The exile, the displaced person, has taken the newspapers away with him. He wants to read them in his good, cheap restaurant. In front of me the table is empty.
“Where can I go now, I, a Trotta?” is absolutely of a piece with that terminal desolation — not least as “Trotta” chimes with the German “Toter,” a dead man.
In Roth, the practical and the quixotic are usually inextricable and inseparable. In February 1938, he visited Vienna for the last time, mirabile dictu, on a diplomatic mission for the Habsburg Legitimists; he spoke on behalf of the young Otto von Habsburg (grandson of Franz Joseph, and Pretendant to the throne that had been abolished at Versailles in 1918) to members of the Austrian government. He got a dusty answer and will have sensed the atmosphere himself (like Trotta’s friends suddenly melting away from the café table where they had all been sitting a moment before). A month later, huge crowds turned out to greet Hitler and the Wehrmacht. After a life spent for the most part in exile, and in the service of European unity, Otto von Habsburg died on July 4, 2011 at the age of ninety-eight, and was buried in the Kapuzinergruft, where Joseph Roth, one of his last and least and unlikeliest and so to speak ferventest subjects ended his last novel seventy years — ein Menschenalter, a biblical lifetime — before. The one word on his tomb (I seem to remember hearing late one night on the BBC World Service) is Frieden — Peace.
MICHAEL HOFMANN
AUGUST 2012
* Perhaps this is the place to draw the reader’s attention to a handful of minor inconsistencies in the text, which I have of course let stand: a little toing and froing in the months around the beginning of World War One; a little wavering in the names of the cafés; and the fact that the doors to Jadlowker’s border tavern are “grass-green” in one place and later “brown,” and that Jacques is described now as having hair, now as bald. Honi soit.
The Emperor's Tomb
I
We are the Trottas. My people’s roots are in Sipolje, in Slovenia. I say “people” because we’re not a family any more. Sipolje no longer exists, hasn’t for a long time. It’s been assimilated with several other villages to form a middle-sized town. As everyone knows, that’s the trend nowadays. People are no longer capable of staying on their own. They form into nonsensical groups, and it’s the same way with the villages. Nonsensical structures come into being. The farmers move into the cities, and the villages themselves — they want to be cities.
I remember Sipolje from when I was a boy. My father took me there once, on August 17, the eve of the day when all over the country, even in the smallest hamlets, they used to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Franz Joseph. In modern Austria, and in the former Crown Lands, there are probably only a handful of people to whom our name means anything. Where you will find our name, though, is in the lost annals of the former Austro-Hungarian army, and I will admit I’m proud of the fact — especially because the annals are lost. I am not a child of these particular times; in fact I find it difficult not to declare myself their enemy. Not because I don’t understand them, as I like to claim. That’s my excuse. The fact is that manners don’t allow me to be unpleasant or aggressive and so I say I don’t understand something, when really I ought to say I hate it or despise it. My hearing is acute, so I pretend to be a little deaf. To me it seems better breeding to feign an infirmity than to admit I’ve heard an unpleasant sound.
My grandfather’s brother was the infantry lieutenant who saved the life of Emperor Franz Joseph at the battle of Solferino. The lieutenant was ennobled. For a long time afterwards he was known as the Hero of Solferino, in the army and in the reading primers of the Dual Monarchy, until, in accordance with his own wishes, the shadow of oblivion settled over him. He took his leave. He is buried in Hietzing. On his gravestone are the quiet, defiant words: “Here lies the Hero of Solferino.”
The Imperial grace and favour were extended to his son, who became District Commissioner, and to his grandson, who fell in autumn 1914 at the battle of Krasne-Busk as a lieutenant of the Jägers. I never met him, as indeed I never met any of the ennobled branch of our people. The ennobled Trottas were all loyal servants to Franz Joseph. My father, though, was a rebel.
My father was a rebel and a patriot of a sort that only existed in the old Austria-Hungary. He wanted to reform the Empire and save the Habsburgs. His understanding of the Dual Monarchy was too acute. He therefore aroused suspicion, and was forced to emigrate. As a young man still, he went to America. He became a chemical engineer. In those days they needed people like him in the sprawling dye works of New York and Chicago. When he was still poor, the only sort of homesickness he felt was for the countryside. But once he had made his fortune, he started to feel homesick for Austria. He came home. He settled in Vienna. He had money, and the Austrian police liked people with money. My father was not merely left alone. He was permitted to found a new Slovene party, and bought a couple of newspapers in Zagreb.
He made some influential friends in the circle of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. My father dreamed of a Slavic kingdom under the overall suzerainty of the Habsburgs. He dreamed, if you will, of a Triple Monarchy. And perhaps it is only right for me, his son, to say I like to think that if my father had been spared, he might have changed the course of history. But he died, some eighteen months before Franz Ferdinand was murdered. I am his only son. In his will he bequeathed me his ideas. Not for nothing did he have me christened Franz Ferdinand. But I was young and foolish then, not to say frivolous. I was certainly frivolous as well. I lived, as they say, into the day. No! That’s wrong. I lived into the night; the days were for sleeping.
II
Early one morning — it was in April of 1914, and I was still groggy, having gone to bed only one or two hours before — a visitor was announced, a cousin of mine, by the name of Trotta.
In my dressing gown and slippers I padded out to the antechamber. The windows were open wide. The morning blackbirds in our garden were warbling away. The early sun merrily poured into the room. Our maid, whom I had never seen so early in the day before, looked unfamiliar to me in her blue apron — I only knew her in her formal evening incarnation, assembled from blond, black and white, something like a flag. It was the first time I had seen her in her blue gear, which resembled the sort of thing that engineers and gasmen wear, wielding a purple feather duster — the sight of her alone would have been enough to change my ideas about life. For the first time in years I beheld the morning in my house, and I saw that it was beautiful. I liked the maid. I liked the open windows. I liked the sun. I liked the singing of the blackbirds. It was as golden as the morning sun. Even the girl in her blue outfit was somehow as golden as the sun. There was so much gold about that at first I failed to make out the visitor who was waiting for me. I only noticed him a couple of seconds — or perhaps minutes — later. Lean, swarthy and silent, he was sitting in the only chair our anteroom had to offer, and he didn’t budge when I entered. Even with his black hair and moustache, and his brown skin, he too amidst the matutinal gold of the anteroom was like a piece of the sun, albeit some distant southern sun. He reminded me spontaneously of my late father. He too had been dark and lean, bony and brown, swarthy and a real child of the sun, not like us, its fair-haired stepchildren. I speak Slovene, my father had taught me. I greeted my Trotta cousin in his native tongue. It seemed not to surprise him. What else was I going to do? He didn’t get up, he remained seated. He held out his hand to me. He smiled. His big strong teeth gleamed under his blue-black moustache. He said “Du” to me right away. I felt: he’s not a cousin, he’s my brother! He had my address from the lawyer. “Your father,” he began, “left me 2000 gulden in his will, and I have come to collect them. I want to thank you. Tomorrow I will go home. I have a sister, who will be able to get married now. With a dowry of 500 gulden, she will get the richest farmer in Sipolje.”