by Joseph Roth
“You know—I don’t mean this in any way personally—but I can’t stand snoring!”
“That’s exactly what I say! Once, I was on my way to . . .” And there follows the obligatory anecdote that ushers in friendships and firms up alliances.
More noxious meanwhile than any snoring is the blaring gramophone. Downstairs, somewhere in the dining room it scratches out marches, waltzes and two-steps with the inert implacability of a machine. Its insidiousness lies in the fact that its sound becomes clearer and more penetrating the further you stand from its funnel. This well-established characteristic of physics leaves the sleepless guest convinced that intervention is impossible, an illusion. Its range is limitless. The acoustic persecution is more traumatically effective in the remotest room on the second floor than anywhere on the first. It would be easier to find sleep in the sonorous throat of the funnel itself than in the illusory, delusory distance.
Sometimes there are fairs in P. It is never possible to anticipate them. They occur like natural catastrophes. They break out like storms. And then the rooms cost more. In fact, they cost twice as much. Also the fairs are surreptitious. There is no sign of them on the evening of one’s arrival. You get tangled up in a fair as in a waiting net.
Thousands of sample cases wander through the “Hotel Kopriva”. Its beds house commercial travellers of every kind. They sit at the single long table in the dining room. The traveller in children’s toys with the doleful face. He looks like someone who should be travelling in sacred relics. But no, he carries with him the gaudy joys of life: red wooden horsemen; yellow silk clowns; bouncy monkeys on thin elastics; colourful spinning tops; chimneysweeps no bigger than Tanagra figurines, with eyes that open and close; little black devils with tongues of flame; abacuses strung with wooden beads that convert mathematics to a game. But beside him the traveller in soaps at least is cheerful. He smells of musk, patchouli, powder. The paper seller plays solitaire. The man with the fountain pens is a little old-fashioned, he reminds you of goose quills. Tobacco smoke hangs under the ceiling. And no one has any time. Everyone is between arrival and departure. The “Hotel Kopriva” is always between trains. Its eighty rooms and hundred and twenty beds whirl round and round. The “Hotel Kopriva” doesn’t exist. It merely seems to exist. The gramophone tumbles upstairs and down. The sample cases fly through the air. The manager rushes from room to room. The room-service waiter runs to the train. The porter is knocked for six. The manager is the room-service waiter. The porter is the manager. The room-service waiter is the porter. The room numbers are departure times. The clock is a timetable. The visitors are tied to the station on invisible elastics. They bounce back and forth. The gramophone sings train sounds. Eighty makes a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty rooms trundle through eighty beds.
Prager Tagblatt, 4 December 1923
24. The All-Powerful Police
At the end of two days I have taken against the porter of my Roman hotel. His professional friendliness is vitiated with that ill-concealed curiosity that betrays the mediocre spy. He simply wasn’t born to serve the police. He has been in the hotel business for twenty years—if I can believe anything he says—and he was a hotel porter when visitors in Italy were merely guests, and not yet objects of official scrutiny. A change in regime is something a traveller sees first in a hotel porter. His first move after welcoming the guest is to ask for his passport. I will admit, I have a deep suspicion of states that demand the surrender of your passport in a hotel. (Some travellers are less particular in this regard.) All the traditional hospitality of a country that has been getting by on tourism for many years, and seems likely not to be able to get by without it for many more, becomes suspicious to me when hotel personnel start to behave in a semi-official capacity and take away my passport, and thereby my freedom of movement, even if it’s only for half a day. But the hotel porter does more. When I go to him for stamps, he takes the trouble to read the names of my addressees. So concerned is he for my comfort that he will not let me walk a few steps to the letter box. He insists on posting my letters himself. The outcome is that they arrive a day or two later than they should have done.
He has some curious friends, my hotel porter. Several times a day one sees him in the company of two or three gentlemen who are certainly not guests at the hotel. Curious fellows, who, as I hand in my key, straightaway fall into a deep silence. As I walk away, I feel their glances boring into my neck. Sometimes I run into one or other of them in a café, whom just half an hour ago I heard sharing a silence with my hotel porter. Haven’t we met somewhere before? Aha!
