Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

Of course I went for rides every day in the cab of my friend Manes Reisiger. The country was in actual fact poor, but it looked blithe and flush. Even the expanse of swamp where nothing grew looked juicy and bountiful to me, and the good-natured chorus of frogs that emanated from it was a hymn of praise from creatures who happened to have an acuter understanding than I did of the purpose for which the Almighty had created their home, the swamps.

At night I sometimes heard the hoarse, broken cries of the wild geese flying high above. There was still plenty of green on the willows and birches, but the magnificent chestnuts were already shedding their tough, bronze, precisely silhouetted leaves. The ducks chattered in the middle of the road, where the silver-grey mud, never completely dry, was punctuated by occasional ponds.

I usually ate my dinner with the officers of the Ninth Dragoons; or, more accurately, drank it. Over the glass bumpers from which we drank, an invisible Death was already crossing his bony hands. We didn’t sense them. Sometimes we sat together till late. Out of an inexplicable fear of the night, we stayed up till dawn.

An inexplicable fear, I say, though to us at the time it seemed rational; we sought an explanation in the claim that we were too young to neglect the nights. In fact, as I saw later, it was our fear of the day, more precisely, our fear of morning, the clearest portion of the day. That’s when a man can see and is himself seen with the greatest clarity. And we had no desire either to see, or to be seen clearly.

In the morning, then, to escape that clarity, and also the dull, unrefreshing sleep that I knew all too well, and that overcomes a man after a night on the tiles like a false friend, a quack doctor, a treacherous well-wisher, or a supposed benefactor, I took refuge with Manes, the coachman. I often turned up around six in the morning, just as he was getting up. He lived outside the town, close to the cemetery. It took me half an hour to get there on foot. I would arrive sometimes just as he had got out of bed. His little house stood there all by itself, surrounded by fields and meadows that didn’t belong to him, painted blue, and with a grey black shingled roof, not unlike a living creature that seemed not to stand, but to be in motion. So strong was the deep blue of the walls against the slowly waning yellow-green that surrounded it on all sides. When I pushed open the red gate that barred the way to the coachman Manes’s residence, I sometimes caught him standing in his doorway. He would be standing in front of the brown door, in his homespun shirt and drawers, barefoot and bareheaded, holding a large brown can in his hand. He would take a sup from it, then spit out the water in a great arc. With his great black beard, staring into the rising sun, in his coarse linens, with his wild and woolly hair, he was redolent of jungle, primitive, primordial, confused and misplaced, who knew why.

He pulled off his shirt and washed himself at the well. He spluttered and snorted as he did so, spat, howled and roared, it really was like the primitive invading our time. Then he pulled on his coarse shirt, and we each advanced to exchange greetings. Our greetings were in equal part formal and heartfelt. There was a kind of ceremony about them, though we saw each other almost every morning, a tacit assurance that to me he was more than a Jewish coachman, while for him I was more than a young whippersnapper from the capital, with influential friends. Sometimes he asked me to read the rare letters his son wrote him from the conservatory. They were short letters, but since in the first place he didn’t have a very good grasp of the German in which his son felt obliged to write — goodness only knows why — and secondly because his tender father’s heart wanted these letters to be a little less short than they were, he made sure I read them to him very slowly. Often he would ask me to repeat a sentence two or three times.

The chickens in his little shed started to cluck as soon as he set foot in the yard. The horses whinnied, almost lustfully, to the morning and to Manes the coachman. First, he unlocked the stable, and both greys put out their heads at once. He kissed them both, as a man kisses a woman. Then he went into the shed to get out the carriage. Thereupon, he put the horses to. Then he opened the henhouse, and with much squawking and flapping of wings the fowls scattered. It was as though an invisible hand had dispersed them across the yard.

I also saw the wife of the coachman Manes Reisiger. She got up about half an hour after her husband, and asked me in to tea. I drank it, from the great tin samovar in their blue kitchen, while Manes ate his bread and onion with grated radish and cucumbers. It smelled strong, but secret, almost homely. I had never breakfasted in this way before, but I loved it, I was young, really I was just young.

