The Hotel Years

  These ladies are even older and deader than the Hussars’ uniforms. They sashay past in a swift gaggle, and although they are all clad in white, they look like so many mourning veils.

  It’s all over in three minutes. It’s no more than one of the numerous terrible moments of world history that show crowned heads at play. This one happened to have been caught by a camera and handed down to posterity. The film is a little worn, the ­pictures flicker, but one can’t say whether it is punctures made in it by the tooth of time, or molecules of natural dust that have shrouded these seemingly living subjects. It is the most terrible irreality that film has ever shown; a historical dance of death, an opened tomb that once looked like a throne . . .

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 31 December 1925

  27. His K. and K. Apostolic Majesty*

  There was once an Emperor. A great part of my childhood and youth happened under the often merciless lustre of His Majesty, which I am entitled to write about today because I was so vehemently opposed to it then. Of the two of us, the Emperor and me, I came out on top—which isn’t to say that I should have done. He lies buried in the Kapuzinergruft, and under the ruins of his crown, while I, living, stumble about among them. Faced by the majesty of his death and its tragedy—not his—my political convictions are silent, and only memory is awake. No external occasion has wakened it. Perhaps just one of those hidden, inner, private things that sometimes cause a writer to raise his voice, without him caring whether there is anyone listening to him or not.

  When he was buried, I stood, one of the many soldiers of his Viennese garrison, in my new field grey uniform that we were to go to war in a few weeks later, a link in the long chain that lined the streets. The shock that came from understanding that the day was an historic one encountered a complicated sadness about the passing of a fatherland that had raised its sons to opposition. Even as I was condemning it, I already began to mourn it. And while I bitterly measured the proximity of the death to which the dead Emperor was sending me, I was moved by the ceremony with which His Majesty (and this was Austria-Hungary) was being carried to the grave. I had a clear sense of the absurdity of the last years, but this absurdity was also part of my childhood. The chilly sun of the Habsburgs was being extinguished, but it had at least been a sun.

  The evening we marched back to barracks in our double rows—parade march on the wider streets—I thought about the days a childish piety had led me to seek out the physical proximity of the Emperor, and I mourned the passing not of the piety but of those days. And because the death of the Emperor spelt the end of the country and of my childhood, I mourned Emperor and fatherland as my childhood. Since that evening I have often thought about the summer mornings when I would go out to Schönbrunn at six, to watch the Emperor’s annual departure for Bad Ischl. The war, the revolution and my radical politics could neither deface nor eclipse those summer mornings. I think those mornings were responsible for my susceptibility to ceremony, my capacity for reverence at religious occasions, and the parade on the 9 November in Red Square in the Kremlin, before every moment of human history whose beauty accords with its grandeur, and each tradition that at least confirms the existence of a past.

  Those summer mornings often fell on a Sunday; as a matter of principle, it never rained. The city had laid on extra trams. Many people went out for the naïve purpose of providing a send-off. In a curious way the very lofty, very distant and very rich trilling of larks combined with the hurrying strides of hundreds of people. They went along in shade, the sun just grazing the second floor of the buildings and the crowns of the tallest trees. A damp chill emanated from the ground and the walls, but above us the summer air was already palpable, so that we felt spring and summer simultaneously, two seasons coincidentally instead of sequentially. The dew was still shining and already evaporating, and the lilac came over the garden walls with the fresh vehemence of a scented wind. The sky was a taut, bright blue. It struck seven from the church tower.