I know there are travellers who have eyes only for the ruins, and who are prepared to let spies be spies. But my sensitivity, nurtured and developed by stays in police states—which is to say, states with an anxious police—is such that no amount of tourist attractions is enough to distract me from the lively espionage culture.
When I call on the gentleman my friend in Milan recommended me to, the janitor looks me up and down. This gentleman, a businessman and devout Catholic, was under police suspicion for a time. As we leave the building together he greets the porter, to whom he sometimes gives tips, with a smile and a tad too politely. “The man is dangerous,” says my host. “He could report me any moment.” “What for?” “Who knows?”
Indeed, one may not know why one incurs the suspicions of the janitor and the intimate of the police. The bourgeois lives in permanent dread of incurring suspicion. The law surrenders him entirely into the hands of the police. Here, perhaps a little excursus on the helplessness of the citizen in present-day Italy.
According to Mussolini himself (as of 26 May 1927), Fascist Italy has: 60,000 gendarmes, 15,000 policemen, and a 10,000-strong rail, post and communications militia. In addition to these there are the frontier militia and a 300,000-strong volunteer Fascist militia for “national security”.
The mere existence of these units would be sufficient to trim the freedoms of the Italian citizen. But then there are Fascist laws, which are such as to completely destroy them.
The Italian is not allowed to travel in his own country unless he carries with him a carte d’identité issued by the police authority of his regular abode. Without it, no hotel is allowed to take him in. (He will even be turned away by hospitals.) Leaving the country is a near-impossibility. The authorities issue no passports for abroad. A twenty thousand lire fine and a minimum of three years in prison is the punishment for anyone caught trying to cross the border without a passport.
Further, Italy has the concept of a so-called citizen “of ill repute”. A citizen of this kind has no personal freedoms. He is under constant supervision. The police tell him when he may leave his flat. A police commission is empowered to tell him where he has to live—anywhere in Italy, or the colonies. The police, and they alone, determine his day, his work, his constitutional, his siesta, his sleep. Mussolini’s explanation for this measure goes: “We remove these individuals from normal society in the same way as doctors isolate patients with infectious diseases.”
To extend the dictator’s simile: one would suppose that the isolation of someone struck down with anti-Fascism would be sufficient, and let the healthy do as they please. Alala! Not so! Every public event—whether of a scientific, sporting, or even charitable nature—must give at least one month’s notice to the prefect of police. He must approve the time and place. He is allowed to ban the event. A commission advises him on the course to take. And who sits on this commission? The secretary of the Fascist League of the province in question and next to him the “Podesta”—the commandant of the garrison! Professors, civil servants, students and high school pupils are disbarred from associating in any way—not even for scholarly purposes. (Neither czarist nor contemporary Russia has laws like that.) Not even a memorial service may be held without police permission. The police reserve the right to determine place and time of any public meeting. And it isn’t hard to imagine that where th
e police, for certain reasons, finds itself unable or unwilling to ban something outright, it will still set a time and a place that will make the meeting impractical or ineffectual in advance.
You understand why my host goes in fear of his janitor. The janitor has become, by police practice, a sort of conduit of opinion. The law is aware of citizens “generally regarded as of ill repute”, and the catspaws of these laws are unable to walk into buildings and listen and hear the sources of this ill repute for themselves. They rely instead on tale-bearers. From the time of Metternich, janitors have been the eyes and ears of the police.
The Italian citizen goes in fear of the newspaper vendor on the corner, the cigarette seller and the barber, the porter and the beggar, the neighbour in the tram, and the conductor. And the cigarette seller, the barber, the neighbour, the traveller and the conductor are all afraid of one another. When I asked my friend, in a café in Milan on the day of Nobile’s arrival, not expecting a serious reply and really only to break his gloomy silence: “What do you think of Nobile then?” he promptly replied: “I take no interest in politics.” “You mean the North Pole?” “No,” he insisted, “in politics.” And he opened his newspaper and immersed himself in an article about military manoeuvres.
