Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

Now all would be revealed. The smaller box contained an enamel miniature of my father, framed in a thin circlet of gold. His big moustaches, his dark, gleaming, almost fanatical eyes, the heavy, carefully and intricately knotted tie round the strikingly high wing collar made him strange to me. Perhaps that was how he looked before I was born. That was how he was alive and dear and familiar to my mother. I am blond and blue-eyed, my eyes were always sceptical, sad, knowing eyes, never the fanatical eyes of a believer. But my mother said: “You’re exactly like him, take his picture with you!” I thanked her and took it. My mother was a clever, clear-sighted woman. Now it became clear to me that she had never seen me properly. Certainly, she loved me deeply. But she was a woman; she loved the son of her husband, not her child. I was the progeny of her beloved: decisively sprung from his loins; and in some secondary way, the fruit of her womb as well.

She opened the second box. There, bedded on snow white velvet lay a large hexagonal amethyst, clasped in a delicately braided gold chain, which made the stone look coarse, almost crude. It wasn’t that it was on a chain, more as though it had got the chain into its possession, and dragged it around everywhere like a weak and submissive female slave. “For your bride!” said my mother. “Give it to her today!” I kissed my mother’s hand, and slipped the second box into my pocket as well.

Just then our manservant announced visitors, my father-in-law and Elisabeth. “In the drawing-room,” decreed my mother. “My mirror!” Jacques brought her the oval hand-mirror. She studied her face in it for a long time, impassively. The women of that time did not need to adjust their dress, complexions or hair by means of make-up, powder, combs, or even by running their fingers through their hair. It was as though my mother was using the mirror to command everything she saw in it — hair, face, dress — to the most punctilious discipline. Without her having raised a finger, all intimacy and closeness suddenly disappeared, and I felt almost like the guest of an elderly lady I didn’t know very well. “Come!” she said. “My cane!” Her cane, a thin wand of ebony, leaned against her chair. She needed it not for support but as a prop for her dignity.

My father-in-law in a morning-coat and not so much wearing gloves as issued with them, Elisabeth in a high-necked silver-grey dress, a diamond cross on her bosom, looking taller than usual, and as pale as the dull silver clasp at her left hip, were both standing almost rigidly upright as we entered. My father-in-law bowed, Elisabeth performed a slight curtsey. Unbothered, I kissed her. The war rendered all ceremonial obligations superfluous. “Forgive the ambush!” said my father-in-law. “You mean the pleasant surprise,” my mother corrected him. She was eyeing Elisabeth as she spoke. Well, in a couple of weeks, I’d be home again, joked my father-in-law. My mother sat bolt upright on a hard, narrow rococo chair. “People,” she said, “sometimes know when they’re leaving. They never know when they’re returning.” She eyed Elisabeth. She ordered coffee, cognac and liqueurs. Not for a second did she smile. At a certain moment she looked hard at my tunic pocket, where I had stashed the box with the amethyst. I understood. Without a word, I looped the chain round Elisabeth’s neck. The stone hung over the cross. Elisabeth smiled, walked over to the mirror, and my mother nodded

at her; Elisabeth took off the cross. The crude purple amethyst shimmered on her silver-grey dress. It looked like frozen blood on frozen ground. I turned away.

We rose. My mother embraced Elisabeth without kissing her. “Leave now with our visitors!” she told me. “Come back tonight!” she added. “I want to know when the wedding is to be. We’re having trout, bleu !” She waved her hand, as crowned heads wave with their fans. She left the room.

Downstairs, in the car (my father-in-law told me the make, I forgot it), I learned that everything in the Döbling church was ready. The hour was not yet fixed, but would probably be ten o’clock. Our witnesses were Zelinsky and Heidegger. Simple ceremony. “Martial,” said my father-in-law.

That evening, while we slowly and carefully ate our trout, bleu , my mother, probably for the first time since she had taken over the household, started to talk of so-called serious subjects during a meal. I was just launching into praise of the trout. She interrupted me. “Perhaps this is the last time we will sit together!” she said. Nothing more. “You’ll be going out tonight to say your goodbyes?” “Yes, Mama!” “Till tomorrow, then!” She left without turning round.

