Free The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

duty every other day. Every other day, he came to the district captain’s headquarters with a stack of documents. He never ran into the district captain’s son. Every other day at four in the afternoon, Carl Joseph marched to the constabulary headquarters. He left it at 7 P.M. The fragrance he brought along from Frau Slama blended with the smells of the dry summer evenings, lingering on his hands day and night. At meals, he made sure never to get closer to his father than necessary.
    “It smells of autumn here,” the old man said one evening. He was generalizing. Frau Slama always used mignonette.

Chapter 3
    I N THE DISTRICT captain’s study, the portrait hung opposite the windows and so high on the wall that hair and forehead blurred into the dark-brown shadow under the old wooden ceiling. The grandson’s curiosity constantly focused on his grandfather’s blurring figure and vanished fame. Sometimes, on still afternoons (the windows open, the dark-green shadows of the chestnut trees in the town park filling the room with the entire mellow and powerful calm of the summer, the district captain heading one of his commissions outside the town, old Jacques’s ghostly steps shuffling from distant stairs as he trudged through the house in felt slippers, gathering shoes, clothes, ashtrays, candelabras, and floor lamps for cleaning and polishing), Carl Joseph would climb on a chair and view his grandfather’s portrait up close. It splintered into countless deep shadows and bright highlights, into brush strokes and dabs, into a myriad weave of the painted canvas, into a hard colored interplay of dried oil. Carl Joseph got down from the chair. The green shade of the trees flashed on the grandfather’s brown coat, the dabs and brush strokes merged back into the familiar but unfathomable physiognomy, and the eyes regained their usual remote look that blurred toward the darkness of the ceiling. The grandson’s mute conversations with the grandfather took place every summer vacation. The dead man revealed nothing; the boy learned nothing. From year to year, the portrait seemed to be growing paler and more otherworldly, as if the Hero of Solferino were dying once again and a time would come when an empty canvas would stare down upon the descendant even more mutely than the portrait.
    In the courtyard below, in the shade of the wooden balcony, Jacques sat on a stool in front of an orderly military line of waxedboots. Whenever Carl Joseph returned home from Frau Slama, he would go over to Jacques in the courtyard and perch on a ledge. “Tell me about Grandfather, Jacques.” And Jacques would put down brush, shoe wax, and brass polish and rub his hands as if cleansing them of work and dirt before starting to talk about the deceased. And as usual, like a good twenty times in the past, he would begin.
    “I always got on fine with him. I wasn’t so young when I came to the farm. I never married; the baron wouldn’t have liked that. He never cared much for women, aside from his own Frau Baroness, but she soon died—her lungs. Everyone knew he had saved the Kaiser’s life at the Battle of Solferino, but he kept mum about it, never a peep out of him. That was why they wrote ‘The Hero of Solferino’ on his gravestone. He wasn’t so old when he died; it was in the evening, around nine, in November. It was already snowing. That afternoon he’d been standing in the courtyard, and he said, ‘Jacques, where did you put my fur-lined boots?’ I didn’t know where, but I said, ‘I’ll get them, Herr Baron.’ ‘Tomorrow’s soon enough!’ he says—and tomorrow he no longer needed them. I never got married.”
    That was all.
    Once—it was the last summer vacation; a year from now Carl Joseph was to join the regiment—when the boy was leaving, the district captain said, “I hope everything goes smoothly. You are the grandson of the Hero of Solferino. Think about it, then nothing can happen to you!”
    The colonel, all the