The Radetzky March (21 page)

Thus it was that the southern borderland remained closed to the son, Carl Joseph, Baron von Trotta und Sipolje, and he was limited to the choice of serving either in the interior of the empire or on its eastern border. He opted for the rifle battalion, which was stationed only a few miles from the Russian border. Nearby lay Burdlaki, Onufrij’s native village. This area was the related homeland of the Ukrainian peasants, their mournful accordions, and their haunting songs; it was the northern sister of Slovenia.

Lieutenant Trotta sat in the train for seventeen hours. During the eighteenth hour, the monarchy’s final eastern railroad station emerged. Here he got out. He was accompanied by Onufrij, his orderly. The rifle barracks lay in the middle of the small town. Before they entered the courtyard of the barracks, Onufrij crossed himself three times. It was morning. The spring, long since at home in the interior of the empire, had come this far only recently. The forsythia was already glowing on the slopes of the railroad embankment. The violets were already blossoming in the damp woods. The frogs were already croaking in the endless swamps. The storks were already circling over the low thatched roofs of the rustic huts, seeking the old wheels, the foundations of their summer homes.

At this time, the border between Austria and Russia, in the northeast of the dual monarchy, was one of the strangest areas. Carl Joseph’s rifle battalion was stationed in a town of ten thousand inhabitants. The town had a spacious ring square, with two large thoroughfares crossing at the center. One ran from east to west, the other from north to south. One led from the train depot to the graveyard, the other from the castle ruins to the steam mill. Of the ten thousand inhabitants of the town,
roughly one third worked at some kind of craft. Another third lived wretchedly on their tiny farms. And the rest were involved in some sort of commerce.

We say “some sort of commerce.” For neither the wares nor the business practices corresponded to the civilized world’s notion of commerce. The tradesmen in those parts lived far more on happenstance than prospects, far more on unpredictable providence than any commercial planning, and any tradesman was willing at any time to seize the goods that destiny had put his way or to invent goods if God had blessed him with none. Indeed, the livelihoods of these tradesmen were a riddle. They had no shops. They had no names. They had no credit. But they did possess a finely whetted, miraculous instinct for any and all secret and mysterious sources of money. They lived off other people’s work, but they also created work for others. They were frugal. They lived as squalidly as if subsisting on manual labor, but it was other people’s labor. Always on the move, always on the alert, with glib tongues and quick minds, they might have had the stuff to conquer half the world—had they known what the world was all about. But they did not know. For they lived far from the world, between East and West, squeezed in between night and day—virtually as living ghosts spawned by the night and haunting the day.

Did we say they lived “squeezed in”? Nature in their homeland prevented them from feeling squeezed in. Nature forged an unending horizon around the borderland people and surrounded them with a noble ring of green forests and blue hills. When they walked through the darkness of the firs, they could actually have believed that they were favored by God—if the daily anxiety about bread for wife and children had left them time to recognize God’s goodness. But they walked through the fir forests to purchase wood for city buyers as soon as winter drew near. For they also dealt in wood. Incidentally, they also dealt in corals for the peasant women in the encircling villages and also for the peasant women who lived on the other side of the border, on Russian soil. They dealt in feathers for feather beds, in horsehair, in tobacco, in silver ingots, in jewels, in Chinese tea, in southern fruit, in horses and cattle, in poultry
and eggs, in fish and vegetables, in jute and wool, in cheese and butter, in fields and woodlands, in Italian marble, in human hair from China for the manufacture of wigs, in raw silk and finished silk, in textiles from Manchester, in Brussels lace and Moscow galoshes, in linen from Vienna and lead from Bohemia. None of the wonderful and none of the cheap goods in which the world is so rich remained unknown to the dealers and agents in this region. If they could not acquire or sell something in accordance with the current laws, they would get hold of it unlawfully through cunning and calculation, through boldness and deceit. Some of them even dealt in human beings, live human beings. They sent deserters from the Russian army to the United States and young peasant girls to Brazil and Argentina. They ran shipping offices and also agencies for foreign brothels. And yet their profits were paltry, and they had no inkling of the vast and splendid affluence a man can live in. Their senses, so polished and skilled in finding money, their hands, so gifted in striking gold from gravel like sparks from flint, were incapable of gaining joy for their hearts or health for their bodies.

The people in this area were the spawn of the swamps. For the swamps lay incredibly widespread across the entire face of the land, on both sides of the highway, with frogs, fever germs, and treacherous grass that could be a horrible lure into a horrible death for innocent wanderers unfamiliar with the terrain. Many died, and their final cries for help went unheard. But all the people who were born there knew the treachery of the swamps and had something of that treachery themselves. In spring and summer, the air was thick with an intense and incessant croaking of frogs. An equally intense trilling of larks exulted under the skies. And a tireless dialogue took place between sky and swamp.

