by Joseph Roth
“How is Herr Colonel Marek?”
“Thank you, Papá, he’s fine.”
“Still weak in geometry?”
“Thank you, Papá, a little better.”
“Read any books?”
“Yessir, Papá!”
“How’s your horsemanship? Last year, it wasn’t special.”
“This year—” Carl Joseph began, but was promptly interrupted. His father had stretched out his narrow hand, which lay half hidden in the round shiny cuff. The huge square cufflink glittered golden.
“It wasn’t special, I just said. It was—“here the district captain paused and then said in a toneless voice, “a disgrace.”
Father and son remained silent. As soft as the word “disgrace” had been, it was still wafting through the room. Carl Joseph knew that a pause had to be observed after a severe critique from his father. The censure had to be absorbed in its full significance, pondered, stamped upon the mind, and imprinted on the heart and the brain. The clock ticked, the fly buzzed.
“This year it was a lot better,” Carl Joseph began in a clear voice. “The sergeant often said so himself. I also received praise from Herr First Lieutenant Koppel.”
“Glad to hear it,” the Herr District Captain remarked in a doomsday voice. Using the edge of the table, he pushed the cuff back into the sleeve; there was a harsh rattle. “Keep talking!” he said, lighting a cigarette. It was the signal for the start of relaxation. Carl Joseph put his cap and his gloves on a small desk, got to his feet, and began reciting all the events of the last year. The old man nodded. Suddenly he said, “You’re a big boy, my son. Your voice is changing. Are you in love yet?”
Carl Joseph turned red. His face burned like a red lantern, but he held it bravely toward his father.
“So, not yet!” said the district captain. “Don’t let me disturb you. Carry on!”
Carl Joseph gulped, the redness faded, he was suddenly freezing. He reported slowly and with many pauses. Then he produced the reading list from his pocket and handed it to his father.
“Quite an impressive list!” said the district captain. “Please give me a plot summary of Zriny.”
Carl Joseph outlined the drama act by act. Then he sat down, weary, pale, with a dry tongue.
He stole a glance at the clock, it was only ten–thirty. The examination would drag on for another hour and a half. It might occur to the old man to test him in ancient history or German mythology. The father walked through the room, smoking, his left hand behind his back. The cuff rattled on his right hand. The sunny stripes kept growing stronger and stronger on the carpet; they kept edging closer and closer to the window. The sun must be high by now. The church bells started clanging; they tolled all the way into the room as if swinging just beyond the thick blinds. Today the old man tested him only in literature. He articulated his detailed opinion of Grillparzer’s significance and recommended Adalbert Stifter and Ferdinand von Saar as “light vacation reading” for his son. Then the father jumped back to military topics: guard duty, Military Regulations Part Two, makeup of an army corps, wartime strength of the various regiments. All at once he asked, “What is subordination?”
“Subordination is the duty of unconditional obedience,” Carl Joseph declaimed, “which every inferior and every lower rank—”
“Stop!” the father broke in, correcting him. “As well as every lower rank.” And Carl Joseph went on.
“—is obligated to show a superior when—”
“As soon as,” the old man rectified. “As soon as the latter takes command.”
Carl Joseph heaved a sigh of relief. The clock struck twelve.
Only now did his vacation begin. Another quarter hour, and he heard the first rattling drumroll from the band leaving the barracks. Every Sunday at noontime it played outside the official residence of the district captain, who, in this little town, represented no lesser personage than His Majesty the Emperor. Carl Joseph, concealed behind the dense foliage of the vines on the balcony, received the playing of the military band as a tribute. He felt slightly related to the Hapsburgs, whose might his father represented and defended here and for whom he himself would some day go off to war and death. He knew the names of all the members of the Imperial Royal House. He loved them all sincerely, with a child’s devoted heart—more than anyone else the Kaiser, who was kind and great, sublime and just, infinitely remote and very close, and particularly fond of the officers in the army. It would be best to die for him amid military music, easiest with “The Radetzky March.” The swift bullets whistled in cadence around Carl Joseph’s ears, his naked saber flashed, and, his heart and head brimming with the lovely briskness of the march, he sank into the drumming intoxication of the music, and his blood oozed out in a thin dark-red trickle upon the glistening gold of the trumpets, the deep black of the drums, and the victorious silver of the cymbals.
