schnapps distilled in this area and sold under the label 180 Proof. From the harmless mediocrity in which military school and traditional drilling had trained them, they skittered into the corruption of this land, with the vast breath of the huge hostile czarist empire blowing across it. Less than nine miles separated them from Russia. The Russian officers of the border regiment often came across in their long sandy-yellow and dove-gray coats, with heavy gold-and-silver epaulets on their broad shoulders and with reflective galoshes on their glossy top boots in all weathers. The two garrisons even maintained a certain camaraderie with each other. Sometimes the Austrian officers would ride small canvas-covered baggage vans across the border to watch the Cossacks showing off their riding feats and to drink the Russian liquor. Over there, in the Russian garrison, the liquor kegs stood on the curbs of the wooden sidewalks, guarded by privates with rifles and long fixed triple-edged bayonets. When evening set in, the kegs, kicked along by Cossack boots, trundled and rumbled over the bumpy streets toward the Russian officers’ club, and a soft splashing and gurgling revealed the contents of the kegs to the populace. The czar’s officers showed His Apostolic Majesty’s officers the meaning of Russian hospitality. And not one of the czar’s officers and not one of His Apostolic Majesty’s officers knew that Death was already crossing his haggard, invisible hands over the glass beakers from which the men drank.
In the vast plain between the two border forests, the Austrian and the Russian, the sotnias of the borderland Cossacks, uniformed winds in military formations, raced around on the mercuric ponies of their homeland steppes, swinging their lances over their tall fur caps like lightning streaks on long wooden poles—coquettish lightning with dainty pennons. On the soft, springy, swampy ground, the clatter of hooves could barely be heard. A damp, quiet sigh was the wet soil’s only response to the flying thuds. The dark-green grasses scarcely yielded. It was as if the Cossacks were soaring over the meadows. And when they galloped along the sandy-yellow highway, a huge, bright, golden column of fine-grained dust rose up, flickering in the sun, shredding widely, dissolving, sinking in a thousand tiny cloudlets. The invited guests sat on rough wooden stands. The riders’ movements were almost swifter than the spectators’ eyes. With their strong yellow horse teeth, the saddled Cossacks, in mid-gallop, lifted their red-and-blue handkerchiefs from the ground, their bodies, suddenly felled, ducked under the horses’ bellies, while the legs in the reflective boots still squeezed the animals’ flanks. Other riders flung their lances high into the air, and the weapons whirled and obediently dropped back into the horsemen’s raised fists—they returned like living falcons into their masters’ hands. Still other riders, with torsos crouching horizontal along the horses’ backs, human mouths fraternally pressing against animal mouths, leaped through wondrously small rounds of iron hoops that could have girded a small keg. The horses splayed all four legs. Their manes rose like wings, their tails stood as upright as rudders, their narrow heads resembled the slender bows of skidding canoes. Further riders vaulted across a line of twenty beer kegs placed bottom to bottom. The horse always neighed as it prepared to jump. The rider came bounding from infinitely far away; at first a tiny gray dot, he grew at breakneck speed into a stroke, a body, a rider, became a gigantic mythical bird, half man, half horse, a winged centaur who then, after a su
ccessful leap, halted, stock-still, a hundred yards beyond the kegs—a statue, a monument of lifeless matter. Others in turn, whizzing like arrows (and, as shooters, looking like gunshots), fired at flying targets that racing riders held at their sides on large round white disks: the shooters galloped, shot, and hit. An occasional horseman sank from his mount. The comrades following him whooshed across his body—no hoof struck him. There were riders who galloped alongside another horse and, while galloping, sprang from one saddle to the other, then back to the first, then suddenly fell upon the accompanying horse, and finally, one hand propped on each saddle, legs dangling between the horses’ bodies, they jerked the animals to a halt at the indicated destination and held both mounts tight so that they stood there immobile like bronze steeds.
