The baron did occasionally think of visiting his father. He had long since begun missing the sergeant of the frugal government poverty, the fibrous shag, and the homemade brandy. But the son dreaded the travel expenses just as his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather would have done. Now he was closer to the war invalid at Laxenburg Castle than years ago, when, in the fresh glory of his newly bestowed nobility, he had sat in the blue lime-washed kitchen of the small official apartment, drinking rakia. He never discussed his background with his wife. He sensed that an embarrassed pride would come between the daughter of the older dynasty of civil servants and a Slovenian sergeant, so he never asked his father to visit him.
Once, on a bright day in March, when the baron was trudging across the hard clods to see his steward, a farmhand brought him a letter from the administration of the Castle of Laxenburg. The invalid was dead; he had passed away painlessly at the age of eighty-one. The baron said only, “Go to the baroness; my bag is to be packed; I’m going to Vienna tonight.” He walked on, entered the steward’s house, inquired about the sowing, discussed the weather, instructed him to order three new plows and send for the veterinarian on Monday and the midwife for a pregnant serving girl today, and then added, when leaving, “My father has died; I’m spending three days in Vienna,” saluted with a casual finger, and left.
His bag was packed, the horses were harnessed to the carriage; the station was an hour’s drive. He bolted down the soup and the meat. Then he told his wife, “I can’t go on! My father was a good man. You never met him.” Was it an obituary? Was it a lament? “You’re coming along!” he told his frightened son. His wife stood up to pack the boy’s things. While she busied herself on the next floor, Trotta said to the child, “Now you’ll see your grandfather.” The boy trembled and lowered his eyes.
The sergeant was lying in state by the time they arrived. Guarded by eight candles three feet high and by two war veterans, he lay on a bier in his living room, sporting a tremendous bristly moustache, a dark-blue uniform, and three twinkling medals on his chest. An Ursuline nun was praying in the corner by the single curtained window. The veterans stood at attention when Trotta came in. He wore his major’s uniform with the Order of Maria Theresa. He knelt down; his son likewise fell to his knees at the dead man’s feet, the tremendous soles of those boots in front of the young face. For the first time in his life, Baron Trotta felt a thin, sharp jab in the region of his heart. His tiny eyes remained dry. He murmured one, two, three Lord’s Prayers out of pious embarrassment, stood up, leaned over the dead man, kissed the tremendous moustache, waved at the veterans, and said to his son, “Come on!
“Did you see him?” he asked outside.
“Yes,” said the boy.
“He was only a constable sergeant,” said the father. “I saved the Kaiser’s life at the Battle of Solferino—and then we got the barony.”
The boy said nothing.
The pensioner was buried in the small cemetery at Laxenburg, military section. Six dark-blue veterans carried the coffin from the chapel to the grave. Major Trotta, in shako and full dress, kept his hand on his son’s shoulder the whole time. The boy sobbed. The sad music of the military band, the priests’ doleful and monotonous singsong, audible whenever the music paused, the gently drifting incense—it all made the boy choke with incomprehensible pain. And the rifle shots discharged over the grave by a demi–platoon shook him with their long–echoing relentlessness. They fired martial salutes for the dead man’s soul, which went straight to heaven, vanishing from this earth forever and always.
Father and son headed back. The baron remained silent the entire trip. It was only when they got off the train and climbed into the carriage awaiting them behind the station garden that the major said, “Don’t forget your grandfather!”
The baron resumed his daily routine, and the years rolled away like mute, peaceful, uniform wheels. The sergeant was not the last corpse that the baron had to inter. First he buried his father-in-law, a few years later his wife, who had died a quick, discreet death without saying goodbye after a severe case of pneumonia. He sent his son to boarding school in Vienna, making sure the boy could never become a regular soldier. He remained alone on the estate, in the white, spacious house through which the breath of the deceased still passed, and he spoke only with the gamekeeper, the steward, the groom, and the coachman. His rage exploded in him less and less. But the servants constantly felt his peasant fist, and his seething hush lay like a hard yoke on their necks. Dreadful silence wafted from him as before a storm.