I have been browsing in Mussolini’s speeches, and the following passage caught my eye: “I want you to be convinced that in Fascist Italy every minister and every secretary of state is nothing but a soldier. They will go wherever their commander orders them, and when I tell them to stay, they stay.” I look up, and catch a familiar face. Two tables away from me, with a floppy red and white necktie on his chest, a sleekly pomaded head craning forward to listen, a thin cane on the chair beside him, a hand with flashing pink nails dangled over the chairback, a cowardly smile that he thinks is engaging—there is the friend of my hotel. He has picked up that we are talking in a foreign language. What an important moment. In return for two lire fifty he will tell the police about it. Alala!
Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 November 1928
25. Where the World War Began
The World War began in Sarajevo, on a balmy summer afternoon in 1914. It was a Sunday; I was a student at the time. In the afternoon a girl came round. Girls wore plaits in those days. She was carrying a large yellow straw hat in her hand, it was like summer coming to call, with hay, grasshoppers and poppies. In her straw hat was a telegram, the first special edition I had seen, crumpled and terrible, a thunderbolt on paper. “Guess what,” said the girl, “they’ve killed the heir to the throne. My father came home from the café. But we’re not going to stay here, are we?”
I didn’t manage to be quite as deadly serious as her father who had left the café. We rode on the back platform of a tram. Out in the suburbs there was a place where the tram brushed past some jasmine bushes that grew close to the track. We drove along, jingle-jangle, it was like a sleigh-ride in summer. The girl was light-blue, soft, close, with cool breath, a morning on an afternoon. She had brought me the news from Sarajevo, the name was visible over her, picked out in dark red smoke, like an inferno over a clueless child.
A year and a half later—strange how durable love could be in peacetime!—there she was again, at the goods station, surrounded by smoke, platform two, music was blaring out, wagons screeched, locomotives whistled, little shivering women hung like withered wreaths on green men, the brand new uniforms smelled of finish, we were an infantry company, our destination secret, but thought to be Serbia. Probably we were both thinking of that Sunday, the telegram, Sarajevo. Her father hadn’t been to a café since, he was in a mass grave.
Today, thirteen years after that first shot, I am seeing Sarajevo. Innocent, accursed city, still standing! Sorry repository of the grimmest catastrophes. Unmoved! No rain of fire has descended on it, the houses are intact, girls are just going home from school, though plaits are no longer in fashion. It’s one o’clock. The sky is blue satin. The station where the Archduke arrived, Death waiting for him, is some way outside the city. A wide, dusty road, part-asphalted, part-gravel, leads off to the left into the city. Trees, thickly crowned, dark and dusty, leftovers from a time when the road was still an avenue, are now irregularly sprinkled along its edge. We are sitting in a spacious courtesy bus from the hotel. We drive through streets, along the river bank—there, that corner there is where the World War began. Nothing has changed. I am looking for bloodstains. They have been removed. Thirteen years, innumerable rains, millions of people have washed away the blood. The young people are coming home from school; did they learn about the World War, I wonder?
The main street is very quiet. At the top end of it is a small Turkish cemetery, stone flowers in a small garden for the dead. At its lower edge an Oriental bazaar begins. Just about the middle of it, facing one another, are two big hotels, with café terraces. The wind browses indifferently through old newspapers and fallen leaves. Waiters stand by at the doors, more to verify than to assist the tourist trade. Old policemen lean against the walls, recalling peace, the pre-War. One has whiskers, a ghost of the old double monarchy. Very old men, probably retired notaries, speak the army German of Austrian days. A bookseller deals in paper and books and literary journals—mostly for symbolic purposes. I pick up a Maupassant from him (although he has Dekobra in stock as well) for a night ahead on a train without a wagon-lit. We get to talking. I learn that literary interest has ebbed in Sarajevo. There is a teacher who subscribes to a couple of literary weeklies. (It’s good to know that such teachers still exist!)
