The Two-Headed Eagle

In a word, it all sounded utterly dismal. I had already written to my cousins in Poland to seek their help. They had a sizeable estate in the country near Myslenice and had written back to say that Elisabeth would be more than welcome to stay with them for as long as she pleased, both before the birth and afterwards.

She was not pleased when I told her that evening outside the Sud- bahnhof, trying to find a fiacre to take us to the Josefsgasse since the trams were not ru

“But dearest, be reasonable. Surely you can’t want to stay in Vie

“Otto, I’ve stuck the war out so far in Vie

“But she’s old, and you’ve only got Franzi to look after you both now that Frau Niedermayer’s gone into the munitions factory.”

“Just fancy—two grown women forced by the brutal circumstances of war to fend for themselves with only one servant to help them. Mer­ciful heavens, how will they bear such privation? Oh wake up Otto: the day of servants and ladies of leisure has gone now and it’ll never come back. If I can’t do the cooking and look after a baby on my own then I must really be a prize ni

“But why stick in Vie

“I know. But I’ve no other home now, and as for scuttling away to hide in the countryside, be damned to it. The ordinary people of this country have had to suffer a lot because of the emperors and the generals and their precious war. People like us landed them in it, so we ought at least to stick by them now that the going’s getting tough.”

“By Vie

“So it is. But its people are real enough.”

I laughed. “Really Liserl, you’re getting to sound like a socialist these days.”

“Perhaps I am, or becoming one. This war’s making me into a revolu­tionary: or at least someone who thinks that we ought to end it by putting the Kaiser and Ludendorff and Conrad and the rest into opposite holes in the ground and making them toss bombs at each other for a bit to see how they like it.”

We woke next morning about 8:00, huddled together under the eider­down in the chilly flat where the stove was now fired with balls of damp­ened newspaper. A wan, grey late-November light filtered through the window panes, grimy with lignite dust now that the building’s caretaker was dead in Siberia and his successor was too old to clean them. Command of a U-Boat had given me an acute instinct for things not being quite right, and I sensed as soon as I woke that the noise from the street outside was not quite the same as on other mornings: more like a Sunday in fact.

Then Franzi came in with our breakfast on a tray: ersatz coffee, but real white-bread rolls, which my aunt had somehow managed to procure in honour of my visit. My aunt’s maidservant was a girl in her mid-twenties from the suburb of Purkersdorf (or “Puahkersdoarf” as she called it) with fluffy blond hair and great china-blue eyes. Franzi was mildly half-witted, so she had not gone to work in the munitions factories. This morning though she was not her usual equable self. Her doll’s eyes were red-rimmed and she wiped them on her apron, sniffing loudly as she did so.

“What’s the matter, Franzi? ”

“It’s him, Herr Leutnant, he’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“The Old Gentleman, God rest his soul.” She crossed herself. “They say he’s gone and died in the night at Schonbru

It was in this ma

And now he was no more. The presence that had shaped the entire lives of all but a few of his subjects and held together his ethnic dust­bin of an empire by sheer personal prestige; all that was gone. Something changed for ever that November morning. Until now, behind the battle- fronts, a curious unreality had hung over Austria-Hungary’s war. The casu­alties had been immense, but the fighting was far away in other people’s countries for the most part, and cafe society had tended to swallow the cheerfully jaunty headlines in the newspapers without demur: “Przemysl Captured”; “Przemysl Recaptured”; “Przemysl Recaptured Again”; or (a couple of days before the rout of Pfanzer-Balltin’s 4th Army) “Our De­fences in Volhynia in a State of Moderate Readiness.” Now there could no longer be any ignoring the Monarchy’s disastrous plight. People suddenly woke up to the fact that they were cold and hungry, and that still no end to the war was in sight.

The dead Emperor’s withered old body even lay between us in bed that evening. We would normally have fallen into one another’s arms with joy. I had been away for two months now and I had been scrupulously faithful to my wedding vows. But when we held one another it was not the embrace of lovers reunited so much as the clinging together of two children lost in a dark wood.

“Oh Otto,” she said at last, “is it my lump? There, let me move over if it gets in the way.”

“No dearest, it’s not that.”

“Why, don’t you like pregnant ladies then?”

“It’s not that either: you know you’re more beautiful to me now than ever. No, I don’t know why . . .”

She gazed into my eyes. “Oh surely not. You don’t mean you’re up­set over the Old Man? Really, I don’t believe it: not in the twentieth century, surely.”

“It’s not that, Liserl, not really. But try to understand: I’ve been a ser­vant of the House of Austria for sixteen years now, and I’ve hardly ever met anyone who could remember when the old boy wasn’t Emperor. I don’t know why, but it just makes me feel odd inside. Perhaps it’s the war and all I’ve seen these past four months. But I’m still bound by oath to the House of Habsburg.”