To the son of a noncommissioned officer, the rank of an ordinary infantry lieutenant had seemed natural and suitable. But to the decorated, aristocratic captain, who went about in the alien and almost unearthly radiance of imperial favor as in a golden cloud, his own father had suddenly moved far away, and the measured love that the offspring showed the old man seemed to require an altered conduct and a new way for father and son to deal with each other. The captain had not seen his father in five years; but every other week, while doing his rounds in the eternally unalterable rotation, he had written the old man a brief letter in the meager and fickle glow of the guardroom candle, after first inspecting the sentries, recording the time of each relief, and, in the column labeled UNUSUAL INCIDENTS, penning a clear and assertive None that virtually denied even the remotest possibility of unusual incidents. These letters to his father, on yellowish and pulpy octavo, resembled one another like furlough orders and regulation forms. After the salutation Dear Father at the left, four fingers from the top and two from the side, they began with the terse news of the writer’s good health, continued with his hope for the recipient’s good health, and closed with an indentation for the perpetual formula drawn at the bottom right at a diagonal interval from the salutation: Very humbly yours, your loyal and grateful son, Lieutenant Joseph Trotta.
But now, especially since his new rank exempted him from the old rotation, how should he refashion the official epistolary form, which was designed for a whole military lifetime, and how should he intersperse the standardized sentences with unusual statements about conditions that had become unusual and that he himself had barely grasped? On that silent evening when, for the first time since his recovery, Captain Trotta, in order to perform the correspondence duty, sat down at the table, which was lavishly carved up and notched over by the playful knives of bored men, he realized he would never get beyond the salutation Dear Father. Leaning the barren pen against the inkwell, he twisted off the tip of the wick on the guttering candle as if hoping for a happy inspiration and an appropriate phrase from its soothing light, and he gently rambled off into memories of childhood, village, mother, and military school. He gazed at the gigantic shadows cast by small objects upon the bare blue lime-washed walls, at the slightly curved, shimmering outline of the saber on the hook by the door, and, tucked into the saber guard, at the dark neckband. He listened to the tireless rain outside and its drumming chant on the tin-plated windowsill. And he finally stood up, having resolved to visit his father the week after the prescribed thank-you audience with the Kaiser, for which he would be detailed during the next few days.
One week later, right after an audience of barely ten minutes, not more than ten minutes of imperial favor and those ten or twelve questions read from documents and at which, standing at attention, one had to fire a “Yes, Your Majesty!” like a gentle but definite gunshot, he took a fiacre to see his father in Laxenburg. He found the old man in shirtsleeves, sitting in the kitchen of his official apartment over a spacious cup of steaming, fragrant coffee on the naked, shiny, planed table, on which lay a dark-blue handkerchief trimmed in red. At the table’s edge, the knotty russet cherrywood cane hung on its crook, swaying gently. A wrinkled leather pouch thickly swollen with fibrous shag lay half open next to a long pipe of white clay, now a brownish-yellow color. It matched the hue of the father’s tremendous white moustache. Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje stood amid this shabby governmental homeyness like a military god, wearing a gleaming officer’s scarf, a lacquered helmet emanating virtually its own black sunshine, smooth fiery waxed riding boots with glittering spurs, two rows of lustrous, almost blazing buttons on his coat, and the blessing of the ethereal power of the Order of Maria Theresa. There the son stood in front of the father, who rose slowly as if the slowness of his greeting were to make up for the boy’s splendor. Captain Trotta kissed his father’s hand, lowered his head, and received a kiss on the brow and a kiss on the cheek.
“Sit down!” said the old man. The captain unbuckled parts of his splendor. “Congratulations!” said the father, his voice normal, in the hard German of army Slavs. The consonants boomed like thunderstorms and the final syllables were loaded with small weights. Just five years ago he had still been speaking Slovenian to his son, although the boy understood only a few words and never produced a single one himself. But today it might strike the old man as an audacious intimacy to hear his mother tongue used by his son, who had been removed so far by the grace of Fate and Emperor, while the captain focused on the father’s lips in order to greet the first Slovenian sound as a familiar remoteness and lost homeyness. “Congratulations, congratulations!” the sergeant thunderously repeated. “In my day it never went this fast. In my day Radetzky gave us hell!”
