by Joseph Roth
Henry Bloomfield was a man of sense.
The firework triplets were called Nachmann, Zobel and Wolff, and they all shared the same visiting card.
Nachmann, Zobel and Wolff had discovered that people in this part of Europe did not know about fireworks. They arrived with money, showed proof of it and talked very sensibly. For years in this place the late Maiblum’s textile mill had stood empty. It could be repaired ‘at little expense’, said Wolff. Herr Nachmann would stay on here, in fact they needed not so much Bloomfield’s money as his name. The firm would be called Bloomfield and Company and would provide the surrounding area and Russia with fireworks.
The triplets intended to manufacture fireworks, paper streamers, crackers and the like.
I then heard that Bloomfield was greatly taken with the idea, and two days later I saw a wooden scaffolding rising slowly round the Maiblum factory which grew and grew until it enclosed the half-decaying walls like some monument in winter.
Nachmann, Zobel and Wolff stayed on for a long time. One saw them ambling about the streets and squares of the town, inseparables. All three would come into the bar and summon a girl to their table.
They led an intimate family life.
In the Hotel Savoy I am treated more respectfully than before. Ignatz lowers those calculating beer-yellow eyes when he meets me in the lift or the bar. The porter bows deeply to me. The triplets simultaneously raise their hats to me.
Gabriel, I say to myself, you arrived at the Hotel Savoy with a single shirt and you’ll leave as the lord of twenty trunks.
Hidden doorways open at my command, people pay respectful attention to me. Wonders cast their shadows before them. And here stand I, ready to accept everything which floods my way. People offer themselves to me and their lives are unveiled before my eyes. I can neither help them nor harm them, but they are thankful to have found a listener who has to listen, and they pour out their sorrows and their secrets.
Things are going badly with these people, and their sorrow towers before them, a great wall. They sit enmeshed in the dusty grey web of their cares and flutter like trapped flies. One has too little bread and another eats his in bitterness. One wants to eat his fill, another to be free. Here a man will wave his arms and believe them to be wings on which in a moment, a month, a year he will be borne aloft, over the humiliations of his world.
Things were going badly with these people. They prepared their own destiny and yet believed that it came from God. They were prisoners of tradition, their hearts hung by a thousand threads and the threads were spun by their own hands. Along all the ways of their lives stood the thou shalt not of their god, their police, their kings, their position. In this direction they could go no further, and in that place they could stay no longer. And so, after a couple of decades during which they had struggled, made mistakes and not known which way to turn, they died in their beds and bequeathed their wretchedness to their descendants.
I sat in the courtyard of the dear god, Henry Bloomfield and registered the prayers and desires of his little people. The people came first to Bondy, and I only received those who brought a chit from him. Bloomfield intended to stay two or three weeks, and after three days I saw that he would have to spend at least ten years.
I made the acquaintance of little Isidor Schabel, who had once been a notary in Roumania but who because of an embezzlement had ceased to be a notary. This is already his sixth year of living in the Hotel Savoy. He lived here during the war, along with the officers at the base. He is sixty years old and he has a wife and children in Bucharest who are ashamed of him and do not even know where he is. Now, he feels, would be a suitable time to rehabilitate himself. Fifteen years have passed since that unfortunate episode and it must surely be time to return home and see what his wife and children are up to, whether they are alive and whether his son became an officer in spite of his father’s misfortune.
He is a remarkable man. He wants to know his son’s rank – and worries so much. He ekes out a living by doing hole and corner scribe’s work. From time to time a Jew will come to him and have him draw up a request to the administration; a release from death duties, for instance.
His luggage has long been in pawn to Ignatz, he eats roast potatoes at midday, but he wants to know if his son is an officer.
He went to Bloomfield last year, unsuccessfully.
He needs a large sum of money in order to establish the justice of his case. He was obstinately convinced that he was in the right.
He was eaten away by bitterness. Today he was still asking shyly, tomorrow he will curse and in a year madness will take him.
