Authors: Stefan Zweig
In the annals of the Tyrolean Wine Bar, one of these boxes cannot often have been booked purely so that its occupants
could talk undisturbed. But I would have found it embarrassing to be disturbed as I listened to Dr Condor’s promised
revelations
by the greetings of any of my comrades who came in, or their curious glances, or by having to get to my feet and salute smartly on the appearance of a superior officer. Even the prospect of walking through the common room of the bar with Condor made me feel uncomfortable—what jokes would there be tomorrow if I was seen seeking privacy with this stout stranger?—but I was relieved to see, on entering the place, that the boxes were deserted, not surprising when the end of the month is near in a small garrison town like ours, and the officers are eking out their pay. No one from the regiment was there, and we had our choice of any of the boxes.
Obviously to avoid any further intrusion by the waitress, Condor immediately ordered two litres of white wine, paid for them at once, and gave the girl such a generous tip that she disappeared with a grateful, “Your good health, sir!” The curtain was drawn down, and after that all we could hear, and then only very indistinctly, was a few loud words or a laugh from the tables in the middle of the room. We were secure in our cell, and could not be overheard.
Condor poured wine into the tall glasses, first for me and then for himself. A certain deliberation in his movements told me that he was working out in advance what to tell me, and perhaps what not to tell me as well. When he turned to me, however, the drowsy, ponderous manner that had previously irked me was entirely gone, and there was a look of concentration in his eyes.
“Well, we’d better begin at the beginning, and we can leave the aristocratic Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva right out of it at this point, for that gentleman didn’t even exist yet. There was no owner of a large estate in a black coat and gold-rimmed
glasses, no nobleman or business magnate. There was only a narrow-chested, sharp-eyed little Jewish boy in a poverty-stricken village on the border between Hungary and Slovakia. His name was Leopold Kanitz, but I believe he was generally known as Lämmel Kanitz.”
I must have given a start of surprise, or shown astonishment in some other way. I thought I was prepared for anything—but not this. However, Condor went on, matter-of-fact and smiling.
“Yes, Kanitz, Leopold Kanitz, I can’t help that. It was only much later that, at the request of a government minister, the name was so sonorously made to sound Magyar and provided with the noble particle
von
. You may not have remembered that after living here for a long time, a man with influence and good connections can get himself a new identity, have his name Magyarised, and sometimes even have the noble
von
added into the bargain. After all, you’re a young man, there’s no reason why you should know what a great deal of water has flowed along the River Lajtha since the time when that sharp-eyed, clever little Jewish lad was holding horses for the local farmers, or guarding their carts while they drank in the tavern, or carrying baskets home for market women in return for a handful of potatoes.
“So Kekesfalva’s father, or I should say Kanitz’s father, was no magnate but an indigent Jew with long ringlets at his temples, the tenant landlord of a roadside tavern selling spirits just outside the little place. The woodcutters and carters would stop there to fortify themselves with a glass—or several—of strong schnapps before or after braving the frosts of the Carpathians. Sometimes the liquid fire went to their heads too quickly, and then they would smash chairs and glasses. It was in one such fight that Kanitz’s father got the blow that killed him. A few farmers coming home from market dead drunk started a brawl, and when the landlord
tried to separate them, in defence of his sparse furnishings, a giant of a man flung him into a corner so hard that he lay there groaning. After that he kept spitting blood, and a year later he died in hospital. He left no money, and the boy’s mother, a capable woman, provided for herself and her small children by working as a washerwoman and midwife. She also went from door to door as a hawker, and Leopold carried her packs on his back. In addition he scraped a few kreuzers together by any means he could; he helped the shopkeeper as an errand boy, he carried messages from village to village. At an age when other children are still playing happily with their marbles, he knew the price of everything, where and how to buy and sell, how to make himself first useful and then indispensable. He also found time to get some education. The rabbi taught him to read and write, and he grasped the principles so quickly that at thirteen he could already act as clerk to an advocate, and for a few kreuzers he would do accounts and make out tax returns for the local grocers. To save on lamplight—every drop of oil was a great expense in that poverty-stricken household—he would sit by the light in the signal box—the village had no railway station of its own—studying the torn newspapers that other people had thrown away. The community elders were already nodding their heads approvingly and prophesying that the lad would do well for himself.