It’s really over! thought Captain Trotta. His father was separated from him by a heavy mountain of military ranks.
“Do you still have rakia, sir?” he asked, addressing him formally while trying to confirm the last remnant of family togetherness. They drank, clinked glasses, drank again; the father moaned after every gulp, floundered in endless coughing, turned purple, spat, gradually calmed down, then launched into old chestnuts about his own military time, with the unmistakable goal of deflating his son’s merits and career. Finally, the captain stood up, kissed the paternal hand, received the paternal kiss on brow and cheek, buckled on his saber, donned his shako, and left—secure in the knowledge that this was the last time he would ever see his father in this life.
It was the last time. The son wrote his father the routine letters—there was no other visible link between them; Captain Trotta was severed from the long procession of his Slavic peasant forebears. A new dynasty began with him.
The round years rolled by, one by one, like peaceful, uniform wheels. In keeping with his status, Trotta married his colonel’s not-quite-young well–off niece, the daughter of a district captain in western Bohemia; he fathered a boy, enjoyed the uniformity of his healthy military life in the small garrison, rode horseback to the parade ground every morning, and played chess every afternoon with the lawyer at the café, eventually feeling at home in his rank, his station, his standing, and his repute. He had an average military gift, of which he provided average samples at maneuvers every year; he was a good husband, suspicious of women, no gambler, grouchy, but a just officer, a fierce enemy of all deceit, unmanly conduct, cowardly safety, garrulous praise, and ambitious self–seeking. He was as simple and impeccable as his military record, and only the anger that sometimes took hold of him would have given a judge of human nature some inkling that Captain Trotta’s soul likewise contained the dim nocturnal abysses where storms slumber and the unknown voices of nameless ancestors.
He read no books, Captain Trotta, and secretly pitied his growing son, who had to start handling slate, pencil, and sponge, paper, ruler, and arithmetic, and for whom the unavoidable primers were already waiting. The captain was convinced his boy had to become a soldier. It never crossed his mind that—from now until the extinction of his dynasty—a Trotta could follow any other calling. Had he had two, three, four sons (but his wife was sickly, needed doctors and treatments, and pregnancy was risky for her), they would all have become soldiers. That was what Captain Trotta still thought. There was talk of another war; Trotta was ready any day. Yes, it struck him as almost certain that he was destined to die in combat. His unshakable simplicity viewed death in the field as a necessary consequence of warrior fame. Until one day, out of idle curiosity, he picked up the first reader assigned to his son, who had just turned five and who, because of his mother’s ambition, had far too prematurely tasted the ordeals of school, thanks to a private tutor. Trotta read the rhymed morning prayer. It had been the same for decades; he could still remember it. He read “The Four Seasons,” “The Fox and the Hare,” “The King of the Beasts.” Then he opened to the table of contents and found the tide of a selection that seemed to refer to him, for it was called “Franz Joseph I at the Batde of Solferino”; he read and had to sit d
own. “In the Battle of Solferino,” the piece began, “our Emperor and King, Franz Joseph I, was beset by great danger.” Trotta himself appeared, but how utterly transformed!
The monarch [it said] had ventured so far ahead in the heat of fighting that he suddenly found himself ringed by a throng of enemy troopers. At that moment of supreme need, a lieutenant of tender years galloped over at full speed on a sweat–covered sorrel, swinging his saber. Oh, how the blows rained upon the heads and necks of the enemy riders!
And further:
An enemy lance bored through the young hero’s chest, but most of the foes were already slain. Gripping his naked sword in his hand, our young undaunted monarch could easily fend off the ever-weakening attacks. The entire enemy cavalry was taken prisoner. And the young lieutenant—Sir Joseph von Trotta was his name—was awarded the highest distinction that our Fatherland has to bestow on its heroic sons, the Order of Maria Theresa.
Captain Trotta, clutching the reader, stepped into the small orchard behind the house, where his wife busied herself on balmier afternoons, and, his lips pale, his voice very low, he asked her whether she had read the vile selection. She nodded with a smile.
