The Radetzky March (11 page)

“Herr Baron,” the sergeant begins, “is good enough to speak of ‘our’ profession. Please do not take it amiss, but it’s quite different for our kind.”

Carl Joseph does not know how to respond. He feels—vaguely—that the sergeant is nursing a grudge toward him, perhaps toward the overall conditions in the army and the constabulary. At military school they never learned anything about how an officer is to conduct himself in this kind of situation. At any rate, Carl Joseph smiles, a smile that pulls down and squeezes his lips together like an iron clamp; he looks as if he is being chary with expressing pleasure, which the sergeant heedlessly fritters away. The raspberry drink, so sweet upon the tongue, sends a bitter, vapid taste back from the throat; it would call for a brandy chaser. The reddish parlor seems lower and smaller than usual; perhaps it is being squashed by the rain.

On the table lies the familiar album with the hard, shiny brass mountings. Carl Joseph is well acquainted with each and every picture. Sergeant Slama says, “May I?” and opens the album and offers it to the lieutenant. The sergeant is photographed here in mufti, as a young bridegroom at his wife’s side. “In those days I was a still a platoon commander,” he says somewhat bitterly, as if he would rather say that a higher rank would have been more befitting by then. Frau Slama sits next to him in a snug light-colored summer frock with a wasp waist as in an airy armor, a white broad-brimmed hat slanting across her hair. What is this? Has Carl Joseph never seen this picture before? Then why does it look so new to him today? And so old? And so alien? And so ridiculous? Yes, he smiles as if he were viewing a quaint picture from times long gone and as if Frau Slama had never been close and dear to him and as if she had died, not just a few months ago but years ago.

“She was very pretty! You can tell!” says Carl Joseph, no longer out of embarrassment, as before, but in honest flattery.
You have to say something nice about a dead woman in front of the widower you’re condoling with.

He instantly feels liberated, and also severed from the dead woman, as if everything were snuffed out. It was all a fantasy! He finishes the raspberry drink, stands, and says, “I’ll be going now, Herr Slama!” He does not wait, he wheels around, the sergeant barely has time to get up, they are already in the hallway, Carl Joseph already has his coat on, he slowly and luxuriously slips on his left glove, he suddenly has more time for that; and, upon saying, “Well,
auf Wiedersehn
, Herr Slama,” Carl Joseph is gratified to catch an alien, haughty sound in his own voice.

Slama stands there with downcast eyes and helpless hands, which are suddenly empty as if after holding something until this very moment they had only just dropped it and lost it forever. They shake hands. Does Slama have something to say? No matter. “Perhaps another time, Herr Lieutenant!” he nevertheless says. No, he probably doesn’t mean it, but Carl Joseph has already forgotten Slama’s face. All he sees are the golden-yellow braids on the collar and the three golden chevrons on the black sleeve of his constable tunic.

“Goodbye, sergeant!”

The rain is still falling, mild, tireless, with sporadic warm mountain gusts. It feels as if evening should have come long ago, and yet evening cannot come. Eternal, this wet gray hatchwork. For the first time since he began wearing a uniform—indeed, for the first time since he began thinking—Carl Joseph feels he ought to pull his coat collar up. He even raises his hands for an instant, then recalls that he is in uniform and drops them again. It is as if he had forgotten his profession for a second. He walks slowly and jingly over the wet, crunching gravel of the front yard and delights in his slowness. He has no need to hurry; nothing has happened, it was all a dream. What time might it be? His watch is buried too deep under his tunic in the small trouser pocket. Not worth unbuttoning his coat. The church clock will be striking soon anyway.

He opens the garden gate, he steps into the road. “Herr Baron!” the constable suddenly says behind him. Mystifying how silently he has followed him. Yes, Carl Joseph is startled. He
halts but cannot make up his mind to turn straightaway. Perhaps a pistol barrel is resting right in the hollow between the regulation creases in his coat. A grisly and childish idea! Is everything starting all over again?

“Yes?” he says, still with an arrogant casualness that almost arduously prolongs his leave-taking and is a great strain on him—and he wheels around.

Coatless and bareheaded, the sergeant stands in the rain, with his wet, small, double brush and thick beads of water on his blond, smooth forehead. He holds a small blue packet tied crosswise with a thin silver ribbon. “This is for you, Herr Baron,” he says, with downcast eyes. “Please excuse me. I have orders from the district captain. I took it to him right away. The district captain skimmed it and said I should give it to you personally!”

The hush lasts for an instant. Only the rain pelts down on the poor little pale-blue packet, staining it utterly dark; it can no longer wait—the packet. Carl Joseph takes it, plunges it deep into his coat pocket, reddens, thinks momentarily about stripping the glove from his right hand, changes his mind, holds his leather-clad hand out to the sergeant, says, “Thank you very much,” and leaves quickly.

