Someone who was eminently alive to her and always present in her imagination was my cousin, the chestnut roaster. I drew my own conclusions. In another week he would be with us, my cousin Joseph Branco Trotta.
X
And in another week, he arrived.
He arrived with his mule, his leather sack and his chestnuts. He was dark and tan and jovial, just as he was when I had last seen him in Vienna. It felt perfectly normal to him to see me here. The proper chestnut season was still a while off. My cousin had simply come a couple of weeks early on my account. On the way from the station into town, he sat on the box alongside our mutual friend, the coachman Manes Reisiger. He had tethered his mule to the cab. His leather sack, his pan and his chestnuts were strapped to either side. And so we made our entry into the little town of Zlotogrod, but we aroused no interest. The people of Zlotogrod were used to seeing my cousin Joseph Branco turning up every other year. And they seemed to have already got used to me, the stranger in their midst.
As usual, my cousin Joseph Branco stayed with Manes Reisiger. Mindful of the deals he had struck with me the previous summer for his watch and chain, he had packed a few more knick-knacks for me, for instance an embossed silver ashtray with two crossed daggers and a St Nicodemus (who had nothing to do with them), also a brass mug that seemed to me to smell of sour dough, and a painted wooden cuckoo. All these, thus Joseph Branco, were presents for me, “in consideration of” his travel expenses. And I understood what he meant by “in consideration of.” I bought the ashtray, the mug and the wooden bird from him on the evening of his arrival. He was happy.
To while away the time, as he claimed, but in fact to take every opportunity of earning a little money, he made occasional attempts to persuade the coachman Manes that he, Joseph Branco, was a skilled coachman, better than Manes, and better able too to find customers. But Reisiger paid no attention. Without bothering about Joseph Branco, he put his horses to early in the morning, and drove off to the station and to the market place, where his colleagues, the other coachmen waited.
It was a fine, sunny summer. Even though Zlotogrod wasn’t a proper “little town” at all, being rather more of a village in disguise; and even though it gave off the fresh breath of nature, to such an extent that the forests, swamps and hills that surrounded it almost seemed to cluster round the marketplace, and you got the impression that forest, swamp and hill might just as easily and naturally march into town as any traveller arriving at the station to put up at the Golden Bear; my friends, the officials in the District Commissioner’s office, and the gentlemen of the Ninth Dragoons were of the view that Zlotogrod was a real town, because they needed to think they hadn’t been banished to the end of the earth, and the mere fact that there was a railway station in Zlotogrod gave them the assurance that they didn’t live remote from the civilisation they had grown up in and that had pampered them. The result was that once or twice a week they claimed to have to leave the unbreathable town air, pile into carriages, and head for the forests, swamps and hills that in actual fact were on their way into town to them. Because not only was Zlotogrod full of nature, it also seemed to be under siege from its surroundings. So it happened that once or twice a week I and my friends went out in Manes Reisiger’s cab into the so-called “environs” of Zlotogrod. We referred to these trips as “outings.” Often we would stop at Jadlowker’s frontier tavern. Old Jadlowker, an ancient, silver-bearded Jew, sat outside the mighty arch of his broad, grass-green double-doors, stiff and half-paralysed. He resembled winter who wanted to enjoy the last fine days of autumn and take them with him into the rapidly approaching eternity that would know no more seasons. He couldn’t hear, not one word, he was deaf as a post. But from his large, sad, black eyes I thought I could tell that everything that younger men took in with their ears, he was able to see, and that his deafness was a chosen deafness that he was happy in. The threads of gossamer flew gently and tenderly past him. The silvery, but still warm autumn sun shone on the old man as he sat facing west, facing the evening and the sunset, the terrestrial emblems of death, as though he expected that the eternity to which he would soon be consigned would come to him, rather than he go out to it. The crickets shrilled incessantly. The frogs croaked incessantly. A deep peace ruled over the world, the bitter peace of autumn.
At about this time, my cousin Joseph Branco, following an old-established tradition among the chestnut roasters of Austria-Hungary, would open his stall on the Ring of Zlotogrod. For two days the warm, chewy smell of baked apples wafted through the little town.
It began to rain. It was a Thursday. The following day, a Friday therefore, the news was on all street-corners.
It was a proclamation from our old Emperor Franz Joseph, and it was addressed: “To my peoples.”
XI
I was an ensign in the Reserve. It was only two years previously that I had left my battalion, the Twenty-First Jägers. At the time it seemed to me that the war had come at a good moment. Now that it was there and inevitable, I saw right away — and it seems to me my friends will have seen it just as spontaneously — that even a meaningless death was better than a meaningless life. I was afraid of death. No question. I didn’t want to die. All I wanted was the certainty that I would know how to die.
My friend Joseph Branco and his friend the cabbie Manes were both reservists. They were drafted. On the evening of the Friday when the Emperor’s proclamation was put up on walls everywhere, I went, as usual, to the officers’ mess, to eat with my friends in the Ninth Dragoons. I couldn’t understand their healthy appetite, their standard good cheer, their foolish equanimity in view of their orders to attack the Russian frontier town of Radziwillow to the northeast. I was the only one among them who saw the signs of death in their harmless, even cheerful, certainly unmoved expressions. It was as though they were in that state of euphoria that is sometimes experienced by people near death, and that is itself an avatar of death. And even though they were healthy and alert as they sat at their tables drinking their schnapps and their beer, and even though I pretended to take part in their tomfooleries and japes, yet I felt more like a doctor or medical orderly who sees his patient dying, thankful only that the dying man seems unaware of his imminent death. And yet in the long run I still felt unease of a kind that the doctor or orderly may feel when confronted with death and the dying man’s euphoria, at that instant when they are not quite sure whether it might not be better to tell the doomed man what awaits him, instead of feeling relief that he might depart without guessing.
As a result I quickly left the gentlemen of the Ninth Dragoons, and set off on my way to Manes the cabbie, with whom, as already said, my cousin Joseph Branco was staying.
How different was the feeling there, and how salutary it was for me after that evening in the mess of the Ninth Dragoons! Maybe it was the ritual candles in the blue parlour of the Jewish cabbie Manes, burning almost cheerfully, but in any case stolidly and fearlessly, towards their extinction; three candles, golden yellow, stuck in green beer bottles; the cabbie Manes was too poor even to buy himself brass candlesticks. They were little more than stumps of candles, and they seemed to me to symbolize the end of the world, which I knew was now at hand. The tablecloth was white, the bottles of that cheap green glass that seems to proclaim its refreshing contents in a plebeian and exuberant manner, and the flickering candle ends were golden yellow. They were guttering. They cast a restless light over the table, and projected equally restless, flickering shadows on the dark blue walls. At the head of the table sat Manes the cabbie, not in his usual cabbie’s gear of belted sheepskin and corduroy cap, but in a shiny three-quarter-length coat and a black velvet cap. My cousin Joseph Branco wore the greasy leather jerkin he always wore, and, out of respect for his Jewish host, a green Tyrolean hat on his head. Somewhere a cricket was chirruping shrilly.