by Joseph Roth
Tonight it was Captain Taittinger’s turn for domino duty. The colonel’s face cast a purple reflection on the rittmaster’s haggard, yellowish features. With a faint jingle, Carl Joseph halted in front of the colonel.
“Hi!” said the colonel without looking up from the dominoes. He was an easygoing man, that Colonel Kovacs. For years now, he had been cultivating a fatherly manner. And only once a month did he work himself up into an artificial rage that struck more fear in him than in the regiment. Any pretext would do. He yelled so loud that the barrack walls shook, as did the old trees around the water meadow. His purple face blanched down to the lips, and his riding crop, quivering and untiring, lashed against his boot shaft. He shrieked a torrent of gobbledygook in which only the ever-recurring and incoherent words, “in my regiment,” were softer than anything else. He would finally stop, for no reason, just as he had started, and leave the office, the club, the parade ground, or whatever setting he had chosen for his thunderstorm. Yes, they all knew him, that Colonel Kovacs—a good egg! His outbursts were as regular and as reliable as the phases of the moon. Each time, Captain Taittinger, who, after already transferring twice in his career, had an accurate knowledge of officers, would assure everyone that there wasn’t a more harmless corporal in the entire army.
Colonel Kovacs finally looked up from the domino game and shook Trotta’s hand. “Dined already?” he asked. “Too bad,” he went on, his eyes melting into an enigmatic distance. “The schnitzel was excellent today.” And “Excellent!” he repeated a bit later. He was sorry that Trotta had missed the schnitzel. He would have gladly chewed a second one for the lieutenant—or at least watched it being eaten with gusto. “Well, have fun!” he eventually said, turning back to the dominoes.
The chaos was intense by now, and a comfortable seat was nowhere to be found. In the course of time, Captain Taittinger, who had been in charge of the mess hall since time immemorial and whose only passion was the consumption of pastries, had transformed the club into a replica of the pastry shop where he spent every afternoon. He could be viewed sitting there behind the glass door, as somber and static as a bizarrely uniformed advertising mannequin. He was the best regular customer in the pastry shop, and probably its hungriest. Without the slightest twitch in his careworn face, he would wolf down one plate of goodies after another, taking a sip of water from time to time, peering fixedly through the glass door and into the street, and nodding gravely whenever a passing soldier saluted him, and simply nothing appeared to be happening inside his big lean skull with its sparse hair. He was a gentle and very lazy officer. Among all his official functions, his only pleasant duty was his supervision of the officers’ mess: its kitchen, the cooks, the orderlies, the wine cellar. And his extensive correspondence with wine dealers and liqueur makers kept no fewer than two army clerks busy full-time. Over the years, he had managed to furnish the officers’ club exactly like his beloved pastry shop, placing dainty little tables in the corners and garbing the table lamps with reddish shades.
Carl Joseph glanced around. He was looking for a tolerable place to sit. Relative safety might be found between Reserve Ensign Sir Bärenstein von Zaloga, a wealthy and recently knighted attorney, and Lieutenant Kindermann, a rosy man of German extraction. The ensign’s youthful rank was so inconsistent with his slight paunch and dignified age that he looked like a civilian in military disguise, and his face with its small coal-black moustache was off-putting because it lacked an utterly indispensable pince-nez. Emanating a dependable dignity in this officers’ club, he reminded Carl Joseph of a family doctor or an uncle. In these two rooms, he was the only one who sat truly, honestly, believably, while the others seemed to be hopping around on their chairs. Aside from his uniform, the only concession that Reserve Ensign Doctor Bärenstein made to the military was his monocle when on duty; for in civilian life he did indeed sport a pince-nez.
Lieutenant Kindermann was likewise more reassuring than the rest, no doubt about it. He consisted of a blond, rosy, transparent substance; one could almost have reached through him as through an airy haze in evening sunlight. Everything he said was airy and transparent and was breathed from his being without diminishing him. And there was something like a sunny smile in his earnest way of following the earnest conversations. A cheerful nonentity, he sat at the little table. “Hello there!” he squealed in his high voice, which Colonel Kovacs described as one of the wind instruments of the Prussian army. Reserve Ensign Bärenstein stood up appropriately but solemnly. “Good evening, Herr Lieutenant,” he said.
