The Radetzky March (45 page)

While the commissioner spoke in hasty whispers, they could hear the shuffling of the dancers in the rooms, the sharp clinking of glasses, and, from time to time, the deep laughter of men. Chojnicki decided to gather a few of his guests in a separate room—people he viewed as influential, discreet, and still sober. Resorting to all kinds of pretexts, he steered now one, now another into the selected room, introduced the district commissioner, and reported the news. These chosen few included the colonel of the dragoon regiment and the major of the rifle battalion with their aides, several bearers of illustrious names, and, representing the officers of the rifle battalion, Lieutenant Trotta. The room they were in was short on seating, so a couple of the men had to lean against the walls while a few unsuspecting and exuberant souls, not knowing what had occurred, sat cross-legged on the carpet. But as it soon turned out, they remained where they were even after hearing the news. Several may have been paralyzed by the shock, others were simply drunk. A third group, however, was by nature indifferent to all events in the world and, so to speak, paralyzed out of innate refinement, and they felt it would not do for them to inconvenience their bodies merely because of a catastrophe. Some had not even removed the gaudy shreds of streamers and the round confetti bits from their necks, heads, and shoulders. And these clownish insignia lent even greater horror to the news.

The small room became hot within minutes. “Let’s open a window!” someone said. Someone else unlatched one of the high narrow windows, leaned out, and bounced back a second later. An unusually violent bolt of white-hot lightning struck the park beyond the window. They couldn’t tell where it had landed, but they heard the splintering of felled trees. Their roaring crowns toppled, black and heavy. And even the exuberant squatters, normally indifferent, leaped up; the tipsy guests began to stagger; and everyone blanched. They were amazed that they were still alive. They held their breath, gawked wide-eyed at one another, and waited for the thunder. It followed within seconds. But between lightning and thunder, eternity itself was crammed in. They all tried to huddle together. They formed a clump of heads and bodies around the table. For an instant their faces, however diverse the features, showed a fraternal resemblance. They acted as if this were their first storm. In fear and awe they waited for the terse clap of cracking thunder. Then they breathed sighs of relief. And while outside the windows the heavy clouds sliced up by the lightning foamed together in a jubilant tumult, the men began returning to their places.

“We have to break up the party!” said Major Zoglauer.

Rittmaster Zschoch, with some confetti stars in his hair and a scrap of pink streamer around his neck, leaped up. He was offended: as a count, as a rittmaster, as a dragoon in particular, as a cavalryman in general, and very particularly as himself, an extraordinary individual—in a word, as Zschoch. His short thick eyebrows bristled, their stiff tiny spikes forming two menacing hedges against Major Zoglauer. His big, bright, silly eyes, which always mirrored everything they might have picked up years ago but rarely what they saw at the moment, now seemed to express the arrogance of his ancestors, an arrogance from the fifteenth century. He had nearly forgotten the lightning, the thunder, the dreadful news—all the events of the past few minutes. His mind retained only the arduous efforts he had gone to for the celebration, his brainchild. Nor could he hold liquor—he had drunk champagne, and his tiny saddlenose was perspiring slightly.

“The news isn’t true,” he said. “It’s simply not true. Let someone prove to me that it’s true. A stupid lie—you can tell
just from the words ‘rumored’ or ‘probably’ or whatever the political gobbledygook!”

“A rumor is enough!” said Zoglauer.

Now Herr von Babenhausen, reserve rittmaster, joined the argument. He was tipsy and kept fanning himself with his handkerchief, either sticking it into his sleeve or pulling it out again. He detached himself from the wall, stepped over to the table, and squinted.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “Bosnia is far away. We don’t give a damn about rumors. As far as I’m concerned, to hell with them! If it’s true, we’ll find out soon enough.”

“Bravo!” cried Baron Nagy Jenö, the one from the hussars.

Although he undeniably had a Jewish grandfather in Bogumin and although his father had purchased his baronage, he considered the Magyars one of the noblest races in the monarchy—nay, the world!—and he managed to forget his Semitic background by taking on all the defects of the Hungarian gentry.