Twice a month he received obedient letters from his child. Once a month he replied in two brief sentences, on small, thrifty scraps torn from the respectful margins of the letters he had gotten. Once a year, on the eighteenth of August, the Kaiser’s birthday, he donned his uniform and drove to the nearest garrison town. Twice a year his son visited him, during Christmas break and summer vacation. On every Christmas Eve the boy was handed three hard silver guldens, for which he had to sign a receipt and which he could never take along. That same evening, the guldens landed in a cashbox inside the old man’s chest. Next to the guldens lay the report cards. They testified to the son’s thorough diligence and his middling but always adequate capacities. Never was the son given a toy, never an allowance, never a book, aside from the required schoolbooks. He did not seem deprived. His mind was neat, sober, and honest. His meager imagination provided him with no other wish than to get through the school years as fast as possible.
He was eighteen years old when his father said to him on Christmas Eve, “This year you’ll no longer get your three guldens. You may take nine from the cashbox if you sign for them. Be careful with women! Most of them are diseased.” And, after a pause: “I’ve decided that you’re going to be a lawyer. It will take two years. There’ll be time enough for the army. It can be deferred until you’re done.”
The boy took the nine guldens as obediently as he took his father’s wish. He seldom visited women, chose among them carefully, and had six guldens left when he came home again in the summer holidays. He asked his father for permission to invite a friend. “Fine,” said the major, somewhat astonished. The friend came with little baggage but a huge paint box, which did not appeal to the master of the house.
“He paints?” asked the old man.
“Very nicely,” said Franz, the son.
“Don’t let him splatter up the house. He can paint the landscape.”
The guest did paint outdoors, but not the landscape. He was painting Baron Trotta from memory. At every meal he memorized his host’s features.
“Why are you staring at me?” asked the baron. Both boys turned red and peered at the tablecloth. Nevertheless the portrait was finished, framed, and presented to the old man when the boys left. He studied it thoughtfully and with a smile. He turned it over as if seeking further details perhaps left out on the front; he held it up to the window, then far from his eyes, gazed at himself in the mirror, compared himself with the portrait, and finally said, “Where should it hang?” It was his first joy in many years. “You can lend your friend money if he needs something,” he murmured to Franz. “Get along with each other!” The portrait was and remained the only one ever done of old Trotta. Later it hung in his son’s study and even haunted his grandson’s imagination.
Meanwhile the portrait kept the major in a rare mood for several weeks. He hung it now on one, now on another wall, feeling flattered delight as he scrutinized his hard, jutting nose, his clean-shaven jaw, his pale, narrow lips, his gaunt cheekbones rising like hills in front of the tiny black eyes, and the low, heavily creased forehead covered by the awning of close-cropped, bristly, thorny hair. Only now did he grow acquainted with his features; he sometimes had a mute dialogue with his own face. It aroused unfamiliar thoughts and memories, baffling, quickly blurring shadows of wistfulness. He had needed the portrait to experience his early old age and his great loneliness; from the painted canvas loneliness and old age came flo
oding toward him. Has it always been like this? he wondered. Has it been like this always?
Now and then, aimlessly, he went to the cemetery, to his wife’s grave, peered at the gray pedestal and the chalky-white cross, the dates of her birth and death: he calculated that she had died too early and he admitted that he could not remember her clearly. He had forgotten, say, her hands. Quinquina Martial Wine flashed into his mind, a medicament she had taken for many long years. Her face? Shutting his eyes, he could still evoke it, but soon it vanished, blurring into the reddish circular twilight. He became mild-mannered in the house and on the farm, sometimes stroking a horse, smiling at the cows, drinking liquor more often than before, and one day he wrote a brief letter to his son outside the normal schedule. People began greeting him with smiles; he nodded pleasantly. Summer came. The holidays brought the son and the friend; the old man drove them to town, entered a restaurant, had a few gulps of slivovitz, and ordered a lavish meal for the boys.