Carl Joseph almost replied reverently, Good evening, Herr Doctor! But all he said was “May I?” and sat down.
“Dr. Demant is coming back tonight,” Bärenstein began. “I ran into him this afternoon.”
“A charming fellow,” Kindermann squealed; behind Bärenstein’s powerful forensic baritone it sounded like a gentle zephyr grazing a harp. Kindermann, ever intent on making up for his scant interest in women by feigning a special attentiveness to them, announced, “And his wife—do you know her?—a charming creature, a delight!” And at the word delight he raised his hand, his limp fingers capering in the air.
“I’ve known her since she was a girl,” said the ensign.
“Interesting,” said Kindermann. He was blatantly shamming.
“Her father used to be one of the richest hat manufacturers,” the ensign went on. It sounded as if he were reading from a document. Terrified by his own remark, he paused. The words hat manufacturers struck him as too civilian; after all, he was not sitting with lawyers. He swore to himself that from now on he would think about every statement before uttering it. He did owe the cavalry that much. He tried to catch Lieutenant Trotta’s reaction. But Trotta was sitting to the left, and Bärenstein’s monocle was on his right eye. The lawyer could see only Lieutenant Kindermann clearly, and he didn’t matter. To determine whether his familiar mention of the hat manufacturer had had a devastating impact on Lieutenant Trotta, Bärenstein produced his cigarette case and held it out to his left, recollected Kindermann’s seniority in time, and, turning right, hastily said, “Excuse me!”
Now all three men were smoking in silence. Carl Joseph’s gaze focused on the portrait of the Kaiser on the opposite wall. There was Franz Joseph in a sparkling-white general’s uniform, the wide blood-red sash veering across his chest and the Order of the Golden Fleece at his throat. The big black field marshal’s helmet with its lavish peacock-green aigrette lay next to the Emperor on a small, wobbly-looking table. The painting seemed to be hanging very far away, farther than the wall. Carl Joseph remembered that during his first few days in the regiment that portrait had offered him a certain proud comfort. He had felt that the Kaiser might step out of the narrow black frame at any moment. But gradually the Supreme Commander in Chief developed the indifferent, habitual, and unheeded countenance shown on his stamps and coins. His picture hung on the wall of the club, a strange kind of sacrifice that a god makes to himself. His eyes—earlier they had recalled a summer vacation sky—were now a hard blue china. And it was still the same Kaiser! This painting also hung at home, in the district captain’s study. It hung in the vast assembly hall at military school. It hung in the colonel’s office at the barracks. And Emperor Franz Joseph was scattered a hundred thousand times throughout his vast empire, omnipresent among his subjects as God is omnipresent in the world. His life had been saved by the Hero of Solferino. The Hero of Solferino had grown old and died. Now the worms were devouring him. And his son, the district captain, Carl Joseph’s father, was also growing old. Soon the worms would be devouring him too. But the Kaiser—the Kaiser seemed to have aged suddenly, within a single day, within a very specific hour, and since that hour he had remained locked in his eternal, silvery, and dreadful senility as in an armor of awe-inspiring crystal. The years did not dare approach him. His eyes kept growing bluer and harder. His very favor, which rested upon the Trotta dynasty, was a load of cutting ice. And Carl Joseph felt chills under his Emperor�
�s blue gaze.
At home during vacation, he recalled, and on Sundays, before lunch, when Kapellmeister Nechwal had set up his military band in the regulation circle, Carl Joseph had been ready to perish for his Kaiser in a warm, sweet, blissful death. Grandfather’s legacy, to save the Emperor’s life, was alive in him. And if you were a Trotta, you kept saving the Emperor’s life over and over.
Now he had been in the regiment for barely four months. All at once it was as if the Kaiser, unapproachably secure in his crystal armor, no longer needed Trottas. Peace had worn on for too long. Death lay far away for a young cavalry lieutenant, as far as the highest grade of regulated advancement. You became colonel someday and then you died. Meanwhile you went to the officers’ club every evening, you saw the Kaiser’s picture. The longer Lieutenant Trotta perused it, the more remote the Kaiser grew.