“Bravo!” he repeated. He had succeeded in respectively loving or hating anything that seemed favorable or detrimental to Hungary’s nationalist policies. He had spurred his heart to loathe the heir to the monarchy’s throne because it was generally said that Franz Ferdinand was partial to the Slavic peoples and hostile to the Hungarians. Baron Nagy had not traveled all the way to a party on the godforsaken border just to have it disrupted by some incident. He considered it a betrayal of the whole Magyar nation if some rumor prevented one of its members from dancing a czardas, which he felt racially obligated to do. Wedging his monocle in tighter as he always did when he had to feel nationalistic, the way an old man clutches his cane harder when he starts out on a hike, the baron said in the German of the Hungarians, which sounded vaguely like a process of whiny orthography, “Herr von Babenhausen is right, absolutely right! If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, then there are other heirs left!”

Herr von Senny, more Magyar by blood than Herr von Nagy, was filled with sudden dread that someone of a Jewish background might outdo him in Hungarian nationalism; rising to his feet, he said, “If the Herr heir to the throne has been assassinated,
well, first of all, we know nothing for certain, and secondly, it doesn’t concern us in the least!”

“It does concern us to some extent,” said Count Benkyö, “but he hasn’t been assassinated at all. It’s just a rumor!”

Outside the rain gushed on steadily. The bluish white flashes grew rarer and rarer; the thunder moved away.

First Lieutenant Kinsky, who had grown up on the banks of the Moldau, claimed that in any case the heir to the throne had been a highly precarious choice for the monarchy—assuming one could even use the word “been.” He himself, the first lieutenant, agreed with the men who had spoken before him: the news of the assassination of the heir to the throne had to be treated as a false rumor. They were so far away from the scene of the alleged crime that there was no way they could verify anything. And in any case they wouldn’t find out the whole truth until long after the party.

Count Battyanyi, who was drunk, hereupon began speaking Hungarian to his compatriots. The others didn’t understand a word. They remained silent, glancing at each speaker in turn and waiting, a bit stunned all the same. But the Hungarians seemed determined to go merrily along for the rest of the evening; perhaps it was a national custom. While the non-Hungarians were far from grasping even a syllable, they could tell by the faces of the Magyars that they were gradually starting to forget that anyone else was present. Sometimes they laughed in unison. The others were offended, not so much because laughter seemed inappropriate at this moment as because they couldn’t ascertain its cause.

Jelacich, a Slovene, hit the ceiling. He hated the Hungarians as much as he despised the Serbs. He loved the monarchy. He was a patriot. And there he stood, love of Fatherland in his helplessly outspread hands, like a flag you have to plant somewhere but can’t find a roof for. A number of his fellow Slovenes and his cousins, the Croats, lived directly under Hungarian rule. The whole of Hungary separated Rittmaster Jelacich from Austria and from Vienna and from Kaiser Franz Joseph. The heir to the throne had been killed in Sarajevo, practically Jelacich’s homeland, and perhaps by a Slovene, such as the rittmaster
himself was. If the rittmaster now began defending the victim against blasphemy from the Hungarians (he was the only non-Hungarian here to understand their language), they could retort that the assassins were his compatriots. And he did feel a wee bit guilty. He didn’t know why. For some hundred and fifty years his family had been serving the Hapsburgs with sincerity and devotion. But both his teenage sons were already talking about independence for all southern Slavs, and they had pamphlets that they concealed from him—pamphlets that might come from a hostile Belgrade. Yet he loved his sons! Every afternoon at thirteen hundred hours, when his regiment passed the high school, his sons dashed over to him, fluttering out of the huge brown door of the school, their hair tousled, laughter pouring from their open mouths, and paternal tenderness compelled him to dismount and hug his children. He shut his eyes when he saw them reading suspicious newspapers, and he closed his ears when he heard them making suspicious remarks. He was intelligent and he knew that he stood powerless between his forebears and his offspring, who were destined to become the ancestors of a brand-new race. They had his features, his hair color, and his eyes, but their hearts beat to a new rhythm, their heads gave birth to strange thoughts, their throats sang new and strange songs that he had never heard. And though he was only forty, the rittmaster felt like an old man, and his sons seemed liked incomprehensible great-grandchildren.

None of that matters, he thought now, and he went over to the table and slapped it with his flat hand. “Gentlemen,” he said, “may we request that you continue the conversation in German.”

Benkyö, who was speaking, broke off and replied, “I will say it in German. We are in agreement, my countrymen and I: we can be glad the bastard is gone!”