He can feel the letters in his pocket. From there, through his hand, along his arm, an unknown heat swells up, turning his face a deeper red. He now feels that he should loosen his collar, just as he believed earlier that he should turn it up. The bitter aftertaste of the raspberry drink is back in his mouth. Carl Joseph takes out the packet. Yes, there is no doubt. These are his letters.

Evening should finally come and the rain stop. A number of things should change in the world: the evening sun perhaps send a final beam here. Through the rain the meadows exhale the familiar fragrance, and an alien bird lets out a lonesome cry; it has never been heard here before; this is like an alien land. He hears five o’clock striking: so it was exactly one hour ago—no more than one hour. Should one walk fast or slow? Time has an alien, enigmatic motion, an hour is like a year. The bell strikes a quarter past five. He has barely gone a few paces. Carl Joseph
starts tramping faster. He crosses the rails; here is where the town’s outlying houses begin. He walks past the town cafe; this is the only place with a modern revolving door. It might be good to go in, have a brandy at the bar, and then leave. Carl Joseph goes in.

“Quick, a brandy,” he says at the counter. He keeps on his cap and coat, a few patrons stand up. You can hear the clattering of the pool balls and the chess figures. Garrison officers sit in the alcove shadows; Carl Joseph does not see them, does not salute them. Nothing is more urgent than the brandy. He is ashen. The pale-blond cashier smiles maternally from her lofty seat and, with a kind hand, places a sugar cube next to the cup. Carl Joseph drains it at one swoop. He instantly orders a refill. All he sees of the cashier’s face is a light-blond shimmer and two gold caps in the corners of her mouth. He feels he is doing something forbidden, and he has no idea why drinking two brandies should be forbidden. After all, he is no longer a cadet. Why is the cashier ogling him with such a bizarre smile? Her navy-blue gaze disconcerts him, as does the charred blackness of her eyebrows. He turns and peers into the room. There in the corner by the window sits his father.

Yes, he is the district captain—and what’s so amazing about that? He sits there every day, from five to seven, reading the
Foreign News
and the
Civil Service Gazette
and smoking a Virginia cigar. The whole town knows, it has known for three decades. The district captain sits there, watching his son, and he seems to be smiling. Carl Joseph doffs his cap and walks over to his father. Old Herr von Trotta glances up from his newspaper without putting it down and says, “Are you coming from Slama?”

“Yessir, Papá!”

“He gave you your letters?”

“Yessir, Papá!”

“Sit down, please.”

“Yessir, Papá!”

The district captain finally lets go of the newspaper, props his elbows on the table, turns to his son, and says, “She’s given you a cheap brandy. I always drink Hennessy.”

“I’ll remember that, Papá!”

“I seldom drink anyway.”

“Yessir, Papá!”

“You’re still pale. Take off your coat. Major Kreidl is over there, just look.”

Carl Joseph stands up and bows to the major.

“Was Slama unpleasant?”

“No, quite a nice guy.”

“There you are!”

Carl Joseph takes off his coat.

“Where are the letters?” asks the district captain. His son removes them from his coat pocket. Old Herr von Trotta takes hold of them. He weighs them in his right hand, puts them down, and says, “Quite a lot of letters!”

“Yessir, Papá!”

It is still, one hears the clatter of the pool balls and the chess figures, and the rain is pouring outside.

“The day after tomorrow you’re reporting for duty!” says the district captain, glancing toward the window. All at once, Carl Joseph feels his father’s gaunt hand on his right hand. The district captain’s hand, cool and bony, a hard shell, lies on the lieutenant’s.

Carl Joseph lowers his eyes to the tabletop. He turns red. He says, “Yessir, Papá!”

“Check!” calls the district captain, removing his hand. “Tell the girl,” he remarks to the waiter, “that we only drink Hennessy.”

In a dead-straight diagonal they veer across the café to the door, the father and, behind him, the son.

Now it is only dripping in a gentle singsong from the trees as they slowly walk home through the humid garden. From the entrance to the district headquarters, Sergeant Slama emerges in a helmet, with a rifle and a fixed bayonet plus a rule book under his arm.

“Good day, my dear Slama!” says old Herr von Trotta. “No news, eh?”

“No news,” the sergeant echoes.

