Authors: Stefan Zweig
But I decline the offer. I don’t want to miss the call again. I don’t want to lose a minute. I must know what has happened. Because many kilometres away, I can already feel it, something must have happened. It can only have been Condor—or the people at Kekesfalva; only Condor can have given them the address of the hotel. It must have been important, must have been urgent, you don’t rouse a man from his bed at midnight for anything else. All my nerves are on edge. I’m needed. Someone wants me to do something. Someone has something important to tell me, a matter of life and death. No, I can’t go up to my room, I must stay at my post down here. I don’t want to lose a minute.
So I sit down on the hard wooden chair that the night porter, rather surprised, gives me, and I wait, my bare legs hidden by my coat, my eyes glued to the telephone. I wait for quarter-of-an-hour, half-an-hour, trembling with uneasiness and perhaps with cold, wiping away the sweat that suddenly breaks out on my forehead with my shirtsleeve. At last—
rrrr! rrr!
—the telephone rings. I rush to it, snatch up the receiver. Now I shall find out what’s happened!
But it is another stupid mistake, as the porter immediately points out to me. It wasn’t the telephone ringing after all, only the hotel doorbell outside. The porter quickly unlocks the door to let in a couple out late. A captain strides through the open doorway with a girl, glances briefly in surprise at the odd character in the porter’s lodge wearing an open-necked shirt, bare legs showing under an officer’s coat. With a murmured goodnight, he disappears up the dimly lit staircase with his girl.
Now I can’t stand it any more. I turn the handle of the telephone and get the operator on the line. “Hasn’t my call come through yet?”
“What call?”
“From Vienna … I think it was from Vienna. Over half-an-hour ago.”
“I’ll just ask. Wait a few minutes, please.”
Wait! Wait another few minutes! Minutes, minutes … a human being can die in a second, someone’s fate can be decided, a whole world can end in a second. Why am I kept waiting such a criminally long time? This is torture, madness. The clock says half-past one. I’ve been sitting here for an hour now, shivering and freezing and waiting.
At last, at long last I hear the ringing tone again. I strain every sense to listen, but it is only the operator telling me, “I made enquiries. The call was cancelled.”
Cancelled? What does that mean? Cancelled? “Just a moment,” I ask the operator, but she has already hung up.
Cancelled? Why cancelled? Why do they call me in the middle of the night and then cancel the call? Something must have happened, something I don’t know about, but I must know what it is. I can’t get past the time and distance between me and the caller—this is sheer horror! Shall I telephone Condor myself? No, not now, not in the middle of the night. It would frighten his wife. It was probably too late for him as well, and he would prefer to telephone me again in the morning.
I cannot describe that night. A succession of confused thoughts and images chase through my mind, while I myself am both weary and wide awake, waiting all the time with every nerve stretched, listening to every footstep on the stairs and in the corridor, to every bell ringing and every clinking sound out in the street, listening to every movement, every noise, while at the same time I am staggering with weariness, drained, exhausted, and then at last I sleep, a sleep that is much too deep, goes on
much too long, a sleep as timeless as death and unfathomable as the void.
When I wake up it is bright daylight in the room. A glance at the time shows me that it is ten-thirty. For God’s sake—and I was supposed to report for duty immediately, on the Colonel’s orders! Once again, before I can begin thinking about personal matters, military discipline automatically takes me over. I get into my uniform, dressing fast, and run downstairs. The porter tries to stop me. No, everything else can wait until later. First I must report for duty. I gave the Colonel my word of honour.
With my uniform belt correctly buckled, I enter the regimental office. But its only occupant is a small, red-haired
noncommissioned
officer, who looks at me in alarm.
“Please go down at once, sir. The Lieutenant Colonel has given express orders for all officers and men of the garrison to be on parade at eleven sharp. Please go straight down.”
I race downstairs. Sure enough, they are all assembled in the yard, the whole garrison. I am just in time to get in line beside the regimental chaplain, and then the divisional commander appears. He strides up with a curiously slow and solemn tread, unfolds a sheet of paper, and begins in a loud, resonant voice.
