He himself did not know why he asked this question today and why the constable’s private life suddenly concerned him.
“No, Herr Baron,” said Slama. “And I won’t ever remarry!”
“You’re doing the right thing!” said Herr von Trotta. But he did not know why the constable was doing the right thing by resolving not to remarry.
This was his normal time for appearing at the café, so that was where he went. The chessboard was already on the table. Dr. Skowronnek arrived at the same time, and they sat down.
“Black or white, Herr District Captain?” the doctor asked, as on any other day.
“Whatever you like,” said the district captain.
And they began to play. Herr von Trotta played carefully today, almost reverently, and won.
“You’re gradually turning into a real chess champion,” said Skowronnek.
The district captain felt truly flattered. “Maybe I could have become one!” he replied. And he mused that it would have been better, that everything would have been better. “By the way, I’ve written to my son,” he began after a while. “He can do as he likes.”
“That sounds right to me,” said Dr. Skowronnek. “One cannot bear responsibility. No man can bear responsibility for another.”
“My father bore responsibility for me, and my grandfather for my father.”
“Things were different back then,” Skowronnek replied. “Now not even the Kaiser bears responsibility for his monarchy. Why, it even looks as if God Himself no longer wishes to bear responsibility for the world. It was easier in those days! Everything was so secure. Every stone lay in its place. The streets of life were well-paved. Secure roofs rested on the walls of the houses. But today, Herr District Captain, the stones on the street lie askew and confused and in dangerous heaps, and the roofs have holes, and the rain falls into the houses, and everyone has to know on his own which street he is taking and what kind of house he is moving into. When your late father said you would become a public official rather than a farmer, he was right. You have become a model official. But when you told your son he had to be a soldier, you were wrong. He is not a model soldier.”
“Yes, yes!” confirmed Herr von Trotta.
“And that’s why we should let everyone do as he wishes, each on his own path. When my children refuse to obey me, all I do is try not to lose my dignity. That is all one can do. I sometimes look at them when they’re asleep. Their faces then look very alien to me, almost unrecognizable, and I see that they are strangers, from a time that is yet to come and that I will not live to see. My children are still very young. One is eight, the other ten, and they have round, rosy faces when they sleep. Sometimes I feel it is the cruelty of their time, the future, that overcomes the children in their sleep. I would not care to live that long.”
“Yes, yes!” said the district captain.
They played another round, but this time Herr von Trotta lost. “I won’t be a champion,” he said mildly, virtually reconciled to his defects. It was late by now, the greenish gas lamps, the voices of silence, were already hissing, and the café was empty. They again walked home across the park. Tonight the evening was cheerful, and cheerful strollers came their way. The two men talked about the frequent rainfall that summer and about the dryness of the previous summer and the foreseeable harshness of the coming winter. Skowronnek went as far as the door of the district captain’s residence. “You did the right thing with your letter, Herr District Captain,” the doctor said.
“Yes, yes!” Herr von Trotta confirmed.
He entered, went to the table, and wordlessly choked down his half chicken with salad. The housekeeper stole anxious glances at him. She served the meals now that Jacques was dead. She left the room before the district captain, curtsying awkwardly just as the little girl had curtsied to her school principal thirty years ago. The district captain waved at her as if shooing flies. Then he rose and went to bed. He felt tired and almost ill; the previous night lay as a very distant dream in his memory but as a very close terror in his limbs.
He calmly fell asleep, believing the worst was over. He did not know—old Herr Trotta—that fate was brewing bitter grief for him while he slept. He was old and tired, and death was already lurking, but life would not yet let him go. Like a cruel host it held him fast at the table because he had not yet tasted all the bitterness that had been prepared for him.
Chapter 17
NO, THE DISTRICT captain had not yet tasted the full measure of bitterness! Carl Joseph received his father’s letter too late—that is, long after deciding to open no more letters and write no more. As for Frau von Taussig, she sent him wires. Like swift small swallows, they summoned him every other week. And Carl Joseph dashed to his closet, pulled out his gray civilian suit, his better, more important, and secret life, and changed clothes. Instantly he felt at home in the world he was about to enter; he forgot his military existence.
