Six weeks later Louise and Mattachich had, in effect, been sacked, expelled, driven out of Vienna. You can imagine their outrage. With hindsight, though, there is something ironic about their indignation at the treatment they received. If Mattachich had been dealt with more harshly – if he had been ordered to go back at once to his regiment and then dispatched to some remote Ruthenian or Polish backwater, and left to kick his heels there indefinitely – he and Louise might have been spared much suffering subsequently. Other officers who had made a nuisance of themselves were banished to the provinces often enough, so why was that not done to him? And if the authorities intended to put an end to the attachment between him and Louise, then why, once he had been expelled from Vienna, did they make it virtually impossible for her to remain in the city, where she would have been safer than before from his approaches?
It is a mystery. In all likelihood the officials in the Hofburg simply didn’t know what to do with them. Both, anyway, would later speak of their expulsion from the city as evidence of the cruelty of the imperial court. ‘From that moment,’ Mattachich wrote, ‘[the princess] was a deserted, unprotected woman and I was an officer of the imperial army forbidden to reside in the city.’* Her view of what they had to go through was if anything more melodramatic than his: ‘I have no idea where I would have gone and what might have happened to me if God had not sent to me the one man with the courage to tell me: “Madam, you the daughter of a king…A Christian woman takes revenge on the iniquity of her enemies by rising above it.”’†
For them, even in hindsight, there was no mystery and no irony about the whole business. They were victims. They were punished by a false, oppressive society for their virtues, not for their vices.
‘One fine day’ (Mattachich’s phrase) an officer turned up at his door with a large stiff envelope in his hand. On the back of the envelope was the royal seal: a flattened, scarlet lump of wax, like a severely squashed tomato.
Unshaven, dressed in his pyjamas and a full-length silk dressing-gown of alternating stripes of pale and dark green (a gift from his beloved), Mattachich had been caught at a disadvantage. He had been just about to begin his breakfast, but the seal on the envelope and the looming presence of its bearer left him with no choice. He had to crack it open and take out the note inside. As he did so he remembered the scribbled-on sheet of paper brought to him by a humble regimental orderly that had summoned him to Colonel Funke’s office. He had come a long way since then. This communication had been brought by a uniformed official of higher rank than himself and came directly from the royal secretariat, the Kabinettkanzlei, in the Hofburg.
‘Yes,’ the man said, the moment Mattachich looked up from it. ‘I’m to take you there right away.’
Holding the thick, embossed note in his hand, Mattachich wondered vaguely how these people had known where to find him. Louise had assured him many months before that she had given his exact address to nobody, her husband included. Well, that was the business of those who had tracked him down; his was to get shaved and changed. His modest breakfast of coffee and a roll, brought in moments before by his landlady, had to be forgone. After some thought he put on his standard service uniform, complete with tall, steep-visored cap. The visitor, who had not troubled to give Mattachich his name, waited in the little hall of the apartment; then they stepped silently into the street, where a two-wheeler with a man up front was waiting for them.
The brief drive to the Hofburg had a strange recapitulatory quality for Mattachich. Back in camp, on his way to answering Funke’s summons, he had felt the humiliated anxiety of a schoolboy – and had emerged triumphant after a few minutes. Now, summoned by an incomparably higher authority, and with little expectation that he would receive good news when he stood before it, he felt perfectly calm, self-satisfied even. Whatever the Kabinettkanzlei wanted of him, whatever judgement it was about to pass on him, the fact was that it had been compelled to recognize his existence, to send for him by name, to demand his presence. In the Hofburg, no less! And why not? He was now the lover of a king’s daughter, a man who would soon (to his own satisfaction anyway) be the bearer of a title; someone who could look any Hohenlohe in the eye, any Kottwitz, Möllendorf, or Waldstein.
A nobody from Croatia no longer. Never again a nobody.
So he enjoyed the ride to the Hofburg. He was not going to allow his companion’s silent hauteur, nor the fact that the man was taller, younger and of higher rank than himself, spoil his pleasure in the summons. The same applied to their march across the palace grounds, or a part of them, after they got out of the vehicle. He looked eagerly about him as they went, but later it was what he heard rather than saw that he remembered most clearly. The crunch of gravel underfoot; the clatter of heels on the flagstones of a courtyard shut off on one side by an ancient wall; the multiple echoes produced by a tunnel-like arch piercing that wall; the sound of a military band in the distance, now loud, now occluded; the slither and click of their boots over cobbles polished to a silver shine by centuries of use; finally their march down a long, wide passage floored in black and white tiles that produced a harsh, ringing note of their own at every pace.
Still not a word said between the two of them. Halfway down the passageway a white-gloved flunkey emerges from a cubicle, as if he has been doing nothing all day but wait for them there. He ushers them into a high-ceilinged yet surprisingly populous and cosy-looking office. A log fire burns in an open grate. Cupboards rise to the ceiling, some with their doors open and boxes within. At various large desks young men much like Mattachich’s escort are seated. At an even larger desk sits an older, heavier man with thinning, neatly combed hair. The top button of his tunic is undone, and his shoulders are adorned with a generous supply of crowns and oak leaves.
