Читать книгу Partner in Three Worlds - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 20

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I WISH I could say now that I knew at once on the twenty-eighth of June in 1914 that something of far-reaching importance had happened, but if I did it would not be true. As far as I could see, it was only a hot summer holiday dedicated to the memory of St. Vitus. Late in the afternoon extra newspaper editions were cried on the streets to tell of the assassination of the Archduke and his Duchess in Sarajevo. Few people knew they had gone to Serbia or why they were there. There was no emotion to be seen as the news was read, nor was there any visible feeling of regret. As the following weeks went by the newspapers were filled with words of righteous wrath which emanated from the Foreign Office in Vienna, but no one paid much attention to them.

Those were weeks in which I had enough to do in worrying about myself. Shortly before the Sarajevo incident I had received a degree from the Commercial Academy. It carried with it no honors, for I had managed to pass my final examinations by the skin of my teeth. Throughout the preceding winter Uncle had been writing to us more frequently than usual. His letters carried admonitions to me to do well at the academy, but they also filled me with hope because he kept talking about the fine recommendations he would give me once my course was over. Leo was about to receive a degree of Doctor of Medicine from the University of Berlin, and once his tuition fees ceased, Uncle would be able to send a larger allowance for Mother and his parents.

As soon as Uncle learned of the results of my final examinations he wrote without delay. Under no circumstance could he now endanger his honor and good name by recommending me to any of his friends or associates in the banking world of Prague. I would have to get along on my own and find employment where I could. As for the increased allowance, his plans in that direction were altered, too. Leo, it seemed, had changed his mind about becoming a doctor. He was really a genius, Uncle explained, and he had discovered just in time that his talents lay in another direction. Instead of leaving school, he was now going back to the university to begin again, this time working toward a degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with scientific research his aim. Uncle felt sure we would all be proud at hearing this. Unfortunately, his expenses would be heavier than ever now, and he felt the time had come when we must all get along without his aid. He was transferring his burden to me.

It was senseless for me to hunt for a job during July. All businessmen in Prague went into the country for a month or two each summer, and while they were gone few transactions of any kind were made. Moreover, during this July there was an added reason for making no commitments and hiring no new employees.

On the last day but three in July, I was scuffing my heels on the pavements as usual. Every morning I went out and walked until I was too tired to go farther, using the crowds and the heat and the noises of the city as an anesthetic against thought. The brass notes of a band came along a side street, measured by drums. The heads of the crowd turned to watch and I stood watching too as the band, followed by soldiers, marched past.

There was something different in the atmosphere of this particular morning that I couldn’t define. Military bands and marching soldiers were to be seen often. Were there more people on the streets today than usual? Or was it only the tempo of everything that seemed different? Everyone seemed to be moving more slowly. Except the soldiers. Not much. Not at all, if I watched closely. Only when I didn’t watch, I felt it.

I began to walk slower myself, on guard. Not much slower. Not so anyone could notice. Then I began to watch, too, to wait for a sign. I realized everyone else was doing the same thing. Watching and waiting. For what? These people weren’t all out of jobs, worried and frightened as I was.

The crowd along the curb began to disintegrate into errand boys and women on shopping excursions and men late for work and children with nothing else to do. Perhaps it was all inside my own imagination. I began to walk a little faster. Then I realized that most of the people on the street who had stopped to watch the band and the marching soldiers were Germans and Austrians. A Czech always felt things like that in Prague, even someone in a stupor as thick as mine.

On the Karlové náměstí I met Eisenstein. He had to speak to me before I saw him. “They’ve crossed the border,” he said. “Before dawn this morning. The ultimatum expired at midnight.”

“Who’s crossed what border?” I replied.

“Our troops, of course. They’re on their way to Belgrade. Now Russia’s mobilizing, and that means Germany’ll be in it, too.”

I looked at the sunshine reflected in the shop windows, at the faces of people passing, at the cars moving in a smooth line down the middle of the street. “What day is it?” I said.

“The twenty-seventh ... no, the twenty-eighth. Berlin pulled that trigger when it went off in Sarajevo, if ever ...”

“Have you got a cigarette?” I said.

