“Why did you need all that money?” asked Zoglauer, but then promptly recalled that he knew everything. He waved his hand. He wanted no details. “Write to your papá, you have to,” said Zoglauer. He felt he had expressed a brilliant idea. And so the report was terminated.
And Lieutenant Trotta went home and sat down and began writing to his papá. He couldn’t do it without liquor. And so he went down to the café, ordered a 180 Proof, plus ink, pen, and paper. He began. What a hard letter! What an impossible letter! Lieutenant Trotta took a few stabs at it, crumpled the paper up, started again. Nothing is more difficult for a lieutenant than describing events that involve him, even endanger him. It turned out on this occasion that Lieutenant Trotta, who had long hated serving in the military, still possessed enough soldierly ambition to avoid being drummed out of the army. And while trying to present the intricate facts to his father,’ he unexpectedly changed into Trotta the cadet, who, on the balcony of his father’s house, had wished to die for Hapsburg and Austria while hearing “The Radetzky March.” So strange, so mutable, and so confused is the human soul.
It took Trotta over two hours to set down the facts of the case. By now it was late afternoon. The cardplayers and roulette players were already gathering in the café. They were joined by the proprietor, Herr Brodnitzer. His cordiality was unusual and terrifying. He bowed low before the lieutenant, who instantly realized that Brodnitzer wanted to remind him of his scene with Kapturak and his own presence as a witness. Trotta went to look for Onufrij. He walked into the vestibule and shouted Onufrij’s name up the stairs several times. But Onufrij did not respond. Brodnitzer, however, came over and reported, “Your orderly left early this morning.”
So the lieutenant took off for the station himself in order to mail his letter. It was only en route that he realized Onufrij had left without permission. Trotta’s military upbringing dictated anger toward the orderly. He himself, the lieutenant, had frequently slipped off to Vienna—AWOL and in mufti. Perhaps, he thought, the orderly had only been emulating his officer. I’m gonna lock him up and throw away the key! thought Lieutenant Trotta. But he also realized that this phrase was not of his own devising and he didn’t mean it seriously. It was a mechanical formula, forever ready—one of the countless mechanical formulas that replace thoughts and anticipate decisions in military minds.
No, Onufrij had no girl in his village. He had four and a half acres, inherited from his father and looked after by his brother-in-law, and he had twenty gold ten-crown ducats buried in the ground, by the third willow left of the hut, on the path leading to his neighbor, Nikofor. Onufrij had gotten up before sunrise, polished the lieutenant’s boots, brushed his uniform, placed the boots outside the door, and draped the uniform over the chair. He had then taken his cherrywood stick and marched off to Burdlaki.
He hiked along the narrow willow-lined path, the only path that revealed the dryness of the soil. For the willows used up all the wetness of the swamps. On both sides of the narrow path, the gray, ghostly morning fog rose in its many shapes, which billowed toward him, compelling him to cross himself. With quivering lips he kept incessantly murmuring the Lord’s Prayer. Nevertheless he was in high spirits. Now, to his left, came the large railroad storehouses with their slate roofs, reassuring him somewhat because they stood where he had expected them to stand. He crossed himself once more, this time out of gratitude for God’s goodness, which allowed the railroad storehouses to stand in their usual place.
He reached the village of Burdlaki an hour after sunrise. His sister and his brother-in-law were already out in the fields. He entered his father’s hut, where they lived. The children were still asleep in the cradles, which hung from thick ropes winding around iron hooks attached to the ceiling. He got a spade and a rake from the small vegetable patch in the rear and went off in quest of the third willow to the left of the hut. First he stood with his back to the door and his eyes on the horizon. It took him awhile to convince himself that his right arm was his right, his left arm his left; then he headed left, toward his neighbor Nikofor, to the third willow. Here he began to dig. From time to time he glanced around to make sure no one was watching. No! Nobody saw what he was doing. He dug and dug. The sun rose so fast in the sky that he thought it was already noon. But it was only 9 A.M.
