The weather turned queasy. It was still spring, but a breath of humid mid-summer came down on the city. Policemen sweated, in part thanks to Redl. To counteract the Redl malaise, the Police Commissioner devised an Austrian remedy. He decided to fortify the morale of his men with the glitter of their headgear. Instead of light summer caps, the constables must keep wearing the heavy but polished metal helmets of winter.
In their airless slums, the poor perspired, too. Suddenly there were more of them at the end of June: The Imperial and Royal Telephone Administration dismissed three hundred workers, thus adding to the record number of jobless in recent years. After all, mobilization cost money, and the government must cut expenses somewhere. The discharged three hundred demonstrated on the Ringstrasse, joined not only by fellow unemployed but by some of the more affluent Viennese who had been waiting for months to have their first telephones installed and now would have to wait still longer.
The jobs were not restored; the premature heat would not let up. But a number of the disadvantaged benefited from the experience of their counterparts in America. The Arbeiter Zeitung reported that indigents of a still more sweltering metropolis, namely New York, found a bit of relief by spending the night outdoors. They'd bed down in Battery Park, hoping for cool breezes from New York Bay. To keep lights from flashing into their eyes, they'd turn their backs to the Statue of Liberty, already blazing brightly with electric bulbs for the Fourth of July. And so many a Viennese pauper made himself a bed of rags or blankets on a sidewalk. Instead of zephyrs from New York, he had whiffs from the Vienna Woods-and no Statue of Liberty by which to be either disturbed or deceived.
***
For men of means it was a very different summer. Like others of their class elsewhere, they dealt with the city heat by leaving it. But in contrast to their peers outside Austria, their travels often took them not to the newly chic but to the fashionable old: the Alps' Salzkammergut, traditionally the hunting and pleasure grounds of Habsburg.
Here, in the heart of this lake district south of Salzburg, lay Bad Ischl, the summer mecca of Vienna's theater world. Here Franz Lehar, composer of The Merry Widow, sovereign of the operetta, maintained a baronial chalet by the banks of the River Traun. Here, in a villa close by, his predecessor Johann Strauss had summered. At the Patisserie Zauner, Lehar munched Mohr im Hemd and exchanged gossip almost as delicious with tenors, sopranos, directors, conductors, actors of note, tragedians, and comic talents, all of whom also did their rusticating here.
The theater represented the most glamorous of the arts. One would think that its luminaries would stake out a vacation terrain of their own toward which their public would then flock. But this was Austria. Vienna's show folk, rather than create a new modish arena of their own, congregated around a spectacle of Habsburg ancien regime, produced bucolicstyle, in Bad Ischl. In 1913 it was produced again.
A major figure in this scene was one of the stage world's own-Katharina Schratt, long a leading actress of the Court Theater. For twenty-seven years (before Franz Joseph had been widowed in 1898 and after) she had been the Emperor's lady. She still was. For twenty-seven summers the pair could be observed at Bad Ischl, his kepi bobbing alongside her flowered hat, his walking stick swinging close to her parasol, striding together between the snow-white lily beds and the bosky chestnut stands of the Spa Park.
By 1913 they looked like a pair bonded by a passion prac ticed through decades. What lay behind them instead was a quarter of a century of abstention. In 1888 Frau Schratt had offered to become her monarch's mistress. 'Our relationship must be in the future what it has been in the past,' the Emperor had replied (characteristically) by letter, referring to their chastity, 'that is, if that relationship is to last, and it must last for it makes me so very happy.'
These words had been written in his wife's lifetime; they remained in force after he was widowed. Celibacy would in the future, just as it had in the past, legitimize their ardor; restraint, well embellished, charmingly straitjacketed, would preserve the impulse forever.
And so Franz Joseph and Frau Schratt continued to be lovers in everything but raw fact. They never met between the sheets. Yet in Vienna or Ischl they practiced the entire range of stagecraft that surrounds the bed: all the ardent preambles of passion and the gallant postscripts, the avowals of desire, denials of indifference, impetuous confidences, embarrassed explanations, and the obligatory sulks and quarrels. These emotions they poured into countless letters. He addressed them to 'My Dear Good Friend,' she, to 'Your Imperial and Royal Majesty, my Most August Lord.'