He is plainly the master of this particular corner of the palace, so it must be by his wish that he works in this domestic, companionable manner. He has a genial air – spectacles, silver eyebrows, a kindly frown line on his brow. His voice is unnervingly calm and soft and his words seem to emerge from his mouth with no visible effort; not even a drawing in or expulsion of breath. All he has to do, it seems, is to open and close his lips and the words become audible, as if of their own volition. Unnerving too is the speed and lack of emotion with which he deals with the matter in hand. It is literally in his hand: a single sheet of paper with its blank side towards Mattachich. No greeting, no hesitation, barely a glance at the man standing in front of him, cap held in both hands.
‘It is the wish of the highest authorities that you leave Vienna immediately. I do not propose to specify the grounds for this decision. No doubt you are aware of them.’
Everyone in the room seems to attend as intently to the silence that follows as they had to the three brief sentences produced moments before. Somehow, from somewhere, with an effort that contrasts painfully to Mattachich himself with the nonchalance of the man in front of him, he manages to bring out a few words of his own.
‘Excellency, I beg you – I have – I need – there are matters –’
‘How long do you want?’
‘Two weeks, sir?’
(Why two weeks? Don’t ask Mattachich. It is merely what comes out of his mouth.)
The adjutant-general does not nod or say yes. He says merely: ‘Don’t fail me.’
Later the same day another formal interview took place in a room in a different part of the Hofburg. There, seated at a table, the aged Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, awaited the arrival of Stephanie and her sister.
Contrary to what Louise was to write about him long after his death, he did not look at all like a head waiter. Nor did he pull at his whiskers. Nor, as she claimed, did he look like a heartless fool.* Imagine him instead to look like the person he was: an old, tired, hard-working man, bound to protocol and ritual, expecting to be regarded with a respect that approaches veneration, but on the whole well-meaning, who had come to the throne at the age of twenty, and in the almost fifty years that had since passed (with another seventeen years still to go) had suffered many disappointments and griefs. Among these were the suicide of his only son, Rudolph, which meant that no son or grandson of his would succeed him as ruler of the Hapsburg lands; defeats in war for which he blamed not only his enemies and his underlings but himself too; his unrequited, incurable infatuation with his wife, the beautiful, half-mad Elizabeth of Bohemia (which not even his long-standing ‘arrangement’ with the actress Katti Schratt had greatly affected); his foreboding, which amounted to a conviction, that the seven hundred years of Hapsburg rule over central Europe, received by him in sacred trust from his ancestors and from the mysterious God he prayed to, would probably come to an end with his own demise.
So there he sat, with yet another duty to perform that he would gladly have spared himself, had his conscience permitted it. The room was unfamiliar to him, but as there were literally several thousand rooms in the sprawling Hofburg it did not surprise him that he could not recall ever having been in this particular one before. Nor did it surprise him, at the same time, that nothing in it struck him as novel or unexpected – chandeliers and sconces, china-crammed cabinets, delicate rococo mouldings (wreaths, swags, leaves and quantities of gilt), a ticking clock in a boulle-work frame, wallpapers in silver and dark red, a large portrait of two children in the court dress of a century or two before, whose names he knew no more than he did those of the dogs at their feet, but whose blood without doubt ran in his own veins. In the complex, pale, intensely polished grain of the walnut-wood table he was sitting at, he could discern a vague reflection of his face and his plain military tunic, with just two small decorations on its breast, one of them like a brace of dark red cherries. As if to check something he would have restrained himself from inspecting if others had been in the room, he pushed his chair back a little and looked beneath the table-top at the legs that sustained it. Yes, they were as he had seen them on coming into the room: tubby, fluted affairs, almost like garden urns. Then, as any other idle old man might have done, he felt the thickness of the table-top with both hands, trying to guess if it really needed such massive supports. No, he decided, it did not. So he studied his hands instead. To his eye their palms had a more friendly and youthful look than their buckled and liver-spotted backs, where veins ran in seemingly haphazard directions, like blue rivers on a map.
The room for this occasion had been chosen by Stephanie. She called it her ‘salon’ and seldom used it. Together with his chef de protocole, Franz Joseph had decided it would be inappropriate for him to meet Stephanie and her errant sister in his own living quarters (since that would imply that Louise was of her own right a member of the imperial family – which she was pointedly to be reminded she was not), or in one of the rooms he used for the transaction of state business (since that would imply that the business he had to transact with Louise was of a constitutional nature – which, once again, it was not). These misgivings were duly passed on by his man to Stephanie, who, as expected, promptly begged the emperor to be gracious enough to use a room in her apartment for the occasion. The chef de protocole then inspected the location she had proposed, found it suitable, agreed with her on a time for the meeting, and on the desirability of the emperor being in possession of the room before she and her sister entered it.
