The Radetzky March (32 page)

But to wipe out, root out her real age, scuttle it in the sea of her passion, she grabbed the shoulders of the young man whose warm, tender bones were confusing her hands and drew him to the sofa. She pounced on him with her stupendous yearning to be young. Passion erupted from her in violent sweeps of flame, chaining the lieutenant and subjugating him. Her eyes, blissful and grateful, blinked at the young man’s face above her face. Looking at him made her young again. And her lust to remain eternally young was as great as her lust to love. For a while she thought she could never let go of this lieutenant. But then a moment later she said, “Too bad you’re leaving today.”

“Won’t I ever see you again?” he asked, reverent, a young lover.

“Wait for me, I’ll be back!” And: “Don’t cheat on me!” she quickly added, with an aging woman’s dread of infidelity and another woman’s youth.

“You’re the only one I love!” answered the honest voice of a young man to whom nothing seems as important as fidelity.

That was how they said goodbye.

Lieutenant Trotta went to the train, arrived too early, and had to wait a long time. But he felt he was already traveling. Every additional minute spent in the city would have been painful,
perhaps even humiliating. He struggled against his obsession by pretending to leave a bit earlier than he had to. At last he could get into the train. He fell into a happy, mostly unbroken sleep and only woke up right before the border.

His orderly, Onufrij, who was waiting for him, reported that the town was in ferment. The bristle workers were demonstrating, and the garrison was on alert.

Now it hit Lieutenant Trotta why Chojnicki had left the area so early. So he was going “south” with Frau von Taussig! And Trotta was a helpless prisoner who could not immediately turn around, hop the train, and go back!

Today no cabs were waiting at the station. So Trotta went on foot. Onufrij walked behind him, clutching the lieutenant’s bag. The small shops of the little town were shut. Iron poles barricaded the wooden doors and shutters of the low houses. Constables patrolled with fixed bayonets. No sound was heard apart from the familiar croaking of the frogs in the swamps. The dust produced indefatigably by this sandy earth had been lavishly poured by the wind over roofs, walls, picket fences, wooden pavements, and scattered willow trees. Centuries of dust seemed to be coating this forgotten world. No inhabitant could be seen in the streets—as if they had all been struck dead behind their bolted doors and windows. Double sentries were posted outside the barracks. All the officers had moved here since yesterday, and Brodnitzer’s hotel stood empty.

Lieutenant Trotta reported to Major Zoglauer. From his superior he learned that the trip had done him good. By the lights of this man, who had been serving at the border for over a decade, a trip could not help doing good. And as if it were a perfectly routine matter, the major told the lieutenant that a platoon of riflemen would march out at dawn, station themselves on the highway opposite the bristle factory, and, if necessary, take armed action against “seditious disturbances” by the striking workers. This platoon was to be commanded by Lieutenant Trotta. It was a minor affair, said the major, and there was reason to assume that the constabulary was strong enough to keep the strikers duly respectful; we only had to maintain cool heads and not move prematurely; in the end, however, the civil
authorities would have to decide whether or not the riflemen had to proceed; this was certainly not very pleasant for an officer, for how could they be bossed around by a district commissioner? But ultimately this delicate task was a kind of distinction for the youngest lieutenant in the battalion; and besides, the other officers hadn’t had any furlough, and the simplest rule of solidarity would demand… and so on and so forth.

“Yessir, Herr Major!” said the lieutenant and left.

One could not fault Major Zoglauer for anything. He had practically asked the grandson of the Hero of Solferino instead of ordering him. And after all, the grandson of the Hero of Solferino had had an unexpected and marvelous furlough. Now he cut across the grounds to the officers’ mess. Fate had prepared this political demonstration for him. That was why he had wound up at the border. He was certain now that a scheming, treacherous fate had granted him his furlough in order to destroy him upon his return.

The others sat in the officers’ mess and greeted him with an exaggerated jubilation that sprang more from their curiosity to find out something than from any deep feelings at having him back. And they also asked, in unison, how “it” had been. But Captain Wagner said, “When everything’s done tomorrow, he can tell us!” And they all hushed.

“What if I’m killed tomorrow?” Lieutenant Trotta said to Captain Wagner.