Jacques stood behind him and cleared his throat. So lunch was starting. Whenever the music paused, a soft clattering of dishes could be heard from the dining room. It lay three large rooms away from the balcony, at the exact midpoint of the second floor. During the meal, the music resounded, far but clear. Unfortunately, the band did not play every day. It was good and useful; it entwined the solemn ceremony of the luncheon, mild and conciliatory, allowing none of the terse, harsh, embarrassing conversations that the father so often loved to start. One could remain silent, listening and enjoying. The plates had narrow, fading, blue-and-gold stripes. Carl Joseph loved them. He often recalled them throughout the year. They and “The Radetzky March” and the wall portrait of his deceased mother (whom the boy no longer remembered) and the heavy silver ladle and the fish tureen and the scalloped fruit knives and the tiny demitasses and the wee frail spoons as thin as thin silver coins: all these things together meant summer, freedom, home.
He handed Jacques his cape, belt, cap, and gloves and went to the dining room. The old man walked in at the same time, smiling at the son. Fräulein Hirschwitz, the housekeeper, came a bit later in her Sunday gray silk, with her head aloft, her heavy bun at her nape, a huge curved brooch across her bosom like some kind of scimitar. She looked armed and armor-plated. Carl Joseph breathed a kiss on her long hard hand. Jacques pulled out the chairs. The district captain gave the signal for sitting. Jacques vanished and reappeared after a time with white gloves, which seemed to alter him thoroughly. They shed a snowy glow upon his already white face, his already white whiskers, his already white hair. But after all, their brightness also surpassed just about anything that could be called bright in this world. With these gloves he held a dark tray. Upon it lay the steaming soup tureen. Soon he had placed it at the center of the table, gingerly, soundlessly, and very quickly. Following an old custom, Fräulein Hirschwitz ladled out the soup. She offered the plates, and the diners approached them with hospitably stretching arms and grateful smiles in their eyes. She smiled back. A warm golden shimmer hovered in the plates; it was the soup, noodle soup: transparent, with thin, tender, entwined, golden-yellow noodles. Herr von Trotta und Sipolje ate very swiftly, sometimes fiercely. He virtually destroyed one course after another with a noiseless, aristocratic, and rapid malice; he was wiping them out. Fráulein Hirschwitz took small portions at the table, but after a meal she re-ate the entire sequence of food in her room. Carl Joseph fearfully and hastily swallowed hot spoonfuls and huge mouthfuls. In this way, they all finished in tandem. No word was spoken when Herr von Trotta und Sipolje held his tongue.
After the soup the Tafelspitz was served, boiled fillet of beef with all the trimmings, the old man’s Sunday entrée for countless years. The delighted contemplation he devoted to this dish took more time than half the meal. The district captain’s eyes caressed first the delicate bacon that silhouetted the colossal chunk of meat, then each small individual plate on which the vegetables were bedded: the glowing violet beets, the lush-green earnest spinach, the bright cheery lettuce, the acrid white of the horseradish, the perfect oval of new potatoes swimming
in melting butter and recalling delicate baubles. The baron had a bizarre relationship with food. He ate the most important morsels with his eyes, so to speak; his sense of beauty consumed above all the essence of the food—its soul, as it were; the vapid remainders that then reached mouth and palate were boring and had to be wolfed down without delay. The beauteous appearance of the victuals gave the old man as much pleasure as their simplicity. For he set store by good solid fare, a tribute he paid to both his taste and his conviction; the latter, you see, he called Spartan. With felicitous skill, he thus combined the sating of his desire with the demands of duty. He was a Spartan. But he was also an Austrian.
Now, as on every Sunday, he set about carving the beef. He jammed his cuffs into his sleeves, raised both hands, set knife and fork to the meat, and began, while saying to Fräulein Hirschwitz, “You see, my dear lady, it is not enough to ask the butcher for a tender piece. One must heed the way it is cut. I mean, with or against the grain. Nowadays butchers no longer understand their craft. The finest meat is ruined by merely a wrong cut. Look here, my dear lady! I can barely save it. It’s disintegrating into threads, it’s simply crumbling. As a whole, it can be labeled ‘tender.’ But the individual pieces will be tough, as you yourself shall soon see. As for the trimmings, which the Germans call Beilage, I would prefer the horseradish, which the Germans call Meerrettich, to be somewhat drier. It must not lose its pungency in the milk. It should also be prepared just before it reaches the table. It’s been wet far too long. A mistake!”