Much of Franz Joseph’s life was taken up with considering issues of this sort. They mattered greatly to him. He gave them the same degree of attention he devoted to state papers received from his ministers and governors and to dispatches from his ambassadors abroad. Now, his thick moustache and white, luxuriant mutton-chop whiskers beautifully shampooed and brushed into backward-curving rolls, his shaven chin and cheekbones by contrast nakedly exposed, the skin of his scalp quite without lustre but remarkably blotch-free for a man of his age, he waited the arrival of two women he had never liked or trusted and towards whom he had always behaved with a courtesy that was second nature to him.
The clock in the room chimed discreetly, prompting clocks in other rooms and in a courtyard outside to respond successively in lightweight, welterweight and heavyweight fashion. Instantly the doors opened and a silver-buttoned, black-stockinged footman appeared in the vacancy he had himself just created. He bowed to the emperor, stood aside and waited for the sisters to come through, Stephanie first. A moment later the footman had disappeared behind the doors he was closing. Standing side by side, shoulders touching, the women curtseyed as deeply as their stiff dresses and half-bustles permitted them to. Only then did they step forward. They remained standing in front of the sovereign just as Mattachich a few hours before had stood before the sovereign’s representative in an office at the other end of the palace.
The business to be conducted in both cases was much the same. But the emperor took longer over it.
He cleared his throat, fixed his eyes on Louise and began. ‘It has been brought to our attention, madam…’ His voice was high, an old man’s voice, but it was assured too; his eyes were small and blinking yet he kept them fixed on hers; his face was expressionless. He pulled towards him a leather folder that had been lying on the table and opened it. Once it was there, however, he did not refer to it. The charges followed. She had been seen entering a chambre séparée with a man who was not her husband. On several occasions she was observed getting into a closed fiacre with the same man. She was seen repeatedly riding alone with him in the Vienna Woods. In each case it was apparent that she and her companion had done their best to elude observation, which they had frequently succeeded in doing. What Franz Joseph also knew, but about which he said nothing, was that Stephanie had told him how Mattachich had shown up in Abbazia and the manner in which the couple had compromised themselves there.
The recital done, and with no change in the tone of his voice, he invited Louise to respond to what he had just said.
‘I was so outraged,’ Louise wrote years later, ‘that I simply had to express to his face what I felt about him.’*
Self-righteousness was one of her gifts. So was her capacity for feeling badly done by. So out it all came. Amazement at being spied on. Anger at the guilt of others. Denial of wrongdoing. Scorn for all slanderers and plotters. Insistence on her Stallmeister’s probity. Affirmations of loyalty to the house of Hapsburg. Warnings of her father’s wrath when he heard how his daughter had been spoken to. Dark hints about how his anger would be expressed. Tears at the thought of her mother’s shame. More tears as she pleaded for the emperor’s protection against conspirators. More tears, hotter than before, accompanying the confession that her husband could no longer be relied on to protect her reputation against the tongues of liars and scandal-mongers. Her need therefore to look to the emperor for protection against the unmerited hostility to which she had been exposed.
All of it, Louise writes, without giving any details, ‘may be imagined’. Franz Joseph listened patiently to her outburst, his eyes blinking from time to time under his thick white eyebrows. Eventually he had had enough. He held up a hand. Louise fell silent. He waited to make sure that she had herself under control. Then he spoke.
‘We know everything. It must be plain to you that we have been closely informed about what has been going on.’ He sought his next word carefully. ‘Errors…have been committed.’ He paused, as if considering whether to go through the accusations against her once more. He decided against it.
‘We know everything,’ he said again, with the air – and the stare – of a man who knew that she had shot her bolt and would not dare to interrupt what he was about to say. ‘We advise you to leave Vienna, to go abroad for the next few months, and to stay away until this scandal has died down. Then we will review your position. It is not possible for you to attend any of the state functions arranged for this season. The invitations to the palace you have already received are now withdrawn. You will not try to communicate with us until we have indicated to your husband that you may do so.’
Before she could make any response, and using the first person singular for the first time, as if he were speaking in the bosom of the family, he said once more, ‘I know everything.’
Those were the last words she was ever to hear from him. He reached for a silver handbell standing on the table and rang it briskly. Like the wings of a pigeon opening, the high-shouldered doors parted, the footman appeared, bowed and vanished. The emperor pulled himself upright, grasping with both hands at the table he had tested earlier. The women curtseyed, Louise less deeply than before: a gesture, or an absence of it, he noticed. As they rose he looked for and caught Stephanie’s eye. She had not said a word throughout, and for that she was given a tiny nod of approbation. Louise he ignored. He and she were never to see one another again. Each was left with a wholehearted detestation of the other.
So what now?
