by Joseph Roth
Canaries like to mark Sundays as well. In the first-floor window is the bird cage and the canary recites an Eichendorff ode. Or maybe it’s something by Baumbach.
On the red tablecloth rests a white crocheted doily. The children can’t be dissuaded from propping their elbows on it, and rucking it up.
I have never seen the mother except in a blue dressing gown. She is very quiet, I think she was born in slippers, and I’m sure she has a shuffling and embittered soul.
She scolds the children for rucking up the tablecloth. What does she have to have a tablecloth for, I wonder, and once I sent her a couple of drawing pins in a matchbox, with instructions for their use. But she went on chastising the children.
Today, on Sunday, though, she had cake for them. The children rucked up the tablecloth, but their mother stood in the window and took delight in the declamations of the canary. She had on a white blouse. And no trace of any slippers.
But Sunday evenings are sad. I see the tabby cat sitting on the third-floor window sill. The teacher has gone out.
Each time the clock sends a quarter hour ringing out over the copper roofs of the town, the cat stretches. I suspect that she is keeping count of the strokes, and is impatient for her mistress to come home.
Sometimes she looks down, and for want of a handkerchief, waves with her tail when she sees the teacher coming.
The teacher has gone to visit her brother, who is a retired infantry captain with hearing loss. It takes her for ever to tell him there is no news. That’s what has caused the teacher to be gone such a long time.
“I swear I’m going to sack her!” says the cat, and is terribly agitated.
Sunday evenings are thin and mealy, as if they already belonged to Monday. Gabriel is back to being a double-entry bookkeeper, and the girls iron their creased white dresses and smell of bread and butter. The world is full again.
Berliner Börsen-Courier, 3 July 1921
* See J. R.’s 1920 story “Career” in his Collected Shorter Fiction.
50. The Office
Because I am going abroad, I am required to call on various offices, many offices, grey buildings, grey-white rooms, gentlemen at desks, gentlemen behind counters, gentlemen in worn suits, with embittered faces, with moustaches and bald heads, with widening partings and spectacles, with blue pencils in their top pockets—wretched men, wretched offices. There is no more than a partition between us, but it is a whole world. I lean against desks and see red, blue, purple inkpads and hammer-headed rubber stamps, chewed-up pens, toothmarks sunk in brown pencils, old pictures, office calendars with the frayed remnants of old, torn-off days, scraps of paper in tin frames, gnawed by the tooth of time which eats a date for breakfast every morning. I pass through corridors, unreal, almost dream-like corridors, past waiting people propped on umbrellas reading newspapers. Sometimes a door opens, and I steal a look inside and see a man sitting, a desk standing, a calendar hanging, just as in the room I will shortly set foot in, even though the one carries the number twenty-four, and mine is sixty-four. A couple of flies bombard the windowpanes, hurling their little black bodies against the glass, while a third stands on the tin lid of the inkwell rubbing its nose with its frail legs. The ink in the inkwell is drying, crusts are forming round the edges, blue-black crusts, dried, prematurely wizened figures, reminders, files.
At the front desk sits a young man and at the back desk an older man. The young man has white-blond hair, which is nice and unruly, it objects to being parted, and then he has a blobby round nose and a red Cupid’s bow and a dimpled chin like a girl. There is the child in his face still, his blue eye is earnest and adorable like a boy’s playing cops and robbers. His hands have dumpy shapeless fingers, and one of them is already wearing a wedding band. His waistcoat is gently swelling over the beginnings of a pot belly, emblem of his career. His briefcase is still new, the fair hands of a young wife have stuffed it full of sandwiches, a sleepy morning tenderness still clings to his lips, and he is friendly, gentle, fair, he makes a modest joke in order to encourage me, the “pending case”, to a light-hearted rejoinder. He is the man on the other side of the barrier. The sunken wall, the partition dividing us, is shattered; with the longing of a man on a desert island he looks up at me, heart overflowing with gratitude. He is like the stationmaster who sees the express race past him every day without stopping—and I am just as exotic here, just as strange and mysterious as the train that never stops. This young official would like to detain me, he wants to know what it’s like in those countries I have visited, and where I hope to go. He wants to know about more than the countries. He is young, he longs for human conversation, he takes an interest in me, he is still unhappy at his desk, not yet chewing his pencils, he too has bold dreams. He still has the sacred faith in the impossible, he is determined to one day leave this room, to have money, to sit in express trains, to see Mt Fuji for himself. But when I come back to this office in twenty years’ time, then he will be the older gentleman at the back desk who will give me a doubtful look over the top of his bifocals, an elderly gentleman with a bald patch and the dry skin coming off it in little flakes. Fresh ink will have crusted around the edges of the inkwell, the two hundredth generation of flies will be assaulting the windows. And my friend, I fear, will be chewing pencils.
