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.
Of course I went for rides every day in the cab of my friend Manes Reisiger. The country was in actual fact poor, but it looked blithe and flush. Even the expanse of swamp where nothing grew looked juicy and bountiful to me, and the good-natured chorus of frogs that emanated from it was a hymn of praise from creatures who happened to have an acuter understanding than I did of the purpose for which the Almighty had created their home, the swamps.
At night I sometimes heard the hoarse, broken cries of the wild geese flying high above. There was still plenty of green on the willows and birches, but the magnificent chestnuts were already shedding their tough, bronze, precisely silhouetted leaves. The ducks chattered in the middle of the road, where the silver-grey mud, never completely dry, was punctuated by occasional ponds.
I usually ate my dinner with the officers of the Ninth Dragoons; or, more accurately, drank it. Over the glass bumpers from which we drank, an invisible Death was already crossing his bony hands. We didn’t sense them. Sometimes we sat together till late. Out of an inexplicable fear of the night, we stayed up till dawn.
An inexplicable fear, I say, though to us at the time it seemed rational; we sought an explanation in the claim that we were too young to neglect the nights. In fact, as I saw later, it was our fear of the day, more precisely, our fear of morning, the clearest portion of the day. That’s when a man can see and is himself seen with the greatest clarity. And we had no desire either to see, or to be seen clearly.
In the morning, then, to escape that clarity, and also the dull, unrefreshing sleep that I knew all too well, and that overcomes a man after a night on the tiles like a false friend, a quack doctor, a treacherous well-wisher, or a supposed benefactor, I took refuge with Manes, the coachman. I often turned up around six in the morning, just as he was getting up. He lived outside the town, close to the cemetery. It took me half an hour to get there on foot. I would arrive sometimes just as he had got out of bed. His little house stood there all by itself, surrounded by fields and meadows that didn’t belong to him, painted blue, and with a grey black shingled roof, not unlike a living creature that seemed not to stand, but to be in motion. So strong was the deep blue of the walls against the slowly waning yellow-green that surrounded it on all sides. When I pushed open the red gate that barred the way to the coachman Manes’s residence, I sometimes caught him standing in his doorway. He would be standing in front of the brown door, in his homespun shirt and drawers, barefoot and bareheaded, holding a large brown can in his hand. He would take a sup from it, then spit out the water in a great arc. With his great black beard, staring into the rising sun, in his coarse linens, with his wild and woolly hair, he was redolent of jungle, primitive, primordial, confused and misplaced, who knew why.
He pulled off his shirt and washed himself at the well. He spluttered and snorted as he did so, spat, howled and roared, it really was like the primitive invading our time. Then he pulled on his coarse shirt, and we each advanced to exchange greetings. Our greetings were in equal part formal and heartfelt. There was a kind of ceremony about them, though we saw each other almost every morning, a tacit assurance that to me he was more than a Jewish coachman, while for him I was more than a young whippersnapper from the capital, with influential friends. Sometimes he asked me to read the rare letters his son wrote him from the conservatory. They were short letters, but since in the first place he didn’t have a very good grasp of the German in which his son felt obliged to write — goodness only knows why — and secondly because his tender father’s heart wanted these letters to be a little less short than they were, he made sure I read them to him very slowly. Often he would ask me to repeat a sentence two or three times.
The chickens in his little shed started to cluck as soon as he set foot in the yard. The horses whinnied, almost lustfully, to the morning and to Manes the coachman. First, he unlocked the stable, and both greys put out their heads at once. He kissed them both, as a man kisses a woman. Then he went into the shed to get out the carriage. Thereupon, he put the horses to. Then he opened the henhouse, and with much squawking and flapping of wings the fowls scattered. It was as though an invisible hand had dispersed them across the yard.
I also saw the wife of the coachman Manes Reisiger. She got up about half an hour after her husband, and asked me in to tea. I drank it, from the great tin samovar in their blue kitchen, while Manes ate his bread and onion with grated radish and cucumbers. It smelled strong, but secret, almost homely. I had never breakfasted in this way before, but I loved it, I was young, really I was just young.
I even liked the wife of my friend Manes Reisiger, though she was what in common parlance is called plain, red-haired, freckled, looking like a puffed-up bread roll. In spite of that, and in spite of her fat fingers, there was something dainty about the way she poured my tea and prepared her husband’s breakfast. She had given him three children. Two had died of smallpox. She would talk about the dead children sometimes, as though they were still alive. She seemed not to distinguish between those of her children who were in the ground and her son who had gone off to the conservatory in Vienna; perhaps to her he was as good as dead. Certainly, he was no longer present in her life.