The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth Page B

the viscous ruby-red liquid from the dark-green bottle, and repeats, “Please do me the honor, Herr Baron!” The lieutenant pours water from the carafe into the raspberry juice; they remain silent. The water plunges from the sinuous mouth of the carafe, splashes a bit, and is like a small response to the tireless pouring of the rain outside, which they have been hearing all along. The rain, they know, envelops the lonesome house and seems to make the two men even more lonesome. They are alone. Carl Joseph raises his glass, the sergeant does likewise; the lieutenant tastes the sweet, sticky liquid. Slama drains his glass at one draught, he’s thirsty, a strange, inexplicable thirst on this cool day.
    “Joining the Tenth Lancers?” asks Slama.
    “Yes. I don’t know which regiment.”
    “I know a sergeant there, Zenower, he’s in the audit department. He and I served with the riflemen, then he transferred. A great guy, very educated! He’s sure to pass the officer’s exam. People like us stay put. There are no prospects in the constabulary.”
    The rain has grown more intense, the gusts are more vehement, the drops keep pelting the window. Carl Joseph says, “It’s generally difficult in our profession—I mean the military!” The sergeant bursts into a puzzling laughter; he seems utterly delighted that the profession practiced by him and the lieutenant is a difficult one. He laughs a bit harder than he intends. You cantell by his mouth, which is wider open than his laughter requires and which remains open longer than it lasts. So for an instant the sergeant, if only for physical reasons, might seem to have trouble regaining his normal earnest self. Is he truly delighted that he and Carl Joseph have such a difficult life?
    “Herr Baron,” the sergeant begins, “is good enough to speak of ‘our’ profession. Please do not take it amiss, but it’s quite different for our kind.”
    Carl Joseph does not know how to respond. He feels—vaguely—that the sergeant is nursing a grudge toward him, perhaps toward the overall conditions in the army and the constabulary. At military school they never learned anything about how an officer is to conduct himself in this kind of situation. At any rate, Carl Joseph smiles, a smile that pulls down and squeezes his lips together like an iron clamp; he looks as if he is being chary with expressing pleasure, which the sergeant heedlessly fritters away. The raspberry drink, so sweet upon the tongue, sends a bitter, vapid taste back from the throat; it would call for a brandy chaser. The reddish parlor seems lower and smaller than usual; perhaps it is being squashed by the rain.
    On the table lies the familiar album with the hard, shiny brass mountings. Carl Joseph is well acquainted with each and every picture. Sergeant Slama says, “May I?” and opens the album and offers it to the lieutenant. The sergeant is photographed here in mufti, as a young bridegroom at his wife’s side. “In those days I was a still a platoon commander,” he says somewhat bitterly, as if he would rather say that a higher rank would have been more befitting by then. Frau Slama sits next to him in a snug light-colored summer frock with a wasp waist as in an airy armor, a white broad-brimmed hat slanting across her hair. What is this? Has Carl Joseph never seen this picture before? Then why does it look so new to him today? And so old? And so alien? And so ridiculous? Yes, he smiles as if he were viewing a quaint picture from times long gone and as if Frau Slama had never been close and dear to him and as if she had died, not just a few months ago but years ago.
    “She was very pretty! You can tell!” says Carl Joseph, no longer out of embarrassment, as before, but in honest flattery.You have to say something nice about a dead woman in front of the widower you’re condoling with.
    He instantly feels liberated, and also severed from the dead woman, as if everything were snuffed out. It was all a