Friedrich suddenly noticed, hanging on the walls, a large coloured oleograph of the Kaiser in coronation robes. The portrait had already been there in peacetime, but so high up on the wall and so dusty that it had always been taken for a landscape. Now it hung in a more prominent position, like a renewed plighting of troths by the beggars and the poor who came there.
11
Friedrich still had enough money to last him for about a month. Berzejev had divided the ready money with him. Friedrich was waiting for a letter from his friend in Zürich. He had no proof of identity to satisfy the police about himself. He lived in his old room at the tailor’s, who had been rejected for the time being on grounds of general physical debility. This good fortune made him affable. He warned Friedrich against his wife and advised him to tell her that he was expecting a telegram to report for duty any day.
Friedrich was afraid of the neighbours, an anonymous denunciation, a policeman’s glance, and even Grünhut the patriot.
He wanted to see Hilde again. He wrote to her, asking her to come to the café. He waited in the corner; an old gentleman sat opposite him, a newspaper in front of his face. Only his snow-white hair was visible, parted in the middle. He did not stir. He did not lay the newspaper down, nor did he turn it over. It was as if he had fallen asleep but went on reading through closed eyelids. A full glass of water which he had not touched stood on his table, covered by a page of the newspaper. He was probably holding quite an old issue of the paper, one announcing the outbreak of war. He could no longer put it down. On the wall to the right hung a long narrow mirror which had never been completely visible because it had always been obscured by a customer’s back. It only provided a fleeting glimpse to the passer-by. Now, for the first time, Friedrich could see his face even though he was sitting down. Only two lamps burnt in the whole room. The wall where the mirror was still lay in the darkening grey of the departing day, and the mirror seemed far removed from the lighted part of the room. It held the image of one of the burning lamps, diminished in its unfathomable depths. Friedrich beheld his face like that of a stranger. If he turned his glance sideways without moving his head he could see his profile, and it alarmed him that he could scarcely recognize himself. His mouth was narrow, his lower lip projected and pulled the chin up with it. His hair was receding, his forehead bulged white and gleaming, and the first hint of a silvery sheen showed at his temples. His nose drooped gently and wearily over his mouth.
Night already lay behind the windows when Hilde entered. He went towards her. He looked in her face for a long time, as he had just been looking in the mirror. He wanted to find changes in her, too, shadows cast by the times. But the months had passed over her smooth dark face like harmless caressing summer airs. Time had found no place on her cheeks to leave a trace behind. The dark gleam of her eyes, the glimmer of the soft silvery down on her skin, the red bow of her lips, the graceful hesitance of her body, which seemed to reflect before every movement as if the limbs had sense and the nerves intelligence — all these were for ever. Friedrich waited for the first sound of her voice as for a gift. He wanted to see and hear all at once. The waiter, hailed by her, came as a deliverance. ‘What would you like to order?’ he asked. And once again he heard her voice.
She had been informed of his fate. She had often revisited the café. Once R. had sat down at her table and told her about Friedrich. But now it was wartime. And he had a twofold reason for fighting against Tsarism. The cause of freedom was now so splendidly identical with the cause of the Fatherland that all class distinctions and class conflicts were annulled. She was well aware of this. At last she had found an opportunity to get to know the people, for she nursed the wounded in hospital every morning. And finally came the inevitable question: ‘When are you joining up?’
‘Next week,’ he said mechanically.
Could he come round tomorrow afternoon? Some of her old friends would be there, many of course in uniform.
‘No!’ he said. But he already saw a shadow on her face and was touched by the fact that she was sad and might miss him.
‘Yes!’ he corrected himself. ‘I’ll come.’
In the entrance hall at Herr von Maerker’s he already noted signs that the Fatherland was in danger. On the clothes-racks at either side of the mirror hung officers’ caps and blue cloaks with metal buttons, and two sabres leaned in the stands appointed for umbrellas in times of peace. As Friedrich handed his hat to the servant girl it seemed to him that she hung it on a rather remote hook with faint disdain, alongside two dark forlorn civilian overcoats. The servant girl had a distant resemblance to a camp-follower.
Most of the friends of the household had joined up. Herr von Maerker himself had become a captain and was currently commandant of a railway station. Twice a day he went to the station and observed the departing regiments and the arriving transports of wounded with an enthusiastic interest. The unwonted exercise did him good. Every day, for decades, he had walked along the same two streets. The sojourn at a station that he had only fleetingly traversed twice a year, on his departure for and his return from the holidays, gave him the pleasant illusion after years of monotonous office work of finding himself caught up in an exciting life. He had to thank his connections at the War Ministry for various items of knowledge about goings-on in politics and at G.H.Q., and for the comforting feeling that he would remain at one of the stations in Vienna for as long as it was possible. Naturally, he did not for a moment think that the protection he enjoyed was inconsistent with his love for the Fatherland. He lacked any understanding of the close connection between patriotism and danger to life. He did not take into account that the direct consequence of war was death, rather than variety. After all, like so many of his social class, he hardly realized that the phrase ‘Fallen on the Field of Honour’ necessarily implied the irrevocable end of the fallen.
Herr von Maerker’s housekeeper now went about with the cheering prospect of becoming the bride of her employer after victory. In its very first months the war had upset a few social prejudices which, despite their stupidity, had nevertheless been more moralistic than the war. A new era was seen as imminent. Because it had become necessary to endow proletarians with the aristocratic attributes of heroes and knights, members of the social class to which Herr von Maerker belonged imagined that they had become democratic. Some young women, so-called ‘liaisons’ of the sons of the aristocracy and high finance, were fortunate enough, through a quick wartime wedding, to become the legitimate spouses of their princes instead, as was usually the case in peacetime, of acquiring a drapery shop or a glove business as a peace-settlement. Through the mediation of their pretty daughters, a few hundred of the lower middle class acquired connections with elevated circles and got into the army medical service when they enlisted. Patriotic unity was therefore no longer a matter for doubt. All the ladies were nurses or manifested some kind of lively charitable impulse. They went so far as to send unknown war widows articles of clothing that would otherwise have been given to the sewing-women in order to forestall any demands for increased wages. Golden wedding-rings were exchanged for iron ones, even though there was some willingness to retain the precious stones. Watch-chains, especially unfashionable ones, were also exchanged. Wherever one looked there was iron. Many sons found themselves risking their lives, to the gratification of their parents. Even the ne’er-do-wells who had squandered money, were forgiven, since they were now heroes and no longer capable of squandering. The mothers of the dead wore their sorrow as generals their golden collars, and the death of the fallen became a kind of decoration for the bereaved. But even the relatives of heroes who were engaged in quite safe duties were as proud as if they had a dead man to mourn, and the nuances between mothers of the deceased and mothers of the living were effaced in the familiar general ‘gravity of the times’. Since all alike was tragic, all imagined themselves as making a sacrifice.