The son became a lawyer, visited home more frequently, looked around the estate, felt one day that he wanted to manage it and abandon his law career. He confessed his wish to his father. The major said, “It’s too late. You’ll never become a farmer or manage an estate in your lifetime. You’ll make an able official, that’s all.” The matter was settled. The son obtained a political office, becoming a district commissioner in Austrian Silesia. While the Trotta name may have disappeared from the authorized schoolbooks, it had not vanished from the secret files of the higher political authorities, and the five thousand guldens allotted by the Kaiser’s favor assured Trotta the official a constant benevolence and furtherance from anonymous higher places. He advanced swiftly. Two years before the son’s promotion to district captain, his father died.
He left a surprising will. Since he was certain—he wrote—that his son was not a good farmer, and since he hoped that the Trottas, grateful to the Kaiser for his continual favor, could advance to high ranks in government service and live more happily than he, the author of the testament, he had decided, in memory of his late father, to bequeath the estate, made over to him years earlier by his father-in-law, together with all his movable and immovable chattel, to the Military Invalid Fund, whereby the beneficiaries of this last will and testament would have no further obligation than to bury the testator as modestly as possible in the cemetery where his father had been interred and, if it was convenient, near the deceased. He, the testator, requested that they refrain from any ostentation. All residual moneys, fifteen thousand florins plus accrued interest placed with the Efrussi Bank in Vienna, as well as any other money, silver and copper, to be found in the house, and also the late mother’s ring, watch, and necklace, belonged to the testator’s only son, Baron Franz von Trotta und Sipolje.
A Viennese military band, an infantry company, a representative of the Knights of the Order of Maria Theresa, a few officers of the south Hungarian regiment whose modest hero the major had been, all military invalids capable of marching, two officials of the Royal and Cabinet Chancellery, an officer of the Military Cabinet, and a junior officer carrying the Order of Maria Theresa on a black-draped cushion: they formed the official cortège. Franz, the son, walked, black, thin, and alone. The band played the same march they had played at the grandfather’s funeral. The salvos fired this time were louder and faded out with longer echoes.
The son did not weep. No one wept for the deceased. Everyone remained dry and solemn. No one spoke at the grave. Near the constable sergeant lay Major Baron von Trotta und Sipolje, the Knight of Truth. They set up a plain military headstone on which, beneath name, rank, and regiment, the proud epithet was engraved in thin black letters: THE HERO OF SOLFERINO.
Now little was left of the dead man but this stone, a faded glory, and the portrait. That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring—and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed. That same week, the Imperial and Royal High Commissioner Trotta von Sipolje received a letter of condolence from His Majesty, which spoke twice about the forever “unforgotten services” rendered by the late deceased.
Chapter 2
NOWHERE IN THE entire jurisdiction of the division was there a finer military band than that of Infantry Regiment No. Ten in the small district town of W in Moravia. The bandmaster was one of those Austrian military musicians who, thanks to an exact memory and an ever-alert need for new variations on old melodies, were able to compose a new march every month. All the marches resembled one another like soldiers. Most of them began with a roll of drums, contained a tattoo accelerated by the march rhythm and a shattering smile of the lovely cymbals, and ended with the rumbling thunder of the kettledrum, the brief and jolly storm of military music. What distinguished Kapellmeister Nechwal from his colleagues was not so much his extraordinarily prolific tenacity in composing as his rousing and cheerful severity in drilling the music. Other bandmasters had the negligent habit of letting a drum major conduct the first march, only picking up the baton for the second item on the program, but Nechwal viewed that slovenly practice as a clear symptom of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time the band had stationed itself in the prescribed round and the dainty little feet of the frail music desks had dug into the black soil of the cracks between the wide paving stones on the square, the bandmaster was already standing at the center of his musicians, discreetly holding up his ebony baton with the silver pommel.