T
HE BARRACKS LAY
in the northern part of town. It closed off the broad well-kept highway, which started a new life behind the red brick construction, where it led far into the blue countryside. The barracks looked as if it had been thrust into the Slavic province by the Imperial and Royal Army as an emblem of the Hapsburg might. The ancient highway itself, which had become so broad and roomy after centuries of migrating Slavic generations, was blocked by the barracks. The highway had to yield. It looped around the barracks. If on a clear day you stood at the extreme northern edge of town at the end of the highway, where the houses grew smaller and smaller, finally becoming peasant huts, you could spy, in the distance, the broad, arched, black-and-yellow entrance to the barracks, a gate brandished like a mighty Hapsburg shield against the town: a threat, a protection, and both at once. The regiment was stationed in Moravia. But its troops were not Czechs, as might be expected; they were Ukrainians and Rumanians.

Twice a week, military exercises took place on the southern terrain. Twice a week, the regiment galloped through the streets of the little town. The clear blaring peal of the trumpets interrupted the regular clopping of the horses’ hooves at regular intervals, and the red trousers of the men astride the glossy brown bodies of the chargers filled the little town with gory splendor. The citizens paused on the curbs. The shopkeepers left their shops, the idle café patrons their tables, the town policemen their customary beats, and the farmers, coming from the villages and bringing fresh produce to the marketplace, their horses and wagons. Only the coachmen on the few fiacres lined up near the town park remained immobile on their boxes. From
up above, they had an even better view of the military spectacle than the people standing at the curbs. And the old nags seemed to greet the splendid arrival of their younger and healthier brethren with dull indifference. The cavalry steeds were very distant relatives of the bleak horses that for fifteen years now had done nothing but pull droshkies to the station and back.

Carl Joseph, Baron von Trotta, was unconcerned about the animals. At times he believed he felt the blood of his forebears inside himself: they had not been horsemen. With combing harrows in their hard hands, they had placed foot after foot on the ground. They had shoved the furrowing plows into the succulent clods of soil and trudged with buckling knees behind the massive pair of oxen. They had goaded the beasts with willow rods, not spurs and whips. And with arms raised high they had swung the polished scythes like flashes of lightning and harvested the rich crops they had sown themselves. His grandfather’s father had been a peasant. Sipolje was the village they came from. Sipolje: the name had an ancient meaning. No one, not even today’s Slovenes, really knew what it meant. But Carl Joseph felt he knew the village. He saw it whenever he recalled his grandfather’s portrait, which hung blurring under the ceiling of the study. The village lay cradled between unknown mountains, under the golden glow of an unknown sun, with squalid huts of clay and thatch. A lovely village, a good village! He would have given his whole career as an officer for it.

Ah, he was no peasant, he was a baron and a lieutenant in the lancers! Unlike the other officers, he had no room of his own in town. Carl Joseph lived in the barracks. His window faced the parade ground. Across from him were the troop rooms. Whenever he returned home to the barracks in the afternoon, and the huge double gate closed behind him, he felt trapped; never again would the gates open before him. His spurs jingled frostily on the bare stone staircase, and the tread of his boots echoed on the brown caulked wooden floor of the corridor. The whitewashed walls clung to a bit of vanishing daylight, radiating it now, as if making sure in their bleak thrift that the government kerosene lamps in the corners were not lit until evening had thickened
completely, as if they had collected the day at the right time in order to dole it out in the destitution of darkness.

Carl Joseph did not turn on the light. Pressing his forehead against the window, which seemed to separate him from the darkness but was actually the cool, familiar outer wall of the darkness itself, he peered into the bright yellow coziness of the troop rooms. He would have gladly traded places with any of the privates. There they sat, half undressed, in their coarse yellowish army shirts, dangling their bare feet over the edges of their bunks, singing, talking, and playing harmonicas. Around this time of day—autumn was already well advanced—an hour after lockup and an hour and a half before taps, the entire barracks resembled a gigantic ship. And Carl Joseph also felt as if it were rocking gently and the chary yellow kerosene lamps with the broad white shades were bobbing in the steady rhythm of waves on an unknown ocean. The men were crooning in an unknown language, a Slavic language. The old peasants of Sipolje would have probably understood them. Carl Joseph’s grandfather might still have understood them! His enigmatic portrait blurred under the ceiling of the study. Carl Joseph’s memory clung to this portrait as the sole and final emblem bequeathed to him by the long line of his unknown forebears. He was their offspring. Since joining the regiment, he felt he was his grandfather’s grandson, not his father’s son; indeed, he was the son of his strange grandfather. They kept playing their harmonicas over there nonstop. He could clearly see sporadic glints of the metal and the movements of the coarse brown hands pushing the metal instruments back and forth in front of red mouths. The vast melancholy of these instruments poured through the closed windows into the black rectangle of the parade ground, filling the darkness with vague inklings of home and wife and child and farm. Back home they lived in dwarfed huts, making their wives fertile by night and their fields by day. White and high, the snow piled around their huts in winter. Yellow and high, the grain billowed around their hips in summer. They were peasants. Peasants! And the Trotta dynasty had lived no differently. No differently!