Vienna is also a city of cemeteries, as majestic and friendly as the portraits of Francis Joseph. The Zentralfriedhof, the Central Cemetery, is a major march-past in the grandes manoeuvres which attempt to postpone the triumph of time. The graves of the great Viennese – the sector devoted to illustrious personages, which starts to the left of the main entrance, Gate No. 2 – comprise the front rank of a Guard which makes a stand against transience but, unlike Napoleon’s Guards at Waterloo, forming square without the least hesitation, this regiment fights according to elastic tactics, seems to wish to defilade itself; it suggests feints, it outflanks death, it jests, it beats about the bush, with a view to frustrating the methodical swish of the scythe. At five in the morning this host of stones, busts and monuments is still almost invisible, opaque and colourless, as it lies hidden in the cloudy night-time drizzle, though here and there a votive lamp punctuates the murk. Herr Baumgartner keeps his shotgun close beside him – a gun he has owned for thirty years, he told me a moment ago – and rests a hand on it with the quiet, affectionate familiarity of long cohabitation, as a musician finds pleasure in touching his violin, which he loves not only for its performance but for its shape, its curves, the texture and colour of its wood.
It is the first time I have ever been in a cemetery next to someone who is handling not flowers, shovels or prayer-books, but guns and cartridges. But today, for an hour or two, before daylight comes, the Central Cemetery in Vienna is a forest, a jungle, Leatherstocking’s woods, Turgenev’s steppes, the dominion of Diana or St Hubert, a place where one does not bless or bury, but lies in wait, fires, kills ancient relatives for whom no rite prescribes a Requiem or a Kaddish. This morning, in the Central Cemetery, the order of the day is shooting, even if Herr Baumgartner doesn’t want to hear this word, and talks about a necessary, authorized reduction of the number of head: they are harmful, it seems, because of their excessive profusion and for other reasons. He is one of three marksmen employed by the Viennese municipal authorities to maintain a correct balance among the living who unlawfully inhabit this metropolis of the dead (this “city of the other Viennese”, as the Austrians put it), and prevent them from being too lively by transforming them on the instant into corpses if they reveal themselves too healthy and prosperous in this world. Death is harmless, respectful and discreet; it causes no trouble and doesn’t hurt anyone. It is life that is so troublesome, so noisy, so aggressively destructive, and must therefore be kept in check, lest it should get above itself. Hares, for example, have a downright passion – destructive and guilty as are all passions – for the pansies laid on the tombs by pious relatives. They gnaw them, they uproot them, they rip them to shreds, they are not content with satisfying their hunger but they make a massacre of them, like martens in a hen-run. And indeed, the sepulchre in which the presidents of the Republic are laid to rest is littered with torn-up, tattered pansies.
Does this mild irreverence merit the licence to kill? Well anyway, this licence is very restricted and rigidly controlled. Herr Baumgartner’s double-barrelled gun only threatens male pheasants, hares and wild rabbits, and even these according to well-established rules. Austria, as they say in my part of the world, both was and is an orderly country, and a gun-licence is subject to strict control. Infractions are severely punished, and there are none of those Sunday hunters who infest Italy, drunken with childish delight in their power to kill, blasting away indiscriminately at wildlife and humans: hunters: more deserving by half of the attentions of Herr Baumgartner than are the hares with a taste for pansies.
The man himself, squatting down beside me in the grass, is beginning to emerge from the darkness in all his massive, paternal bulk; he is not a trigger-happy maniac, he shows no sign of that stupid pleasure in killing and putting a stop to whatever life is seen to move; he does not indulge in threadbare sophisms about the totemistic communion between killer and victim; and indeed he reveals no kind of banal excitation, but rather the good-natured calm of a gardener. He is a good shot and does what he has to do, for Austria is an orderly country, but maybe he is not all that displeased when, through no fault of his own, he goes home empty-handed.
I imagine that, to start with, he was none too keen on the idea of having me under his feet, for no one as a rule is allowed to be present. At the entrance to the cemetery he explained to the night-watchman that I was a professor, a title much honoured here, and that I was allowed in as an exceptional case through the good offices of the department of the burgomaster of Vienna. In this damp dawn, which is already beginning to pale the gloomy clouds, I am experiencing what is not a great hunting adventure, but what may be the zenith of my fame and glory, because it is unlikely that my books on the Mitteleuropa of the Hapsburgs, in virtue of which the municipality of Vienna have given me special permission to be squatting down at this hour of the morning in the grass in the Central Cemetery, will have any greater impact on reality than this, or any further force its limits and prohibitions. It might well be that, in this dawn, I have had my day, as King Lear puts it.
We move towards the edge of the cemetery, passing between the tombs, which are slowly becoming more distinct. The tomb of Castelli, the light-hearted, prolific author of popular comedies, bears an inscription by courtesy of the league for the protection of animals, while from the faint mist rises a tall, simple cross with a phrase that sums up the life of Peter Altenberg, all a toccata and fugue: “He loved and saw.” A bare, basic cube is the funeral monument of Adolf Loos, while that of Schönberg, creator of a more disquieting geometry, is also a cube, but a distorted one.
