by Joseph Roth
At that time, Elisabeth was beautiful, soft, tender, and unquestionably devoted to me. The smallest, the least of her actions and gestures moved me deeply, because I felt that every movement of her hand, every nod of her head, every swing of her foot, the smoothing of her skirt, the gentle raising of her veil, the touch of her lip on a cup of coffee, a particular flower in her corsage, the way she pulled off a glove, all carried a clear and immediate message for me — and for me alone. Yes, from various signs that might then have been accounted “forward,” I thought I was entitled to conclude that the tenderness with which she eyed me, an impetuous or ostensibly accidental touch on my hand or my shoulder were in the nature of binding promises of great and delicious tendernesses to come, if I liked. The eves of celebrations whose calendrical certainty was beyond questioning. Her voice was low and soft (I dislike shrill soprano voices). Her speaking put me in mind of a stifled, tamed, chaste and yet suggestive cooing, the purling of underground streams, the rumbling of distant trains that one sometimes hears on sleepless nights, and each of her words, however trite, because of the timbre of her speech, acquired the portentousness and gravitas of some far-off, maybe not readily understandable, but clearly intuited lost ur-language once maybe heard in dreams.
When I left her to return to the society of my friends, I felt tempted to tell them all about Elisabeth, yes, even to rave to them about her. But at the sight of their tired, slack and cynical faces, their palpable and even obtrusive mockery, that I not only didn’t care to have levelled at me, but was keen to participate in as a regular contributor, I first lapsed into a dull and sheepish silence, and then, within a few minutes, fell in with that arrogant “décadence” whose lost and proud sons we all were.
Such was my foolish cleft stick, and I honestly didn’t know where to find comfort. I occasionally thought about taking my mother into my confidence. But at that time, while I was still young, I thought her incapable of understanding my concerns. My relationship with my mother was not honest and authentic, but rather the pathetic effort to imitate those that my friends had with their mothers. To them, they weren’t mothers, but a sort of hatchery to which they owed life and maturity, or, at best, a sort of domestic setting in which they happened to have come into the world, and to which they owed nothing more than a respectful acknowledgment. I, though, felt an almost holy awe for my mother all my life; only I chose to suppress it. I ate lunch at home. We sat silently opposite each other at the big table in the spacious dining room. My father’s old place at the head of the table was kept vacant, and every day in accordance with my mother’s wishes, a setting was put out for the permanent absentee. You could say my mother sat at the right hand of the departed, and I on his left. She drank a golden muscadet, and I a half bottle of Vöslauer. (I didn’t like it. I would have preferred Burgundy. But my mother had decreed it so.) Our old servant Jacques waited on us, with his trembling old man’s hands in snow-white gloves. His thick hair was almost equally white. My mother ate small portions, quickly but with dignity. As soon as I raised my eyes to her, she lowered hers to her plate — even though just a moment before, I had sensed her looking at me. Oh, I could feel that she had many things she wanted to ask me, and only bit them back to save herself the shame of being lied to by her only child. She carefully folded up her napkin. Those were the only moments I could look closely at her broad, slightly puffy face, with the slack cheeks, and the creased heavy lids. I looked down at her lap where she was folding the napkin, and I thought reverently but also reproachfully that it was from there that my life had taken its inception, that warm lap, the most motherly part of my mother, and I felt some astonishment that I could sit there so silently, so truculently, yes, so obtusely, and that she, my own mother, could find no words to say to me, and that obviously she felt just as ashamed of her grown-up, too rapidly grown up son, as I did of her, my aged, too rapidly aged progenetrix. How I wished I could have been able to talk to her about my cleft stick, my double life between Elisabeth and my friends. But she clearly didn’t want to hear anything of what she sensed, so as not to have to condemn aloud what she disapproved of in quiet. Perhaps, probably in fact, she had come to terms with the terrible law of nature that compels sons quickly to forget their origins; to see their mothers as old ladies; no longer to think of the breasts at which they first sucked — an unyielding law, that also compels the mothers to see the fruit of their womb grow bigger and taller and stranger and more remote; initially with pain, then with bitterness, and finally with resignation. I felt my mother spoke to me so little because she didn’t want me to say things for which she would have had to chide me. But if I had felt myself at liberty to talk with her about Elisabeth, and my love for that girl, then I would probably have dishonoured her, my mother, and so to speak myself as well. Sometimes I did want to talk about my love. But then I thought about my friends. Their relationships with their mothers. I had the childlike feeling that by confessing I would betray myself. As if keeping silent about something to my mother wasn’t a betrayal of myself, and moreover a betrayal of my mother. When my friends spoke about their mothers, I felt triply ashamed: for my friends, my mother, and myself. They spoke of their mothers almost the way they spoke of their “liaisons” that they had stood up or left behind, as if they were prematurely aged mistresses, and worse, as if the mothers were undeserving of such sons.
