She was a redhead with freckles and looked like a dumpling which had risen too far. In spite of this, and in spite of her chubby fingers, she had an appetising way of preparing her husband’s breakfast and pouring his tea. She had borne him three children.Two of them had died of smallpox. She would sometimes speak of her dead children as though they were alive, as if, to her, there were no difference between the children they had buried and the son who had gone away to the Konservatorium in Vienna and may well have seemed to her as good as dead, for he had gone out of their life. Very much alive and present in her eyes, however, was my cousin the chestnut roaster. Here I sensed all sorts of things. He was due to arrive in a week’s time, my cousin Joseph Branco Trotta.

[X]

A WEEK LATER he did, indeed, arrive.

He came with his mule, his leather sack and his chestnuts. He was brown and black and merry; just as I had last seen him in Vienna. It was plain to see that he took it as a matter of course that he should meet me again here. The real chestnut season was still a long way off, but my cousin had simply set off a couple of weeks early on my account. On the way from the railway to the town he sat up on the coachman’s box alongside our friend Manes Reisiger. They had tied the donkey with a halter to the back of the fiaker. The leather sack, the oven and the chestnuts were made fast on each side. And so we drove into the little town of Zlotogrod, without causing the least commotion. The people of Zlotogrod were accustomed to seeing my cousin Joseph Branco turn up every other year. They even seemed to have become accustomed to me, the stray outsider.

My cousin Joseph Branco put up, as usual, at Manes Reisiger’s. In remembrance of the good business he had done with me the summer before over the watch and chain, he had brought me a couple of folkloric trivia, such as a beaten silver ashtray displaying two crossed daggers and the blessed and venerable Nicodemus, who bore no relation whatever to them; a brass cup which seemed to me to smell of sour dough; and a painted wooden cuckoo. He had brought all this, said Joseph Branco, as a present for me in the hope that I would be in a position to pay the ‘cost of carriage’. I understood what was implied by ‘cost of carriage’ and bought the ashtray, the cup and the cuckoo on the evening of his arrival. He was delighted.

In order to pass the time, as he put it, but in reality to exploit every opportunity of making a little money, he tried from time to time to persuade Manes the fiaker that he, Joseph Branco, was an accomplished coachman, better than Manes, and better able to find customers. Reisiger, however, would have none of this talk. He harnessed his horses to the coach early in the morning, without bothering about Joseph Branco, and set off to the station and to the market square where his colleagues, the other fiakers, were stationed.

It was a lovely, sunny summer. Although Zlotogrod was, in a manner of speaking, not a ‘proper market town’, because it really looked more like an overgrown village—its market place was almost overwhelmed by the full clean breath of nature streaming in from the surrounding woods, swamps and hills.Woods, swamps and hills seemed just as likely to appear in town as some traveller from the station heading for the Hotel zum Goldenen Bären.To my friends in the district administration, however, and to the gentlemen of the Ninth Dragoons it really was a town. They needed to feel that they were not buried in some God-forsaken little place. The mere fact that Zlotogrod had a railway station gave them a confident feeling that they were not divorced from the civilisation in which they had grown up and been pampered. As a result, they behaved as if it were essential once or twice a week to leave the supposedly intolerable city atmosphere and proceed in fiakers in the direction of the very woods, swamps and hills which were in fact pressing in on them. For Zlotogrod was not only teeming with Nature, it was oppressed by its surroundings. And so a couple of times a week I would drive with my friends in Manes Reisiger’s fiaker into the so-called ‘environs’ of Zlotogrod. ‘Excursions’, we called them. We often drew up outside Jadlowker’s frontier tavern.