Beware of Pity (47 page)

I go up to him and stand to attention. He examines me keenly.

“I suppose it’s the latest fashion for young gentlemen to wear their coats half-unbuttoned, is it? You think you can come in
after midnight like a sow dragging her teats along the ground? Next thing we know you’ll be going about with your flies undone too. I won’t have this sort of sloppiness. Even after midnight I expect my officers to be neatly dressed, understand?”

I obediently click my heels together. “Yes, sir.”

He turns away with a contemptuous expression on his face, and without another word he marches over to the stairs. His broad back is a heavy outline seen against the moonlight. Suddenly I am infuriated to think that the last words I hear in my life are to be his reproof. To my own surprise, I do something entirely instinctive, as if my body were acting of its own accord—with a few quick steps I hurry after him. I know that what I am doing is pointless—why spend my last hour on earth trying to explain or justify myself to a bone-headed old boy like the Colonel? But I suppose all would-be suicides are illogical enough to succumb to vanity only ten minutes before they plan to lie with their faces distorted in death. What they want is to set the record straight before they leave this life, although they will never know any more about it. A suicide will shave himself (for whose benefit?) and put on clean underclothes (again, for whose benefit?) before firing a bullet into his brain. I remember once hearing of a woman who made up her face, went to the hairdresser to have her hair waved, and applied the most expensive Coty perfume before throwing herself off the top of a four-storey building. Only this vanity, for which there is no logical explanation, got my muscles moving, and now, as I hastily followed the Colonel, I did so, I must emphasise, not in the fear of death or out of sudden cowardice, but because of an absurd instinct to wipe the slate clean rather than disappear into the void with my reputation smirched, leaving confusion behind.

The Colonel must have heard my footsteps, because he turned abruptly, and his small piercing eyes stared at me in surprise from under his bushy brows. Obviously the sheer impropriety of a junior officer’s venturing to follow him without permission was more than he could grasp. I stopped two steps away from him, raised my hand to my cap in a salute and said, calmly returning his menacing glare—my voice must have been as blank as the moonlight was pale—“With respect, sir, may I have a few words with you?”

Those bushy brows shot up in surprise. “What, now? At
one-thirty
in the morning?”

His expression was forbidding. He was probably about to make some angry retort or tell me to report to him in the morning. But there must have been something in my face that troubled him. For a moment or so those hard, keen eyes scrutinised me, and then he barked, “Here’s a fine state of affairs! Still, just as you like. Come up to my room, and get a move on!”

Meek as a shadow, I followed the Colonel in the dim lamplight along passages and up stairways, places now sombre and empty, but redolent of the body odour of many men. Colonel Svetozar Bubencic was one hundred per cent a soldier of the old school, and the most feared among all our superior officers. Short-legged and bull-necked, he had a low forehead, and under those bushy brows a pair of sharp, deep-set eyes that had seldom been known to look at anyone with favour. His sturdy body and heavy, massive stature unmistakably betrayed his rustic origins (he came from the Banat area of the Balkans), but with that low, bovine forehead and iron skull he had slowly and
doggedly made his way up through the army to reach the rank of colonel. It was true that his lack of any cultural education, his rough tongue, his profanity and his unpolished manners had kept the Ministry posting him to a series of provincial garrisons for years, and it was tacitly agreed in high places that he would never rise to become a general. Unpolished and plain-spoken as he was, however, there was no one to match him in the barracks or on the parade ground. He knew every last paragraph of the army rules as well as any puritan Scot knows his Bible, and never regarded them as elastic precepts that could be adjusted for the sake of harmony; he saw them almost as religious commandments to be accepted without question by every soldier. He devoted himself to his military service as the faithful devote themselves to God, he did not indulge in amorous adventures, he neither smoked nor gambled, he had hardly ever been inside a theatre or a concert hall in his life, and like his supreme commander Emperor Franz Joseph he had never read anything but the army rules and
Danzer’s Army Gazette.
Nothing on earth mattered to him outside the Imperial and Royal Austrian Army, and within the army the cavalry, within the cavalry only the lancers, and among the lancers only one regiment, his own. The whole point of his life was to ensure that everything in this regiment of his functioned more smoothly than in any other.

