white hair. But after all, their brightness also surpassed just about anything that could be called bright in this world. With these gloves he held a dark tray. Upon it lay the steaming soup tureen.Soon he had placed it at the center of the table, gingerly, soundlessly, and very quickly. Following an old custom, Fräulein Hirschwitz ladled out the soup. She offered the plates, and the diners approached them with hospitably stretching arms and grateful smiles in their eyes. She smiled back. A warm golden shimmer hovered in the plates; it was the soup, noodle soup: transparent, with thin, tender, entwined, golden-yellow noodles. Herr von Trotta und Sipolje ate very swiftly, sometimes fiercely. He virtually destroyed one course after another with a noiseless, aristocratic, and rapid malice; he was wiping them out. Fráulein Hirschwitz took small portions at the table, but after a meal she re-ate the entire sequence of food in her room. Carl Joseph fearfully and hastily swallowed hot spoonfuls and huge mouthfuls. In this way, they all finished in tandem. No word was spoken when Herr von Trotta und Sipolje held his tongue.
After the soup the
Tafelspitz
was served, boiled fillet of beef with all the trimmings, the old man’s Sunday entrée for countless years. The delighted contemplation he devoted to this dish took more time than half the meal. The district captain’s eyes caressed first the delicate bacon that silhouetted the colossal chunk of meat, then each small individual plate on which the vegetables were bedded: the glowing violet beets, the lush-green earnest spinach, the bright cheery lettuce, the acrid white of the horseradish, the perfect oval of new potatoes swimming in melting butter and recalling delicate baubles. The baron had a bizarre relationship with food. He ate the most important morsels with his eyes, so to speak; his sense of beauty consumed above all the essence of the food—its soul, as it were; the vapid remainders that then reached mouth and palate were boring and had to be wolfed down without delay. The beauteous appearance of the victuals gave the old man as much pleasure as their simplicity. For he set store by good solid fare, a tribute he paid to both his taste and his conviction; the latter, you see, he called Spartan. With felicitous skill, he thus combined the sating of his desire with the demands of duty. He was a Spartan. But he was also an Austrian.
Now, as on every Sunday, he set about carving the beef. He jammed his cuffs into his sleeves, raised both hands, set knife andfork to the meat, and began, while saying to Fräulein Hirschwitz, “You see, my dear lady, it is not enough to ask the butcher for a tender piece. One must heed the way it is cut. I mean, with or against the grain. Nowadays butchers no longer understand their craft. The finest meat is ruined by merely a wrong cut. Look here, my dear lady! I can barely save it. It’s disintegrating into threads, it’s simply crumbling. As a whole, it can be labeled ‘tender.’ But the individual pieces will be tough, as you yourself shall soon see. As for the trimmings, which the Germans call
Beilage,
I would prefer the horseradish, which the Germans call
Meerrettich,
to be somewhat drier. It must not lose its pungency in the milk. It should also be prepared just before it reaches the table. It’s been wet far too long. A mistake!”
Fräulein Hirschwitz, who had lived in Germany for many years and always spoke High German, and to whose predilection for literary usage Herr von Trotta’s Germanisms had alluded, nodded slowly and heavily. It was obviously a great effort for her to detach the considerable weight of her bun from the back of her neck and induce her head to nod in acquiescence. This added a touch of reserve to her assiduous amiability—indeed, it even seemed to contain resistance. And the district captain felt prompted to say, “Surely I am not off the mark, my dear lady!”
He spoke the nasal Austrian German of
After the soup the
Tafelspitz
was served, boiled fillet of beef with all the trimmings, the old man’s Sunday entrée for countless years. The delighted contemplation he devoted to this dish took more time than half the meal. The district captain’s eyes caressed first the delicate bacon that silhouetted the colossal chunk of meat, then each small individual plate on which the vegetables were bedded: the glowing violet beets, the lush-green earnest spinach, the bright cheery lettuce, the acrid white of the horseradish, the perfect oval of new potatoes swimming in melting butter and recalling delicate baubles. The baron had a bizarre relationship with food. He ate the most important morsels with his eyes, so to speak; his sense of beauty consumed above all the essence of the food—its soul, as it were; the vapid remainders that then reached mouth and palate were boring and had to be wolfed down without delay. The beauteous appearance of the victuals gave the old man as much pleasure as their simplicity. For he set store by good solid fare, a tribute he paid to both his taste and his conviction; the latter, you see, he called Spartan. With felicitous skill, he thus combined the sating of his desire with the demands of duty. He was a Spartan. But he was also an Austrian.
Now, as on every Sunday, he set about carving the beef. He jammed his cuffs into his sleeves, raised both hands, set knife andfork to the meat, and began, while saying to Fräulein Hirschwitz, “You see, my dear lady, it is not enough to ask the butcher for a tender piece. One must heed the way it is cut. I mean, with or against the grain. Nowadays butchers no longer understand their craft. The finest meat is ruined by merely a wrong cut. Look here, my dear lady! I can barely save it. It’s disintegrating into threads, it’s simply crumbling. As a whole, it can be labeled ‘tender.’ But the individual pieces will be tough, as you yourself shall soon see. As for the trimmings, which the Germans call
Beilage,
I would prefer the horseradish, which the Germans call
Meerrettich,
to be somewhat drier. It must not lose its pungency in the milk. It should also be prepared just before it reaches the table. It’s been wet far too long. A mistake!”
Fräulein Hirschwitz, who had lived in Germany for many years and always spoke High German, and to whose predilection for literary usage Herr von Trotta’s Germanisms had alluded, nodded slowly and heavily. It was obviously a great effort for her to detach the considerable weight of her bun from the back of her neck and induce her head to nod in acquiescence. This added a touch of reserve to her assiduous amiability—indeed, it even seemed to contain resistance. And the district captain felt prompted to say, “Surely I am not off the mark, my dear lady!”
He spoke the nasal Austrian German of
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