Taking Captain Wagner’s place, Captain Jedlicek had come to the battalion from the First Lancers: a “good guy” with enormous bodily dimensions, broad, merry, as gentle as any giant, and open to any persuasion. What a man! The moment he arrived, everyone knew he was equal to this swamp and was stronger than the borderland. You could rely on him! He flouted all military rules, but as if he were knocking them over. He looked like the sort of man who could have devised and introduced and put through a new set of regulations. He needed lots of money, but it came pouring in from all sides. His comrades loaned him cash, co-signed his IOUs, pawned their rings and watches for him, wrote to their fathers for his sake and to their aunts. Not that they actually loved him, for love would have brought them closer to him, and he did not seem to want anyone getting close to him. Indeed, it would not have been easy for sheer physical reasons: his size, his girth, his forceful personality kept everyone at bay, and so he had no problem being good-natured.
“Just go on your trip,” he told Lieutenant Trotta. “I’ll take responsibility.” He took responsibility, and he could take it. And he needed money every week. Lieutenant Trotta got it from Kapturak. He needed money himself, Trotta did. He felt it was wretched to show up at Frau von Taussig’s home without money. He’d be an unarmed man entering an armed camp. How foolhardy! His needs gradually increased, and he took along higher and higher sums, but all the same he returned from each excursion with his very last crown, and he always resolved to take along more the next time. Occasionally he tried to account for the lost money, but he never managed to recall the individual expenses, and often he couldn’t even do simple additions. Arithmetic was beyond him.
His small memo books could have testified to his pathetic efforts to keep order. Endless columns of figures lined each page. But they were tangled and mixed up: they virtually slipped through his fingers, they added themselves up and deceived him with wrong totals, they galloped away before his gaping eyes, they returned a moment later, fully changed and unrecognizable. He didn’t even succeed in adding up his debts. Nor did he understand the interest. His loans vanished behind his debts like a hill behind a mountain. Nor did he understand how Kapturak calculated. And while he distrusted Kapturak’s honesty, he had even less faith in his own arithmetic. In the end, he was bored by every number. And once and for all he gave up calculating, abandoned his efforts with the courage born of despair and impotence.
He owed Kapturak and Brodnitzer six thousand crowns. When he compared this sum with his monthly pay, it was gigantic even for his hazy conception of numbers. (And a third of his pay was deducted regularly.) Nevertheless he had slowly gotten used to the figure six thousand as if it were an overpowering but very old enemy. Why, in good moments the sum might even appear to be shrinking and losing strength. But in bad moments it seemed to be growing and gaining strength.
He went to Frau von Taussig. For weeks now he had been taking these brief, furtive trips as if they were sinful pilgrimages. Like the naive believers for whom a pilgrimage is a kind of delight, a distraction, and sometimes even a sensati
on, Lieutenant Trotta associated the goal of his pilgrimage with a number of things: the environment he lived in, his eternal longing for what he pictured as a free life, the civvies he put on, and the lure of the forbidden. He loved his trips. He loved the drive in a closed carriage to the station—ten minutes of imagining that he was incognito. He loved the borrowed hundred-crown bills in his breast pocket—they were his alone today and tomorrow, and no one could tell that they were borrowed and that they were already starting to grow and fatten in Kapturak’s notebooks. Trotta loved his civilian anonymity when he passed through Vienna’s North Station. Nobody recognized him. Officers and privates walked by. He didn’t salute, nor was he saluted. Sometimes his arm rose on its own. He then quickly remembered his mufti and dropped his arm. His vest, for instance, was a source of childish pleasure. He thrust his hands in all its pockets, not knowing how to use them. And his vain fingers fondled the knot of his tie above the vest: it was the only tie he owned, a present from Frau von Taussig, but he still didn’t know how to knot it despite countless efforts. The most dim-witted police detective would have seen at first glance that Lieutenant Trotta was an officer in civvies.
