“What about the rest of the money?”
“That’s for me,” he said serenely. He smiled, and it seemed to me the sun was pouring into our anteroom even more brightly.
“What will you do with the money?”
“I will invest it in my business,” he replied. And as though the moment to introduce himself had finally come, he got up from his chair, there was a confident swagger as he stood there, and a touching formality with which he introduced himself. “Joseph Branco’s the name,” he said. Only then did I remember I was standing in front of my visitor in dressing-gown and slippers. I asked him to wait, and went back into my room to dress.
III
It was no later than seven o’clock when we strolled into the Café Magerl. The first of the baker’s delivery boys were just arriving, snow white and smelling of crisp rolls and poppy seed biscuits and salt sticks. The day’s first freshly roasted coffee, virginal and spicy, smelled like a morning within a morning. My cousin Joseph Branco was sitting beside me, swarthy and southern, merry, healthy and alert. I felt ashamed of my haggardness and my almost colourless pallor. I was a little uncomfortable as well. What was I going to talk to him about? It made me a little more uncomfortable when he said: “I don’t drink coffee in the morning. I want soup.” Of course. In Sipolje the peasants started the day with potato soup.
So I ordered potato soup for him. It was a long time coming, and in the meantime I was bashfully dipping my almond croissant in my coffee. Finally it did come, a steaming bowlful. My cousin Joseph Branco disregarded his spoon. He raised the steaming bowl to his mouth in his black-haired brown hands. While he drank his soup, he seemed to have forgotten about me. Completely concentrating on his steaming bowl, supported on the tips of his strong, slim fingers, he looked like a person in whom appetite is a noble thing, and who disdained a spoon because it is nobler to drink straight from the bowl. Yes, while I watched him drinking his soup, I was almost perplexed by the fact that people had bothered to invent something as ridiculous as spoons. My cousin set down his bowl, and I could see that it was smooth and empty and clean as if it had just been wiped and washed.
“This afternoon,” he said, “I will collect the money.” What sort of business was it, I asked him, that he was planning to invest in. “Oh,” he said, “a very small business, but something that will keep a man fed through the winter.”
And so I learned that in spring, summer and autumn my cousin Joseph Branco was a farmer, tending his fields, but in winter he was a chestnut-roaster. He had a sheepskin, a mule, a small cart, a roasting-pan and five sacks of chestnuts. Thus equipped, he set off every year at the beginning of November through some of the Monarchy’s Crown Lands. If he happened to like it in one particular place, he would spend the whole winter there until the storks came. Then he would tie the empty sacks round the mule and go to the nearest railway station. He put the mule in a cattle car, boarded the train, went home and became a farmer again.
I asked him how it was possible to expand such a small business, and he indicated there were various possibilities. For instance, one might offer a sideline in baked apples and baked potatoes, in addition to the chestnuts. Also, his mule was old and feeble, and it was almost time to buy a new one. He had a couple of hundred crowns already saved up.
He wore a shimmering satin jacket, a flowery velvet waistcoat with coloured-glass buttons and a heavy, braided gold watch chain looped round his neck. And I, who had been raised by my father to love the Slavs of our Empire, and who was therefore apt to take any sort of folkloric detail for a totem, straightaway fell for the chain. I wanted to have it. I asked my cousin how much it cost. “I don’t know,” he said. “I got it from my father, and he got it from his father, it’s not the sort of thing you can buy. But seeing as you’re my cousin, I’ll sell it to you.” “How much is it, then?” I asked. And there I was, mindful of everything my father had inculcated into me, thinking to myself that a Slovene farmer is far too noble to think of money and prices. My cousin Joseph Branco thought for a long time, and finally he said: “Twenty-three crowns.” I didn’t ask how he arrived at this particular figure. I gave him twenty-five. He counted them out, made no move to give me two crowns’ change, pulled out a great red-and-blue checked handkerchief, and wrapped the money in that. Only then, after twice knotting the handkerchief, did he take off the chain, pull the watch out of his waistcoat pocket, and lay watch and chain on the table. It was an old-fashioned heavy silver watch, with a little key to wind it. My cousin seemed a little reluctant to detach it from the chain, looked at it tenderly, almost devoutly, for a long time, and finally said, “Well, seeing as you’re my cousin! If you give me another three crowns, you can have the watch as well!” I gave him a whole five-crown piece. He didn’t give me any change this time either. Once again, he produced his handkerchief, unpicked the double knot, put the new coin in with the other money, stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and looked at me with his big brown eyes.
“I like your waistcoat too!” I said after an interval of a few seconds. “I’ll buy that off you as well.”
“Because you’re my cousin,” he replied, “I’ll sell you my waistcoat as well.” And, not hesitating for a moment, he pulled off his jacket, took off his waistcoat and passed it across the table to me. “It’s good material,” said Joseph Branco, “and the buttons are pretty. Because it’s you, I’ll only ask two fifty.” I gave him three crowns, and in his eyes I could clearly see disappointment that it wasn’t five again. He seemed disgruntled, stopped smiling, but in the end he stowed the money away just as carefully and elaborately as he had done with the rest.
So now I had, as I saw it, the most important attributes of a proper Slovene: an old watch-chain, a brightly coloured waistcoat and a heavy lump of a watch, stopped, with a key to wind it. I didn’t hesitate. I put on all three items on the spot, paid, and ordered up a fiacre. I accompanied my cousin to his hotel; he was staying at the Green Huntsman. I asked him to wait for me tonight, so that I could collect him. I wanted to introduce him to my friends.
IV
For form’s sake, and to calm my anxious mother, I was enrolled as a law student. I did no studying. All of life lay spread out in front of me like a flowery meadow, barely confined by the rim of a very, very distant horizon. I lived in the merry, even uproarious society of young aristocrats, the class that, along with artists, I liked best in the old Empire. I shared their sceptical frivolity, their resourceful melancholy, their sinful negligence, their proud sense of doom — all of them signs of the end which we failed to see coming. Over the glasses from which we drank to excess, an invisible Death was already crossing his bony hands. We chuntered away, we even blasphemed mindlessly. Alone and old, almost petrified in his remoteness, but still close to us and ubiquitous in the great and colourful Empire lived and ruled the old Emperor Franz Joseph. It was possible that in the misty depths of our souls there slumbered those certainties called instincts, the certainty above all that with each passing day the old Emperor was dying, and with him the monarchy, not so much a fatherland as an empire, something greater, wider, more spacious and all-encompassing than just a fatherland. From out of our heavy hearts there bubbled forth the light witticisms, from our sense of doom a foolish pleasure in every affirmation of life: in balls, in Heurigen wine taverns, in girls, in food, in coach rides and follies of all sorts, in silly japes and suicidal ironies, vehemence and outspokenness, in the Prater, in the big wheel and puppet shows, in masquerade balls and ballets, in risky flirtations in the silent boxes of the Hofoper, in manoeuvres we slept through and even in those infections we sometimes caught from love.