Free The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth Page B

the house, he halted once again. Turning his face to his son, he said, “In my youth, I would have liked to become a soldier. Your grandfather explicitly prohibited it. Now I’m glad that you’re not a government official.”
    “Yessir, Pápa!” replied Carl Joseph.
    There was wine; they had also managed to muster up beef and cherry dumplings. Fräulein Hirschwitz came in her gray Sunday silk and, upon seeing Carl Joseph, relinquished most of her severity without further ado. “I am utterly delighted,” she said, “and congratulate you from the bottom of my heart”—using the German word
beglückwünschen
for “congratulate.” The district captain translated it into the Austrian word
gratulieren.
And they began to eat.
    “You don’t have to hurry!” said the old man. “If I finish first, I’ll wait a little.”
    Carl Joseph looked up. He realized his father must have always known what an effort it was to keep up with him. And for the first time he felt he could see through the old man’s armor, into his living heart and into the web of his secretthoughts. Though he was already a lieutenant, Carl Joseph turned red. “Thank you, Pápa,” he said. The district captain kept eating his soup. He seemed not to hear.
    A few days later, they boarded the train for Vienna. The son was reading a newspaper, the old man documents. At one point the district captain glanced up and said, “We’ll have to order you a pair of dress trousers in Vienna, you’ve only got two.”
    “Thank you, Pápa!” They continued reading.
    They were just fifteen minutes from Vienna when the father put away the documents. The son instantly folded the newspaper. The district captain peered at the windowpane, then for a few seconds at the son. All at once, he said, “You know Constable Sergeant Slama, don’t you?”
    The name banged against Carl Joseph’s memory, a cry from lost times. He instantly saw the road leading to the constabulary headquarters, the low room, the flowery dressing gown, the wide well-upholstered bed; he caught the scent of meadows and also Frau Slama’s mignonette. He listened.
    “Unfortunately he was widowed this year,” the old man went on. “Sad. His wife died in childbirth. You should call on him.”
    All at once the train compartment was unbearably hot. Carl Joseph tried to loosen his collar. As he vainly struggled for appropriate words, a hot, foolish, childish desire to weep rose up in him, strangling him; his palate was dry as if he had drunk nothing for days. He felt his father’s eyes, peered strenuously at the countryside, sensed the nearness of the destination toward which they were heading inexorably, felt it as a sharpening of his torment, longed to be at least in the corridor, and simultaneously realized that he could not escape the old man’s eyes and news. He quickly gathered a bit of weak, temporary strength and said, “I’ll call on him.”
    “The train ride doesn’t seem to be agreeing with you,” the father remarked.
    “Yessir, Pápa”
    Mute and upright, plagued by a torment that he could not have named, that he had never known, that was like an enigmatic disease from distant climes, Carl Joseph went to the hotel. Hebarely managed to say, “Excuse me, Pápa!” Then he locked his door, unpacked his suitcase, and pulled out the folder containing a few letters from Frau Slama in their envelopes, as they had come, with the encoded address:
General Delivery, Hranice, Moravia.
The blue pages were the color of the sky and had a hint of mignonette, and the black, dainty letters soared off like an orderly flight of sleek swallows. Letters from a dead Frau Slama! To Carl Joseph they seemed like early harbingers of her sudden end, with the spectral grace that emanates only from doomed hands, anticipatory greetings from the beyond. He had not answered her last letter. The induction, the speeches, the leave-taking, the mass, his commission, his new rank, and the new uniforms lost their