gojungle: переводы

→There is nothing now that remains to be said—at least, nothing worth the telling—so I shall leave you with these memoirs of mine in the hope that someone may listen to them one day. After all, it would have been the worst joke of all, would it not, for me to have lived so long, to have seen so much, and still to have left no record of it behind me? A life written upon water.

→There never was anything even remotely like it before, and there will certainly never be anything like it again as long as the world turns on its axis—which is probably just as well. So that is why I have spent these months telling you what I remember of it all.

→I lived other lives in the years that followed, but none of them really adds up to very much. I was only thirty-two when the old Monarchy collapsed, yet I realise now—though I never thought that I would live to say it—that the only real country I ever had was Old Austria. It was a unique civilisation, that dowdy, chaotic, paper-obsessed empire that I once served.

→There, they are ringing the bell for supper now. I missed the exposi-tion of the blessed sacrament this afternoon, which should earn me two days’ dark-arrest on bread and water if Sister Felicja gets to hear about it. I do not really care now though: these recordings have taken a great deal out of me and I have felt faint sometimes over the past few days, which may mean that I am about to slip my cable at last. But if this is so then I shall die happy at least in the knowledge that I have committed to poster-ity what I saw of the old Danubian Monarchy and that splendid, rather improbable fleet in which I once had the honour to serve.

→The salt spray from the winter storms will soak our graves as we both moulder away to nothing: the remains of the sailing ship, and the bones of the old man who was one of the last to have served aboard such vessels. Short of a shroud of canvas with a ballast weight tied to my feet, I could not have asked for a fitter burial.

→We all know where our voyage begins, but who of us can say where it will end? Could that unknown English sailor who stumbled out of a waterfront bar in Montevideo one night in the year 1890 have foreseen that he was embarking on a voyage which would one day bring his bones to rest among the remains of emperors and archdukes in the Capuchin Crypt? Soon I too shall be dead, and they will bury me there in the grave-yard just above the beach, not a hundred metres from the remains of the ship which I once boarded that day at Taltal eighty-five years ago.

→You will probably find it hard to believe that I was young once: that the creature you find here, half-way between the animal and the mineral state, should once have climbed masts in a gale, once had its ears boxed by senior officers and once have swum with Samoan girls in the waters of Apia Bay. Why should you believe it, after all, when I can hardly believe it myself? But it all happened, as surely as the timbers of the copper barque Angharad Pritchard lie half-buried in the shingle at the far end of the bay.

→So that, if you please, is the story of my first ocean voyage: how the boy from a small town in the heart of Europe came to be aboard a sailing warship on a world cruise and ended up marooned on a desert island in a sort of bourgeois parody of the adventure stories which had led him there in the first place. I hope that it may have been of interest to you, not only as a record of the last days of sailing warships but also of that long-vanished world into which I was born: the old multi-national Monarchy of the House of Habsburg, with its few large vices and its many small vir-tues; most of the latter quite unappreciated until it was no more.

→“Sometimes. I’m no saint, but I’ve always felt awkward with lies. You know how it is though: it didn’t really bother me until it was almost too late—until the day when I was lying on a stretcher in my cabin with half the nosecap of a Royal Navy shell embedded in my liver. They’d brought me up from the sick-bay because the Surgeon thought I was a goner, and anyway we’d taken a notable pasting from the Britishers and there were wounded coming in from all over the ship. They just sent the Chaplain to give me the last rites; he’d been wounded as well and had his head in a bandage. I made my confession—and told him about the Johann Salvator business and asked if I needed absolution for that as well? He thought a bit, then said, ‘No: there is nothing to absolve. The Church has always held that a fiction that conduces towards a state of grace may sometimes be the moral equivalent of the truth.’ ”

→“Quite so. I gather though from what the Consul told me that the assassination was not on artistic grounds. The gaucho was a Welshman called Pablo Hopkins. He objected to them performing on the Sabbath.”

→“If he was as bad as when we heard him then I’m surprised it didn’t happen during Act I.”

→“I’ve no idea: but when I was at Montevideo with the old Kaiser Karl in—when was it—1912 or thereabouts, I was talking with the Austrian Consul and he told me that someone claiming to be an ex-archduke had been going around the sheep stations in Patagonia years before with an Austrian woman and a troupe of yodelling Indians putting on a really awful operetta; until one night a gaucho in the audience climbed up on stage half-way through Act II and stuck a knife into Herr Orth, who was playing the piano accordion at the time.”

