The Emperor's Tomb

By Joseph Roth

Translated from German, a novel portraying the post-WW1 decline of Viennese society from a “twentieth-century master of the quixotic and melancholy.” (Publishers Weekly)
 
The Emperor’s Tomb – the last novel Joseph Roth wrote – is a haunting elegy to the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Running from 1913 to 1938, from the eve of one world war to the eve of the next, the novel continues the saga of the von Trotta family from The Radetzky March.  Roth tells of one man’s foppish, sleepwalking, spoiled youth, and his struggle to come to terms with the uncongenial society of post-First World War Vienna, financial ruin, and the first intimations of Nazi barbarities.  A powerful and moving look at a decaying society in the devastating aftermath of the Great War.
 
“Sharply observed.” —The Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781590208465

Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) nació en Brody, un pueblo situado hoy en Ucrania, que por entonces pertenecía a la Galitzia Oriental, provincia del viejo Imperio austrohúngaro. El escritor, hijo de una mujer judía cuyo marido desapareció antes de que él naciera, vio desmoronarse la milenaria corona de los Habsburgo y cantó el dolor por «la patria perdida» en narraciones como Fuga sin fin, La cripta de los Capuchinos o las magníficas novelas Job y La Marcha Radetzky. En El busto del emperador describió el desarraigo de quienes vieron desmembrarse aquella Europa cosmopolita bajo el odio de la guerra.  En su lápida quedaron reflejadas su procedencia y profesión: «Escritor austriaco muerto  en París».

Book preview

[I]

OUR NAME IS Trotta. Our people came from Sipolje, in Slovenia. I say ‘people’, because we are not a family. Sipolje no longer exists, nor has it existed for a long time past. Merged with a number of neighbouring parishes, it has become quite a sizeable market town. That, as we know, is the way of the world these days. People cannot live alone, therefore they form themselves into futile groups, and their villages cannot live alone, either. Senseless patterns are thus evolved which drive the peasantry into the towns, and the villages into wishing to become towns themselves.

I knew Sipolje while I was still a boy. My father had taken me there, one seventeenth of August, on the eve of Emperor Franz Joseph the First’s birthday, which used to be celebrated even in the tiniest hamlets of the old Monarchy. In present-day Austria and in the former Crown Lands there can be very few people left in whom our name will evoke a memory.

In the forgotten annals of the old Austro-Hungarian Army, however, our name is recorded and I admit that I am proud of it, precisely because those annals are forgotten. I am not a man of my time. In fact I find it hard not to declare myself its enemy. Not, as I often remark, that I fail to understand it. My comment is merely a pious one. Because I am easy-going I prefer not to be aggressive or hostile and therefore I say that I do not understand those matters which I ought to say that I hate or despise. I have sharp ears but pretend to be hard of hearing, finding as I do that it is more elegant to feign this handicap than to admit that I have heard some vulgar sound.

My grandfather’s brother was that plain lieutenant of infantry who saved the Emperor Franz Joseph’s life at the battle of Solferino. The lieutenant was ennobled. For a long time he was known in the army, as in the schoolbooks of the old Monarchy, as the Hero of Solferino until, in accordance with his own wish, a veil of forgetfulness sank over him. He took his leave and lies buried in Hietzing. On his tombstone stand the proud and tranquil words: ‘Here rests the Hero of Solferino’.

The Emperor’s grace was extended to his son, who became a district commander; and even to the grandson who fell as a Jäger lieutenant in the autumn of 1914 in the action at Krasne-Busk. I never saw him nor, indeed, did I ever see any of the titled branch of our people. The titled Trottas were pious and devoted servants to Franz Joseph. My father, however, was a rebel.

My father was a rebel and a patriot, both—a species which only existed under the old Dual Monarchy. He wanted to reform the Empire and save the Habsburgs. He understood too clearly the significance of the Austrian Monarchy. He therefore came under suspicion and had to flee the country. In his early years he went to America. He was by profession a chemist. People of his sort were needed in the tremendous expansion of the chemical industry in New York and Chicago. As long as he was poor he only felt homesick for his countryside, but by the time he was at last rich he began to feel homesick for Austria. He came back and settled in Vienna. He had money, and the Austrian police loved people who had money. Not only was my father not molested, but he even started to found a new Slovenian party, and bought two newspapers in Agram.