Eisenstein looked at me hard, offered me a light, and than gave me a pat on the arm. “Well, see you sometime,” he said. “I’m working in my old man’s office. There’s a nice little piece standing over there on the corner with her eye on us. If I weren’t busy I’d ... well, so long. See you sometime.”

I went on my way aimlessly, forgetting almost at once what Eisenstein had said. I was thinking about his good fortune in having a father with an office where he could work without question of honors or no honors attached to his degree. By the time I got home late in the afternoon I was tired and hungry, and I hardly answered intelligibly when Mother spoke to me. She had to say the same thing twice before my mind took account of her words.

The husband of one of her customers had sent her word that he would give me a job. He was the general manager of a factory in Smichov that manufactured kitchen and sanitary ware. The factory had received enormous orders from the government for field water bottles, messtins, drinking cups and other aluminum eating utensils for the army. The bookkeeper needed an assistant. I was to see the bookkeeper at once.

So I found my first job. The bookkeeper was almost totally deaf, but he could add and subtract like a machine. I sat at a high desk in the same cubicle with him all day long, listening to him talk when he wasn’t poring over books, but never able to answer because he wouldn’t have heard a thing I said. I took orders from him and did as I was told. He instructed me in orderly behavior in an office, outlined my duties which consisted exclusively of entering orders from retailers in a large account book in a neat and precise hand, and impressed upon me the necessity of promptness in getting to my desk on time. My salary was eighty crowns, or approximately sixteen dollars a month.

Those were the months when war spread over the Continent and the first battles got under way, but I was able to think of little besides my new work. It was important that I should keep that job. The factory was only a four-minute walk from our apartment house, so I could leave in the morning and again at noon when the five-minute whistle blew and be on the stool before my desk on the hour. By the end of the first week I knew all there was to know about entering figures in large books to indicate the size of orders that came in not only from the government but from retail shops as far away as towns in South America. After that the work was simply a matter of routine, stupid, deadly and inescapably dull. I was given to understand from the first that no advancement was possible, and there was no place higher in the factory where I could eventually hope to go.

Slowly the war began to work its way into my consciousness. I still saw Julča once or twice a week, to walk home with her when her work was done. Her talk now was of the things she overheard in the café among the officers. Because she hated all military men, she hated war as a device engineered by the army for its own glory. We took it for granted that it was the same in the countries which were now our enemies.

Headlines containing the names of strange battlefields had no meaning. We were unable to think what fighting between French and Germans and Austrians would be like. France, to me, meant only a mean, petty French teacher whom I had hated in school. England meant Charles Dickens whom I had admired and read often in translation. But Dickens, an Englishman himself, had told us how cruel and despicable his own countrymen were. It was all right if our soldiers killed Murdstones and Uriah Heeps. Russians were better known to us, because they, too, were Slavs. But I knew about the dreadful conditions existing in Russia under the czars, so I felt it was a bad country and thought of Russian aristocracy as our opponents. As for the Serbs, they were Slavs, too, but the revolting murder of the King of Serbia and his wife Draga in 1903 by their own people had made such a lasting impression of horror on me that I considered them too disorderly and brutal for respect.

Mother seemed to me to cry constantly during these autumn months of 1914. She cried for those who were doomed to die on both sides, for crippled Frenchmen and wounded Russians, as well as bereaved Viennese families and shocked Czechs here at home. She was unconscious of any political meaning in the war, so she prayed each night for all soldiers on fields of battle, and thanked God I had been born too late to go through this horrible holocaust which was going to be over, praise be, by Christmas.

Grandfather confined his activities these days exclusively to the reading of newspapers. When he had read every word in every paper in Ludvik’s shop, he wandered into the parks and picked up more papers from the benches and brought them home. He needed a strong magnifying glass to make out even the blackest headlines, and it is doubtful if he derived the full import of anything he read. Day after day he damned the Japanese. They were the cause of all this unhappiness in the world, even to the battles then raging in Galicia. When I tried to argue with him, he brushed me aside. He knew what he was talking about and I was a mere child with no opinions worth considering.

Grandmother took no notice of the war at all. Even when Mother’s orders began to fall off sharply until they disappeared almost altogether, and my sixteen dollars a month had to serve as our sole income, she chose to believe we were deliberately trying to make her hungry and uncomfortable, and her complaints never ceased.