A man of limited vision is hard to tolerate when he has power at his disposal, and hardest of all to tolerate in the army. Since military service consists of a thousand meticulous precepts, most of them out of date and fossilised, rules that only a committed old soldier knows by heart and only a fool expects to be taken literally, no one in the barracks ever felt safe from an officer so fanatical in observing those sacred
regulations. This stickler for exactitude was a sturdy figure on horseback, sat enthroned at table looking around with eyes sharp as needles, and terrorised the staff of the army canteens and offices. A cold wind of anxiety always preceded his advent, and when the regiment was drawn up for inspection and Bubencic slowly rode past on his thick-set chestnut gelding, his head slightly lowered like a bull about to charge, all movement in the ranks stopped dead, as if enemy artillery had come up and the guns were already unlimbering and taking aim. We all knew that the first inevitable salvo might be fired at any moment and could not be diverted, and no one could tell in advance if he might not be its target. Even the horses stood rooted to the spot and never twitched an ear, no one’s spurs clinked, we hardly dared to breathe. Then the tyrant, visibly relishing the terror that he spread among us, rode along the line at his leisure, subjecting man after man to close inspection. Nothing escaped his accurate and beady eye. His iron gaze saw everything, a cap worn very slightly too low, a poorly polished button, every speck of rust on a sword, any negligence in grooming a horse, and as soon as he spotted the slightest contravention of the rules a storm of abuse broke. His Adam’s apple bulged apoplectically like a tumour suddenly appearing beneath his tight uniform collar, his forehead beneath his cropped hair turned red, thick veins stood out on his temples. And then he let rip in his harsh voice, pouring buckets of filthy profanity down on the unwitting offender’s head. Sometimes the vulgarity of his language was so embarrassing that we officers looked at the ground, feeling ashamed of him in front of the men.

The men themselves feared him like the Devil incarnate. He would have them on fatigues or in the cells for the least little
thing, and sometimes he even drove his heavy fist into a man’s face in his fury. We called the Colonel the Bullfrog because of the way his fat neck swelled almost to bursting point in anger. Once, when he was letting fly in a box in the stables, I myself saw a Ruthenian in the neighbouring box make the sign of the cross in the Russian way and utter a fervent prayer. Bubencic drove the poor fellows to the point of exhaustion, hitting out at them, making them repeat their rifle drill until their arms were nearly breaking, and forcing them to ride the most recalcitrant horses until the blood ran down their thighs. Oddly enough, however, his honest rustic victims preferred this tyrant, in their dull and intimidated way, to all the officers who took a less harsh line with the men, but preserved their personal distance. It was as if some kind of instinct in them said that this severity from a stubborn and bigoted man was decreed by divine providence, and it cheered the poor devils that we officers were no more immune than they were to his outbursts, for you immediately find it easier to take the worst punishment if you know that it may hit your neighbour just as hard. In some mysterious way, equal treatment compensates for violence. The men always liked telling the story of young Prince W, who was related to the imperial family, no less, and therefore thought that he could do as he liked. But Bubencic had him in the cells for two weeks like any huckster’s son, and wouldn’t relent, however many dignitaries phoned from Vienna to plead for leniency for Prince W. The noble delinquent was not spared a day of his detention—an act of defiance, incidentally, that cost Bubencic any further promotion.

Yet more remarkable was the fact that even we officers could not help feeling a certain liking for him. We too were impressed by the dogged honesty of his implacable nature, and above all
by his unconditional solidarity with us as his comrades. Just as he would not have a speck of dust on a lancer’s tunic or a splash of dirt on the saddle of the last man to pass by, he would not put up with injustice. He felt that any scandal in the regiment was a slur on his own honour. We were his protégés, and we knew very well that if anyone was in trouble his best course was to go straight to the Colonel, who would begin by bawling him out but then set to work to get him out of whatever mess he was in. When someone was waiting for promotion to come through, or if one of us was in financial difficulty and needed a loan from military funds to tide him over, the Colonel would go straight to the Ministry and put his mind to ensuring that everything went the way he wanted. However much he infuriated and tormented us, every one of us felt, in some remote corner of his heart, that in his own crude and bigoted way this rustic from the Banat showed more loyalty and honesty than any of the aristocratic officers in defending the spirit and tradition of the army, its invisible aura, which meant more to us impecunious junior officers than our pay.