Imagine the lovers aware of themselves as figures in a real-life drama of their own invention, speaking for effect (not least to each other), reordering their view of the past, manipulating their hopes for the future, changing the roles they play as their circumstances change. Now go on to imagine something that is more difficult to hold firmly in mind. Imagine that to them there is nothing ‘period’ or outlandish about the world they live in: the clothes they wear, the expectations they have about how other people are likely to behave, the carriages they ride in, the candles and gas-lamps that light their rooms and streets. They are unconscious of the contrivances they lack: antibiotics, combine harvesters, heart–lung machines, laser-guided missiles, radio, television, supermarkets. Nor do they miss the innumerable noises that those who come after them will regard as commonplace: cars changing gear, aeroplanes overhead, pneumatic drills, the nut-like rattle of computer keyboards, zips opening or closing with their distinctive little mew. Since they know nothing of these things, the absence of them does not make them feel underprivileged. On the contrary, they are proud of what they do have and what their parents and grandparents lacked: a European-wide network of railways and electric telegraphy, electric trams in some of their cities, automobiles (of a kind), aeroplanes (also of a kind), the earliest cinematographic pictures, machine-manufactured goods of all varieties. Machine-guns too.
What Louise and Mattachich felt was relief, first of all. Excitement. Almost a feeling of omnipotence. Here they were, about to be expelled from the city that had dominated the life of the one and the dreams of the other since adulthood. So what further harm could come to them? Disgrace was no longer to be feared; nor expulsion. They were free to do as they wished, answerable only to themselves, subject to none of the social constraints that had bound them for so long. Their world had just done the worst it could to them? Very well. Did it matter? If Louise now chose to leave the Coburg palace on her own for the first time since she had entered the house as a bride in her teens, who could stop her? She had left the palace on foot before – to go for a stroll or to accompany the children (when they were still children) to the park. But this was different. No lady-in-waiting, no footman to carry whatever she thought she might need, no groom and pony trap to accompany her should she become tired, no nannies, no husband to return to, thank God: just Louise, herself, on her own, doing something she had long thought of and had always been afraid to attempt.
Then let her leave behind her the gaping servants and the ugly, overblown building with its balustrades and its sky-high statues in a row, looking down on her in a manner more stupidly aghast than ever. It was like being a naughty child again, but without the fear. What did she have to lose? Nothing. What did she have to gain? Entry to her lover’s apartment, which she had paid for but not seen since he had moved in.
There they fell on each other as if he had just returned from a battlefield and she from exile or imprisonment. No one could bully or threaten them now and no one could stop them from doing with each other whatever they liked, here, in the confinement of Mattachich’s apartment, with its rented furniture and brass and iron bedstead, which in all its years of service had never been compelled to perform so loudly, to creak and jingle so vulgarly, as it did that late afternoon for the princess and her self-styled count.
It was shameless, degraded and wonderful. All of it. And it went on for a long time. Repeatedly. Excruciatingly. Then they lay together and watched the meagre whitish sunlight of an early February evening invade a corner of the room, high up, where two walls met the coarse moulding of the ceiling, and two squares of light also met, one on each wall like the pages of an open book, before both rapidly disappeared, leaving no stain behind. Now only shadows remained, some darker than others, undoing the objects they enveloped. Sounds from outside – wheels and people’s feet, cries, bells, talk, laughter – grew louder before suddenly sinking, each sound again becoming distinct from every other once the shops had closed and people went home to drink and eat and raindrops began to tick-tick-tick irregularly against the single window of the bedroom, as if something out there had not dared to make itself known before and was still timid about doing it now.
Night. Dishevelled, suddenly estranged, they looked at each other by the light of the gas-lamp Mattachich had lit. ‘I must get back,’ Louise said abruptly and did not move. She could not. Elsewhere in the house someone ran up the stairs, opened a door, spoke, was answered, came downstairs slowly, sneezed. Silence again. She had spent time before in rooms as humble as this, when forced to take shelter while travelling or in some of the rougher hunting lodges she had visited. But this room was different. It was in the middle of Vienna, not in some unknown, rain-sodden tract of countryside. It was a few blocks only from the palace that had been her home for twenty years. It had a naked man in it. It smelled of what they had just indulged in. It was like a whore’s room, she thought, though she had never seen a whore’s room and this one was not at all like the gravure illustrations of such rooms she had studied in her husband’s collection of pornographic books. Most of those were Japanese anyway, which he had brought back from his travels, so how could she tell?
‘Yoshivara…’ she said to herself. The strange syllables took possession of her tongue, and she found herself muttering them over and over again, turning her head this way and that on the skimpy pillow.* Alarmed by this gibberish-like sound, Mattachich propped himself on one elbow and tried to cup her temples in his hands and hold her head still. He wanted her to look at him but she resisted, laughing at first, until her laughter developed a life of its own, as the word had done. He poured some water into a glass and stood over the bed, trying to get her to drink it. When she had calmed down enough to explain to him what the syllables meant and how the name had come into her mind, he smiled, though he did not enjoy having his bedroom compared to a whore’s (which he knew it did not resemble at all; it was bare, bleak, masculine).