“Just look!” Lieutenant Kindermann’s voice simpered. “Trotta can’t take his eyes off the old man!”
Carl Joseph smiled at Kindermann. Reserve Ensign Bärenstein had started a game of dominoes long since and he was losing. He considered it his bounden duty to lose when playing with the regulars. Back in civilian life, he always won. He was a feared player even among lawyers. But when he reported for the annual military exercises, he shelved his superiority and tried to act the fool. “He keeps losing nonstop,” Kindermann said to Trotta. Lieutenant Kindermann was convinced that “civilians” were inferior beings. They could not even win at dominoes.
The colonel still sat in the corner with Captain Taittinger. A few bored officers wandered between the tables. They did not dare leave the club so long as the colonel was playing. The gentle pendulum clock whined every quarter hour very clearly and slowly, its rueful melody interrupting the clatter of dominoes and chess figures. Sometimes one of the orderlies clicked his heels, dashed into the kitchen, and returned with a small snifter of brandy on a ridiculously large salver. Sometimes somebody guffawed resoundingly, and if you glanced toward the source of the mirth you spied four heads huddling together and you realized they were telling jokes. These jokes! These anecdotes with which you could instantly tell whether the laughter was polite or genuine! The jokes separated the natives from the foreigners. Any man who did not understand was not an insider. No, Carl Joseph was not among them!
He was just about to propose a three-way game when the door opened and an orderly saluted with a conspicuously loud bang of his boot heels. The room instantly hushed. Colonel Kovacs leaped from his chair and peered at the door. It was none other than Demant, the regimental surgeon. He himself was taken aback by the agitation he had triggered. He halted at the door and smiled. Next to him the orderly was still at attention, which plainly embarrassed the physician. He waved his hand. But the orderly did not notice. The doctor’s thick spectacles were faintly misted by the autumnal evening fog outside. Normally he would remove his spectacles and polish them when he stepped from the cold air into the warmth. But here he did not have the nerve. It took him awhile to leave the threshold.
“Why, look, it’s the doctor!” cried the colonel. He was yelling for all he was worth, as if straining to make himself heard in the tumult of a county fair. The good man believed that shortsighted people were also deaf and that their spectacles would become clearer if their ears heard more sharply. The colonel’s voice blazed a passage. The officers stepped back. The few officers still sitting at tables stood up. The regimental surgeon gingerly placed one foot before the other as if walking on ice. His spectacles seemed to be clearing gradually. Greetings showered upon him from all sides. He painstakingly recognized the officers. He leaned over to read the faces the way one pores over books. He finally halted in front of Colonel Kovacs, squaring his chest. His posture looked strongly exaggerated as he tossed back his eternally bowing head on his thin neck and attempted to jerk up his narrow, sloping shoulders. He had almost been forgotten during his long sick leave: he and his unmilitary bearing. Now the men stared at him not without surprise.
The colonel hastened to end the official ritual of greeting. He shouted loud enough to make the glasses tremble, “He looks good, our doctor!”—as if trying to inform the entire army. He slapped Demant on the shoulder as though to restore it to its natural position. He really liked the regimental surgeon. But the guy was unmilitary, damn it all to hell! If only he’d act just a little more like an officer, they wouldn’t have to make such efforts to be nice to him. And, damn it all, they could’ve sent Kovacs a different doctor. Why his regiment? Those endless battles that the colonel’s heart had to fight with his military sensibilities on behalf of this goddamn nice guy were enough to grind down an old soldier. This doctor’s gonna be the death of me! mused the colonel whenever he saw the regimental surgeon on horseback. And one day he had even asked him if he would mind not riding through town.
I have to say something nice to him, he thought frantically. In his haste, it flashed through his mind: The schnitzel was excellent today! And say it he did. The doctor smiled. The guy has a totally civilian smile! the colonel thought. And suddenly he recalled that there was an officer here who did not know the doctor. Trotta, of course! He had joined while the doctor was on sick leave. The colonel thundered, “This is Trotta, our youngest! You haven’t met him!” And Carl Joseph went over to the regimental surgeon.
“Grandson of the Hero of Solferino?” asked Dr. Demant.
No one would have expected him to be so conversant with military history.
“He knows everything, our doctor!” cried the colonel. “He’s a bookworm.”