At last he heard the iron tongue of his spade hit something hard and resonant. He put down the spade, began gently caressing the loosened soil with his rake, then tossed the rake aside as well, lay down on the ground, and used all ten fingers to comb away the loose crumbs of damp earth. He touched a linen handkerchief, groped for the knot, and pulled out the cloth. There was his money: twenty gold ten-crown ducats.
He took no time to count them. He stowed the treasure in his trouser pocket and went to the Jewish innkeeper in the village of Burdlaki, a man named Hirsch Beniover, the only banker in the world whom he knew personally.
“I know you!” said Hirsch Beniover. “I knew your father, too. Do you need sugar, flour, Russian tobacco, or money?”
“Money!” said Onufrij.
“How much do you need?” asked Beniover.
“A lot!” said Onufrij—and spread out his arms as wide as he could to show how much he needed.
“Fine,” said Beniover. “Let’s see how much you’ve got.”
And Beniover opened a huge book. This book indicated that Onufrij Kolohin owned four and a half acres of land. Beniover was prepared to lend him three hundred crowns on that.
“Let’s go to the mayor,” said Beniover. He called his wife, told her to mind the store, and he and Onufrij Kolohin went to the mayor.
Here he gave Onufrij three hundred crowns. Onufrij sat down at a brown worm-eaten table and began writing his name at the bottom of a document. He removed his hat. The sun was already high up in the sky. It managed to send its burning rays through the tiny windows of the peasant hut where the mayor of Burdlaki officiated. Onufrij was perspiring. The beads of sweat grew on his low brow like transparent crystal boils. Every letter that Onufrij wrote produced a crystal boil on his forehead. These boils ran, ran down like tears wept by Onufrij’s brain. At last his name was at the bottom of the document. And with the twenty gold ten-crown ducats in his trouser pocket and the three hundred-crown bills in his blouse pocket, Onufrij Kolohin set out on his hike back.
He appeared at the hotel that afternoon. He went into the café, asked where his officer was, and had stationed himself amid the cardplayers when, as carefree as if he were standing in the barrack square, he spotted Trotta. The orderly’s whole broad face beamed like a sun. Trotta glared and glared at him, with tenderness in his heart and severity in his eyes.
“I’m gonna lock you up and throw away the key!” said the lieutenant’s lips, obeying the dictates of his military brain. “Come up to my room!” And Trotta got to his feet.
The lieutenant climbed the stairs. Onufrij followed precisely three steps behind him. They stood in the room.
Onufrij, his face still sunny, reported, “Herr Lieutenant, here is money!” and from his trouser pocket and tunic pocket he pulled out everything he owned; he came over and put the money on the table. Silvery gray bits of mud still stuck to the dark-red handkerchief that had so long concealed the twenty gold ten-crown ducats in the ground. Next to the handkerchief lay the blue banknotes. Trotta counted them. Then he undid the cloth. He counted the gold pieces. Then he added the bills to the gold pieces in the cloth, reknotted it, and handed Onufrij the bundle.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t take any money from you, do you understand?” said Trotta. “It’s against regulations, do you understand? If I take money from you, I’ll be demoted and drummed out of the army, do you understand?”
Onufrij nodded.
The lieutenant stood there, holding the bundle in his raised hand. Onufrij kept nodding. He reached out and took the bundle. It swung in the air awhile.
“Dismissed!” said Trotta, and Onufrij left with the bundle.
The lieutenant remember
ed that autumn night in the cavalry garrison when he had heard Onufrij stamping behind him. And he recalled the military humoresques he had read in the slim green-bound booklets at the military hospital. They teemed with poignant orderlies, uncouth peasant boys with hearts of gold. Now Lieutenant Trotta had no literary taste, and whenever he heard the word literature he could think of nothing but Theodor Körner’s drama Zriny and that was all, but he had always felt a dull resentment toward the melancholy gentleness of those booklets and their golden characters. Lieutenant Trotta wasn’t experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written.
All in all, Lieutenant Trotta’s experiences amounted to very little.
