The Radetzky March (27 page)

Herr von Trotta cautiously settled next to his son on the edge of the sofa and cast about for an appropriate word. He wasn’t used to speaking to drunks. “You should,” he said after a long consideration, “be careful with liquor. Me, for instance, I only do social drinking.”

The lieutenant made a tremendous effort to change from his disrespectful crouching to a sitting position. His attempt was useless. He gazed at the old man: now, thank goodness, there was only one, making do with the narrow edge of the sofa,
propping himself with his hands on his knees. The lieutenant asked, “What did you say, Papá?”

“You should be careful with liquor!” the district captain repeated.

“Why?” asked the lieutenant.

“What are you asking?” said Herr von Trotta, a bit comforted because his son at least seemed clearheaded enough to grasp his father’s words. “Liquor will destroy you. Do you remember Moser?”

“Moser, Moser,” said Carl Joseph. “Of course! But he’s right. I remember him. He painted Grandfather’s portrait.”

“You forgot?” murmured Herr von Trotta.

“I haven’t forgotten him,” replied the lieutenant. “I’ve never stopped thinking about the portrait. I’m not strong enough for that portrait. The dead! I can’t forget the dead! Father, I can’t forget anything! Father!”

Herr von Trotta sat helpless next to his son. He didn’t quite understand what Carl Joseph was saying, but he sensed that it was not drunkeness alone speaking. He felt that cries for help were coming out of the boy, and he could not help! He had come to the borderland to find a little help himself. For he was all alone in this world. And this world too was going under. Jacques lay under the ground, Herr von Trotta was alone, he wanted to see his son again, and his son was likewise alone and perhaps, being younger, was closer to the collapse of the world. How simple the world had always looked! the district captain mused. There was a specific attitude for every situation. When your son came home for vacation, you tested him. When he became a lieutenant, you congratulated him. When he wrote his obedient letters, which said so little, you replied with a few measured lines. But how should you behave if your son was drunk, if he cried “Father!” if the cry “Father!” came out of him?

Herr von Trotta saw Chojnicki entering and stood up more intensely than was his wont. “There’s a telegram for you,” said Chojnicki. “The bellboy brought it over.” It was an official telegram. It summoned Herr von Trotta home. “Unfortunately they’re ordering you home already,” said Chojnicki. “It must have something to do with the Sokols.”

“Yes, that’s probably it,” said Herr von Trotta. “There must be disturbances.” He now knew that he was too weak to do anything about disturbances. He was very tired. Only a few years were left until his retirement! But at that moment he had a sudden whim to retire soon. He could take care of Carl Joseph, a fitting task for an old father.

Chojnicki said, “It’s not easy to do something about disturbances if your hands are tied as in this damn monarchy. You just arrest a couple of ringleaders, and the Freemasons, the deputies, the national leaders, the newspapers pounce on you, and they’re all released. Break up the Sokol Association, and you’ll be rebuked by the governor’s office. Autonomy! Yeah, just wait! Here in my district every disturbance ends with bullets. So long as I live here, I’m the government candidate and I get elected. Luckily, this area is sufficiently remote from all the modern ideas that they spawn in their filthy editors’ offices!”

He went over to Carl Joseph and said with the emphasis and knowledge of a man used to dealing with drunks, “Your Papá has to go home!”

Carl Joseph instantly understood. He could even get to his feet. His glassy eyes searched for his father. “I’m sorry, Father!”

“I’m a little worried about him,” the district captain told Chojnicki.

“Rightfully so!” the count replied. “He has to get away from this area. When he’s on furlough, I’ll try to show him a little of the world. Then he won’t have any desire to come back. Maybe he’ll fall in love.”

“I don’t fall in love,” said Carl Joseph very slowly.

They drove back to the hotel.

During the entire ride only one word was spoken, one single word: “Father!” said Carl Joseph, and that was all.

The next day the district captain woke up very late; he could already hear the bugles of the returning battalion. The train was leaving in two hours. Carl Joseph arrived. Chojnicki’s whip signal was already snapping below. The district captain ate at the riflemen’s table in the station restaurant.

