Beware of Pity

The whole affair be Gan with a piece of ineptitude, of entirely accidental foolishness, a faux pas, as the French would say. Next came my attempt to make up for my stupid-ity. But if you try to repair a little cogwheel in clockwork too quickly, you can easily ruin the whole mechanism. Even today, years later, I don’t know exactly where plain clumsiness ended and my own guilt began. Presumably I never shall.

I was twenty-five years old at the time, a lieutenant serving in a regiment of lancers. I can’t say that I ever felt any particular enthusiasm for the career of an army officer, or a special voca-tion for it. But when an old Austrian family with a tradition of service to the state has two girls and four boys, all with hearty appetites, sitting around a sparsely laid table, no one stops for long to consider the young people’s own inclinations. They are put through the mill of training for some profession early, to keep them from being a burden on the household. My brother Ulrich, who had ruined his eyesight with too much studying even at elementary school, was sent to a seminar for the priest-hood, while I, being physically strong and sturdy, entered the military academy. From such chance beginnings the course of your life moves automatically on, and you don’t even have to oil the wheels. The state takes care of everything. Within a few years, working to a preordained pattern, it makes a pale adolescent boy into an ensign with a downy beard on his chin, and hands him over to the army ready for use. I passed out from the academy on the Emperor’s birthday, when I was not quite eighteen years old, and soon after that I had my first star on my collar. I had reached the first stage of a military career, and now the cycle of promotion could move automatically on at suitable intervals until I reached retirement age and had gout. I was to serve in the cavalry, unfortunately an expensive section of the army, not by any wish of my own but because of a whim on the part of my aunt Daisy, my father’s elder brother’s second wife. They had married when he moved from the Ministry of Finance to a more profitable post as managing director of a bank. Aunt Daisy, who was both rich and a snob, could not bear to think that anyone who happened to be called Hofmiller should bring the family name into disrepute by serving in the infantry, and as she could afford to indulge her whim by making me an allowance of a hundred crowns a month, I had to express my humble gratitude to her at every opportunity. No one, least of all I myself, had ever stopped to wonder whether I would enjoy life in a cavalry regiment, or indeed any kind of military service. But once in the saddle I felt at ease, and I didn’t think much further ahead than my horse’s neck.

In that November of 1913, some kind of decree must have passed from office to office, because all of a sudden my squadron had been transferred from Jaroslav to another small garrison on the Hungarian border. It makes no difference whether I give the little town its real name or not, for two uniform but-tons on the same coat can’t be more like each other than one provincial Austrian garrison town is to another. You find the same ubiquitous features in both: a barracks, a riding school, a parade ground, an officers’ mess, and the town will have three hotels, two cafés, a cake shop, a bar, a run-down music hall with faded soubrettes whose professional sideline consists of dividing their affections between the regular officers and volunteers who have joined up for a year. Army service means the same sleepy, empty monotony everywhere, divided up hour by hour according to the old iron rules, and even an officer’s leisure time offers little more variety. You see the same faces and conduct the same conversations in the officers’ mess, you play the same card games and the same games of billiards in the café. Sometimes you are quite surprised that it has at least pleased the Almighty to set the six to eight hundred rooftops of these small towns under different skies and in different landscapes.

But my new garrison did have one advantage over my ear-lier posting in Galicia—a railway station where express trains stopped. Go one way and it was quite close to Vienna, go the other and it was not too far from Budapest. A man who had money—and everyone who served in the cavalry was rich, even and indeed not least the volunteers, some of them members of the great aristocracy, others manufacturers’ sons—a man who had money could, with careful planning, go to Vienna on the five o’clock train and return on the night train, getting in at two-thirty next morning. That gave him time for a visit to the theatre and a stroll around the Ringstrasse, courting the ladies and sometimes going in search of a little adventure. Some of the most envied officers even kept a permanent apartment for a mistress in Vienna, or a pied-à-terre. But such refreshing diver-sions were more than I could afford on my monthly allowance. My only entertainment was going to the café or the cake shop, and since cards were usually played for stakes too high for me, I resorted to those establishments to play billiards—or chess, which was even cheaper.

So one afternoon—it must have been in the middle of May 1914—I was sitting in the cake shop with one of my occasional partners, the pharmacist who kept his shop at the sign of the Golden Eagle, and who was also deputy mayor of our little gar-rison town. We had long ago finished playing our usual three games, and were just talking idly about this or that—what was there in this tedious place to make you want to get up in the morning?—but the conversation was drowsy, and as slow as the smoke from a cigarette burning down.

