The Radetzky March (16 page)

Now they reach the edge of town. The regimental surgeon has to say something else before they enter the town. “It’s not because of my wife,” he says. “That’s no longer important. I’m over that. It’s for your sake.”

He waits for an answer, knowing that none will come.

“It’s all right, thank you!” he blurts out. “I’m going to the club. Are you coming along?”

No. Lieutenant Trotta is not going to the officers’ club today. He is going back. “Good night,” he says and wheels around. He goes to the barracks.

T
HE WINTER CAME.
In the morning, when the regiment marched out, the world was still dark. The delicate film of ice on the streets splintered under the hooves of the horses. Gray breath streamed from the nostrils of the animals and the mouths of the riders. The matte breath of the frost beaded on the sheaths of the heavy sabers and on the barrels of the light carbines. The small town grew even smaller. The muted, frozen bugle calls lured none of the usual spectators to the curbs. Only the coachmen at their usual station raised their bearded faces every morning. They drove sleighs whenever a lot of snow had fallen. The little bells on the harnesses of their horses jingled softly, incessantly moved by the restlessness of the shivering animals. The days resembled one another like snowflakes. The officers of the lancer regiment were waiting for some extraordinary event to break the monotony of their days. No one knew what kind of event it might be. But this winter seemed to be concealing some kind of dreadful surprise in its jingling bosom. And one day it erupted from the winter like red lightning from white snow.…

That day, Rittmaster Taittinger was not sitting as usual behind the huge mirror pane at the door of the pastry shop. Since early afternoon the captain, surrounded by younger officers, had kept to the small back room. He struck them as paler and more haggard than normal. Mind you, all of them were pale. They drank many liqueurs, but their faces did not redden. They did not eat. Yet today, as always, a mountain of pastries loomed in front of the captain. Indeed, he may have been indulging his sweet tooth even more than on other days. For grief was gnawing at his innards; it was hollowing him out, and he had to keep alive. And as his haggard fingers shoved one pastry after
another into his gaping mouth, he reiterated his story, for the fifth time already, to his ever-eager audience.

“Well, the main thing, gentlemen, is absolute discretion in regard to the civilian populace. When I was in the Ninth Dragoons, we had a chatterbox—in the reserves, of course, and filthy rich, by the way—and just as he joined, the incident took place. Naturally, by the time we buried poor Baron Seidl, the whole town knew why he had died so suddenly. I hope, gentlemen, that this time we can have a more discreet—” he wanted to say “funeral” but paused, mulled and mulled, failed to hit on a word, and peered at the ceiling, while a dreadful silence roared around his head and the heads of the listeners. Finally the rittmaster concluded, “Can have a more discreet procedure.” He heaved a momentary sigh, swallowed a small pastry, and gulped down his water.

They all felt that he had summoned Death. Death hovered over them, and they were completely unfamiliar with the feeling. They had been born in peacetime and become officers in peaceful drills and maneuvers. They had no idea that several years later every last one of them, with no exception, would encounter death. Their ears were not sharp enough to catch the whirring gears of the great hidden mills that were already grinding out the Great War. A white winterly peace reigned in the small garrison. And black and red, death fluttered over them in the twilight of the small back room.

I can’t understand it!” said one of the boys. They had all said similar things.

“But I’ve already told you umpteen times!” replied Taittinger. “The touring players, that’s how it began! I don’t know what got into me, going to that very operetta, that—what was the title? Now I’ve even forgotten the title. What was it now?”

“The Wandering Tinker,”
someone said.

“Right! Well, it all began with
The Wandering Tinker.
Just as I’m coming out of the theater, there’s Trotta standing lonesome and godforsaken in the snow on the square. You see, I ducked out before the end; I always do that, gentlemen. I can never stand waiting till the final curtain. If it’s got a happy ending, you can tell right away at the start of the third act, and then I know
everything, so I simply tiptoe out, as quiet as possible. Besides, I’d already seen the thing three times! Well, anyway, poor Trotta is standing there all by his lonesome in the snow. I say, ‘The play was nice.’ And then I tell him about how strange Demant’s been acting. He barely glanced at me; he left his wife alone during the second act and just simply walked out and didn’t come back! He could have asked me to look after her, you know—but just up and leaving like that, it’s scandalous, and I tell Trotta all about it.

“ ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I haven’t talked to Demant for a long time.’ ”

“Trotta and Demant were seen together for weeks on end!” someone cried.

“I know, I know, and that’s why I told Trotta about how strangely Demant was acting. But I don’t butt into other people’s business, so I ask Trotta if he wants to stop off at the pastry shop with me. ‘No,’he says, ‘I have an appointment.’ So I leave. And tonight of all nights, the pastry shop closed early. Fate, gentlemen! So I’m off to the club, of course. And I innocently tell Tattenbach and whoever else was there about Demant and about Trotta having an appointment in the middle of the theater square. I can still hear Tattenbach whistling. ‘What are you whistling about?’ I ask. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing,’ he says. ‘Watch out! All I can say is, Watch out! Trotta and Eva, Trotta and Eva,’ he sings twice, like a cabaret ditty, and I don’t know who Eva is, I figure it’s Eve from the Garden of Eden—sort of symbolic and generally speaking, you know, gentlemen! Understand?”

They all understood, which they confirmed with nods and shouts. They not only understood the captain’s story, they knew it intimately, from start to finish. But nevertheless, they wanted to hear about the events over and over, for in their most foolish heart of hearts they hoped that the rittmaster’s story would eventually change and allow some meager prospect of a happier end. They kept asking Taittinger over and over. But his story was always the same. There was no change in even the least of the sad details.

“What now?” someone asked.

“You already know the rest,” the rittmaster replied. “Just as we’re leaving the club—Tattenbach, Kindermann, and I—Trotta and Frau Demant practically walk right into us. ‘Watch out!‘ says Tattenbach. ’Didn’t Trotta say he had an appointment?’ ‘It could
be a coincidence,’ I say to Tattenbach. And it
was
a coincidence, as I know now. Frau Demant came out of the theater alone. Trotta felt obligated to see her home. He had to miss his appointment. Nothing would have happened if Demant had entrusted his wife to me during intermission. Nothing!”

“Nothing!” everyone confirmed.

“The next evening, at the club, Tattenbach is drunk as usual. And when Demant shows up, Tattenbach instantly gets up and says, ‘Oy, hello, Izzy-whizzy!’ That’s how it began.”

“Shoddy!” said two men in unison.

“Shoddy, of course, but he was drunk! What should we do? I say correctly, ‘Good evening, Herr Regimental Surgeon!’ And Demant, in a voice I would never have expected from him, says to Tattenbach, ‘Captain, you know that I am the regimental surgeon!’

“ ‘Then you oughta stay home and watch out,’ says Tattenbach, sticking to his chair. Incidentally, it was his birthday. Did I tell you?”

“No!” they all chorused.

“Well, now you know: it happened to be his birthday,” Taittinger repeated.

They all slurped up the news greedily. It was as if the fact that it had been Tattenbach’s birthday would provide a brand-new positive solution to the dismal affair. Each man privately wondered what benefit could be drawn from Tattenbach’s birthday. And little Count Sternberg, through whose brain thoughts would shoot one at a time like lone birds through empty clouds, without brethren and leaving no trace, instantly stated, with premature jubilation in his voice, “Why, then, everything’s fine! That changes everything! It was his birthday!”

They eyed little Count Sternberg, puzzled and cheerless and yet ready to grasp at that nonsensical straw. Sternberg’s comment was utterly silly, but if you thought about it carefully, couldn’t you cling to it, didn’t it contain some hope, didn’t some solace beckon?

The hollow laugh instantly emitted by Taittinger overwhelmed them with new horror. Their lips parted, with helpless sounds on their mute tongues; their eyes gaping and empty, they
kept still—dumbstruck and blinded men who, for an instant, had believed they had heard a comforting sound, had sighted a comforting glint. Deaf and dark was the world around them. In the huge, mute, snowed-in winterly world there was nothing but Taittinger’s eternally unchanging story, which he had already repeated five times. He continued.

“ ‘Then you oughta stay home and watch out,’ says Tattenbach. And the doctor, you know—as if he were examining Tattenbach for being too sick to march, sticks his head out toward him and says, ‘Herr Rittmaster, you are drunk!’

“ ‘You oughta stay home and watch out!’ Tattenbach babbles again. ‘Our kind don’t let a wife go strollin’ at midnight with lootenants!’