When Christmas came and went and the war was still going on, the impact of its meaning on the lives of everyone in Prague began to show more clearly. I found myself holding the pen suspended above the big account book whenever a military band marched by the windows of our office. I found myself watching men in uniform on the streets, trying to imagine what they had been like in civilian clothes. Suddenly petty clerks and factory hands would appear at their posts in the factory to say good-by, wearing uniforms now and all but sneering in the faces of their superiors who had as suddenly lost all the glamour of their high positions. It was astonishing and faintly exciting to watch these superintendents and office managers become overly polite to the soldiers who had once quailed under their glances, and try to explain why they were physically unfit for military service themselves.

Then individual stories of heroism began to filter back from the front, and any man in uniform on the streets was looked upon as an important personality. Girls turned down dates with anyone but an officer, or a soldier if no officers were available. There was a permanent clank of spurs on the streets, the shine of high patent-leather boots and the color of red breeches on members of cavalry regiments. When the first uniforms of field-gray battle dress were seen in town they were considered mysterious and intriguing, because their wearers were known to have come through one of these new-fashioned battles of trenches and many nationalities and modern weapons.

And then there were the black, casket-like boxes being carried through the streets. These were wooden chests, painted black and marked in white to indicate regiment and battalion, which were given to all reservists for carrying their personal effects. Often now we saw crowds of young men carrying these black chests, young men and middle-aged ones, usually drunk and singing in every language of the empire. They were always going in one direction, up the hilly streets to the Bruska Barracks, where they sat on the steps outside until their names were called and officers in beautiful uniforms walked among them to greet those they recognized from the last classes of compulsory military training groups.

I began to meet friends from the Commercial Academy, looking like young gods in the uniform of the Windischgrätz Dragoons. And in the winter months of 1915 wounded soldiers began to pour into Prague through the Franz Josef Bahnhof, wearing Cossack caps and carrying Russian swords captured from their fallen enemies. We only saw the ones whose wounds were slight. Crowds shouted at the carloads of these soldiers as they passed along the streets, and cigarettes and flowers were thrown into their laps.

By the spring of 1915 I had fallen into the habit of working in the factory until midnight and after. When there was no work of my own to do, I found someone else’s. It was monotonous and dreary, but it was better than walking the streets with their disturbing encounters, and it was much better than staying at home to listen to Grandfather’s whimsical and old-fashioned opinions and watch Mother’s expression which was worse than if she had openly revolted against the life we were living.

As the nights grew warmer I braved the surges of young people on the streets who sang and shouted as though the restraint of a cumbersome past had been put aside forever, and Julča and I would sit until nearly dawn on benches in a park near the abattoir. The wide, impersonal sense of drama which had been building through the winter and into the spring was becoming focused at last, straight on me.

“Why don’t you enlist?” she said one night, as though she had been thinking about it a long time and now had heard her cue.

It was strange how her question added nothing new to my mind. I hardly listened as she talked on. For a long while my subconscious had been working on a consuming desire. It had come to the surface at last and I couldn’t pretend it out of existence any more. Our cigarettes were flecks of light in the tunnel of darkness under the trees.

“I won’t be nineteen for another three weeks,” I said. “I’m not eligible to be drafted for two years. Mother will never consent to sign my papers now, and there’s no other way I can get into the army.”

“Have you asked her?” Julča said.

I waited a moment before I answered. “No, I haven’t asked her,” I said finally. “What’s the use? I know how she feels. My grandfather’s ill and she has enough worries without my adding any more. It would just about kill her if I left her now.”

It was a relief to admit to myself at last what I really wanted to do. But I would still have to wait, and try to find a way. Julča went on to talk about my taking an officer’s training course. There would be no need to shoot Russians, she kept saying. If I was smart I could find a good desk job for myself that would pay well in the army. Plenty of others were doing it. Why shouldn’t I howl with the wolves? I was almost happy that night for the first time in many months. I kissed her gently when I left her at her gate.

