The Radetzky March (24 page)

“Nice day today,” the district captain observed.

“Here he comes, here he comes!” said Jacques. “On a white horse, dressed all in white—why is he riding so slowly? Look,
look, how slowly he’s riding! Good day! Good day! Won’t you come closer? Come on! Come on over! Nice day today, isn’t it?”

He withdrew his hand, focused his eyes on the district captain, and said, “How slowly he’s riding! It’s because he’s from over there. He’s been dead for a long time and he’s no longer used to riding around on the stones here. Yes, way back when! Do you remember what he looked like? I’d love to see the picture. Has he really changed? Bring it over, the picture; please, bring it over. Please, Herr Baron!”

The district captain instantly realized that Jacques was asking for the portrait of the Hero of Solferino. He obediently went out. He even took the steps two at a time, hurried into his study, climbed on a chair, and removed the picture of the Hero of Solferino from its hook. It was a bit dusty; he blew on it and rubbed it with the handkerchief that he had used to wipe the dying man’s forehead. The district captain was still grinning nonstop. He was cheerful. He had not been cheerful for a long time. With the large portrait under his arm, he dashed across the courtyard. He walked over to Jacques’s bed. Jacques stared at the portrait for a long time, stretched out his forefinger, poked around the face of the Hero of Solferino, and finally said, “Hold it in the sun!” The district captain obeyed. He held the portrait in the sunny strip at the end of the bed. Jacques sat up and said, “Yes, that’s exactly what he looked like!” and lay back again on the pillows.

The district captain placed the picture on the table, next to the Mother of God, and returned to the bed.

“Soon we’ll be going up!” said Jacques with a smile and pointed at the ceiling.

“You’ve got plenty of time,” the district captain replied.

“No, no!” said Jacques and let out a ringing laugh. “I’ve had time long enough. Now we’ll be going up! Check on how old I am. I’ve forgotten.”

“Where should I check?”

“Down there!” said Jacques, pointing at the bedstead. It contained a drawer. The district captain pulled it out. He saw a small, neatly tied package in brown wrapping paper, next to a round tin box with a colorful but faded picture on the lid, a shepherdess in a white wig, and he remembered that it was one
of those candy boxes that had lain under the Christmas trees of some of his childhood friends.

“That’s the book!” said Jacques. It was his army paybook.

The district captain put on his pince-nez and read,
“Franz Xaver Joseph Kromichl.
Is that your book?” asked Herr von Trotta.

“Of course!” said Jacques.

“Your name is Franz Xaver Joseph?”

“Must be!”

“Then why do you call yourself Jacques?”

“Those were his orders!”

“I see,” said Herr von Trotta and read the birth year. “You’ll be turning eighty-two in August.”

“What’s today?”

“May nineteenth.”

“How long is it till August?”

“Three months.”

“Fine, I won’t live that long,” said Jacques very softly.

He leaned back again.

“Open the box!” said Jacques, and the district captain opened the box. “Saint Anthony and Saint George are inside,” Jacques went on. “You can keep them. There’s also a piece of root, for fever. Give that to your son, Carl Joseph. My best regards to him. He can use the root, that area’s swampy! And now close the window. I’d like to sleep.”

It was noon already. The bed was now basking fully in the brightest sunshine. Big Spanish flies stuck motionless to the window, and the canary had stopped twittering and was pecking on some sugar. Twelve strokes boomed from the tower of the town hall, their golden echoes fading in the courtyard. Jacques was breathing silently. The district captain went into the dining room

“I’m not eating,” he told Fräulein Hirschwitz. He scanned the dining room. Here, in this place, Jacques had always stood with the platter; he had stepped up to the table and had held out the platter. Herr von Trotta could not eat today. He walked down into the courtyard, sat on a bench at the wall under the brown timberwork of the wooden balcony, and waited for the Sister of Mercy.

“He’s asleep now,” the baron said when she came. The soft wind fanned through from time to time. The shadow of the timberwork slowly grew broader and longer. The flies buzzed around the district captain’s whiskers. Now and then he slapped at the flies, and his cuff rattled. For the first time since he had entered his Kaiser’s service he remained idle in broad daylight on a weekday. He had never felt any need to take a furlough. This was his very first day off. He kept thinking about old Jacques but was cheerful all the same. Old Jacques was dying, but it was as if he were celebrating a grand event and as if the district captain were taking his first day off for that occasion.