Such was Colonel Svetozar Bubencic, chief slave-driver of our regiment, in whose wake I was now climbing the stairs, and later he was to call himself to account in the same upright and single-minded way as when he took us to task, with the same keen sense of honour. After General Potiorek’s disastrous defeat in the Serbian campaign, when just forty-nine lancers out of a whole regiment that had set out in good order got safely back over the River Save, he was the last man left on the enemy bank, and seeing the panic-stricken rout of the retreat, which he considered as a terrible blot on the army’s reputation, he did what very few generals and senior officers in the Great War did after a defeat—he took his heavy service revolver and put
a bullet through his own head. He did not want to witness the downfall of Austria, which the terrible images of our regiment in flight seemed to portend to his dull mind.

The Colonel unlocked his door. We entered his room, which was plain and spartan, more like a student’s lodgings. It contained an iron camp bed—he was not going to sleep in more comfort than Emperor Franz Joseph did in the Hofburg—two colour prints, the Emperor on the right, the Empress on the left, four or five cheaply framed souvenir photographs of the regiment drawn up for inspection, or regimental dinners, a couple of crossed swords and two Turkish pistols—that was all. No comfortable easy chair, no books, just four cane chairs round a hard, empty table.

Bubencic vigorously stroked his moustache once, twice, three times. We all knew that abrupt movement of his; it was the visible sign of dangerous impatience. Finally he growled briefly, without offering me a chair, “Well, make yourself comfortable. Now, no havering, out with it! Money problems, eh? Or trouble with women?”

It was difficult for me to speak standing up, and in addition I felt exposed to his impatient glance in the bright light. I just indicated briefly that no, it was not money problems.

“Trouble over a woman, then! Again! I don’t know why you fellows can’t let it alone! As if there weren’t enough women to be had easily enough. Go on, then, and no beating about the bush—what’s the nub of your problem?”

I said, as briefly as I could, that I had got engaged to Herr von Kekesfalva’s daughter today, and then three hours later I had
simply denied the fact. But I didn’t want him to think, I said, that I was trying to excuse my own dishonourable conduct—far from it, I had come just to tell him as my commanding officer in private that, as an officer, I was fully aware of the conclusions I had to draw from my behaviour. I knew my duty, and I would do it.

Bubencic stared at me rather blankly.

“What’s all this nonsense? Dishonourable conduct, drawing conclusions? Drawing conclusions from what, and why? This doesn’t amount to much! So you got engaged to Kekesfalva’s daughter? I saw her once—odd tastes you have, she’s a sickly, crippled girl. And then you changed your mind? Nothing much to that either, plenty of men have changed their minds and no one thinks the worse of them for it. Or have you maybe? …” He came closer to me. “Been up to a little hanky-panky with her, have you, and now there’s a little stranger on the way? That wouldn’t look so good, I must say.”

I was ashamed of myself, and getting annoyed as well. The casual, almost deliberately frivolous way in which he misunderstood it all was getting me down. I clicked my heels.

“With respect, sir, I would like to say that I was telling a downright lie when I said no, I was not engaged, in front of seven officers of this regiment at our regular table in the café. I lied to my comrades out of cowardice and embarrassment. Tomorrow Lieutenant Hawliczek is going to accuse the pharmacist who told him about it of making the story up, but the pharmacist told the truth. Tomorrow everyone in the town will already know that I told a lie at the officers’ table, and I’m not worthy to be an officer myself.”

Now he was staring at me in surprise. His slow mind had obviously begun working at last. His face gradually darkened.

“Where did you say this was?”

“At our regular table in the café.”

“In front of your comrades, right? They all heard you?”