→“It all got forgotten, what with one thing and another. I parted com-pany with the ship at Apia, as you know, and then there was the trouble in New Silesia. When the mutineers took over the ship they broke into Professor Skowronek’s workroom and tipped his collection of skulls overboard, saying they’d brought the ship bad luck. But our bones were packed away in a box down in the hold and they missed them. I sent a report from Rabaul explaining the whole business, but they’d told the Emperor by then so I suppose that it was tactfully lost somewhere along the way. At any rate, when we arrived at Pola what should we see but flags at half-mast and a black-draped lighter waiting to receive the box—though nobody had been told whose bones they were supposed to be. I was still worried that we might all end up in front of a court martial, so I could hardly call out, ‘Wait a minute—the whole thing’s a hoax, I can explain!’ Of course it never got into the papers—Johann Salvator had renounced his titles in 1889 and was not officially a mem-ber of the Imperial House any longer. But they still gave him a private funeral in the Capuchin Crypt: just a plain slab in the floor marked J.S. They invited me as well.”

→“Oh, Festetics saw to that as well, don’t you worry: it was carried out on board by poor Luchieni, who had no doubt been extensively leant upon beforehand to reach the right conclusions. Luchieni would have said that it was his own grandmother if you’d threatened his next promotion. He showed me his report, you know? ‘European male, about forty years of age; strongly protruding lower jaw and evidence of syphilitic infection in the shinbones.’ ‘But, Herr Kovettenarzt,’ I said, ‘I’ve had syphilis twice but that still doesn’t make me an archduke: it’s what the philosophers call a necessary condition but not a sufficient one.’ But he stuck by what he’d written. ‘Quite so,’ he said, ‘but there: if I am a physician I am also a naval officer like yourself, and subject to service discipline. The prestige of the Dynasty is at stake, so science must give way.’ ”

→“It happened like this. I got back aboard with the landing party that morning after we’d come across Herr Orth in his hut up in the mountains. I went straight to Festetics in his cabin and told him what we’d found— and showed him the communion medal in case he didn’t believe me. He stared at it for a while after I’d told him. His face had gone the colour of a lettuce and I had to pour him a brandy to steady him. You remember old Festetics as well as I do: the ex-courtier, the loyal servant of the Noble House of Austria and all that. He just stood there saying, ‘But Zaleski, this is terrible . . . terrible . . . Whatever shall we do? . . . The Monarchy will be the laughing-stock of Europe . . .’ You see, we’d been looking for a dead man; and now here he was at last, alive and well, barking mad and intent on coming back to Vienna with a simply dreadful light opera in his pocket—and with the police ready to arrest him and his floozy for insur-ance fraud as soon as they set foot on Austrian soil. Remember, Festetics had been an ADC at court during the Mayerling affair: he kept telling me that the Dynasty could never survive another scandal like that. And of course, in this particular case a certain Korvettenkapitän Count Eugen Festetics von Szentkatolna would be the bringer of the bad tidings . . . So you see, we had to find a dead archduke before the insurance investigators found the live one.Your people went ashore to dig up a skeleton, the com-munion medal was dropped in with the bones, and Festetics concocted the rest: the wreck of the St Margaret discovered in a lonely cove down at the end of the world, the archduke’s remains lying half-buried in the shingle, the communion medal discovered with them: all rather romantic really in a melancholy sort of way—‘a Habsburg to the last’ and so forth. I saw the cable he sent from Punta Arenas: so beautifully written that you’d weep reading it.”

→“So where did the bones fit in, and what became of them?”

→He gazed out across the water beyond the hotel windows, and sighed. “Yes, I did intend to make a clean breast of it all when we got back to Pola. With Festetics and Mikulić both dead there was no reason why I shouldn’t of course. But I soon discovered that the whole affair had gone too far for it to be turned around. They’d told the Emperor, and too many people’s careers were at stake.”

→“How did it finish? I didn’t get back to Pola until the middle of ’04, so I never did hear how it all ended. The last I knew of it was when we were ashore that morning with Mikulić on the Brecknock Peninsula, digging up a dead sailor’s bones and loading them into a box. What on earth was all that in aid of?”

→Commodore ( Retd ) Florian Zaleski had left the Polish Navy the year before and was now at Gdynia as a con-sultant on mine warfare. He had prospered greatly after the return of the Windischgrätz , elevated to the rank of Baron and promoted two ranks to Fregattenkapitän, which was a thing almost unheard-of in the Austrian service. He had also served with distinction in the First World War, until he was invalided out of the Navy in 1917 as a result of wounds received while leading a cruiser squadron in an action with the British off Valona.

→The whole story of the cruise of S.M.S. Windischgrätz was not finally related to me until one evening in the year 1930, in the dining-room of the Grand Hotel in the Polish seaside resort of Sopot, on a stretch of Baltic sand dunes just south of the new port of Gdynia. I was in my late forties, a Polish citizen for the past three weeks and a Commander in the Polish Navy for two, recently returned from South America to organise that service’s infant submarine arm.