by Joseph Roth
From a distance the mud has a sheen like dirty silver. At night you might take the roads for murky rivers, in which the sky with its moon and stars is reflected a thousandfold, as in a dirty, distorting crystal. Twenty times a year they pour stones into the mud, rough blocks, mortar and rust-brown bricks, and call it ballast. But the mud comes out on top; it gulps down the blocks of stone, the mortar, the bricks, and its deceptive surface mimics something solid and flat, as whole mountain chains slumber under gurgling water, a line of hills painfully driven through narrows. Many baggage trains have flogged down these roads, gun carriages left deep tracks, the horses sank down to the saddle—I remember it, I was there. Once, I tramped down these roads and others just like them, a pack man among pack animals, and the endless mud swallowed us alive, as it swallows the ballast of the roads.
Just as a mountain river will widen out to form lakes, so the road widens out into a circular marketplace. This is where the town was born. It is an offspring of the road. There are secret laws by which a small town will be created in one place, and a village in another. The one round and wide, the other longish and slender. The market produces a hamlet, which produces a little town. It will never make a city. The careers of places are as preordained as those of men.
For it appears that in this land the conditions for development are not given. Things don’t grow. They warp and distort. In this maltreated, scorned corner of Europe, the Gothic is very much alive. There are places where everything seems unreal: families living in summer from the sale of cucumber juice and in winter from saying prayers for the dead; haunted castles; small barefoot boys selling drinking water in the station, just water, nothing else. In Lemberg it happened that a big shire horse fell through an open drain cover. The drain covers in Lemberg are no bigger, the horses no smaller than in the rest of Europe. But God allows miracles to happen. Every Sunday He outdoes Himself.
A man in the small towns of Galicia is different from a man in the small towns of Western Europe. There he grows into pleasures, bounded by a glass of wine in the morning, and the cosy Stammtisch at night. The small town in Galicia knows no pleasures. It even turns its philistines into a phenomenon. It encourages eccentricity. The frenzy of the great cities of the world rampages through the small towns of Galicia. There is movement without discernible purpose and for no evident reason.
But the same wind keeps blowing across the flat land, though one hardly feels it. Hills, intimations of the Carpathians, ring the distance in blue. Ravens circle over the forests. They were always at home here. Since the war they have prospered. Nothing in the way of industry, advertisements, soot. In the markets people sell the sort of primitive wooden figurines that were current in Europe a couple of centuries ago. Has Europe come to an end here?
No, it hasn’t. The connection between Europe and this half-banished land is vital and unbroken. In the bookshops I saw the latest literary titles from France and England. A cultured wind carries seeds into the Polish soil. Strongest of all is the line to France. Even to Germany, more obliquely situated, occasional sparks fly back and forth.
Galicia lies in unworldly seclusion and yet is not isolated; it was banished but not severed; it has more culture than one might suppose from its deficient sewage system; plenty of disorder and still more eccentricity. Many remember it from the War, but then it hid its true nature. It wasn’t a nation. It was either hinterland or Front. But it has its own delights, its own songs, its own people, and its own allure: the sad allure of the place scorned.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 20 November 1924
22. The Polish California
Dear Friend,
I have just been to visit one of the most interesting parts of Europe, the part of Mala-Polska where the oil wells are. As you will know, it lies in Galicia, on the northern edge of the Carpathians, and its centre is the strange town of Boryslav. Oil has been produced here since the middle of the nineteenth century. The dark wooden drilling towers are positioned over an area of ten square miles or so. Compared to the towers of Baku, these seem less cruel to me, and less inimical to the earth’s surface. The earth in the Caucasus clearly suffers the curse that makes up for the blessing buried beneath. There is nothing green there, only yellow-grey desert sand and dirty brown ponds that seem not to want to dry, even though everything seems condemned to dry in the southern sun. Here in Boryslav, dubbed “the Polish Baku”, the sun is moderate, the drilling towers thin and rickety and in spite of their numbers still not the only things growing. There are still woods, which are slow to make room for the towers, seeming more to surround them fraternally than to flee from them in dread. One’s eye moves from the planked wells to the green hills, which are rendered somewhat respectable by virtue of the fact that they are part of the Carpathians. Were it not for the dust, which really is the brother of the Caucasian dust, there would only be the towers that evoke Baku.
But there is the dust, white and extremely thick. It’s as though it were not the chance outcome of rubble and dead matter, but its own element like water, fire and earth, less to do with these than with the wind, before which it spins in thick veils. It sheets the road, like flour, powder or chalk, coating every vehicle and every walker, as if it had a will or inclination of its own. It has a special relationship with the sun when it burns, as though it were fulfilling its task. And when it rains, then it turns into an ash-grey, wet, sticky mass, which forms greenish pools in every hollow.