Among the dealers we have spoken of were many Jews. A whim of nature, perhaps the mysterious law of an unknown descent from the legendary tribe of the Khazars, gave many of the borderland Jews red hair. The hair blazed on their heads. Their beards were aflame. On the backs of their deft hands, hard, red bristles stood rigid like tiny spears. And their ears were rank with soft reddish wool like the haze of the red fires that might be glowing inside their heads.

Any stranger coming into this region was doomed to gradual decay. No one was as strong as the swamp. No one could hold out against the borderland. By this time, the high-placed gentlemen in Vienna and St. Petersburg were already starting to prepare for the Great War. The borderlanders felt it coming earlier than the others, not only because they were used to sensing future things but also because they could see the omens of doom every day with their own eyes. They profited even from these preparations. Any number of them lived from spying and counterspying; they received Austrian guldens from the Austrian police and Russian rubles from the Russian police. And in the isolated swampy bleakness of the garrison, one or another officer fell prey to despair, gambling, debts, and sinister men. The graveyards of border garrisons held many young corpses of weak men.

But here too the soldiers drilled, as in any other garrison of the empire. Every day the rifle battalion, splattered with springtime mire, gray mud on their boots, marched back to the barracks. Major Zoglauer rode at their head. The second platoon of the first company was led by Lieutenant Trotta. The beat to which the riflemen marched was set by the bugler’s long, sober signal, not the haughty fanfare that marshaled, interrupted, and blared at the clattering hooves of the lancer horses. Carl Joseph trudged along, pretending to himself that he felt better on foot. All around him the riflemen’s hobnailed boots crunched over the sharp-edged gravel that, at the behest of the military authorities, was sacrificed constantly—in spring, weekly—to the swampy roads. All the stones, millions of stones, were swallowed up by the insatiable ground. And more and more victorious, shimmering, silvery-gray layers of mud welled up from the depths, ate stone and gravel, and slapped together over the stamping boots of the soldiers.

The barracks lay behind the town park. To the left of the barracks stood the District Court, faced by the district captain’s office, behind whose festive and ramshackle wall stood two churches, a Roman Catholic and a Greek Orthodox; and to the right of the barracks loomed the high school. The town was so tiny that one could walk across it in twenty minutes. Its
important buildings crowded together as irksome neighbors. Every evening the strollers, like convicts in a prison yard, did their regular round of the park. It took a good half hour to walk to the train depot.

The rifle officers’ mess hall was located in two small rooms of a private home. Most of the officers ate at the station restaurant. So did Carl Joseph. He liked to march through the slapping mire just to see the station. It was the last of all the monarchy’s stations; nevertheless, it too displayed two pairs of glittering rails ribboning uninterruptedly into the core of the empire. This station too had not only bright, glassy, cheerful signals jingling with soft echoes of calls from home but also an incessantly ticking Morse apparatus on which the lovely, confused voices of a lost and distant world were diligently hammered out, stitched out as if on a bustling sewing machine. This station too had a stationmaster, and this master swung a jangling bell, and the bell signified, All aboard! All aboard! Once a day, at the stroke of noon, the stationmaster swung his bell at the train heading west, toward Crakow, Bogumin, Vienna. A good, dear train! It lingered almost until the end of lunch, outside the windows of the first-class dining room where the officers sat. The engine did not whistle until the coffee arrived. The gray steam billowed against the panes. By the time the damp beads began streaking the glass, the train was gone. The bleak group of diners drank their coffee and slowly straggled back through the silvery-gray mud. Not even generals on tours of inspection cared to come this far. They did not come. Nobody came. At the small town’s only hotel, where most of the officers resided as permanent tenants, the rich hops dealers from Nuremberg and Prague and Zatec would stay only twice a year. Once they completed their inscrutable deals, they would send for musicians and play cards at the only café, which belonged to the hotel.

Carl Joseph could take in the entire small town from the third floor of the Hotel Brodnitzer. He could see the gabled roof of the District Court, the white turret of the district captain’s office, the black-and-yellow flag over the barracks, the twofold cross of the Greek church, the weathercock on the town hall, and all the dark-gray shingle roofs of the small one-story houses.
The Hotel Brodnitzer was the highest building in town. It was as much a landmark as the church, the town hall, or any other municipal structures. The streets had no names and the cottages no numbers, and if anyone asked how to reach a specific place, he would have to go by the vague directions he was offered. So-and-so lived behind the church, so-and-so opposite the town jail, someone else to the right of the District Court. People lived as if in a hamlet.

