They threw uncertain light across the table and equally uncertain shadows across the dark blue painted walls. At the head of the table sat Manes the fiaker, but no longer in his usual coachman’s uniform of sheepskin with a belt and a cloth cap. Instead he was wearing a long shiny coat and on his head a little black velvet cap. My cousin Joseph Branco wore his usual greasy leather jerkin and, out of respect for his Jewish host, a little green Tyrolean hat. Somewhere a cricket chirped shrilly.

‘Now we must all say farewell,’ began Manes the fiaker. He saw much more clearly than my friends in the Ninth Dragoons, and yet he was entirely calm; I was about to say, ennobled, as if by death, which does confer nobility on any man who is ready and willing to accept it. So he continued: ‘It will be a great war, and a long one, and there is no telling which of us three may come back. I sit here for the last time, my wife beside me, for the Friday evening meal, before the candles of the Sabbath. Let us take a worthy farewell my friends: you, Branco, and you, Sir!’ And in order to take proper farewell of each other we decided, all three of us, to go to Jadlowker’s tavern.

[XII]

JADLOWKER’S BORDER TAVERN was always open, day and night. It was the tavern for Russian deserters, for those soldiers of the Tsar who were induced by agents of American shipping lines, through persuasion, threat or cunning, to leave the army and take ship for Canada. Admittedly there were many who needed no persuasion to desert and who paid the agents out of their last worldly goods, they or their relatives. Jadlowker’s tavern was reckoned to be of ill repute, as the phrase goes. But in those parts any tavern of ill repute was under the particular favour of the Austrian border police and so to some extent under the protection as much as under the suspicion of the authorities.

When we arrived—after walking silently and gloomily for half an hour—the great big green double gate was closed, and even the lantern was extinguished. We had to knock and the serving-man, Onufriy, came and opened to us. I knew Jadlowker’s tavern, having been there once or twice, and I knew the general confusion which used to prevail there, the particular kind of noise which is made by those who have suddenly become homeless, men in despair, all of them in fact deprived of a present, travelling between past and future, between a known past and a highly uncertain future, like passengers crossing a wobbling plank from terra firma into a strange ship.

But this time it was quiet.Yes, eerily quiet. Even little Kapturak, one of the noisiest and most vociferous agents, who used to hide beneath a smokescreen of fast talk the many things which his nature and his profession compelled him to conceal; even Kapturak was sitting silently in the corner, on the bench by the stove, even smaller and more wizened than usual, doubly implausible, a silent shadow of his real self. Only two days previously he had brought over the border a gang, a ‘load’ of deserters, to use the trade term. Now the Emperor’s manifesto was posted to the walls, there was war, and even the mightiest shipping agency was powerless. The great thunder of world history had silenced the chatter of little Kapturak, its blinding lightning had reduced him to a shadow. Kapturak’s victims, the deserters, sat silent, staring vacantly across glasses which were only half empty. When I had previously visited Jadlowker’s tavern, I had done so with the quite special pleasure of a young and frivolous man who sees in the irresponsible attitudes of others, even of the most bizarre among them, the rightful justification of his own follies. I had enjoyed watching the carefree way in which those who had just become homeless would empty one glass after another and go on ordering more. The landlord Jadlowker was sitting behind the bar like some bird of ill omen, the bearer of disaster rather than its harbinger. He looked, too, as if it would not afford him the smallest pleasure to pour out fresh glasses, even if his guests had ordered them. What was the sense in all this? Tomorrow or the next day the Russians could be there. Poor Jadlowker, who only a week earlier had sat there so majestically with his silvery pointed beard, a kind of Lord Mayor among taverners, as much protected and guarded by the tacit acquiescence of the authorities as by their half admiring mistrust, now looked like someone who was about to liquidate his whole past; a mere victim of history. And the heavy, blond cashier who sat beside him at the back of the bar had also been given her notice by history, and short notice at that. Everything private had suddenly entered the public domain, which it now represented and symbolised. For this reason our farewell was short and unhappy.We drank three glasses of mead and in silence ate a few pickled peas. Suddenly my cousin Joseph Branco spoke: ‘I’m not going to Sarajevo first.