“But this is monstrous, to serve up . . .”
“Oh do be sensible my dear fellow; there’s a war on, don’t you know? It’s not much worse than the rest of your consignment anyway. By the looks of it the other carcasses must have died of old age or disease.”
Life on Lussin was quiet, to be sure. But at least the remoteness of the station seemed to have spared me for the time being from further investigations into my assault on Hauptmann Kraliczek and my involvement in the escape of Major di Carraciolo. Each day I returned to base expecting to be given a message telling me to report to the Marine Auditor’s office in Pola. But nothing came. By the second half of November things seemed to have quietened down sufficiently for me to risk a trip back to the mainland, to spend a week’s leave in Vienna with my wife, who had by now left the hospital and was staying with my Aunt Aleksia on the Josefsgasse. I had urgent matters to discuss with her anyway: chiefly that of moving her out of the capital now that she was into the sixth month of her pregnancy and things were becoming so difficult. Her last letter had painted a dismal picture of life in the city: the electricity off at least half of each day; the trams not running; queues everywhere and even potatoes hard to come by. Soap was practically unobtainable, she wrote, or if it could be found, consisted of nothing more than a block of scouring sand held together by the thinnest smear of grease. By now the only food item that could be obtained regularly was the dismal vegetable which would brand that bitterly cold winter into the memory of all who lived through it in Central Europe as “the Turnip Winter.” Already substitute substitutes had begun to appear: a new type of ersatz coffee made from roasted turnips, and a wondrous material called “imitation leather substitute.” Buildings were being shaken to pieces now that motor lorries had finally lost their rubber tyres and been fitted with surrogates, which had originally consisted of two concentric steel hoops held apart by springs, but in which the springs had now been replaced by wooden blocks since spring-steel was in short supply. My aunt was helping run a charity clinic for children in Favoriten and said that the incidence of rickets and scabies was increasing most alarmingly among the poor.
In a word, it all sounded utterly dismal. I had already written to my cousins in Poland to seek their help. They had a sizeable estate in the country near Myslenice and had written back to say that Elisabeth would be more than welcome to stay with them for as long as she pleased, both before the birth and afterwards.
She was not pleased when I told her that evening outside the Sud- bahnhof, trying to find a fiacre to take us to the Josefsgasse since the trams were not running.
“But dearest, be reasonable. Surely you can’t want to stay in Vienna for the birth. The place already looks as if it’s been under siege for a year, and this is only November.”
“Otto, I’ve stuck the war out so far in Vienna and I don’t intend quitting now. Anyway, there’s bags of room at your aunt’s and we get on well together.”
“But she’s old, and you’ve only got Franzi to look after you both now that Frau Niedermayer’s gone into the munitions factory.”
“Just fancy—two grown women forced by the brutal circumstances of war to fend for themselves with only one servant to help them. Merciful heavens, how will they bear such privation? Oh wake up Otto: the day of servants and ladies of leisure has gone now and it’ll never come back. If I can’t do the cooking and look after a baby on my own then I must really be a prize ninny. What sort of woman did you think you were marrying? ”
“But why stick in Vienna, for heaven’s sake? It’s hungry and cold already, so what will it be like when the snow comes? Why stay here? It’s not your home.”
“I know. But I’ve no other home now, and as for scuttling away to hide in the countryside, be damned to it. The ordinary people of this country have had to suffer a lot because of the emperors and the generals and their precious war. People like us landed them in it, so we ought at least to stick by them now that the going’s getting tough.”
“By Vienna? You always used to say that it wasn’t so much a city as a form of mental disorder.”
“So it is. But its people are real enough.”
I laughed. “Really Liserl, you’re getting to sound like a socialist these days.”
“Perhaps I am, or becoming one. This war’s making me into a revolutionary: or at least someone who thinks that we ought to end it by putting the Kaiser and Ludendorff and Conrad and the rest into opposite holes in the ground and making them toss bombs at each other for a bit to see how they like it.”
We woke next morning about 8:00, huddled together under the eiderdown in the chilly flat where the stove was now fired with balls of dampened newspaper. A wan, grey late-November light filtered through the window panes, grimy with lignite dust now that the building’s caretaker was dead in Siberia and his successor was too old to clean them. Command of a U-Boat had given me an acute instinct for things not being quite right, and I sensed as soon as I woke that the noise from the street outside was not quite the same as on other mornings: more like a Sunday in fact.
Then Franzi came in with our breakfast on a tray: ersatz coffee, but real white-bread rolls, which my aunt had somehow managed to procure in honour of my visit. My aunt’s maidservant was a girl in her mid-twenties from the suburb of Purkersdorf (or “Puahkersdoarf” as she called it) with fluffy blond hair and great china-blue eyes. Franzi was mildly half-witted, so she had not gone to work in the munitions factories. This morning though she was not her usual equable self. Her doll’s eyes were red-rimmed and she wiped them on her apron, sniffing loudly as she did so.
“What’s the matter, Franzi? ”
“It’s him, Herr Leutnant, he’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“The Old Gentleman, God rest his soul.” She crossed herself. “They say he’s gone and died in the night at Schonbrunn.”
It was in this manner that we learnt of the death of our sovereign lord and ruler Franz Joseph the First, by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary for the past sixty-eight years—all but eleven days. Neither Elisabeth nor I were anything but the most tepid of monarchists, but even so we were hushed as we heard the news. It was not that the man had been inordinately loved by his subjects: most in fact knew that he had been an obstinate and short-sighted ruler in peace and a blundering commander in war. Even that morning as the muffled church bells tolled through the city and the flags flew at half-mast there must have been many ancestral memories of the working men summarily shot in the city moat in 1849; of the crows flapping over the mangled white-coated bodies tumbled in the vineyards of the Casa di Solferino; of the half- mad Empress wandering Europe to get away from her dreary husband and his insufferable court; of the sleazy incompetent cover-up after their wretched son had shot his girlfriend in the lodge at Mayerling and then blown his own limited supply of brains through the top of his head. No, it was just that the Emperor—“Old Prohaska,” as the Viennese used to call him—had been around for so long that he had become as fixed a feature in people’s lives as the green summit of the Kahlenberg in the distance. People had excised from their minds the fact that the dear old boy spent much of his regular sixteen-hour working day signing death warrants; or that his ministers were strictly forbidden to deviate from their scheduled subject when they had an audience with him; or that he spoke nineteen languages but would never utter anything else in them but the most leaden platitudes. Instead they remembered the legendary courtesy, and the odd round-shouldered walk, the famous side-whiskers and the hundreds of little anecdotes which had accumulated around the old man over the years like ferns and wildflowers in the cracks of a mausoleum.