  Just then a gate opened, and an open carriage slowly rolled out, high-stepping white horses with lowered heads, an impassive coachman on a terribly high box in the yellow-grey livery, the reins so loose in his hand that they dangled over the horses’ backs, and we couldn’t understand why they trotted so briskly, since they obviously had leave to go at their own pace. The whip was disregarded, an instrument not even of exhortation, much less chastisement. I began to sense that the coachman had other powers at his command than his fists, and other means than reins and whip. His hands, I should say, were two dazzling white spots in the midst of the shady green of the avenue. The large and elegant wheels of the coach, whose frail spokes resembled whirring conductor’s batons, a children’s game and an illustration in a book, these wheels completed a few mild turns on the gravel, which remained silent, as if it had been fine milled sand. Then the coach came to a stop. None of the horses moved so much as a foot. An ear may have twitched, but even that will have struck the coachman as unseemly. (Not that he moved to remonstrate.) But the distant shadow of a distant shadow moved across his face, convincing me that his ire wasn’t from him but from the atmosphere above him. All was still. Midges danced in the treetops, and the sun grew gradually warmer.

  Uniformed policemen, who until now had been on duty, suddenly and silently disappeared. It was among the coolly calculated orders of the old Emperor that no armed official was to be seen in his vicinity. The plainclothes police wore grey caps instead of the usual green, so as to avoid detection. Committee members in top hats with yellow and black ribbons maintained order, and kept the affection of the people within decorous bounds. The crowd too didn’t dare move a foot. Sometimes we heard its muffled muttering, it was like choral praise. Still, there was a feeling of privilege and intimacy. Because it was the Emperor’s habit to leave for the summer without pomp, and early in the morning, in that hour when the Emperor is at his most human, the one in which he has just quit bed and bath and dressing-room. Hence the low-key livery of the coachman, no more than the coachman of a rich man might have worn. Hence the open carriage, with no seat at the rear. Hence no one on the box but the coachman himself, while the carriage was standing by. It wasn’t the Spanish ceremony of the Habsburgs, the ceremony of the Spanish midday sun. It was the minor Austrian ceremony of an early morning in Schönbrunn.

  But just because this was so, his lustre was the more readily discernible, and it seemed to be personal to the Emperor and not from the laws that hedged him about. The light was modest, which made it visible rather than dazzling. We could, so to speak, see to the heart of the lustre. An Emperor in the morning, going on his summer holiday, in an open carriage, without retainers: an Emperor tout privé. A human majesty. He was leaving behind the business of government and going on holiday. Every cobbler could imagine it was himself giving the Emperor permission to go away. And because subjects bow most deeply when they imagine they are giving their master something, this morning found his people at their most submissive. And because the Emperor was not separated from them by any ceremonial, they themselves made up their own ceremonial in the privacy of their hearts, in which everyone placed themselves and the Emperor. They hadn’t been invited to Court. So each one invited the Emperor to Court instead.

  From time to time we felt how a shy, distant rumour arose, without the courage to make itself public, but just entertaining the possibility of an “airing”. Suddenly it seemed the Emperor had already left the palace, we seemed to feel how he received the declamation of a poem from an infant, and in the same way as the first intimation of a still distant storm is a wind, so the first thing one sensed of the approaching Emperor was the grace that wafts ahead of majesties. Shaken by it, a couple of the committee gentlemen went into a little tizz, and from their excitement, as on a thermometer, we read the temperature, the state of things that were going on within.

  At long last, the heads of those standing at the front were uncovered, and those standing further back felt suddenly restless
. What was this? Disrespect? By no means! Only their awe had become a little curious, and was eagerly looking about for an object. Now they scraped with their feet, even the disciplined horses pinned back their ears, and then the most unbelievable thing happened: the coachman himself pursed his lips like a child sucking a sweet, and so gave the horses to understand that they were not allowed to behave like the people.

  And then it was really the Emperor. There he was, old and stooped, tired after the poem declamations and already a little rattled, so early in the morning, by the display of loyalty on the part of his people, perhaps also a little journey-proud, in that condition that the newspaper reports were pleased to refer to as “the youthful freshness of our monarch”, and with that slow old man’s step that was called “supple”, almost tippling along and with gently jingling spurs, an old and slightly dusty black officer’s cap on his head, as might have been worn at the time of Radetzky, no higher than four fingers’ width. The young lieutenants scorned this design of cap. The Emperor was the only one in the army who kept so rigidly to the rules. Because he was an Emperor.