“How exactly it was that he left the Slovakian village and came to Vienna I don’t know. But when he turned up in these parts at the age of twenty he was already agent for a well-regarded insurance company, and his tireless industry allowed him to do many little business deals in addition to his official job. He became what they call a ‘factor’ in Galicia, someone who deals in everything, acts as a go-between, and builds bridges between supply and demand.
“At first he was merely tolerated. But soon people began to notice him, even to need his services. He knew about everything, he knew the way of the world in general. If there was a widow who wanted to get her daughter married, he would instantly set up shop as a marriage broker; if there was a man planning to emigrate to America who needed information and papers, Leopold would get them for him. He also dealt in old clothes, watches and clocks, and antiques; he gave estimates of the value of land, goods and horses and saw the subsequent deals through, and if an officer needed someone to stand surety for him, Kanitz would fix it. His knowledge and his sphere of influence expanded in parallel to each other year after year.
“With such tireless and persistent energy you can earn good money, but real fortunes are made only when there is a
particular
connection between income and expenditure, takings and outgoings. This was the other secret in the rise of our friend Kanitz—in all those years he spent almost nothing, apart from supporting a whole series of relations and helping his brother to study. The sole major purchase he had made for himself was a black coat and that pair of gold-rimmed glasses you know, which won him a reputation as a scholar among the local rustics. But long after he had become prosperous, he was still modestly describing himself as just an agent, to be on the safe side. Agent is a wonderful word, and can cover any number of contingencies. What Kekesfalva hid behind it was the fact that he had long ago ceased to be a mere go-between; he had now become a financier and entrepreneur. It seemed to him far more fitting and important to be rich than to be considered rich (as if he had read Schopenhauer’s
Parerga and Paralipomena
, with its wise remarks on what we are and what we make ourselves out to be).
“In my view, however, it takes no special philosophical approach to work out that a man who is not only industrious but also clever and thrifty will sooner or later make money, nor is that cause for wonder and admiration. We doctors know that at crucial moments a man’s bank account is not much use to him. What has really impressed me about our friend Kanitz is his positively daemonic determination at that time to increase his knowledge at the same time as his fortune. All those nights spent on railway journeys, every free moment in a carriage, in the inns where he stayed, on the road, he was reading and studying. He taught himself all the legal textbooks of
commercial
law and trade law, so that he could be his own lawyer; he followed the auctions in London and Paris like a professional antique dealer, and was as well versed in all financial investments and transactions as a banker. So it naturally turned out that his businesses gradually assumed a grander style. From working for small tenant farmers he moved on to
leaseholders
, from leaseholders to the great aristocratic estate owners; soon he was arranging the sale of entire harvests and forests, he was supplying factories, founding consortiums, and finally he was also commissioned to deliver certain supplies to the army. And now his black coat and gold-rimmed glasses were often to be seen in the waiting rooms of government ministries. But still—and at that time he already owned property worth perhaps a quarter of a million or half a million crowns—people here thought Kanitz a mere unimportant agent, and went on greeting him in a very offhand way in the street—until he pulled off his great coup, and all of a sudden Lämmel Kanitz became Herr von Kekesfalva.”
At this point Condor interrupted himself. “Well, what I’ve told you so far is known to me only at second hand. This last story, however, I have from Kekesfalva himself. He told it to me on the night of his wife’s operation, when we were sitting in a room in the sanatorium from ten in the evening until dawn, waiting for news. From here on I can vouch for every word. At such moments, no one tells lies.”