Chapter 18
ONE FRESH AND sunny spring morning the district captain received the lieutenant’s unhappy letter. Herr von Trotta balanced the envelope on his palm before opening it. This letter felt heavier than any other he had ever received from his son. It had to be two pages long, a letter of exceptional length. Herr von Trotta’s aged heart filled up with grief, paternal anger, joy, and anxious forebodings. When he opened the envelope, the hard cuff rattled slightly on his old hand. His left hand clutched the pince-nez, which had gotten somewhat shaky during the past few months, and his right hand brought the letter rather close to his face so that the edges of his whiskers rustled softly against the paper. Herr von Trotta was as terrified by the obvious haste of the handwriting as he was by the extraordinary contents. The district captain likewise searched between the lines for any other hidden terrors, for he suddenly felt that the letter did not hold enough and he had long been waiting for the worst news day after day, especially since his son had stopped writing. That was probably why he remained calm when he put the letter down.
He was an old man from an old era. The old men from the era before the Great War may have been more foolish than the young men of today. But in the moments that preceded those horrible ones and that in our time might be shrugged off with a casual joke, the old decent men maintained heroic equanimity. Nowadays the concepts of honor—professional, familial, and personal—that Herr von Trotta lived by seem like relics of implausible and juvenile legends. But in those days an Austrian district captain like Herr von Trotta would have been less shaken by the news of the sudden death of his only child than by the news of even a seemingly dishonorable action of that only child. That lost era, which was virtually buried under the fresh grave mounds of the fallen, was ruled by very different notions. If someone offended the honor of an officer of the Imperial and Royal Army, and that officer failed to kill the man apparently because he owed him money, then that officer was a misfortune and worse than a misfortune: he was a disgrace to his progenitor, to the army, and to the monarchy.
At first it was to some extent Herr von Trotta’s official heart that was stirred and not his paternal heart. And he said to himself, resign immediately. Take early retirement. You have no further business serving your Emperor! But a moment later the father’s heart yelled, it’s the fault of the times we live in! It’s the fault of the border garrison! It’s your own fault! Your son is honest and noble, but unfortunately he’s weak and you have to help him.
He had to help him! He had to make sure that the Trotta name would not be sullied and dishonored. And on this point both of Herr von Trotta’s hearts, the official one and the paternal one, were in agreement. So the most important thing was to get money—seven thousand two hundred fifty crowns. The five thousand florins with which the Kaiser had once gifted the son of the Hero of Solferino was long gone, as was the father’s inheritance. The money had run through the district captain’s fingers for one thing or another: for the household, for the military academy in Hranice, for Moser the painter, for the horse, for charitable purposes. Herr von Trotta had always made a point of appearing richer than he was. He had the instincts of a true gentleman. And in those days (and perhaps in our day too) no instincts were more expensive than those. People favored with such curses do not know how much they possess or how much they spend. They draw from an invisible source. They never keep accounts. They assume that their wealth cannot lag behind their generosity.
For the first time in his very long life, Herr von Trotta was confronted with the impossible task of coming up with a relatively large sum of money on the spot. He had no friends, aside from those old schoolmates and fellow students who now sat in government offices as he did but whom he hadn’t seen in years. Most of them were poor. He was acquainted with the richest man in this district seat, old Herr von Winternigg. And the baron slowly began adjusting to the hideous thought of going to Herr von Winternigg, tomorrow, the day after, or even today, and asking for a loan. Herr von Trotta did not have much of an imagination. Nevertheless he managed to picture that terrible step in all its torturous clarity. And for the first time in his very long life he realized how hard it is to be helpless yet maintain one’s dignity. This insight struck him like a lightning bolt, shattering the pride that he had so carefully nurtured and fostered for such a long time, that he had inherited and was determined to pass down. He already felt humiliated, like a man who has been petitioning people in vain for many years. Earlier, pride had been the staunch companion of his youth, then his support in middle age. Now he was robbed of all pride—the poor old district captain!
