through the pallid and deserted city centre, and sometimes one of the sweet creatures would walk with us, with a different walk to the one she had on her beat. At that time, the streetlights were rarer and more modest, but they shed a stronger light, and some of them even swayed in the wind. .
Later on, when I returned from the war, not just older, but positively antique, the Viennese nights were wrinkled and withered, like ancient drabs; evening didn’t slip into night as it had once done, but avoided it, turned pale, and ran off as soon as it saw night coming. You had to grab these shy, fleeting evenings before they disappeared, and what I liked best was to catch them in the parks, the Volksgarten or the Prater, and then to savour the last sweetest lingering of them in a café, where they seeped in, gentle and mild, like a fragrance.
That evening too I went to the Café Lindhammer, and I conducted myself as though I was by no means as agitated as the other customers. For a long time now, ever since my return from the war, I had seen myself as someone who had no right to be alive. I had long since got used to viewing events that the newspapers blazoned as “historic” with the piercing regard of one no longer of this world. I was on extended leave from death. Death could end my furlough at any moment. Of what interest to me were the things of this world?. .
Still, they preoccupied me, and especially they preoccupied me on that Friday. What was at issue was whether I, retired from life, could go on drawing my retirement pension, as hitherto, in an embittered tranquillity; or if that too, my poor embittered tranquillity, or the resignation I had got used to calling “peace” was to be taken from me. Of late, whenever one or other of my friends came to tell me the time had come for me to take an interest in the fate of my country, I would say my usual piece: “Leave me alone!” — but I knew that what I should have said was: “Leave me to despair!” My sweet despair! It too is all gone. Gone the way of my unfulfilled desires and hopes. .
So I sat in the café and while my friends at my table still were talking about their personal lives, I, who had seen the elimination by a merciful and implacable fate of all possibility of personal life, had only the collective to commune with, which all my life had concerned me least, and which all my life I had sought to elude. .
It was weeks since I had last read a newspaper, and the conversation of my friends who seemed to live off newspapers, yes, to be kept alive by news and rumours, washed past me with no effect, like the waves of the Danube when I sometimes sat on the Franz-Josefs-Kai, or on the Elisabeth Promenade. I was switched off; switched off. To be switched off among the living means something like exterritorial. I was an exterritorial among the living.
And the agitation of my friends on that Friday evening struck me as unnecessary; until that instant when the café door was yanked open, and a young man stood in the doorway in unusual dress. He wore leather gaiters, a white shirt, and a sort of forage cap that looked to me like a cross between a bedpan and our good old army caps, in a word, a sub-Prussian item of headgear. (Because on their heads the Prussians wear neither hats nor caps but headgear.) Remote from the world as I was, and the Hell that it represented to me, I was hardly likely to distinguish among the new caps and uniforms, much less to identify any of them. There were white, blue, green and red shirts; trousers in black, brown, green or sky blue; boots and spurs, leather and straps and belts and daggers in sheaths of all kinds. I at any rate had decided for myself long ago, when I returned from the War, that I was not going to interest myself in them any more, and not to learn any. And so I was initially more surprised than my friends at this person, who, to judge from his appearance, looked as though he might have come up from the toilets in the basement, and yet had walked in the street door. For a few seconds I actually thought the downstairs toilets, with which I was perfectly familiar, had been rehoused, and were now outside, and one of the men who worked there as attendants had just stepped in to let us know that they were all occupied. Instead the man said: “Fellow countrymen! The government has fallen! A new German people’s government has been established.”
Ever since I had returned from the World War to my reduced fatherland, I had not mustered a belief in any form of government; much less a people’s government. Even now — shortly before what will in all probability be my final hour, I, a human being, dare to speak the truth — I belong to an evidently lost world, in which it was only to be expected that a people would be ruled in some form, and that, unless it were to cease being a people, it would not rule itself. To my deaf ears — which I have often heard described as “reactionary” — it sounded as though a beloved woman had said to me she no longer needed me; she could sleep with herself, and was even obliged to, purely in order to contract a child.
I was therefore surprised by the shock that came over my friends at the sight of this jackbooted gentleman and his exotic announcement. Between the lot of us, we took up three tables. A moment later, I was all alone. I was all alone, it was as though I had been looking for myself and to my surprise suddenly found myself, alone. All my friends had got up from their chairs, and instead of bidding me “Good night!” first, as had been their way for years, they called: “Waiter, bill please!” But since our waiter Franz didn’t appear, they called out to the Jewish café owner Adolf Feldmann: “We’ll pay tomorrow!” and they walked out, without looking at me.
I thought they meant it, that they really would return tomorrow to pay, and that Franz was just detained in the kitchen or somewhere, and hence unable to come promptly when called. But after ten minutes, the café owner Adolf Feldmann came out from behind the bar, in his hat and coat, and said: “Baron, this is goodbye. If we should meet anywhere in the world, we will recognize each other. Tomorrow you surely will not come here. Not with the new German people’s government. Will you go home, or do you think you will stay here?”
“I’ll stay here, like every other night,” I replied.
“Then farewell, Baron! I’m turning out the lights. Here are two candles!”
And with that he lit a couple of pallid candles, and before I could account for my impression that he had left me two funeral candles, all the lights in the café went out, and pale, with a black top hat on his head, looking more like an undertaker than the jovial, silver-bearded Jew Adolf Feldmann, he handed me a massy lead swastika, and said: “Just in case, Baron! Enjoy your schnapps in quiet! I’ll let the shutters down. When you’re ready to go, you can open them from inside. The pole is on the right of the door.”
“I’d like to pay,” I said.
“There’s no time for that today!” he said.
And he was gone, and I heard the shutter clatter down outside the door.
So I was alone at the table, with the two candles. They stuck to the imitation marble tabletop and reminded me of white, upright, burning worms. At any instant I expected them to start to writhe in the manner of worms.
As I began to feel a little spooked, I called out: “Franz, the bill!” as I did every other evening.
But in came not Franz the waiter, but the guard dog who was also called “Franz,” and whom I had never liked. He was a sandy yellow colour, and had rheumy eyes and a slimy muzzle. I don’t care for animals, and I care even less for people who love animals. All my life it seemed to me that people who love animals withhold some of that love from people, and that view seemed particularly justified when I happened to hear that the Germans of the Third Reich love those German sheepdogs called Alsatians. “Poor sheep!” I said to myself when I heard that.