I know Taddeus Montag, Zwonimir’s friend the sign painter, who is actually a caricaturist. He is my neighbour in room 705. I have been here a few weeks now and in the next room Taddeus Montag was starving to death, but he never made a sound. People are silent nowadays, more silent than fish. In the old days they would cry out when something hurt, but with the passage of time they have lost the habit.
Taddeus Montag is a candidate for death. Thin, pale and tall, he pads silently about and one cannot hear his footsteps on the bare stones of the sixth floor. He walks in shoes with torn soles, in any case, but even the soft slippers of Hirsch Fisch are audible on the stone floor. Taddeus Montag, however, already has the ghost soles of the departed. He arrives silently, stands in the doorway like a dumb man and breaks one’s heart with his dumbness.
Taddeus Montag cannot help not earning money. He made caricatures of the planet Mars, of the moon, of long-buried Greek legends. One could find Agamemnon in his pictures, betraying Clytemnestra in the meadows with a plump Trojan girl. Clytemnestra was standing on a hilltop watching her husband’s misconduct through a gigantic pair of opera glasses.
I remember that Taddeus Monatg grotesquely falsified the whole of history from the Pharaohs down to the present day. Montag would hand over these crazy drawings for inspection, as if they were a selection of trouser buttons. Once he designed a sign for a master carpenter. In the middle of it he painted an enormous plane and beside it, standing on a big trestle, stood a man sharpening a pencil on the plane.
He even delivered the sign.
Wonderful liars appeared, like the man with the glass eye who wanted to build a cinema. Now the showing of German films was very difficult. Bloomfield knew it and would not commit himself to the project.
In this town nothing is more needed than a cinema. It is a grey town with a lot of rain and dull days, and the workers are on strike. People have time. Half the town would sit all day long in a cinema, and half the night.
The man with the glass eye is called Erich Kohler, and is a small-time producer from Munich. He came originally from Vienna, so he says, but he can’t fool me with my knowledge of the Leopoldstadt. He comes without question from Czernowitz, and he did not lose an eye in the war, either. It would have had to be a much bigger world war to manage that. He is an uneducated man and mixes up his foreign words. He is a bad man: he does not lie for the love of lying but sells his soul for a shabby profit.
‘In Munich I opened a cinema, with an address to the press and the entire city council. That was in the last year of the war and but for that revolution you would know better today who Erich Kohler is.’
A quarter of an hour later he is talking about close friendship with Russian revolutionaries.
He was a rare one, that Erich Kohler.
The other man, the one with the French boots, was an Alsatian and represented Gaumont films. He really did found a cinema. Bloomfield had no wish to provide entertainment for the inhabitants of his native city. But the young Frenchman bought a dairy from Frankel, whose business was going badly, and printed posters announcing entertainment for decades to come.
No, it was not easy to extract money from Bloomfield.
I was with Abel Glanz in the bar. All the old lot was there. Glanz told me in confidence – and everything he said was in confidence – that Neuner had received no money and that Bloomfield no longer
had the slightest financial interest in this part of the world. In one year his fortune in America increased tenfold – why should he have anything to do with bad currency?
Bloomfield had disappointed a lot of people. They had not disposed of their foreign exchange, and business continued just as if Bloomfield had never come over from America. Nevertheless I failed to understand why all of a sudden the industrialists and their wives were appearing on the scene, and with their daughters as well.
In the meantime the company to be found in the afternoon lounge was altering considerably.
First and foremost, Kaleguropulos had laid on music, a five piece orchestra playing waltzes and marches with overwhelming temperament. Every evening five Russian Jews play operetta and the first violin has curly hair for the ladies.
Ladies never used to be seen there.
Now the factory owner Neuner shows off a wife and daughter, Kanner was a widower with two daughters, Siegmund Fink had a young wife, and then came Phöbus Bohlaug, my uncle, with his daughter.
Phöbus Bohlaug greets me heartily and reproaches me for not visiting him.
