The other four, Reisiger’s colleagues, had dirty cabs, lame, lazy old nags, ‘square wheels’ and moth-eaten leather seats. Sawdust leaked out of the leather, which was worn out and full of holes, and it was certainly not suitable for a gentleman, let alone a Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons, to go riding in a fiaker of that sort.

I had a letter of introduction from Chojnicki to the garrison Commander, Colonel Földes of the Ninth, as well as to the District Commander, Baron Grappik. I had thought of paying both these visits on the day after my arrival. Manes the fiaker fell silent. He had nothing further to impart, for he had already told me everything of importance in his life. Nevertheless he still left his whip sheathed, held the reins slackly and leaned over to me from his box. The fixed smile on that wide mouth full of strong white teeth, framed in the black, almost blue, beard and moustache, reminded me a little of a milky moon shining between woods; rather pleasant woods, indeed. There was so much good humour and kindliness in this smile that it quite dominated the strange, flat, melancholy landscape through which I was being driven. Since broad fields stretched away to the right of me and broad swamps to the left on the road from Zlotogrod station to Zlotogrod township, it seemed as if the latter had, with deliberate modesty, remained far away from the station which connected it with the world. It was a rainy afternoon and, as I said, it would soon be the beginning of autumn. The rubber tyres of Manes’ fiaker rolled in ghostly silence along the soft, unmetalled country road, but the heavy hooves of the strong former army horses splashed ponderously and rhythmically through the dark grey mud, great lumps of which spurted out ahead of us. Dusk was just falling as we reached the first houses. Half way along the main square, opposite the little church and illuminated by a sad, solitary lantern which could be seen from far off, stood the only two-storey building in Zlotogrod: the Hotel zum Goldenen Bären. The lonely lantern which stood before it reminded one of an orphan vainly trying to smile through its tears.

Although I had prepared myself for much that was strange, remote and unfamiliar, most of what I saw seemed friendly and homelike. Only much later, long after the Great War which is now, in my opinion, rightly called the World War, not only because the whole world was involved in it but also because, as a result of it, we each lost a world, our own world; only much later, then, was I to realise that even landscapes, fields, nations, races, huts and coffee houses of the most widely differing sorts are bound to submit to the perfectly natural dominion of a powerful force with the ability to bring near what is remote, to domesticate what is strange and to unite what seems to be trying to fly apart. I speak of the misunderstood and also misused power of the old Monarchy which worked in such a way that I was just as much at home in Zlotogrod as I was in Sipolje or Vienna. The one coffeehouse in Zlotogrod, the Café Habsburg, situated on the ground floor of the Hotel zum Goldenen Bären where I was staying, looked very much like the Café Wimmerl in the Josefstadt where I was accustomed to meet my friends in the afternoon. Here, too, there sat at the receipt of custom a confidence-inspiring cashier, blonde and buxom as only cashiers used to be when I was young, an honest form of latter-day Goddess of Depravity, herself a sin unfulfilled in that she only hinted at sinfulness, expressing as she did corruption, lechery and a sharp eye for business, all at the same time. I had seen her like in Agram, Olmütz, Brünn and Kecskemet, in Szombathely, Ödenburg, Sternberg and Müglitz. The chessboard, the dominoes, the smoke-stained walls, the gaslamps, the cake trolley in the corner by the lavatories, the blue-aproned waitress, the country gendarme with his loam-yellow helmet suddenly walking in, at once authoritative and embarrassed, leaning his rifle with fixed bayonet almost shyly against the umbrella stand, the card players with their imperials and their round sleeves, who met every day punctually at the same hour: all of this was home, stronger than any mere Fatherland, broad and bright, familiar, home: the kaiser-und königliche Monarchie. Both the District Commander, Baron Grappik, and Földes, the Colonel of the Ninth Dragoons, spoke that same nasal, government, language of the upper classes, a language which was hard and gentle at the same time, as if Slavs and Italians had been the founding fathers of this idiom full of discreet irony and a cheerful acceptance of harmless chatter, even of genuine nonsense. I had hardly spent a week in Zlotogrod before I was as much at home as if I were in Sipolje, Müglitz, Brünn or our own Café Wimmerl in the Josefstadt.

Needless to say, I drove round the district every day in the fiaker of my friend, Manes Reisiger. The land was poor, in fact, but it gave an impression of courage and freedom from care. Even the wide-stretching and uncultivable swamps seemed to me luscious and benevolent, whilst the frogs’ chorus which rose from them seemed to be a hymn of praise from creatures who knew better than I did for what purpose God had created them and the swamp, their home.

In the night I sometimes heard the hoarse, often interrupted cry of the wild geese flying high. The willows and birches were still in full leaf, but from the impressive chestnut trees the clean-cut, jagged, hard, golden-yellow leaves were just falling. Ducks quacked in the middle of the street where ponds interrupted the silver-grey mud which never dried.

In the evening I used to eat, or rather to drink, with the officers of the Ninth Dragoons. Death crossed his bony hands above our glasses as we drank, but we did not suspect it. Sometimes we stayed up late together. Because of some inexplicable fear of the night we would stay up till morning.

Inexplicable today. At the time it seemed easy to explain; we were too young to waste the night. On the other hand, as I later noticed, we were afraid of the day, especially of the morning, the clearest time of day.