“At ease!” he finally commanded. “Rifles on the ground! Platoon dismissed!”
And things were as before. The soldiers lay behind the rifle stacks. The singing of the peasant women came from the distant fields. And the soldiers responded with the same songs.
The constabulary marched over from the town, three reinforced files of sentinels, accompanied by District Commissioner Horak. Lieutenant Trotta knew him. He was a good dancer, a Silesian Pole, both dashing and upright at once, and though none of the men had known Horak’s father, Horak nevertheless reminded them of him. His father had been a mailman. Today, as prescribed on duty, he wore the uniform, black and green with violet lapels, and the sword. His short blond moustache shone as golden as wheat, and the scent of the powder on his full, rosy cheeks could be smelled far away. He was as cheerful as a Sunday and a parade.
“My orders,” he told Lieutenant Trotta, “are to break up the meeting at once. Presumably you are ready, Herr Lieutenant.” He arranged his constables around the desolate factory square, where the meeting was to be held.
Lieutenant Trotta said “Yes!” and wheeled around.
He waited. He would have liked another 180 Proof, but he couldn’t return to the tavern. He saw the corporal, the platoon leader, and the lance corporal vanish inside the tavern and reemerge. He stretched out on the roadside grass and waited. The day grew fuller and fuller, the sun rose higher, and the songs of the peasant women in the distant fields died out. Lieutenant Trotta felt as if an endless stretch of time had passed since his return from Vienna. From those remote days he saw only the woman, who could be in the south by now, who had left him—betrayed him, he thought. Now he lay on the roadside in the border garrison and waited, not for the enemy but for the demonstrators.
They came. They came from the direction of the tavern. Ahead of them wafted their singing, a song the lieutenant had never heard before. It had scarcely been heard in this region. It was “The Internationale,” sung in three languages. District Commissioner Horak knew it, for professional reasons. Lieutenant Trotta couldn’t make out a word. But the melody seemed to be a musical translation of the hush he had felt in back of him. A solemn excitement overcame the dashing district commissioner. He ran from one constable to the next, clutching a notebook and a pencil. Once again Trotta commanded, “Fall in!” And like a cloud that had dropped to the earth, the dense group of strikers marched past the twofold fence of gaping riflemen. The lieutenant had a dark foreboding of the end of the world. He remembered the rainbow splendor of the Corpus Christi pageant, and for a brief instant he felt as if the murky cloud of rebels were rolling toward that imperial procession. For all of a single rapid moment the lieutenant had the sublime ability to see in images, and he saw the times rolling toward one another like two rocks, and he himself, the lieutenant, was smashed between them.
His men shouldered their rifles while opposite them, lifted by invisible hands, a male head and torso appeared above the dense, black, incessantly moving circle of the throng. Soon the floating body was almost the exact midpoint of the circle. Its hands rose aloft. From its mouth came incomprehensible sounds. The throng yelled. Next to the lieutenant stood Commissioner Horak, notebook and pencil in hand. All at once, he shut his book and slowly walked between two sparkling constables toward the throng on the other side of the road.
“In the name of the law!” he cried. His clear voice drowned out the speaker. The demonstrators were ordered to disperse.
There was an instant of silence. Then a single shriek broke from all the strikers. Next, the white fists emerged, flanking each face. The constables formed a cordon. The next moment, the semicircle of demonstrators began moving. They surged shrieking toward the constables.
“Bayonets at the charge!” Trotta commanded.
He drew his sword. He could not see that his weapon flashed in the sun, casting a fleeting, playful, provocative reflection upon the shady side of the highway, where the throng had gathered. The pommels of the constables’ helmets and their bayonet points had abruptly submerged in the throng.
“Toward the factory!” Trotta commanded. “Forward march!”
The riflemen advanced, and toward them flew dark wooden objects, brown laths, and white stones, whizzing and whistling, snuffing and snorting. Nimble as a weasel Horak ran alongside the lieutenant, whispering, “Shoot, Lieutenant, for God’s sake!”
“Platoon halt!” Trotta commanded. “Fire!”