Herr Baumgartner peers around him, lends an ear to every rustle, scrutinizes the foliage, amorphous in the half light. He may fire where he likes, even among the crosses and the still-fresh wreaths, but he is careful to make no mistakes, because that sector of the cemetery – roughly a third, the other parts falling to the competence of his two colleagues – is entirely his responsibility, and he has to answer for where his lead ends up, for any chance bosh-shot that shatters a votive lamp or grazes an angel thoughtfully watching over a tomb. In a couple of hours’ time the relatives who find the photograph of their dear departed as riddled as a sombrero in a western movie, or the stone stained with the blood of a rabbit hit at the wrong moment, would know to whom to address their outraged protests. “It shouldn’t happen, but it might,” he repeats several times, but placidly.
We are on the edge of the last row of graves, set on a slight rise which commands a good view. The bank itself is made of loose earth, debris, and rotten grass and leaves swept up along the avenues and amassed at this point. The soil in this area is particularly well suited to the rapid putrefaction of corpses, as was well known in the last century to the authorities and to the proprietors of plots. During the projection stage for the building of the cemetery the latter used to haggle and stick out for higher prices in relation to the greater or lesser putrefactive vigour of the soil, to the point of exchanging abusive pamphlets such as the one addressed in 1869 by the municipal councillor Dr Mitlacher to Baron Lasky. The area where we are now is unkempt, a large grassy expanse stretching between the wood and a wall surrounding the central workshops of the Vienna tramway company. A few steps away is a tomb bearing the name of the Pabst family, and beneath it the inscription auf Wiedersehen. This meadow, extensive as it is, is a small slice of nature hemmed in by society, by the symmetry of the avenues and the funeral industry on one hand and the municipal transport company on the other; but even this minimal space is like the taiga or the savannah, which are also surrounded by civilization but measured by the ancient laws of the animal world, sniffing at scents, crawling, searching for food, coupling, setting and avoiding ambushes; the law, in fact, which rules even in a flower-bed in the garden or in a pot containing a single plant.
The colourless grass now swiftly turns to green, the first birdcall and the first flutterings are heard among the trees, the big crows migrating from Russia rise on the wing, while in the east there rises a pallid lemon-rind sun. Even in that suburban undergrowth the unmistakable smell of morning endows us with a physical sense of happiness, the pleasure of a body at ease in itself, a relish for hearing, touching, seeing things. The untouchable hen-birds which for some minutes have been sporting on the grass are now about to be joined by a cock-pheasant. Still some way off, he approaches cautiously while my neighbour takes aim. Accustomed as I am, on my own Mount Snežnik, to dismantling the traps laid by hunters, I have a vague sense of being a traitor, a man who has gone over to the other side. Is this the way in which each of us goes to meet his fate, with useless even if practised caution? Standing motionless, I ask myself what constellations of possible threats, atomic or microbiological, star-wars, recurrent viruses or overtakings on bends have my life in their sights, as my neighbour’s gun now has this pheasant, selected by an infinite concatenation of coincidences.
During this absurd, guilt-stricken wait, I regret the fact that in 1874 the high cost (a million florins) of the operation led to the failure of Felbinger and Hudetz’s scheme for funerals by pneumatic post. According to this the dead would be shot off directly to their allotted tombs through miles of tubing activated by compressed air. And I imagine that the air of the cemetery would have rung with the sharp reports made by corpses in continuous arrival, and that this pheasant would have taken wing.
But the interplay of coincidences which holds the universe in its grip, taking on a different guise, though remaining perfectly Austrian and bureaucratic, has decided to grant the pheasant a stay of execution. Just before the target gets within absolutely safe range, at the edge of the wood, near the Pabsts’ auf Wiedersehen, a lorry comes huffing and puffing along, laden with dead leaves and other debris which the cemetery gardeners – birds almost as early as the gamekeepers – have swept up along the pathways and are about to dump near us. The pheasant takes fright and vanishes, while Herr Baumgartner allows himself a sonorous “Damn!”, but greets the spoilsports cordially.
We make for the exit, for the usual visitors will soon be starting to arrive. All in all it has been a dawn in keeping with the Viennese spirit which mocks at death, flatters it but also ridicules it, courts it but at the same time, not being able to leave it in the lurch once and for all, as in the case of a lover who has grown to weary us, at least tries to spite it a little. At the gate we meet one of Herr Baumgartner’s colleagues. The hare he has shot is an image of the deficit of the universe and of the original sin of life which feeds on death. In a few hours that hare will be a pleasing trophy, and later still a succulent dish, but right now it is still terror and flight, the suffering of a creature that neither asked to live nor deserved to die, the mystery of life, this strange thing that was in the hare until a short while ago and now is not, the real essence of which is unknown even to the scientists, if in order to define it they must needs have recourse to such tautologies as “the complex of phenomena which oppose death”. I don’t know exactly why, since – like all those with walk-on parts in the spectacle of the world – I have no central role and therefore no direct, precise responsibilities, but that hare certainly leaves one with a sense of shame.