The Radetzky March (5 page)

“My ministers,” Franz Joseph began, “must know what they’re doing. I have to rely on them. Do you catch my drift, my dear Trotta?” And after a while. “We’ll do something. You’ll see!”

The audience was over.

His father was still alive. But Trotta did not go to Laxenburg. He returned to the garrison and requested his discharge from the army.

He was discharged as a major. He moved to Bohemia, to his father-in-law’s small estate. Imperial favor did not abandon him. A few weeks later, he was notified that the Kaiser had seen fit to contribute five thousand guldens from the privy purse to the education of the son of the man who had saved his life. At the same time, Trotta was raised to the barony.

Baron Joseph von Trotta und Sipolje accepted these imperial gifts sullenly, as insults. The campaign against the Prussians was waged and lost without him. His resentment simmered. His temples were already turning silvery, his eyes dim, his steps slow, his hands heavy, his words fewer than ever. Though a man in the prime of life, he appeared to be aging swiftly. He had been driven from the paradise of simple faith in Emperor and Virtue, Truth, and Justice, and, now fettered in silence and endurance, he may have realized that the stability of the world, the power of laws, and the glory of majesties were all based on deviousness. Thanks to the Kaiser’s casually expressed wish, Reading Text No. 15 disappeared from the monarchy’s schoolbooks. The Trotta name survived only in the unknown annals of the’ regiment.

The major now vegetated as the unknown bearer of ephemeral fame, like a fleeting shadow that a secret object sends into the bright world of the living. On his father-in-law’s estate, he puttered about with watering cans and garden shears: similar to his father at the castle park in Laxenburg, the baron trimmed the hedges and mowed the lawn, guarded the forsythia in early spring and then the elderberry bushes against thievish and unauthorized hands; he supplanted the rotten pickets with fresh, smoothly planed ones, repaired tools and tackling, bridled and saddled his bay horses himself, replaced rusty locks on gates and portals, carefully wedged neatly carved slats in worn-out sagging hinges, spent days on end in the forest, shot small game, slept in the gamekeeper’s hut, looked after poultry, manure, and harvest, fruit and espalier flowers, groom and coachman.
Penny–pinching and distrustful, he made his purchases, his sharp fingers fishing coins from the stingy leather pouch and slipping it back upon his chest. He became a little Slovenian peasant.

At times, his old anger would overcome him, shaking him like a powerful storm shaking a flimsy shrub. He would then whip the servant and the flanks of the horses, smash the doors into the locks that he himself had repaired, threaten to maim and murder the farmhands, shove his luncheon plate away in a nasty swing, and fast and grumble. Next to him lived his feeble, sickly wife in a separate room; the boy, who saw his father only at meals and whose report cards were submitted to him twice a year, eliciting neither praise nor reproach; the father-in-law, who blithely frittered his pension and had a weakness for young girls, who stayed in town for long weeks and feared his son-in-law. He was a little old Slovenian peasant, that Baron Trotta. Twice a week, late in the evening, by flickering candlelight, he still wrote his father a letter on yellowish octavo, the salutation
Dear Father
four male fingers from the top, two male fingers from the side. He very seldom received an answer.

The baron did occasionally think of visiting his father. He had long since begun missing the sergeant of the frugal government poverty, the fibrous shag, and the homemade brandy. But the son dreaded the travel expenses just as his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather would have done. Now he was closer to the war invalid at Laxenburg Castle than years ago, when, in the fresh glory of his newly bestowed nobility, he had sat in the blue lime-washed kitchen of the small official apartment, drinking rakia. He never discussed his background with his wife. He sensed that an embarrassed pride would come between the daughter of the older dynasty of civil servants and a Slovenian sergeant, so he never asked his father to visit him.

Once, on a bright day in March, when the baron was trudging across the hard clods to see his steward, a farmhand brought him a letter from the administration of the Castle of Laxenburg. The invalid was dead; he had passed away painlessly at the age of eighty-one. The baron said only, “Go to the baroness; my bag is to be packed; I’m going to Vienna tonight.” He walked on,
entered the steward’s house, inquired about the sowing, discussed the weather, instructed him to order three new plows and send for the veterinarian on Monday and the midwife for a pregnant serving girl today, and then added, when leaving, “My father has died; I’m spending three days in Vienna,” saluted with a casual finger, and left.

