The Radetzky March (30 page)

The only intimate friend who did not propose to the widow was Chojnicki. The world worth living in was doomed. The world that would follow it deserved no decent inhabitants. So it made no sense loving for keeps, marrying, perhaps having offspring. Chojnicki looked at the widow with his sad, pale-blue, somewhat bulging eyes and said, “Forgive me for not wanting to marry you.” With these words he ended his condolence visit.

So the widow married the insane Herr von Taussig. She needed money and he was more manageable than a child. Once he got over an attack, he would send for her. She came, allowed him one kiss, and took him home.

“Till we meet again, I hope,” said Herr von Taussig to the physician, who walked him to the gate of the closed section. “See you very soon!” said the wife. (She loved the periods when her husband was ill.) And they went home.

She had last visited Chojnicki ten years ago, when she had not yet married Taussig, had been no less beautiful than today and a whole ten years younger. Nor had she gone back alone that time either. A lieutenant, as sad and young as this one, had escorted her. His name was Ewald and he was a lancer. (In those days there had been lancers along the border.) It would have been the first real pain of her life to go back without an escort and a disappointment to be escorted by, say, a first lieutenant. She felt nowhere near old enough for senior ranks. Ten years from now—perhaps.

But old age was approaching with cruel, hushed steps and sometimes in crafty disguises. She counted the days slipping past her and, every morning, the fine wrinkles, delicate webs that old age had spun at night around her innocently sleeping eyes. Yet her heart was that of a sixteen-year-old girl. Blessed with constant youth, it dwelled in the middle of the aging body, a lovely secret in a ruinous castle. Every young man whom Frau von Taussig took in her arms was the guest she had so long been yearning for. Unfortunately he lingered in the vestibule. After all, she wasn’t living; she was only waiting. She saw one man after another leave with anxious, unslaked, embittered eyes. Gradually she got used to seeing men come and go: a race of childish giants, resembling clumsy mammoth insects, fleeting and yet weighty; an army of awkward fools who tried to flutter
with leaden wings; warriors who believed that they had conquered when they were despised, that they possessed when they were ridiculed, that they had enjoyed when they had barely tasted; a barbaric horde, for whom she nevertheless waited lifelong. Perhaps, perhaps some day a single one would arise from their dark, chaotic midst, an airy, shimmering prince with blessed hands. He did not come! She waited; he did not come! She grew old; he did not come! Frau von Taussig put up young men as dams against the approach of old age. Fearing their discerning gazes, she entered into every so-called adventure with closed eyes. And with her desires she bewitched the foolish men, using them to her own ends. Unfortunately they never noticed. And so they did not change in the slightest.

She assessed Lieutenant Trotta. He looks old for his age, she thought, he’s experienced sad things, but he hasn’t grown any wiser. He does not love passionately, but perhaps not casually either. He is already so unhappy that all you can really do is make him happy.

The next morning Trotta was given three days’ leave “to attend to family matters.” At 1
P.M.
, he said goodbye to his comrades in the officers’ mess. Envied and cheered, he escorted Frau von Taussig into a first-class compartment, for which, however, he had paid extra.

When night came, he felt scared of the darkness like a child and left the compartment in order to smoke—under the pretext, that is, of having to smoke. He stood in the corridor, filled with garbled images, and peered through the nocturnal window at the flying serpents instantly formed by the white-hot sparks from the locomotive and instantly fading, and he peered at the thick blackness of the forests and the peaceful stars in the vault of the sky. Gently he pushed back the door and tiptoed into the compartment.

“Perhaps we should have taken sleeping cars!” the woman said, surprising him—indeed, frightening him—from the darkness. “You’re a chain smoker. You can smoke in here, you know.”

So she still wasn’t asleep. His match illuminated her face, which lay, white, framed by black tangled hair, on the crimson upholstery. Yes, perhaps they should have taken sleeping cars. The
tiny head of the cigarette glowed reddish through the darkness. They lumbered over a bridge; the wheels clattered more noisily.

“The bridges!” she said. “I’m scared they’ll collapse.”

Yes, thought the lieutenant, let them collapse!

His only choice was between a sudden disaster and one that crept up very slowly. He sat opposite the woman, motionless, saw the lights of each whizzing station brighten the compartment for an instant, saw Frau Taussig’s pale face grow even paler. He was tongue-tied. He imagined he ought to kiss her rather than talk. He kept putting off the expected kiss more and more. After the next station, he told himself. All at once, the woman stretched out her hand, groped for the bolt on the compartment door, found it, and snapped it shut. And Trotta bent over her hand.