Since his departure from W district, a tremendous amount of time had worn by. He barely remembered boarding the train
just two days ago. The only civilian aside from Count Chojnicki, he sat, dark and gaunt, at the long horseshoe-shaped table of the particolored officers, under the wall portrait of Franz Joseph I, the familiar omnipresent portrait of the Supreme Commander in Chief in the sparkling-white field marshal’s tunic with the blood-red sash. Right under and almost parallel to the Kaiser’s white sideburns, twenty inches below, loomed the black, slightly silvered sides of the Trotta whiskers. The youngest officers, sitting at the ends of the horseshoe, could see the resemblance between His Apostolic Majesty and his servant. From his seat Lieutenant Trotta could likewise compare the Kaiser’s face with his father’s. And for a few seconds it seemed to the lieutenant as if his aged father’s portrait were hanging up on the wall and the Kaiser, in the flesh, slightly rejuvenated, and in mufti, were sitting below at the table. And far and foreign were both his Kaiser and his father.

Meanwhile the district captain sent a hopeless, scrutinizing look around the table, at the downy, almost beardless faces of the young officers and the moustachioed faces of the older ones. Next to him sat Major Zoglauer. Ah, Herr von Trotta und Sipolje would have liked to exchange a few anxious words with him about Carl Joseph! There was no time left. Outside the window the train was already being marshaled.

The district captain was quite despondent. They all drank his health, a bon voyage, and success in his official tasks. He smiled in all directions, rose, clinked glasses, and his mind was heavy with worries and his heart besieged by dark inklings. After all, a tremendous amount of time had gone by since his departure from his district. Yes indeed, the district captain had been cheerful and exuberant when he had ridden into an adventuresome region and to his dear son. Now he was returning home, alone, from a lonesome son and from this borderland, where the collapse of the world could already be seen as clearly as one sees a thunderstorm on the edge of a city, whose streets lie still unaware and blissful under a blue sky. The doorman’s cheery bell was already ringing. The locomotive was already whistling. The wet steam of the train was already banging against the restaurant windows in fine gray beads. The meal was already over, and they all stood up. The
whole battalion escorted Herr von Trotta to the platform. Herr von Trotta wanted to say something special, but nothing suitable occurred to him. He glanced tenderly at his son. But then he instantly feared that someone would notice that glance, and he lowered his eyes. He shook Major Zoglauer’s hand. He thanked Chojnicki. He tipped his dignified gray silk hat, which he always wore when traveling. He held the hat in his left hand and threw his right arm around Carl Joseph’s back. He kissed his son on both cheeks. And always he wanted to say, Don’t cause me any grief, I love you, my son! All he said was, “Stay well!” For the Trottas were shy people.

He was already boarding, the district captain. He was already at the window. His hand in the dark-gray kid glove lay on the open window. His bald skull shone. Once again his worried eyes looked for Carl Joseph’s face.

“The next time you visit, Herr District Captain,” said Captain Wagner, who was always in a good mood, “you’ll find a little Monte Carlo here!”

“What do you mean?” asked the district captain.

“They’re going to open a gambling casino!” replied Wagner. And before Herr von Trotta und Sipolje could call over his son to urgently warn him about the announced Monte Carlo, the locomotive whistled, the buffers smashed and boomed into one another, and the train glided away. The district captain waved with his gray glove, and all the officers saluted. Carl Joseph did not stir.

He walked back alongside Captain Wagner. “It’s going to be fabulous,” said the captain. “A real casino! Oh, God, how long has it been since I saw a roulette wheel? You know, I love the way it rolls, and that noise! I’m so delighted!”

Captain Wagner was not the only one looking forward to the opening of the casino. They were all waiting. So far as we know, the border garrison had spent years waiting for the casino that Kapturak was supposed to open.

One week after the district captain’s departure, Kapturak arrived. And he probably would have caused a greater stir if, by a strange coincidence, the woman on whom they all focused their attention had not arrived at the same time.

I
N THOSE DAYS
there were a lot of men like Kapturak on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They began to circle around the old empire like those black cowardly birds that ogle a dying man from infinitely far away. Dark and impatient, beating their wings, they wait for his end. Their slanting beaks jab into their prey. No one knows where they come from or where they fly off to. They are the feathered brethren of enigmatic Death; they are his harbingers, his escorts, and his successors.

