I've just finished reading Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March.
In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent when they saw the gap. When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbours and passers-by alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That's how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively. For a long time afterwards, the feelings of the officers and men of the dragoon regiment, and of the civilian inhabitants of the small town, were shaken and troubled by the deaths of the regimental doctor and Count Tattenbach.
Those words especially stuck in my mind. I am conscious of the past, of the things that are no more and the people who have disappeared. Indeed more so than ever now, with a growing awareness of a vanished birth mother who may be dead of alive, and living here or there if indeed she still lives. Suddenly a fresh mystery has come upon my life, and a new tension.
But, before that, I wandered my Transylvania of exile deeply aware of those who had gone before me: travellers, shepherds, soldiers, aristocrats, traders, invaders, bureaucrats and bandits. Their debris lay all about: old roads, crosses, battlefields, ruined castles, manor houses derelict or converted to state institutions, old border posts, multi-lingual place names and railways heading in peculiar directions. I noticed things that few of the inhabitants seemed aware of. Perhaps I could, who had not lived through communism, whose family had not bloodied its hands, directly or through association, during the fascist era. It was my freedom to see beyond the veils that clouded my neighbours' vision, and my choice to keep quiet or to speak.
Now here in my homeland, or what I suppose it to be, I am aware of the past. I feel the past and the footsteps of those who trod, rode and trudged ways now more or less busy. The main road is busy and clogged with vehicles, whilst the former Roman road sees an occasional pedestrian. I feel the gaps where once the farmer went with his horses, the train once crossed the bare hills, the cavalry exercised, labourers worked, and villagers went about their business. That is all gone, and we have forgotten them all. As Roth said, everything that existed left behind traces of itself. It still does. But when I walked around T E Lawrence's cottage yesterday the press of people caused memory to flee and hide. Tourists sought some glimpse of Lawrence the celebrity, but it was others that rendered him thus, and that reclusive man hated it. Of the private Lawrence, complex and requiring wisdom to understand, subject of an excellent biography by a psychiatrist (A Prince of Our Disorder by Professor John Mack), there was no trace. The guides did not know of Mack's book, and nothing was said to hint at Lawrence being anything other than a slightly eccentric hero who liked to relax in a quiet cottage.
Roth showed me another thing too: which I knew, of course, but had not articulated so clearly. In the final stages of The Radetzky March, as the First World War breaks out on the Eastern Front, the Habsburg regime went about a rather arbitrary selection and execution of "traitors". The retreating army left behind many corpses swinging from trees, whose only "crime" was belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion. So, every regime has its dark side - a shadow and skeletons in the cupboard - however kindly the old emperor might appear. Every country and each corporation, and some religions too. I left exile sickened by the inescapable darkness of the nationality whose country I shared. But here in Britain there is a shadow too, even as we remove those skeletons. Where I work there is a shadow.
I spent a good few years talking up the positive side of Romania, where I lived, and making excuses for the faults. It was the Holocaust that stopped me, for I could not excuse the deeds of my neighbours' parents and grandparents let alone whitewash them when children and grandchildren neither cared nor repented.
Now I am finding a way to get on with life, aware of the national shadow back here in Britain, unable to do much about it, and a little constrained myself by the dark side. It's all about living with duality, I suppose. As well as those internal tensions between opposites, there is a great big duality beyond: fairness versus guarded privilege; civic values pitched against hubris; responsibility opposing unsustainability. Like Roth's characters we are caught up on a runaway train. Unlike those characters we may be able to adapt. The hardest part is to living hopefully. No, I shall not be making excuses for any shadow.
Lieutenant Carl Joseph, Baron von Trotta and Sipolje, the main protagonist of Roth's novel, a soldier for most of his life, longed to be a peasant just like his great-grandfather. Just before war broke out he attained that aim, earning a few brief months of happiness. Then all was sundered by events far beyond his control. I sought to work with horses in a remote mountain village, and that was taken from me by events far less momentous than a war. Unlike Trotta. my life was preserved, and health too. I could have fared much worse. It's best not to hang onto a dream whose fulfilment depends upon good fortune and the favourable outcome of events beyond ones control.
As for being aware of the past, the people and things that have gone, that is a bonus to enrich life.
That leaves the puzzle of what to read after Miklos Banffy and Joseph Roth. Tolstoy, perhaps?
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