The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Rudolf was calm, or at least so it appeared. He acknowledged that his use of force was inappropriate and a breach of good manners. He also regretted that he had disturbed the performance at the theater. But he was not the least apologetic for handling the prince so roughly. Why should he be? A man has the right to defend that which belongs to him. He loved Arabella and the old goat was trying to steal her away. There was no reason at all for him to feel guilty or to have a bad conscience.

  “The spectacle of jealous fisticuffs,” responded the emperor, “you could certainly have spared yourself. And the rest of us, as well. I wish to advise you, young prince, that the women of Vienna are hypocritical and flirtatious. They are wicked fairies who torture men. Neither more nor less. It is entirely different in Budapest. In my youth there I once met a gloriously beautiful Hungarian countess. She could make any man’s blood boil. But she was timid and reticent, just as was her Christian duty. Nothing at all like your wife. Everyone knows her background. And, by my word, at the theater I saw with my own eyes the way she was dressed. Her décolletage was an open challenge to good moral character. You should ask your mother to teach her proper decorum.”

  Rudolf had a sudden pressing need to urinate. It made him nervous. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other like a great clumsy duck and his hands began to tremble as if he had been drinking. He was seized by a growing panic, more and more difficult to conceal.

  He interrupted the emperor. “Your Majesty, forgive me for saying so, but it seems as if the emperor was never in love. The emperor appears not to understand what Arabella means to me. And I beg Your Majesty please to abstain from getting my mother involved in my marriage.”

  The emperor frowned and shot Rudolf an icy look. He was not used to such lack of respect. None of his subjects had ever allowed himself to use such a tone. Ferdinand was not about to allow his late friend’s scandalous son to speak to him in such an impertinent manner. Even if the young man was his own relative.

  THE EMPEROR ORDERED him to quit the castle at once. Thirty seconds later, Rudolf stepped behind a door in the adjacent imperial salon and urinated without the slightest hesitation and at the same time let loose an enormous fart. The first impulse of the astonished retainer charged with escorting the young man out of the Hofburg was to attack the shameless prince; he restrained himself only with great difficulty.

  KAISER FERDINAND was a short, melancholy man often subject to fits of epilepsy and not fit to rule Austria. Everyone knew it. He always avoided the issues of strategy that determined the fate of his empire and found political matters simply too complicated. He said exactly that, with the disarming smile of a person who doesn’t want to grow up. The country was ruled by a quadrumvirate dubbed the “four-leafed clover,” consisting of Duke Ludwig, Duke Hans Karl, Prince Metternich, and Count Kolowrat. The emperor spent his time going around in pomp and circumstance, arranging for one brilliant ceremony after another, and exchanging gossip with his adjutants.

  The powerful men of the ruling council considered this incident an excellent opportunity—since if there is no fear of reprisal, unruly events will begin to propagate themselves even in the best society—to demonstrate decisively that the emperor would not tolerate any actions aimed at undermining the hierarchy of Austrian society. They decided that Ferdinand would have to be perceived as the upholder of the moral values of ancient Austria.

  “There must be order,” insisted Duke Ludwig. “No one can piss in the imperial salon with impunity.” He wrote out a decree and obliged the emperor to sign it. Prince zu Biederstern was in disgrace and forever banished from the court. Further, Rudolf was forbidden to visit Vienna for a period of ten years.

  POLITICAL COMMENTATORS in the liberal press of the capital theorized in guarded terms about the hidden meaning and long-term consequences of that decree.

  The salons of Vienna were roiled by veritable orgies of gossip. Prince zu Biederstern’s fate was on everyone’s lips. No one was surprised by the harsh punishment handed down to him. Indignation was still great over his inexplicable behavior at the theater and his shameless attack upon the respected Prince Schwarzenberg. Honorable men proclaimed to one and all that never again would they shake hands with Rudolf; they asserted that even the rotters and curs one encountered while subduing the Balkans were better men than the young prince. Many were pleased that the madman had been exiled from the salons and sent away alone and dishonored in his misery. Some members of society commented that the whole affair would be the death of his poor mother.

