Esteemed sir! Don’t despise this invitation. I am so small, and you are so great. Dear sir! I also beg your forgiveness for having this letter written. I cannot write, except my own name. The present letter is written on my instructions by the official public scribe of our town, Hirsch Kiniower, who is a dependable, tidy, and officially licensed individual. Signed, your obedient servant:
Manes Reisiger, Coachman, Zlotogrod
The whole letter was written in a careful, calligraphic hand, of the sort that was then described as “like a book.” Only the writing of the name, the signature, betrayed the enchanting clumsiness of the coachman’s hand. That signature alone would have been sufficient to decide me to keep my word, and travel to Zlotogrod in early autumn. All of us in those days were carefree, and I was as carefree as any of the others. Our life before the Great War was idyllic, and a journey to the faraway town of Zlotogrod seemed like an adventure to all of us.
And the fact that I was to be the hero of this adventure was a splendid opportunity to strike a pose before my friends. And even though this adventurous journey was so far in the future, and even though I was going alone, we talked about it every evening, as though there was only a week between me and Zlotogrod, and as though it wasn’t just me alone, but all of us who were going. Gradually the journey became a passion for us, an obsession even. And we started to paint an imaginary picture of the remote little town of Zlotogrod, to such a degree that even while we were describing it, we were convinced we were painting wholly inaccurate pictures; and we couldn’t stop distorting this place none of us had ever seen. I mean: giving it all sorts of attributes of which we were sure in advance that they were products of our imagination, and not at all the real properties of the little town.
Untroubled times! Death was already crossing his bony hands over the glass bumpers from which we drank. We didn’t see him; we didn’t even see his hands. We talked so long and so intently about Zlotogrod that I began to be afraid it might suddenly disappear, or that my friends might come to the conclusion that it was all talk, and that such a Zlotogrod didn’t in fact exist and that it was a figment of my imagination. Suddenly I was seized with an impatient longing for Zlotogrod, and for the coachman by the name of Reisiger.
In the middle of the summer of 1914 I went there, having first written to my cousin Trotta in Sipolje that I hoped to meet him there.
IX
So, in the middle of the summer of 1914, I went to Zlotogrod. I put up at the Golden Bear, the only hotel in the little town, so I was told, that was up to European standards.
The station was tiny, just like the station in Sipolje, which I had dutifully committed to memory. All the stations in the old Dual Monarchy resembled each other, all the little stations in the little provincial towns. Yellow and tiny, they were like lazy cats that in winter lay in the snow, in summer in the sun, sheltering under the crystal glass roofs over the platform, and guarded by the emblem of the black double eagle on yellow ground. All over, in Sipolje as in Zlotogrod, there was the same porter, the same porter with the impressive belly, the peaceable dark blue uniform, the black sash diagonally across the chest, the sash in which the bell was stuck, the bell from which issued the threefold official ring that was the signal for departure; on the platform in Zlotogrod, over the door to the stationmaster’s office, as in Sipolje and everywhere else, hung that black iron instrument that so miraculously produced the distant silver tinkle of the distant telephone, douce and frail signals from other worlds, so that one was surprised that they had found a home in such a heavy, albeit small earpiece; on the station in Zlotogrod, as on the station in Sipolje, the porter saluted the arrivals and the departures, and his saluting conferred a sort of military benediction; in the station in Zlotogrod, as in the station in Sipolje, there was the same “first and second class waiting room,” the same station buffet, with the row of schnapps bottles and the bosomy blonde cashier and the two gigantic potted palms either side of the bar, that were equally reminiscent of primitive vegetation and cardboard beer-mats. And outside the station, exactly as in Sipolje, stood three coaches. And I straightaway recognized the unmistakeable coachman, Manes Reisiger.
Of course, it was he who took me to the Golden Bear. He had a fine carriage drawn by a pair of silvery greys, the spokes of the wheels were painted yellow, and the tyres were rubber, just as Manes had seen them in Vienna, on the so-called “rubber-wheelers.”
He admitted to me as we drove that he had reconditioned his coach, not so much for my comfort and in my honour, as out of a sort of collective zeal that compelled him to take a leaf out of the book of his colleagues, the Viennese coachmen, and sacrifice his savings to the god of progress, and invest in two greys, and put rubber tyres on his wheels.
From the station to the town was a substantial distance, and Manes Reisiger had plenty of time to tell me the things that were on his mind. As he did so, he held the reins in his left hand. On his right, the whip stayed in its case. The greys needed no instruction, seeming to know the way. Manes didn’t need to do anything. So he sat there casually on the box, with the reins in a loose grip in his left hand, half-turned towards me while he talked. The two greys had cost just one hundred and twenty-five crowns. They were army horses, both blind in one eye, and so no longer useful for military purposes, and sold cheap by the Ninth Dragoons, who were stationed in Zlotogrod. Admittedly he, the coachman Manes Reisiger, would never have been able to buy them so easily, if he hadn’t happened to be a favourite of the Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons. In the little town of Zlotogrod there were no fewer than five coachmen. The other four, Reisiger’s colleagues, had dirty cabs, lazy, hobbling old mares, crooked wheels, and scabbed leather benches. The stuffing swelled up out of the patched and holey leather, and no gentleman, much less a Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons, could be expected to sit in such a coach.
I had letters from Chojnicki to the commanding officer of the local garrison, Colonel Földes of the Ninth, and also to the District Commissioner, Baron Grappik. The following morning, on the first full day of my stay, I proposed to pay calls on both men. The coachman Manes Reisiger fell silent, he had nothing more to say, having already told me everything important in his life. Even so, he left the whip in its case, still held the reins nice and loose, still sat half-turned towards me on the box. The steady smile on his wide mouth, with the strong white teeth against the night-black, almost blue-black blackness of his beard and moustaches suggested a milky moon between forests, between agreeable forests. There was so much cheer, so much goodness in that smile, that it even contrived to dominate the flat, melancholy landscape I was driving through. Wide fields on my right, and wide swamps on my left bordered the road between the Zlotogrod railway station and the little town of Zlotogrod itself — it was as though it had taken some vow of chastity and sworn to keep away from the station that connected it to the world at large. It was a rainy afternoon, and, as I say, early autumn. The rubber tyres of Manes’s carriage rolled soundlessly along the sodden, unpaved road, while the heavy hooves of the ex-Army greys smacked rhythmically into the dark grey mud, sending great clumps of it flying through the air. Darkness was falling when we reached the first houses. In the middle of the Ring, facing the little church, its presence marked by a solitary sorry lantern, stood Zlotogrod’s one and only two-storey building: it was the Golden Bear. The solitary lantern was like an orphan child, vainly trying to smile through its tears.