“It’s a pack of lies!” shouted the captain and hurled the book upon the damp soil.
“It’s for children,” his wife gently answered.
The captain turned his back on her. Anger shook him like a storm shaking a flimsy shrub. He hurried indoors, his heart pounding. It was time for his chess game. He took the saber from its hook, buckled the strap around his waist with a nasty and violent jerk, and loped wildly out of the house. To anyone who saw him he looked as if he were out to massacre a drove of enemies. With four deep furrows in his narrow brow under the rough short hair, he lost two games at the café without saying a word, knocked the clattering figures over with a fierce hand, and said to his opponent, “I have to confer with you!” Pause. “I’ve been abused,” he resumed, peering straight into the lawyer’s sparkling glasses, and noticed after a while that words were failing him. He should have brought the primer along. With that odious object in hand, he would have had a far easier time explaining things.
“What kind of abuse?” asked the lawyer.
“I never served with the cavalry.” That was how Captain Trotta felt he might best begin, although he himself realized he was not making himself clear. “And here these shameless writers write in the children’s books that I galloped up on a sorrel, they write, on a sweat-covered sorrel, to rescue the monarch, they write.”
The lawyer understood. He knew the piece himself from his sons’ books. “You’re taking it too seriously, captain,” he said. “Don’t forget, it’s for children.”
Trotta looked at him aghast. At that instant, the entire world seemed allied against him: the authors of primers, the lawyer, his wife, his son, the tutor.
“All historic events,” said the lawyer, “are rewritten for school use. And to my mind this is proper. Children need examples that they can grasp, that sink in. They can find out the real truth later on.”
“Check!” cried the captain, standing up. He went over to the barracks, surprised the officer on duty, Lieutenant Amerling, with a woman in the assistant paymaster’s office, personally inspected the sentries, sent for the sergeant, commanded the junior officer on duty to report, had the company fall in, and ordered rifle drill on the parade ground.
The men obeyed, confused and trembling. A few were missing from each platoon; they were nowhere to be found. Captain Trotta ordered their names read out. “All absentees are to report to me tomorrow!” he told the lieutenant. Panting and gasping, the troops did their rifle exercises. Ramrods clattered, straps flew, hot hands clapped upon cool metal barrels, huge gun butts stamped upon the dull, soft ground.
“Load!” commanded the captain. The air quivered with the hollow rattling of the blank cartridges. “Half an hour of salute drilling!” commanded the captain. Ten minutes later, he changed the order. “Kneel down for prayers!” Appeased he listened to the numb thud of hard knees on soil, sand, and gravel. He was still captain, master of his company. He would show those writers.
That night he did not go to the officers’ mess; he didn’t even eat, he went to bed. His sleep was heavy and dreamless. The next morning, at the officers’ roll call, he submitted his complaint, terse and sonorous, to the colonel. It was passed on. And now began the martyrdom of Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje, the Knight of Truth. It took weeks for the Ministry of War to notify him that his complaint had been forwarded to the Ministry of Religion, Culture, and Education. And more weeks dragged by until one day the minister’s answer arrived. It read:
Your Lordship,
Dear Captain Trotta,
In reply to Your Lordship’s complaint regarding Text No. 15 in the authorized readers written and edited by Professors Weidner and Srdcny for Austrian elementary and secondary schools in accordance with the Law of 21 July 1864, the Minister of Religion, Culture, and Education most respectfully takes the liberty of calling Your Lordship’s attention to the circumstance that, in accordance with the Edict of 21 March 1840, the primer selections of historic significance, in particular those relating to the august person of His Majesty Emperor Franz Joseph as well as other members of the Supreme Imperial House, are to be adjusted to the intellectual capacities of the pupils and kept consistent with the best possible pedagogic goals. The text in question, No. 15, as mentioned in Your Lordship’s complaint, was submitted personally to His Excellency the Minister of Religion, Culture, and Education, who approved the use thereof in the school system. It was the intention of the higher educational authorities and no less that of the lower educational authorities to introduce the pupils in the Monarchy to the heroic deeds performed by members of the Armed Forces and to depict them in accordance with the juvenile character, imagination, and patriotic sentiments of the developing generation without altering the veracity of the events portrayed, but also without rendering them in a dry tone devoid of any spur to the imagination and any patriotic sentiments. In consequence of the above and similar considerations, the undersigned most respectfully begs Your Lordship to be so good as to withdraw his complaint.
