by Joseph Roth
He did not doff his hat until he encountered Kronauer, the pharmacist, who likewise enjoyed morning constitutionals and was also, incidentally, the borough councilor. Sometimes Herr von Trotta would also say, “Good morning, Herr Pharmacist,” stand still, and ask, “How are you?”
“Excellent!” said the pharmacist.
“Glad to hear it!” remarked the district captain, doffing his hat once more and resuming his stroll.
He never came back before 8 A.M. Sometimes he ran into the postman in the vestibule or out on the steps. Next he would spend some time in his office. For he liked finding the letters next to his breakfast tray. It was impossible for him to see, much less speak to, anyone during breakfast. Old Jacques might happen to walk in on winter days to check the stove or on summer days to shut the window if it was raining all too hard. But Fräulein Hirschwitz was out of the question. The sight of her before 1 P.M. was anathema to the district captain.
One morning in May, Herr von Trotta returned from his constitutional at five minutes after eight. The mailman must have come long since. Herr von Trotta sat down at the table in the breakfast room. The egg, soft-boiled as usual, was in its silver cup. The honey shimmered golden, the fresh kaiser rolls smelled of fire and yeast, the butter shone yellow, embedded in a gigantic dark-green leaf, the coffee steamed in the gold-rimmed porcelain. Nothing was missing. Or at least it seemed to Herr von Trotta at first glance that nothing was missing. But then he promptly stood up, put down his napkin, and scrutinized the table again. The letters were missing from their usual place. For as long as the district captain could remember, no day had ever passed without official mail. First Herr von Trotta went to the open window as if to convince himself that the world still existed outside. Yes, the old chestnut trees in the city park still wore their dense green crowns. The invisible birds were making their usual morning racket in the foliage. The milk wagon, which normally drew up at his residence around this time, stood there today, nonchalant, as if this were a day like any other. So nothing has changed outside, the district captain determined. Was it possible that there had been no mail? Was it possible that Jacques had forgotten it? Herr von Trotta shook the handbell. Its silvery peal scurried through the silent house. No one came. The district captain did not touch his breakfast for now. He shook the bell once more. Finally there was a knock. He was amazed, startled, and offended upon seeing his housekeeper, Fräulein Hirschwitz, enter.
She wore a kind of morning armor in which he had never viewed her before. A huge apron of dark-blue oilcloth covered her from throat to foot and a white coif perched rigidly on her head, displaying her big ears with their soft, broad, fleshy lobes. It made her extraordinarily repulsive to. Herr von Trotta—he could not stand the smell of oilcloth.
“Highly annoying!” he said without returning her greeting. “Where is Jacques?”
“Jacques has been stricken with an indisposition today.”
“Stricken?” the district captain repeated, not understanding immediately. “Is he sick?” he then asked.
“He has a fever,” said Fräulein Hirschwitz.
“Thank you!” said Herr von Trotta, waving his hand.
He sat back down at the table. He only drank the coffee. The egg, the honey, the butter, and the kaiser rolls were left on the tray. He now understood that Jacques was sick and therefore unable to bring the letters. But why was Jacques sick? He had always been as sound as the postal service, for instance. If it had suddenly stopped delivering mail, that would have come as no greater surprise. The district captain himself was never sick. Getting sick meant dying. Sickness was merely nature’s way of getting people accustomed to death. Epidemics—cholera had still been feared in Herr von Trotta’s youth—could be overcome by some people. But when other diseases simply came sneaking along, striking only one person, he was bound to succumb—no matter how many different names were applied to those complaints. The doctors, whom the district captain called medics, pretended they could heal patients—but only to avoid starving. Even if there were exceptions and people did survive an illness, Herr von Trotta, so far as he could remember, had never noticed such a case among people he knew personally or heard about.
He rang again. “I would like the mail,” he said to Fräulein Hirschwitz. “Please have someone, anyone, bring it to me!… Incidentally, what’s wrong with Jacques?”