  An old cloak, lined with a dull red, enwrapped him. The sabre dragged a little at his side. His diligently waxed and polished cavalry boots shone like dark mirrors, and we saw his narrow black trousers with the wide red general’s stripe, unpressed trousers, that in the old way were of a tubular roundness. The Emperor kept raising his hand in salute. He nodded and smiled. He had the look in his eye of someone who seems to see nothing in particular and everyone in general. His eye described a semicircle like the sun, scattering beams of grace to all who were there.

  At his side walked his adjutant, almost his age but not so tired, always half a step behind His Majesty, more impatient and probably very nervous, impelled by the deep desire that the Emperor might already be seated in his carriage and the loyalty of his subjects have come to a natural end. And as though the Emperor weren’t heading towards his carriage, but were perfectly capable of losing himself somewhere in the throng, were it not for the adjutant, he continued to make tiny inaudible comments in the ear of the Emperor, who after every whisper on the part of the adjutant, seemed to turn his head very slightly away. Finally they had both reached the carriage. The Emperor sat and issued greetings in a smiling semicircle. The adjutant walked round the back of the carriage and sat down. But even before doing so, he made a movement as though to sit not at the side of the Emperor but facing him, and we could clearly see the Emperor move something away to encourage the man to sit at his side. At that moment a servant appeared with a blanket, which was slowly lowered over the legs of both old men. The servant turned sharply, and leaped up onto the box, alongside the coachman. He was the Emperor’s personal valet. He too was almost as old as the Emperor, but as lissom as a youth; service had kept him supple, just as ruling had caused his master to age.

  Already the horses were pulling, and we picked up the silver sheen from the Emperor’s dundrearies. The crowd shouted their “Hurrah!” and “Long Live the Emperor!” At that instant a woman plunged forward, and a piece of paper fluttered into the carriage like a consternated bird. A petition! The woman was seized, the carriage stopped, and while plainclothes policemen took her by the shoulders, the Emperor smiled at her, as though to allay the pain the police was doing her. And everyone was convinced the Emperor didn’t know the woman would be locked away. Meanwhile she was taken to a police station, questioned, and released. Her petition would have its effect. The Emperor owed it to himself.

  The carriage was gone. The even clopping of the hooves disappeared in the shouting of the crowd. The day had turned oppressively hot. A heavy summer’s day. The clock on the tower struck eight. The sky was a deep azure blue. The trams jingled. The sounds of the world awoke.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 March 1928

  *Majesty: between 1867 and 1915, the Habsburgs were Emperors of Austria (the Holy Roman Empire) and Kings of Hungary—kaiserlich (imperial) and königlich (royal). This gave rise to the designation ‘Dual Monarchy’, the emblem of the double-headed eagle and the abbreviation “k. and k.”, sometimes jocularly—as by Robert Musil—termed “Kakania”.

  IV

  USSR

  28. The Czarist Émigrés

  Long before we thought of visiting the new Russia, the old one came to us. The émigrés brought with them the wild aroma of their homeland, of dispossession, of blood and poverty, of their singular romantic destiny. It suited our clichéd European notions of Russians that they had experienced such things, that they found themselves expelled from their warm hearths, were aimless wanderers through the world, were derailed. We were armed with the old literary formula reflexively applied for every transgression and excess: “the Russian soul”. Europe was familiar with music-hall Cossacks, the operatic excesses of Russian peasant weddings, Russian singers and their balalaikas. It never understood (not even after the Russians turned up on our doorstep) how French romanciers—the most conservative in the world—and sentimental Dostoyevsky readers had deformed the Russian to a kitschy figure compounded of divinity and bestiality, alcohol and philosophy, samovar cosiness and the barren steppes of Asia. As for the Russian woman! A kind of human animal endowed with remorse and adulterous passion, wasteful and rebellious, a writer’s wife and a bomb-maker. The longer the emigration went on, the more our Russians resembled the notion we had of them. They flattered us by assimilating themselves to it. Their feeling of playing a part maybe soothed their misery. They bore it more easily once it was appreciated as literature. The Russian count as Paris cabbie takes his fares straight into a storybook. His fate itself may be ghastly. But it is at least literary.