All at once he heard the Sister of Mercy step out of the door. She explained that Jacques, apparently with a clear mind and without fever, had gotten out of bed and was getting dressed. And indeed the district captain promptly spotted the old man at the window. He had placed his brush, soap, and razor on the sill, as he did every morning on normal days, and he had hung the small mirror from the window handle and was about to shave. Jacques opened the window and in his healthy, familiar voice he called, “I’m fine, Herr Baron, I’m as fit as a fiddle. Do forgive me, please, and please don’t inconvenience yourself!”

“Well, then, everything’s fine! I’m delighted, absolutely delighted. Now you can start a new life as Franz Xaver Joseph!”

“I’d rather stick with Jacques!”

Herr von Trotta, thrilled by this miraculous event but also a bit perplexed, returned to his bench, told the Sister of Mercy to stay on just in case, and asked her whether she knew of similar rapid recoveries among people this old. The nun, her eyes lowered to her rosary and her fingers picking out the answer from among the beads, replied that recovery and illness, fast or slow, were in God’s hands, and His will had often swiftly turned the dying into the living. The district captain would have preferred a more scientific answer, and he resolved to ask the district physician the next day. Meanwhile he went to his office, freed of a great worry but also filled with an even greater and inexplicable anxiety. He was unable to work. Sergeant Slama had been waiting for a long time, and Herr von Trotta gave him instructions for the Sokol celebration, but without severity or
emphasis. Suddenly, all the dangers looming for the district of W and the monarchy seemed less threatening than in the morning. He dismissed the sergeant but immediately called him back and said, “Listen, Slama, have you ever heard anything of the sort? This morning old Jacques was on the verge of death, and now he’s completely chipper!”

No, Sergeant Slama had never heard anything of the sort. And when the district captain asked him whether he wanted to see the old man, Slama said of course he would. And the two men stepped into the courtyard.

Jacques was sitting on his stool, a military line of boot pairs in front of him, the brush in his hand, and he was spitting vigorously into the wooden box of shoe polish. He wanted to rise when the district captain stood before him, but he could not manage quickly enough and he already felt Herr von Trotta’s hands on his shoulders. Jacques cheerfully saluted the sergeant with his brush. The district captain sat down on the bench; the sergeant leaned his rifle against the wall and likewise sat down at an appropriate distance. Jacques remained on his stool, polishing the boots, albeit slower and more gently than usual. Meanwhile the Sister of Mercy sat praying in Jacques’s room.

“It just hit me,” said Jacques, “that I used the familiar form with the Herr Baron. I remembered all at once.”

“It doesn’t matter.” said Herr von Trotta. “It was the fever.”

“Yes, my corpse was talking. And you ought to lock me up for fraud, Sergeant. You see, my name is Franz Xaver Joseph! But I’d like my gravestone to say ‘Jacques.’ And my bankbook is under my army book—there’s something for my funeral and a mass, and my name’s Jacques there too!”

“All in good time,” said the district captain. “We can wait!”

The sergeant guffawed and wiped his forehead.

Jacques had polished all the boots until they shone. A slight shiver ran through him; he went indoors, came back wrapped in his winter fur, which he also wore in summer when it rained, and sat down on the stool. The canary followed him, fluttering over his silvery head, seeking a perch for a while, then settling on the bar from which a few rugs were hanging. The bird began to carol. Its song awoke hundreds of sparrow voices in the
crowns of the few trees, and for several minutes the air was filled with a merry, twittering, whistling chaos. Jacques raised his head and listened, not without pride, to his canary’s victorious voice, which outsang all the others. The district captain smiled. The sergeant laughed, holding his handkerchief to his face, and Jacques giggled. The nun even stopped praying and smiled through the window. The golden afternoon sunshine already lay on the wooden timberwork and was flashing high up in the green foliage. The evening gnats capered wearily in soft round swarms, and now and then a maybug buzzed heavily past the seated people, straight into the leaves and to its doom, probably into the open bills of the sparrows. The wind blew harder. Now the birds hushed. The segment of sky turned deep blue and the white cloudlets rosy.