Fräulein Hirschwitz, who had lived in Germany for many years and always spoke High German, and to whose predilection for literary usage Herr von Trotta’s Germanisms had alluded, nodded slowly and heavily. It was obviously a great effort for her to detach the considerable weight of her bun from the back of her neck and induce her head to nod in acquiescence. This added a touch of reserve to her assiduous amiability—indeed, it even seemed to contain resistance. And the district captain felt prompted to say, “Surely I am not off the mark, my dear lady!”
He spoke the nasal Austrian German of higher officials and lesser nobles. It vaguely recalled distant guitars twanging in the night and also the last dainty vibrations of fading bells; it was a soft but also precise language, tender and spiteful at once. It suited the speaker’s thin, bony face, his curved, narrow nose, in which the sonorous, somewhat rueful consonants seemed to be lying. His nose and mouth, when the district captain spoke, were more like wind instruments than facial features. Aside from the lips, nothing moved in his face. The dark whiskers that Herr von Trotta wore as part of his uniform, as insignia demonstrating his fealty to Franz Joseph I, as proof of his dynastic conviction—these whiskers likewise remained immobile when Herr von Trotta und Sipolje spoke. He sat upright at the table, as if clutching reins in his hard hands. When sitting he appeared to be standing, and when rising he always surprised others with his full ramrod height. He always wore dark blue, summer and winter, Sundays and weekdays: a dark-blue jacket with gray striped trousers that lay snug on his long legs and were tautened by straps over the smooth boots. Between the second and third course, he would usually get up in order to “stretch my legs.” But it seemed more as if he wanted to show the rest of the household how to rise, stand, and walk without relinquishing immobility.
Jacques cleared away the meat, catching a swift glance from Fräulein Hirschwitz to remind him to have it warmed up for her. Herr von Trotta walked over to the window with measured paces, lifted the shade slightly, and returned to the table.
At that moment, the cherry dumplings appeared on a spacious platter. The district captain took only one, sliced it with his spoon, and said to Fräulein Hirschwitz, “This, dear lady, is a paragon of a cherry dumpling. It has the necessary consistency when it is cut open, yet it nevertheless yields instantly on the tongue.” And, turning to Carl Joseph, “I advise you to take two today!” Carl Joseph took two. He wolfed them down in a flash, was finished one second earlier than his father, and gulped down a glass of water (for wine was served only at dinner) to wash them from his gullet, where they might still be stuck, down into his stomach. He folded his napkin in the same rhythm as the old man.
They all stood up. The band outside played the Tannhäuser overture. Amid its sonorous strains, they walked into the study with Fräulein Hirschwitz in the lead. There Jacques brought the coffee. They were expecting Herr Kapellmeister Nechwal. While down below his musicians fell in to march off, he came, in a dark-blue full-dress uniform, with a shining sword and two small, golden, sparkling harps on his collar. “I am delighted with your concert,” said Herr von Trotta today as on every Sunday. “It was quite extraordinary today.” Herr Nechwal bowed. He had already lunched in the officers’ mess an hour ago, unable to wait for the black coffee: the taste of the food was still in his mouth; he craved a Virginia cigar. Jacques brought him a packet of cigars. The bandmaster drew and drew on the light that Carl Joseph steadfastly held at the end of the long cigar, running the risk of burning his fingers.
They sat in broad leather armchairs. Herr Nechwal talked about the latest Lehár operetta in Vienna. He was a man of the world, the kapellmeister. He went to Vienna twice a month, and Carl Joseph sensed that the musician hid many secrets of the great nocturnal demimonde in the depths of his soul. He had three children and a wife “from a simple background,” but he himself stood in the brightest splendor of the world, quite separate from his family. He relished and told Jewish jokes with impish gusto. The district captain did not understand them, nor did he laugh, but he said, “Very good, very good!”
“How is Frau Nechwal?” Herr von Trotta would inquire regularly. He had been asking that question for years. He had never seen her, nor did he wish ever to meet the wife “from a simple background.” Whenever Herr Nechwal would be leaving, the baron would always say to him, “My very best to Frau Nechwal, whom I do not know!” And Herr Nechwal promised to give her the message and assured the baron that his wife would be delighted.
