by Joseph Roth
She was still sitting over her humorist, drinking tea, and pushing little pieces of buttered toast and jam into her sweet red mouth. She set her book down on the table, and spread her arms. “Jacques,” I began, “Jacques . . .” and I faltered. I didn’t want to say the terrible verb. A smile of lustfulness and indifference and cheerfulness quivered round Elisabeth’s mouth, a smile I thought I would only be able to dispel if I used the macabre word itself — and so I said it: “He’s dying!” She dropped her arms, and said merely: “He’s old!”
People came for me, the doctor was there. The old fellow had been put to bed in his room. His starched shirt had been taken off. It hung over his black jacket, a gleaming linen breastplate. His polished boots stood like two sentries at the foot of his bed. His woollen socks, multiply darned, lay curled over them. That was all that was left of a simple human being. One or two brass buttons on the bedside table, a collar, a tie, boots, socks, jacket, trousers, shirt. The old feet with their hammer toes peeped out of the end of the bed. “Heart attack!” said the doctor. He had himself just been called to the colours, a regimental doctor, already in uniform. Tomorrow he was joining the Deutschmeisters. Our formal exchange of greetings at this death-scene was like something from an alternative theatre production, somewhere in Wiener Neustadt. We both felt ashamed. “Is he going to die?” I asked. “Is he your father?” asked the doctor. “Our retainer!” I said. I would rather have concurred: yes, my father. The doctor seemed to sense it. “Probably,” he said. “Tonight?” He shrugged.
All of a sudden it was evening. The lights came on. The doctor gave Jacques an injection of Cardiazol, wrote out prescriptions, rang the bell, sent for someone to go to the apothecary. I slunk out of the room. Just the way a traitor slinks away, I thought. I slunk up the stairs to Elisabeth, as though afraid I might wake someone. Elisabeth’s door was locked. My room was the one beside it. I knocked on the door, and then tried it. The connecting door was locked as well. I wondered briefly whether to force it. But at that instant I knew there was no love between us. It seemed I had two fatalities to mourn; and my love was the first to go. I buried it under the threshold of the door between our two rooms. Then I went down a flight of steps to sit with Jacques.
The good doctor was still there. He had unbuckled his sword and unbuttoned his tunic. It smelled of vinegar, ether and camphor in the room, and through the open window streamed the damp, withered air of an autumn evening. The doctor said: “I’ll stay for as long as I’m needed,” and he shook my hand. I sent my mother a telegram, saying that I had need of our retainer, at least until it was time for me to go. We ate ham, cheese and apples. We drank a couple of bottles of Nussdorfer.
The old man lay there, blue in the face, his breathing audible throughout the room like a rasping saw. From time to time his upper body would seize up, and his bent hands would pluck at the dark red quilt. The doctor wet a towel, shook a little vinegar on to it, and laid it on the dying man’s forehead. Twice I went upstairs to Elisabeth. The first time, there was silence. The second time I could hear her sobbing loudly. I knocked harder. “Leave me alone!” she cried. Her voice pierced me through the locked door like a knife.
It was about three in the morning, I was perched on the side of the bed, the doctor, in shirtsleeves, was asleep at the desk, his head in his arms. Then Jacques sat up with arms outstretched, opened his eyes, and babbled something. The doctor straightaway awoke and went to the bed. Then I heard Jacques’s old clear voice: “Please would the young master tell madam I’ll be back tomorrow morning.” He fell back into the pillows. His breathing came more quietly. His eyes were fixed and open; it was as though they no longer needed eyelids. “He’s dying,” said the doctor, just as I was deciding to go up to Elisabeth once more.
I waited. Death seemed to approach the old man on stockinged feet, like a father, a true angel. At four in the morning, a breeze blew a yellow, withered chestnut leaf in through the window. I picked it up and laid it on Jacques’s quilt. The doctor put his arm round my shoulder, then bent down over the old man to listen, took his hand, and then said: “Gone.” I knelt down and, for the first time in many, many years, crossed myself.
Not two minutes later, there was a knock on the door. The night porter had a note for me. “From Madam!” he said. The envelope was barely stuck down, it seemed to open of its own accord. I read a single line: “Adieu! I’ve gone home. Elisabeth.” I showed the doctor the note. He read it and looked at me and said: “I understand.” Then, after a while: “I’ll sort everything out here, with the hotel and the burial and your Mama. I don’t leave Vienna for a while. Where are you off to today?” “I’m headed East!” “Servus, then!”
I never saw the doctor again, but I never forgot him. Grünhut was his name.
XIX
I went into battle as a “seconded officer.” In my initial access of anger, hurt pride, irritation, vengefulness, what do I know, I had crumpled up my wife’s note and stuck it in my trouser pocket. Now I took it out, smoothed it out, and read the line over again. It was clear to me that I had sinned against Elisabeth. A little later, it even seemed to me that I had sinned gravely against her. I decided to write to her, and set about getting some paper out of my pack — in those days, we travelled into battle with leather writing-cases; the empty blue sheet reflected my own irritation back to me. It seemed to say everything I wanted to say to Elisabeth, and I wanted to send it off, as smooth and empty as it was. I just signed my name to it. I posted it at the next station we came to. I crumpled Elisabeth’s note a second time. And put it back in my pocket.
