I thought of their relationship with their mothers. I had the childish feeling that I would be betraying myself by making an admission, that this would be in any case a betrayal; of oneself by keeping something from one’s mother, and of one’s mother as well. When my friends talked about their mothers I was terribly ashamed; of my friends, my mother and myself. They spoke of their mothers almost in the same tone as they employed for the women of their liaisons whom they had dropped or thrown away, as if their mothers were prematurely aged mistresses and, worse still, hardly worthy of their sons.

It was, therefore, my friends who prevented me from obeying the voice of nature and of common sense and who also prevented me from expressing my feelings for my beloved Elizabeth as freely as I had shown, in childhood, my love for my mother.

But all this also suggests that the sins which my friends and I heaped on our own heads were not so much personal matters as the faint, still hardly recognisable, foreshadowing of the coming annihilation which I shall soon describe.

[VI]

BEFORE THE GREAT Armageddon I had had occasion to meet the Jew, Manes Reisiger, of whom I shall tell later. He came from Zlotogrod in Galicia. Not long after this I came to know Zlotogrod and so can give a description of it here. It seems to me important that I should because, like Sipolje, it no longer exists. It was destroyed in the war. It was a town, a small market town, but nevertheless a town. Today it is one enormous meadow. In summer clover grows there, crickets shrill in the tall grass, earthworms wax fat and prosper, and the larks dive down and eat them. One day in October the Jew Manes Reisiger called at our house at the same early hour at which, a few months earlier, his friend, my cousin Branco, had appeared. And he came on the advice of my cousin, Joseph Branco.

‘Young master,’ said Jacques, ‘a Jew wishes to speak with the young master.’ I did know one or two Jews at the time;Viennese Jews, admittedly. I did not dislike them in the least, for the very reason that at that period the active anti-semitism of the aristocracy and of the circle which I frequented had become the fashion among butlers, petty bourgeois, chimneysweeps and paperhangers. This change of attitude was akin to changes of fashion such as occurred when the daughter of some employee of the town hall pinned to her Sunday hat exactly the pleureuse which a Trautmanns-dorff or a Szechenyi had worn three years previously, but on a Wednesday. Just as today no Szechenyi could wear a pleureuse such as was worn by an employee’s daughter, so it came about that good society, to which I considered I belonged, could certainly not look down on a Jew—precisely because people like my butler did so.

I went into the anteroom prepared to find one of the Jews I knew, whose occupations seemed to have permeated, if not positively formed, their physical appearance. I knew money changers, pedlars, dealers in clothes and brothel piano players. As I walked into my anteroom, I saw, on the contrary, a man who in no way corresponded with my general idea of a Jew, one who was capable of completely upsetting it. He was almost uncannily dark and huge. One could not say that his beard, which was smooth and blue-black, framed his brown, hard, bony face, but rather that his face grew directly out of his beard, as though the beard had been there first, before the face, and had had to wait for years before being able to frame it so abundantly. The man was strong and big. In his hand he held a black cloth hat with a wide brim and on his head he wore a round little velvet cap, such as clerics sometimes affect. There he stood, close to the door, powerful, louring, a weighty power, his red hands clenched and hanging like two hammers from the black sleeves of his kaftan. From the inner leather sweatband of his hat he withdrew the Slovenian letter of my cousin, Joseph Branco, folded small. I invited him to sit down, but his hands made a shy gesture of refusal. The refusal seemed to me all the more timid since the hands which made it could have reduced the window, the little marble table, the coat-stand, myself and everything else in the anteroom to a shambles. I read the letter, from which I learned that the man standing before me was Manes Reisiger of Zlotogrod, by trade a coachman, a friend of my cousin Joseph Branco who, on his yearly circuit of the Crown Lands of the Monarchy selling roast chestnuts, received from the bearer of this letter free board and lodging, and that moreover I was in duty bound, by our cousinship and friendship, to give aid and comfort to Manes Reisiger in all ways that might be required of me.

And what did the said Manes Reisiger of Zlotogrod require of me? Nothing less than a free place in the Konservatorium for his very gifted son, Ephraim, who was not to become a coachman and end up in the far eastern extremities of the Monarchy. In the opinion of his father, Ephraim was a musical genius.

I promised him everything, and made my way to my friend, Count Chojnicki who, alone of all my friends, was a Galician. He was also the only man I knew who was capable of breaking the age-old, traditional and powerful resistance of the Austrian civil servants of that day: by means of pressure, displays of force, cunning and malice, the weapons of an ancient culture, now long since sunk without trace: our world, in fact.

That evening I met Count Chojnicki in our Café Wingerl.

I knew very well that one could hardly afford him greater pleasure than by asking him to procure a favour for one of his compatriots. He not only lacked a profession, but even an occupation.