So it was my friends who kept me from hearing the voice of nature and common sense, and from giving free expression either to my feeling for my dear Elisabeth or to my filial love of my mother.
But it was to become apparent that the sins with which my friends and I burdened our souls were not personal to ourselves, but only the feeble, barely discernible signs of the coming devastation I will tell you about shortly.
VI
Before the great devastation began, it was given to me to meet the Jew Manes Reisiger, who has a part to play in this story later. He came from Zlotogrod in Galicia. A little later, I got to see Zlotogrod for myself, so I can describe it to you here. It matters to me so much because it no longer exists, no more than Sipolje does. It was destroyed in the course of the war. It used to be a town once: a small town, but still a town. Today it is an expanse of meadow. Clover grows there in the summer, crickets shrill in the tall grasses, earthworms thrive in plump coils, and the larks come with jabbing beaks to gobble them up.
The Jew Manes Reisiger came to see me one day in October, just as early in the morning as his friend, my cousin Branco, had come to see me a couple of months before. He came, in fact, on the recommendation of my cousin Branco. “Young master” — thus Jacques — “a Jew would like to speak to you.” I knew a few Jews at the time, Viennese Jews admittedly. I didn’t hate them by any means, because at that time the virulent anti-Semitism of the nobility and the circles in which I moved had become fashionable with janitors, with the lower middle classes, with chimney sweeps and housepainters. This change reflected the democratizing drift of fashion, whereby the daughter of a court usher wore exactly the same veil on her Sunday hat as a Trautmannsdorf or a Szechenyi had worn three years before, on a weekday. And just as no Szechenyi could possibly wear the same veil that graced the hat of an usher’s daughter, so the high society of which I counted myself a member could not possibly turn up their noses at a Jew — simply because my janitor already did.
I stepped into the anteroom, prepared to see one of those Jews I knew, whose profession seemed to have affected, even to have become, their physical aspect. I knew money-changers, pedlars, garment-dealers and brothel pianists. Stepping into the anteroom, I beheld a man who not only failed to correspond to my notions of a Jew, but who might have been enough all on his own to demolish them. He was incredibly dark and incredibly big. It would be incorrect to say that his beard, his sleek, deep black beard framed his tough, tanned, bony face. No, it was the face that emerged from the beard, as though the beard had been there first, before the face, and had spent years waiting for something to frame and surround. The man was big
and strong. In his hand he held a peaked corduroy cap, and on his head he wore a round velvet kippah, of the sort our clerics sometimes wear. He stood in the doorway, mighty, sinister, a force of nature, his red hands clenched into fists, hanging like two hammers from the black sleeves of his kaftan. Out of the leather lining of his cap he took a multiply folded letter in Slovene from my cousin Joseph Branco. I asked him to sit down, but he motioned that he wouldn’t, and the gesture struck me as even more bashful than it was already because it had been performed by those hands, either one of which would have been enough to crush me, the window, the little marble table, the clothes stand and everything else that was in the anteroom. I read the letter. It informed me that the man standing before me was Manes Reisiger from Zlotogrod, coachman by trade, friend of my cousin Joseph Branco, who, on his annual transits through the Crown Lands of the Monarchy to sell chestnuts, enjoyed free board and lodging with the bearer of the letter, Manes Reisiger, and that the ties of friendship and family obliged me to do all I could to help the said Manes Reisiger.
And what help did he want, Manes Reisiger from Zlotogrod?
Nothing more and nothing less than a free place at the conservatory for his gifted son, Ephraim. He was not to become a coachman like his father, and not to go to seed in the Eastern marches of the monarchy. According to his father, Ephraim was a prodigy.
I promised. I set off to visit my friend, Count Chojnicki, first because he was the only Galician among my friends, and second because he was the only one who was capable of breaking the ancient, traditional, invariable and insidiously effective resistance of Austrian officialdom: by threats, by force, by subtlety and deception, the weapons of an old culture: the weapons of our world.
That evening, I saw Count Chojnicki in our café, which was the Café Wimmerl.
I knew that one could hardly please him more than by turning to him for a favour for one of his countrymen. Chojnicki had neither job nor occupation. He, who could have made a so-called brilliant career in the army, in the government, in the diplomatic service, and who had disdained such a thing for contempt of the fools, the imbeciles, the eejits who ran the state, took a keen delight in making Court Councillors aware of his power, which was a real power, conferred upon him by standing outside all hierarchies. And he, who was so kindly and so gracious to waiters, coachmen, constables and postmen, who never forgot to doff his hat when asking a policeman or porter for directions, was barely recognizable when he undertook one of his protection errands to the Ballhausplatz, the Statthalterei or the Ministry of Culture and Education: an icy loftiness lay over his features like a transparent visor. If he had shown himself to be agreeable, even affable, to the liveried doorman at the gate, then his aversion to officialdom seemed to grow with every step he climbed, until by the time he had reached the top floor, he looked every inch a man who had come to hold some fearsome inquest. In the ministries he was a well-known figure. And when, in his dangerously quiet voice, he told the aide in the corridor: Announce me to the Court Councillor!, it rarely happened that he was asked for his name, and if he was, then he merely said again, if anything more quietly still: Kindly announce me right away! Perhaps the word “kindly” was spoken a little louder.