These festivals of Cossack horsemanship were not the only ones in the borderland between the monarchy and Russia. A dragoon regiment was also stationed in the garrison. Intimate ties between rifle officers, dragoon officers, and gentlemen of the Russian border regiments were established by Count Chojnicki, one of the richest Polish landowners in the area. Count Wojciech Chojnicki—kin to the Ledochowskis and the Potockis, related by marriage to the Sternbergs, friendly with the Thuns, a man of the world, forty years old but of no discernible age, a cavalry captain in the reserve, a bachelor, both happy-go-lucky and melancholy at once—loved horses, liquor, society, frivolity, and also seriousness. He always wintered in big cities and in the gambling casinos of the Riviera. But once the forsythia started blossoming on the railroad embankments, the count, like a migrant bird, would return to his ancestral homeland, bringing along a faintly perfumed whiff of high society and tales of gallantry and adventure. He was the sort of man who could have no foes, but also no friends, only comrades, companions, or indifferent acquaintances. With his bright, smart, slightly bulging eyes, his smooth, bald, glossy head, his wispy blond moustache, his narrow shoulders, his exceedingly lanky legs, Chojnicki was liked by all the people whom he accidentally or deliberately encountered.
He alternated between two homes, which the populace knew and respected as the Old Castle and the New Castle. The so-called Old Castle was a huge ramshackle hunting lodge that the count, for unfathomable reasons, refused to fix up. The New Castle was a spacious two-story villa whose upper landing was constantly occupied by odd and at times even sinister strangers. These were the count’s “poor relations.” Even had he carried out the most painstaking genealogical investigation, he could not possibly have tracked down their degrees of kinship. It had gradually become customary for Chojnicki’s relatives to move into the New Castle and stay all summer. But as soon as the first flocks of starlings could be heard in the nights and the season for corn on the cob was over, these visitors, sated, relaxed, and sometimes even supplied with new clothes from the count’s local tailor, headed back to the unknown regions where they apparently were at home. The host noticed neither the arrivals nor the sojourns nor the departures of his guests. His Jewish steward had standing orders to check the visitors’ family credentials, regulate their food and drink, and make sure they left at the approach of winter. The house had two entrances. While the count and the nonrelated guests used the front door, his kinfolk had to take the wide detour through the orchard and go in and out through a small gate in the garden wall. Otherwise these uninvited boarders could do as they pleased.
Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, Count Chojnicki gave his so-called small soirees and once a month his so-called parties. For the small soirees, only six rooms were lit and open to the guests, but for the parties there were twelve rooms. At the small soirees the footmen served without gloves and in dark-yellow liveries, but at the parties they wore white gloves and brick-brown coats with black velvet collars and silver buttons. The evening always began with vermouth and dry Spanish wines. These gave way to burgundy and bordeaux. Next came the champagne. It was followed by cognac. And, paying the tribute due their homeland, they ended with the fruit of the local soil, the 180 Proof.
At these functions, the officers of the ultrafeudal dragoon regiment and the mostly nonaristocratic officers of the rifle battalion swore tearful oaths of lifelong friendship. The summer dawns peering through the broad arched windows of the castle witnessed a gaudy chaos of infantry and cavalry uniforms. The sleepers snored toward the golden sun. At around 5 A.M., a throng of despairing orderlies dashed over to the castle to awaken their masters. For at six the regiments began their drills. The host, who was never worn out by liquor, had long since returned to his small hunting lodge. There he fiddled around with peculiar test tubes, tiny flames, laboratory apparatuses. Rumor had it that the count was trying to make gold. He certainly appeared to be engaged in foolish alchemical experiments. But while he may not have succeeded in producing gold, he did know how to win at roulette. He occasionally let on that he had inherited an infallible “system” from a mysterious long-deceased gambler.
For years now, he had been a deputy to the Imperial Council, routinely reelected by his district, beating all other candidates with the help of money, violence, and surprise attacks; a minion of the government, he despised the parliamentary body to which he belonged. He had never given a speech and never heckled. Impious, derisive, fearless, and without qualms, Chojnicki used to say that the Kaiser was mindless and senile, the government a gang of nincompoops, the Imperial Council a gathering of gullible and grandiloquent idiots, and the national authorities venal, cowardly, and lazy. The German Austrians were waltzers and boozy crooners, the Hungarians stank, the Czechs were born bootlickers, the Ruthenians were treacherous Russians in disguise, the Croats and Slovenes, whom he called Cravats and Slobbers, were brushmakers and chestnut roasters, and the Poles, of whom he himself was one after all, were skirt chasers, hairdressers, and fashion photographers. Every time he came home from Vienna or another haunt of high society where he romped about so familiarly, he would deliver a gloomy lecture, which went more or less:
“This empire is doomed. The instant the Kaiser shuts his eyes, we’ll crumble into a hundred pieces. The Balkans will be more powerful than we. All the nations will set up their own filthy little states, and even the Jews are going to proclaim a king in Palestine. Vienna already stinks of the sweat of the Democrats; I can’t stand being on Ringstrasse anymore. The workers wave red flags and don’t care to work. The mayor of Vienna is a pious janitor. The padres are already going with the people; their sermons are in Czech. The Burgtheater is playing Jewish smut, and every week a Hungarian toilet manufacturer becomes a baron. I tell you, gentlemen, if we don’t start shooting now, we’re doomed. We’ll live to see it for ourselves!”