And for once in his life, he liked the suspicious word “bookworm” so much that he repeated it—“a bookworm!”—in the caressing tone that he normally used for “a lancer!”
They sat down again, and the evening took its usual course.
“Your grandfather,” said the regimental surgeon, “was one of the most singular men in the army. Did you know him?”
“I didn’t know him,” replied Carl Joseph. “His picture is in our study at home. When I was little, I used to look at it frequently. And his butler, Jacques, is still with us.”
“What’s the picture like?” asked the regimental surgeon.
“It was painted by my father’s boyhood friend,” said Carl Joseph. “It’s a strange portrait. It’s hung fairly high. When I was little, I had to climb on a chair to look at it.”
They paused for a moment. Then the doctor said, “My grandfather was an innkeeper, a Jewish innkeeper in Galicia. Galicia—have you ever been there?” Dr. Demant was a Jew. All the jokes had Jewish regimental surgeons. There had also been two Jews at military school. They had joined the infantry.
“Let’s go to Resi’s, Aunt Resi’s!” a voice suddenly shouted.
And they all repeated, “To Resi’s! We’re going to Resi’s!”
“To Aunt Resi’s!”
Nothing could have frightened Carl Joseph more than that shout. He had been dreading it for weeks. He still had sharp memories of everything about his last visit to Frau Horwath’s brothel: everything! The champagne, consisting of camphor and lemonade; the soft, fleshy dough of the girls, the blinding red and demented yellow of the wallpaper, the smell of cats, mice, and lilies of the valley in the corridor, and his heartburn twelve hours later. He had scarcely been in the regiment a week, and that had been his first visit to a brothel.
“Love maneuvers!” said Taittinger. He was the ringleader. It was one of the duties of an officer who had been in charge of the mess hall since time immemorial. Pale and haggard, his saber hilt in his arm, he would take long, thin, softly jingling steps from table to table in Frau Horwath’s parlor—a stealthy admonisher to sour joys. Kindermann felt faint whenever he smelled naked women; the female sex nauseated him. Major Prohaska had stood in the toilet, earnestly striving to thrust his stubby finger down Kindermann’s throat. Frau Resi Horwath’s silk petticoats rustled in every nook of the house at once. Her big black eyeballs rolled aimlessly and haphazardly in her broad, mealy face; as white and lar
ge as piano keys, her false teeth shimmered in her broad mouth. Trautmannsdorff, from his corner, followed all her movements with quick, squinting, greenish glances. Eventually he got up and lunged one hand into Frau Horwath’s bosom. The hand disappeared inside like a white mouse among white mountains. And Pollak, the pianist, a slave to the music, sat hunched over at the grand piano with its blackish reflections, and on his hammering hands the hard cuffs clattered like hoarse cymbals accompanying the tinny sounds.
To Aunt Resi’s! They were going to Aunt Resi’s. The colonel wheeled around downstairs. He said, “Have fun, gentlemen,” and twenty voices chorused through the silent street—“Good night, sir!”—and forty spurs jingled against one another. Dr. Max Demant, the regimental surgeon, made a shy attempt to likewise take his leave. “Do you have to go with them?” he softly asked Lieutenant Trotta.
“I really do!” whispered Carl Joseph. And the regimental surgeon wordlessly tagged along. They brought up the rear in the straggly line of officers walking and rattling through the hushed, moonlit streets of the small town. The two men did not converse. They felt bonded by the whispered question and the whispered answer; there was nothing more to say. Both were cut off from the entire regiment. And yet they had met barely half an hour ago.
Suddenly, without knowing why, Carl Joseph said, “I loved a woman named Kathi. She died.”
The regimental surgeon halted and turned to the lieutenant full face. “You will love other women,” he said.
And they walked on.
Late trains could be heard whistling from the distant station, and the regimental surgeon said, “I’d like to go away, go far away!”
Now they stood by Aunt Resi’s blue lantern. Captain Taittinger knocked on the bolted door. Someone opened. Inside, the piano instantly began to tinkle: “The Radetzky March.” The officers marched into the parlor. “Fall out singly!” Taittinger commanded. The naked girls thronged toward them, a bustling cluster of white hens.