Everyone leaped up. Chojnicki and the cheery district commissioner left the room. The guests remained alone. They had been informed that no witness would be tolerated during internal army quarrels. Lieutenant Trotta stood by the door. He had drunk a lot. His face was ashen, his limbs were slack, his palate was dry, his heart hollow. He felt intoxicated, but to his amazement he missed the familiar beneficent fog in front of his eyes.
Instead he appeared to see everything more distinctly, as if through clear, shiny ice. Although he had never seen these faces before, he felt he had known them a long time. Indeed, this whole occasion seemed utterly familiar, the realization of something he had often dreamed of. The Fatherland of the Trottas was splintering and crumbling.

At home, in the Moravian district seat of W, Austria might still exist. Every Sunday Herr Nechwal’s band played “The Radetzky March.” Austria existed once a week, on Sundays. The Kaiser, that forgetful old man with the white beard and the drop gleaming on his nose, and old Herr von Trotta were Austrians. Old Jacques was dead. The Hero of Solferino was dead. Regimental Physician Dr. Demant was dead. “Leave the army!” he had said. I’m going to leave the army, the lieutenant thought. My grandfather left it too. I’m gonna tell them, he thought. He felt compelled to do something, just as he had felt years ago in Frau Resi’s establishment. Was there no painting to rescue here? He felt his grandfather’s dark gaze on the back of his neck. He took a step toward the center of the room. He didn’t quite know what he wanted to say. A few of the men looked at him.

“I know,” he began and still knew nothing. “I know,” he repeated, taking another step forward, “that His Imperial-Royal Highness, the Archduke and Heir Apparent, has really been assassinated.”

He fell silent. He pressed his lips together. They formed a thin pale-pink strip. A clear, almost white light gleamed in his small dark eyes. His black, tangled hair overshadowed his low forehead, darkening the cleft between the eyebrows, the cavern of anger, the Trotta legacy. He kept his head down. His clenched fists hung on his slack arms. They all stared at his hands. Had they been acquainted with the portrait of the Hero of Solferino, they would have believed that old Trotta had returned from the grave.

“My grandfather,” the lieutenant resumed, still feeling the old man’s gaze on the back of his neck, “my grandfather saved the Kaiser’s life. And I, his grandson, will not allow anyone to insult the House of our Supreme Commander in Chief. These gentlemen are behaving scandalously.” He raised his voice. “Scandal!” he shouted. This was the first time he had ever heard
himself shout. Unlike his fellow officers, he never shouted at his men. “Scandal!” he repeated. The echo of his voice reverberated in his ears. The drunken Count Benkyö took a staggering step toward the lieutenant.

“Scandal!” the lieutenant repeated once again.

“Scandal!” Rittmaster Jelacich echoed.

“If anyone else says another word against the dead man,” the lieutenant went on, “I’ll shoot him down!” He reached into his pocket. Since the drunken Count Benkyö was starting to murmur something, Trotta shouted “Silence!” in a voice that sounded borrowed, a thundering voice—perhaps it was the voice of the Hero of Solferino. He felt as one with his grandfather. He himself was the Hero of Solferino. That was his own portrait blurring under the ceiling of his father’s den.

Colonel Festetics and Major Zoglauer stood up. For the first time in the history of the Austrian army a lieutenant was ordering rittmasters, majors, and colonels to shut up. No one now believed that the assassination of the heir to the throne was merely a rumor. They could see him lying in a steaming pool of red blood. They feared they would see blood here too, in this room, any second now. “Order him to keep quiet,” Colonel Festetics whispered.

“Herr Lieutenant,” said Zoglauer, “leave us!”

Trotta turned toward the door. At that instant, it burst open. Countless guests poured in, with confetti and streamers clinging to their heads and shoulders. The door stayed open. They heard the women laughing in the other rooms and the music and the shuffling of the dancers.

Someone yelled, “The heir to the throne has been assassinated!”

“The Funeral March!” shouted Benkyö.

“The Funeral March!” several voices repeated.

They poured out the door. In the two huge rooms where the guests had been dancing, both military bands, led by their bright-red, smiling bandmasters, played Chopin’s Funeral March. All around, a few guests were circling, circling to the beat of the music. Gaudy streamers and confetti stars clung to their hair and shoulders. Men in uniform or in mufti escorted ladies. Their feet unsteadily obeyed the macabre and stumbling rhythm. For the bands were playing without scores, not conducted but
accompanied by the slow loops that the black batons traced in the air. Sometimes one band lagged behind the other and then tried to catch up with the hastier one by skipping a few measures.