In accordance with Major Zoglauer’s instructions, the riflemen fired their first round into the air. Next came utter silence. For a second they could hear all the peaceable voices of the summer afternoon. And they felt the benevolent brooding of the sun through the dust whirled up by the soldiers and by the crowd and through the faint burning smell produced by the cartridges and now wafting away. All at once, a woman’s sharp, howling voice sliced through the afternoon. And since a few in the throng evidently believed she had been hit by a bullet, they again began to hurl their haphazard missiles at the soldiers. And the few hurlers were instantly followed by several more and finally the whole throng. And several riflemen in the front line were already sinking to the ground, and while Lieutenant Trotta stood there rather perplexed, his sword in his right hand, his left hand groping for his pistol holster, he caught Horak’s whispering voice at his side. “Shoot! For God’s sake shoot them!”
In one second a hundred fragmented thoughts and images churned through Lieutenant Trotta’s agitated brain, a few simultaneously, and tangled voices in his heart enjoined him to show now pity, now cruelty, reminded him of what his grandfather would have done in this situation, predicted that he himself would the the next moment, and also presented his own death as the only possible and desirable outcome of this battle. Someone, he believed, raised his hand, someone else’s voice coming out of him repeated the order—“Fire!”—and he managed to see that this time the rifles pointed at the demonstrators. A second later he knew nothing more. For in the throng a portion that had seemed to have fled or pretended to flee was merely circling around and rushing in behind the riflemen, so that Trotta’s platoon was hemmed in between the two groups.
While the riflemen fired the second round, stones and nailed slats plummeted upon their backs and necks. Struck on the head by one of those missiles, Lieutenant Trotta sank to the ground, unconscious. The workers banged away at the fallen man with all kinds of objects. The riflemen now shot without orders, helter-skelter, firing at their attackers and forcing them to flee. The whole thing lasted barely three minutes. When the riflemen fell in, forming two lines under the command of the junior officer, wounded soldiers and workers lay in the dust of the highway, and it took a long time for the ambulances to arrive.
Lieutenant Trotta was taken to the small garrison hospital, where he was diagnosed as having a fractured skull and a broken left clavicle and possibly encephalitis. Chance, clearly senseless, had left the grandson of the Hero of Solferino with an injured clavicle, but none of the living, except for the Kaiser, perhaps, could have known that the Trottas owed their rise to the wounded collarbone of the Hero of Solferino.
Three days later the lieutenant did have encephalitis. And the district captain would have been notified if the lieutenant, waking up from his blackout on the very day he was delivered to the garrison hospital, had not begged the major under no circumstances to inform the father about the incident. While the lieutenant was now unconscious again, and there was ample reason to fear for his life, the major nevertheless preferred to wait. So two weeks passed before the district captain learned about the borderland rebellion and the unfortunate role his son had played. He first read about it in the newspapers, which mentioned it because of the opposition’s politicians. For the opposition was determined that the army, the rifle battalion, and especially Lieutenant Trotta, who had given the order to fire, were all to be held responsible for the casualties and for the widows and orphans. And the lieutenant was actually threatened with an investigation of sorts—that is, a for
mal investigation, undertaken to calm the politicians, conducted by military authorities, and used to rehabilitate the defendant and perhaps even distinguish him in some fashion. But this did not put the district captain’s mind at ease. He sent two telegrams to his son and one to Major Zoglauer. By then, the lieutenant was improving. He could not yet move in bed, but he was out of danger. He wrote a brief account to his father. And he was not worried about his health.
He mused that corpses were lying in his path again, and he was resolved to finally leave the army. Occupied with such thoughts he could not possibly see or speak to his father, even though he missed him. He felt something like homesickness for his father, but he also knew that his home was no longer with his father. The army was no longer his profession. And however much he shuddered at what had brought him to the hospital, he welcomed his illness because it put off the necessity of acting on decisions. He surrendered to the dismal smell of carbolic acid, the snowy bleakness of walls and bed, the pain, the changes of bandages, the strict nurturing of the attendants, and the boring visits by eternally jocular comrades. He had read nothing since military school, but he now reread a few of the books that his father had once assigned him to peruse on his own, and every line reminded him of his father, and the quiet Sunday mornings in summer, and Jacques, Bandmaster Nechwal, and “The Radetzky March.”