At this point the door suddenly opens, and a pretty girl in a full-skirted dress is swept in on a gust of fresh air, a girl with brown, almond-shaped eyes and a dark complexion. She is dressed with real elegance, not at all in the provincial style. Above all she is a new face in the monotony of this godforsaken town. Sad to say, the elegantly dressed young lady does not spare us a glance as we respectfully admire her, but walks briskly and vivaciously with a firm, athletic gait past the nine little marble tables in the cake shop and up to the sales counter, to order cakes, tarts and liqueurs by the dozen. I immediately notice how respectfully the master confectioner bows to her—I’ve never seen the back seam of his swallow-tailed coat stretched so taut. Even his wife, that opulent if heavily built provincial Venus, who in the usual way negligently allows the officers to court her (all manner of little things often go unpaid for until the end of the month), rises from her seat at the cash desk and almost dissolves in obsequious civilities. While the master confectioner notes down the order in the customers’ book, the pretty girl carelessly nibbles a couple of chocolates and makes a little conversation with Frau Grossmaier. However, she has no time to spare for us, and we may perhaps be craning our necks with unbecoming alacrity. Of course the young lady does not burden her own pretty hands with a single package; everything, as Frau Grossmaier assures her, will be delivered, she can rely on that. Nor does she think for a moment of paying cash at the till, as we mere mortals must. We all know at once that this is a very superior and distinguished customer.

Now, as she turns to go after leaving her order, Herr Grossmaier hastily leaps forward to open the door for her. My friend the pharmacist also rises from his chair to offer his respectful greet-ings as she floats past. She thanks him with gracious friendli-ness—heavens, what velvety brown eyes, the colour of a roe deer—and I can hardly wait until she has left the shop, amidst many fulsome compliments, to ask my chess partner with great interest about this girl, a pike in a pond full of fat carp.

“Oh, don’t you know her? Why, she is the niece of … ”—well, I will call him Herr von Kekesfalva, although that was not really the name—“she is the niece of Herr von Kekesfalva—surely you know the Kekesfalvas?”

Kekesfalva—he throws out the name as if it were a thousand-crown note, and looks at me as if expecting a respectful “Ah yes! Of course!” as the right and proper echo of his information. But I, a young lieutenant transferred to my new garrison only a few months ago, and unsuspecting as I am, know nothing about that mysterious luminary, and ask politely for further enlightenment, which the pharmacist gives with all the satisfac-tion of provincial pride, and it goes without saying does so at far greater length and with more loquacity than I do in recording his information here.

Kekesfalva, he explains to me, is the richest man in the whole district. Absolutely everything belongs to him, not just Kekesfalva Castle—“You must know the castle, it can be seen from the parade ground, it’s over to the left of the road, the yellow castle with the low tower and the large old park.” Kekesfalva also owns the big sugar factory on the road to R, the sawmill in Bruck and the stud farm in M. They are all his property, as well as six or seven apartment blocks in Vienna and Budapest. “You might not think that we had such wealthy folk here, but he lives the life of a real magnate. In winter, he goes to his little Viennese palace in Jacquingasse, in summer he visits spa resorts, he stays at home here only for a few months in spring, but heavens above, what a household he keeps! Visiting quar-tets from Vienna, champagne and French wines, the best of everything!” And if it would interest me, says the pharmacist, he will be happy to take me to the castle, for—here he makes a grand gesture of self-satisfaction—he is on friendly terms with Herr von Kekesfalva, has often done business with him in the past, and knows that he is always glad to welcome army officers to his house. My chess partner has only to say the word, and I’ll be invited.

Well, why not? Here I am, stifling in the dreary backwaters of a provincial garrison town. I already know every one of the women who go walking on the promenade in the evenings by sight, I know their summer hats and winter hats, their Sunday best and their everyday dresses, always the same. And from look-ing and then looking away again, I know these ladies’ dogs and their maidservants and their children. I know all the culinary skills of the stout Bohemian woman who is cook in the officers’ mess, and by now a glance at the menu in the restaurant, which like the meals in the mess is always the same, quite takes away my appetite. I know every name, every shop sign, every poster in every street by heart, I know which business has premises in which building, and which shop will have what on display in its window. I know almost as well as Eugen the head waiter the time at which the district judge will come into the café, I know he will sit down at the corner by the window on the left, to order a Viennese melange, while the local notary will arrive exactly ten minutes later, at four-forty, and will drink lemon tea for the sake of his weak stomach—what a daring change from coffee!—while telling the same jokes as he smokes the same Virginia cigarette. Yes, I know all the faces, all the uniforms, all the horses and all the drivers, all the beggars in the entire neighbourhood, and I know myself better than I like! So why not get off this treadmill for once? And then there’s that pretty girl with her warm, brown eyes. So I tell my acquaintance, pretending to be indifferent (I don’t want to seem too keen in front of that conceited pill-roller) that yes, it would be a pleasure to meet the Kekesfalva family.