Frau von Taussig stood on the platform in North Station. Twenty years ago—she imagined it was fifteen, for she had been denying her age for so long that she herself was convinced her years had ground to a halt and would not go till the end—twenty years ago she had likewise stood in North Station, waiting for another lieutenant, albeit a cavalry lieutenant. She climbed up to the platform as if it were a fountain of youth. She submerged in the caustic haze of coal dust, in the hissing and steaming of shunting locomotives, in the dense ringing of signal bells. She wore a short travel veil. She imagined it had been fashionable fifteen years ago. But it had been twenty-five years ago, not even twenty! She loved waiting on the platform. She loved the moment when the train rolled in, and she spotted Trotta’s ridiculous little dark-green hat at the compartment window and his beloved, perplexed young face. For she made Carl Joseph younger, as she did herself, made him more naive and more perplexed, as she did herself. The instant the lieutenant left the lowest footboard, her arms opened as they had opened twenty or rather fifteen years ago. And from the face she wore today, that earlier one emerged, the rosy, uncreased face she had worn twenty or rather fifteen years ago, a girl’s face, sweet and slightly flushed. Around her throat, where two parallel rills were already digging in, she had hung the thin childish gold necklace that had been her sole ornament twenty or rather fifteen years ago. And, as she had done twenty or rather fifteen years ago, she rode with the lieutenant to one of those small hotels where concealed love blossomed in squalid, squeaking, and delicious bed paradises that were rented by the hour.
The strolls began. The amorous quarter hours in the young greenery of the Vienna Woods, the small sudden squalls of the blood. The evenings in the reddish twilight of opera boxes, behind drawn curtains. The caresses, well-known and yet surprising, which the experienced and yet unsuspecting flesh looked forward to. Her ears knew the oft-heard music, but her eyes knew only fragments of scenes. For in her opera box Frau von Taussig had always drawn the curtain or kept her eyes shut. The caresses, spawned by the music and virtually entrusted to the man’s hands by the orchestra, were both cool and hot on her skin: long familiar and eternally youthful sisters, presents she thought she had often received but then forgotten and merely dreamt of some day receiving. The quiet restaurants opened up. The silent dinners began, in corners where the wine they drank seemed to have grown, ripened by the love that shone eternally here in the darkness. The parting came, a final embrace in the afternoon, harried by the ruthlessly ticking watch on the night-stand and already filled with the joyous prospect of their next meeting; and their haste in getting to the train; and the final kiss on the footboard; and the hope, abandoned in the last moment, of her traveling back with him.
Tired but imbued with all the sweetnesses of life and love, Lieutenant Trotta arrived back in his garrison. His orderly, Onufrij, had the uniform ready for him. Trotta changed in the back room of the restaurant and drove to the barracks. He went to the company office. Everything in order, nothing had happened. Captain Jedlicek was as cheery and merry, as healthy and massive as ever, Lieutenant Trotta felt both relieved and disappointed. In a secret nook of his heart he had hoped for a catastrophe that would make it impossible for him to remain in the army. He would then have gone straight back to Vienna. But nothing had happened. And so he had to wait for another twelve days, cooped up inside the four walls of the barrack square, within the tiny, desolate streets of this town. He glanced at the target dummies lining the walls of the barrack square. Small blue mannequins, riddled with bullets and then refurbished, they looked like wicked trolls, familiars of the barracks, threatening the barracks with the very weapons that they themselves were shot with—they were no longer targets but dangerous marksmen. As soon as Trotta reached the Hotel Brodnitzer, entered his bare room, and flopped down on the iron bed, he resolved not to return to the garrison after his next leave.
But he was incapable of acting on his decision, and he knew it. He was really waiting for some kind of strange fluke, something that would fall into his lap one day, forever liberating him from the military and from the necessity of leaving it of his own free will. The only thing he managed to do was to stop writing to his father and to leave a few letters from him unopened, intending to open them later on. Sometime later on….
The next twelve days rolled by. He opened his closet, gazed at his civilian suit, and waited for the telegram. It always came at this time, at dusk, right before nightfall, like a bird coming home to its nest. But today it did not come, not even after nightfall. The lieutenant did not switch on a lamp, refusing to acknowledge the night. Fully dressed and with open eyes he lay on the bed. All the familiar voices of spring wafted in through the open window: the deep croaking of the frogs and, above it, the softer, clearer chirping of the crickets and in between the distant calls of the nocturnal jay and the songs of the boys and girls in the border village.