‘I have no time these days,’ say I.
‘You no longer need money,’ answers Phöbus.
‘You never gave me any –’
‘No offence meant!’ trills my uncle Phöbus.
XXII
I did not in fact understand why Henry Bloomfield had come. Just to have music played? So that the ladies would appear?
One day Zlotogor, Xaver Zlotogor the mesmerist, turned up in the afternoon lounge. He had assumed his mischievous young Jewish expression, went in and out among the tables and saluted the ladies, who nodded amicably in his direction and invited him to sit down.
He had to sit down at each table. He sat down everywhere for five minutes before standing up and kissing the ladies’ hands. He kissed twenty-five hands in an hour.
He came along to me, too. Zwonimir was with me and asked him, ‘Are you the man with the donkey?’
‘Yes,’ says Zlotogor, withdrawing slightly since he was a silent man whose element was silence and since he did not care for Zwonimir’s ebullience.
‘A good joke,’ Zwonimir compliments him, not realising that his noisy cheerfulness is not appreciated.
Even so this did not get rid of Xaver Zlotogor.
On the contrary: Zlotogor took a seat and told me that he had a good idea. The present season was no good for public mesmerism and he wanted to make use of the holidays for mesmerising in private. In the hotel, in his big room on the third floor. He wished to receive ladies suffering from headaches.
‘Marvellous idea,’ shouts Zwonimir.
Zwonimir calls across to the army doctor, ‘Herr Doctor,’ whilst Zlotogor sits there wishing he could knife Zwonimir.
No mesmerism, however, can affect Zwonimir’s powerful character.
The army doctor comes over.
‘You’re going to have competition,’ says Zwonimir and points to the mesmerist.
Xaver Zlotogor jumped to his feet, wishing to avoid further disaster and hoping to silence Zwonimir’s noise. He therefore outlined his views himself.
‘Thank God,’ says the army doctor, who was not fond of work, ‘now I shan’t have to prescribe ony more aspirin. I’ll send you all my patients.’
‘My most grateful thanks,’ says Zlotogor, and bows deeply.
And the next day a couple of ladies came and sent notes up to Zlotogor. None would trust herself to enter the hotel, but Zlotogor did not take this amiss and went to give hypnosis in their houses.
‘It’s remarkable,’ I say to Zwonimir, ‘do you notice how people are altering because my boss Bloomfield is here? Everyone suddenly has ideas for business, in this hotel and in town. Everyone wants to earn money.’
‘I have an idea, too,’ says Zwonimir.
‘Yes?’
‘To kill Bloomfield.’
‘What’s the point?’
‘Just for a lark. This is no business idea and it has no point.’
‘By the way, do you know the reason for Bloomfield being here?’
‘To do business.’
‘No, Zwonimir, Bloomfield doesn’t give a rap for business here. I would very much like to know why he is here. Perhaps he loves some woman. But he could take a woman over. A woman is no business but she may be married and in that case she is even more difficult to take over than a business. I do not believe that Bloomfield has come over to repair the factory of the late lamented Maiblum. Fireworks do not interest him. He has enough money to provide a quarter of America with such things. Has he come here to finance a cinema in his home town? He doesn’t even give Neuner money and this is the fifth week of his workers’ strike.’
‘Why doesn’t he give any money?’ says Zwonimir.
‘Ask him, then.’
‘I shan’t ask him. It’s none of my business. It’s mean.’
It seemed to me that Neuner was just talking things out with Bloomfield and that he was no longer interested in the factory. It was a bad period, money had lost its value. Abel Glanz said that Neuner preferred speculating on the Zurich Stock Exchange, and was dealing in currencies. Every day he received telegrams – they came from Vienna, Berlin, London. Rates of exchange were cabled to him, he cabled contracts; of what interest was the factory?
