But there was no time to lose. In fact, what chiefly oppressed us in those days was haste: there was no more time to fill the negligible amount of space left us by our lives, not even time to ready ourselves to die. We didn’t really know whether to yearn for death or hope to escape with our lives. For me and the likes of me these were hours of utmost tension: hours in which death no longer looked like an abyss that you plunge into one day, more like a further shore that you try to leap across to, and you know how long the seconds feel before you leap.
I went first to my mother’s, as though following some prompting of nature. It was clear that she didn’t think she would see me again, but she pretended to be expecting me. It’s one of the secrets of mothers: they never pass up a chance to see their offspring, whether supposed dead or actually dead; and if it were possible for a dead son to be resurrected, she would take him in her arms as promptly as though he hadn’t returned from the hereafter, but merely from the reaches of here somewhere. A mother is always expecting the return of her son: whether he’s near or far or dead. It was in such a spirit that my mother welcomed me at nine o’clock that morning. She was sitting there as ever, in her chair, having just finished her breakfast, with the newspaper in front of her and her old-fashioned oval steel-rimmed spectacles on. She took them off when I walked in, but she didn’t lower her newspaper. “I kiss your hand, Mother!” I said, walked up to her, and took the newspaper from her. I fell into her lap. She kissed me on the mouth, the cheeks, the brow. “So it’s war,” she said, as though she was breaking the news to me, or as though the war had only begun with the moment of my return home to say goodbye.
“Yes,” I replied, “it’s war, and I’ve come to say goodbye to you.” “And also,” I added after a while, “to marry Elisabeth before I join up.”
“Why marry,” asked my mother, “if you’re off to the war?” Here too, she was speaking like a mother. If she was letting her son — her only son — go off to the war, then she wanted to be sure she was delivering him into the hands of death, and death alone. She didn’t want to share her possession or her loss with another woman.
She had probably guessed for a long time that I was in love with Elisabeth. (She knew her.) My mother had probably been afraid for a long time that she would lose her only son to another woman — which seemed on balance worse than losing him to death. “Son of mine,” she said, “you are old enough to decide what you want to do with your life. You want to get married before you go to war; I understand. I am not a man, I have never experienced war, I know little of the army. But I know that war is something terrible, and that you may very well die in the course of it. At this time I can be blunt with you. I don’t care for Elisabeth. I would never have stood in the way of your marrying her, not even under normal circumstances. But I wouldn’t have been blunt with you. Marry her and be happy, if circumstances permit. And there’s an end. Now, let’s talk about other things: when are you reporting? And where?”
For the first time in my life I felt sheepish, even a little insignificant, in front of my mother. I had no other answer to give than a rather pathetic: “I’m sure I’ll be back soon, Mama!” which still sounds wretched in my ears today.
“Be back by lunchtime, son,” she said, the way she always did, and as though the world were perfectly in order, “we’re having schnitzel and plum dumplings for lunch.”
It was a classic display of motherhood: my readiness to die suddenly trumped by the peaceful dumplings. I could have fallen to my knees with emotion. But I was still too young at the time to be able to show emotion without embarrassment. I’ve since learned that it takes great maturity and experience for a man to display emotion without embarrassment.
I kissed my mother’s hand, as I always did. Her hand — how could I ever forget it — was slender and delicate and veined with blue. The morning light swept into the room, a little dimmed by the dark red silk curtains, like a well-behaved guest dressed in formal attire. The pale hand of my mother took on a reddish shimmer as well, a kind of blushing scarlet, a hallowed hand gloved in morning sunlight. And the hesitant autumnal twitter of the birds in our garden was almost as familiar and almost as remote to me as the familiar red-veiled hand of my mother.
“I have to go,” was all I said. I went to see the father of my dearly loved Elisabeth.
XIV
The father of my dearly loved Elisabeth was at that time a prominent, almost a celebrated, hat-maker. He had gone from a ten-a-penny “imperial councillor” to a common-or-garden Hungarian baron. The positively arcane customs of the old Monarchy sometimes called for Austrian commercial councillors to become Hungarian barons.
The war came at a not unwelcome juncture for my future father-in-law. He was already too old to have to serve, but still young enough to make the leap from a respectable solid hat-maker to a dashing manufacturer of those army caps that bring in so much more profit and cost so much less to produce than a topper.
It was noon, the bells in the Rathaus were just striking, and when I walked in, he was just back from a highly satisfactory meeting at the War Ministry. He had been given a contract to make half a million army caps. In this way, he told me, an ageing helpless man could still serve his fatherland. As he spoke, he kept running his hands through his greying blond whiskers, as though to caress both halves of the Dual Monarchy, its Cis- and Trans-Leithanian wings. He was big, heavy and slow. He made me think of a sort of sunny porter who had undertaken to make half a million caps, and whom such a burden, far from weighing him down, made lighter. “Well, I suppose you’ll be reporting for duty then!” he said in positively genial tones. “I don’t think I’m giving anything away if I say my daughter will miss you.”
At that moment, I saw I couldn’t possibly ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage. And with that impetuosity with which one tries to make the impossible possible, and that haste with which an ever-advancing death compelled me to seize whatever remained of my life, I was brusque with the hat-maker: “I need to speak to your daughter right away.”
“My young friend,” he replied, “I know you want to ask for her hand in marriage. I know Elisabeth won’t turn you down. So why don’t you just take mine for the moment, and see yourself as my son!” And with that he put out his large, soft and far too white hand. I took it and had the sensation of paddling around in some hopeless pastry dough. It was a hand without pressure and without warmth. It gave the lie to his offer of making me his “son,” it even rescinded it. Elisabeth came in, and the hat-maker saved me the trouble of speaking. “Herr Trotta is away to the war” — thus my father-in-law, as if to say I was going to the Riviera for a holiday — “but he would like to marry you first.”
He spoke in the same tones he had used an hour before in the War Ministry, talking to the equipment johnnies about forage caps. But there was Elisabeth. There was her smile, seeming to float ahead of her towards me, a light that was born in her, and seemed everlasting and eternally renewable, a silvery bliss that seemed to tinkle, though it was silent.
We fell into each other’s arms. We kissed for the very first time, passionately, shamelessly almost, in spite of her father’s presence, yes, perhaps even with the blissful criminal awareness of having a witness to our indiscretion. I told her the situation. I had no time. Death stood at my back. I was its son, more than I was the son of any hat-maker. I had to join my Twenty-First, on the Landstrasser Hauptstrasse. I hurried off, straight from Elisabeth’s embrace into the army; from love to destruction. I relished them both with the same fortitude of heart. I hailed a cab, and trundled off to the barracks.