“And how are your children?” asked Herr von Trotta, who could never remember whether they were sons or daughters.
“The eldest boy is doing well at school,” said the kapellmeister.
“So he’ll be a musician too?” asked Herr von Trotta und Sipolje with a smidgen of condescension.
“No,” replied Herr Nechwal, “another year and he’ll be entering military school.”
“Ah, an officer!” said the district captain. “That’s good. Infantry?”
Herr Nechwal smiled. “Of course! He’s capable. Maybe someday he’ll join the general staff.”
“Certainly, certainly!” said the district captain. “Such things have happened.”
A week later, he had forgotten everything. One did not recall the bandmaster’s children.
Herr Nechwal drank two demitasses, no more, no less. With regret he stubbed out the final third of the cigar. He had to go; one did not leave with a smoking cigar.
“It was especially wonderful today. My very best to Frau Nechwal. Unfortunately I have not yet had the pleasure!” said Herr von Trotta und Sipolje.
Carl Joseph clicked his heels. He accompanied the kapellmeister down to the first landing. Then he returned to the study. Presenting himself to his father, he said, “I’m taking a walk, Papá!”
“Fine, fine! Have a relaxing time!” said Herr von Trotta and waved his hand.
Carl Joseph left. He meant to saunter slowly; he wanted to amble, prove to his feet that they were on vacation. But he “shaped up,” as the army term goes, when he encountered the first soldier. He began to march. He reached the town limits, the big yellow tax office broiling leisurely in the sun. The sweet fragrance of the fields came surging toward him, the throbbing song of the larks. To the west, the blue horizon was cut off by gray-blue hills; the first peasant huts emerged with shingled or thatched roofs; the clucking of poultry thrust like fanfares into the summery hush. The countryside was sleeping, wrapped in day and brightness.
Behind the railr
oad embankment lay the constabulary headquarters, commanded by a sergeant. Carl Joseph knew him, Sergeant Slama. He decided to knock. He entered the broiling veranda, knocked, rang the bell; no one answered. A window opened. Frau Slama leaned over the geraniums and called, “Who’s there?” Catching sight of little Trotta, she said, “Coming!” She opened the front door; the interior smelled cool and a bit fragrant. Frau Slama had dabbed a drop of scent on her dressing gown.
Carl Joseph thought of the Viennese nightclubs. He said, “The sergeant isn’t here, ma’am?”
“He’s on duty, Herr von Trotta,” the wife replied. “Do come in!”
Now Carl Joseph sat in the Slama parlor. It was a low, reddish room, very cool; this was like sitting in an icebox. The high backs of the upholstered chairs were stained brown and richly carved into leafy vines that hurt the back. Frau Slama brought in some cool lemonade; she sipped it daintily, her pinkie cocked and one leg crossing the other. She sat next to Carl Joseph, turning toward him and jiggling one foot, which was trapped in a red velvet slipper, naked, without a stocking. Carl Joseph eyed the foot, then the lemonade. He did not look at Frau Slama’s face. His cap lay on his knees. He kept them stiff. He sat upright in front of the lemonade as if drinking it were an official obligation.
“You haven’t been here in a long time, Herr von Trotta,” said the sergeant’s wife. “You’ve really grown! Are you past fourteen?”
“Yes, ma’am, long ago.” He thought of leaving the house as fast as possible. He would have to bolt down the lemonade, bow nicely, tell her to give his best to her husband, and leave. He gazed helplessly at the lemonade; there was no finishing it. Frau Slama refilled his glass. She brought cigarettes. He was not allowed to smoke. She lit a cigarette for herself and drew on it indolently, with flaring nostrils, and jiggled her foot. Suddenly, without a word, she took the cap from his knees and put it on the table. Then she thrust her cigarette into his mouth. Her hand was redolent with smoke and cologne; the bright sleeve of her dressing gown with its pattern of summery flowers shimmered before his eyes. He politely puffed the cigarette, its tip wet from her mouth, and gazed at the lemonade. Frau Slama reinserted the cigarette between her teeth and placed herself behind Carl Joseph. He was afraid to turn around. All at once, both her shimmering sleeves were around his neck, and her face bore down on his hair. He did not stir. But his heart pounded; a huge tempest burst inside him, convulsively held back by his petrified body and the solid buttons of the uniform.
