Read The Radetzky March for Free Online Page B

he lay on a bier in his living room, sporting a tremendous bristly moustache, a dark-blue uniform, and three twinkling medals on his chest. An Ursuline nun was praying in the corner by the single curtained window. The veterans stood at attention when Trotta came in. He wore his major’s uniform with the Order of Maria Theresa. He knelt down; his son likewise fell to his knees at the dead man’s feet, the tremendous soles of those boots in front of the young face. For the first time in his life, Baron Trotta felt a thin, sharp jab in the region of his heart. His tiny eyes remained dry. He murmured one, two, three Lord’s Prayers out of pious embarrassment, stood up, leaned over the dead man, kissed the tremendous moustache, waved at the veterans, and said to his son, “Come on!
    “Did you see him?” he asked outside.
    “Yes,” said the boy.
    “He was only a constable sergeant,” said the father. “I saved the Kaiser’s life at the Battle of Solferino—and then we got the barony.”
    The boy said nothing.
    The pensioner was buried in the small cemetery at Laxenburg, military section. Six dark-blue veterans carried the coffin from the chapel to the grave. Major Trotta, in shako andfull dress, kept his hand on his son’s shoulder the whole time. The boy sobbed. The sad music of the military band, the priests’ doleful and monotonous singsong, audible whenever the music paused, the gently drifting incense—it all made the boy choke with incomprehensible pain. And the rifle shots discharged over the grave by a demi–platoon shook him with their long–echoing relentlessness. They fired martial salutes for the dead man’s soul, which went straight to heaven, vanishing from this earth forever and always.
    Father and son headed back. The baron remained silent the entire trip. It was only when they got off the train and climbed into the carriage awaiting them behind the station garden that the major said, “Don’t forget your grandfather!”
    The baron resumed his daily routine, and the years rolled away like mute, peaceful, uniform wheels. The sergeant was not the last corpse that the baron had to inter. First he buried his father-in-law, a few years later his wife, who had died a quick, discreet death without saying goodbye after a severe case of pneumonia. He sent his son to boarding school in Vienna, making sure the boy could never become a regular soldier. He remained alone on the estate, in the white, spacious house through which the breath of the deceased still passed, and he spoke only with the gamekeeper, the steward, the groom, and the coachman. His rage exploded in him less and less. But the servants constantly felt his peasant fist, and his seething hush lay like a hard yoke on their necks. Dreadful silence wafted from him as before a storm.
    Twice a month he received obedient letters from his child. Once a month he replied in two brief sentences, on small, thrifty scraps torn from the respectful margins of the letters he had gotten. Once a year, on the eighteenth of August, the Kaiser’s birthday, he donned his uniform and drove to the nearest garrison town. Twice a year his son visited him, during Christmas break and summer vacation. On every Christmas Eve the boy was handed three hard silver guldens, for which he had to sign a receipt and which he could never take along. That same evening, the guldens landed in a cashbox inside the old man’s chest. Next to the guldens lay the report cards. Theytestified to the son’s thorough diligence and his middling but always adequate capacities. Never was the son given a toy, never an allowance, never a book, aside from the required schoolbooks. He did not seem deprived. His mind was neat, sober, and honest. His meager imagination provided him with no other wish than to get through the school years as fast as possible.
    He was eighteen years old when his father said to him on Christmas Eve, “This year you’ll no longer get your three guldens. You may take