Frau Taussig made love with the lieutenant as intensely as she had made love with Lieutenant Ewald ten years earlier, on the same route and—who knows?—in the same compartment. But for now that lancer was snuffed out, like the earlier men, like the later men. Pleasure roared over memory, washing away all traces. Frau von Taussig’s first name was Valerie, shortened to the usual Vally. Her nickname, whispered to her in all tender moments, sounded brand-new each time. This young man was rebaptizing her; she was a child—and as fresh as her name. Nevertheless, out of habit, she wistfully noted that he was “much older” than she: a remark she often dared make to young men—in some degree, a foolhardy precaution. Besides, her remark always inspired a new series of caresses. She now pulled forth all the tender words that she spoke so glibly, using them with one man or another. Next—how well, alas, she knew this sequence—would come the man’s always identical plea not to talk about age or time. She knew how meaningless these pleas were—and she believed them. She waited. But Lieutenant Trotta kept silent, an obstinate young man. She was afraid his silence was a verdict, and so she cautiously began. “How much older do you think I am?”

He was at a loss. One did not respond to such a remark, nor did it really concern him. He felt the swift alternation of smooth coolness and equally smooth heat on her skin, the abrupt climatic changes that are among the enchanting manifestations of love. (Within a single hour they accumulate all the features of
all the seasons on a single female shoulder. They truly suspend the laws of time.)

“I’m old enough to be your mother!” the woman whispered. “Guess my age.”

“I don’t know!” said the unhappy man.

“Forty-one!” said Frau Vally. She had turned forty-two just one month ago. But some women are prohibited by nature itself from telling the truth—the nature that prevents them from aging. Frau von Taussig may have been too proud to cover up three whole years. But stealing a single wretched year from truth was no theft.

“You’re lying!” he eventually said, very gruffly, out of politeness. And she gratefully embraced him in a new, roaring surge. The white lights of stations dashed by the window, illuminating the compartment, brightening up her white face, and appearing to bare her shoulders once again. The lieutenant lay with his head at her breast like a child. She felt a blissful, beneficial, a motherly pain. A motherly love poured into her arms, filling her with new strength. She wanted to do something good for her lover as if for her own child: as if her womb had birthed him, the same womb that now received him.

“My child, my child!” she repeated. She no longer feared old age. Indeed, for the first time she blessed the years that separated her from the lieutenant. And when morning, a radiant early-summer morning, broke through the flying windows, she fearlessly showed the lieutenant her face, which was not yet equipped for the day. Of course, she was reckoning a little with the dawn. For the window she sat at happened to be facing east.

To Lieutenant Trotta the world looked different. As a result, he fancied that this was love—the materialization, that is, of his notions about love. In reality he was merely thankful, a sated child.

“We’ll stay together in Vienna, won’t we?”

Dear child, dear child! she kept thinking. She gazed at him, filled with maternal pride as if she could take credit for the virtues that he did not possess and that she ascribed to him like a mother.

She imagined an endless series of small parties. Luckily they happened to be arriving at Corpus Christi. She would obtain
two seats on the grandstand. Together they would enjoy the colorful procession that she loved, just like all Austrian women of all classes.

She got seats on the grandstand. The cheerful and solemn pomp gave her a warm, rejuvenating glow. Since her youth she had been familiar—and probably no less precisely than the Controller of the Royal Household—with all phases, portions, and rules of the Corpus Christi procession, the way the old spectators in hereditary boxes are familiar with each and every scene in their favorite operas. Their pleasure in looking is not reduced; on the contrary, it is nourished by this intimate familiarity.

