“But she’s old, and you’ve only got Franzi to look after you both now that Frau Niedermayer’s gone into the munitions factory.”
“Just fancy—two grown women forced by the brutal circumstances of war to fend for themselves with only one servant to help them. Merciful heavens, how will they bear such privation? Oh wake up Otto: the day of servants and ladies of leisure has gone now and it’ll never come back. If I can’t do the cooking and look after a baby on my own then I must really be a prize ninny. What sort of woman did you think you were marrying? ”
“But why stick in Vienna, for heaven’s sake? It’s hungry and cold already, so what will it be like when the snow comes? Why stay here? It’s not your home.”
“I know. But I’ve no other home now, and as for scuttling away to hide in the countryside, be damned to it. The ordinary people of this country have had to suffer a lot because of the emperors and the generals and their precious war. People like us landed them in it, so we ought at least to stick by them now that the going’s getting tough.”
“By Vienna? You always used to say that it wasn’t so much a city as a form of mental disorder.”
“So it is. But its people are real enough.”
I laughed. “Really Liserl, you’re getting to sound like a socialist these days.”
“Perhaps I am, or becoming one. This war’s making me into a revolutionary: or at least someone who thinks that we ought to end it by putting the Kaiser and Ludendorff and Conrad and the rest into opposite holes in the ground and making them toss bombs at each other for a bit to see how they like it.”
We woke next morning about 8:00, huddled together under the eiderdown in the chilly flat where the stove was now fired with balls of dampened newspaper. A wan, grey late-November light filtered through the window panes, grimy with lignite dust now that the building’s caretaker was dead in Siberia and his successor was too old to clean them. Command of a U-Boat had given me an acute instinct for things not being quite right, and I sensed as soon as I woke that the noise from the street outside was not quite the same as on other mornings: more like a Sunday in fact.
Then Franzi came in with our breakfast on a tray: ersatz coffee, but real white-bread rolls, which my aunt had somehow managed to procure in honour of my visit. My aunt’s maidservant was a girl in her mid-twenties from the suburb of Purkersdorf (or “Puahkersdoarf” as she called it) with fluffy blond hair and great china-blue eyes. Franzi was mildly half-witted, so she had not gone to work in the munitions factories. This morning though she was not her usual equable self. Her doll’s eyes were red-rimmed and she wiped them on her apron, sniffing loudly as she did so.
“What’s the matter, Franzi? ”
“It’s him, Herr Leutnant, he’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“The Old Gentleman, God rest his soul.” She crossed herself. “They say he’s gone and died in the night at Schonbrunn.”
It was in this manner that we learnt of the death of our sovereign lord and ruler Franz Joseph the First, by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary for the past sixty-eight years—all but eleven days. Neither Elisabeth nor I were anything but the most tepid of monarchists, but even so we were hushed as we heard the news. It was not that the man had been inordinately loved by his subjects: most in fact knew that he had been an obstinate and short-sighted ruler in peace and a blundering commander in war. Even that morning as the muffled church bells tolled through the city and the flags flew at half-mast there must have been many ancestral memories of the working men summarily shot in the city moat in 1849; of the crows flapping over the mangled white-coated bodies tumbled in the vineyards of the Casa di Solferino; of the half- mad Empress wandering Europe to get away from her dreary husband and his insufferable court; of the sleazy incompetent cover-up after their wretched son had shot his girlfriend in the lodge at Mayerling and then blown his own limited supply of brains through the top of his head. No, it was just that the Emperor—“Old Prohaska,” as the Viennese used to call him— had been around for so long that he had become as fixed a feature in people’s lives as the green summit of the Kahlenberg in the distance. People had excised from their minds the fact that the dear old boy spent much of his regular sixteen-hour working day signing death warrants; or that his ministers were strictly forbidden to deviate from their scheduled subject when they had an audience with him; or that he spoke nineteen languages but would never utter anything else in them but the most leaden platitudes. Instead they remembered the legendary courtesy, and the odd round-shouldered walk, the famous side-whiskers and the hundreds of little anecdotes which had accumulated around the old man over the years like ferns and wildflowers in the cracks of a mausoleum.