He decided to write to Herr von Winternigg immediately. But no sooner had he set pen to paper than he knew he was not even up to announcing a visit that should really be termed a plea. Old Trotta felt he would be committing a kind of fraud unless he stated the reason for his visit right off the bat, but he found it impossible to come up with any suitable wording for his intention. And so he sat there on and on, pen in hand, mulling and polishing and rejecting every sentence.
He could, of course, ring up Herr von Winternigg. But since the installation of a telephone in the district captain’s headquarters—and that had been no longer than two years ago—he had used it only for official calls. He could not see himself stepping up to the large, brown, slightly eerie box, twisting the handle, and starting a conversation with Herr von Winternigg after hearing that dreadful “Hello!” which almost offended Herr von Trotta, sounding as it did like the childish watchword of an inappropriate bravura with which certain people tackle a discussion of serious matters.
Meanwhile the district captain remembered that his son was waiting for a response, perhaps a telegram. And what could the district captain wire? Perhaps “Will try everything. Details later”? Or “Wait patiently for news”? Or “Trying other means, impossible here”? Impossible! This word triggered a long and dreadful echo. What was impossible, saving the honor of the Trottas? It had to be possible. It could not be impossible! Up and down, up and down; the district captain paced up and down his office as on those Sunday mornings when he had tested little Carl Joseph. One hand was on his back, the cuff rattled on the other. Then he went down to the courtyard, driven by the insane notion that dead Jacques might be sitting there, in the shade of the beams. The courtyard was empty. The window of the tiny cottage where Jacques had lived was open, and the canary was still alive. It perched on the windowsill, chirping for all it was worth.
The district captain went back, took his hat and cane, and left the house. He had decided to do something extraordinary—namely, go and see Dr. Skowronnek at his home. He crossed the small marketplace, turned into Lenaugasse, and scrutinized the signs on the house doors, for he didn’t know the doctor’s number. Eventually he had to ask a storekeeper for Skowronnek’s address, although he viewed it as indiscreet to bother a stranger for information. But Herr von Trotta got through this ordeal with self-confidence and strength of mind, and he entered the house that had been pointed out to him. Dr. Skowronnek, book in hand, was sitting under a gigantic sunshade in the small back garden.
“Good God!” cried Skowronnek. For he knew very well that something unusual must have occurred to make the d
istrict captain come to his home.
Herr von Trotta reeled off a whole set of involved apologies before he began. Then he told him the story, sitting on the bench in the small garden, his head drooping, his cane poking the colored gravel on the narrow path. He handed his son’s letter to Skowronnek. Then he fell silent, quelling a sigh as he took a deep breath.
“My savings,” said Skowronnek, “add up to two thousand crowns, and they are yours for the asking, Herr District Commissioner, if that’s all right with you.” He raced through that sentence as if afraid the district captain might break in. In his embarrassment, the doctor took hold of Herr von Trotta’s cane and began poking around in the gravel himself, for he could not sit around with idle hands after uttering that sentence.
Herr von Trotta said, “Thank you, Herr Doctor, I’ll take it. I’ll give you an IOU. I’ll pay you back in installments, if that’s all right with you.”
“That’s out of the question,” said Skowronnek.
“Good!” said the district captain. He suddenly found it impossible to say a lot of useless words, such as he had employed throughout his life out of politeness to strangers. All at once, time was breathing down his neck. The few days at his disposal suddenly melted, becoming nothing.
“As for the rest,” Skowronnek went on, “you could get it only from Herr von Winternigg. Do you know him?”
“Casually.”
“You have no choice, Herr District Captain! But I believe I know what sort of man he is. I once treated his daughter-in-law. He appears to be a monster, as they say. And it may be, it may be, Herr District Captain, that he will refuse your request.”
Hereupon, Skowronnek fell silent. The district captain took back his cane. And there was a deep hush. The only sound was the scraping of the cane in the gravel.
“Refuse,” whispered the district captain. “I’m not afraid,” he said aloud. “But then what?”