And the secrets of the people in these low cottages, under the dark-gray shingle roofs, behind the small square windowpanes and the wooden doors, oozed through chinks and rafters into the miry streets and even into the large, eternally remote barracks yard. One man had been cuckolded, another had sold his daughter to the Russian captain; someone was vending rotten eggs, someone else was regularly living off contraband; one man was an ex-convict, another had just barely avoided prison; this one lent money to officers, and his neighbor pocketed one third of the profits. The officers, nonaristocrats mostly and from a German-speaking background, had been stationed in this garrison for years and years; it had become both their home and their fate. Cut off from their homeland customs, from their German mother tongue (which had become an officialese here), at the mercy of the unending bleakness of the swamps, they fell prey to gambling and to the sharp schnapps distilled in this area and sold under the label 180 Proof. From the harmless mediocrity in which military school and traditional drilling had trained them, they skittered into the corruption of this land, with the vast breath of the huge hostile czarist empire blowing across it. Less than nine miles separated them from Russia. The Russian officers of the border regiment often came across in their long sandy-yellow and dove-gray coats, with heavy gold-and-silver epaulets on their broad shoulders and with reflective galoshes on their glossy top boots in all weathers. The two garrisons even maintained a certain camaraderie with each other. Sometimes the Austrian officers would ride small canvas-covered baggage vans across the border to watch the Cossacks showing off their riding feats and to drink the Russian liquor. Over there, in the Russian garrison, the liquor kegs stood on the curbs of the
wooden sidewalks, guarded by privates with rifles and long fixed triple-edged bayonets. When evening set in, the kegs, kicked along by Cossack boots, trundled and rumbled over the bumpy streets toward the Russian officers’ club, and a soft splashing and gurgling revealed the contents of the kegs to the populace. The czar’s officers showed His Apostolic Majesty’s officers the meaning of Russian hospitality. And not one of the czar’s officers and not one of His Apostolic Majesty’s officers knew that Death was already crossing his haggard, invisible hands over the glass beakers from which the men drank.

In the vast plain between the two border forests, the Austrian and the Russian, the sotnias of the borderland Cossacks, uniformed winds in military formations, raced around on the mercuric ponies of their homeland steppes, swinging their lances over their tall fur caps like lightning streaks on long wooden poles—coquettish lightning with dainty pennons. On the soft, springy, swampy ground, the clatter of hooves could barely be heard. A damp, quiet sigh was the wet soil’s only response to the flying thuds. The dark-green grasses scarcely yielded. It was as if the Cossacks were soaring over the meadows. And when they galloped along the sandy-yellow highway, a huge, bright, golden column of fine-grained dust rose up, flickering in the sun, shredding widely, dissolving, sinking in a thousand tiny cloudlets. The invited guests sat on rough wooden stands. The riders’ movements were almost swifter than the spectators’ eyes. With their strong yellow horse teeth, the saddled Cossacks, in mid-gallop, lifted their red-and-blue handkerchiefs from the ground, their bodies, suddenly felled, ducked under the horses’ bellies, while the legs in the reflective boots still squeezed the animals’ flanks. Other riders flung their lances high into the air, and the weapons whirled and obediently dropped back into the horsemen’s raised fists—they returned like living falcons into their masters’ hands. Still other riders, with torsos crouching horizontal along the horses’ backs, human mouths fraternally pressing against animal mouths, leaped through wondrously small rounds of iron hoops that could have girded a small keg. The horses splayed all four legs. Their manes rose like wings, their tails stood as upright as
rudders, their narrow heads resembled the slender bows of skidding canoes. Further riders vaulted across a line of twenty beer kegs placed bottom to bottom. The horse always neighed as it prepared to jump. The rider came bounding from infinitely far away; at first a tiny gray dot, he grew at breakneck speed into a stroke, a body, a rider, became a gigantic mythical bird, half man, half horse, a winged centaur who then, after a successful leap, halted, stock-still, a hundred yards beyond the kegs—a statue, a monument of lifeless matter. Others in turn, whizzing like arrows (and, as shooters, looking like gunshots), fired at flying targets that racing riders held at their sides on large round white disks: the shooters galloped, shot, and hit. An occasional horseman sank from his mount. The comrades following him whooshed across his body—no hoof struck him. There were riders who galloped alongside another horse and, while galloping, sprang from one saddle to the other, then back to the first, then suddenly fell upon the accompanying horse, and finally, one hand propped on each saddle, legs dangling between the horses’ bodies, they jerked the animals to a halt at the indicated destination and held both mounts tight so that they stood there immobile like bronze steeds.