“The time has come for us all to say our goodbyes,” began Manes the cabbie. And, much more clear-sighted than my friends in the Ninth Dragoons, and yet with an almost aristocratic touch of equanimity, because of the way death exalts every man who is both prepared for it and worthy of it, he continued: “It will be a great war, a long war, and there is no knowing which of us may one day come home from it. For the last time I am sitting here, at the side of my wife, at the Friday table, with the Sabbath candles. Let us take a proper farewell, my friends: you, Branco, and you, sir!” And, in order to take a truly proper farewell, we decided, the three of us, to go to Jadlowker’s border tavern.
XII
Jadlowker’s border tavern was always open, at all times of day and night. It was the bar for Russian deserters, those of the Tsar’s soldiers, that is, who could be persuaded, cajoled or threatened by the numerous agents of the American shipping lines to leave the army, and take ship for Canada. Many more, admittedly, quit voluntarily. They paid the agents the last money they had; they or their relations. Jadlowker’s border tavern had the reputation of a disorderly house. But, like all the other disorderly houses in the area, it was commended to the favour of the Austrian border police, and thus in a manner of speaking enjoyed simultaneously the protection and the suspicion of the authorities.
When we got there — at the end of a silent and depressed half-hour walk — the great, brown double-doors were already locked. Even the lantern that hung there was out. We were forced to knock, and the boy Onufri came to let us in. I knew Jadlowker’s tavern, I had been there a couple of times, and I was familiar with the usual commotion of the place, that particular type of noise that is made by people who have suddenly become homeless or stateless, who have no present, because they are transiting from the past into the future, from a familiar past to a highly doubtful future, like ship’s passengers at the moment that they leave terra firma to board an unfamiliar ship by way of a wobbling gangplank.
Today, though, was quiet. It was eerily quiet. Even little Kapturak, one of the keenest and noisiest agents, whose preferred way of hiding all the many things he was professionally and personally obliged to hide was by means of an extreme garrulousness, today sat silently in the corner, on the bench by the stove, small, tinier than he was already, and thus doubly inconspicuous, a silent shadow of his otherwise self. Only the day before yesterday he had escorted a group of deserters, or as they like to say in his calling, a “consignment,” over the frontier, and now the Emperor’s proclamation was on every wall, the war was there, even the mighty shipping agency was powerless, the mighty thunder of world history silenced the chattersome little Kapturak, and its violent lightning reduced him to a shadow. The deserters, Kapturak’s victims, sat with dull and glazed expressions in front of their half-filled glasses. Each time I’d gone to Jadlowker’s tavern before, it had been a particular pleasure of mine — as a young, glib person, who sees in the foolish behaviour of others, even the most exotic and alien, due confirmation of his own thoughtlessness — to spectate at the insouciance of those recently become stateless, the way they drained one glass after another, and ordered one glass after another. The landlord Jadlowker sat behind his bar like an omen, not a messenger of doom, but its bearer; he looked as though he didn’t have the least inclination to fill any glasses, even if his customers had called for it. What was the point of it all? Tomorrow or the day after, the Russians might be here. Poor Jadlowker, who even a week ago had sat there so majestically with his silver beard, like a lord mayor among the barmen, shadowed and shielded as much by the discreet protection of the authorities as by their creditable mistrust, today looked like a human being who is obliged to liquidize his entire existence: a victim of world history. And the heavy blonde barmaid at his side behind the bar had also just been terminated by world history, and given in her brief notice. Everything private was suddenly out in the open. It represented the public world, it stood in for and symbolized it. That was why our farewells were so misguided and so brief. We drank three glasses of mead, and with them we silently munched salted peas. Suddenly my cousin Joseph Branco said: “I’m not going back to Sarajevo. I’m going to report here in Zloczow, together with Manes!” “Bravo!” I exclaimed. And as I did, I knew I would have liked to do exactly the same thing.
But I was thinking about Elisabeth.
XIII
I was thinking about Elisabeth. Ever since I had read the Emperor’s proclamation, I had only two thoughts in my head: one was of death, and the other was of Elisabeth. To this day I don’t know which of them was stronger.
Faced with death, all my foolish anxieties about the foolish jeers of my friends vanished and were forgotten. All at once, I felt brave, for the first time in my life I had courage to own up to my so-called “weakness.” I sensed that the facile exuberance of my friends in Vienna would have recoiled before the black gleam of death, and that in the hour of farewell — of such a farewell — there could be no space for any sort of mockery.
I too could have reported for duty to the local recruiting office in Zloczow, where the cabbie Manes was expected and where my cousin Joseph Branco was also going. In fact, it was my intention to forget Elisabeth and my friends in Vienna and my mother, and deliver myself as soon as possible to the nearest receiving station of death, which is to say, the local recruiting office in Zloczow. Strong feelings bound me to my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend the cabbie Manes Reisiger. Given the nearness of death, my feelings became purer and clearer, just as sometimes, with the onset of a grave illness, clear insights and priorities emerge, so that, for all one’s apprehension and anxiety and sense of suffering to come, a sort of proud satisfaction sets in that one has understood something; the happiness one has identified in suffering, and a sort of serenity because one has been presented with the bill in advance. We are almost happy in our illness. I was just as happy in contemplation of the great illness that was breaking out in the world, which is to say the World War. I could allow my fever dreams their course, which otherwise I tried to suppress. I was in equal measure liberated and endangered.
I already knew that my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend Manes Reisiger were dearer to me than all my erstwhile friends, with the exception of Count Chojnicki. People’s notions of the war ahead were simplistic and for the most part ridiculous. I myself supposed we would march by garrisons, probably in closed ranks, and if not side by side, then at least remain in hailing distance. I pictured myself as I wished to be: in close proximity to my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend, the cabbie Manes.