He got back in the bed and they continued to lie side by side. As if in a vision that was also a sensation, both at once, she saw and felt herself as a part of the house, nothing more, as immobile as the stones of which it was built. Every stone was rammed against others on all sides; the house itself was rammed between the houses adjacent to it; the basement somewhere below was rammed into the earth. But the earth at last was rammed against nothing; it was a hanging object, turning in space, or so she had been told, and herself somewhere within it. Where was she and what was she doing there? What would become of her? She couldn’t live in a place like this with a man who owned nothing except what she herself had given him. What would he do if she had no more to give? And she? Would her father take her in? Would she ever see her children again?
‘I must get back,’ she said in the same tone as before, but this time she did manage to get up from the bed. She dressed and they rode to the palace in a cab. The faint rain had stopped, leaving no puddles, yet everything still glistened, as if with a black dew. Mattachich accompanied her to the entrance and left her there. She asked one of the footmen where her husband was and went straight to the room the man had indicated. Philipp was smoking a cigar in what he called his study. Gablenz was there, also smoking.
She stood at the door. Her clothing was dishevelled, her face blotched, the plumped-out skin under her eyes stained with iodine hues – brown, violet, yellow. She gestured at Gablenz to leave and Philipp gestured to him to stay. Gablenz stayed.
‘I’m leaving Vienna,’ she said.
‘You have no choice. You’ve been told to go.’
‘I want Dora to come with me.’
‘I’m not discussing arrangements with you. Or anything else. Bachrach will call on you tomorrow. You can speak to him.’
‘I must speak to your Jew?’
‘Yes, Bachrach.’
Earlier in that long day she and Franz Joseph had exchanged the last words they were to address to one another. Though neither knew it, Louise and Philipp too were also never to speak to one another again. She stayed on in the palace, making arrangements for her own and her daughter’s departure. Sometimes she heard Philipp’s voice from a distance; sometimes he heard hers. But the messages that passed between them were carried by servants or by Dr Adolf Bachrach, Doctor of Jurisprudence, Geheimer Justizrat, Regierungsrat, Hof- und Gerichts-Advokat.*
Of Bachrach, more later. For the moment he can be left doing what he has always done best: going about his duty as his master’s indispensable middleman and counsellor; a man who knows where his loyalties lie but who tries at all times to be as fair to others as circumstances permit. Or at least to appear as if that is what he is doing.
Mattachich did not see out the fourteen days of grace he had asked for when told of his banishment from Vienna. There was no point, he felt, in hanging about. After Louise had visited him in his apartment, the messages he sent her produced only brief, distant replies, as if she could not forgive him for something he had said or done to her. His requests for a meeting she ignored. She did not attempt to visit him again. Remembering how strange her mood had been when he had last parted from her, he did not dare to go to the palace to seek her out. In any case he had no wish to see Philipp accidentally, or to be turned out of the grounds because the servants had been told to keep him away. A fracas was the last thing he wanted.
So, after collecting from camp various things he had left there, and having made sure that officially the army still had him down as being on an extended leave of absence, he left Vienna for Lobor, Croatia. From the telegraph office in the nearest market-town he sent Louise a telegram telling her where he was, but giving no indication of what he intended to do next. This ‘military tactic’ – as he thought of it – worked. The first telegram he received from her was reproachful. How could he have left Vienna without telling her? What had she done to deserve such treatment? He did not respond. Her next message was beseeching. Thereafter messages went back and forth between them fairly frequently, though each one he sent or received involved a morning’s journey – by horse, pony trap, or bicycle – to and from the town. They were both cautious in the language they used in these messages, since they suspected the authorities were monitoring them. Coming or going, it pleased Mattachich to think how impressed the local telegraphist must be by what he was transmitting to Louise, and to imagine the man talking about it to others. How many people in that dead-and-alive place sent telegrams to a royal highness and received affectionate telegrams from her in return?
And if it was part of the telegraphist’s duties to pass copies of these telegrams to the police in Agram, or direct them to some office in Vienna, why should he care? What could they learn about him that they didn’t already know? What could they do to him that they hadn’t already done?
Mattachich had been a child when his stepfather, Oskar Keglevich, had been driven out of the family home, Schloss Lobor, by his own father. In old Keglevich’s view it was bad enough that his son Oskar had taken up with a married woman, Anna Mattachich; what made it worse was that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Roman Catholic priest and thus doubly, irredeemably, even sacrilegiously tainted in his eyes.* Oskar responded to his banishment from the Schloss by moving into the house in Tomasevich which his mistress shared with her husband and her son – and remaining there. Fifteen years later old Keglevich died and the Schloss fell into Oskar’s hands. He returned to it almost immediately and Anna followed him not long after.
Her husband, Mattachich’s father, remained behind in Tomasevich, where he set about quietly drinking himself to death. Or so everyone thought. But he knew better. He went on drinking and did not die. Géza, the son, was in his last year as a high school student at the time of his mother’s move, and chose her new abode over the old one. He never went back to see his father. The only thing about the house in Tomasevich he missed occasionally was that talismanic coin he had buried and exhumed so many times in the past. But it was not enough to draw him back. Nothing would draw him back. Eventually Anna’s husband agreed to divorce her (on being paid for his cooperation in the matter) and Oskar Keglevich was at last free to marry Anna and thus make an honest Gräfin of her.