“Now you’re going to bed!” said Herr von Trotta to Jacques.

“I have to take the picture upstairs,” the old man murmured; he went over to get the portrait of the Hero of Solferino and disappeared in the darkness of the stairs.

The sergeant peered after him and said, “Strange!”

“Yes, quite strange!” replied Herr von Trotta.

Jacques came back and walked over to the bench. Without a word he sat down—surprisingly between the district captain and the sergeant—opened his mouth, took a deep breath, and before the other two men could even turn to him, his old neck sank upon the back of the bench, his hands fell upon the seat, his fur coat opened, his legs stiffened, and the curving tips of his slippers loomed in the air. The wind gusted briefly through the courtyard. Gently the reddish cloudlets scudded along. The sun had vanished behind the wall. The district captain bedded his servant’s silvery head in his left hand while his right hand groped for the unconscious man’s heart. The sergeant stood there, alarmed, his black cap on the ground. The Sister of Mercy came over with broad, hurried steps. She took the old man’s hand, held it in her fingers for a while, placed it gently on the fur, and made the sign of the cross. She gazed silently at the sergeant. He understood and thrust his hands under Jacques’s arms. She took hold of the legs. They carried him into the small room, laid him out on the bed, folded his hands, twisted the rosary around
them, and put the effigy of the Mother of God at his head. They knelt at his bedside, and the district captain prayed. He had not prayed in a long time. From the buried depths of his childhood a prayer returned to him, a prayer for the salvation of dead relatives, and that prayer was what he whispered. He rose, glanced at his trousers, brushed the dust from his knees, and strode out, followed by the sergeant.

“That’s how I would like to die some day, my dear Slama,” he said instead of his usual “Goodbye!” and walked into the study.

On a large sheet of official stationery, he wrote instructions for the laying out and burial of his servant, itemizing deliberately, point by point, section and subsection. The next morning he drove to the cemetery to choose a grave, purchased a head-stone, and provided the inscription—
Here rests in God Franz Xaver Joseph Kromichl, known as Jacques, an old servant and a true friend
—and ordered a first-class funeral, with four black horses and eight liveried footmen.

Three days later he walked behind the coffin as the sole mourner, followed at a respectful distance by Sergeant Slama and a number of other people, who joined the cortège because they had known Jacques and especially because they saw Herr von Trotta on foot. Thus it was that a stately group accompanied old Franz Xaver Joseph Kromichl, known as Jacques, to his grave.

Now the district captain felt that his house was changed: empty and no longer homey. He no longer found his mail next to his breakfast tray, and he also hesitated to give his orderly new instructions. He no longer touched a single one of the small silver bells on his desk; if he sometimes absently reached for one, he merely caressed it. Now and then in the afternoon, he pricked up his ears, thinking he could hear old Jacques’s ghostly footfalls in the staircase. Sometimes he entered the small cottage where Jacques had lived, and he reached through the cage bars to hand the canary a morsel of sugar.

One day, just before the Sokol celebration, when his presence in his office was not without importance, he made a surprising decision.

We will report on it in the next chapter.

T
HE DISTRICT CAPTAIN
decided to visit his son in the remote border garrison. For a man like Herr von Trotta, this was no easy undertaking. He had unusual notions about the eastern border of the monarchy. Because of embarrassing lapses in duty, two of his schoolmates had been transferred to that distant crownland, at whose edges the Siberian wind could probably be heard howling. The civilized Austrian was menaced there by bears and wolves and even more dreadful monsters, such as lice and bedbugs. The Ruthenian peasants made sacrifices to pagan gods, and the Jews raged cruelly against other people’s property. Herr von Trotta took along his old revolver. He was not the least bit terrified of adventure; indeed, he experienced that intoxication he had felt in his long-buried boyhood—the excitement that had driven him and his friend Moser to go hunting in the mysterious wooded depths of his father’s estate and to visit the graveyard at midnight.

Herr von Trotta took a terse and cheery leave of Fräulein Hirschwitz, vaguely and boldly hoping he would never see her again. He drove to the station alone. The ticket clerk said, “Oh, a long trip at last. Bon voyage!”