  THE BANISHMENT of Rudolf from courtly society was hard for his family to bear. It was hardest of all for his mother, a Habsburg on her mother’s side and the niece of the emperor. The shame was great, the incident was huge, and a centuries-old family reputation had been dragged into the dirt.

  Rudolf locked himself away in his office in the castle. He sat down at the desk to write a lengthy letter to Arabella, to tell her that even though he was only one of a thousand men for her and perhaps not even the most interesting, she was his one and only, the one who stood at the center of his life. He wished to tell her that through a sort of magical attraction she had brought out in him all the elements of tenderness and warmth hidden in the depths of his heart, qualities that no one had ever managed to evoke. He had trouble finding the words to express all of this. He stared dully at the empty page for a long time.

  After a while he began to experience a vague dread that Arabella might actually come back to him. A voice within him whispered that his love was stimulated less by Arabella herself than by the rupture between them. He suddenly remembered that the more time he had spent with her, the less attractive she had seemed to him. In her absence, however, his fantasy worked full time, stimulated by pain, creating in his heart a lunatic love for her.

  A FEW DAYS before Christmas, Rudolf’s mother abruptly entered his office without knocking. He was sitting at a desk littered with empty wine bottles. She started to say something but burst into tears instead. Several minutes passed before she was able to control herself. Finally, reluctantly, she entreated her son to ask His Majesty for a pardon.

  Rudolf refused to be moved. He told his mother without the least sign of contrition that he felt he been treated unfairly. In his view, the Kaiser was interfering with his own private affairs. That was why, with no heed for the consequences, he had made the bitter decision that he would cease to be Ferdinand’s faithful servant. He stressed that decision later that evening in a fairly drunken rant delivered in the garden of the castle to a group of frightened, freezing workers. With wild gestures Rudolf wound up his address with words that were almost prophetic: “The warm winds of springtime will sweep that coldhearted emperor from his throne.” Following that, he called for bread and meat to be distributed to the people. There was no lack of wine, either.

  ———

  HIS SPITEFUL DECLARATION quickly became common knowledge in Vienna. In the view of aristocratic society it confirmed that by breaking with convention and marrying a whore, Rudolf had sunk as low as he could go; he had completely lost his mind. The fact that he also had the arrogance to denounce the emperor was unforgivable. His direct public criticism of the Kaiser was taken as proof that he was a traitor and a politically dangerous outcast.

  ALONE, BANISHED, with no prospects of a return to the world of the salons, Rudolf lived beyond all limits of rational behavior, remote from life’s realities. He slept the days away and spent his nights frequenting all the dubious bordellos on the Hungarian side of the border. Every night he demanded new prostitutes to soothe his pains. He was constantly in search of one with Arabella’s swarthy aspect, her perfect, voluptuous body, her willfulness and determination. But he never found one with the same womanly charms, sensual lips, and enigmatic expression. Perhaps because he paid for women who in fact meant nothing to him. Nevertheless, he was given to madly throwing away diamonds and rubies, gems that would have been the treasures of an exhibition in any first-class museum in the world,
giving them to prostitutes who wouldn’t have merited a second look from any man from the Viennese nobility.

  With all the wine and cognac poisoning his blood, Rudolf was unshaved, unkempt, and smelly. He adored baked goods rich in sugar and cream almost as much as he liked alcohol. This diet resulted in a rapid gain of more than sixty pounds that made him almost unrecognizable in his blubber.

  When he wasn’t debauching himself in the bordellos, he was frequenting smugglers and cardsharps wanted by the Hungarian police. He did not realize how unscrupulous they were until he had lost the lion’s share of his inheritance playing cards with them.

  HIS MOTHER AND SISTERS could not hide their disgust with Rudolf’s chronic drunkenness and atrocious behavior. When they pleaded with him to stop drinking, he told them to go to hell and screamed that he hated their affectations and constant prattle. Then he drastically reduced the allowances of all three.