“Goddammit!” replied the captain. “A disgusting death. The whole thing’s disgusting! But they’re poor devils. And maybe they’re right after all.”

It had not yet occurred to the lieutenant that the workers were poor wretches who could be right. Now the captain’s remark struck Trotta as excellent, and he no longer doubted that they were poor devils. So he drank two 180 Proofs and said, “Then I simply won’t order the men to shoot! Or to advance with fixed bayonets! The constabulary should fend for itself.”

“You’ll do what you have to, you know you will.”

No! Carl Joseph did not know it at this moment. He drank. And he very quickly got into a state in which he felt capable of
just about anything: insubordination, resigning from the army, winning a fortune. No more corpses should lie on his path. “Leave the army!” Dr. Max Demant had said. The lieutenant had been a weakling long enough. Instead of leaving the army, he had gotten himself transferred to the border. Now everything was to have an end. He would not be degraded tomorrow to a kind of high-level policeman. The day after, he might have to walk a beat and give tourists directions! Ridiculous, playing the soldier in peacetime! There will never be a war! They’ll rot in the officers’ mess! But as for him, Lieutenant Trotta, who knows? By next week at this time he might be sitting in the south!

He said all this to Captain Wagner in a loud, eager voice. A few comrades surrounded him, listening. Several were certainly in no mood for war. Most of them would have been content with anything so long as they got somewhat higher pay, somewhat more comfortable garrisons, and somewhat faster promotions. Several found Lieutenant Trotta strange and also a bit unsettling. He enjoyed special protection. He had just returned from a wonderful trip. What? And he didn’t feel like marching out tomorrow?

Lieutenant Trotta sensed a hostile stillness around him. For the first time since joining the army, he decided to provoke his fellow officers. And knowing what was bound to offend them the most, he said, “Maybe I’ll apply to staff school!”

Sure, why not? the officers said. He had come from the cavalry, why not go to staff school? He would certainly pass the exams and even make general without seniority, at an age when their kind were just making captain and putting on their first spurs. So it couldn’t hurt him to march off to the huggermugger tomorrow!

The next day he had to march off at the crack of dawn. For it was the army that regulated the sequence of the hours. It grabbed time and put it wherever the military found appropriate. Even though the “seditious disturbances” were not expected until noon, Lieutenant Trotta marched out by eight hundred hours, along the wide dusty highway. Behind the neat, systematic rifle stacks, which looked both peaceful and dangerous, the soldiers
lay, stood, and wandered. The larks blared, the crickets chirped, the mosquitoes hummed. In the remote fields, they could see the colorful, radiant kerchiefs of the peasant women. They were singing. And sometimes the soldiers who were natives of this area responded with the same songs. They would have known what to do in those fields, but they did not understand what they were waiting for here. Had the war begun already? Were they going to the this afternoon?

There was a small village tavern nearby. And that was where Lieutenant Trotta went to drink a 180 Proof. The low taproom was crowded. The lieutenant realized that these were the workers who were supposed to assemble outside the factory at noon. They all fell silent when he entered, jingling and fearsomely girded. He halted at the counter. Slowly, all too slowly, the tavern keeper fiddled around with bottle and glasses. Behind Trotta’s back the hush towered, a massif of silence. He drained his glass at one gulp. He sensed that they were all waiting for him to leave. He would have liked to tell them that it wasn’t his fault. But he was incapable of speaking to them or leaving immediately. He did not want to appear timorous, so he had several more drinks in a row. The men were still hushed. Perhaps they were making signs behind his back. He did not turn around. At last he left the tavern, squeezing past the hard rock of silence, and hundreds of gazes bristled on the back of his neck like dark lances.

Upon reaching his platoon again, he felt he should order the men to fall in even though it was only ten hundred hours. He was bored, and he had also learned that troops are demoralized by boredom, while rifle drills boost their morale. In a flash his platoon stood before him in the regulation two lines, and suddenly, and no doubt for the first time in his soldierly life, it seemed to him as if the precise limbs of the men were dead components of dead machines that produced nothing. The entire platoon stood motionless, all the men with bated breath. But after feeling that dark, weighty hush on his back at the tavern, Lieutenant Trotta suddenly realized that there are two kinds of silence. And perhaps, he thought further, there are several kinds of silence just as there are several kinds of noises? No one had ordered the workers to fall in when he had entered
the tavern. Nevertheless they had hushed all at once. And their silence had poured out a dark, dumb hatred, the way pregnant and infinitely silent clouds sometimes pour out the mute electric sultriness of an unspent thunderstorm.

