That same instant, a shot bored through the lieutenant’s left shoulder, the very shot meant for the Kaiser’s heart. As the emperor rose, the lieutenant sank. Along the entire front, a tangled and irregular rattling awoke from the terrified guns, which had been startled from their slumber. The Kaiser, impatiently urged by his escorts to leave this perilous zone, nevertheless leaned over the prostrate lieutenant and, mindful of his imperial duty, asked the unconscious man, who could hear nothing, what his name was. A regimental surgeon, an ambulance orderly, and two stretcher bearers came galloping over, backs bent, heads stooped. The staff officers first yanked the Kaiser down and then threw themselves on the ground. “Here—the lieutenant!” the Kaiser shouted up at the breathless medic.

Meanwhile the firing had petered out. And while the acting cadet officer stepped in front of the platoon and announced in a clear voice, “I am taking command,” Franz Joseph and his escorts stood up, the orderlies gingerly strapped the lieutenant to the stretcher, and they all withdrew toward the regimental command post, where a snow-white tent spread over the nearest clearing station.

Trotta’s left clavicle was shattered. The bullet, lodged right under the left shoulder blade, was removed in the presence of the Supreme Commander in Chief, amid the inhuman bellowing of the wounded man, who was revived by his pain.

Trotta recovered within four weeks. By the time he returned to his south Hungarian garrison, he possessed the rank of captain, the highest of all decorations—the Order of Maria Theresa—and a knighthood. Now he was called Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje.

Every night before retiring and every morning upon awakening, as if his own life had been traded for a new and alien life manufactured in a workshop, he would repeat his new rank and his new status to himself and walk up to the mirror to confirm that his face was the same. Despite the awkward heartiness of army brethren trying to bridge the gulf left by a sudden and incomprehensible destiny, and in spite of his own vain efforts to encounter everyone as unabashedly as ever, the ennobled Captain Trotta seemed to be losing his equilibrium; he felt he had been sentenced to wear another man’s boots for life and walk across a slippery ground, pursued by secret talking and awaited by shy glances. His grandfather had been a little peasant, his father an assistant paymaster, later a constable sergeant on the monarchy’s southern border. After losing an eye in a fight with Bosnian smugglers, he had been living as a war invalid and groundskeeper at the Castle of Laxenburg, feeding the swans, trimming the hedges, guarding the springtime forsythias and then the elderberry bushes against unauthorized, thievish hands, and, in the mild nights, shooing homeless lovers from the benevolent darkness of benches.

To the son of a noncommissioned officer, the rank of an ordinary infantry lieutenant had seemed natural and suitable. But to the decorated, aristocratic captain, who went about in the alien and almost unearthly radiance of imperial favor as in a golden cloud, his own father had suddenly moved far away, and the measured love that the offspring showed the old man seemed to require an altered conduct and a new way for father and son to deal with each other. The captain had not seen his father in five years; but every other week, while doing his rounds in the eternally unalterable rotation, he had written the old man a brief letter in the meager and fickle glow of the guardroom candle, after first inspecting the sentries, recording the time of each relief, and, in the column labeled UNUSUAL INCIDENTS, penning a clear and assertive None that virtually denied even the remotest possibility of unusual incidents. These letters to his father, on yellowish and pulpy octavo, resembled one another like furlough orders and regulation forms. After the salutation Dear Father at the left, four fingers from the top and two from the side, they began with the terse news of the writer’s good health, continued with his hope for the recipient’s good health, and closed with an indentation for the perpetual formula drawn at the bottom right at a diagonal interval from the salutation: Very humbly yours, your loyal and grateful son, Lieutenant Joseph Trotta.

But now, especially since his new rank exempted him from the old rotation, how should he refashion the official epistolary form, which was designed for a whole military lifetime, and how should he intersperse the standardized sentences with unusual statements about conditions that had become unusual and that he himself had barely grasped? On that silent evening when, for the first time since his recovery, Captain Trotta, in order to perform the correspondence duty, sat down at the table, which was lavishly carved up and notched over by the playful knives of bored men, he realized he would never get beyond the salutation Dear Father. Leaning the barren pen against the inkwell, he twisted off the tip of the wick on the guttering candle as if hoping for a happy inspiration and an appropriate phrase from its soothing light, and he gently rambled off into memories of childhood, village, mother, and military school. He gazed at the gigantic shadows cast by small objects upon the bare blue lime-washed walls, at the slightly curved, shimmering outline of the saber on the hook by the door, and, tucked into the saber guard, at the dark neckband. He listened to the tireless rain outside and its drumming chant on the tin-plated windowsill. And he finally stood up, having resolved to visit his father the week after the prescribed thank-you audience with the Kaiser, for which he would be detailed during the next few days.

One week later, right after an audience of barely ten minutes, not more than ten minutes of imperial favor and those ten or twelve questions read from documents and at which, standing at attention, one had to fire a “Yes, Your Majesty!” like a gentle but definite gunshot, he took a fiacre to see his father in Laxenburg. He found the old man in shirtsleeves, sitting in the kitchen of his official apartment over a spacious cup of steaming, fragrant coffee on the naked, shiny, planed table, on which lay a dark-blue handkerchief trimmed in red. At the table’s edge, the knotty russet cherrywood cane hung on its crook, swaying gently. A wrinkled leather pouch thickly swollen with fibrous shag lay half open next to a long pipe of white clay, now a brownish-yellow color. It matched the hue of the father’s tremendous white moustache. Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje stood amid this shabby governmental homeyness like a military god, wearing a gleaming officer’s scarf, a lacquered helmet emanating virtually its own black sunshine, smooth fiery waxed riding boots with glittering spurs, two rows of lustrous, almost blazing buttons on his coat, and the blessing of the ethereal power of the Order of Maria Theresa. There the son stood in front of the father, who rose slowly as if the slowness of his greeting were to make up for the boy’s splendor. Captain Trotta kissed his father’s hand, lowered his head, and received a kiss on the brow and a kiss on the cheek.

“Sit down!” said the old man. The captain unbuckled parts of his splendor.