Elisabeth wasn’t accompanying me to the East. Rather, we were going to Baden together. We had sixteen hours ahead of us, sixteen long, full, replete, fleeting, inadequate hours.
XVIII
Sixteen hours! I had been in love with Elisabeth for three years, but those three years struck me as brief compared to the sixteen hours, when surely it should have been the other way around. Forbidden things are rushed, while what is sanctioned has a certain built-in longevity. Besides, while Elisabeth didn’t seem changed to me, she seemed at least to be on the way to change. I thought about my father-in-law, and detected similarities between him and her. A few of her hand gestures were clearly his; they were like distant and refined echoes of gestures of her father’s. Some of the things she did on the little electric train to Baden almost offended me. For example, barely ten minutes after we had started moving, she took a book out of her little valise. There it was, between her cosmetics bag and her underthings — the bridal robe, I was thinking — and the very fact that a book of all things could presume to rest on such a near-sacramental garment seemed outrageous to me. (The book, incidentally, was a collection of gags of one of those North German humorists who at that time, along with our Nibelung tendency, the German Schulverein, and itinerant lecturers from Pomerania, Danzig, Mecklenburg and Königsberg, were just beginning to spread their drizzly good humour and their noisome expansiveness over Vienna.) Elisabeth looked up from her book, looked at me, looked out of the window, stifled a yawn, and went back to her book. She had a way of crossing her legs that struck me as positively indecent. Was she enjoying her book, I asked. “Funny!” she observed. She passed it to me, so that I might see for myself. I started reading one of the silly tales halfway through; it was about the delicious humour of August the Strong, and a relationship with a cheeky lady-in-waiting. The two epithets, to my mind indicative of Prussian and Saxon souls on their day off, were enough for me. “Delicious,” I said, “delicious and cheeky!” Elisabeth smiled, and read on. We had a reservation at the Golden Lion hotel. Our old servant was in attendance, the only person who had been made privy to our Baden plan. He confessed to me right away that he had betrayed it to my mother. He stood there, at the terminus of the electrical suburban line, holding in his hand the stiff bowler hat that my father had probably left him, and presented my wife with a bouquet of dark red roses. He kept his head bowed, the reflection of the sun left a speck of silver on his bald pate, like a little star. Elisabeth was silent. If only she would say something! I thought. Nothing came. The silent ceremony went on forever. Our two little cases stood together on the pavement. Elisabeth clutched her roses to her, along with her handbag. The old fellow asked us if there was anything he could do for us. He conveyed greetings from my mother. My trunk with my spare uniform and my linens was already in the hotel. “Thank you!” I said. I observed how Elisabeth flinched and moved a little to the side. This flinching, this desertion provoked me. I told Jacques: “Accompany us to the hotel, will you! I want to talk to you still.” “Very good, sir!” he said, and he picked up our cases and toddled off after us.
“I need to have a chat with the old man!” I said to Elisabeth. “I’ll be up in half an hour!”
I went with Jacques to the café. He kept his bowler hat on his lap; gently I took it away from him, and set it on the chair next to us. All of Jacques’s tenderness seemed to flow to me from the distant, pale blue, slightly moist old eyes; it was as though my mother had left one last maternal message for me in those eyes. His gouty hands (it was a long time since I had last seen them bare, they were only ever in white gloves) trembled as they picked up his coffee cup. They were good faithful servant’s hands. Why had I never looked at them before? Blue knots sat atop the crooked joints of the fingers, the nails were flat, fissured and blunt, the bump of bone at the wrist was askew and seemed unwillingly to suffer the stiff edge of the old-fashioned cuffs, and innumerable pale-blue veins, like tiny rivulets, made their laborious way under the cracked skin of the back of the hand.
We sat in the garden of the Astoria Café. A dry, golden chestnut leaf sailed down and settled on Jacques’s bald skull; he didn’t feel it, his skin had grown leathery and insensitive; I let the leaf lie. “How old are you?” I asked him. “Seventy-eight, young master!” he replied, and I saw a single, large, yellow snaggle-tooth under the thick, white moustache. “It should be me going to war now, not the youngsters!” he went on. “I was there in ’66, against the Prussians, with the Fifteenth.” “Where were you born?” I asked. “In Sipolje!” said Jacques. “Do you know the Trottas?” “Of course I do, all of them!” “And can you still speak Slovene?” “I’ve forgotten, young master!”
“Half an hour!” I had told Elisabeth. I was reluctant to take out my watch. More than an hour might have passed, but I couldn’t tear myself away from Jacques’s pale blue eyes, in which dwelt his pain and my mother’s. I felt somehow as though in the space of this single hour I could atone for the past twenty-three years of my facile and loveless life, and instead of embarking on my so-called new life in the traditional manner of a newly-wed, I bent my mind to try to correct the one that was behind me. Ideally, I would have started again with my birth. It was clear to me that I had made a mess of the most important things. Too late. And now I was standing
before death and before love. For an instant — I admit — I even considered a scandalous, disgraceful ruse. I could send Elisabeth a message that I had to leave instantly for the Front. Or I could tell it to her face, embrace her, mime the despairing, the inconsolable. It was just a momentary confusion. I got over it right away.
I left the Astoria. Loyally, half a step behind me, went Jacques. Just before the entrance to the hotel, as I was about to turn and say goodbye to him, I heard a faint gurgle. I half-turned and spread my arms. The old fellow slumped against my shoulder. His bowler hat rolled over the cobbles. The hotel porter came running out. Jacques was unconscious. We carried him into the lobby. I sent for the doctor, and ran up to tell Elisabeth.
She was still sitting over her humorist, drinking tea, and pushing little pieces of buttered toast and jam into her sweet red mouth. She set her book down on the table, and spread her arms. “Jacques,” I began, “Jacques. .” and I faltered. I didn’t want to say the terrible verb. A smile of lustfulness and indifference and cheerfulness quivered round Elisabeth’s mouth, a smile I thought I would only be able to dispel if I used the macabre word itself — and so I said it: “He’s dying!” She dropped her arms, and said merely: “He’s old!”
People came for me, the doctor was there. The old fellow had been put to bed in his room. His starched shirt had been taken off. It hung over his black jacket, a gleaming linen breastplate. His polished boots stood like two sentries at the foot of his bed. His woollen socks, multiply darned, lay curled over them. That was all that was left of a simple human being. One or two brass buttons on the bedside table, a collar, a tie, boots, socks, jacket, trousers, shirt. The old feet with their hammer toes peeped out of the end of the bed. “Heart attack!” said the doctor. He had himself just been called to the colours, a regimental doctor, already in uniform. Tomorrow he was joining the Deutschmeisters. Our formal exchange of greetings at this death-scene was like something from an alternative theatre production, somewhere in Wiener Neustadt. We both felt ashamed. “Is he going to die?” I asked. “Is he your father?” asked the doctor. “Our retainer!” I said. I would rather have concurred: yes, my father. The doctor seemed to sense it. “Probably,” he said. “Tonight?” He shrugged.