The Radetzky March (3 page)

A stranger seeing them at this moment could have easily mistaken them for two brothers’… And one thought he had changed into a district captain. And the other thought he had changed into the Kaiser.

The unity of Roth’s masterwork is achieved in that highest faculty of the imagination Walter Benjamin
⁶
speaks of as “an extensiveness… of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes.”

Carl Joseph, firing on striking workers, hears them sing a song he has never heard before, the “Internationale.” At the same time, he has a yearning to escape to the peasant origins of the Trotta family. Unable to retreat to the “innocent” past, superfluous between the power of the doomed empire and the power of the revolution to come, he is given by Roth a solution that is both intensely ironic and at the same time a strangely moving assertion of the persistence of a kind of naked humanity, flagellated by all sides. Leading his men in 1914, he walks into enemy fire to find something for them to drink. “Lieutenant Trotta died holding not a weapon but two pails.”

Carl Joseph’s cousin, of
The Emperor’s Tomb
, has never met him although Roth knows how to give the reader a
frisson
by casually dropping the fact that they were both in the battle at which Carl Joseph was killed. But this Trotta links with the peasant branch of the family, through his taking up, first as a form of radical chic, another cousin, Joseph Branco, an itinerant chestnut roaster from Roth’s familiar frontier town. Emotionally frozen between a mother who, like the DC, cannot express her love, and a young wife who turns lesbian after he leaves her alone on their wedding night while he sits with a dying servant (the vigil of the DC with Jacques composed in a
new key), Trotta forms his warmest relationship with Branco and Branco’s friend, the Jewish cab driver. They go to war together, live together as escaped prisoners of war in Siberia, and in this phase of Roth’s deepest reflection on the elements of his meganovel, exemplify brilliantly his perception that consistency in human relations is not a virtue but an invention of lesser novelists. The ideal camaraderie of the three men cracks along unpredictable lines, just as the complexity of Trotta’s love for and indifference to his wife, and her constant breaking out of what has seemed to be emotional resolutions to their life, are consonant with the jarring shifts of war and postwar that contain them.

As with all Roth’s work, this phase is as wonderfully populous as any nineteenth-century novel, psychologically masterly, particularly in the person of Trotta’s mother and the tangents of distress and illogical fulfillment in the relationship between him and her. But
The Emperor’s Tomb
was one of Roth’s last works, published only the year before he died, the year of the next war for which all that was unresolved in the previous one was preparing in his world, his time. Although he wrote at least two more novels after this one, he concludes this phase, and—for me—the summation of his work, with a scene in which Trotta is in a café. On that night “my friends’ excitement… seemed to me superfluous”—as it does to the reader, since it is not explained until, with Roth’s power to shatter a scene with a blow of history:

the moment when the door of the café flew open and an oddly dressed young man appeared on the threshold. He was in fact wearing black leather gaiters… and a kind of military cap which reminded me at one and the same time of a bedpan and a caricature of our old Austrian caps.

The
Anschluss
has arrived. The café empties of everyone, including the Jewish proprietor. In an inspired fusion of form with content, there follows a dazedly disoriented piece of writing that expresses the splintering of all values, including emotional values, so that the trivial and accidental, the twitching
involuntary, takes over. Trotta sits on in the deserted café, approached only by the watchdog. “Franz, the bill!” he calls to the vanished waiter. “Franz, the bill!” he says to the dog. The dog follows him in the dawn breaking over “uncanny crosses” that have been scrawled on walls. He finds himself at the
Kapuzinergruft
, the Emperor’s tomb, “where my emperors lay buried in iron sarcophagi.”

“I want to visit the sarcophagus of my Emperor, Franz Joseph… Long live the Emperor!” The Capuchin brother in charge hushes him and turns him away. “So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?”

I know enough of the facts of Joseph Roth’s life to be aware that, for his own death, he collapsed in a café, a station of exile’s calvary.

1
. In a letter to his translator, Blanche Gidon, quoted by Beatrice Musgrave in her introduction to
Weights And Measures
(Everyman’s Library, 1983), p. 9. Roth lived in Paris for some years and two of his novels,
Le Triomphe de la beauté
and
Le Buste de L’Empereur
, were published first in French.
Le Triomphe de la beauté
probably was written in French; it appears not to have been published in German.

2
. Robert Musil,
The Man without Qualities
, Vol. I (Seeker and Warburg, 1961), p. 64, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Musil was born in 1880, and though long neglected as a writer outside German-speaking culture, was not forgotten as long as Roth. Musil became a figure in world literature in the Fifties; Roth’s work had to wait another twenty years before it was reissued in Germany, let alone in translation.

3
.
The Silent Prophet
was edited from unpublished work, with the exception of fragments published in
24 Neue Deutsche Erzähler
and
Die Neue Rundschau
in 1929, and published after Roth’s death, in 1966. The English translation by David Le Vay was published in the United States by The Overlook Press in 1980. The work appears to have been written, with interruptions, over several years. The central character, Kargan, is supposedly, modeled on Trotsky.

4
. Czeslaw Milosz, “To Raja Rao,”
Selected Poems
(Ecco Press, 1980), p. 29.

5
. The dates I give are generally the dates of first publication, in the original German.

6
. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,”
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
, edited and with an introduction by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Schocken, 1986), p. 83.

T
HE
T
ROTTAS WERE
a young dynasty. Their progenitor had been knighted after the Battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene. Sipolje—the German name for his native village—became his title of nobility. Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.