And now he was no more. The presence that had shaped the entire lives of all but a few of his subjects and held together his ethnic dustbin of an empire by sheer personal prestige; all that was gone. Something changed for ever that November morning. Until now, behind the battle- fronts, a curious unreality had hung over Austria- Hungary’s war. The casualties had been immense, but the fighting was far away in other people’s countries for the most part, and cafe society had tended to swallow the cheerfully jaunty headlines in the newspapers without demur: “Przemysl Captured”; “Przemysl Recaptured”; “Przemysl Recaptured Again”; or (a couple of days before the rout of Pfanzer-Balltin’s 4th Army) “Our Defences in Volhynia in a State of Moderate Readiness.” Now there could no longer be any ignoring the Monarchy’s disastrous plight. People suddenly woke up to the fact that they were cold and hungry, and that still no end to the war was in sight.
The dead Emperor’s withered old body even lay between us in bed that evening. We would normally have fallen into one another’s arms with joy. I had been away for two months now and I had been scrupulously faithful to my wedding vows. But when we held one another it was not the embrace of lovers reunited so much as the clinging together of two children lost in a dark wood.
“Oh Otto,” she said at last, “is it my lump? There, let me move over if it gets in the way.”
“No dearest, it’s not that.”
“Why, don’t you like pregnant ladies then?”
“It’s not that either: you know you’re more beautiful to me now than ever. No, I don’t know why . . .”
She gazed into my eyes. “Oh surely not. You don’t mean you’re upset over the Old Man? Really, I don’t believe it: not in the twentieth century, surely.”
“It’s not that, Liserl, not really. But try to understand: I’ve been a servant of the House of Austria for sixteen years now, and I’ve hardly ever met anyone who could remember when the old boy wasn’t Emperor. I don’t know why, but it just makes me feel odd inside. Perhaps it’s the war and all I’ve seen these past four months. But I’m still bound by oath to the House of Habsburg.”
“And you’re bound by oath to me, and to the child you’ve planted inside me.” She took my hand and placed it on her satin-smooth belly. “There, feel. It’s life in there: a living child who’ll be breathing in a few months and walking not long after that. Why grieve for the dead? There’s simply too many of them: the whole of Europe turned into one vast bone- yard by Franz Joseph and his like. Let all the kings and generals rot, like the millions of young men they’ve sent to moulder into the earth. Come my Maria-Theresien Ritter, forget about Maria Theresa and Franz Joseph and all the dead emperors and dying empires. Long live life! Let’s make love and create a dozen children: it’s the only way people like us can get back at the rotten sods.”
“Liserl, are you quite mad? Have you no respect for the departed, to talk like that? ”
She laughed. “Yes, I think perhaps I am a little crazy now. After what I’ve had to look at these past two years I’m not surprised: all the maimed bodies and damaged minds. Respect for the departed? If we could I’d take you now to Schonbrunn and make love on top of his coffin.”
In the years since, I must have read or listened to several dozen eye-witness accounts of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph. I am sure that you too will be familiar with the solemn pageantry of that grey November day; the muffled hoofs of the horses; the nodding black plumes on the catafalque; the thirty-four reigning monarchs following bare-headed behind the hearse as the cortege wound its way along streets lined with stunned, grieving people; and of course the traditional exchange at the door of the Capuchin Crypt:
“Who seeks to enter? ”
The Court Chamberlain reeling off the Emperor’s name and his fifty or sixty titles. Then the reply:
“We know of none such here. I ask again, who seeks to enter?” “Franz Joseph, a poor servant of God seeking burial.”
“Enter then,” and the doors slowly swinging open to admit the coffin. No, I shall not bother you yet again by giving a detailed account of what happened. I have found that the aforementioned eye-witness accounts usually come either from people who were not there at all, or who were tiny children at the time, or who could not possibly