He made influential friends in circles close to the heir to the throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. My father dreamed of a Slav monarchy under the rule of the Habsburgs. He dreamed of a joint monarchy of Austrians, Hungarians and Slavs. And I, as his son, may here be allowed to state my belief that, had my father lived longer, he could perhaps have changed the course of history. But he died, some eighteen months before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. I am his only son. In his will he had made me executor of his ideas. Not for nothing had he christened me Franz Ferdinand. But in those days I was young and foolish: not to say thoughtless. In any case I was frivolous and lived my life, as the saying went, day by day. No! That is wrong: I lived it night by night; by day I slept.

[II]

ONE MORNING, HOWEVER—it was in April 1913—while I was still fast asleep, having reached home only two hours before, a cousin of mine was announced, a Herr Trotta.

In my nightshirt and slippers I went down to the anteroom. The windows were wide open. The early rising blackbirds in the garden were busily fluting away, and the morning sun flooded the room with happiness. Our maid, whom I had never previously observed at that hour, looked strange to me in her blue apron, for I was aware of her only as a young creature made of blonde hair, in black and white, rather like a flag. I saw her for the first time in a dark blue uniform, of the sort that mechanics and gasmen used to affect, with a reddish-purple feather duster in her hand. The mere sight of her would have been enough to give me quite a fresh and unfamiliar view of life. For the first time for several years I looked at morning in my own house and discovered that it was beautiful. I liked the maid. I liked the open windows. I liked the sun. I liked the blackbirds’ song, which was as golden as the morning sun. Even the girl in blue was golden like the sun. I was so bemused by all this gold that at first I failed to notice the guest who awaited me. It took me a few seconds—or were they minutes?—to become aware of him. There he sat, lean, dark and silent, upon the only chair in the anteroom, and made no movement as I came in. And although his hair and his moustache were so dark and his skin so brown, he seemed to be the center of that room, gilded by the morning light, to be himself a part of the sun, a part of some distant and southern sun, moreover. At first sight he reminded me of my late father. He, too, had been lean and dark, brown and bony, a true child of the sun, not like us who are fair and are only the sun’s stepchildren. I speak Slovene, for my father taught it me. I greeted my cousin Trotta in Slovene, which did not seem to surprise him. He took it for granted. He remained seated, but held out his hand and smiled. Beneath the blue-black moustache gleamed big strong teeth. He called me at once by the familiar ‘thou’, and I felt that this was no cousin, but a brother. He had obtained my address from the notary. ‘Your father’, he began, ‘has willed me two thousand gulden and I have come to fetch them. I have called on you to thank you, since I go home tomorrow. I still have a sister to marry off and with a dowry of five hundred gulden she will catch the wealthiest peasant in Sipolje.’

‘What about the rest?’ I asked.

‘That I shall hold on to,’ he said cheerfully. He smiled, and I had the feeling that the sun shone more warmly than ever into our anteroom.

‘What do you plan to do with the money?’ I asked.

‘I shall expand my business,’ he replied and, as if it were now the moment to introduce himself, he rose self-confidently from his chair and, with touching good humour, said, ‘My name is Joseph Branco.’ It then occurred to me for the first time that I was standing before my guest in my nightshirt and slippers. I asked him to wait and went to my room to dress.

[III]

I SUPPOSE IT was about seven in the morning as we came into the Café Magerl. The first bakers’ lads were arriving, white as snow and smelling of crisp kaiser rolls, poppyseed loaves and salty breadsticks.The new, fresh-roasted coffee, spicy and virginal, smelt like morning all over again. My cousin Joseph Branco sat beside me, dark and meridional, lively, healthy, wide awake. I was ashamed of my pallid fairness and the dissipated weariness which came from too late a night. I was also mildly embarrassed. What should I say to him? He increased my embarrassment by saying, ‘I never drink coffee in the morning. I should like some soup.’ Of course! In Sipolje the peasants ate potato soup in the morning.

