The Radetzky March Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 ortwelve 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. “Congratulations!” said the father, his voice normal, in the hard German of army Slavs. The consonants boomed like thunderstorms and the final syllables were loaded with small weights. Just five years ago he had still been speaking Slovenian to his son, although the boy understood only a few words and never produced a single one himself. But today it might strike the old man as an audacious intimacy to hear his mother tongue used by his son, who had been removed so far by the grace of Fate and Emperor, while the captain focused on the father’s lips in order to greet the first Slovenian sound as a familiar remoteness and lost homeyness. “Congratulations, congratulations!” the sergeant thunderously repeated. “In my day it never went this fast. In my day Radetzky gave us hell!”
    It’s really over! thought Captain Trotta. His father was separated from him by a heavy mountain of military ranks.
    “Do you still have rakia, sir?” he asked, addressing him formally while trying to confirm the last remnant of family togetherness. They drank, clinked glasses, drank again; the father moaned after every gulp, floundered in endless coughing, turned purple, spat, gradually calmed down, then launched into old chestnuts about his own military time, with the unmistakable goal of deflating his son’s merits and career. Finally, the captain stood up, kissed the paternal hand, received the paternal kiss on brow and cheek, buckled on his saber, donned his shako, and left—secure in the knowledge that this was the last