Inside Carl Joseph the old childish and heroic dreams surfaced, the ones that had filled him and made him happy during vacations at home, on his father’s balcony, when he had heard the strains of “The Radetzky March.” The full majestic might of the old empire passed before his eyes. The lieutenant thought about his grandfather, the Hero of Solferino, and the unshakable patriotism of a father who was like a small but strong rock amid the towering mountains of Hapsburg power. He thought about his own holy mission to die for the Kaiser at any moment, on water or on land, or also in the air—in short, any place. The oath he had perfunctorily sworn a few times came alive. It rose up, word for word, each word a banner. The porcelain-blue eyes of the Supreme Commander in Chief—eyes grown cold in so many portraits on so many walls in the empire and now filled with a new fatherly solicitude and benevolence—gazed like a whole blue sky at the grandson of the Hero of Solferino. The light-blue breeches of the infantry were radiant. Like the serious embodiment of ballistic science, the coffee-brown artillerists marched past. The blood-red fezzes on the heads of the azure Bosnians burned in the sun like tiny bonfires lit by Islam in honor of His Apostolic Majesty. In black lacquered carriages sat the gold-decked Knights of the Golden Fleece and the black-clad red-cheeked municipal councilors. After them, sweeping like the majestic tempests that rein in their passion near the Kaiser, came the horsehair busbies of the bodyguard infantry. Finally, heralded by the blare of the beating to arms, came the Imperial and Royal anthem of the earthly but nevertheless Apostolic Army cherubs—“God
preserve him, God protect him”—over the standing crowd, the marching soldiers, the gently trotting chargers, and the soundlessly rolling vehicles. It floated over all heads, a sky of melody, a baldachin of black-and-yellow notes. And the lieutenant’s heart stood still yet pounded fiercely—a challenge to all medical science. Over the slow strains of the anthem, the cheers fluttered like small white flags amid huge banners painted with coats of arms. The white Lipizzaner steed capered along with the majestic coquettishness of the famous Lipizzaner horses trained at the Imperial and Royal Stud Farm. The steed was followed by the trotting hooves of a half squadron of dragoons—a delicate parade thunder. The black-and-gold helmets flashed in the sun. The loud fanfares resounded, the voices of cheerful heralds: Clear the way! Clear the way! The old Kaiser’s coming!

And the Kaiser came; eight radiant-white horses drew his carriage. And on the white horses rode the footmen in black gold-embroidered coats and white periwigs. They looked like gods and yet they were merely servants of demigods. On each side of the carriage stood two Hungarian bodyguards with a black-and-yellow panther skin over one shoulder. They recalled the sentries on the walls of Jerusalem, the holy city, and Kaiser Franz Joseph was its king. The Emperor wore the snow-white tunic well known from all the portraits in the monarchy, and an enormous crest of green parrot feathers on his hat. The feathers swayed gently in the wind. The Kaiser smiled in all directions. The smile hovered on his old face like a small sun that he himself had created. The bells tolled from St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the salutes of the Roman Church, presented to the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The old Kaiser stepped from the carriage, showing the elastic gait praised by all newspapers, and entered the church like any normal man; he walked into the church, the Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation, immersed in the tolling of bells.

No lieutenant in the Imperial and Royal Army could have watched this ceremony apathetically. And Carl Joseph was one of the most impressionable. He saw the golden radiance streaming from the procession and he did not hear the dark beating of the vultures’ wings. For they were already circling over the
two-headed eagle of the Hapsburgs—vultures, the eagle’s brotherly foes.

No, the world was not going under, as Chojnicki had said; you could see with your own eyes that it was very much alive. The inhabitants of this city surged across the broad Ring Street, cheerful subjects of His Apostolic Majesty, all of them members of his court retinue. The entire city was simply a gigantic outer court of his palace. Mighty in the entrance arches of the ancient palaces stood the liveried doorkeepers clutching their staffs—the gods among the footmen. Black coaches on high noble wheels with rubber tires and thin spokes drew up at the gates. The horses caressed the asphalt with solicitous hooves. Government officials with black cocked hats, gold-embroidered collars, and slender swords came from the procession, dignified and sweaty. White-clad schoolgirls, blossoms in their hair and candles in their hands, returned home, wedged between their solemn parents as if their somewhat bewildered and perhaps slightly beaten souls had become flesh. The delicate canopies of parasols vaulted over the bright hats of the bright women, who were leading their beaux along like dogs on leashes. Blue, brown, and black uniforms decorated with gold and silver moved like bizarre plants and saplings that had escaped from a southern garden and were striving back to their distant homeland. The black fire of the top hats glowed over red, zealous faces. Particolored sashes, the rainbows of the burghers, slanted across wide chests, waistcoats, and bellies. Now, along Ring Street, the bodyguardists came floating in two broad files, sporting white angelic pelerines with red lapels and white panaches and gripping shimmery halberds, and trolleys, fiacres, and even automobiles pulled over as though for familiar ghosts from history. At the corners and crossings, the obese flower women in tenfold petticoats—urban sisters of the fairies—held dark-green cans to water their radiant bouquets and tied lilies of the valley together; their old tongues wagged freely and their smiling glances blessed the loving couples who strolled past. The gold helmets of the firemen, who were marching toward the uproar, sparkled, cheerfully evoking danger and disaster. Everything was redolent of lilac and hawthorn. The hubbub of the city was
not loud enough to drown out the whistling blackbirds in the gardens and the trilling larks in the air. The world lavished all these things on Lieutenant Trotta. He sat next to his mistress in the carriage, he loved her, and he was riding through what seemed like the first good day of his life.