So lunch was starting. Whenever the music paused, a soft clattering of dishes could be heard from the dining room. It lay three large rooms away from the balcony, at the exact midpoint of the second floor. During the meal, the music resounded, far but clear. Unfortunately, the band did not play every day. It was good and useful; it entwined the solemn ceremony of the luncheon, mild and conciliatory, allowing none of the terse, harsh, embarrassing conversations that the father so often loved to start. One could remain silent, listening and enjoying. The plates had narrow, fading, blue-and-gold stripes. Carl Joseph loved them. He often recalled them throughout the year. They and “The Radetzky March” and the wall portrait of his deceased mother (whom the boy no longer remembered) and the heavy silver ladle and the fish tureen and the scalloped fruit knives and the tiny demitasses and the wee frail spoons as thin as thin silver coins: all these things together meant summer, freedom, home.

He handed Jacques his cape, belt, cap, and gloves and went to the dining room. The old man walked in at the same time, smiling at the son. Fräulein Hirschwitz, the housekeeper, came a bit later in her Sunday gray silk, with her head aloft, her heavy bun at her nape, a huge curved brooch across her bosom like some kind of scimitar. She looked armed and armor-plated. Carl Joseph breathed a kiss on her long hard hand. Jacques pulled out the chairs. The district captain gave the signal for sitting. Jacques vanished and reappeared after a time with white gloves, which seemed to alter him thoroughly. They shed a snowy glow upon his already white face, his already white whiskers, his already white hair. But after all, their brightness also surpassed just about anything that could be called bright in this world. With these gloves he held a dark tray. Upon it lay the steaming soup tureen. Soon he had placed it at the center of the table, gingerly, soundlessly, and very quickly. Following an old custom, Fräulein Hirschwitz ladled out the soup. She offered the plates, and the diners approached them with hospitably stretching arms and grateful smiles in their eyes. She smiled back. A warm golden shimmer hovered in the plates; it was the soup, noodle soup: transparent, with thin, tender, entwined, golden-yellow noodles. Herr von Trotta und Sipolje ate very swiftly, sometimes fiercely. He virtually destroyed one course after another with a noiseless, aristocratic, and rapid malice; he was wiping them out. Fráulein Hirschwitz took small portions at the table, but after a meal she re-ate the entire sequence of food in her room.