Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

In the middle of the summer of 1914 I went there, having first written to my cousin Trotta in Sipolje that I hoped to meet him there.

So, in the middle of the summer of 1914, I went to Zlotogrod. I put up at the Golden Bear, the only hotel in the little town, so I was told, that was up to European standards.

The station was tiny, just like the station in Sipolje, which I had dutifully committed to memory. All the stations in the old Dual Monarchy resembled each other, all the little stations in the little provincial towns. Yellow and tiny, they were like lazy cats that in winter lay in the snow, in summer in the sun, sheltering under the crystal glass roofs over the platform, and guarded by the emblem of the black double eagle on yellow ground. All over, in Sipolje as in Zlotogrod, there was the same porter, the same porter with the impressive belly, the peaceable dark blue uniform, the black sash diagonally across the chest, the sash in which the bell was stuck, the bell from which issued the threefold official ring that was the signal for departure; on the platform in Zlotogrod, over the door to the stationmaster’s office, as in Sipolje and everywhere else, hung that black iron instrument that so miraculously produced the distant silver tinkle of the distant telephone, douce and frail signals from other worlds, so that one was surprised that they had found a home in such a heavy, albeit small earpiece; on the station in Zlotogrod, as on the station in Sipolje, the porter saluted the arrivals and the departures, and his saluting conferred a sort of military benediction; in the station in Zlotogrod, as in the station in Sipolje, there was the same “first and second class waiting room,” the same station buffet, with the row of schnapps bottles and the bosomy blonde cashier and the two gigantic potted palms either side of the bar, that were equally reminiscent of primitive vegetation and cardboard beer-mats. And outside the station, exactly as in Sipolje, stood three coaches. And I straightaway recognized the unmistakeable coachman, Manes Reisiger.

Of course, it was he who took me to the Golden Bear. He had a fine carriage drawn by a pair of silvery greys, the spokes of the wheels were painted yellow, and the tyres were rubber, just as Manes had seen them in Vienna, on the so-called “rubber-wheelers.”

He admitted to me as we drove that he had reconditioned his coach, not so much for my comfort and in my honour, as out of a sort of collective zeal that compelled him to take a leaf out of the book of his colleagues, the Viennese coachmen, and sacrifice his savings to the god of progress, and invest in two greys, and put rubber tyres on his wheels.

From the station to the town was a substantial distance, and Manes Reisiger had plenty of time to tell me the things that were on his mind. As he did so, he held the reins in his left hand. On his right, the whip stayed in its case. The greys needed no instruction, seeming to know the way. Manes didn’t need to do anything. So he sat there casually on the box, with the reins in a loose grip in his left hand, half-turned towards me while he talked. The two greys had cost just one hundred and twenty-five crowns. They were army horses, both blind in one eye, and so no longer useful for military purposes, and sold cheap by the Ninth Dragoons, who were stationed in Zlotogrod. Admittedly he, the coachman Manes Reisiger, would never have been able to buy them so easily, if he hadn’t happened to be a favourite of the Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons. In the little town of Zlotogrod there were no fewer than five coachmen. The other four, Reisiger’s colleagues, had dirty cabs, lazy, hobbling old mares, crooked wheels, and scabbed leather benches. The stuffing swelled up out of the patched and holey leather, and no gentleman, much less a Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons, could be expected to sit in such a coach.

I had letters from Chojnicki to the commanding officer of the local garrison, Colonel Földes of the Ninth, and also to the District Commissioner, Baron Grappik. The following morning, on the first full day of my stay, I proposed to pay calls on both men. The coachman Manes Reisiger fell silent, he had nothing more to say, having already told me everything important in his life. Even so, he left the whip in its case, still held the reins nice and loose, still sat half-turned towards me on the box. The steady smile on his wide mouth, with the strong white teeth against the night-black, almost blue-black blackness of his beard and moustaches suggested a milky moon between forests, between agreeable forests. There was so much cheer, so much goodness in that smile, that it even contrived to dominate the flat, melancholy landscape I was driving through. Wide fields on my right, and wide swamps on my left bordered the road between the Zlotogrod railway station and the little town of Zlotogrod itself — it was as though it had taken some vow of chastity and sworn to keep away from the station that connected it to the world at large. It was a rainy afternoon, and, as I say, early autumn. The rubber tyres of Manes’s carriage rolled soundlessly along the sodden, unpaved road, while the heavy hooves of the ex-Army greys smacked rhythmically into the dark grey mud, sending great clumps of it flying through the air. Darkness was falling when we reached the first houses. In the middle of the Ring, facing the little church, its presence marked by a solitary sorry lantern, stood Zlotogrod’s one and only two-storey building: it was the Golden Bear. The solitary lantern was like an orphan child, vainly trying to smile through its tears.

Even with so much that was unfamiliar, or more, that was remote and distant for which I had prepared myself, most of what I saw was homely and familiar. It wasn’t till much later — long after the Great War, which people call the “World War,” and in my view rightly, and not for the usual reason, that the whole world was involved in it, but rather because as a result of it we lost a whole world, our world — not till much later, then, was it that I would see that even landscapes, fields, nations, races, huts and cafés of all sorts and origins must follow the natural law of a strong spirit that is capable of bringing the far near, making the exotic familiar, and bringing together things that are pulling apart. I am referring to the misunderstood and maligned spirit of the old Monarchy, which allowed me to feel every bit as much at home in Zlotogrod as I did in Sipolje, or in Vienna for that matter. The only café in Zlotogrod, the Café Habsburg, situated on the ground floor of the hotel where I was staying, the Golden Bear, looked not a whit different from the Café Wimmerl in Josefstadt, where I was in the habit of meeting my friends in the afternoons. Here too behind the bar sat the familiar figure of the cashier, a voluptuous blonde of a type that seemed to be the exclusive preserve of cashiers in my time, a stolid goddess of vice, a seductress so obvious — lustful, destructive and professionally patient — that she contented herself with mere hints. I had seen her like in Agram, in Olmütz, in Brünn, in Kecskemet, in Szombathely, in Ödenburg, in Sternberg, in Müglitz. The chessboards and dominoes, the smoke-stained walls, the gaslights, the kitchen table in the corner by the door to the toilets, the maid in her blue apron, the local constable with his clay-coloured helmet stepping in for a break, equally sheepish and intimidating, leaving his rifle with fixed bayonet almost shyly in the umbrella holder, and the tarock players with their Franz Joseph mutton-chops and their round cuffs, foregathering every day at the same time — all this was home and it was more than country or fatherland, it was a wide and varied expanse, but it was still familiar and homely: it was the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. District Commissioner Baron Grappik and Colonel Földes of the Ninth both spoke the same nasal army German of the better classes, a language that was harsh and soft at the same time, as though it had been sired by Slavs and Italians, a language full of discreet irony and ornate assurances of beholdenness, and of gossip, and even of mild nonsense. Before a week was out, I felt as much at home in Zlotogrod as I had in Sipolje, or Müglitz, or Brünn, or in our Café Wimmerl in the Josefstadt.