It felt good to be home again. All of us had lost name and rank and station, house and money and net worth, past, present and to come. In the morning when we woke up, and at night when we went to bed, we cursed Death, who had invited us to his great gala celebration. Every one of us envied the fallen. They were resting under the ground, and in springtime violets would sprout from their bones. Whereas we had returned home incurably infertile, with paralysed loins, a doomed race, scorned by Death. The verdict of the military panel was irrevocable and final. It read: “Found unfit for death.”
XXVII
We all got used to the unusual. It was a hurried process of adjustment. Not really knowing what we were doing, we hurried to adjust, we chased after phenomena we hated and despised. We began to fall in love with our misery, just as one can love loyal enemies. We buried ourselves in it. We were grateful to it for consuming our little individual personal troubles, like their big brother, proof against consolation, but equally beyond the reach of our little daily anxieties. It is my view that the terrifying meekness of people nowadays in the face of their even worse oppressors is understandable and even to some extent pardonable, if one considers that it’s in human nature to prefer the vast, omnivorous misfortune to the specific individual mishap. The outsize calamity gobbles up the little misfortune, the stroke of bad luck. And so we in those years came to love our monstrous misery.
Not, please understand, that we weren’t able to redeem a few little joys in the face of it, ransom or reprieve or rescue them. We laughed and joked. We spent money, money that we couldn’t in fairness claim was ours — but then it didn’t have much value left either. We were happy to borrow it and lend it out, accept it and give it away, ourselves remain in debt, and pay the debts of others. It is like this that mankind will live on the day before the Day of Judgement. Sucking nectar from poisonous flowers, praising the fading sun as the giver of life, kissing the bleaching earth as mother of fruitfulness.
Spring was at hand, the Viennese spring, that none of the sentimental chansons could begin to do justice to. Not one of the popular tunes has the urgency of a blackbird’s song in the Votivpark or the Volksgarten. No rhymed strophes are as eloquent as the adorably rough cry of a barker outside a Prater booth in April. Who can sing the careful gold of the laburnum, trying vainly to conceal itself among the alert green of the other shrubbery? The sweet scent of elderflower was approaching, a solemn promise. In the Vienna woods, the violets were out. Young people paired off. In our regular café, we cracked jokes, played chess and dardel and tarock. We lost and won valueless money.
So important was spring to my mother that, from April 15, she redoubled the number of her excursions, and drove out to the Prater twice a month, not once as in winter. There were not many cabs left. The horses died of old age. Many more were slaughtered and made into sausages. In the storehouses of the old army, you could see parts of wrecked hackney cabs. Rubber-tyred carriages that may once have conveyed the Tschirschkys, the Pallavicinis, the Sternbergs, the Esterhazys, the Dietrichsteins, the Trautmannsdorffs. My mother, cautious by nature, and grown more so over the years, had come to an “arrangement” with one of the few remaining cabbies. He would come for her punctually twice a month, at nine in the morning. Sometimes I went with her, especially on rainy days. She didn’t like to be alone in adversity — and rain already counted as such. We didn’t speak much in the quiet penumbra under the rain roof. “Xaver,” my mother would say to the cabbie, “talk to me.” He would turn to face us, give the horses their heads for a couple of minutes, and tell us all sorts of things. “According to my son,” Xaver told us, “Capitalism is finished. He doesn’t call me Dad any more. He calls me: Let’s go, your Graces! He’s a sharp cookie. He knows what he wants. He doesn’t understand the first thing about horses.” Was she a capitalist, asked my mother. “To be sure, ma’am,” replied the cabbie, “all those that don’t work and that still manage to live are capitalists.” “What about the beggars?” asked my mother. “They might not work, but then they don’t go on excursions to the Praterspitz like you, ma’am!” replied Xaver. My mother whispered “A Jacobin!” to me. She thought she had spoken in the code of the owning classes. But Xaver understood. He turned round and said: “It’s my son who’s the Jacobin.” Thereupon he cracked his whip. It was as though he had applauded his own remark, with its historical culture.
My mother grew more reactionary by the day, especially the day I took out the mortgage on the house. Arts and crafts, Elisabeth, the lady professor, short hair, Czechs, Social Democrats, Jacobins, Jews, tinned meat, paper money, the stock exchange, my father-in-law — all these came in for her contempt and her vitriol. Our solicitor, Dr Kiniower, who had been a friend of my father’s, was now called, for simplicity’s sake: the Jew. Our maid was the Jacobin. The janitor was a sans-culotte, and Frau Jolanth Szatmary went by Keczkemet. A new personality turned up in our lives, one Kurt von Stettenheim, come all the way from Brandenburg and determined to bring arts and crafts to a waiting world. He looked like one of those men that these days pass for well-bred. By that I mean a mixture of champion tennis player and landowner from no fixed province, with a little maritime whiff of shipping magnate thrown in. Such men may come from anywhere: the Baltic, or Pomerania, or even the Lüneburg Heath. We were relatively lucky with ours: Herr von Stettenheim came from Brandenburg.
He was tall and sinewy, blond and freckled, he wore the inevitable duelling scar on his forehead, the sign of the Borussian fraternity and affected the monocle so anything other than indispensable that we had no option but to call it indispensable. I myself use a monocle on occasion for the sake of convenience, as I’m too vain to wear glasses. But there are certain faces — faces from Pomerania, from the Baltic, from Brandenburg — in which a monocle gives the appearance of being a superfluous third eye, not an aid to vision, but a sort of glass mask. When Herr von Stettenheim screwed in his monocle, he looked like Professor Jolanth Szatmary when she was lighting a cigarette. When Herr von Stettenheim spoke, and much more when he waxed wrathful, then the Cain’s mark on his forehead turned blood red — and the man got excited over everything and nothing. There was a perplexing contrast between his zeal and the words in which he expressed it, as for instance: “Well, I can tell you, I was gobsmacked,” or “I can only advise you: nil desperandum,” or “I’ll lay ten to one, and shake on it!” And more of the same. Evidently our mortgage wasn’t enough for my father-in-law. Herr von Stettenheim promised to invest heavily in the Elisabeth Trotta Studios. Once or twice my father-in-law brought us together. After all, because of the mortgage, he’d now “taken me on board,” as promised, in the arts and crafts industry. So he had to at least introduce me to the third member of our board. “I know a Count Trotta!” exclaimed Herr von Stettenheim after we’d barely exchanged two sentences. “You must be mistaken,” I said, “there are only Trottas raised to the barony — if indeed they are still alive!” “I remember now, he was a baron, the old Colonel.” “You’re mistaken again,” I said, “my uncle is District Commissioner.” “So sorry!” replied Herr von Stettenheim. And his scar flushed purple.