Moreover, he adored music, and for that reason too it seemed appropriate to try and enlist his support for young Reisiger. With typical impulsiveness, he promised to go the very next day. His alacrity was such that I felt a little conscience-stricken, and asked him if he didn’t require some proof of young Reisiger’s talent before going to do battle on his behalf. That merely irritated him. “You may know your Slovenes,” he said, “but I know my Galician Jews. The father’s name is Manes, you tell me, and he’s a coachman. The son’s name is Ephraim, and that’s all I need to know. I am utterly convinced of the gifts of the young man. I trust my instincts. My Galician Jews can do anything. Only ten years ago I didn’t much care for them. Now I love them dearly because all those eejits are anti-Semites now. I need only inquire who is serving in the relevant department, and who among them is the most outspoken anti-Semite. Then I will flaunt my little Ephraim at him, and I will go in the company of his father as well. I hope he looks thoroughly Jewish.”
“He wears a kaftan,” I began. “Perfect,” exclaimed Count Chojnicki, “then he’s my man. You know, I’m no patriot, but I love my countrymen. A country, a fatherland, there’s something abstract about that. But a countryman is something concrete. I can’t possibly love every wheat and maize field, every pine forest, every swamp, every Polish lady and gentleman, but show me one field, one copse, one swamp, one individual, well, à la bonheur! That’s something I can see and understand, that speaks to me in a language I am familiar with, that — because of its singularity — can be dear to me. And beyond that, there are persons I term my countrymen, even if they happen to have been born in China or Persia or Africa. Some are dear to me from the moment I first clap eyes on them. A true ‘countryman’ is immediately identifiable. And if he happens to be someone from my own patch as well, then, as I say, à la bonheur! But there’s an element of chance there, the other is simple providence.” He raised his glass, and called out: “Here’s to my countrymen, wherever they happen to hail from!”
Two days later, I brought along the coachman Manes Reisiger to see him in the Hotel Kremser. Manes perched on the edge of his chair, not moving, a dark colossus. He appeared not to have sat down himself, but to have been placed there rather approximately by some agency, and as though he wouldn’t allow himself to occupy the whole of a chair. Aside from a couple of sentences he repeated at intervals for no very good reason — namely, “Please, gentlemen!” and “Thank you, kind sirs!” — he said nothing, nor did he seem to follow the proceedings very closely. It was Chojnicki who was giving the coachman Manes from Zlotogrod a lecture on all things Zlotogrod; for Chojnicki was very well acquainted with all parts of Galicia.
“Well then, tomorrow at eleven, we’ll go and sort out your affair,” he said.
“Thank you, kind sirs!” said Manes. In one hand he waved his peaked corduroy cap, and with the other he doffed his kippah. He bowed once more at the door that the porter held open for him, and to whom he shot a grateful and happy smile.
A couple of weeks later, young Ephraim Reisiger had his place in the conservatory. The boy came to Chojnicki to thank him. I happened to be present in Chojnicki’s hotel. Young Ephraim Reisiger almost scowled, and all the while he was expressing his gratitude, he looked more like a youth who is bringing a complaint. He spoke Polish, of which, thanks to my Slovene, I understood roughly every third word. But the mien of Count Chojnicki gave me to understand that the surly and basically ungrateful attitude of the boy pleased him.
“Isn’t that something!” he said, once the boy had left. “Our people don’t say thank you — more the opposite. They are proud people, the Galician Jews — my Galician Jews! They live in the belief that distinctions are theirs as of right. They respond to grace and favour with the same wonderful equanimity with which they receive abuse and stones. All other people wax indignant when they are abused, and bow and scrape when they receive a favour. My Polish Jews are equally immune to abuse and to kindness. In their own way, they are aristocrats. For the mark of an aristocrat above all is equanimity; and never have I seen greater equanimity than in my Polish Jews!”
My Polish Jews, he said, in the same tone as he had so often spoken to me of “my estates,” “my Impressionists,” “my musical instrument collection.” I had a distinct sense that part of the reason he so admired the Jews was that he saw them as his property. It was as though they hadn’t seen the light of the world in Galicia because of God’s will, but because he personally had ordered them from the Almighty, just as he ordered Persian carpets from the noted seller Pollitzer, and parrots from the Italian birdseller Scapini, and rare old musical instruments from the violin maker Grossauer. And with the same attention to detail, the same circumspect nobility with which he treated his carpets and birds and instruments, so he
encountered his Jews, so that he took it for his self-evident duty to write the good coachman Manes, the father of that arrogant boy, a letter congratulating him on Ephraim’s acceptance in the conservatory. Chojnicki was afraid the coachman Manes might thank him first.