It was in this way that she became the official chatelaine of the Schloss Lobor.* Its stuccoed front and sides, painted in a faded lemon colour, looked over ploughed fields and roughly mown meadows; beyond were steep hills strewn irregularly with firs and birches. Not far off, in the nearest cleft in the hills, was the ancient settlement of Lobor, complete with a church steeple, an inn, two or three stores, a mill, a bridge, a doctor and other such amenities. Looking out of the upper windows of the Schloss one could see some of its buildings thrust forward from the cleft, like the pale, projecting paw of an animal.
Mattachich had only occasionally visited the place since he had left school. On his first evening back he told Keglevich and his mother that Princess Louise and her daughter Dora were about to go travelling in France and Germany and that he had accepted the princess’s invitation to accompany them as her Kammerherr, or chamberlain. His friend, a fellow Croatian and fellow uhlan by the name of Artur Ozegovich, would be taking over his job as the princess’s Stallmeister. No, he did not know how long he would be away or how far his employer’s travels would take her. He had come to Lobor simply to see his mother and Oskar before he set out on these travels. Also to find out if there was anything he could do to speed up this adoption business – for which he would always be more grateful to the count than he could express.
He was calm, measured, detached, minimally truthful. He had always protected himself from them both, and from his father, in this manner.
Over the following days nothing changed. Louise’s messages told him she was ‘arguing about money’; she wasn’t going to let herself be ‘hurried’ by Philipp’s lawyer, who was trying to ‘swindle’ her out of what she was entitled to; she would let Mattachich know immediately once things were ‘sorted out’. Sure once again of her dependence on him, he telegraphed back that he was content to wait until she sent for him. He knew few people in the neighbourhood, but it was easy enough to get on with the tenants of the estate and the people he drank with in the inn, who treated him with a gratifying deference. The count’s name may not have cut much ice in Vienna, but it meant a great deal here. He went into Agram twice and stayed overnight on both occasions; there too the name ‘Keglevich’ was recognized. The city was livelier and more populous than he had remembered it; since his last visit it had acquired some ambitious new public buildings and gardens. He found it pleasant to be a Croatian in the Croatian capital once again, and constantly to hear around him the language he had learned first and would always know better than any other.
The short days were cold but sunny, with occasional sudden cloudings-over and brief falls of snow. In Lobor the snow clung to the fir trees’ thick swatches of needles, but left the birches bare. They stood like inverted besoms, their handles stuck in the ground and their heads raised towards the hard blue sky. At night he went to his bedroom and stared at the sweet-smelling log fire that was always burning there, or stood at the window looking into the darkness. Stars came out in handfuls, in fiery swarms. The hills cut oblique shapes out of the display and so did passing clouds, discernible only by the disappearance of the stars. Then they emerged, seeming to shine more brightly than before. The empty house creaked in the cold; footfalls resounded along its wooden-floored corridors; muffled voices came from the servants’ quarters at the back. After the upheavals he had been through, the silence inside the house and the vacancy outside it came as a relief. Nobody here knew what had been happening to him and he liked them better for it. He liked himself better for it too. He marvelled at how much there was in the world at large that was not himself, and wondered why from his childhood onwards he had always felt this so-much-elseness as a threat instead of finding in it a strange reassurance, even happiness. If trees, mountains, stars, night, winter, an owl vehemently hooting in the darkness out there – if they had not existed, then he would not have done so either. He took up space and had weight, as they did; he was made of the same materials as they were. The difference was that he knew how transient he was and they did not. But what would they be without his awareness of them? How diminished they would be, even if they did not know it! Why had he repeatedly buried and dug up that coin in the ground in Tomasevich if not to humiliate himself, to exacerbate his feelings of exclusion and powerlessness? Why should he want to do something like that?
During one of these half-vacant, half-intense spells of idleness the prospect of staying on in Lobor suddenly presented itself to him – as a temptation. In the same moment (or so it seemed) he knew why the idea had entered his head. He could afford to be tempted now. Look what he had done over the last months. He had pursued and conquered a princess – a princess! – and that was precisely the reason he was now free to turn away from her if he wished. When the test had come he had not flinched. He was in no danger of falling prey to the shame that might otherwise have gnawed away at his life: the shame of having been too craven and too humble to reach for what the world would have considered to be for ever beyond him. That fear was done with, behind him. How many of the subalterns in the regiment, some of them born to grander families and raised more advantageously than himself, would have recognized the challenge that had suddenly risen before him in the Prater – would have been capable of recognizing it as a challenge – and dared to seize hold of it? How many of them would have dared to find themselves in the position he was now in, sitting by the fireplace, staring out of the window, drafting his next message to Louise?
What a question!
The next morning he got up with the intention of telling his mother the truth about his life during the last several months in Vienna. And in Abbazia too. It seemed logical, somehow. Over a solitary breakfast he learned from one of the servants that the count had left for Agram that morning, and that the countess was in the ‘office’. He finished the meal rapidly and went to see her, fearing a change in his own mind if he did not do it immediately.
