In the morning, while I was splitting wood for kindling to light the samovar, Baranovich came into the kitchen. Unwontedly quickly, he started speaking: “So there was a fight,” he said. “I saw the wounds, I heard the silence. I can’t keep them here any longer. This house needs to be at peace. I’ve had guests before. They were always welcome to stay as long as they kept the peace. I never asked anyone where he was from. He could have been a murderer for all I cared. To me he was a guest. I have the watchword: a guest in the house is God in the house. The lieutenant who sent you to me I have known for a long time. I had to throw him out once too for fighting. He wasn’t upset. I’d like to keep you. You didn’t fight. But the other two will report you. So you’ll have to leave as well.” He stopped. I tossed the burning kindling into the samovar pan, and stuffed some loose newspaper over it to keep it from blowing out. When the samovar started to sing, Baranovich resumed: “You can’t run away. In this region, in this season it’s impossible for a wanderer to stay alive. There’s nothing for you but to go back to Viatka. To Viatka,” he said again, hesitated, and spelled it out: “to the camp. You may be punished gravely, lightly, or not at all. Then again, there’s no shortage of other trouble, the Tsar is far away, his laws are a mess. Report to Sergeant Kumin. He has more power than the camp commandment. I’ll give you some tea and makhorka for him. Remember: Kumin.” The water was boiling, I tipped some tea into the chajnik, poured boiling water on it, and put the chajnik on the samovar fire. For the last time! I thought. I wasn’t afraid of the camp. It was war, and that’s what happened to prisoners: they were put in camps. But I now understood that Baranovich was a sort of father, that I felt at home in his house, and that his bread was the bread of home. The previous day I’d lost my friends. Today I was losing my home. At that time, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t the last time I would lose my home. The likes of us is marked down by fate.
When I brought the tea in, Reisiger and Joseph Branco were already seated at opposite ends of the table. Baranovich was leaning in the doorway. He didn’t sit down, not even when I poured his tea. I cut the bread myself, and doled it out. He stood by the table, drank his tea standing up, standing up he ate his bread. Then he said: “My friends, I’ve talked to your lieutenant. It’s impossible for me to keep you here any longer. Take your sleigh, stuff a few furs under your coats, they will warm you. I’ll take you back to the place where I first met you.”
Manes Reisiger went out; I could hear him towing the sleigh across the crisp snow in the yard. At first Branco didn’t realize what was happening. “All right, let’s pack up!” I said. For the first time, I was upset at having to take command.
When we were finished, and were sitting squeezed together in the narrow sleigh, Baranovich said to me: “Get down, there’s something I’ve forgotten.” We walked back into the house. For the last time, I sneaked a look at kitchen, parlour, window, knife, cutlery, the tied-up dog, the two shotguns, the stacks of furs. My discretion was futile, because Baranovich saw everything. “Here,” he said, and gave me a revolver. “Your friends will—” he didn’t complete the sentence. I pocketed the revolver. “Kumin won’t search you. Just give him the tea and the makhorka.” I wanted to thank him, but how pitiful thanks would have sounded, thanks from my mouth! It occurred to me how often in my life I had mechanically uttered the word thanks. I had disallowed it. How hollow it would have sounded to Baranovich’s ears, my weightless thank you, and even my handshake would have been something lightweight — and he was just pulling on his mittens anyway. Only when we got to the place from where he had collected us the first time did he pull off his right mitten, shake our hands, and give us his usuaclass="underline" “God give you good health!” Then he called out a loud “Vyo!” to the grey, as though afraid we might stay on the spot. He turned his back on us. It was snowing. He disappeared into the dense whiteness, a ghost in a hurry.
We drove to the camp. Kumin asked no questions. He accepted tea and makhorka and asked no questions. He separated us. I went to the officers’ barracks. I saw Manes and Joseph Branco twice a week during exercise. They never looked at each other. When I sometimes went to one of them to give him a little of my tobacco, whichever of them it was would say, formally and in German: “Thank you, sir!” “Everything all right?” “Yes, sir!” One day at roll call they were both missing. That evening I found a note under my pillow. On it was written, in Joseph Branco’s hand: “We’ve gone. We’re going to Vienna.”
XXIII
And Vienna is where I saw them again, four years later.
I got home on Christmas Eve of 1918. The clock on the Westbahnhof showed eleven o’clock. I walked along the Mariahilfer Strasse. A rough sleet, failed snow and wretched brother to hail, slanted down from an inclement sky. My cap was bare, the pips had been torn off it. My collar was bare, the stars had been torn off it. I myself was bare. The stones were bare, and the walls and roofs likewise. Bare the sparse streetlamps. The sleet scrabbled against their dull glass, as though the heavens were chucking handfuls of grit at helpless glass marbles. The coattails of the sentries outside the public buildings were flapping, and their skirts bellied out, even though they were sodden. The fixed bayonets didn’t look real, the rifles were curled against their shoulders. It was as though the rifles wanted to go to sleep, tired like us from four years of shooting. I wasn’t in the least surprised that no one saluted me, my naked cap and naked tunic collar gave no one cause. I wasn’t a rebel. I was just a poor wretch. It was the end. I thought of my father’s old dream of the triple monarchy, which he had given into my keeping. My father lay buried in the cemetery at Hietzing, and Emperor Franz Joseph, whose dissident loyalist he had been, in the Kapuzinergruft. I was the heir, and the sleet fell on me, and I trudged to the house of my father and mother. I made a detour via the Kapuzinergruft. There too a sentry was going up and down. What did he have to guard? The tomb? The memory? History itself?! I, an heir, stopped in front of the church for a while. The sentry ignored me. I doffed my cap. Then I wandered on, from one house to the next, back to the house of my father. Was my mother still alive? Twice on my way I had sent her word of my return. I walked faster. Was my mother still alive? I stood in front of our house. I rang the bell. I waited a long time. Our old concierge opened the gate. “Frau Fanny!” I cried. She recognized me right away by my voice. The candle flickered in her hand. “We’re waiting for you, we’re waiting for you, young master. We haven’t slept for days, neither of us, madam upstairs hasn’t neither.” She was indeed dressed as I had only ever seen her on Sunday mornings, never at night after the police curfew hour. I took the stairs two at a time.
My mother stood next to her old chair, in her buttoned-up black dress, her silver hair swept back. Over the crown of two braids lay the broad ridge of her comb, as grey as her hair. The collar and narrow cuffs of her dress were set off by the familiar narrow white lace borders. In conjuration, she raised her old stick with the silver crutch aloft, she raised it to the heavens, as though her arm alone wasn’t enough for the thanks she wanted to give. She didn’t move, she stayed where she was, and her waiting for me seemed to me like a striding. She bent down over me. This time she didn’t even kiss me on the forehead. She raised my chin on two of her fingers so that I lifted my face and saw for the first time that she was much bigger than I was. She looked at me for a long time. Then something unlikely happened, something alarming, extraordinary, almost unreaclass="underline" my mother picked up my hand, bent down, and kissed it twice. Quickly and in embarrassment I took off my coat. “The tunic as well,” she said, “it’s all wet.” I took the tunic off as well. My mother saw that my right sleeve had a long rip in it. “Take your shirt off, I’ll sew it for you,” she said. “No, don’t,” I said, “it’s not clean.” Never could I have dreamed of saying of anything in our house that it was dirty or soiled. How quickly these ceremonial usages returned! Only now was I truly back.