He thanks the audience for their applause, comes out in front of the curtain, bows, and then can’t find his way offstage. Grock is cut off from the scenery, left to the mercy of the people in the stalls who now, of all things, applaud him — but for how long, how long? Soon, they will start to laugh at his helpless condition just as they laughed at his intentional jokes before — evil people. No one makes a move, no one shows him where to go, the curtain has innumerable pleats, yes, it seems to consist of nothing but pleats, one of them must be the way out, but which one. What an awful pickle. Mustn’t show that he’s stuck, whatever he does! Another nice, smiling, adorable bow. The people are to believe that he’s staying out of gratitude, sheer heartfelt gratitude. Then while they’re still clapping, quickly pick up the curtain, and slip under it! Saved.
Grock appears once more, but it is a different Grock, a Grock without bald patch, with a sad face full of noble ugliness, an aristocrat in a crude world, a man of noble truth betrayed a thousand times, an honest, yes, a humble striver who always comes a cropper, a man born for despair who forces himself to believe, a clumsy so-and-so, a hero, a lofty man in the depths, defeated a thousand times but always victorious.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 10 December 1924
19. The Dapper Traveller
The dapper traveller enters the compartment carrying in his hand a small case of soft leather, accompanied by a porter who hoists a suitcase of tough leather into the luggage net. The dapper traveller pays him quietly without looking and without responding to his goodbye. Straightaway he drops into the seat and bounces up once before his body comes to rest. He peels off his grey leather gloves and lays them in the soft little case, from which he takes out a pair of grey thread gloves. These he puts on, stroking each finger straight. Thereupon he looks in a mirror with leather backing, runs his right hand lightly through his hair, and looks out of the window without fixing any particular object or person.
The traveller is clad in a discreet grey, set off by an exquisite iridescent purple tie. With complacent attention he examines his feet, his leather shoes, and the fine knots in the broad laces. He stretches out his legs in the compartment, both arms are casually on the arm rests to either side. Before long the grey traveller pulls out his mirror again, and brushes his dense, black parted hair with his fingers, in the way one might apply a feather duster to a kickshaw. Then he burrows in his case, and various useful items come to light: a leather key-holder, a pair of nail scissors, a packet of cigarettes, a little silk handkerchief and a bottle of eau de cologne.
Then the traveller pushes a cigarette between his lips and pats his pockets for matches. Now, where are his matches? Yes, where are they, the elegant, flat matches for his waistcoat pocket, with their little yellow youthful phosphorus heads?
They are forgotten, lost, stolen, spoiled, disappeared, they are not there. The dapper traveller no longer dominates the compartment. Yes, he even feels a little trivial, with his impeccable outfit and no matches. His distinguished, sensual, olive-yellow face takes on a pale brown coloration. With his soft little leather case in his hand, he marches off in the direction of the dining car.
When he returns, fed, a little grease at the corners of his lips, he pulls a leather-bound volume from the pocket of his travelling cloak. He writes with a silver pencil, engrossed, dreamy. He is surely a poet.
Yes, clearly, a popular poet. He invents female characters so ethereal, so morphinistically thin that one may not see that they are spun from nothing at all. He is a poet on laid paper, his hand signs three hundred and fifty-one book jackets a year.
But as he leans forward and puts his book down on his knee, I see that what he was writing and totting up were columns of figures. The beautiful book contains profane calculations.
Then he puts a cigarette between his lips and his olive yellow face turns brown, and because I am getting off soon, I offer him my matches. But he refuses them. Because mine is a common or garden matchbox, bulky, just the thing to spoil the line of a waistcoat pocket, and full of common or garden red-tipped matches, not to be carried in a leather case without compromising oneself.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 August 1924
III. Austria and Elsewhere
20. Bruck and Kiralyhida
Bruck-Kiralyhida was once like so: hyphenated.
Then came the revolution, it washed away the hyphen, and with that the Dual Monarchy was finished.
If the hyphen had remained, we might still have had the Duality today.
The hyphen was in reality a bridge, the bridge over the Leitha, connecting cis- and trans-. Traffic crossed the bridge completely unimpeded. On this side people spoke German and Hungarian, on the other side Hungarian and German. This side they swaggered in black and yellow, the other side they glittered in red, white and green. On this side they were loyal to the emperor, on the other to Kiraly. Those were the main differences; everything else was negligible. Here as there, the children were blond, brown- or black-haired, but always dirty. Here as there, the merchants were clever, practical-minded and sober. Here as there, one could get through money easily and painlessly. And get through it one did. Nowhere in the monarchy more easily than in Bruck-Kiralyhida.
During the war there was a penal institution in Bruck that went by the name of “Officers’ Training College”. It had the task of turning one-year volunteers “with button” into privileged detainees with a claim to pay and an ensign’s sword-knot. Every day the striplings of this institution marched across the bridge. Back then the bridge still signified the place where Austrians and Hungarians rubbed shoulders, to fight and give their lives for their joint fatherland. The ones for the Kaiser, the others for their king. Back then, it was still one person. Now one has become two. The hyphen is gone…
But no. If one looks more closely, it is still there. Only it is called something else. It has become a line of separation. Instead of conjoining, it dissevers. In a word, it is a frontier. The hyphen is an armed frontier. Defended on this side by Austrian gendarmes, on the other by Red Guards. An eerie feeling to stand close to the bridge. The heart for a moment stops beating. The end of the world. The beginning of chaos. The limits of common sense. Or of irrationality?
Frontier traffic is lively. People exchange money, goods, ideas. In the interests of fairness, the Austrian government has despatched one policeman for every Hungarian agent-provocateur. They get along extraordinarily well, and frequent the same bars. The better to observe the other, they play billiards together.
There are also middle-class people. Hungarian capitalists. They are very difficult to tell apart from the agents-provocateurs. They also speak Hungarian, are just as elegant, their wallets have the same extent and cubic volume. Only they don’t dare to cross the border, and are waiting for the fall of the Kun dictatorship. The agents-provocateurs are waiting for the dictatorship of the proletariat to reach Austria. That’s the extent of the difference.