The men listening to the count laughed and drank another round. They did not understand him. People fired bullets occasionally, especially around election time, in order to, say, assure Count Chojnicki’s mandate, thereby showing that the world could not go under without a fight. The Kaiser was still alive. He would be followed by his successor. The army drilled and shone in all the regulation colors. The nations in the empire loved the imperial dynasty and paid homage to it in the most disparate ethnic costumes. Chojnicki was a jokester.
But Lieutenant Trotta, more sensitive than his comrades, sadder than they, his soul constantly echoing with the dark, roaring wings of Death, which he had already encountered twice—the lieutenant sometimes felt the dark weight of these prophecies.
PART TWO
Chapter 10
EVERY WEEK WHEN he was on barracks duty, Lieutenant Trotta would pen his monotonous accounts to the district captain. The barracks had no electric light. In the guardrooms they still burned the regulation government candles, as in the days of the old Hero of Solferino. Now they had “Apollo candles” made of spongier snow-white stearin, with well-plaited wicks and steady flames. The lieutenant’s letters revealed nothing about his changed way of life and the unusual conditions at the border. The district captain avoided asking any questions. His replies, routinely dispatched to his son every fourth Sunday, were as monotonous as t
he lieutenant’s letters.
Every morning old Jacques brought the mail into the room where the district captain had been breakfasting for many years. It was a somewhat out-of-the-way room that was never used during the day. The window, facing east, willingly let in all the mornings—the cloudy, the warm, the cool, and the rainy ones; it was open during breakfast in both summer and winter. In the winter, the district captain wrapped his legs in a warm shawl and the table was moved close to the wide stove, which crackled with a fire lit by old Jacques half an hour earlier. Every fifteenth of April, Jacques stopped lighting the stove. Every fifteenth of April, the district captain, regardless of the weather, resumed his summer-morning constitutionals.
The barber’s assistant, groggy and himself unshaven, came to Trotta’s bedroom at 6 A.M. By six-fifteen the district captain’s chin lay smooth and powdered between the slightly silver pinions of his whiskers. His bald skull had already been massaged and slightly reddened by a few drops of cologne that had been rubbed in, and all superfluous hair—some sprouting from the nostrils, some from the ear conches or even on the back of the neck, welling over the high stand-up collar—had been removed without a trace. Then the district captain reached for the light-colored cane and the gray silk hat and headed toward the municipal park. He wore a white high-necked waistcoat with gray buttons and a dove-gray morning coat. The narrow creaseless trousers were fastened by dark-gray straps to the narrow pointed boots, untipped and seamless and made of the softest kidskin.
The streets were still empty. The sprinkler wagon, pulled by two lumbering brown horses, came rattling over the bumpy cobblestones. Upon spotting the district captain, the driver on his high seat lowered his whip, looped the reins over the brake handle, and swung his hat so low that it grazed his knees. He was the only person in the town—nay, the district—whom Herr von Trotta greeted with a cheerful, almost exuberant wave of his hand. At the entrance to the park, the policeman saluted. Without moving his hand, the district captain wished him a hearty “Good day!” Then he strolled on toward the blond owner of the soda-water stand. Here he tipped his silk hat, drank a glass of tonic, drew a coin from his waistcoat pocket without removing his gray gloves, and continued his stroll. Bakers, chimney sweeps, grocers, butchers came his way. Each one greeted him. The district captain responded by gently placing his forefinger on his hat brim.