Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

“I need to have a chat with the old man!” I said to Elisabeth. “I’ll be up in half an hour!”

I went with Jacques to the café. He kept his bowler hat on his lap; gently I took it away from him, and set it on the chair next to us. All of Jacques’s tenderness seemed to flow to me from the distant, pale blue, slightly moist old eyes; it was as though my mother had left one last maternal message for me in those eyes. His gouty hands (it was a long time since I had last seen them bare, they were only ever in white gloves) trembled as they picked up his coffee cup. They were good faithful servant’s hands. Why had I never looked at them before? Blue knots sat atop the crooked joints of the fingers, the nails were flat, fissured and blunt, the bump of bone at the wrist was askew and seemed unwillingly to suffer the stiff edge of the old-fashioned cuffs, and innumerable pale-blue veins, like tiny rivulets, made their laborious way under the cracked skin of the back of the hand.

We sat in the garden of the Astoria Café. A dry, golden chestnut leaf sailed down and settled on Jacques’s bald skull; he didn’t feel it, his skin had grown leathery and insensitive; I let the leaf lie. “How old are you?” I asked him. “Seventy-eight, young master!” he replied, and I saw a single, large, yellow snaggle-tooth under the thick, white moustache. “It should be me going to war now, not the youngsters!” he went on. “I was there in ’66, against the Prussians, with the Fifteenth.” “Where were you born?” I asked. “In Sipolje!” said Jacques. “Do you know the Trottas?” “Of course I do, all of them!” “And can you still speak Slovene?” “I’ve forgotten, young master!”

“Half an hour!” I had told Elisabeth. I was reluctant to take out my watch. More than an hour might have passed, but I couldn’t tear myself away from Jacques’s pale blue eyes, in which dwelt his pain and my mother’s. I felt somehow as though in the space of this single hour I could atone for the past twenty-three years of my facile and loveless life, and instead of embarking on my so-called new life in the traditional manner of a newly-wed, I bent my mind to try to correct the one that was behind me. Ideally, I would have started again with my birth. It was clear to me that I had made a mess of the most important things. Too late. And now I was standing

before death and before love. For an instant — I admit — I even considered a scandalous, disgraceful ruse. I could send Elisabeth a message that I had to leave instantly for the Front. Or I could tell it to her face, embrace her, mime the despairing, the inconsolable. It was just a momentary confusion. I got over it right away.

I left the Astoria. Loyally, half a step behind me, went Jacques. Just before the entrance to the hotel, as I was about to turn and say goodbye to him, I heard a faint gurgle. I half-turned and spread my arms. The old fellow slumped against my shoulder. His bowler hat rolled over the cobbles. The hotel porter came running out. Jacques was unconscious. We carried him into the lobby. I sent for the doctor, and ran up to tell Elisabeth.

She was still sitting over her humorist, drinking tea, and pushing little pieces of buttered toast and jam into her sweet red mouth. She set her book down on the table, and spread her arms. “Jacques,” I began, “Jacques. .” and I faltered. I didn’t want to say the terrible verb. A smile of lustfulness and indifference and cheerfulness quivered round Elisabeth’s mouth, a smile I thought I would only be able to dispel if I used the macabre word itself — and so I said it: “He’s dying!” She dropped her arms, and said merely: “He’s old!”

People came for me, the doctor was there. The old fellow had been put to bed in his room. His starched shirt had been taken off. It hung over his black jacket, a gleaming linen breastplate. His polished boots stood like two sentries at the foot of his bed. His woollen socks, multiply darned, lay curled over them. That was all that was left of a simple human being. One or two brass buttons on the bedside table, a collar, a tie, boots, socks, jacket, trousers, shirt. The old feet with their hammer toes peeped out of the end of the bed. “Heart attack!” said the doctor. He had himself just been called to the colours, a regimental doctor, already in uniform. Tomorrow he was joining the Deutschmeisters. Our formal exchange of greetings at this death-scene was like something from an alternative theatre production, somewhere in Wiener Neustadt. We both felt ashamed. “Is he going to die?” I asked. “Is he your father?” asked the doctor. “Our retainer!” I said. I would rather have concurred: yes, my father. The doctor seemed to sense it. “Probably,” he said. “Tonight?” He shrugged.

All of a sudden it was evening. The lights came on. The doctor gave Jacques an injection of Cardiazol, wrote out prescriptions, rang the bell, sent for someone to go to the apothecary. I slunk out of the room. Just the way a traitor slinks away, I thought. I slunk up the stairs to Elisabeth, as though afraid I might wake someone. Elisabeth’s door was locked. My room was the one beside it. I knocked on the door, and then tried it. The connecting door was locked as well. I wondered briefly whether to force it. But at that instant I knew there was no love between us. It seemed I had two fatalities to mourn; and my love was the first to go. I buried it under the threshold of the door between our two rooms. Then I went down a flight of steps to sit with Jacques.

The good doctor was still there. He had unbuckled his sword and unbuttoned his tunic. It smelled of vinegar, ether and camphor in the room, and through the open window streamed the damp, withered air of an autumn evening. The doctor said: “I’ll stay for as long as I’m needed,” and he shook my hand. I sent my mother a telegram, saying that I had need of our retainer, at least until it was time for me to go. We ate ham, cheese and apples. We drank a couple of bottles of Nussdorfer.

The old man lay there, blue in the face, his breathing audible throughout the room like a rasping saw. From time to time his upper body would seize up, and his bent hands would pluck at the dark red quilt. The doctor wet a towel, shook a little vinegar on to it, and laid it on the dying man’s forehead. Twice I went upstairs to Elisabeth. The first time, there was silence. The second time I could hear her sobbing loudly. I knocked harder. “Leave me alone!” she cried. Her voice pierced me through the locked door like a knife.

It was about three in the morning, I was perched on the side of the bed, the doctor, in shirtsleeves, was asleep at the desk, his head in his arms. Then Jacques sat up with arms outstretched, opened his eyes, and babbled something. The doctor straightaway awoke and went to the bed. Then I heard Jacques’s old clear voice: “Please would the young master tell madam I’ll be back tomorrow morning.” He fell back into the pillows. His breathing came more quietly. His eyes were fixed and open; it was as though they no longer needed eyelids. “He’s dying,” said the doctor, just as I was deciding to go up to Elisabeth once more.

I waited. Death seemed to approach the old man on stockinged feet, like a father, a true angel. At four in the morning, a breeze blew a yellow, withered chestnut leaf in through the window. I picked it up and laid it on Jacques’s quilt. The doctor put his arm round my shoulder, then bent down over the old man to listen, took his hand, and then said: “Gone.” I knelt down and, for the first time in many, many years, crossed myself.

Not two minutes later, there was a knock on the door. The night porter had a note for me. “From Madam!” he said. The envelope was barely stuck down, it seemed to open of its own accord. I read a single line: “Adieu! I’ve gone home. Elisabeth.” I showed the doctor the note. He read it and looked at me and said: “I understand.” Then, after a while: “I’ll sort everything out here, with the hotel and the burial and your Mama. I don’t leave Vienna for a while. Where are you off to today?” “I’m headed East!” “Servus, then!”