They enacted their roles with a persuasiveness that appeared to obviate consummation. In Vienna, their play unfolded invisibly: behind the garden walls of Schonbrunn Palace or over the coffee table in her breakfast room across the street from Schonbrunn. But in Ischl the octogenarian swain and his fifty-year-old inamorata produced their romance in the open, beneath the summer sun. They simulated to perfection the trappings of a liaison.
It was a way of love, a way of life, that came natural to Franz Joseph, the weathered centerpiece of a patinaed court. Under his reign animation had petrified into decor. Decor-not dynamics-governed his affections as well as his politics. Both the Emperor's empire and the Emperor's affair were artifacts. Neither had much fleshly reality. Therefore both must draw their vigor, their tang, their long lives from etiquette and accoutrement. Both represented the triumph of form over substance. They were both masterpieces of survival through sheer style.
When Franz Joseph strode with Frau Schratt through Ischl's parks, detectives discreetly preceded and followed them. When he walked alone, he forbade all such protection. In Vienna there was his state coach with six snow-white steeds; his braided, epauletted retinue of equerries, adjutants, and chamberlains. In Ischl he furloughed them all. Protocol, too, took a holiday. Several times a week Franz Joseph strolled past the gate guards of the Kaiservilla, entirely by himself. This bearer of seventy-two august titles, this breathing legend that had occupied for sixty-odd years the West's most venerable and resonant throne, this master over life and death of many millions, this symbol holding together, against odds, an improbable empire ranging from yodelers on the Swiss border to muezzins chanting from minarets by the Turkish frontierthis near-divinity joined passers-by on the common sidewalk.
If the hour was very early, before seven, it found him off for his coffee with Frau Schratt in her Villa Felicitas. If it was later in the morning, he'd be wending his way toward the town church for Mass. He would stroll behind a babushka'd maid, laden with shopping, or next to a spa guest puffing a cigar. Often they didn't realize for seconds that The Presence was among them. In his blue uniform but without any of his countless decorations, His Imperial and Royal Majesty looked like any officer, long pensioned but still well barbered, trim, as he stepped with a certain circumspection off and on the curb. He glanced at the store windows as he passed and sometimes, like a typical vacationer, he squinted westward up the Ischl sky to see what the day's weather might bring.
Why? Why this charade of ordinariness? Perhaps for His Apostolic Majesty the ordinary had the allure of the exotic. His letters to Frau Schratt breathe a need for the commonplace. He inquires about the effectiveness of the garbage pick-up on her block in Vienna. And how comfortable were the new taxi cars in Vienna? As for himself, he will confess, in detail, that his corns hurt while he stood up to toast the King of Bulgaria. In other words, the Emperor wished to indulge a little in the plain prose of life-for the most part he was imprisoned in his own exaltedness.
And he may have had other reasons for impersonating a pedestrian in Ischl. In the Emperor's sundry capitalsVienna, Budapest, Prague-the machinery of pomp manufactured the Habsburg charisma. In Ischl, Franz Joseph proved that he needed no courtiers, no supporting players, no footlights, no props. He could wreak magic alone, stepping over a dog turd on the Ischler Hauptstrasse. With a flash of wispy white sideburns on wrinkled cheeks, he could hush each street corner into a throne room. Traffic crunched to a halt at his sight. Drivers whipped off their hats. Women froze in midchat. The street turned into a tableau of bows and curtsies past which the Emperor ambled, responding now and then with a salute that seemed friendly but also a bit puzzled. It was as if he'd just been greeted by a nice fellow-officer whose name escaped him but which he might remember right after appreciating the Doboschtorte displayed there in the Patisserie Zauner's window.
For many years Ischl had seen Franz Joseph conjure impe rial radiance next to a burgher storefront. But by the teens of the twentieth century his saunterings had taken on yet other aspects. In 1898 his Empress had been stabbed to death as she walked unescorted along the quai of Geneva. Since then even the presence of guards had been unable to prevent the spurting of royal blood. Earlier in 1913 an attempt had been made on the life of the Spanish King. The King of Greece had been murdered. Franz Joseph's solo rambles in Ischl were wellknown enough to be downright provocative. Behind every doorway a revolver or a stiletto might be poised. What Franz Joseph was staging, after the gunning-down of Franz Schuhmeier, after the sudden Redl nightmare, was the theater of fatalism.