Yes, I went out to say my goodbyes. Or rather, I wandered around, trying to. Here and there I ran into someone I knew. The people on the pavements blurted out incomprehensible cries. It took me some time before I had understood what they were saying. Bands were playing the Radetzky March, the Deutschmeister March, or Heil du, mein Österreich ! There were gypsy bands, Heurigen bands, in bourgeois establishments. People were drinking beer. Wherever I walked in, a couple of NCOs would get to their feet to salute, and civilians would wave their beer mugs in my direction. I had the feeling I was the only sober man in the whole city, and that made me feel odd. Yes, my city was withdrawing from me, moving away from me, further with each passing minute, and the streets and lanes and gardens, however noisy and crowded they were, seemed to me to have died out, just as I would see them later, after the war and after coming home. I wandered around into the small hours, took a room in the old Bristol, had a couple of hours’ sleep, wrestling the while with plans and thoughts and memories, went to the War Ministry, received my confirmation, drove to our old barracks on the Landstrasser Hauptstrasse, said goodbye to Major Pauli our commanding officer, received “open orders” telling me to join the Thirty-Fifth, hurried to Döbling, heard that I was to be married at half past ten, returned to my mother to give her the news, and then to Elisabeth.

We let it be known that Elisabeth would accompany me a ways. My mother kissed me, as per usual, on the forehead, got into her cab quick and cold and brisk, in spite of her slow air. It was a sealed carriage. Even before it started to move, I could see her hurriedly pull down the blinds in the little window in the back. And I knew that within, in the gloom of the little compartment, she was just starting to cry. My father-in-law kissed both of us blithely and cheerily. He had dozens of platitudes for the occasion, and they came tumbling out of him, and, like smells, were quickly dispelled. We left him, somewhat brusquely. “I’ll just let you get on with it, then!” he called out after us.

Elisabeth wasn’t accompanying me to the East. Rather, we were going to Baden together. We had sixteen hours ahead of us, sixteen long, full, replete, fleeting, inadequate hours.

Sixteen hours! I had been in love with Elisabeth for three years, but those three years struck me as brief compared to the sixteen hours, when surely it should have been the other way around. Forbidden things are rushed, while what is sanctioned has a certain built-in longevity. Besides, while Elisabeth didn’t seem changed to me, she seemed at least to be on the way to change. I thought about my father-in-law, and detected similarities between him and her. A few of her hand gestures were clearly his; they were like distant and refined echoes of gestures of her father’s. Some of the things she did on the little electric train to Baden almost offended me. For example, barely ten minutes after we had started moving, she took a book out of her little valise. There it was, between her cosmetics bag and her underthings — the bridal robe, I was thinking — and the very fact that a book of all things could presume to rest on such a near-sacramental garment seemed outrageous to me. (The book, incidentally, was a collection of gags of one of those North German humorists who at that time, along with our Nibelung tendency, the German Schulverein , and itinerant lecturers from Pomerania, Danzig, Mecklenburg and Königsberg, were just beginning to spread their drizzly good humour and their noisome expansiveness over Vienna.) Elisabeth looked up from her book, looked at me, looked out of the window, stifled a yawn, and went back to her book. She had a way of crossing her legs that struck me as positively indecent. Was she enjoying her book, I asked. “Funny!” she observed. She passed it to me, so that I might see for myself. I started reading one of the silly tales halfway through; it was about the delicious humour of August the Strong, and a relationship with a cheeky lady-in-waiting. The two epithets, to my mind indicative of Prussian and Saxon souls on their day off, were enough for me. “Delicious,” I said, “delicious and cheeky!” Elisabeth smiled, and read on. We had a reservation at the Golden Lion hotel. Our old servant was in attendance, the only person who had been made privy to our Baden plan. He confessed to me right away that he had betrayed it to my mother. He stood there, at the terminus of the electrical suburban line, holding in his hand the stiff bowler hat that my father had probably left him, and presented my wife with a bouquet of dark red roses. He kept his head bowed, the reflection of the sun left a speck of silver on his bald pate, like a little star. Elisabeth was silent. If only she would say something! I thought. Nothing came. The silent ceremony went on forever. Our two little cases stood together on the pavement. Elisabeth clutched her roses to her, along with her handbag. The old fellow asked us if there was anything he could do for us. He conveyed greetings from my mother. My trunk with my spare uniform and my linens was already in the hotel. “Thank you!” I said. I observed how Elisabeth flinched and moved a little to the side. This flinching, this desertion provoked me. I told Jacques: “Accompany us to the hotel, will you! I want to talk to you still.” “Very good, sir!” he said, and he picked up our cases and toddled off after us.