Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

He was sitting in his old drawing room, in his old flat, but he was almost unrecognizable, because he had had his moustache taken off. “Why, whatever for?” I asked him. “So that I can look like my own manservant. I am my own valet. I open the door to let myself in. I polish my own shoes. I ring when I want something, and then I inquire: what would sir like? Cigarettes! Very good, sir. And I send myself round to the Trafik . I can still eat for nothing at the old lady’s.” The old lady, in our circle, meant Frau Sacher. “I still get wine at Fatso’s.” Fatso in our circle was Lautgartner in Hietzing. “And Xandl’s lost his marbles and is in the Steinhof,” and with that Chojnicki closed his tour d’horizon .

“Lost them?”

“Utterly. I look him up every week. The crocodile” — the uncle of the Chojnicki brothers, Sapieha — “slapped a court order on the estates. He’s Xandl’s guardian. I have no say whatever. This flat has been sold. I have another three weeks here. What about you, Trotta?”

“I’m about to mortgage our house. I’m married, you know. I have a wife to feed.” “Uh-oh, married!” exclaimed Chojnicki. “Come to think of it, so am I. But my wife is in Poland, God save and protect her, and give her a long life. I decided,” he went on, “to leave everything in the hands of the Almighty. He made my bed, let Him lie in it.” He was silent for a while, then he smashed his fist on the table, and shouted: “It’s you that’s to blame for everything, you” — he groped for a word — “you smart alecs,” he finally said, “you wrecked our state with your stupid witticisms. My Xandl saw it coming. You failed to see that those Alpine goiters and those Sudeten Czechs, those Nibelung cretins, offended and attacked our nationalities for so long until they began to hate the Monarchy and turned against it. It wasn’t our Czechs or our Serbs or our Poles or our Ruthenians who committed treason, but our Germans, our core people.”

“But my family’s Slovene!” I said.

“Forgive me,” he replied quietly. “It’s just that I have no Germans here to address myself to. Get me a Sudeten German!” he suddenly yelled, “and I’ll break his neck! Let’s go find one! Come on! We’re going to the Josefinum!”

Dvorak, Szechenyi, Hallersberg, Lichtenthal and Strohhofer were sitting there, most of them still in uniform. They all belonged to our old group. Aristocratic titles were banned now, but what difference did it make? “No one who doesn’t use my first name,” said Szechenyi, “is worth talking to anyway!” They played chess endlessly. “All right, where’s the Sudeten German?” yelled Chojnicki. “Here I am!” came the reply, from one of the kibitzers. Papa Kunz, old Social Democrat, editor of the Party newspaper and ready at any moment to prove historically that the Austrians were actually Germans. “Your proof, sir!” called Szechenyi. Papa Kunz ordered a double slivovitz and embarked on his proof. No one listened to him. “God damn the Sudetens!” cried Chojnicki, who had just lost a game. He jumped up and ran up to old Papa Kunz with raised, clenched fists. We managed to restrain him. He was foaming at the mouth, his eyes were bloodshot. “Pruzzian blockheads!” he yelled finally. That was the height of his rage. After that he became visibly milder.

It felt good to be home again. All of us had lost name and rank and station, house and money and net worth, past, present and to come. In the morning when we woke up, and at night when we went to bed, we cursed Death, who had invited us to his great gala celebration. Every one of us envied the fallen. They were resting under the ground, and in springtime violets would sprout from their bones. Whereas we had returned home incurably infertile, with paralysed loins, a doomed race, scorned by Death. The verdict of the military panel was irrevocable and final. It read: “Found unfit for death.”

We all got used to the unusual. It was a hurried process of adjustment. Not really knowing what we were doing, we hurried to adjust, we chased after phenomena we hated and despised. We began to fall in love with our misery, just as one can love loyal enemies. We buried ourselves in it. We were grateful to it for consuming our little individual personal troubles, like their big brother, proof against consolation, but equally beyond the reach of our little daily anxieties. It is my view that the terrifying meekness of people nowadays in the face of their even worse oppressors is understandable and even to some extent pardonable, if one considers that it’s in human nature to prefer the vast, omnivorous misfortune to the specific individual mishap. The outsize calamity gobbles up the little misfortune, the stroke of bad luck. And so we in those years came to love our monstrous misery.

Not, please understand, that we weren’t able to redeem a few little joys in the face of it, ransom or reprieve or rescue them. We laughed and joked. We spent money, money that we couldn’t in fairness claim was ours — but then it didn’t have much value left either. We were happy to borrow it and lend it out, accept it and give it away, ourselves remain in debt, and pay the debts of others. It is like this that mankind will live on the day before the Day of Judgement. Sucking nectar from poisonous flowers, praising the fading sun as the giver of life, kissing the bleaching earth as mother of fruitfulness.

Spring was at hand, the Viennese spring, that none of the sentimental chansons could begin to do justice to. Not one of the popular tunes has the urgency of a blackbird’s song in the Votivpark or the Volksgarten. No rhymed strophes are as eloquent as the adorably rough cry of a barker outside a Prater booth in April. Who can sing the careful gold of the laburnum, trying vainly to conceal itself among the alert green of the other shrubbery? The sweet scent of elderflower was approaching, a solemn promise. In the Vienna woods, the violets were out. Young people paired off. In our regular café, we cracked jokes, played chess and dardel and tarock. We lost and won valueless money.

So important was spring to my mother that, from April 15, she redoubled the number of her excursions, and drove out to the Prater twice a month, not once as in winter. There were not many cabs left. The horses died of old age. Many more were slaughtered and made into sausages. In the storehouses of the old army, you could see parts of wrecked hackney cabs. Rubber-tyred carriages that may once have conveyed the Tschirschkys, the Pallavicinis, the Sternbergs, the Esterhazys, the Dietrichsteins, the Trautmannsdorffs. My mother, cautious by nature, and grown more so over the years, had come to an “arrangement” with one of the few remaining cabbies. He would come for her punctually twice a month, at nine in the morning. Sometimes I went with her, especially on rainy days. She didn’t like to be alone in adversity — and rain already counted as such. We didn’t speak much in the quiet penumbra under the rain roof. “Xaver,” my mother would say to the cabbie, “talk to me.” He would turn to face us, give the horses their heads for a couple of minutes, and tell us all sorts of things. “According to my son,” Xaver told us, “Capitalism is finished. He doesn’t call me Dad any more. He calls me: Let’s go, your Graces! He’s a sharp cookie. He knows what he wants. He doesn’t understand the first thing about horses.” Was she a capitalist, asked my mother. “To be sure, ma’am,” replied the cabbie, “all those that don’t work and that still manage to live are capitalists.” “What about the beggars?” asked my mother. “They might not work, but then they don’t go on excursions to the Praterspitz like you, ma’am!” replied Xaver. My mother whispered “A Jacobin!” to me. She thought she had spoken in the code of the owning classes. But Xaver understood. He turned round and said: “It’s my son who’s the Jacobin.” Thereupon he cracked his whip. It was as though he had applauded his own remark, with its historical culture.