One day, Captain Wagner came to visit and he sat on the bed for a long time, emitting a word or two every so often, standing up and sitting down again. Finally with a sigh he pulled an IOU from his pocket and asked Trotta to co-sign it. Trotta signed. It was for fifteen hundred crowns. Kapturak had expressly asked for Trotta’s guarantee. Captain Wagner grew very animated, told a detailed story about a racehorse he was planning to buy for a song, hoping to race it in Baden; he added a few jokes and suddenly took off.
Two days later the head physician appeared at Trotta’s bedside, pale and anxious, and explained that Captain Wagner was dead. He had shot himself in the border forest. He had left a farewell letter to all his fellow officers and best wishes for Lieutenant Trotta.
The lieutenant did not think about the IOUs or the consequences of his signature. He became feverish. He dreamed—and also said—that the dead were calling him and that it was time for him to leave this world. Old Jacques, Max Demant, Captain Wagner, and the unknown workers who had been shot were standing in a line and calling him. Between him and the dead stood a deserted roulette table, on which the ball, spun by no hand, kept rotating endlessly.
His fever dragged on for two weeks, a welcome pretext for the military authorities to postpone the inquiry and inform several political offices that the army likewise had victims to mourn, that the civil authorities in the border town bore the responsibility, and that the constabulary should have been reinforced in time. Immense files swelled around the Trotta case, and the files grew, and every department in every agency splattered a little more ink on them, the way one waters flowers, to make them grow. The entire matter was finally submitted to the Kaiser’s military cabinet, because an especially circumspect senior assessor had discovered that the lieutenant was a grandson of that vanished Hero of Solferino, who had had a now thoroughly forgotten but in any case intimate connection with the Supreme Commander in Chief, and this lieutenant was bound to be of interest to supreme figures, and it would be better to wait before starting an investigation.
So one morning at seven, the Kaiser, just back from Ischl, had to deal with a certain Carl Joseph, Baron von Trotta und Sipolje. And since the Kaiser was old, though refreshed by his sojourn in Ischl, he could not figure out why that name evoked the Battle of Solferino, and he left his desk and with the short steps of an old man he shuffled up and down his humble study, up and down, surprising his old valet, who, starting to worry, knocked on the door.
“Come in!” said the Kaiser, and, upon spotting his servant, “When is Montenuovo coming?”
“At eight A.M., Your Majesty!”
Eight A.M. was still half an hour away. The Kaiser felt he couldn’t stand this uncertainty any longer. Now just why, oh, why did Trotta’s name remind him of Solferino? And why couldn’t he remember the link between them? Was he that old already? Since returning from Ischl, he had been haunted by the question of how old he really was, for it suddenly struck him as odd that you could tell your age by subtracting the year of your birth from the current calender year, but that each year began in January, while his birthday was the eighteenth of August! Now if the year began in August! And if, say, he had been born on the eighteenth of January, then it wouldn’t have made much difference. But this way, you couldn’t possibly know whether you were eighty-two and in your eighty-third year or eighty-three and in your eighty-fourth year. Nor did the Kaiser care to ask. People had a lot to do anyhow, and it didn’t matter at all whether you were one year younger or older, and ultimately, even if you’d been younger, you still wouldn’t have remembered why that damn Trotta reminded you of Solferino. The Comptroller of the Royal Household knew. But he wasn’t due until eight o’clock. Maybe the valet knew?
And the Kaiser paused in his shuffling and asked the valet, “Listen, does the name Trotta ring a bell?”
Actually the Kaiser had meant to use the familiar form with his valet, as he often did, but he was dealing with an historic issue and he respected even the people whom he asked about historic events.
“Trotta?” said the Kaiser’s valet. “Trotta!”
The valet too was old and he very vaguely remembered a schoolbook piece entitled “The Battle of Solferino.” And all at once the memory radiated from his face like a sun. “Trotta!” he cried. “Trotta! He saved Your Majesty’s life!”
The Kaiser went over to the desk. The jubilance of the morning birds of Schönbrunn came through the open window of the study. The Kaiser felt young again, and he heard the rattling of the rifles, and he felt someone grabbing his shoulders and yanking him to the ground. And suddenly he was very familiar with the name Trotta, just as he was with the name Solferino.
“Yes, yes,” said the Kaiser, waving his hand, and on the edge of the Trotta dossier he wrote, Settle favorably.
Then he stood up again and shuffled over to the window. The birds were jubilating, and the old man smiled at them as if he could see them.
