The entente is represented as well. By four Englishmen, NCOs, on 100 crowns per diem. Only one of them speaks any German. And so the four of them hang around together all day. They eat the same food, drink the same drinks, buy the same commodities. Simply because only one of them knows any German, and so the others all fall in with him. Because it’s awkward and not very English to talk a lot and to gesticulate. The Hungarians more than make up for it. They all speak German.
If you’re not very careful, the shops, cafés, hotels, etc., will give you twenty kronen change in two-krone notes, with serial numbers all beginning with seven. It’s an unlucky seven. The money is Kun money, and therefore worthless. The best thing to do is palm it off on a clueless traveller coming from the depths of Austria to use as tips.
As I say, Bruck is a little alarming. People here come in two types: those in blue shirts, and those in white shirts. The former are police spies, the latter communist agitators. (The locals wear no collars.) As a stranger, you come in for lots of suspicious looks. Either you’re a spy or an agitator, or you decide to leave your collar behind. Then you’ll be picked up by the nearest cop and your worries will be over.
Strange city! When I wanted to stretch out at night in the too-short bed, I dreamed that my nose collided with a hyphen, at the very point where the Red Guards are. I caught a whiff of Béla Kun, awoke dripping with sweat, and was unable to get back to sleep.
I will never go to Bruck on the Leitha again. Ever since it’s stopped being Bruck-Kiralyhida, it’s become a little edgy. And all on account of one hyphen.
It’s too bad about the hyphen.
Der Neue Tag, 20 July 1919
21. Journey through Galicia: People and Place
The country has a bad reputation in Western Europe. Our complacent culture likes to associate it with squalor, dishonesty and vermin. But while it may once have been the case that the East of Europe was less sanitary than the West, to say so today is banal; and anyone doing so will have said less about the region he claims to be talking about than the originality he lacks. And yet Galicia, one of the great battlefields of the Great War, is a long way from being rehabilitated. Not even for those to whom a battlefield is eo ipso a field of honour. Even though Western European bodies fell on Galician soil. Even though out of the mouldering bones of dead Tyroleans, Austrians and Germans sprouts the characteristic maize of this country.
“Kukuruza” is what they call the ears of maize. When they are ripe, they are hung round the straw eaves of the peasants’ huts, large, yellow, naturally occurring tassels, fluffed with long yellow hairs. Pigs are fattened on Kukuruz, and geese and ducks, and then brought to market. Poor Jewish traders put their maize in pans of boiling water and wander through the streets with the hot kernels, to sell them to other poor Jews who trade in old rags, and leftovers of glass and newspapers. The Kukuruz dealers live off the ragmen. But who do the ragmen live off?
It’s difficult to live. Galicia has more than eight million inhabitants to feed. The soil is rich, the people are poor. They are peasants, traders, craftsmen, officials, soldiers, officers, merchants, bankers, landowners. There are too many traders, too many officials, too many soldiers, and too many officers. All of them live off the only productive class, namely the peasants.
These are devout, superstitious, anxious. They live in timid awe of the priest, and have boundless respect for the “city”, from which come strange horseless carriages, officials, Jews, gentry, doctors, engineers, geometers, electricity, which is known as “elektryka”; the town into which they send their daughters for them to become maids or prostitutes; the town where the law courts are, the clever lawyers a man has to be wary of, the wise judges in their gowns behind metal crosses under the colourful pictures of the Saviour in whose Holy Name a man is sentenced to months and years and sometimes even to death by the rope; the town which he feeds so that it can feed him, so that he can go there to buy colourful headscarves and aprons, the town where “commissions”, decrees, local ordinances and newspapers break out.
That’s the way it was under Emperor Franz Joseph, that’s the way it is now. There are different uniforms, different eagles, different insignia. But the basic things don’t change. Among these basic things are: the air, the human clay, and God with all His Saints that inhabit the heavens and whose images are put up by the side of the road.
These holy pictures in among the wide cornfields, on the edges of the meadows, were destroyed in the Great War, riddled with holes and hacked at and crippled and then put up again, repainted, and given inscriptions that indicate the peasants’ sacrifice was as great as their devotion was profound. This is not the way everywhere. One little village in East Galicia still has that celebrated Christ whose cross was shot away, leaving only the stone Saviour, his bleeding feet nailed to a stump, his arms spread wide in incomprehension of a silent God and a trigger-happy world; a Redeemer crucified without a cross; the symbolic consequence of the odds of war. The miracle was rightly left to stand. All round it, the trenches slowly grow over.
But they leave ugly scars that are like a disfiguring skin disease of the earth. I try to avoid the kind of reportage that looks out of a railway window and jots down fleeting impressions with a rush of satisfaction. But I can’t. My eyes always move from the speaking features of my fellow travellers to the melancholy flat world without limits, the mild sorrow of the fields into which the battlegrounds have grown, to subsequent details. Around me, a strange and typical man may just be explaining a world, his world — I can’t take my eyes off the little station.
All these stations are small and narrow, consisting of a pavement with a couple of rails in front of it. The platform looks like a scrap of road stuck between fields. As though it was a busy street corner by a stock exchange, dark-haired and red-haired Jewish traders take up position here. They aren’t expecting anyone, they aren’t seeing off any friend, they are going to the station because it is part of the profession of a small trader to go to the station to watch the train come in, the passengers get out, the once-a-day train, the only connection to the world beyond, that brings with it something of the world’s hubbub and something of the great deals that are concluded across the world. The train brings German-language newspapers from Vienna and Prague and Ostrava. Someone reads aloud. Later, the traders go home, talking in little groups, along the path that connects the little town to the station, fields on the left, fields on the right; on the right is the picture of Jesus, on the left a saint’s shrine, and between them go the Jews with lowered heads, careful not to touch the cross, and to avoid the saint, between the Scylla and the Charybdis of the alien, deliberately ignored faith. Mud splashes up from the street.
From a distance the mud has a sheen like dirty silver. At night you might take the roads for murky rivers, in which the sky with its moon and stars is reflected a thousandfold, as in a dirty, distorting crystal. Twenty times a year they pour stones into the mud, rough blocks, mortar and rust-brown bricks, and call it ballast. But the mud comes out on top; it gulps down the blocks of stone, the mortar, the bricks, and its deceptive surface mimics something solid and flat, as whole mountain chains slumber under gurgling water, a line of hills painfully driven through narrows. Many baggage trains have flogged down these roads, gun carriages left deep tracks, the horses sank down to the saddle — I remember it, I was there. Once, I tramped down these roads and others just like them, a pack man among pack animals, and the endless mud swallowed us alive, as it swallows the ballast of the roads.