“He has a fever,” said Fräulein Hirschwitz. “He must have caught a chill.”
“A chill?! In May?”
“He is no longer young!”
“Send for Dr. Sribny!”
This was the district medical officer. He was on duty every morning from nine to twelve at the district captain’s headquarters. He was bound to arrive soon. In the district captain’s opinion, the doctor was a “decent sort.”
Meanwhile the office assistant brought the mail. The district captain glanced at the envelopes, handed them back, and ordered his assistant to leave them in his office. He stood at the window and could not get over the fact that the world outside seemed to know nothing as yet about the changes in his house. Today he had neither breakfasted nor read the mail. Jacques was in bed with a mysterious disease. And yet life was taking its usual course.
Very slowly, his mind occupied with several unclear thoughts, Herr von Trotta walked to his office; twenty minutes later than normal he sat down at his desk. The assistant district commissioner came and delivered his report. Yesterday there had been another meeting of Czech workers. A Sokol gymnasts’ celebration had been announced; delegates from “Slavic countries”—Serbia and Russia were meant but never named in officialese—were due tomorrow. The German-language Social Democrats were likewise drawing attention. A worker at the spinning plant had been beaten up by other workers, supposedly—and this was confirmed by reports from agents—for refusing to join the red party. All these things worried the district captain, they pained him, they upset him, they wounded him. Anything the disobedient segments of the populace undertook to weaken the state, insult His Majesty the Kaiser directly or indirectly, make the law even more powerless than it already was, disturb the peace, offend decency, scoff at official dignity, set up Czech schools, elect opposition deputies—all those actions were aimed at him personally, the district captain. At first he had merely belittled the nations that demanded autonomy and the “working people” who demanded “more rights.” But gradually he was getting to hate them—the carpenters, the arsonists, the electioneers. He gave his assistant stringent orders to instantly break up any meeting that dared to pass a resolution. Of all the words that had lately become modern, he hated this one most of all—perhaps because it needed to change just a single tiny letter to turn into the most disgraceful word of all: revolution. That word he had utterly exterminated. It did not exist in his vocabulary, not even in his official usage, and if an agent’s report employed, say, the term “revolutionary agitator” for one of the active Social Democrats, von Trotta crossed out those words, changing them in red ink to “suspicious individual.” Perhaps there were revolutionaries elsewhere in the monarchy, but they did not exist in Herr von Trotta’s bailiwick.
“Tell Sergeant Slama to see me this afternoon,” Herr von Trotta told his assistant. “Request constable reinforcements for those Sokols. Write a brief report for the governor’s office and get it to me by tomorrow. We may have to contact the military authorities. In any case, the constabulary is to be on alert as of tomorrow. I would like a short outline of the latest ministerial edict regarding military alertness.”
“Yessir, Herr District Captain!”
“Good. Has Dr. Sribny shown up yet?”
“He was immediately sent in to Jacques.”
“I’d like to see him.”
The district captain touched no other document that day. Long ago, in the quiet years, when he had started getting his bearings in his office, there had been no autonomists, no Socialists, and relatively few “suspicious individuals.” And as the years wore by, he scarcely noticed that those gr
oups were growing, spreading, and becoming dangerous. But now the district captain felt as if Jacques’s illness were suddenly making him aware of the dreadful changes in the world, as if Death, perhaps already perching on the edge of the old footman’s bed, were menacing not just him. If Jacques dies, it occurred to the district captain, then in a sense the Hero of Solferino will die once again and perhaps—and here Herr von Trotta’s heart skipped a beat—the man whom the Hero of Solferino had rescued from death. Oh! It was not only Jacques who had fallen ill today! The letters lay unopened on the desk, in front of the district captain; who knew what they might contain? The Sokols were gathering in the interior of the empire, before the very eyes of the authorities and the constabulary. These Sokols—whom the district captain privately nicknamed “Sokolists,” as if to turn this one large group among the Slavic peoples into a sort of minor political party—only pretended to be athletes strengthening their muscles. In reality they were spies or rebels, paid by the czar. Yesterday’s Foreign News had said that German students in Prague occasionally sang “The Watch on the Rhine”, that anthem of the Prussians, Austria’s archenemies and allies. Who could still be trusted? The district captain shuddered. And for the first time since he had begun working in this office, he went over to the window and shut it on an undeniably warm spring day.