Prager Tagblatt, 20 July 1924
51. The Destruction of a Café
The café was as old as a church.
Stout pillars supported the ceiling, which seemed to disappear in the gloaming. It was flat, and covered with paintings. But because it was propped by pillars, and grey cigar smoke clouded it, you couldn’t help feeling that it was vaulted, that you had arches overhead that sheltered but also swaddled you, a roof and also a robe.
The pillars were dark brown, and a polished bark covered them, as if they had reverted to the status of trees. At eye-level they put out iron hooks, decorated by iron foliage. The tables stood in their shade. One knew the size of the pillars, where each one began and ended; but measured with that measure that has no units, but is nevertheless real and true, the pillars were endless, and whoever leaned on one was alone, as alone as in a room by himself. Someone else might be resting against the other side of the pillar. But he was a hundred years away. The din of conversation was muffled by the coats that hung on the hooks, trapping indiscretions in their folds. It was possible to sit in the middle of the café, and yet remain as concealed as in the middle of a forest.
To enter the café, you had to push aside a heavy green velvet curtain with leather trim. It was heavier and fitted more snugly than a door of iron or oak. It was draped around the shoulders of the entry, like a winter cloak. You batted it aside, walked in, and straightaway it closed behind you. You were in the warm—whether it was autumn or February or even Christmas.
Across from the entrance on a raised platform was the wide dark bar. Looming in the background were innumerable bottles of various shapes and sizes, colourful gold-rimmed labels, and in front of them a regiment of gleaming glasses, opalescent cups and a jingling, singing heap of frivolous teaspoons—a lady sat or stood behind the bar. One couldn’t see quite where she was rooted. Her growth was a mystery. It was possible that she perched on a bar stool. Her complexion was pale, a little subterranean, as though lit by ancient candles. The outline of her face was fine—her face was little more than outline—she reminded one of a well-preserved spring. Perhaps she didn’t exist at all, and someone had sketched her with fawn crayon on soft paper. Because it was as though she was looking out of a frame, or from a high window over rooftops. Her eye strayed, without aim . . .
A mannerly gentleman made his way quietly through the room. He knew all the customers. He would suddenly pop up behind a pillar to help someone into his coat, he had clearly been following the man’s movements for some time—and now there he was, at the right time. He offered a restrained greeting with the dignity of someone who has been greeted himself wit
h considerably less warmth over decades.—Good evening—his inclined head seemed to say—no need to thank me. I don’t need thanks.—As he held out the coat, he seemed to turn into a hat stand with extended arms. If a waiter was negligent, the gentleman got his attention with a long look. Like a general he surveyed the terrain, like a doctor he offered diagnoses, like the master of a house he welcomed visitors, like a theatre director he supervised the waiters’ entrances and exits, like a protective angel he watched over the forsaken and alone, and like God he was unchanging. He was neither young nor old, his hair was neither white nor dark, his expression was neither animated nor listless, and never did I see him sit and rest.
This was the café where my friend Krac would come in the evenings, with books and manuscripts, the evening paper, and a roll (filled). Other people would go home at this time, or out to dinner, but he, secum portans, liked to eat his supper here. He held it under the table in his left hand, and with his right helped himself to little unexplained titbits. Other people would take a couple of soft-boiled eggs in a glass, reddish-yellow, with scraps of shell mixed in. He for his part would order a cup of coffee, not even an espresso, just a common or garden coffee. The whole of the café where we sat, the table, the chairs, the pillar behind us, the waiter, the mannerly gentleman, the lights, the bar and the lady were like condiments for my friend’s roll. Meanwhile the café was happy to act as though it had requested him to come, bringing his supper. Such was the hospitality of this institution.