At the Battle of Solferino, he, as an infantry lieutenant, commanded a platoon. The fighting had been raging for half an hour. Three paces ahead of him, he could see the white backs of his soldiers. The front line of his platoon was kneeling, the second line standing. All the men were cheery and confident of victory. They had lavishly devoured food and liquor at the expense of and in honor of the Kaiser, who had been in the field since yesterday. Here and there, a soldier fell from the line. Trotta swiftly leaped into every gap, shooting from the orphaned rifles of the dead or wounded. By turns he serried the thinned rank or widened it, his eyes sharpened a hundredfold, peering in many directions, his ears straining in many directions. Right through the rattling of guns, his quick ears caught his captain’s few, loud orders. His sharp eyes broke through the blue-gray fog curtaining the enemy’s lines. He never shot without aiming, and his every last bullet struck home. The men sensed his hand and his gaze, heard his shouts, and felt confident.

The enemy paused. The command scurried along the interminable front rank: “Stop shooting!” Here and there a ramrod still clattered, here and there a shot rang out, belated and lonesome. The blue-gray fog between the fronts lifted slightly. All at once, they were in the noonday warmth of the cloudy, silvery, thundery sun. Now, between the lieutenant and the backs of the soldiers, the Kaiser appeared with two staff officers.
He held a field glass supplied by one of his escorts and was about to place it on his eyes. Trotta knew what that meant: even assuming that the enemy was retreating, the rear guard must still be facing the Austrians, and anyone raising binoculars was marking himself as a worthy target. And this was the young Kaiser! Trotta’s heart was in his throat. Terror at the inconceivable, immeasurable catastrophe that would destroy Trotta, the regiment, the army, the state, the entire world drove burning chills through his body. His knees quaked. And the eternal grudge of the subaltern frontline officer against the high-ranking staff officers, who haven’t the foggiest sense of bitter reality, dictated the action that indelibly stamped the lieutenant’s name on the history of his regiment. Both his hands reached toward the monarch’s shoulders in order to push him down. The lieutenant probably grabbed too hard; the Kaiser promptly fell. His escorts hurled themselves upon the falling man. That same instant, a shot bored through the lieutenant’s left shoulder, the very shot meant for the Kaiser’s heart. As the emperor rose, the lieutenant sank. Along the entire front, a tangled and irregular rattling awoke from the terrified guns, which had been startled from their slumber. The Kaiser, impatiently urged by his escorts to leave this perilous zone, nevertheless leaned over the prostrate lieutenant and, mindful of his imperial duty, asked the unconscious man, who could hear nothing, what his name was. A regimental surgeon, an ambulance orderly, and two stretcher bearers came galloping over, backs bent, heads stooped. The staff officers first yanked the Kaiser down and then threw themselves on the ground. “Here—the lieutenant!” the Kaiser shouted up at the breathless medic.

Meanwhile the firing had petered out. And while the acting cadet officer stepped in front of the platoon and announced in a clear voice, “I am taking command,” Franz Joseph and his escorts stood up, the orderlies gingerly strapped the lieutenant to the stretcher, and they all withdrew toward the regimental command post, where a snow-white tent spread over the nearest clearing station.

Trotta’s left clavicle was shattered. The bullet, lodged right under the left shoulder blade, was removed in the presence of the
Supreme Commander in Chief, amid the inhuman bellowing of the wounded man, who was revived by his pain.

Trotta recovered within four weeks. By the time he returned to his south Hungarian garrison, he possessed the rank of captain, the highest of all decorations—the Order of Maria Theresa—and a knighthood. Now he was called Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje.

Every night before retiring and every morning upon awakening, as if his own life had been traded for a new and alien life manufactured in a workshop, he would repeat his new rank and his new status to himself and walk up to the mirror to confirm that his face was the same. Despite the awkward heartiness of army brethren trying to bridge the gulf left by a sudden and incomprehensible destiny, and in spite of his own vain efforts to encounter everyone as unabashedly as ever, the ennobled Captain Trotta seemed to be losing his equilibrium; he felt he had been sentenced to wear another man’s boots for life and walk across a slippery ground, pursued by secret talking and awaited by shy glances. His grandfather had been a little peasant, his father an assistant paymaster, later a constable sergeant on the monarchy’s southern border. After losing an eye in a fight with Bosnian smugglers, he had been living as a war invalid and groundskeeper at the Castle of Laxenburg, feeding the swans, trimming the hedges, guarding the springtime forsythias and then the elderberry bushes against unauthorized, thievish hands, and, in the mild nights, shooing homeless lovers from the benevolent darkness of benches.

To the son of a noncommissioned officer, the rank of an ordinary infantry lieutenant had seemed natural and suitable. But to the decorated, aristocratic captain, who went about in the alien and almost unearthly radiance of imperial favor as in a golden cloud, his own father had suddenly moved far away, and the measured love that the offspring showed the old man seemed to require an altered conduct and a new way for father and son to deal with each other. The captain had not seen his father in five years; but every other week, while doing his rounds in the eternally unalterable rotation, he had written the old man a brief letter in the meager and fickle glow of the guardroom
candle, after first inspecting the sentries, recording the time of each relief, and, in the column labeled
UNUSUAL INCIDENTS
, penning a clear and assertive
None
that virtually denied even the remotest possibility of unusual incidents. These letters to his father, on yellowish and pulpy octavo, resembled one another like furlough orders and regulation forms. After the salutation
Dear Father
at the left, four fingers from the top and two from the side, they began with the terse news of the writer’s good health, continued with his hope for the recipient’s good health, and closed with an indentation for the perpetual formula drawn at the bottom right at a diagonal interval from the salutation:
Very humbly yours, your loyal and grateful son, Lieutenant Joseph Trotta
.