At that instant, the district physician walked in, and Herr von Trotta inquired how old Jacques was doing.
Dr. Sribny said, “If it turns into pneumonia, he won’t make it. He’s very old. His temperature’s up to one hundred four. He’s been asking for the priest.”
The district captain leaned over his desk. He was afraid that Dr. Sribny would catch some change in his face, and he felt that something in his face was indeed beginning to change. He pulled out the drawer, removed the cigars, and offered one to the doctor. He pointed mutely to the armchair. Now both were smoking.
“So you don’t have much hope?” Herr von Trotta finally asked.
“Really very little, to tell the truth,” the doctor replied. “At his age …” He did not complete the sentence, and he peered at the district captain as if trying to determine whether the master was a lot younger than the servant.
“He’s never been sick!” said the district captain, as though it were an extenuating circumstance and the doctor were the’ supreme judge ruling on life and death.
“Yes, yes,” was all the doctor said. “It happens. How old is he actually?”
The district captain pondered and said, “Oh, seventy-eight or eighty.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Sribny, “that’s what I figured. That is: only today. As long as someone is up and about, you think he’s going to live forever.”
Whereupon the district physician rose and went to his office.
Herr von Trotta wrote on a slip, I am at Jacques’s cottage,” put the note under a paperweight, and walked into the courtyard.
He had never been in Jacques’s cottage before. The tiny home with an oversized chimney on its tiny roof was built against the back wall of the courtyard. The cottage had three yellow-brick walls with a brown door in the middle. You stepped first into the kitchen and then, through a glass door, into the parlor. Jacques’s tame canary stood on the top knob of its domed cage, next to the window with the white curtain, which, being somewhat short, made the pane seem overly large. The smooth-planed table was pushed up against the wall. Above it hung a blue oil lamp with a round reflector. On the table, the Holy Mother of God stood in a large frame, leaning against the wall, like a portrait of a relative. In the bed, with his head against the window wall, Jacques lay under a white mountain of sheets and pillows. Thinking the priest had come, he heaved a deep sigh of relief as if grace were already approaching him.
“Ah, Herr Baron!” he then said.
The district captain stepped over to the old man. The district captain’s grandfather, the constable sergeant, had lain in state in a similar room, in the pensioners’ quarters of Laxenburg Castle. The district captain could still see the yellow glow of the large white candles in the twilight of the curtained room, and the gigantic boot soles of the festively garbed corpse thrust themselves into his face. Was Jacques’s turn coming up? The old man propped himself on his elbows. He wore an embroidered dark-blue woolen nightcap, his silver hair shimmering through the dense stitches. His clean-shaven face, bony and reddened by fever, looked like colored ivory.
The district captain sat on a bedside chair and said, “Well, the doctor’s just told me it’s not so bad. Probably a cold in the head.”
“Yessir, Herr Baron!” replied Jacques, making a feeble attempt to click his heels under the blanket. He sat up. “Please forgive me,” he added. “It’ll be over by tomorrow, I think.”
“Within a couple of days, I’m sure of it!”
“I’m waiting for the priest, Herr Baron.”
“Yes, yes,” said Herr von Trotta, “he’ll be coming. There’s more than enough time!”