Every one of these outdoor concerts—they took place under the Herr District Captain’s balcony—began with “The Radetzky March.” Though all the band members were so thoroughly familiar with it that they could have played it without a conductor, in the dead of night, and in their sleep, the kapellmeister nevertheless required them to read every single note from the sheets. And every Sunday, as if rehearsing “The Radetzky March” for the first time with his musicians, he would raise his head, his baton, and his eyes in military and musical zeal and concentrate all four on any segments that seemed needful of his orders in the round at whose midpoint he was standing. The rugged drums rolled, the sweet flutes piped, and the lovely cymbals shattered. The faces of all the spectators lit up with pleasant and pensive smiles, and the blood tingled in their legs. Though standing, they thought they were already marching. The younger girls held their breath and opened their lips. The more mature men hung their heads and recalled their maneuvers. The elderly ladies sat in the neighboring park, their small gray heads trembling. And it was summer.
Yes, it was summer. The old chestnut trees opposite the district captain’s house moved their dark-green crowns with rich, broad foliage only mornings and evenings. During the day they remained motionless, exhaling a pungent breath and sending their wide cool shadows all the way to the middle of the road. The sky was a steady blue. Invisible larks warbled incessantly over the silent town. Sometimes a fiacre rolled across the bumpy cobblestones, transporting a stranger from the railroad station to the hotel. Sometimes the hooves of the two horses taking Lord von Winternigg for a ride clopped along the broad road from north to south, from the landowner’s castle to his immense hunting preserve. Small, ancient, and pitiful, a little yellow oldster with a tiny wizened face in a huge yellow blanket, Lord von Winternigg sat in his barouche. He drove through the brimming summer like a wretched bit of winter. On high, soundless, resilient rubber wheels whose delicate brown spokes mirrored the sunshine, he rolled straight from his bed to his rural wealth. The big dark woods and the blond green gamekeepers were already waiting for him. The townsfolk greeted him. He did not respond. Unmoved, he drove through a sea of greetings. His dark coachman loomed steeply aloft, his top hat almost grazing the boughs of the chestnut trees, the supple whip caressing the brown backs of the horses, and at very definite, regular intervals the coachman’s firm-set mouth emitted a snappy clicking, louder than the clopping of the hooves and similar to a melodious rifle shot.
Summer vacation began around this time. Carl Joseph von Trotta, the fifteen-year
-old son of the district captain, a pupil at the Cavalry Military School in Hranice, Moravia, regarded his native town as a summery place; it was as much the summer’s home as his own. Christmas and Easter he spent at his uncle’s. He came home only during summer holidays. He always arrived on a Sunday. This accorded with the wishes of his father, Herr District Captain Franz, Baron von Trotta und Sipolje. At home, summer vacation, no matter when it commenced at school, had to begin on a Saturday. On Sundays, Herr von Trotta was off duty. He reserved the entire morning, from nine to twelve, for his son. Punctually at ten minutes to nine, a quarter hour after early mass, the boy stood in his Sunday uniform outside his father’s door. At five minutes to nine, Jacques, in his gray butler’s livery, came down the stairs and said, “Young master, your Herr Papá is coming.” Carl Joseph gave his coat a last tug, adjusted the waist belt, took off the cap, and, as prescribed by regulations, propped it against his hip.
The father arrived; the son clicked his heels; the noise snapped through the hushed old house. The old man opened the door and with a slight wave of his hand motioned for his son to precede him. The boy stood still; he did not respond to the invitation. So the father stepped through the door. Carl Joseph followed but paused on the threshold. “Make yourself comfortable!” said the district captain after a while. It was only now that Carl Joseph walked over to the large red–plush armchair and sat down opposite his father, his knees drawn up stiffly and the cap and white gloves upon them. Through the narrow cracks of the green Venetian blinds, narrow stripes of sunshine fell upon the dark-red carpet. A fly buzzed, the wall clock began to strike. After the nine golden strokes faded, the district captain began.