So this is where they found oil. A few decades ago, Boryslav was no more than a village, today 30,000 people live here. A single street—four miles long—connects three places without showing any of the joins. Along the front of the houses is a wooden boardwalk mounted on short stout posts. It’s not possible to make a conventional stone pavement, because pipes run beneath the road, carrying the oil to the station. The gap in height between the boardwalk and the little houses is quite considerable; the pedestrian reaches or overtops the roofs and looks diagonally down into the rooms. The houses are all wood. Only occasionally a larger brick house comes along, whitewashed and stony, and breaks the sequence of crooked, mouldering, crumbling dwellings. All were built overnight: at a time when the stream of naphtha-seekers first began to flow here. It’s as though the boards hadn’t been hastily assembled by human hands, but the breath of human greed had blown chance materials together, and not one of these fleeting homes seems to exist for the purpose of accommodating sleeping humans, but to preserve and exacerbate the sleeplessness of excited individuals. The rancid reek of the oil, a stinking miracle, brought them here. The anomie of subterranean laws—not even predictable by geology—raised the tension of the diggers to a kind of frenzy, and the constant possibility of being a thousand feet away from billions was bound to give rise to an intoxication that was stronger than the intoxication of actual ownership. And even though they were all consigned to the unpredictability of a lottery and roulette, none of them gave in to the fatalism of waiting that was a mild prelude to disappointment. Here, at the source of petroleum, everyone believed that all it took to compel destiny was his labour; and then his zeal magnified the sorry outcome to a calamity he was no longer able to bear.
The small digger could only be freed from the intolerable cycle of hope and discouragement by the mighty hand of the greater one, and of the “societies”. They were able to buy up many claims at once, and with the relative calm that is a masculine aspect of wealth, abide the whims of the subterranean element. In amongst these mighty ones, whose patience costs them nothing and who could happily plough in millions overnight to reap billions at their leisure, the medium-sized speculators inserted themselves with their moderate credit and moderate risk-proneness and so further squeezed the little adventurer. These gradually forsook their dreams. They kept their huts. Some inscribed their names over the doors and started to deal in commodities, in soap, in shoelaces, in onions, in leather. They returned from the violent and tragic realms of the hunter of fortune to the sorry modesty of
the small grocer. The huts that had been built to last a few months stayed up for years and their rickety provisionality settled into something like a local character. They suggested posed photographs in ateliers or crude book jackets for Californian adventures or just plain hallucinations. It seems to me, knowing several great industrial zones as I do, that commerce nowhere has such a fantastical aspect as here. Here capitalism lurches into expressionism.
And it seems likely that the place will keep its fantastical aspect. The town is on the march, and not just in a metaphorical sense. As the old wells begin to stagnate, new ones are opened, and the dusty road sets off after the petroleum. It pushes its houses outward, turns a corner, and bounds onward to catch up with the capricious mineral. If most of the wells in Boryslav and in Tustanowice are now idle, then the drillers are hammering day and night in Mraznica. I can’t help thinking this road will go on for ever, a long, white, dusty ribbon going over humps and hollows, twisty and straight, provisional and durable, as unpredictable as human fortune, and as abiding as human desire.
I will admit that the sight of this great town, consisting as it does of one street, made me forget the actual laws of its social order. For the space of a few hours I thought speculation and greed were elemental and almost mysterious. The gargoyle faces of the lust for profit, the everywhere tense atmosphere, in which overnight catastrophes are a continual possibility, roused my interest in the literary possibilities of the milieu more than the actual beings that lived there. The fact that there were workers here and officials, cabbies and unemployed, tended to disappear behind the novelistic aspect of individuals. Imagination was livelier than conscience.
At least the oil workers are considerably better off than coal miners. They are specialists, even here. The average wage of an assistant is nine zloty, or four marks fifty, for an eight-hour day. A foreman gets twelve zloty. Conditions are relatively tolerable. Work is in—if not an airy space, at least one that is aired—and the smell of oil is not unpleasant, and even said to be good for the lungs. To the layman the tools used in drilling are disappointingly primitive. Motors drive the drills. A man walks round and round a sort of basin with a horizontal iron pole in his hand. The movement and the action look straightforward, but it may be a lot harder in practice. Experts say that the art of the worker lies in judging the degree of difficulty, or if you prefer, sensing the resistance to the drill of various types of geological terrain. The worker’s hand must have a pronounced sensitivity, given that it stands in for the eye, which is not involved in drilling. If the borehole is choked by some object, as for instance a broken screw, then clever and cunning means are used to remove the obstacle—there are instruments of canny reach and clutch that feel in the dark. Their endeavours remind me of efforts to extract a cork from some narrow-necked container. It can cost you hours and months and money.