Condor slowly and thoughtfully took a small sip of wine before lighting another cigar—I think his fourth that evening, and I took note of his constant smoking. I was beginning to understand that the deliberately stolid, jovial manner he assumed as a medical man, along with his slow speech and apparently casual attitude, were a special technique allowing him to think and perhaps to observe at his leisure. Three or four times he put the cigar to his full lips, drawing on it slowly, while he watched the smoke rise with almost dreamy fascination. Then he suddenly gave himself a brisk shake.
“The story of how Leopold or Lämmel Kanitz became Herr von Kekesfalva and master of a landed estate begins in a
passenger
train from Budapest to Vienna. Although by now he was forty-two years old, and there were strands of grey in his hair, our friend still spent most of his nights travelling—the thrifty like to save time as well as money—and I don’t suppose I have to point out that he always went third class. He was an old hand at travelling by night, and had long ago worked out a technique for it. First he would spread a Scottish tartan rug that he had once picked up cheap at an auction over the hard wooden seat, then he carefully hung up his inevitable black coat on the hook provided, to spare it wear and tear, put his
goldframed
glasses away in their case, took a soft old dressing gown out of his canvas travelling bag—he never went to the expense
of buying a leather suitcase—and finally crammed his cap well down over his forehead to keep the light out of his eyes. Then he would settle back into the corner of the compartment, used as he was to falling asleep where he sat, for little Leopold had learnt as a child that you can spend the night asleep without the comfort of a bed.
“This time, however, our friend did not drop off to sleep, because there were three other men in the compartment, discussing the business they had been doing. And when people talked business, Kanitz couldn’t help pricking up his ears. His avid desire to learn had persisted through the years, like his wish to make money. They were bound together as if by an iron screw, like the two parts of a pair of pincers.
“In fact he had been very close to dozing off, but the phrase that roused him, like a warhorse hearing the trumpet sound, was a number. ‘Guess what, the lucky bastard made sixty
thousand
crowns at one fell swoop, and through his own ridiculous folly too!’
“What sixty thousand crowns? Whose sixty thousand crowns? Kanitz was wide awake at once, as if icy water had been dashed in his face to rouse him from sleep. Who had made sixty thousand crowns, and how did he do it? Kanitz had to find out. Of course he took care not to let his three fellow travellers notice that he was listening. In fact he pulled his cap a little further down on his face, so that his eyes were entirely hidden in its shadow, and the others would think him asleep. At the same time he cunningly used every jolt of the railway carriage to move slightly closer to them, so as not to miss hearing a single word in the noisy rattle of the wheels.
“The young man speaking with such animation, the man whose indignant trumpet call had alerted Kanitz, turned out to
be a clerk in a Viennese lawyer’s chambers, and his amazement at his employer’s huge stroke of luck lent him eloquence.
“‘And he’d made the most shocking mess of the whole business! He arrived in Budapest a day late on account of a piddling little case that earned him maybe fifty crowns, and by the time he did get there the silly goose had been well and truly taken in. It was all going without a hitch—watertight will, trustworthy Swiss witnesses, two impeccable medical opinions stating that Princess Orosvár was in full possession of her wits at the time of signing it. The whole darn bunch of great-nephews and pseudorelations by marriage wouldn’t have inherited a penny, in spite of the scandalous insinuations their lawyer managed to get into the evening papers, and my bone-headed boss was so sure of himself that because the hearing wasn’t until Friday, back he goes to Vienna to see his silly little case through, thinking no harm. But while he was gone, that wily scoundrel Wiezner, lawyer for the other side, gets at her, pays her a friendly visit, and the idiotic woman goes into hysterics—
Oh, but I don’t want such a terrible lot of money as all that, I only want to be left in peace!’
He mimicked a woman’s voice speaking with some kind of north German accent. ‘Well, she’s left in peace now and no mistake, and the rest of ’em are left, entirely unnecessarily, in possession of three-quarters of her inheritance. Without waiting for my boss to arrive, the idiot woman signs a settlement, the most ridiculous settlement you ever set eyes on. That one stroke of the pen cost her a cool half million.’