At last the telegram came. It informed the lieutenant that he could not visit this time. Frau von Taussig had gone to her husband. She wanted to get back soon but didn’t know when. The text concluded with “a thousand kisses.” Their number offended the lieutenant. She shouldn’t have been so miserly, he thought. She could just as easily have wired a hundred thousand! It hit him that he owed a debt of six thousand crowns. Compared with that a thousand kisses were a paltry number. He stood up to shut the closet door. There, clean and straight, a neatly pressed corpse, hung the free dark-gray civilian Trotta. The door shut upon him. A coffin: Buried! Buried!
The lieutenant opened the door to the corridor. Onufrij always sat there, silent or softly humming or with the harmonica at his lips, his hands cupped over it to muffle the notes. Sometimes Onufrij sat on a chair. Sometimes he squatted at the threshold. He should have left the military a year ago. He stayed on voluntarily. His village, Burdlaki, was located nearby. Whenever the lieutenant left town, Onufrij went to his village. He would take along a cherrywood stick and a white handkerchief with blue flowers, wrap enigmatic objects in this cloth, hang the bundle at the end of his stick, shoulder the stick, accompany the lieutenant to the station, wait until the departure of the train, stand in a rigid salute on the platform even if Trotta wasn’t peering out the window, and then hike off to Burdlaki, between the swamps, along the safe narrow path lined with willows, the only path with no danger of sinking. Onufrij always came back in time to wait for Trotta. And he sat down outside Trotta’s door, silent, humming, or playing the harmonica under his cupped hands.
The lieutenant opened the door to the corridor. “You can’t go to Burdlaki today. I’m not leaving!”
“Yessir, Herr Lieutenant!” Onufrij stood in a rigid salute, a straight dark-blue line in the white corridor.
“You’re to stay here!” Trotta repeated; he thought Onufrij hadn’t understood.
But Onufrij only r
epeated, “Yessir!” And as if prove he understood more than he was told, he went downstairs and came back with a bottle of 180 Proof.
Trotta drank. The bare room grew homier. The naked electric bulb on its twisted wire, circled by whirring moths and swaying in the nocturnal wind, aroused fleeting cozy reflections on the brownish gloss of the table. Gradually Trotta’s disappointment mellowed into a pleasurable pain. He formed a kind of alliance with his grief. Everything in the world was extremely sorrowful today, and he, the lieutenant, was the midpoint of this miserable world. It was for him that the frogs were croaking so dolefully; the rueful crickets were lamenting for him. It was for him that the spring night was imbued with such a sweet, gentle sorrow, that the stars were so unreachably high in the heavens; for him alone their light twinkled with unrequited yearning. The infinite sorrow of the world fitted in perfectly with Trotta’s misery. He suffered in utter harmony with the suffering universe. From behind the deep-blue vault of the sky, God Himself gazed down at him in pity.
Trotta reopened his closet. There, forever dead, hung the free Trotta. At his side shone the saber that had belonged to Max Demant, his dead friend. In the trunk lay old Jacques’s memento, the stone-hard root, next to the letters of Frau Slama, who was dead. And on the windowsill lay no less than three unopened letters from his father, who may likewise have died. Ohh! Lieutenant Trotta was not only sad and unhappy but also wicked, with a thoroughly wicked character! He returned to the table, poured himself another glass, and gulped it down.
In the corridor, outside the door, Onufrij was starting a new tune on his harmonica, the well-known song “Oh, Our Emperor.” Trotta knew only the first few words in Ukrainian: “Oh, nash tshizar, tshizareva.” He hadn’t managed to learn the local vernacular. Not only did he have a thoroughly wicked character, but his mind was tired and foolish. In short: he was an utter failure. His chest tightened. The tears were already welling up in his throat; soon they would reach his eyes. He drank another glass to ease their passage. Finally they gushed from his eyes. He put his arms on the table, bedded his head on his arms, and began sobbing wretchedly. He must have wept for some fifteen minutes. He didn’t hear Onufrij breaking off his music, he didn’t hear the knock on the door. It was only when the door closed that Trotta raised his head. And he saw Kapturak.