I even liked the wife of my friend Manes Reisiger, though she was what in common parlance is called plain, red-haired, freckled, looking like a puffed-up bread roll. In spite of that, and in spite of her fat fingers, there was something dainty about the way she poured my tea and prepared her husband’s breakfast. She had given him three children. Two had died of smallpox. She would talk about the dead children sometimes, as though they were still alive. She seemed not to distinguish between those of her children who were in the ground and her son who had gone off to the conservatory in Vienna; perhaps to her he was as good as dead. Certainly, he was no longer present in her life.

Someone who was eminently alive to her and always present in her imagination was my cousin, the chestnut roaster. I drew my own conclusions. In another week he would be with us, my cousin Joseph Branco Trotta.

And in another week, he arrived.

He arrived with his mule, his leather sack and his chestnuts. He was dark and tan and jovial, just as he was when I had last seen him in Vienna. It felt perfectly normal to him to see me here. The proper chestnut season was still a while off. My cousin had simply come a couple of weeks early on my account. On the way from the station into town, he sat on the box alongside our mutual friend, the coachman Manes Reisiger. He had tethered his mule to the cab. His leather sack, his pan and his chestnuts were strapped to either side. And so we made our entry into the little town of Zlotogrod, but we aroused no interest. The people of Zlotogrod were used to seeing my cousin Joseph Branco turning up every other year. And they seemed to have already got used to me, the stranger in their midst.

As usual, my cousin Joseph Branco stayed with Manes Reisiger. Mindful of the deals he had struck with me the previous summer for his watch and chain, he had packed a few more knick-knacks for me, for instance an embossed silver ashtray with two crossed daggers and a St Nicodemus (who had nothing to do with them), also a brass mug that seemed to me to smell of sour dough, and a painted wooden cuckoo. All these, thus Joseph Branco, were presents for me, “in consideration of” his travel expenses. And I understood what he meant by “in consideration of.” I bought the ashtray, the mug and the wooden bird from him on the evening of his arrival. He was happy.

To while away the time, as he claimed, but in fact to take every opportunity of earning a little money, he made occasional attempts to persuade the coachman Manes that he, Joseph Branco, was a skilled coachman, better than Manes, and better able too to find customers. But Reisiger paid no attention. Without bothering about Joseph Branco, he put his horses to early in the morning, and drove off to the station and to the market place, where his colleagues, the other coachmen waited.

It was a fine, sunny summer. Even though Zlotogrod wasn’t a proper “little town” at all, being rather more of a village in disguise; and even though it gave off the fresh breath of nature, to such an extent that the forests, swamps and hills that surrounded it almost seemed to cluster round the marketplace, and you got the impression that forest, swamp and hill might just as easily and naturally march into town as any traveller arriving at the station to put up at the Golden Bear; my friends, the officials in the District Commissioner’s office, and the gentlemen of the Ninth Dragoons were of the view that Zlotogrod was a real town, because they needed to think they hadn’t been banished to the end of the earth, and the mere fact that there was a railway station in Zlotogrod gave them the assurance that they didn’t live remote from the civilisation they had grown up in and that had pampered them. The result was that once or twice a week they claimed to have to leave the unbreathable town air, pile into carriages, and head for the forests, swamps and hills that in actual fact were on their way into town to them. Because not only was Zlotogrod full of nature, it also seemed to be under siege from its surroundings. So it happened that once or twice a week I and my friends went out in Manes Reisiger’s cab into the so-called “environs” of Zlotogrod. We referred to these trips as “outings.” Often we would stop at Jadlowker’s frontier tavern. Old Jadlowker, an ancient, silver-bearded Jew, sat outside the mighty arch of his broad, grass-green double-doors, stiff and half-paralysed. He resembled winter who wanted to enjoy the last fine days of autumn and take them with him into the rapidly approaching eternity that would know no more seasons. He couldn’t hear, not one word, he was deaf as a post. But from his large, sad, black eyes I thought I could tell that everything that younger men took in with their ears, he was able to see, and that his deafness was a chosen deafness that he was happy in. The threads of gossamer flew gently and tenderly past him. The silvery, but still warm autumn sun shone on the old man as he sat facing west, facing the evening and the sunset, the terrestrial emblems of death, as though he expected that the eternity to which he would soon be consigned would come to him, rather than he go out to it. The crickets shrilled incessantly. The frogs croaked incessantly. A deep peace ruled over the world, the bitter peace of autumn.