  The bishop of Burgenland sought with all his ecclesiastical techniques of persuasion to bring him to his senses. Rudolf simply burst into merry laughter and told him that the final souvenir he had carried off from Arabella was a case of syphilis.

  HE COMPLETELY NEGLECTED his duties as the master of the castle. The magnificent estate rapidly fell into a state of decay, but no one dared to criticize him. The master had absolute power and made all the decisions; his wish was everyone’s command. They all understood that this was the natural order of things. Although he was much diminished physically, seriously alcoholic, and short of cash, the prince wielded absolute power over them and his inheritance. Everyone was obliged to cater to his every whim, attend to him in abject servility, and comply with the social order that those living on his estate had inherited throughout generations of serfdom.

  CIVIL UNREST intensified in March 1848. There was an upwelling of discontent and change was in the air. A new epoch was dawning, the new era of class struggle. The citizens of Vienna rose up and demonstrated in the streets. From one moment to the next, they changed from loyal subjects to revolutionaries. Paving stones flew. Windows shattered. Public spaces were laid waste. Blood flowed in the streets. The crowds surged forward, massing and shouting their demands. In the turmoil, the people were simply trying to better their lot in life. The prevailing world order came under furious attack. The government tottered.

  THE SCENES on the streets of Vienna were reprised across Europe. The unexpected conflagration set city after city on fire. Europe was aflame. Outcry against the prevailing social order resounded in Paris, Munich, Milan, and Budapest. The military held back the thrusting crowds.

  BIEDERHOF REMAINED strangely calm even though it was situated only twenty-five miles from Vienna. Echoes of the political unrest reached the Biederstern family castle, so of course the workers on the estate knew that in the capital class clashes were growing, and the pressure for reform was surging like a mighty river. They never showed the least interest and wasted no time trying to make out the meaning of all this. Getting into a lather about politics and distant events was like arguing which came first, the chicken or the egg.

  Kaiser Ferdinand found the revolution most unpleasant and betrayed his increasing apprehension in his posture: He tended more and more to twist to one side as if defending himself. He was depressed and confused by the news of turmoil in the empire. His epileptic seizures became more frequent. The situation finally became unbearable. One dark bleak day after receiving a report that some hooligan had broken a window at Schönbrunn Palace, he precipitately fled Vienna and took refuge in Olomouc, a rustic village on the bank of the Morava River in northern Mähern.

  So that the people would not interpret his flight as surrender to revolutionary masses, Ferdinand abdicated and designated his eighteen-year-old nephew as his successor, without consulting the real rulers of the land. Franz Josef ascended the throne at a time of extreme political tension under the skeptical eyes of the ruling class.

  Opinion makers among the conservative aristocracy considered the new Habsburg ruler a naïve and boyish lightweight. They assumed him incapable of putting down the revolt and ruling the empire. Even ancient faithful court retainers feared that Franz Josef’s rule would be a disaster. Franz Josef opened a military campaign against rebellious subjects of his vast realm on a spring day just as the trees began to bud. He didn’t allow mistaken notions of Christian charity to get in his way.

  The struggles with the rebels were especially violent in Hungary, where the new Kaiser had sent the Croatian commander Josip Jelačić and his army of forty thousand soldiers, tried and true. Croatians had lived under the yoke of Hungary for seven hundred and fifty years. They hated the Magyars for forcing the Hungarian language and culture upon them. Patriotic Croatian troops experienced brilliant successes for the very first time. Rivers of blood flowed, meadows were strewn with corpses, and the Croatians destroyed everything that stood in their way—houses, bridges, farms, even public laundries.

  Order was restored after a year of this. The emperor had demonstrated his strength, and the prestige of the throne was restored. Peace and calm reigned throughout the land.

