Old Jadlowker, an ancient silver-bearded Jew, was in the habit of sitting, motionless and half lame, outside his broad, mightily-vaulted, grass-green double courtyard gate. He looked like winter enjoying the last fine days of autumn, wishing he could take them with him into that fast-approaching eternity which knows no seasons. He heard nothing, he understood nothing, he was stone deaf. But by the look of his big, black, melancholy eyes I seemed to sense that in a way he saw everything which we youngsters could only understand by hearing, and that he was, so to speak, voluntarily and gladly deaf. Gently, delicately, strands of gossamer drifted past him.The autumn sun, silvery but still warm, shone on the old man as he faced the west and the setting sun, itself the terrestrial symbol of death. It was as though he hoped that eternity, to which he would soon be dedicated, would come to him instead of his having to go to it. The crickets sang inexhaustibly, and inexhaustibly sang the frogs. A great peace reigned in the world, the austere peace of autumn.

At this season it was the custom of my cousin Joseph Branco, in obedience to an old tradition handed down among the chestnut roasters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to set up his stand in the main square of Zlotogrod.

For two long days the bitter-sweet, warm smell of baking apples drifted through the little town.

It began to rain. It was a Thursday. The next day, Friday, the notice was up at every street corner.

It was the manifesto of our old Emperor, Franz Joseph, and it was headed: ‘To all my peoples!’

[XI]

I WAS AN ensign on the reserve. I had left my battalion, the Twenty-First Jägers, barely two years before. It seemed to me at this moment that the war was coming at quite the right time. The very instant that it happened and there was no escaping it, I recognised—and I believe my friends recognised it as immediately and as surely as I did—that even a pointless death was better than an aimless life. I was afraid of dying. That is quite certain. I had no wish to be killed. I just wanted to assure myself that I was capable of dying.

My cousin Joseph Branco and his friend Manes the fiaker were both soldiers on the reserve. They, too, had to rejoin. On the evening of the Friday on which the Emperor’s manifesto had been posted I reported as usual to the mess, to dine with my friends of the Ninth Dragoons. I could not understand their appetite, their usual cheerfulness, nor their foolish indifference towards their marching orders against the Russian border town, Radzivilov, which lay to the north-east. I was the only one who could already read on their harmless, even happy, and in any event unmoved faces, the writing of death. It was as if they were in that state of euphoria which so often graces the dying; death’s forerunner. And although they sat at table, still healthy and cheerful, drinking their schnaps and beer, and although I pretended to take part in their silly jokes, I had the impression of being a doctor or a nurse who watches his patient dying and is happy that the dying man is still quite unaware of death’s proximity. And yet after a time I felt ill at ease, as perhaps many a nurse or doctor feels, in the face of death and the euphoria of the dying. There comes a moment, therefore, when it is hard to know whether it is not better to tell the doomed man that his time is near rather than to welcome the euphoria which would send him off without suspicion of any sort. Because of this I soon left the gentlemen of the Ninth Dragoons and took myself off to Manes the fiaker with whom, as I have already mentioned, my cousin Joseph Branco was living.

How different those two were, and how much good they did me after that evening in the mess with the Ninth Dragoons. Perhaps this was because of the ritual candles burning in the blue room of Manes the Jewish cabman, candles burning away to their own death, almost cheerfully, and in any case surely and steadily: those golden-yellow candles stuck into green beer bottles, since Manes the fiaker was too poor to buy brass candlesticks. They were by now little more than stumps of candles, and seemed to me to symbolise the end of the world, which I knew was now beginning to come about. The tablecloth was white; the bottles were of that cheap dark green which seems at once to indicate vulgarly and boastfully the indifferent quality of its liquid content; and the dying candles were golden yellow as they flickered.