Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

At that moment, I saw I couldn’t possibly ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage. And with that impetuosity with which one tries to make the impossible possible, and that haste with which an ever-advancing death compelled me to seize whatever remained of my life, I was brusque with the hat-maker: “I need to speak to your daughter right away.”

“My young friend,” he replied, “I know you want to ask for her hand in marriage. I know Elisabeth won’t turn you down. So why don’t you just take mine for the moment, and see yourself as my son!” And with that he put out his large, soft and far too white hand. I took it and had the sensation of paddling around in some hopeless pastry dough. It was a hand without pressure and without warmth. It gave the lie to his offer of making me his “son,” it even rescinded it. Elisabeth came in, and the hat-maker saved me the trouble of speaking. “Herr Trotta is away to the war” — thus my father-in-law, as if to say I was going to the Riviera for a holiday — “but he would like to marry you first.”

He spoke in the same tones he had used an hour before in the War Ministry, talking to the equipment johnnies about forage caps. But there was Elisabeth. There was her smile, seeming to float ahead of her towards me, a light that was born in her, and seemed everlasting and eternally renewable, a silvery bliss that seemed to tinkle, though it was silent.

We fell into each other’s arms. We kissed for the very first time, passionately, shamelessly almost, in spite of her father’s presence, yes, perhaps even with the blissful criminal awareness of having a witness to our indiscretion. I told her the situation. I had no time. Death stood at my back. I was its son, more than I was the son of any hat-maker. I had to join my Twenty-First, on the Landstrasser Hauptstrasse. I hurried off, straight from Elisabeth’s embrace into the army; from love to destruction. I relished them both with the same fortitude of heart. I hailed a cab, and trundled off to the barracks.

I met friends and comrades there. Some of them, like me, were coming straight out of embraces.

They came straight out of embraces, and they had the sense that they had already performed the critical part of their warriors’ duties. They had set a date for their weddings. Each of them had lined up some girl or other to marry, even if it wasn’t a proper match but a chance hook-up of a kind that in those times for unknown reasons seemed to come fluttering along from who knew where, not unlike moths fluttering in through an open window on a summer night to our tables and beds and mantelpieces — fluttering, flighty, effortless, devoted, the velvety gifts of a brief and generous night. If peace had continued, each of us would surely have held out against a legal marriage. It was only heirs to the throne who were required to marry. At thirty, our fathers were all dignified patresfamiliases and heads of households. But in us, foredoomed to war from birth, the reproductive urge had manifestly faded. We had no very great desire to procreate. Death crossed its bony hands not only above the glass bumpers from which we drank, but also over the beds in which at night we slept with our women. And that was perhaps why there was something so lackadaisical about our women in those days. We didn’t even greatly care for the pleasure of sex.

But now, now that war suddenly summoned us to the reserve depots, it wasn’t the thought of death that it bred in us, but that of honour, and its sister, danger. Honour is an anaesthetic, and what it anaesthetized in us was fear and foreboding. When a man is on his deathbed, and draws up his will and settles his worldly accounts, he will experience a certain tremor. But we were young and healthy! We could feel no tremor, not really; it just suited us, flattered us to evoke the idea of it in our relatives. Yes, we made our wills out of vanity; out of vanity we married in haste, with a headlong rush that precluded thought or even remorse. Marriage made us appear nobler than we already were by virtue of our sacrifice. For us it made death (which we feared but still preferred to a lifelong commitment) less dangerous and less ugly. We burned our bridges. And that first unforgettable and fine elan with which we advanced into those first terrible battles was surely fuelled by our fear of retreating into “settled domesticity,” fear of gouty furniture, of wives who lost their attractiveness, of children who came into the world lovely as angels only to turn into hateful and monstrous strangers. No, we didn’t want any of that. Danger was unavoidable. But to sweeten it, we got engaged. And so we went out to meet it, like an unknown but already beckoning and half-familiar home. .