“ ‘You’re drunk and you’re a scoundrel!‘says Demant. And just as I’m about to stand up and before I can even move, Tattenbach starts yelling like crazy, ‘Yid, Yid, Yid!’ He says it eight times in a row—I had enough presence of mind to count precisely.”

“Bravo!” said little Sternberg, and Taittinger nodded at him.

“However,” the rittmaster went on, “I had enough presence of mind to issue a command: ‘Orderlies, leave!’ For why should the orderlies be present?”

“Bravo!” little Sternberg shouted once again. And all of them nodded in approval.

They fell silent again. From the nearby kitchen of the pastry shop came the hard clattering of dishes and from the street the bright jingling of a sleigh. Taittinger stuffed another pastry into his mouth.

“Now the fat’s in the fire!” shouted little Sternberg.

Taittinger swallowed the last remnant of his delicacy and only said, “Tomorrow morning, seven-twenty!”

Tomorrow morning, seventy-twenty! They knew the conditions: simultaneous exchange of bullets at ten paces. There was no way for Dr. Demant to use a sword. He couldn’t fence.

Tomorrow morning at seven, the regiment will be marching to the water meadow for a drill. The so-called Green Square behind the old castle, where the duel is to take place, is barely two hundred feet from the water meadow.

Every officer knew that tomorrow, during the drilling, he would hear two shots. Everyone could hear them already—the two shots. With black and red wings, Death rustled over their heads.

“Check!” cried Taittinger. And they left the pastry shop.

It was snowing again. A mute dark-blue pack, they walked through the mute white snow, straggling off in twos or alone. Each was afraid to stay by himself, yet it was not possible for them to be together. They tried to lose themselves in the small streets of the tiny town—and were forced to run into one another within a few seconds. The crooked streets drove them together. They were trapped in the small town and in their great confusion. And whenever any of them came toward another, both were startled, each by the other’s fear. They waited for dinnertime—and they simultaneously feared the imminent evening at the club, where today, already today, not all would be present.

And indeed, they were not all present. Tattenbach was missing, so were Major Prohaska, the doctor, First Lieutenant Zander, and Lieutenant Christ, and indeed all the seconds. Taittinger did not eat. He sat at a chessboard, playing against himself. No one spoke. The orderlies stood, silent and stony, at the doors; everyone heard the slow, hard ticking of the big grandfather clock; to its left, the Supreme Commander in Chief stared with cold china-blue eyes at his taciturn officers. No one had the nerve to leave by himself or to take his neighbor along. And so they lingered, each at his place. If two or three men sat together, their words dripped in single heavy drops from their mouths, and a huge leaden hush weighed between question and answer. Everyone felt the hush on his back.

They thought about the men who were not there, as if the absent were already corpses. They all remembered Dr. Demant’s arrival several weeks ago, after a long medical furlough. They could see his faltering steps and his sparkling glasses. They could see Count Tattenbach, his short rotund body on bandy equestrian legs, the eternally red skull with the close-shorn clear-blond hair parted down the middle and his pale, beady, red-rimmed little eyes. They could hear the physician’s gentle
voice and the rittmaster’s thunderous voice. And even though the words “honor” and “dying,” “shooting” and “fighting,” “death” and “grave” had been at home in their hearts and minds ever since they could think and feel, it struck them today as incomprehensible that they might be separated forever from the rittmaster’s thunderous voice and the physician’s gentle one. Whenever the doleful chimes of the large wall clock rang out, the men believed that their own final hour had struck. Unwilling to trust their ears, they looked at the wall. No doubt about it: time had not paused. Seven-twenty, seven-twenty, seven-twenty: it hammered in all brains.

They stood up, one by one, hesitant and shamefaced; as they went their separate ways, they felt they were betraying one another. Their steps were almost soundless. Their spurs did not jingle, their swords did not clatter, their soles numbly struck a numb floor. By midnight the club was empty. And at a quarter to midnight, First Lieutenant Schlegel and Lieutenant Kindermann reached the barracks where they lived. One flight up, where the officers’ rooms were located, a single bright window cast a yellow rectangle into the square darkness of the parade ground. Both men looked up at the window together.

“That’s Trotta!” said Kindermann.