“A terrible crime has been committed, instilling horror into the realm of Austria-Hungary and the entire civilised world.” (What crime, I wonder in alarm, what crime? I involuntarily begin to tremble as if I had committed it myself.) “I have to announce the wicked murder”—what murder?—“of the beloved heir to the throne. His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Her Highness the Archduchess have been assassinated.” (What, someone has murdered the heir to the throne? When? Oh yes, there were all those people crowding to read a bulletin pinned up in Brünn yesterday—so that’s what
it was about!) “This despicable act has cast the whole imperial house into deep grief and mourning. However, it is above all the imperial and royal army that must …”
I can’t hear what he is saying distinctly any more, but the words “crime” and then “murder” have fallen like hammer blows on my heart. I couldn’t feel more afraid if I were the assassin myself. A crime, a murder—that was what Condor said. All at once I’m not listening to the wearer of that blue plume of feathers, an officer festooned with decorations, as he addresses us in a voice like thunder. I have suddenly remembered last night’s telephone call. Why didn’t Condor call to give me news this morning? Without stopping to report to the Lieutenant Colonel, I use the general confusion when the announcement is over to run back to my hotel. Perhaps a call has come through by now.
The porter hands me a telegram. It arrived first thing this morning, he says, but I was in such a hurry as I ran past him that he hadn’t been able to give it to me. I tear the envelope open. At first I don’t understand. No signature! A text that makes no sense at all. Only then do I realise that it is simply information from the telegraph office, to say that my own telegram, handed in at Brünn at 15.58 hours yesterday, was as yet undeliverable.
Undeliverable? I stare at the word. A telegram to Edith von Kekesfalva, undeliverable? But everyone in and around the town knows her. I can’t bear this suspense any longer. I immediately ask for a telephone call to be put through to Dr Condor in Vienna. “Is it urgent?” asks the porter. “Yes, urgent,” I tell him.
Twenty minutes later I am connected, and—by some miracle, if a terrible one—Condor is at home and answers the telephone himself. In three minutes I know it all—there’s no time in a long-distance call for tactful phasing. A diabolical chance ruined everything, and the unhappy girl never heard of my remorse,
my fervent and honest decision. The Colonel’s plans to hush the business up came to nothing. Ferencz and my other comrades had not gone straight home to barracks from the café, but went into the wine bar, where they met the pharmacist with a number of other people. Out of sheer friendship for me, Ferencz, that well-intentioned idiot, confronted the pharmacist and abused him roundly, calling him to account in front of everyone and accusing him of telling wicked lies about me. It caused a tremendous scandal, and next day the whole town knew about it. For the pharmacist, his honour wounded, had stormed straight off to the barracks first thing in the morning, to force me to bear witness to his veracity, and on hearing the news that I had disappeared, which struck him as suspicious, he had driven straight out to the Kekesfalva house. Here he confronted the old man in his office, shouting in such a loud voice that the windowpanes shook. The Kekesfalvas, he said accusingly, had been making him look a fool with their “stupid telephone call”, and as a local citizen of good standing he wasn’t taking such impudence from a bunch of military men. He knew, he added, why I had run away in such a cowardly fashion, and it was no use trying to pretend to him that the whole thing was just a silly joke. There must be some very shady dealing on my part behind it—but he was going to clear it all up even if he had to go to the Ministry of War, he wasn’t having snotty-nosed young fellows call him names in a public bar.
With great difficulty, the furious man had been calmed down, and he went home. Horrified as he was, Kekesfalva only hoped that Edith would not have heard any of the pharmacist’s wild accusations. But as bad luck would have it, his office windows had been open, and the pharmacist’s words had carried with dreadful clarity all the way across the yard and through the
window of the salon, where Edith was sitting. That was probably when she decided to carry out the plan she had made so long ago. But she dissembled cleverly; she had her new clothes brought and looked at them again, she laughed with Ilona, talked equably to her father, asked a hundred little things—was this and that ready and packed for the journey? Secretly, however, she told Josef to telephone the barracks to ask when I would be back, and whether I had left any message for her. When the orderly who took the call said truthfully that I was called away on army business, no one knew how long I would be away, and I had left no message for anyone, that will have been the last factor in her decision. In the impatience of her heart, she did not wish to wait another day, another hour. I had disappointed her too deeply, I had struck her too mortal a blow for her ever to trust me again, and my weakness made her fatally strong.