In the evening, there’s the passeggiata of the lovely, chaste women. It’s the passeggiata of a small town. The beautiful women walk in twos and threes, like convent girls. The gentlemen are continually doffing their hats, people here know each other so well that I feel a threefold stranger. I might almost be watching a film, a historical costume drama, where the people don’t know each other, the scenes of their greetings have been left in the cutting room, I am a stranger among strangers, the auditorium is dark; only the bright, garish intervals frighten me. It might be good to read a newspaper, to discover something about the world I have left behind in order to see something of the world.
By ten o’clock everything is quiet, there’s the distant glimmer of a single late bar down a side street; it’s a family gathering. Across the river, on the Turkish side, the houses climb up in flat terraced trays, their lights dissolve in the fog, they remind me of the wide staircase to a lofty altar.
There is a theatre and opera, there is a museum, hospitals, a law court, police, everything a city could want. A city! As if Sarajevo were a city like any other! As though the war to end all wars hadn’t begun here in Sarajevo! All the monuments, all the mass graves, all the battlefields, all the poison gas, all the cripples, the war widows, the unknown soldiers: they all came from here. I don’t wish destruction upon this city, how could I? It has dear, good people, beautiful women, charming innocent children, animals that are grateful for their lives, butterflies on the stones in the Turkish cemetery. And yet the War began here, the world was destroyed, and Sarajevo has survived. It shouldn’t be a city, it should be a monument to the terrible memory.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 July 1927
26. The Opened Tomb
In cinema newsreel footage you can see the Russian czar and the Imperial family on one of their last outings in Petersburg, the czarina, the little czarevich, the whole court, the rigid Honour Guard. This sequence is followed by the recording of the May Day parade which was recently taken by Trotsky in Moscow. Through the distance between these two slices of history the audience begins to understand how much has happened.
It should have been reversed: first the scenes with the red multitudes, under the command of a man with no military education and whose orientation is primarily literary, and then the last czar with his family. Following the picture of the czar the screen should be left white, clear and white as a funeral shroud, and a rigid silence must overlay it, compared to which t
he silence of the Siberian taiga would be noisy commotion. For not even an ignorant and insentient screen can show the scenes of these ten by ten dead, and more-than-dead people without emotion; this vision of ghosts who were dead at the moment they were filmed fresh and frolicsome, and who when they were murdered were not murdered; what was extinguished in them was not life so much as an unreality which bore an uncanny resemblance to life. The last czar ruled, banished and executed; he permitted branding, looting and killing in his name. Yes, he was even wound up for the piece of film. But, as the film shows, he didn’t live. Even graves have a breath. This blew so deceptively through the bodies of the czar’s family that one supposed they were all alive, the Archduke, the Archduchess, the rigid Guard and the little czarevich.
In the van strides the czar. He is wearing a richly stitched and braided tunic, a kind of hussar’s uniform, and his face is mounted on a pointed little imperial beard screwed to the middle of his chin. His heavy eyelids are like lowered blinds. Their glassy regard is probably levelled at the camera. It’s like the stare down the barrels of rifles a few years later. The czar walks briskly, with the movements of a creature that is part puppet, part shadow. He vanishes half-right, there where the white screen bleeds into black background. Not for an instant do you think a piece of film has come to an end in the projector behind you. This is the invocation of an undead soul at a spiritist séance.
The czarina and all the court ladies are wearing the fashions of the pre-War age, the big hats with wide rims, bent down at the front and up at the back, secured to the lofty coiffures by means of pins to keep them from swaying. The hats are worn at an angle and shade one profile, in order to show the other quite unprotected. They look terribly bold; they have the false boldness of robber hats at mask balls, the futile coquetterie of a scent that would be alluring but is only musty. The dresses are long and closed at the top, whalebone rings the throat like a closely fitted garden fence, and the bosom, at once respectable and emphatic, arches under a great deal of impenetrable material. The hair is pulled painfully up behind the ears.