Once the longing to get into the war had been acknowledged in my conscious mind, I could think of nothing else. I hadn’t the slightest scrap of political feeling, and I gave not a moment’s reflection to the right or the wrong or what the war was about. I saw it as my only chance of escape from a life I could no longer endure. Not only would it enable me to get away from home, but it offered unlimited possibilities for adventure and eventual success. I saw myself becoming a famous hero overnight. I was entitled to join an officer’s training course because I had a college degree, and I suddenly realized I could send more money home from my pay than I could hope to do if I stayed at my desk in the factory. If I were killed, Mother would have a pension for life.

But chiefly I thought about the exciting possibility of being sent to wonderful and strange countries that I could never otherwise hope to see. If I didn’t get into the army soon, my last chance of escape would be gone. The idea became an obsession. Somehow, I must get Mother’s consent.

Grandfather grew more feeble every day. Three times in two weeks he took a few pieces of silverware that Mother gave him to a government pawnshop, where he had to stand in long lines to exchange them for a few crowns and a certificate. They were wedding presents and a silver spoon I had received when I was born. The last time he came home big tears were running into his beard. He lay down on his bed and looked straight up at the ceiling. By the end of another week he had forgotten there was so little in the house, and in his delirium began to ask for chocolate. It was the first time in his life he had ever asked for anything, and Mother had to refuse because there wasn’t a penny in the house.

One rainy night at the end of March I returned home from the factory as usual shortly after midnight. I was hungry and weary and forlorn. When I reached the courtyard in front of our building I raised my eyes automatically to our apartment. All the windows in all the apartments in the courtyard were closed as usual for the night, except one. The window in the room where Grandfather slept was open and the white curtains were blowing out. Windows were opened in Smichov at night for one reason only ... to let out the soul of someone who had just died.

When I opened our door I could see Mother in the room Grandfather and I shared, kneeling beside the bed. A white linen coverlet was over his face. Grandmother sat looking out the window, her eyes as expressionless as ever. When she heard me, Mother rose and took me in her arms, trying to comfort me. I could neither cry nor speak. Something in me envied Grandfather because our troubles were no longer of any concern to him.

I sat with Mother all night beside his bed. Just before dawn she went into the kitchen to make some fresh coffee. When she came back I took the cup she offered and then quickly, without looking at her, I said, “I’m going into the army, if you’ll sign my papers.” My voice was very tired.

She put one hand over her heart and just stood there in the middle of the room, beside Grandfather’s bed. Before she could say anything I went on. “I can’t live here any longer, Mother.”

Had I given her long arguments about how much I wanted to be a soldier she would have known the answers to dissuade me. No doubt she had been saving them for this moment for a long time. But what I did say hurt her all the way through. She simply stood still and said nothing, and then she turned and went back to the kitchen.

There wasn’t a single sound in the house, anywhere. The lack of it was a weight, pressing against my mind. There was too much to think about, so I could think of nothing. I could only hear the blood pounding in my ears, beating out a black rhythm like the sound of drums. I looked about the room. Once it had been a refuge and sanctuary, but it wasn’t now. There was a worn suit on a hanger in one corner, and next to it some of Grandfather’s clothes. A battered alarm clock ticked on a table beside the iron bed where Grandfather lay. The clock and the clothes were meaningless, and no part of me. A small volume of poetry was on the table. I picked it up and put it into my inside coat pocket. I tried not to notice the form under the coverlet on the bed.

No one was in the other room as I went through. Grandmother was with Mother in the kitchen and the door was closed. I could hear Mother sobbing faintly. The only man I had ever loved had done me this last service. Mother was crying her heart out, but Grandfather served as the cause and I was relieved of feeling that her tears were for me.

I went through the courtyard and into the early dawn. On the same hilly streets where so many others had climbed in the last months, I made my way to the Bruska Barracks. A line had already formed when I got there. The doctor laughed as he tapped my flat chest, but he passed me, and then a recruiting officer asked me where I wanted to serve. I didn’t know. I had no money to buy two horses, which was the requirement of an aspirant for officer’s stripes in the cavalry. All I was sure of was that I didn’t want to serve in Prague. So I wrote “Kaiser und Königliches Infanterie Regiment 91” on the application blank because I remembered that some of my comrades from the academy had joined that unit, and an hour later I was sworn in and posted to Česká Budějovice.

A life of adventure had begun for me at last.