Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

At about this time, my cousin Joseph Branco, following an old-established tradition among the chestnut roasters of Austria-Hungary, would open his stall on the Ring of Zlotogrod. For two days the warm, chewy smell of baked apples wafted through the little town.

It began to rain. It was a Thursday. The following day, a Friday therefore, the news was on all street-corners.

It was a proclamation from our old Emperor Franz Joseph, and it was addressed: “To my peoples.”

I was an ensign in the Reserve. It was only two years previously that I had left my battalion, the Twenty-First Jägers. At the time it seemed to me that the war had come at a good moment. Now that it was there and inevitable, I saw right away — and it seems to me my friends will have seen it just as spontaneously — that even a meaningless death was better than a meaningless life. I was afraid of death. No question. I didn’t want to die. All I wanted was the certainty that I would know how to die.

My friend Joseph Branco and his friend the cabbie Manes were both reservists. They were drafted. On the evening of the Friday when the Emperor’s proclamation was put up on walls everywhere, I went, as usual, to the officers’ mess, to eat with my friends in the Ninth Dragoons. I couldn’t understand their healthy appetite, their standard good cheer, their foolish equanimity in view of their orders to attack the Russian frontier town of Radziwillow to the northeast. I was the only one among them who saw the signs of death in their harmless, even cheerful, certainly unmoved expressions. It was as though they were in that state of euphoria that is sometimes experienced by people near death, and that is itself an avatar of death. And even though they were healthy and alert as they sat at their tables drinking their schnapps and their beer, and even though I pretended to take part in their tomfooleries and japes, yet I felt more like a doctor or medical orderly who sees his patient dying, thankful only that the dying man seems unaware of his imminent death. And yet in the long run I still felt unease of a kind that the doctor or orderly may feel when confronted with death and the dying man’s euphoria, at that instant when they are not quite sure whether it might not be better to tell the doomed man what awaits him, instead of feeling relief that he might depart without guessing.

As a result I quickly left the gentlemen of the Ninth Dragoons, and set off on my way to Manes the cabbie, with whom, as already said, my cousin Joseph Branco was staying.

How different was the feeling there, and how salutary it was for me after that evening in the mess of the Ninth Dragoons! Maybe it was the ritual candles in the blue parlour of the Jewish cabbie Manes, burning almost cheerfully, but in any case stolidly and fearlessly, towards their extinction; three candles, golden yellow, stuck in green beer bottles; the cabbie Manes was too poor even to buy himself brass candlesticks. They were little more than stumps of candles, and they seemed to me to symbolize the end of the world, which I knew was now at hand. The tablecloth was white, the bottles of that cheap green glass that seems to proclaim its refreshing contents in a plebeian and exuberant manner, and the flickering candle ends were golden yellow. They were guttering. They cast a restless light over the table, and projected equally restless, flickering shadows on the dark blue walls. At the head of the table sat Manes the cabbie, not in his usual cabbie’s gear of belted sheepskin and corduroy cap, but in a shiny three-quarter-length coat and a black velvet cap. My cousin Joseph Branco wore the greasy leather jerkin he always wore, and, out of respect for his Jewish host, a green Tyrolean hat on his head. Somewhere a cricket was chirruping shrilly.

“The time has come for us all to say our goodbyes,” began Manes the cabbie. And, much more clear-sighted than my friends in the Ninth Dragoons, and yet with an almost aristocratic touch of equanimity, because of the way death exalts every man who is both prepared for it and worthy of it, he continued: “It will be a great war, a long war, and there is no knowing which of us may one day come home from it. For the last time I am sitting here, at the side of my wife, at the Friday table, with the Sabbath candles. Let us take a proper farewell, my friends: you, Branco, and you, sir!” And, in order to take a truly proper farewell, we decided, the three of us, to go to Jadlowker’s border tavern.

Jadlowker’s border tavern was always open, at all times of day and night. It was the bar for Russian deserters, those of the Tsar’s soldiers, that is, who could be persuaded, cajoled or threatened by the numerous agents of the American shipping lines to leave the army, and take ship for Canada. Many more, admittedly, quit voluntarily. They paid the agents the last money they had; they or their relations. Jadlowker’s border tavern had the reputation of a disorderly house. But, like all the other disorderly houses in the area, it was commended to the favour of the Austrian border police, and thus in a manner of speaking enjoyed simultaneously the protection and the suspicion of the authorities.

When we got there — at the end of a silent and depressed half-hour walk — the great, brown double-doors were already locked. Even the lantern that hung there was out. We were forced to knock, and the boy Onufri came to let us in. I knew Jadlowker’s tavern, I had been there a couple of times, and I was familiar with the usual commotion of the place, that particular type of noise that is made by people who have suddenly become homeless or stateless, who have no present, because they are transiting from the past into the future, from a familiar past to a highly doubtful future, like ship’s passengers at the moment that they leave terra firma to board an unfamiliar ship by way of a wobbling gangplank.

Today, though, was quiet. It was eerily quiet. Even little Kapturak, one of the keenest and noisiest agents, whose preferred way of hiding all the many things he was professionally and personally obliged to hide was by means of an extreme garrulousness, today sat silently in the corner, on the bench by the stove, small, tinier than he was already, and thus doubly inconspicuous, a silent shadow of his otherwise self. Only the day before yesterday he had escorted a group of deserters, or as they like to say in his calling, a “consignment,” over the frontier, and now the Emperor’s proclamation was on every wall, the war was there, even the mighty shipping agency was powerless, the mighty thunder of world history silenced the chattersome little Kapturak, and its violent lightning reduced him to a shadow. The deserters, Kapturak’s victims, sat with dull and glazed expressions in front of their half-filled glasses. Each time I’d gone to Jadlowker’s tavern before, it had been a particular pleasure of mine — as a young, glib person, who sees in the foolish behaviour of others, even the most exotic and alien, due confirmation of his own thoughtlessness — to spectate at the insouciance of those recently become stateless, the way they drained one glass after another, and ordered one glass after another. The landlord Jadlowker sat behind his bar like an omen, not a messenger of doom, but its bearer; he looked as though he didn’t have the least inclination to fill any glasses, even if his customers had called for it. What was the point of it all? Tomorrow or the day after, the Russians might be here. Poor Jadlowker, who even a week ago had sat there so majestically with his silver beard, like a lord mayor among the barmen, shadowed and shielded as much by the discreet protection of the authorities as by their creditable mistrust, today looked like a human being who is obliged to liquidize his entire existence: a victim of world history. And the heavy blonde barmaid at his side behind the bar had also just been terminated by world history, and given in her brief notice. Everything private was suddenly out in the open. It represented the public world, it stood in for and symbolized it. That was why our farewells were so misguided and so brief. We drank three glasses of mead, and with them we silently munched salted peas. Suddenly my cousin Joseph Branco said: “I’m not going back to Sarajevo. I’m going to report here in Zloczow, together with Manes!” “Bravo!” I exclaimed. And as I did, I knew I would have liked to do exactly the same thing.