His bag was packed, the horses were harnessed to the carriage; the station was an hour’s drive. He bolted down the soup and the meat. Then he told his wife, “I can’t go on! My father was a good man. You never met him.” Was it an obituary? Was it a lament? “You’re coming along!” he told his frightened son. His wife stood up to pack the boy’s things. While she busied herself on the next floor, Trotta said to the child, “Now you’ll see your grandfather.” The boy trembled and lowered his eyes.

The sergeant was lying in state by the time they arrived. Guarded by eight candles three feet high and by two war veterans, he lay on a bier in his living room, sporting a tremendous bristly moustache, a dark-blue uniform, and three twinkling medals on his chest. An Ursuline nun was praying in the corner by the single curtained window. The veterans stood at attention when Trotta came in. He wore his major’s uniform with the Order of Maria Theresa. He knelt down; his son likewise fell to his knees at the dead man’s feet, the tremendous soles of those boots in front of the young face. For the first time in his life, Baron Trotta felt a thin, sharp jab in the region of his heart. His tiny eyes remained dry. He murmured one, two, three Lord’s Prayers out of pious embarrassment, stood up, leaned over the dead man, kissed the tremendous moustache, waved at the veterans, and said to his son, “Come on!

“Did you see him?” he asked outside.

“Yes,” said the boy.

“He was only a constable sergeant,” said the father. “I saved the Kaiser’s life at the Battle of Solferino—and then we got the barony.”

The boy said nothing.

The pensioner was buried in the small cemetery at Laxenburg, military section. Six dark-blue veterans carried the coffin from the chapel to the grave. Major Trotta, in shako and
full dress, kept his hand on his son’s shoulder the whole time. The boy sobbed. The sad music of the military band, the priests’ doleful and monotonous singsong, audible whenever the music paused, the gently drifting incense—it all made the boy choke with incomprehensible pain. And the rifle shots discharged over the grave by a demi–platoon shook him with their long–echoing relentlessness. They fired martial salutes for the dead man’s soul, which went straight to heaven, vanishing from this earth forever and always.

Father and son headed back. The baron remained silent the entire trip. It was only when they got off the train and climbed into the carriage awaiting them behind the station garden that the major said, “Don’t forget your grandfather!”

The baron resumed his daily routine, and the years rolled away like mute, peaceful, uniform wheels. The sergeant was not the last corpse that the baron had to inter. First he buried his father-in-law, a few years later his wife, who had died a quick, discreet death without saying goodbye after a severe case of pneumonia. He sent his son to boarding school in Vienna, making sure the boy could never become a regular soldier. He remained alone on the estate, in the white, spacious house through which the breath of the deceased still passed, and he spoke only with the gamekeeper, the steward, the groom, and the coachman. His rage exploded in him less and less. But the servants constantly felt his peasant fist, and his seething hush lay like a hard yoke on their necks. Dreadful silence wafted from him as before a storm.

Twice a month he received obedient letters from his child. Once a month he replied in two brief sentences, on small, thrifty scraps torn from the respectful margins of the letters he had gotten. Once a year, on the eighteenth of August, the Kaiser’s birthday, he donned his uniform and drove to the nearest garrison town. Twice a year his son visited him, during Christmas break and summer vacation. On every Christmas Eve the boy was handed three hard silver guldens, for which he had to sign a receipt and which he could never take along. That same evening, the guldens landed in a cashbox inside the old man’s chest. Next to the guldens lay the report cards. They
testified to the son’s thorough diligence and his middling but always adequate capacities. Never was the son given a toy, never an allowance, never a book, aside from the required schoolbooks. He did not seem deprived. His mind was neat, sober, and honest. His meager imagination provided him with no other wish than to get through the school years as fast as possible.

He was eighteen years old when his father said to him on Christmas Eve, “This year you’ll no longer get your three guldens. You may take nine from the cashbox if you sign for them. Be careful with women! Most of them are diseased.” And, after a pause: “I’ve decided that you’re going to be a lawyer. It will take two years. There’ll be time enough for the army. It can be deferred until you’re done.”