The ‘office’ was the room from which Anna Mattachich managed not only the household but the entire estate. (Lordly, underemployed Oskar had little taste for such matters.) The room was one of the oldest in the house, a survivor from an earlier building: a sunken affair with leaded windows running high up along its external wall and five great, naked beams across the ceiling. From the middle beam hung a circular, cast-iron candelabra with a chain and pulley anchored to a bolt in the floor, to lower and raise it. As big and heavy as a cartwheel, it had many thick, upright candles fixed on to it. They were not alight now, but on the lumpy, yellowed ceiling above there was a ring of discrete stains that showed exactly where the smoke from each candle-holder had risen over the last hundred years and more. The only advantage this room had for his mother’s purposes, as far as Mattachich could see, was the open door to one side that enabled her to listen to everything going on in and near the kitchen.
She was alone, seated at the large, scarred table with various papers lying on it. He kissed her hand and her averted cheek. He asked if she could spare some time for him. She pushed her papers aside and put on top of them a paperweight in the shape of a bronze hand with an erect pointing finger. As always, he felt uncomfortable under her gaze. She had curiously flat blue eyes with little or no curve to their white and iris; they looked out at close quarters to what was in front of her, while allowing no access for others to look into her own mind. Her black satin dress was buttoned severely to the neck and down to the wrists; her thick greying hair was compressed as closely to her skull as brisk brushing and fierce pinning could make it; even the bun sitting high up at the back of her head was as tight as a fist. Yet for all that was stiff, stuffed, almost bolster-like about her appearance, her neatly proportioned features were clear, her brow was calm, and her pale, cool skin always had a seemingly new-washed freshness to it.
He began, or tried to begin, by confessing that he had ‘something to say’ that he’d been holding back from her and Oskar. It was about –
She let him go no further. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We know all about you and your princess.’
‘You know!’
‘Of course. Where do you think we’re living? In Africa?’
‘Why didn’t you say anything to me?’
‘Why didn’t you say anything to us?’
That silenced him. Then: ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
Her pale lips widened but remained secretively closed, as if her amusement – if it was amusement – came from something remembered, not from what he had just said.
‘That was very considerate of you.’
Again they sat in silence. She glanced towards the papers she had put aside. The moment seemed to be slipping from him. So he began again. He tried to describe Louise as he saw her, and as he wished his mother to see her. Her boldness and insecurity; her unhappiness with her husband; her loneliness and naivety; the extraordinarily formal, ceremonious, hemmed-in life she had led and how little, he thought, it had affected her, and how little she had got out of it. As for himself, he went on, struggling still, how exciting it was for him to be with her. How amazing. Unbelievable. A lieutenant in the uhlans! How she made him feel that everything he did with her was important.
But it was hard too, he confessed. He felt…empty sometimes. As if she were too much for him and he – not enough for her.
His mother listened without questioning or prompting him, her gaze resting evenly on him, one hand at the collar of her dress, the other flat on the table, palm down.
After a silence he said abruptly: ‘I’ve been thinking since I’ve been here. Maybe I shouldn’t go back. To her, I mean. It would be a struggle for me and for her too if I broke away, but…I’m here and you’re here and Oskar, and I see how you live, and I think, I can live like that. It’s not so bad. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
He hadn’t known the last phrase to be lurking in his mind, lying in wait for his unguarded tongue. Instantly he wanted it unspoken. But it was out now. His mother responded with a swallowing movement in her pale throat; nothing else. Her eyes remained fixed on his. He waited. When she spoke finally it was as quietly as before.
‘That’s what you’ve always felt about me, isn’t it? Don’t say anything: I know. Now listen to me. I have never, never been ashamed of myself. Not for a moment. Even when I was wretched, and I’ve been wretched often, it wasn’t because I was ashamed of who I am or what I’ve done in my life. It made me suffer to know that you were ashamed of me, but that didn’t mean I had to share what you felt. Never. You have your life; I have mine. If this great lady gives you what you want, some of what you want, take it. Don’t throw your chance away. Make the most of it. Do what you can. There’s nothing here for you. Believe me,’ she said, ‘I know.’ She pointed scornfully at the chair on which her husband usually sat when he was in the room with her. ‘So does he.’
The desolation of childhood welled up in Mattachich; it occupied its old place inside him, as if nothing else had ever been there. He thought angrily: she still looks down on me. Also: she was right; there was nothing for him there.
Before he left the room – they had sat silently together for some time, as much at peace with one another as they ever would be – she said to him, ‘You must speak to Oskar. You must tell him what you’ve said to me.’
‘But he knows it all, surely – if you –?’
‘Of course. But he must hear it from you. He said you’d never leave us without boasting about what you’ve been up to in Vienna.’