It’s not so easy any more.
The café has been redecorated. There is no longer a curtain in the entrance. To keep the pillars clear, a wardrobe has been installed to the right of the door. You are supposed to surrender your coat when you walk in, as at the theatre. The large windows have narrow green sills. The pillars are white, the ceiling is white. Away with the wall-paintings!—said the spirit of the age—the smoke obscures them anyway. The colour of the age is white, laboratory white, as white as the room where they invented lewisite, white as a church, white as a bathroom, white as a dissecting room, white as steel and white as chalk, white as hygiene, white as a butcher’s apron, white as an operating table, white as death, and white as the age’s fear of death! Let’s brighten up the ceiling!—Because it is the age’s belief that white is cheerful. It wants by brightness to attract cheerful people. And the people are as merry as patients, and the present is as merry as a hospital.
The ceiling hasn’t been lowered, it’s sufficient to have had it painted white. Now it presses down on our heads, unremitttingly hygienic. Light is cast not by lamps, but by glass columns that resemble thermometers—perhaps they take the room’s temperature at the same time. Light streams in from the side, not harmful to the eyes, so that blind people with artificial eyes can read faits divers. The floor is no longer wood, but grey stone marked with white lines—or so it appears. (Your feet tell you that the stone is actually rubber or linoleum.) A cowardly stone that makes no sound, a stone for tiptoeing around on. Hygienic. Deaf-mutes can listen to the radio in this silence. The number of tables has been increased by a third, and the comfortable armchairs have been thrown out. The new chairs are straight-backed for straight backs, they steel the body, they are steel seats. The bar looks like the counter of a pharmacy. The waiter has a prescription pad. A boy with gold buttons, a milk and blood face, bum-freezer jacket, Cupid, Mercury and messenger-boy in one, doles out nicotine-free cigarettes. On special application you are served coffee that will cure heart-patients and put you to sleep. The lady behind the bar is gone, vanished, airbrushed out, removed. The mannerly gentleman is gone. (Will you ever be greeted like that again?) He couldn’t go along with the evolution of the café, the way that claims to go from Germany to Broadway, but never gets past Kurfürstendamm.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 October 1927
52. Music in the Volksgarten
The music in the Volksgarten began at five in the afternoon. It was spring, and the blackbirds were still warbling in the shrubbery and the flowerbeds. The army band was seated behind the gold-tipped iron railings that separated the restaurant terrace from the park concourse, and thus parted the paying guests from other listeners without means. Among these were many young women. They had come to enjoy the music. But music on those evenings meant more than music, it was a chance to hear the voice of nature and of spring. The leaves overarched the proud melancholy of the trumpets—and a fitful breeze seemed for long moments at a time to whisk away the whole band and all the noises on the terrace to unknown distances. At the same time, one could hear the slow, crunching footfall of walkers on the footpath. Their settled tempo gave back the pleasure the music gave the ears. When the instruments sounded again, the drums began to roll, and the cymbals to clash, then it was as though the trees had grown louder, and the excitable arms of the bandleader had not only the musicians at his beck and call, but also the soughing leaves. Now, when suddenly a solo flute broke through the storm, it didn’t sound like the voice of an instrument, but like a singing pause. Then the birds too resumed—as though the composer had written a part for blackbirds. The scent of the chestnuts was so strong that it drowned out the sweetest melodies, and it batted your face like a brother to the wind. And from the many young women in the avenue there came a lustre, and a whispering and in particular a laughter that was even closer than the women themselves, and more familiar. Then if you addressed a strange girl you thought you had already heard her speak. And if you went away with her from this avenue into another, more secluded, then you didn’t have just the girl with you, you had something of the music, and you entered into the silence there as into one of the singing pauses.
