Only the signature, the name itself, betrayed the touching clumsiness of the fiaker’s hand. The sight of the signature alone would have been enough to make me determined to travel in the coming early autumn to Zlotogrod. We were all carefree in those days, and I as much as all the others. Before the Great War our life was idyllic, and even a journey to distant Zlotogrod seemed to all of us an adventure.

As I was supposed to be the hero of this adventure, it was a glorious opportunity to make myself important in the eyes of my friends. And although this adventurous journey still lay so far in the future, and although I was to undertake it alone, we discussed it every evening as if Zlotogrod were but a week away and all of us travelling together. Gradually this journey became for us a passion, even an obsession. We thus began, quite deliberately, to paint ourselves a picture of little, distant Zlotogrod, but in such a way that even as we described Zlotogrod, we were convinced that we were painting an entirely false portrait of it, yet could not stop picturing this place which none of us knew. In other words we furnished it with all sorts of characteristics which we knew from the start were deliberate creations of our own fantasy and bore no relation to the real qualities of the little town. It was such a happy time! Death folded his hands above the goblets from which we drank. We did not see him, did not see his hands. We talked so urgently of Zlotogrod, at such length and with such intensity, that I was gripped by fear that the town would one day suddenly disappear, or that my friends might begin to think that Zlotogrod had become unreal and no longer existed, that it was just a tale I had told. I was suddenly overtaken by impatience and even by an urge to see Zlotogrod and the coachman, the fiaker Reisiger.

In midsummer of the year 1914 I set off, after writing to my cousin Trotta in Sipolje to say that I would wait for him there.

[IX]

IN MIDSUMMER OF 1914 I therefore set off for Zlotogrod. I put up at the Hotel zum Goldenen Bären, the only hotel in the little town, I was told, which was acceptable to a European.

The railway station was tiny, like the station at Sipolje, of which I had retained a certain memory. All little stations in all little provincial towns looked alike throughout the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Small and painted yellow, they were like lazy cats lying in the snow in winter and in the sun in summer, protected by the glass roof over the platform, and watched by the black double eagle on its yellow background. The porter was the same everywhere, in Sipolje as in Zlotogrod, his paunch stuffed into his inoffensive dark blue uniform, and across his chest the black belt into which was tucked his bell, whose prescribed treble peal announced the departure of a train. In Zlotogrod, too, as in Sipolje, there hung above the entrance to the station-master’s office, on the platform, the black iron contraption out of which, miraculously, sounded the distant silvery ringing of the telephone, delicate and enchanting signals from other worlds which made one wonder why they took refuge in such a small but weighty lodging. On Zlotogrod station, as in Sipolje, the porter saluted the coming in of the train and its going out, and his salute was a kind of military blessing. In Zlotogrod station, as in Sipolje, there were the same first- and second-class waiting rooms, the same buffet with bottles of schnapps, the identical blonde, full-bosomed cashier and the same two enormous potted palms to the left and right of the buffet which might have been either prehistoric growths or pasteboard. In front of the station, just as in Sipolje, stood three fiakers. I at once recognised the unmistakable cabby, Manes Reisiger.

Naturally it was he who drove me to the Hotel zum Goldenen Bären. He had a splendid fiaker harnessed to two silver-grey horses; the spokes of the wheels were varnished yellow and the wheels themselves equipped with rubber tyres such as Manes had seen in Viennese dealers’ shops.

He admitted to me as we drove along that it was not so much for my sake and in the expectation of my arrival that he had renovated his cab, but more on account of an instinctive passion which had driven him to examine more closely his colleagues, the drivers of Vienna, and then to sacrifice his savings to the God of Progress by buying two new horses, and rubber tyres for the wheels.

The way from the station to the town was long, and Manes Reisiger had ample time to tell me everything he had on his mind. With his left hand he held the reins, and beside him to his right stood the whip in its sheath. The horses knew their way well and there was no need to direct them. Manes paid them no attention whatever. He sat quite relaxed on his box, idly holding the loose reins in his left hand and leaning over towards me with the upper half of his body while he told me his stories. The two horses had only cost him a hundred and twenty-five crowns between them. They were government horses; each of them had gone blind in the left eye and therefore become unfit for military duty, and they had been sold off cheap by the Ninth Dragoons, who were stationed in Zlotogrod. Even so he, Manes Reisiger, could never have bought them so cheaply had he not been a favourite of the Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons. In all there were five fiakers in the town of Zlotogrod.