Chapter 15
THE KAISER WAS an old man. He was the oldest emperor in the world. All around him Death was circling, circling and mowing. The entire field was already cleared, and only the Kaiser, like a forgotten silver stalk, was still standing and waiting. For many years his bright hard eyes had been peering, lost, into a lost distance. His skull was bare like a vaulted wasteland. His whiskers were white like a pair of wings made of snow. The wrinkles in his face were a tangled thicket dwelt in by the decades. His body was thin, his back slightly bowed. At home he shuffled about. But upon going outdoors, he tried to make his thighs hard, his knees elastic, his feet light, his back straight. He filled his eyes with sham kindness, with the true characteristic of imperial eyes: they seemed to look at everyone who looked at the Kaiser, and they greeted everyone who greeted him. But actually, the faces merely swirled and floated past his eyes, which gazed straight at that soft fine line that is the frontier between life and death—gazed at the edge of the horizon, which is always seen by the eyes of the old even when it is blocked by houses, forests, or mountains.
People thought Franz Joseph knew less than they because he was so much older than they. But he may have known more than some. He saw the sun going down on his empire, but he said nothing. He knew he would the before it set. At times he feigned ignorance and was delighted when someone gave him a long-winded explanation about things he knew thoroughly. For with the slyness of children and oldsters he liked leading people down the garden path. And he was delighted at their vanity in proving to themselves that they were smarter than he. The Kaiser disguised his wisdom as simplicity: for it does not behoove an emperor to be as smart as his advisers. Far better to appear simple than wise. If he went hunting, he
knew quite well that the game was placed in front of his rifle, and though he could have felled some other prey, he nevertheless shot only the prey that had been driven before his barrel. For it does not behoove an old emperor to show that he sees through a trick and can shoot better than a gamekeeper. If he was told a fairy tale, he pretended to believe it. For it does not behoove an emperor to catch someone in a falsehood. If people smirked behind his back, he pretended not to know about it. For it does not behoove an emperor to know he is being smirked at, and this smirk is foolish so long as he refuses to notice it. If he ran a fever, and people trembled all around him, and the court physician lied to him, telling him he had no fever, the emperor said, “Well, then, everything’s fine,” although he knew he had a fever. For an emperor does not accuse a medical man of lying. Besides, he knew that the hour of his death had not yet come. He also experienced many nights of being plagued by fever unbeknownst to his physicians. For sometimes he was ill, and no one realized it. And at other times he was well, and they said he was ill, and he pretended to be ill. When he was considered kind, he was indifferent. And when they said he was cold, his heart bled. He had lived long enough to know that it is foolish to tell the truth. So he allowed people their errors, and he believed less in the permanence of the world than did the wags who told jokes about him in his vast empire. But it does not behoove an emperor to compete with wags and sophisticates. So the Emperor held his tongue.
Even though he was well rested, and his physician was satisfied with his pulse, lungs, and respiration, he had had the sniffles since yesterday. He wouldn’t dream of letting anyone notice. They might prevent him from attending autumn maneuvers on the eastern border, and he wanted to watch maneuvers again, at least for a day. The file on that man who’d saved his life, whose name had slipped his mind again, had conjured up Solferino. He didn’t like wars (for he knew that one loses them), but he loved the military, the war games, the uniforms, the rifle drills, the parades, the reviews, and the company drills. He was sometimes vexed that the officers wore higher hats than he himself, sharp creases in their trousers, patent-leather shoes, and overly high collars on their tunics. Many were even clean-shaven. Just recently he had spotted a clean-shaven militia officer in the street, and his heart had been heavy the rest of the day. But when he went over to the people themselves, they again knew the difference between rules and mere swagger. He could snap at certain ones more grossly. For in the army everything behooved the emperor, in the army even the emperor was a soldier. Ah! He loved the blaring of the trumpets, though he always feigned interest in the operational plans. And while he knew that God Himself had placed him on his throne, he felt upset in weak moments that he was not a front-line officer, and he bore a grudge against the staff officers. He remembered how undisciplined the retreating troops had been after the Battle of Solferino, and he had chewed them out like a sergeant and gotten them back in line. He was convinced—but whom could he tell?—that ten good sergeants are a lot more useful than twenty general-staff officers. He yearned for maneuvers!