“He’s already on the way,” replied Jacques, as if with his own eyes he could see the priest approaching. “He’s coming,” he went on, and suddenly he no longer seemed aware that the district captain was sitting next to him. “When the late Herr Baron passed away,” he continued, “none of us realized anything. That morning, or maybe it was the previous day, he came into the courtyard and he said, ‘Jacques, where are the boots?’ Yes, that was the day before. And the next morning, he didn’t need them anymore. The winter then set in right away, it was a very cold winter. I think I’ll make it to winter. Winter isn’t all that far away, I just need a little patience. It’s July now, so July, June, May, April, August, November, and by Christmas I think I’ll be able to go out, march off—company, march!” He paused and his large, shiny blue eyes peered through the district captain as if through glass.
Herr von Trotta tried to press the old man gently into the pillows, but Jacques’s upper body was stiff and unyielding. Only his head trembled, and his dark-blue nightcap likewise trembled incessantly. Tiny beads of sweat glittered on his high, bony, yellow forehead. From time to time, the district captain dried them with a handkerchief, but new ones kept forming. He took old Jacques’s hand and gazed at the scaly, brittle, reddish skin on its wide back and the powerful, prominent thumb. Then he placed the hand carefully upon the blanket, returned to his office, told the orderly to get the priest and a Sister of Mercy, while Fraulein Hirschwitz was to sit with Jacques. The district captain asked for his hat, cane, and gloves and went to the park at this unwonted hour—to the surprise of all the people who happened to be there.
But he soon felt compelled to leave the deep shade of the chestnut trees and return to the house. Upon nearing his door, he caught the silvery tinkling of the priest administering the Blessed Sacrament. Herr von Trotta doffed his hat and bowed his head and lingered at the entrance. Some of the passersby likewise halted. Now the priest emerged from the cottage. A few people waited until the district captain had vanished in the hallway; following him curiously, they learned from the orderly that Jacques was dying. He was well known in the small town. And so they devoted a few minutes of reverential silence to the old man who was about to pass away.
The district captain strode right across the courtyard and entered the dying man’s room. In the dark kitchen he cautiously looked for a place to leave his hat, cane, and gloves, finally storing them among pots and plates on the shelves of the étagère. He sent Fräulein Hirschwitz away and sat down by the bed. The sun was so high in the heavens now that it filled the whole broad courtyard of the district captain’s residence, and its rays fell through the window into Jacques’s room. The short white curtain now hung like a small, cheery, sunny apron in front of the panes. The canary twittered merrily and without stopping, the bare shiny floorboards shimmered yellow in the glow of the sun, a wide silvery band of sunlight lay across the foot of the bed, the lower part of the white bedcover was now a more intense, virtually celestial white, and the band of sunlight was also visibly climbing the wall by the
bed. From time to time a soft wind wafted through the few old trees that stood along the courtyard walls and might have been as old as Jacques, or even older, and whose shade had sheltered him every day. The wind blew, and their crowns rustled, and Jacques seemed to know it, for he sat up and said, “Please, Herr Baron, the window!” The district captain unlatched the window, and instantly the cheery May-like noises of the courtyard penetrated the small room. They could hear the rustling of the branches, the soft puffing of the breeze, the exuberant buzzing of the sparkling Spanish flies, and the warbling of the larks from infinite blue heights. The canary darted out, but only to show that it could still fly. For it came back several moments later, perched on the windowsill, and began singing twice as intensely as before. The world was cheerful, indoors and out.
And Jacques leaned out of the bed, listening immobile, the tiny beads of sweat glittered on his hard forehead, and his thin lips slowly parted. First he just smiled mutely. Then he closed his eyes tight, his gaunt, reddened cheeks creased at the cheekbones. Now he looked like an old rogue, and a thin giggling emerged from his throat. He laughed. He laughed nonstop. The pillows trembled softly, and the bedstead even creaked a bit. The district captain likewise smirked. Yes, Death was coming to old Jacques like a vivacious girl in spring, and Jacques opened his old mouth and showed Death his sparse yellow teeth. He lifted his hand, pointed to the window, and, still giggling, shook his head.