It wasn’t thought proper to lounge outside by the rails and let the girls know that you were in no position to go inside and order a coffee. And so I walked up and down the avenue, fell in love, despaired, got over it, forgot, and fell in love again—all in the space of a minute. I would have liked to stop and listen and nothing else. But even if I had been friends with a lieutenant who—all jingle and elegance—was sitting eating butter biscuits within, I would still have fallen for the distant and inaccessible charms of the lightsome ladies who sat at white garden tables, like so many spring clouds, impossible to speak to because one never saw them out on the streets anywhere. At that time, some of the “grand monde” would foregather on the restaurant terrace, and the barrier was the border that separated us. And just as the young lady I was kissing took me for a mighty knight, so on the terraces of the great restaurants I saw damsels I would straightaway have died for. I would get a chance later. But to be able to promenade up and down and discreetly watch life going on, and pretend it wasn’t behind lock and key, that was something I owed myself.
From time to time I would spot a graceful ribbon that the silver-tipped conductor’s baton of black lacquer had set spinning into the air. It hung there in my sight, a billowing memory. Sometimes, when I happened to be standing beside the exit, the seductive and supercilious look of a lady would brush me. She would get in a carriage, followed by a suite of gentlemen. But on the brief way from the threshold of the garden to the running board of the carriage, she demanded from my worshipful eye confirmation that she was beautiful. I fell in love instantly—meanwhile the carriage trundled off, and the dapper clopping of the horses mimicked my heart. I was still bewailing her disappearance, but already melancholy began to give way to the hope that the lady might leave the restaurant at the same time tomorrow, and I, a chance passer-by, would be on hand to see it and be noticed. And even though the music had recalled me to the avenue and the vulgar chancers, I was perfectly convinced that I was standing on the threshold of a magnificent existence that would begin tomorrow.
Already night had fallen, lamps came on among the leaves, and you couldn’t see the young ladies any more, only hear them. In the dimness they seemed to have become more numerous. Giggling became their principal communication. Since I could no longer see their cheap blue dresses, the young l
adies could almost compete with those within the enclosure. The public part of the garden was closing, and the band was getting ready to finish for the evening. One of the players went from desk to desk, gathering in the sheet music like so many school exercise books. The last piece—it was almost always the Radetzky March—wasn’t played from the score, but from empty desks. The march seemed not to exist on paper. It had passed into the players’ flesh and blood, and they were playing it from memory, as you breathe from memory. Now the march rang out—the Marseillaise of reaction—and while the drummers and trumpeters still stood at their places, you thought you could see the drums and trumpets march off by themselves, drawn along by the melody that poured from them. Yes, the entire Volksgarten was marching. People wanted to stroll and to dawdle, but the rolling drums got their limbs moving. They echoed long after in the street beyond, and suffused the noise of the evening city like a smiling and rapid thunder.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 April 1928
53. The Strange City
For the past week, I’ve been living on a new street, and it feels like a different city. As yet I know little about the customs, population and dimensions of this city, but at least I have established its chief quality: it has balconies.
The man who built it was an architect with an obsession with the south. For twenty years his soul went about pregnant with gables and oriels and turrets and weathervanes, his soul was a sort of compressed version of Nuremberg, and then in the twenty-first it was let loose on some open space. And the architect gave expression to his dream of the south. Because this town was supposed to give a home to as many people as possible, he had to build large buildings, which meant setting one apartment over another and then another, till there were four or five squatting on top of each other. And then he dropped a pert Nuremberg gabled roof on top of the ensemble, and carved little balconies out of the bellies of the individual flats, and teased round and square bay-fronts out of the forms of the rooms. So that his yearning was satisfied, but only up at the top. The lower parts of the buildings have the usual facades, wide gateways, glass doors, tarnished door handles and zoological doorbells, for instance lions’ heads with panting tongues you have to tickle to get the bell to ring. Along the corridors he set unframed mirrors. So that the people liked to go up—in the lift if they were well-off, taking the stairs if they weren’t—and inspect themselves, though without getting to know themselves at all.