After lunch she had herself taken up to the terrace, and Ilona, who in fact was worried by Edith’s striking cheerfulness, did not move from her side. It was as if she had some dark presentiment. But at half-past four—the very time when I used to visit Edith, and just quarter-of-an-hour before my delayed telegram and Condor arrived at almost the same time, she asked the faithful Ilona to fetch her a certain book, and unfortunately Ilona agreed to this apparently harmless request. That brief moment was enough for the impatient Edith, who could not master her own heart, to put her plan into practice—just as she had told me she would on that same terrace, just as I had imagined it in my nightmares, she had done the terrible deed.
Condor found her still alive. Extraordinarily, there were no major signs of external injury on her frail body, and the unconscious girl was taken to Vienna by ambulance. The doctors still hoped to save her until late into the night, and so Condor
had telephoned me from the hospital at eight in the evening. However, on the night of the twenty-ninth of June, the night after the assassination of the heir to the throne, all the offices of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy were in turmoil, and the telephone lines requisitioned the whole time for the use of the civil and military authorities. Condor waited four hours before he could get a connection. Only when the doctors said, after midnight, that there was no hope left did he have the call cancelled. Half-an-hour later she was dead.
Of the hundreds of thousands of men called up to fight in the war during August 1914, I am sure that few set off for the front as gladly and even impatiently as I did. Not that I was looking forward to the ferocity of war, it was just a way out, an escape route for me. I fled to the war as a criminal runs to hide in the dark. I had spent the four weeks before the declaration of war in a state of self-loathing, confusion and despair, which I remember to this day with more horror than the worst savagery on the battlefields. For I was convinced that through my own weakness, through the pity that first attracted and then repelled me, I had murdered another human being, and moreover the one human being who loved me passionately. I did not venture out in the street any more, I reported sick, I hid away in my room. I had written to Kekesfalva to express my sincere condolences (it was my own part in his daughter’s death for which I was really sorry). He did not reply. I sent Condor explanation after explanation justifying myself. He did not reply either. I did not receive a line from any of my comrades or my father—which in reality was probably because he was overworked in his ministry during
those critical weeks. However, I took this unanimous silence as a judgement passed on me by one and all. I increasingly fell prey to the delusion that they had all condemned me, just as I condemned myself, they all thought of me as a murderer because I thought myself a murderer. While the whole realm was in uproar, while the telegraph wires were hot and vibrant with terrible news all over Europe, a continent in a state of turmoil, while stock exchanges tottered, armies were mobilised, and the cautious had already packed their bags, I thought only of my craven betrayal, my guilt. So to be called up and have my mind taken off myself was liberation. The war, the millions of innocent souls it swept away, saved me, a guilty man, from despair (not that I am proud of it).
I dislike high-flown language. So I will not say that I went in search of death at the time, only that I did not fear it. Or at least, I feared it less than most of the others did, for there were many times when a return to the hinterland behind the lines, where there were people who knew about my guilt, seemed to me worse than all the horrors of the front—and where could I have returned to, who still needed me, who still loved me, for whom or what was I to live? If to be brave is nothing higher than to feel no fear, then I can say with an easy conscience, and meaning it, that I actually was brave in the field, for even what seemed to the most virile of my comrades worse than death, even the possibility of being crippled and mutilated, held no terrors for me. I would probably have regarded it as a punishment, as just revenge to be a helpless cripple myself, the object of any stranger’s pity, when my own pity had proved too weak and cowardly in the past. If death did not come to meet me, then, the fault was not in myself, for dozens of times I went to meet death with cold indifference. Wherever there was some
difficult task to be performed and volunteers were called for, I answered the call. I felt happiest in the thick of the fighting. After my first wound I got myself transferred first to a machinegun company and then to the air force. Apparently I really did do all kinds of daring deeds in the rickety planes of those times. But whenever my name was mentioned in dispatches for “outstanding courage in the face of the enemy” I felt that I was a fraud. And if anyone looked too sharply at the decorations I had won, I quickly moved away.