So I ordered soup. It took rather a long time, and in the meantime I felt rather guilty as I dipped my croissant in my coffee.The soup came eventually, a steaming bowlful of it. My cousin Joseph Branco seemed to pay no attention to the spoon. He lifted the steaming bowl to his lips with brown, hairy hands. While he gulped down his soup he seemed to have forgotten me, too. Concentrating completely on the bowl, which he held aloft with small, powerful fingers, he looked like a man whose appetite was indeed a noble impulse and who only disregarded his spoon because it seemed more aristocratic to swallow straight from the bowl. Indeed, as I watched him gulping the soup it seemed to me almost bewildering that mankind had invented anything as ridiculous as a spoon. My cousin put down his bowl and I saw that it was quite smooth and white and empty, as though it had just been washed and polished.

‘This afternoon’, he said, ‘I shall collect the money.’

I asked him what kind of business he intended to expand.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘a very small affair, but one which keeps a man going nicely through the winter.’

And so I learnt that my cousin Joseph Branco farmed in spring, summer and autumn, working on his land, and that in winter he was a chestnut roaster. He had a sheepskin coat, a donkey, a small waggon, an oven and five sacks full of chestnuts. With all this he would set off early in November through various Crown Lands of the Monarchy. If, however, some place particularly attracted him he would spend the whole winter there, until the storks came. He would then tie the empty sacks round the donkey and take himself off to the nearest railway station. He hired out the donkey, went home, and became a peasant again.

I asked him how it was possible to expand such a small business, and he replied that all kinds of possibilities existed. One could, for instance, sell baked apples and baked potatoes as well as chestnuts. Also, the donkey had grown old over the years and he might buy a new one. He had already saved two hundred crowns.

He was wearing a brilliant satin jacket, a flowered plush waistcoat with bright glass buttons and, round his neck, a beautifully plaited heavy gold watchchain. My father had brought me up to love the Slavs of our Empire, as a result of which I tended to take any folkloric material as symbolic, so I promptly fell in love with this chain. I wanted to possess it. I asked my cousin how much it was worth.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘I had it from my father and he had it from his father, and one doesn’t sell that kind of thing. But as you are my cousin I will gladly sell it to you.’

‘For how much, then?’ I asked.

I had assumed, remembering my father’s teaching, that a Slovenian peasant would be much too proud to trouble his head about money or value. Cousin Joseph Branco thought for a long time and said ‘Twenty-three crowns’. How he reached this exact sum I dared not ask. I gave him twenty-five. He counted the money carefully, made no attempt to give me back two crowns, pulled out a big blue checked handkerchief and put the money away in it. Only then, having tied a double knot in the handkerchief, did he take off the chain, at the same time extracting his watch from his waistcoat pocket and laying both down on the table. It was an old-fashioned heavy silver watch with a little key to wind it up. My cousin hesitated before taking it off the chain, looked at it tenderly, almost sorrowfully, and finally said: ‘You are after all my cousin! If you’ll give me three crowns more I’ll sell you the watch as well.’ I gave him a five-crown piece. Again he gave me no change. He took out his handkerchief once more, slowly undid the double knot, added the new coin to the others, put everything into his trouser pocket, and looked me frankly in the eye.

‘I admire your waistcoat too,’ I added after a few seconds, ‘and I should like to buy that as well.’

‘Since you are my cousin,’ he replied, ‘I will also sell you the waistcoat.’ And without a moment’s hesitation he took off his jacket, undid his waistcoat and handed it across the table to me. ‘It is fine material,’ said Joseph Branco, ‘and the buttons are of the best, and since it is for you it will only cost two and a half crowns.’ I paid him out three crowns and in his eyes I saw, unmistakably, his disappointment that I had not paid him five yet again. He seemed put out and stopped smiling, but in the end he tucked away his money as carefully as all the rest.

I was now, in my opinion, the owner of the most important things which distinguish the true Slovene: an old watchchain, an old turnip of a watch, heavy as lead, with its own little key, and a coloured waistcoat. I did not lose a second, but put everything on at once, paid the bill and called for a cab. I accompanied my cousin to the hotel where he put up, the