It was pointless trying to explain these complicated matters to Zwonimir because he did not wish to understand them, because he felt that it would require an effort on his part, and he was a peasant. He went every day to the hutments, not only because of the returning soldiers but because they were close to the fields, and Zwonimir’s spirit was homesick for the sheaves, the scythes and the bird calls of his native acres.
He brings me news of the wheat every day and he hides blue cornflowers in his pocket. He curses because the peasants in these parts have no idea of the proper way to deal with the soil. They like to let their cows run free, in the way which the beasts enjoy. They also run into the wheat and it is far from easy to wheedle them out again.
And he cannot forget the bird calls and the boundary stones.
He comes back in the evening, does Zwonimir Pansin, the peasant, and with him he brings a deep longing and a hidden homesickness. He arouses my own longing and although he dreams of fields and I dream of streets, he sets me going. It is like that with the songs from our homelands. If someone starts singing a song from his own country, another will start singing his, and the different tunes become one tune and they all become different instruments in one orchestra.
Homesickness grows in the open air. It grows and grows when no walls hem it in.
On Sunday morning I walk out into the fields. The grain is as tall as a man and the wind is poised in the white clouds. I walk slowly towards the cemetery, wanting to find Santschin’s grave. After looking for a long time I find it. So many people have died in such a short time; mostly poor people, since they lie near Santschin’s grave. Things go badly for the poor at present, and death delivers them to the worms.
I found Santschin’s grave and it came to me that it was time to take leave of his last traces on this earth. The good clown had died too soon. He should have crossed the path of Henry Bloomfield. Perhaps he could still even have won his journey to the south?
I climb over the low railing which separates the Jewish cemetery, and notice some excitement among the poor Jews, the beggars who live by the generosity of rich heirs. They no longer stand singly, like weeping willows, at the entrance to some avenue, but in a group, talking at the top of their voices. I overhear the name Bloomfield, listen for a while and learn that they are waiting for Bloomfield.
That seemed to me very important. I ask the beggars and they tell me that today is the anniversary of old Blumenfeld’s death, and for this reason his son Henry comes here.
The beggars know the date of death of all rich people, and they alone know why Henry Bloomfield is here. The beggars know, not the industrialists.
Henry Bloomfield came to visit his de
ad father, Jechiel Blumenfeld. He came to thank him for his milliards, for his ability, for life, for all that he had inherited. Henry Bloomfield did not come to found a cinema or a fireworks factory. Everyone believed he had come because of money or factories. Only the beggars knew the purpose of Bloomfield’s journey.
It was a homecoming.
I waited for Henry Bloomfield. He came to the cemetery alone and on foot, did his majesty Bloomfield. I saw him stand at the foot of old Blumenfeld’s grave, and he wept. He took off his spectacles and the tears ran down his thin cheeks, and he brushed them away with his small childlike hands. Then he drew out a bundle of banknotes and the beggars swarmed around him like flies so that he disappeared in the midst of the many dark figures to whom he was giving money in order to ransom his soul from the guilt of riches.
I did not wish to seem to have lurked unnoticed so I went up to Bloomfield and greeted him. He was not surprised at all that I was there. What could surprise Henry Bloomfield anyway? He shook my hand and asked me to keep him company into the town.
‘I come here every year to visit my father,’ says Bloomfield, ‘and I cannot forget the town, either. I am an Eastern Jew and, to us, home is above all where our dead lie. Had my father died in America I could be perfectly at home in America. My son will be a full-blooded American, because I shall be buried there.’
‘I understand Mister Bloomfield.’ I am moved and speak as if to an old friend.
‘Life and death hang together so visibly, and the quick with the dead. There is no end there, no break – always continuity and connection.’
‘In this part of the world live the cleverest scroungers,’ says Bloomfield, cheerful once more, for he is a man of the moment and only lets himself forget it once a year.
I go with him to the town, people greet us and I enjoy one more pleasure: my uncle Phöbus Bohlaug passes us, gives the first greeting and bows very low and I smile condescendingly at him, as if I were his uncle.
XXIII