Even so, and although I knew I felt just like them, compared to my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend the Jewish cabbie Manes Reisiger, my comrades, as I record their names here, Reserve Ensign Bärenfels, Lieutenant Hartmann, First Lieutenant Linck, Baron Lerch and Officer Cadet Dr Brociner, struck me as superficial, frivolous, uncomradely, dull and unworthy both of the death they were going to meet, and of the settlements and weddings they were in the process of arranging. Of course I loved my Twenty-First Jägers! The old K-and-K army had a patriotism all of its own, a patriotism of regions, regiments and units. Militarily speaking, I had grown up with Sergeant Marek, with Corporal Türling, with Lance Corporal Alois Huber during my service and later on, during the annual manoeuvres. And of course one grows up a second time in the army: just as a child learns to walk, so a recruit learns to march. A man never forgets the recruits who learned to march at the same time as him, and to clean rifles and train with rifles, the packing of a haversack, and the regulation way to make a bed, to roll up a coat, to spit and polish boots, and night duty, Service Regulation part two, and the definitions: subordination and discipline, Service Regulation, part one. You never forget them or the water meadows you jogged around, with elbows tucked, and in late autumn the physical training, the grey mist turning every silver fir into a blue-grey widow, and the clearing in front of us, where soon, after the ten o’clock break, the field training would begin, the idyllic envoys of the real, scarlet war. You don’t forget. The water meadows of the Twenty-First regiment were my home.

But my comrades were so cheerful about it all! We sat at the little bar that wasn’t really a bar, not from the beginning, not from birth so to speak. Rather in the course of the many, almost innumerable years where our barracks, the barracks of the Twenty-First, had been situated and established here, it had evolved from an army outfitter’s, where you could buy braid, pips, one-year-service badges, rosettes and bootlaces, into a bar. Gold braid was still stocked on the shelves. The dingy atmosphere was still more redolent of cardboard boxes of stars — the ones of white rubber, the ones of gold silk, the rosettes for military officials, and the sword knots, which looked like concentrated showers of gold — than of apple juice, schnapps and old Gumpoldskirchner. In front of the counter, three or four little tables were set up. They were about as long-serving as we were. In fact, we had acquired them, and Zinker the owner had obtained his alcohol licence simply because our battalion commander, Major Pauli, had supported it. Civilians were not allowed to drink at Zinker’s. The licence was for uniformed personnel only.

So there we were, huddled together again, in the outfitter’s, just as once in our volunteer year. And the blitheness of my comrades, toasting our victory, just as years before they had drunk to our approaching officer’s exams, deeply offended me. It’s possible that my prophetic sense was just then unusually strong, my sense that while my comrades might manage to scrape through their officers’ exams, given an actual war, they would fail. They had grown up in a pampered Vienna that was continually kept supplied by the Crown Lands of the Monarchy, naive, almost absurdly naive children of the celebrated and cossetted and over-mythologized Capital and Residence City, which sat, like a gleaming seductive spider, in the middle of a great black and yellow web, continually drawing strength and juice and glitter from the surrounding Crown Lands. The taxes that my poor cousin the chestnut roaster Joseph Branco Trotta paid in Sipolje, and the taxes that my impoverished Jewish cabbie Manes Reisiger paid in Zlotogrod went on maintaining the proud houses on the Ring belonging to the ennobled Jewish family Todesco, and the public buildings, the Parliament, the Law Courts, the University, the Land Credit Bank, the National Theatre, the Opera, and even the Police Presidium. The gaudy serenity of the Imperial Capital and Residence City was very clearly sustained — my father had often said so — by the tragic love of the Crown Lands for Austria, tragic because not reciprocated. The gypsies from the Puszta, the sub-Carpathian Hutsuls, the Jewish cabbies from Galicia, my own relatives, the Slovene chestnut roasters from the Bačka, the horse-breeders from the steppe, the Ottoman Sibersna from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse-traders from the Haná in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge, the millers and coral sellers from Podolia: they were the great-hearted feeders and suppliers of Austria; and the poorer they were, the more generous. So much hurt, so much pain, so much sacrifice had gone into making the centre of the Monarchy appear to the eyes of the world as a home of the Graces, of merriment, and genius. Our culture flourished and spread, but their fields were fertilized by sorrow and grief. I thought, while we were sitting together, of Manes Reisiger and of Joseph Branco. Those two would certainly not go to their deaths as airily, nor die such light-opera deaths as my comrades in my battalion. Nor would I: no, nor would I! Probably in that hour I was the only one who sensed the brute violence of what lay ahead of us, unlike and in contrast to my comrades. Therefore I abruptly got to my feet, and to my own surprise spoke as follows: “Comrades! You all are dear to me, as should be the situation among comrades in particular in the hour before death.” — And at that point my voice choked. My heart stopped, my tongue faltered. I remembered my father and — God forgive me! — I lied. I put something in the mouth of my late father that he never actually said, though it might have occurred to him to say it. I resumed, then: “It was one of my father’s last wishes that in the event of war, which he correctly predicted, I shouldn’t report for duty with my dear Twenty-First, but in the same regiment as my cousin Joseph Branco.”