That night he found himself tumbling over and over again into dreams that flowed remorselessly into and out of each other and yet remained the same, always seemed to be telling the same incoherent story. He was alone in various unnameable sets of buildings (an army camp, or a railway station, or a school, or a government office, or all of them at once), thronged with people who were strangers to him, though occasionally someone he did not know emerged from the crowd to stare intimately at him from just a few inches away, as if he or she knew him well, and to say words he could not hear in the hubbub. Always he had some duty to carry out (meet someone, find something, pass on a message), but could never recall why he had been chosen for the task and what was to come after it; nor, often enough, what the mission itself had been. All he was left with was a sense of its importance and urgency, and a conviction of his ignominious failure to carry it out.
Then he woke and knew just where he was, with dawn showing itself slate-blue against the window and a faint worm-like glow among the cinders in the fireplace.
Another morning. Surely he had been waiting here for too long. He sent a telegram by messenger to Louise saying he had had enough of Croatia and couldn’t bear to be away from her any longer. The next day he cycled to the telegraph office hoping to find a reply from her. But there was no message. Instead, outside the office he bumped into his stepfather, who had just got off the coach from Agram and was waiting to be picked up by someone from the Schloss. So they left a message for the man and went into a small, brown, sticky private room in an inn near by, with high-backed settles and scarred tables, and an ineffable reek of vanished meals, spilt drinks, pipes and cigars smoked to extinction.
Once they were seated Oskar told Mattachich that while in Agram he had been to his lawyer’s office and had signed the last of his adoption papers.
‘So you are now my son,’ he announced solemnly.
The two shook hands. For a moment neither knew what to say. Keglevich withdrew his hand and said, ‘We must drink to it.’ A bottle of grape-spirit was brought to their table. Two small glasses of the transparent liquid were filled and clinked together. First, a toast to Keglevich. They drank it off at a gulp. Then a toast to the Gräfin, put away in the same manner. Finally a toast to ‘Mattachich-Keglevich’, as the younger man, he told his newfound father, had been styling himself for some time past.
Another silence followed. At heart each had always regarded the other’s existence as unnecessary, an embarrassment, even an affront; something they would have preferred to do without, if the choice had only been offered to them. They were tied to each another through the woman between them: nothing else. Taking a deep breath Mattachich launched himself into his ‘confession’ and Keglevich listened greedily, asking questions from time to time about Louise and his relations with her that his wife had been too proud to ask. All this in a tone of indifferent, blasé knowingness about such matters, of course. Tall, slender, grey-bearded, high-coloured, half-heartedly a dandy, always ready to talk about the two years of his late adolescence he had spent in Paris, Keglevich looked younger than he was. His movements were lithe; his suits hung loosely on his frame; around his neck he invariably wore a bright silk cravat in a single colour (yellow today); across his flat stomach there hung a gold chain in a hammock-shaped curve, from which several seals and a small watch were suspended. His voice was loud and his laugh a series of discrete, humourless, cough-like sounds that expressed not mirth but the intention to express mirth. Occasionally his lips could be seen working and the muscles around his right eye flickering before the words he wanted came out: not because he was deliberating deeply but because some blocked thing within him was showing itself stronger than his will.
‘You still haven’t told me what made you come here [pause] and tell us a pack of lies [pause] about what you’ve been doing. As if we wouldn’t know, and wouldn’t feel insulted at being treated like fools…Stallmeister? Bettmeister! That’s the job for an ambitious young man with a rich old lady-friend.’
Mattachich stood up, a little unsteadily. The three drinks he had put down so rapidly had had an effect on him. ‘I will not permit you to speak about her highness the Princess Louise in that way.’
‘Excellent! Excellent!’ Kegelvich exclaimed. He laughed, producing from the roof of his mouth three hollow sounds of no meaning.
‘That’s right, defend your lady’s honour. Always. I expect nothing else from a son of mine.’
Mattachich was still on his feet. ‘I’m not going back to your house after this. You can send my things here, to the inn.’
‘Excellent! Excellent!’ Keglevich repeated, in the same manner as before.
After this exchange of angry words and scornful looks, they went on drinking together for another couple of hours. It was easier for Mattachich to talk to this man, whom he disliked, than to his mother, whom he feared. Also, they got on better in her absence than they ever did in her presence.
However, he was true to his word in one respect. He did not return to the Schloss. The driver from Lobor took Keglevich and the bicycle there, and reappeared the following day at the inn with the luggage Mattachich had left behind. He remained where he was while waiting for instructions from Louise.
Three days later he left Agram for Paris. In Vienna he changed trains but did not leave the station. The bustle, the crowds of people, the noise that rose to the station’s high, glassed-over roof, reminded him of the dreams he had had in Lobor. But he was not bewildered by what was around him. He knew why he was there and where he was going.
He was to stay in Lobor just once again, about eighteen months later, accompanied by Louise. During the decades that followed he occasionally thought of those wintry weeks he had spent in the Schloss as a lost opportunity; a chance he had passed up of leading another life altogether. In these moods he blamed his mother for not pleading with him to stay. Who could say what might have happened if she had? At other times the whole episode seemed to him absurd: a piece of play-acting he had briefly persuaded himself to take seriously. Dreams! Freedom! A quiet, provincial life! For him? What nonsense it was.