The boy took the nine guldens as obediently as he took his father’s wish. He seldom visited women, chose among them carefully, and had six guldens left when he came home again in the summer holidays. He asked his father for permission to invite a friend. “Fine,” said the major, somewhat astonished. The friend came with little baggage but a huge paint box, which did not appeal to the master of the house.

“He paints?” asked the old man.

“Very nicely,” said Franz, the son.

“Don’t let him splatter up the house. He can paint the landscape.”

The guest did paint outdoors, but not the landscape. He was painting Baron Trotta from memory. At every meal he memorized his host’s features.

“Why are you staring at me?” asked the baron. Both boys turned red and peered at the tablecloth. Nevertheless the portrait was finished, framed, and presented to the old man when the boys left. He studied it thoughtfully and with a smile. He turned it over as if seeking further details perhaps left out on the front; he held it up to the window, then far from his eyes, gazed at himself in the mirror, compared himself with the portrait, and finally said, “Where should it hang?” It was his first joy in many years. “You can lend your friend money if he needs something,” he murmured to Franz. “Get along with each other!” The
portrait was and remained the only one ever done of old Trotta. Later it hung in his son’s study and even haunted his grandson’s imagination.

Meanwhile the portrait kept the major in a rare mood for several weeks. He hung it now on one, now on another wall, feeling flattered delight as he scrutinized his hard, jutting nose, his clean-shaven jaw, his pale, narrow lips, his gaunt cheekbones rising like hills in front of the tiny black eyes, and the low, heavily creased forehead covered by the awning of close-cropped, bristly, thorny hair. Only now did he grow acquainted with his features; he sometimes had a mute dialogue with his own face. It aroused unfamiliar thoughts and memories, baffling, quickly blurring shadows of wistfulness. He had needed the portrait to experience his early old age and his great loneliness; from the painted canvas loneliness and old age came flooding toward him. Has it always been like this? he wondered. Has it been like this always?

Now and then, aimlessly, he went to the cemetery, to his wife’s grave, peered at the gray pedestal and the chalky-white cross, the dates of her birth and death: he calculated that she had died too early and he admitted that he could not remember her clearly. He had forgotten, say, her hands. Quinquina Martial Wine flashed into his mind, a medicament she had taken for many long years. Her face? Shutting his eyes, he could still evoke it, but soon it vanished, blurring into the reddish circular twilight. He became mild-mannered in the house and on the farm, sometimes stroking a horse, smiling at the cows, drinking liquor more often than before, and one day he wrote a brief letter to his son outside the normal schedule. People began greeting him with smiles; he nodded pleasantly. Summer came. The holidays brought the son and the friend; the old man drove them to town, entered a restaurant, had a few gulps of slivovitz, and ordered a lavish meal for the boys.

The son became a lawyer, visited home more frequently, looked around the estate, felt one day that he wanted to manage it and abandon his law career. He confessed his wish to his father. The major said, “It’s too late. You’ll never become a farmer or manage an estate in your lifetime. You’ll make an able official,
that’s all.” The matter was settled. The son obtained a political office, becoming a district commissioner in Austrian Silesia. While the Trotta name may have disappeared from the authorized schoolbooks, it had not vanished from the secret files of the higher political authorities, and the five thousand guldens allotted by the Kaiser’s favor assured Trotta the official a constant benevolence and furtherance from anonymous higher places. He advanced swiftly. Two years before the son’s promotion to district captain, his father died.

He left a surprising will. Since he was certain—he wrote—that his son was not a good farmer, and since he hoped that the Trottas, grateful to the Kaiser for his continual favor, could advance to high ranks in government service and live more happily than he, the author of the testament, he had decided, in memory of his late father, to bequeath the estate, made over to him years earlier by his father-in-law, together with all his movable and immovable chattel, to the Military Invalid Fund, whereby the beneficiaries of this last will and testament would have no further obligation than to bury the testator as modestly as possible in the cemetery where his father had been interred and, if it was convenient, near the deceased. He, the testator, requested that they refrain from any ostentation. All residual moneys, fifteen thousand florins plus accrued interest placed with the Efrussi Bank in Vienna, as well as any other money, silver and copper, to be found in the house, and also the late mother’s ring, watch, and necklace, belonged to the testator’s only son, Baron Franz von Trotta und Sipolje.