This document was signed by the Minister of Religion, Culture, and Education. The colonel handed it to Captain Trotta with the fatherly words, “Let it be!”
Trotta took it and remained silent. One week later, through official channels, he petitioned for an audience with His Majesty, and one morning three weeks later he stood in the palace, face-to-face with the Supreme Commander in Chief.
“Listen, my dear Trotta!” said the Kaiser. “The whole business is rather awkward. But neither of us comes off all that badly. Let it be!”
“Your Majesty,” replied the captain, “it’s a lie!”
“People tell a lot of lies,” the Kaiser confirmed.
“I can’t, Your Majesty,” the captain choked forth.
The Kaiser inched closer to the captain. The monarch was scarcely taller than Trotta. They locked eyes.
“My ministers,” Franz Joseph began, “must know what they’re doing. I have to rely on them. Do you catch my drift, my dear Trotta?” And after a while. “We’ll do something. You’ll see!”
The audience was over.
His father was still alive. But Trotta did not go to Laxenburg. He returned to the garrison and requested his discharge from the army.
He was discharged as a major. He moved to Bohemia, to his father-in-law’s small estate. Imperial favor did not abandon him. A few weeks later, he was notified that the Kaiser had seen fit to contribute five thousand guldens from the privy purse to the education of the son of the man who had saved his life. At the same time, Trotta was raised to the barony.
Baron Joseph von Trotta und Sipolje accepted these imperial gifts sullenly, as insults. The campaign against the Prussians was waged and lost without him. His resentment simmered. His temples were already turning silvery, his eyes dim, his steps slow, his hands heavy, his words fewer t
han ever. Though a man in the prime of life, he appeared to be aging swiftly. He had been driven from the paradise of simple faith in Emperor and Virtue, Truth, and Justice, and, now fettered in silence and endurance, he may have realized that the stability of the world, the power of laws, and the glory of majesties were all based on deviousness. Thanks to the Kaiser’s casually expressed wish, Reading Text No. 15 disappeared from the monarchy’s schoolbooks. The Trotta name survived only in the unknown annals of the’ regiment.
The major now vegetated as the unknown bearer of ephemeral fame, like a fleeting shadow that a secret object sends into the bright world of the living. On his father-in-law’s estate, he puttered about with watering cans and garden shears: similar to his father at the castle park in Laxenburg, the baron trimmed the hedges and mowed the lawn, guarded the forsythia in early spring and then the elderberry bushes against thievish and unauthorized hands; he supplanted the rotten pickets with fresh, smoothly planed ones, repaired tools and tackling, bridled and saddled his bay horses himself, replaced rusty locks on gates and portals, carefully wedged neatly carved slats in worn-out sagging hinges, spent days on end in the forest, shot small game, slept in the gamekeeper’s hut, looked after poultry, manure, and harvest, fruit and espalier flowers, groom and coachman. Penny–pinching and distrustful, he made his purchases, his sharp fingers fishing coins from the stingy leather pouch and slipping it back upon his chest. He became a little Slovenian peasant.
At times, his old anger would overcome him, shaking him like a powerful storm shaking a flimsy shrub. He would then whip the servant and the flanks of the horses, smash the doors into the locks that he himself had repaired, threaten to maim and murder the farmhands, shove his luncheon plate away in a nasty swing, and fast and grumble. Next to him lived his feeble, sickly wife in a separate room; the boy, who saw his father only at meals and whose report cards were submitted to him twice a year, eliciting neither praise nor reproach; the father-in-law, who blithely frittered his pension and had a weakness for young girls, who stayed in town for long weeks and feared his son-in-law. He was a little old Slovenian peasant, that Baron Trotta. Twice a week, late in the evening, by flickering candlelight, he still wrote his father a letter on yellowish octavo, the salutation Dear Father four male fingers from the top, two male fingers from the side. He very seldom received an answer.