Money, money, lots of money! Consider that to drill to a depth of a mile costs maybe 90,000 dollars. Neither you nor I will ever own an oil well. It’s become a lottery for people who basically don’t need it, for banks and consortia and American billionaires. The people who once experienced the sensation of fortune bubbling up out of the ground, have already lost the capacity to feel happiness from material gain. There is a certain opposition between the fairy-tale way the earth gives up treasure, and the share-holdings of the naphtha diggers, and the stoic calm with which they await the miracle. These poor treasure diggers sit a very long way away from the miracle of nature, in the great metropolises of the West, and the fact that they are so far away, mighty, invisible and almost impersonal, gives them the lustre of godhead, directing the efforts of engineers and worker teams with mysterious glory. By far the greater part of the Polish sources is in the hands of foreign financiers. The workforces are paid out of a mystically replenished exchequer. Far away, on the great trading floors of the world, the shares are bought and sold, and transactions concluded according to opaque laws. The being and becoming of heavenly bodies are better understood by astronomers than changes in ownership by the local managers and people in charge of the wells. The petty officials can only sit there trembling when the noise of the great tempests on the world markets reaches their ear. Only recently, three large enterprises, “Fanto”, “Nafta” and “Dombrowa”, were sold to a French conglomerate. There was a meeting in Paris, and three or four gentlemen took out their pens and scrawled a signature, nothing more. In Boryslav and environs though, it means 500 employees thrown out of work, and hunger peers in at their windows, and rattles the doorknobs, because some god in Paris said the word: Efficiencies! And because it was a French god—and not as it might have been, a British one—diplomatic motives are woven into the lamentations of the alarmed Polish newspapers. Sceptics claim to understand that the new owners are only interested in the coup on the market, and in selling on the shares at a higher price, and not the exploitation of the resources at all. Even for optimists, though, gods are less than reliable, and at least as remote from any social feeling as from their workers and officials.
I left the area on a peaceful golden evening that gave no indication of the type of terrain that lay beneath. The workers trudged home with the serenity of peasants coming home from the fields, and it was as though they carried scythes over their shoulders, as their grandfathers before them had done. A few paupers stood by murky puddles and scooped up oil in tin canisters. They were the minor colleagues of the great French Dreyfus. Their tools are buckets, not shares. Such oil as they find they sell in minute quantities or they use it to light their temporary hovels with. That’s all that a lavish nature has accorded them. Their huts stood crooked, brown and humble in the flat gleam of the sun. They seemed to huddle together a little more, to grow small, and to almost disappear completely. By tomorrow they wouldn’t be there anymore.
I hope, my dear friend, that I have managed to give you some sense of the atmosphere in this Polish California. I chose to write about it to prove to you that I am not exclusively wedded to idylls in this country.
I remain your humble servant,
J.R.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 June 1928
23. Hotel Kopriva
In P. is the “Hotel Kopriva”. It has eighty rooms on two floors. It has a front-of-house manager who doubles as room-service waiter and porter. He is short and frail-looking and not really imposing enough to serve in a hotel of two storeys and eighty rooms. He meets guests at the station. If the town of P. had a larger station concourse, as would befit a town that harbours within itself a hotel like the Kopriva, then one wouldn’t even be able see him. He owes his visibility entirely to the dimensions of the station hall in P. and the anxious visitors, looking where they may sleep.
The “Hotel Kopriva” is almost always full. And yet, one almost always finds room in it. There are hotels in which the law of solid geometry is suspended and replaced by another law, which goes as follows: “A room that already has one traveller in it may under certain circumstances accommodate a second.” It is to this law that the “Hotel Kopriva” owes its wealth; and to the circumstance that it doesn’t show itself to its visitors first, its unchallenged standing. Many hotel managers could learn from it. Complaints do not exist where they cannot be made. There is no such thing as inaudible dissatisfaction. It is true to say therefore that all its guests are fully satisfied with the “Hotel Kopriva”.
Other hotels have glossy, exchangeable names. They are called things like the Imperial, the Savoy, the Grand, the Central, the Paris, or the Metropole. But this hotel is called plainly and confidence-inspiringly: the Kopriva. Other hotels have had eighty or eighty-odd rooms. But the “Hotel Kopriva” has one hundred and twenty beds in its eighty rooms; because of the eighty, forty are “dual occupancy”.
Now, dual-occupancy rooms in towns where lovers or, on occasion, married couples stay are a necessity. But in the town of P. and in the “Hotel Kopriva” in particular where almost exclusively single, rivalrous, anxious travellers put
up, dual-occupancy rooms give rise to awkward scenes. The conviction that one does not snore depends on the physiological impossibility of listening to oneself in sleep; the belief that others do follows an old tradition. But an even stronger objection to dual occupancy is the prejudice that a man of distinction should and must sleep alone. So there are repeated productions of the following scene:
“I always sleep alone. On principle!”
“Whose are those things? You told me you had a room! You don’t have a room at all!”
“But there is the room!”
“I’m not paying for a room with two beds!”
“Nor am I!”
“You will pay for it both together!”
“No!” said simultaneously by both visitors.
But the porter, who understands the pliancy of human nature, says: “All right then, room seventy-six.”
“Unbelievable!” say both travellers. One would think they really didn’t like each other. But the imagination of the porter in seeing them as sleeping companions has made them into such. Their hostility to the idea welds them together.
“Er—do you snore?” asks the first.
“I beg your pardon!” replies the other.
“I hasten to say, I don’t . . . !”