Lieutenant Trotta listened. But from the dead silence of his motionless platoon nothing came pouring. One stony face waited next to another. Most of them vaguely resembled his orderly, Onufrij. They had broad mouths, and heavy lips that could barely close, and blank, bright, narrow eyes. And as he stood there in front of his platoon, poor Lieutenant Trotta, overarched by the blue radiance of the early-summer day, surrounded by blaring larks, chirping crickets, and humming mosquitoes, and yet believing he could hear the dead hush of his soldiers more strongly than all the voices of the day, was overwhelmed by the certainty that he did not belong here. But then where did he belong? he wondered, while the platoon awaited his further orders. Where
do
I belong? Not among the men in the tavern. In Sipolje, perhaps? Among the fathers of my father? Does the plow belong in my hand and not the sword? And the lieutenant kept his platoon at rigid attention.

“At ease!” he finally commanded. “Rifles on the ground! Platoon dismissed!”

And things were as before. The soldiers lay behind the rifle stacks. The singing of the peasant women came from the distant fields. And the soldiers responded with the same songs.

The constabulary marched over from the town, three reinforced files of sentinels, accompanied by District Commissioner Horak. Lieutenant Trotta knew him. He was a good dancer, a Silesian Pole, both dashing and upright at once, and though none of the men had known Horak’s father, Horak nevertheless reminded them of him. His father had been a mailman. Today, as prescribed on duty, he wore the uniform, black and green with violet lapels, and the sword. His short blond moustache shone as golden as wheat, and the scent of the powder on his full, rosy cheeks could be smelled far away. He was as cheerful as a Sunday and a parade.

“My orders,” he told Lieutenant Trotta, “are to break up the meeting at once. Presumably you are ready, Herr Lieutenant.”
He arranged his constables around the desolate factory square, where the meeting was to be held.

Lieutenant Trotta said “Yes!” and wheeled around.

He waited. He would have liked another 180 Proof, but he couldn’t return to the tavern. He saw the corporal, the platoon leader, and the lance corporal vanish inside the tavern and reemerge. He stretched out on the roadside grass and waited. The day grew fuller and fuller, the sun rose higher, and the songs of the peasant women in the distant fields died out. Lieutenant Trotta felt as if an endless stretch of time had passed since his return from Vienna. From those remote days he saw only the woman, who could be in the south by now, who had left him—betrayed him, he thought. Now he lay on the roadside in the border garrison and waited, not for the enemy but for the demonstrators.

They came. They came from the direction of the tavern. Ahead of them wafted their singing, a song the lieutenant had never heard before. It had scarcely been heard in this region. It was “The Internationale,” sung in three languages. District Commissioner Horak knew it, for professional reasons. Lieutenant Trotta couldn’t make out a word. But the melody seemed to be a musical translation of the hush he had felt in back of him. A solemn excitement overcame the dashing district commissioner. He ran from one constable to the next, clutching a notebook and a pencil. Once again Trotta commanded, “Fall in!” And like a cloud that had dropped to the earth, the dense group of strikers marched past the twofold fence of gaping riflemen. The lieutenant had a dark foreboding of the end of the world. He remembered the rainbow splendor of the Corpus Christi pageant, and for a brief instant he felt as if the murky cloud of rebels were rolling toward that imperial procession. For all of a single rapid moment the lieutenant had the sublime ability to see in images, and he saw the times rolling toward one another like two rocks, and he himself, the lieutenant, was smashed between them.

His men shouldered their rifles while opposite them, lifted by invisible hands, a male head and torso appeared above the dense, black, incessantly moving circle of the throng. Soon the floating body was almost the exact midpoint of the circle. Its hands rose
aloft. From its mouth came incomprehensible sounds. The throng yelled. Next to the lieutenant stood Commissioner Horak, notebook and pencil in hand. All at once, he shut his book and slowly walked between two sparkling constables toward the throng on the other side of the road.