Waste Land to a Scream: A Gay Science

Novel - 003

3. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” Nietzsche

Budapest – The waning hours of 19 July 1914

The bitter brew was hot within the white cup draining in its blackened juices. István Tisza’s whiskers sought out the strength of the coffee’s body because his own was ebbing very quickly as he wrote on the red blotter on top of the ornate desk in this palace which was dedicated to the Prime Minister of Hungary. He was grabbed and crossed out lines because he did not want to do what they said was going to do: declare war on Serbia.

It was a decision for him to make, but it had already been taken. The other members of the cabinet would not have it any other way because they were already swept up in the chant: “War! War! War!” The original cantor being Chief of Staff von Hötzendorf – what István privately called a fanatic by another name. And now he was swept up in the chanting if not the police. And he realized that even as far away as Berlin the opportunity to engage in bloodshed was just too well calculated. What were the lives of a few hundred thousand men in such schemes as Princes and Kings? Even called Machiavelli would approve of the situation. And so he crossed out and then crossed back in again to give him some out where he could place the blame elsewhere. He hunched over in his gray suit with his white shirt and tried to ignore the demands on his shoulders. He could hear the trees rustle at the base of the building, and he sighed.

This was a formality because the real power lay elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian throne and in the Habsburg-Lorraine, though no one used that last name. The pressure loads down from the monarch rather than up to a pinnacle. The pinnacle was not in Vienna but in Berlin where the real decision would be made whether to risk a war in the Balkans, the dam fool little Balkans, if it meant that all of Europe would catch cold.

He wished that he had seen the Kaiser, who now held in his hand the blank check that the Emperor of all of the Austrian and Hungarian people so desperately wanted from him. He knew the face from pictures and portraits. The glowering brow and massive mustache told everyone that this was a man who wanted to be thought of as the Lord of all. But this is exactly the reverse because he would not have so small a functionary dictate a memo. The Kaiser wanted enormous distances from the idea of war to the actual mechanic clock of conscription.

He looked up through the long fenestra open to the wide city of Budapest with little dots representing buildings. It was still new that electric lights could illuminate the Danube River and far the armed. Each one with a separate conversation or working out of some ledger. He grimly thought that the ledgers were going to be upset with the stroke of a pen dotting the ultimatum. But it was clear that the entire mass of people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire - in its native German, Österreichisch-Ungarische Monarchie. But who would say that in any other tongue by chance? It would be a tuber, a root, to say it in any other language.

He almost sneezed.

But still, he thought of how everyone would move south by the order of this white neoclassical building with a red roof on top. He did not know whether he would survive this encounter if all of the nations collapsed down into a heap. And so he looked at the red dome and white building of the parliament which demanded he sign the ultimatum with a delirious rush so that they could gather up and form in two ranks and rows.

He stopped to sip another taste of coffee, to give him strength for what he did not want to do. The scrawls of lines were forceful but hesitant, with each reading of each word he revolted at what was ordering someone else to do. But it would be him who took the blame - it would be his neck, metaphorically, which was stretched out for the acts. And many of his countrymen would no longer be Hungarian when this happened because all of the pieces would fly apart never having the order to regain their composure. As a king’s man, he knew what he had to do: the signing of a death warrant with stipulations that no sovereign country could bear. No Locust tree would stand this and yet men were going to be bound by a signature which was ripped from their hands. He knew it well because the ultimatum was ripped from his hands by the mob who wanted blood. And he knew he had to work on this fractious task.

He looked at his hands and realized that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow there would be a hell told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. He wished he could be held of the direst cruelty and shivered in fatal compunctions ignoring the hold of his conscience. But it was not to be. So with the stroke of a ballpoint pen, he dispatched his signature and hoped he would not have to answer for it. Signed in a square room, above a triangle pediment, under a circular enclosure. And he knew from that instant that his time in this office would be short. But then most of the men who occupied it were in the same category.

He slipped off his black shoes and saw the lights go out on the Boulevard where horses pranced and men started to march hoping that there and their March would be the ides and tides.