Joseph Roth - The Hundred Days

Wokurka stroked her brittle reddish hair. He could guess everything she was feeling and knew her despair would deafen her to all his reassurances and promises. There was nothing more he could do except continue the silent conversation between his caressing hand and her red hair. After some time she raised her pale moist face to him.

“I understand, Angelina,” he said. “It’ll pass, believe me, it’ll pass; everything passes.” She began to smile an obedient smile that made her face even sadder. It was a grateful and at the same time reproachful and resigned smile, the pained and exalted glow that lights the faces of the weak who are giving themselves up.

She had already given up. She had begun to make her preparations with the conscientious determination that is equally particular to the strong as it is to those who have finally resigned themselves. It had been decided they would marry in January and set out a month later. It was thus still several weeks until their departure. To Angelina, however, it seemed that Wokurka’s colossal plan decimated the laws of time. As she feared that her determination might falter, she believed there were no days left to waste.

She mulled over what she could leave her son, for she was certain she would never see him again. The cross she had brought with her from her homeland, the handkerchief she had stolen out of foolish love for the Emperor — she could give both to her little Pascal. She imagined what she would say to him: they were trivial, but for her, his mother, they were objects of importance, and she was giving them to him so he would always think of her. Of her, but also of the Emperor.

So she removed the handkerchief from her box, took down the cross she had hung over Wokurka’s bed, and went to the barracks.

Wokurka escorted her. He had fashioned a pair of boots for Angelina’s son, good solid boots that were fitting for a drummer.

They found the boy and went with him to the canteen. He let his mother embrace him, shook hands with Wokurka, accepted his presents, expressing delight at the handkerchief and boots, but regarding the cross, he said: “I don’t need that. Nobody needs that in our regiment!” He gave it back to his mother and said: “You need it, I think!” And he had at that moment the rumbling voice of his father, Sergeant-Major Sosthène.

The canteen was filled with boisterous soldiers. Behind the buffet, on the wall over the étagère with its multicolored bottles, hung a transparent veil covering the Imperial eagle and above that an oversized and quite obvious portrait of the returned King. His good-natured yet indifferent face, his fat droopy cheeks, and his half-shut eyelids seemed even more distant and indistinct than the veiled eagle of gleaming brass. It was as if the King’s portrait were veiling itself while the veil covering the Imperial eagle was but a passing cloud.

At the tables all around soldiers were conversing. Both the sober and the tipsy were talking about the Emperor; the drunken ones even shouted now and again: “Long live the Emperor!” Little Pascal spread out the handkerchief before him and said with an affected deep voice: “Everybody says the Emperor is coming back. We don’t give a damn about the Bourbons!” And he gestured with his little finger at the portrait of the returned King on the wall.

“He won’t come back,” said the cobbler Wokurka. “And I want to say that you, if you like, can come with us, with your mother and I, to my homeland.”

“Why?” asked the boy. “The Emperor’s coming back soon; everyone says so.”

Angelina was silent. She heard the soldiers all around her talking about the Emperor. The Emperor was not dead and forgotten; he was alive in the hearts of the soldiers and they awaited him every day. Only she had stopped waiting for him; she alone would not be allowed to wait any longer.

And she noticed that both the man and her son became strangers as soon as she thought about the Emperor. In fact, her son only seemed close because he had spoken lovingly of the Emperor, so out of fear that she might betray her confusion and would lose her determination to follow Wokurka, she said: “Let’s go,” stood up, kissed her son on the cheeks, on the forehead, and on his red hair, and turned to go before Wokurka even had time to get up.

On the way home he spoke to her, gently and timidly and somewhat uncertain. He told her that the soldiers were wrong. They did not comprehend the intricacies of the political world and therefore believed the Emperor would return. But even if the soldiers were right in their prediction and the Emperor came back, this should not hinder them, Angelina and the cobbler Wokurka, from starting a new life in a distant land, far removed from the confusion caused by the great ones in the world only so that the lowly ones might suffer.

“Yes, yes,” she said, but no longer believed him.

Upon arriving at the house, they saw all its residents — who were craftsmen, coachmen, and lackeys — standing at the door. Something extraordinary had happened: the midwife Pocci had returned and with her Véronique Casimir. They had both refused to give out any information, but had only asked after Angelina and proclaimed quite generally and solemnly that they came back because “a whole new era was dawning.”

Véronique Casimir had not changed, nor had Barbara Pocci. Where both women had been living for so long, nobody dared ask. Both were recognizable at first glance and had returned wholly unchanged: the midwife Pocci was still trustworthy yet menacing, bony, and gaunt, and Mademoiselle Casimir was still plump yet nimble.

“You mustn’t do it,” she said to the shoemaker. “You’ll lose your right to a pension if you go and the Emperor returns. And sure as my name is Véronique Casimir, sure as I have predicted, as all the world knows, the Emperor’s battles, both victories and defeats, now I predict that he’s coming back soon, and nothing can stop it.”

Véronique Casimir did not say any of this lightly. She proved it too. She proved it in the presence of all the residents of the house, of neighbors in the quarter who had been either invited or compelled to come and in the presence of many strangers, all of whom had gathered — rapt, credulous, and hopeful — in the cobbler’s room and even filled the passage or sometimes had to wait in the street outside. She proved it through the irrefutable cards. She repeated it every evening: “The Emperor is preparing for his departure. Eleven hundred men are accompanying him. They have anticipated many dangers, but all these dangers are dispersing and evaporating as the Emperor approaches. All doors are opened for him. The people are cheering him. He has won, he has won! He comes, he comes!”

“And then?” the cobbler Wokurka would sometimes inquire. “What will happen then?”

“That I cannot see,” answered Véronique Casimir. And she collected her cards together and bustled out through a street crowded with awe-struck believers.

One evening — spring had long since announced its arrival, but had quickly been chased away again by winter’s merciless rebirth — Angelina heard the wooden leg of the returning Wokurka rapping more hurriedly, nimbly, and loudly upon the cobbles in front of the house than ever before.

He arrived out of breath. It was hailing outside. There were wet little hailstones on his shoulders and water ran down from his single boot to form a large black puddle on the floor. He did not remove his cap. He remained standing in the doorway and said: “Angelina, things are happening! He comes tomorrow! The King is on the run!”

She stood up. She had been sitting on a stool peeling potatoes and they fell to the floor with a series of thuds. “He’s coming?” she repeated. “Tomorrow? And the King flees?”