  The anonymous life of the émigrés became a public production. And then they began to make an exhibition of themselves. Hundreds of them founded theatres, choirs, dance groups, balalaika orchestras. For two years they were all new, authentic, stupefying. After a while they became boring and redundant. They lost their connection to their native soil. They grew ever further away from Russia—and Russia from them. Europe had heard of Meyerhold—meanwhile they were still retailing Stanislavsky. The “blue birds” started to sing in French, English and German. Finally they flew to America and started to moult.

  The émigrés saw themselves as the only rightful representatives of Russia. What grew to significance in Russia following the Revolution was decried as “un-Russian” or “Jewish” or “cosmo­politan”. Europe had long since got used to seeing Lenin as a representative of Russia. The émigrés were back with Nicholas II. They clung to the past with moving fealty, but they transgressed against history. And they took away from their own tragedy as well.

  Oh, but they had to live. That’s why they appeared in staged Cossack gallops in the Paris Hippodrome with alien horses, dressed with crooked Turkish scimitars that they bought at the fair in Clignancourt, took empty bandoliers and blunt daggers out in Montmartre, stuffed catskin bearskins on their heads and inspired awe as Don chieftains outside the doors of tacky establishments, even if they had been born in Volhynia. Some erased their trails with stateless Nansen passports and became archdukes. No one cared anyway. They were all equally good at plucking their homesickness and their melancholy on their balalaikas, putting on red morocco leather boots with silver spurs and spinning round on one heel kicking up their legs. I saw a duchess performing a Russian wedding in a Parisian variété. She was the blushing bride; night-watchmen from the Rue Pigalle, dressed as boyars, stood either side, ranked like flowerpots; a cardboard cathedral sparkled in the background; from it emerged the priest with a candy-floss beard; glass jewels shone in the Russian sun, which emerged from a spotlight; and the band dribbled the song of the Volga into the hearts of the audience from pizzicato violins. The other noblewomen were played by waitresses in various bars, notepads hung from Tula silver chains on their aprons. Their heads sat proudly atop their necks, models of rigid émigré tragedy.

  Others, broken, sat slumped on the benches of the Tuileries
, the Jardins du Luxembourg, the Viennese Prater, the Berlin Tiergarten, the banks of the Danube in Budapest, and the cafés of Constantinople. They were in touch with the reactionaries of their respective host nations. They sat there and mourned their fallen sons and daughters, their missing wives—but also the gold watch, a present from Alexander III. Many had left Russia because they couldn’t stand “the wretchedness of the country” any more. I know Russian Jews expropriated only a few years before by Denikin and Petljura, who now hate nothing in the world so much as Trotsky, who hasn’t lifted a finger to hurt them. They want the return of their false baptismal certificate with which they once humbly, unworthily sneaked their way into the great forbidden Russian cities.

  In the little hotel in the Quartier Latin where I stayed, lived one of the well-known Russian “counts”, along with his father, wife, children and a “bonne”. The old count was still the genuine article. He heated his soup on a spirit burner, and even though I knew him to be a leading anti-Semite and a figure in the exploitation of the peasantry, there was still something moving about him. He would crawl shivering through the damp evenings of autumn, a symbol, no longer a human being, a leaf, dissevered from the tree of life. But his son, brought up abroad, elegantly clad by Parisian tailors, kept by better-off noblemen—the difference! In the ­telephone exchange he conferred with former life guards, sent birthday greetings to genuine and fake Romanovs, and left kitschy pink billets-doux in the mailboxes of ladies staying in the hotel. He drove to czarist congresses, and he lived like a little émigré god in France. Soothsayers, priests, fortune tellers and theosophists beat a path to his door, all those who knew what the future held for Russia, namely the return of Catherine the Great and the troika, bear-hunts and katorga, Rasputin and the serf system.