  WE KNOW LITTLE of Arabella’s fate after that evening in the Burgtheater. Her relationship with Schwarzenberg lasted only a few months. She was shown the door when she could no longer hide the fact that she was pregnant. She left her newborn baby girl with her eldest brother, then she lived for a time with an elderly baron with a reputation for sadistic mistreatment of women. After that, her long-term relationships gave way to much briefer ones. A whole generation of men—this time of less cosmopolitan stamp—paid for the privilege of emptying their seed into her.

  Arabella’s allure lasted only as long as her raven-black hair retained its luster and her skin remained smooth. Then she quickly wound up on the back streets of Vienna.

  She died of an acute infection on a spring day just a week before her twenty-seventh birthday. People said an old woman with little experience of practical medicine had bungled an abortion. No one was at all surprised.

  They buried Arabella in her bridal gown, according to her dying wish, in a potter’s field on the far edge of the capital. Only three people came to bid her farewell: two former colleagues from the Salon Rouge and a confused old woman who hadn’t known Arabella but made a habit of attending all the funerals. It was fortunate that the two relatively bedraggled whores were present. The priest didn’t want to carry out the full graveside service, but the younger woman offered him a blow job in lieu of his customary fee. The priest zealously applied himself and gave a particularly enthusiastic eulogy depicting the piety of the last princess zu Biederstern.

  GRIEF FASTENED ITS CLAWS in Rudolf’s soul when he received word of Arabella’s death. His days at Biederhof were already black as night, and he now sank into even deeper melancholy. The master of the castle had lost his taste for Hungarian prostitutes and had no money left to gamble away at cards. He never went out; he sat alone in his armchair, his face as pale as death, staring emptily into space or absorbed in deeply meaningful conversation with the cat, the only earthly creature that seemed to care for him.

  His family was deeply concerned about his health. Everyone at the castle knew that Rudolf was ill, and they could see that something was seriously wrong. Only the reliable old Bohemian retainer Bohumil, who had accompanied the young master twenty-five years earlier to Captain von Knapp’s renowned boarding school, knew he had been using opium to alleviate the misery of his tortured spirit. But the pleasant distractions of opium did not last for long. His addiction and abuse rapidly undermined his already fragile health.

  Creditors were gathering outside the castle doors like hungry wolves. Everyone on the estate wondered how much longer the prince could survive. His mother had a premonition, stronger with each passing day, that the end of the family was near.

  ONE STORMY NIGHT Rudolf sat up in bed, looked around, and wondered if the sun had already come up. The skies were fiery red, and cries could be heard in the distance. At first he was completely con
fused. He pulled on his clothes, bewildered, and went out on the balcony. Lightning had struck buildings in Biedersingen and the timber mill was on fire. By the time he got to it, nothing was recognizable. Where houses and workshops once had stood, only chimneys were left. Smoking heaps of blackened timbers were everywhere. The mill had burned to the ground, leaving nothing but ruins.

  RUDOLF WAS A CHANGED MAN after the great fire in the autumn of 1856. The transformation was unbelievable. In every man’s life there comes a moment when he can start anew, and Rudolf experienced that moment after climbing the steps of the highest tower of the castle. From that vantage point he looked out over the surrounding landscape and saw everything that the centuries had given to his family. The weather was magnificent. He saw fields and trees and rolling hills, a whole region of Austria that belonged to him. He stood high atop the castle handed down from his father and grandfather and from their fathers and grandfathers over the centuries and through the generations. Biederhof lay like a jewel case among those cultivated fields and forests.

  Rudolf had grown up in a world where one could pretend that money did not exist. He had never learned the mysterious process by which the secret depths of forests were transformed into new slate tiles for the castle roof and trees became bales of firewood for the royal kitchens in Vienna. Only when he could no longer pay wages to coachmen, servants, cooks, gardeners, and foresters because no one would provide him with credit did he finally begin to grasp the disaster that was looming. He saw that everything the Biedersterns had always possessed, everything that embodied the family name, was slipping inexorably out of his hands. If he lost the estate, he would grieve the spirits of his ancestors and obliterate their heritage.