I shall report in Zloczow along with Manes!’ ‘Bravo!’ I cried, and knew then that I would gladly have done the same as my cousin.

But I was thinking of Elizabeth.

[XIII]

I WAS THINKING OF Elizabeth. Since reading the Emperor’s manifesto I had only had two thoughts in my head: death and Elizabeth. I do not know to this day which was the stronger.

All my stupid concern about the scorn of my foolish friends had disappeared and been forgotten in the face of death. I suddenly found courage; for the first time in my life I found the courage to recognise my so-called ‘weakness’. Admittedly, I already sensed that the frivolous arrogance of my Viennese friends would have wilted beneath the black glare of Death and that at the moment of parting, and what a parting, there could no longer be any room for cynicism.

I, too, could have reported to the reserve depot in Zloczow, to which the fiaker Manes was bound, and to which my cousin Joseph Branco had also decided to report. In fact I had it in mind to forget Elizabeth, my friends in Vienna and my mother, and to report as quickly as possible for the first posting to death, namely the district reserve depot at Zloczow, for I was drawn closely to my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend, the fiaker Manes Reisiger. In the shadow of death my feelings became purer and more honest, in much the same way as one will sometimes be granted, just before a severe illness, such a clear insight and intuition that in spite of anxiety, preoccupation and the murderous apprehension of pain, one derives a certain proud satisfaction in the final recognition of happiness through pain, of peace through knowing in advance the price to be paid for it. One can be very happy when one is ill, and at that moment I was happy in relation to the great illness which was being heralded into the world: the world war. I could allow free rein to all the feverish dreams which I had otherwise suppressed. I was as much released as imperilled.

I knew very well that my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend Manes Reisiger meant more to me than all my earlier friends, with the exception of Count Chojnicki. At that time one had a very simple and rather casual idea of war. I, at least, was one of a number of people who believed we would be marched into garrison towns, billeted wherever there was room, and that we would be, if not actually close to each other, then at least more or less within reach. I imagined that it was my wish to remain somewhere near my cousin Joseph Branco and his friend, Manes the fiaker.

There was no time to be lost. One was in those days aware above all of the impression, obsession almost, that one had no more time: no more time to use what little room for manoeuvre life had left us, not even time to wait for death. It was hard for us to know whether we yearned for death or hoped for life. For me and for others like me there were hours of extreme tension: hours during which death no longer looked like a chasm into which one would eventually pitch, but like the far bank which one thinks of reaching at one leap. One knows how slowly the seconds pass before that leap.

First, inevitably, I went home to my mother. It was plain that she had hardly expected to see me again, but she behaved as if she had. It is one of the mysteries of mothers: they never resign themselves to not seeing their children again, even when they believe them to be dead, even when they really are dead; and if it were possible for a dead child to come back to life and stand before its mother, then she would take it in her arms as naturally as if it had not come back from another world, but only from some distant reaches of our own. A mother constantly awaits the return of her child, indifferent to whether it has wandered to some distant land or has been near at hand, or is dead. And so my mother received me when I arrived, at about ten in the morning. There she sat as usual in her armchair, her breakfast finished, holding up her paper and reading it through her old-fashioned oval steel-rimmed glasses. She took the glasses off as I arrived, but barely let the newspaper drop. ‘I kiss your hand, Mama,’ I said, and I went over to her and she took me in her arms. She kissed my mouth, my cheeks, my forehead. ‘Now we are at war,’ she said, as if she were imparting something new to me; or as if the war had only broken out, as far as she was concerned, the moment I returned home to take my leave of her, my mother.

‘Now we are at war, Mama,’ I replied, ‘and I have come to say goodbye to you. And also,’ I added after a pause, ‘to marry Elizabeth before I go off to war.’

‘Why marry,’ asked my mother, ‘when you have to go to war anyway?’ Here, too, she spoke as mothers speak. If she must let her child, and her only child at that, go off to his death, she wanted to let him go alone. She did not wish to share either loss or possession of him with another woman.

She may have sensed for a long time that I loved Elizabeth. (She knew her well.) My mother may for a long time have feared that she would one day lose her only son, and to another woman, which may almost have seemed worse to her than losing him to death.