Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

But I was thinking about Elisabeth.

I was thinking about Elisabeth. Ever since I had read the Emperor’s proclamation, I had only two thoughts in my head: one was of death, and the other was of Elisabeth. To this day I don’t know which of them was stronger.

Faced with death, all my foolish anxieties about the foolish jeers of my friends vanished and were forgotten. All at once, I felt brave, for the first time in my life I had courage to own up to my so-called “weakness.” I sensed that the facile exuberance of my friends in Vienna would have recoiled before the black gleam of death, and that in the hour of farewell — of such a farewell — there could be no space for any sort of mockery.

I too could have reported for duty to the local recruiting office in Zloczow, where the cabbie Manes was expected and where my cousin Joseph Branco was also going. In fact, it was my intention to forget Elisabeth and my friends in Vienna and my mother, and deliver myself as soon as possible to the nearest receiving station of death, which is to say, the local recruiting office in Zloczow. Strong feelings bound me to my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend the cabbie Manes Reisiger. Given the nearness of death, my feelings became purer and clearer, just as sometimes, with the onset of a grave illness, clear insights and priorities emerge, so that, for all one’s apprehension and anxiety and sense of suffering to come, a sort of proud satisfaction sets in that one has understood something; the happiness one has identified in suffering, and a sort of serenity because one has been presented with the bill in advance. We are almost happy in our illness. I was just as happy in contemplation of the great illness that was breaking out in the world, which is to say the World War. I could allow my fever dreams their course, which otherwise I tried to suppress. I was in equal measure liberated and endangered.

I already knew that my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend Manes Reisiger were dearer to me than all my erstwhile friends, with the exception of Count Chojnicki. People’s notions of the war ahead were simplistic and for the most part ridiculous. I myself supposed we would march by garrisons, probably in closed ranks, and if not side by side, then at least remain in hailing distance. I pictured myself as I wished to be: in close proximity to my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend, the cabbie Manes.

But there was no time to lose. In fact, what chiefly oppressed us in those days was haste: there was no more time to fill the negligible amount of space left us by our lives, not even time to ready ourselves to die. We didn’t really know whether to yearn for death or hope to escape with our lives. For me and the likes of me these were hours of utmost tension: hours in which death no longer looked like an abyss that you plunge into one day, more like a further shore that you try to leap across to, and you know how long the seconds feel before you leap.

I went first to my mother’s, as though following some prompting of nature. It was clear that she didn’t think she would see me again, but she pretended to be expecting me. It’s one of the secrets of mothers: they never pass up a chance to see their offspring, whether supposed dead or actually dead; and if it were possible for a dead son to be resurrected, she would take him in her arms as promptly as though he hadn’t returned from the hereafter, but merely from the reaches of here somewhere. A mother is always expecting the return of her son: whether he’s near or far or dead. It was in such a spirit that my mother welcomed me at nine o’clock that morning. She was sitting there as ever, in her chair, having just finished her breakfast, with the newspaper in front of her and her old-fashioned oval steel-rimmed spectacles on. She took them off when I walked in, but she didn’t lower her newspaper. “I kiss your hand, Mother!” I said, walked up to her, and took the newspaper from her. I fell into her lap. She kissed me on the mouth, the cheeks, the brow. “So it’s war,” she said, as though she was breaking the news to me, or as though the war had only begun with the moment of my return home to say goodbye.

“Yes,” I replied, “it’s war, and I’ve come to say goodbye to you.” “And also,” I added after a while, “to marry Elisabeth before I join up.”

“Why marry,” asked my mother, “if you’re off to the war?” Here too, she was speaking like a mother. If she was letting her son — her only son — go off to the war, then she wanted to be sure she was delivering him into the hands of death, and death alone. She didn’t want to share her possession or her loss with another woman.

She had probably guessed for a long time that I was in love with Elisabeth. (She knew her.) My mother had probably been afraid for a long time that she would lose her only son to another woman — which seemed on balance worse than losing him to death. “Son of mine,” she said, “you are old enough to decide what you want to do with your life. You want to get married before you go to war; I understand. I am not a man, I have never experienced war, I know little of the army. But I know that war is something terrible, and that you may very well die in the course of it. At this time I can be blunt with you. I don’t care for Elisabeth. I would never have stood in the way of your marrying her, not even under normal circumstances. But I wouldn’t have been blunt with you. Marry her and be happy, if circumstances permit. And there’s an end. Now, let’s talk about other things: when are you reporting? And where?”

For the first time in my life I felt sheepish, even a little insignificant, in front of my mother. I had no other answer to give than a rather pathetic: “I’m sure I’ll be back soon, Mama!” which still sounds wretched in my ears today.

“Be back by lunchtime, son,” she said, the way she always did, and as though the world were perfectly in order, “we’re having schnitzel and plum dumplings for lunch.”

It was a classic display of motherhood: my readiness to die suddenly trumped by the peaceful dumplings. I could have fallen to my knees with emotion. But I was still too young at the time to be able to show emotion without embarrassment. I’ve since learned that it takes great maturity and experience for a man to display emotion without embarrassment.

I kissed my mother’s hand, as I always did. Her hand — how could I ever forget it — was slender and delicate and veined with blue. The morning light swept into the room, a little dimmed by the dark red silk curtains, like a well-behaved guest dressed in formal attire. The pale hand of my mother took on a reddish shimmer as well, a kind of blushing scarlet, a hallowed hand gloved in morning sunlight. And the hesitant autumnal twitter of the birds in our garden was almost as familiar and almost as remote to me as the familiar red-veiled hand of my mother.

“I have to go,” was all I said. I went to see the father of my dearly loved Elisabeth.

The father of my dearly loved Elisabeth was at that time a prominent, almost a celebrated, hat-maker. He had gone from a ten-a-penny “imperial councillor” to a common-or-garden Hungarian baron. The positively arcane customs of the old Monarchy sometimes called for Austrian commercial councillors to become Hungarian barons.

The war came at a not unwelcome juncture for my future father-in-law. He was already too old to have to serve, but still young enough to make the leap from a respectable solid hat-maker to a dashing manufacturer of those army caps that bring in so much more profit and cost so much less to produce than a topper.

It was noon, the bells in the Rathaus were just striking, and when I walked in, he was just back from a highly satisfactory meeting at the War Ministry. He had been given a contract to make half a million army caps. In this way, he told me, an ageing helpless man could still serve his fatherland. As he spoke, he kept running his hands through his greying blond whiskers, as though to caress both halves of the Dual Monarchy, its Cis- and Trans-Leithanian wings. He was big, heavy and slow. He made me think of a sort of sunny porter who had undertaken to make half a million caps, and whom such a burden, far from weighing him down, made lighter. “Well, I suppose you’ll be reporting for duty then!” he said in positively genial tones. “I don’t think I’m giving anything away if I say my daughter will miss you.”