Kapturak is a short man with a nondescript face. Rumors flit around him, fly ahead of him on his twisty paths, and follow the barely perceptible footprints he leaves behind. He lives at the border inn. He associates with the agents of the South American shipping companies whose steamers carry thousands of Russian deserters to a new and cruel homeland year after year. He gambles a lot and drinks little. Nor does he lack a certain careworn affability. He says that for years he used to do his smuggling of Russian deserters on the other side of the border and that he left a home, a wife, and children there for fear of being packed off to Siberia after several officials and officers had been caught and sentenced. And when asked what he plans to do here, Kapturak tersely replies with a smile, “Business.”

The hotel where the officers resided was owned by a certain Herr Brodnitzer, of a Silesian background; no one knew how he had ended up in the borderland. It was he who opened the casino. He hung a large notice in the window of the café. It announced that he had all sorts of games of chance, that a band would be “concertizing” every evening until morning, and that he had hired “renowned chanteuses.” The renewal of the premises began with concerts by the band—eight musicians
hastily scraped together. Later on, the so-called Mariahilf Nightingale arrived, a blond girl from Bogumin. She sang waltzes by Lehár, plus the naughty ditty “When I wander through the gray dawn of a night of love,” as well as the encore: “Underneath my frock I wear pink and pleated undies.” Thus did Brodnitzer heighten the expectations of his clientele.

It turned out that along with the countless short and long card tables Brodnitzer had also set up a small roulette table in a shadowy curtained alcove. Captain Wagner told everyone about it, stoking enthusiasm. To these men, who had been serving on the border for many years (and many had never seen a roulette wheel), the tiny ball was one of those magical objects of the great world, something that helped a man to suddenly win beautiful women, expensive horses, splendid castles. Who could not be helped by the ball? They had all spent a wretched boyhood in parochial school, a harsh adolescence in military school, and cruel years in borderland service. They were waiting for the war. But instead, the army had partially mobilized against Serbia, then returned ingloriously to the usual expectation of routine promotions. Maneuvers, service, officers’ club, officers’ club, service, maneuvers! The first time they heard the clickety-click of the little ball they knew that fortune itself was turning among them, smiling on this man today and that man tomorrow. Sitting there were strange, pale, rich, mute gentlemen such as they had never seen before. One day Captain Wagner won five hundred crowns. The next day his debts were settled. This was the first month in a long time that he received his pay intact, a whole three thirds. Then again, Lieutenant Schnable and Lieutenant Gründler had each lost a hundred crowns. Tomorrow they could win a thousand!

When the white ball began to scurry, looking for all the world like a milky circle drawn along the periphery of black and red squares, when the black and red squares similarly blended into a single blurring round of indefinable colors, then the hearts of the officers trembled and a strange roar swept through their heads, as if a separate ball were rotating in each brain, and they saw only black and red, black and red. Their knees buckled even though they were seated. Their eyes desperately chased the ball they
could not grab. Obeying its own laws, it finally began to reel, drunk from its dash, and, exhausted, collapsed in a numbered niche. They all moaned. Even the losers felt relieved. The next morning each man told another, and a great delirium overwhelmed them all. More and more officers flocked to the casino. Foreign civilians likewise came from inscrutable areas. It was they who heated up the game, filled the coffers, drew huge bills from wallets, gold ducats, watches, and chains from vest pockets, and rings from fingers. The hotel was booked solid. The sleepy droshkies, which had always waited at their stand, like mock-up vehicles in a waxworks, with the yawning drivers on the boxes and the scrawny jades in front—they too awoke, and lo and behold: the wheels were able to roll, the scrawny jades galloped with clattering hooves from the train depot to the hotel, from the hotel to the border, and back again to the little town. The morose shopkeepers smiled. The murky stores seemed to grow brighter, the displayed wares gaudier. Night after night, the Mariahilf Nightingale sang. And as if her warbling had wakened other sisters, new, made-up girls, never seen before, came to the café. The tables were pushed apart, and people danced to Lehár’s waltzes. The whole world had changed….