I was, according to the “open orders” issued by the War Ministry and signed by Stellmacher, to report directly to the Thirty-Fifth Yeomanry regiment, wherever they might be met with, without first reporting to the auxiliary local HQ, which, as a result of the recent fighting, had been withdrawn from the dangerous border region into the interior. I saw myself therefore confronted with the tricky task of tracking down my regiment, which must be on a course of continual retreat, somewhere in a village or wood or small town, in a word, in their “position,” which meant more or less an errant individual hoping to encounter his errant fugitive unit. It was an aspect of warfare that had been neglected in manoeuvres.
It was just as well that this problem took up all my attention. I positively fled into it. That way, I didn’t have to think about my mother any more, or my wife, or our dead manservant. My train stopped every half hour or so in some tiny insignificant station. We travelled, a first lieutenant and I, in a small matchbox of a compartment for some eighteen hours to Kamionka. Beyond that point, the regular rails were down. There was only a provisional, narrow-gauge train with three tiny uncovered baggage cars that led on to the nearest field command position that might be able — without guarantees, admittedly — to give information about the whereabouts of individual regiments to “seconded officers.” The little train trundled along. The locomotive driver kept ringing his bell, because great numbers of casualties, on foot and on various farm vehicles, were streaming the other way. I am — as I had occasion then to learn — pretty impervious to shock. So for instance I found the sight of wounded men lying on litters, presumably because their feet or their legs had been shot off, less terrible than that of single soldiers staggering along with flesh wounds, and fresh blood oozing up through the clean white bandages. And with all that, on both sides of the narrow-gauge rail, the tardy crickets were chirruping, because a deceptively warm September afternoon had misled them into thinking that it was summer yet or again. At the field-command post, I happened to run into the padre of the Thirty-Fifth. He was a plump, self-satisfied man of god, in a tight, close-fitting, gleaming surplice. He had got lost on the retreat, he and his batman, his coachman, and his horse and his canvas-covered baggage wagon, where he kept his altar and mass serving gear, as well as a number of fowls, bottles of brandy, hay for his horse, and various other goodies confiscated from farmers. He hailed me like a long-lost friend. He seemed to be afr
aid of getting lost again, nor could he bring himself to surrender his fowls to the command post where for the past ten days there had been only conserved goods and potatoes to eat. He wasn’t especially well-liked there. But he refused to set out at a peradventure or in a proximate direction, whereas for me, thinking of my cousin Joseph Branco and the cabbie Manes Reisiger, anywhere seemed better than waiting. Our Thirty-Fifth, thus the vague reports we had, was stationed some two miles north of Brzezany. So I set out with the field chaplain, his cart and his fowls, with no better map than a hand-drawn sketch.
When we found the Thirty-Fifth, not admittedly north of Brzrezany, but in the hamlet of Strumilce, I reported to the colonel. News of my promotion had already been passed to the regimental adjutant. I asked to see my friends. They came. I asked for them to be put in my platoon. And how they came! I was waiting for them in the office of Warrant Officer Cenower, but they hadn’t been informed that it was I who had sent for them. At first, they failed even to recognize me. But the next instant, Manes Reisiger was flinging his arms round my neck, rule book be damned, while my cousin Joseph Branco, from a mixture of astonishment and discipline, stood to attention. He was a Slovene, of course. But Manes Reisiger was a Jewish cabbie from the East, heedless and mindless of any rule book. His beard was so many wild hard knots; the man didn’t look uniformed so much as in disguise. I kissed one of the knots in his beard, and threw my other arm around Joseph Branco. I too was forgetting about the army. I was only thinking about the war, and called out maybe ten times in succession, “You’re alive! You’re alive! . . .” and Joseph Branco straightaway noticed the wedding ring on my finger, and pointed silently at it. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve got married.” I could feel, I could see that they wanted to hear more about my wedding and my new wife, I went out with them on to the tiny square around the church in Strumilce. But I didn’t talk about Elisabeth at all, until suddenly I remembered — how could I have forgotten it — that I had a photograph of her in my wallet. Surely it was the easiest thing to save myself so many words, and just show my friends her picture. I pulled out my wallet, and I looked and looked, and the picture wasn’t in it. I began to wonder where I could have lost it or left it, and suddenly I seemed to remember that I had left the picture with my mother, at home. A baffling, yes, an absurd terror gripped me, as though I had ripped up or burned Elisabeth’s picture. “I can’t find it,” I told my friends. Instead of replying, my cousin Joseph Branco took out the picture of his wife from his pocket and showed it to me. She was a fine-looking woman, voluptuous and proud, in Slovene village costume, with a crown of coins over her smooth parted hair, and a tripled chain of the same coins round her neck. Her strong-looking arms were bare, and she had her hands on her hips. “The mother of my son!” proclaimed Joseph Branco. “Are you married?” asked Manes the cabbie. “When the war is over, I will marry her, our son is called Branco, like me. He is ten years old. He is with his grandfather. He can carve beautiful pipes.”
XX
The days ahead, capacious and fraught with danger, gloomy and lofty and mysterious and opaque, brought at least no prospect of fighting, just further retreats. Two days later, we left Strumilce for Jeziory, and three days after that we were in Pogrody. The Russians were coming after us. We withdrew as far as Krasne-Busk. Probably as a result of lost or delayed orders, we stayed there for longer than the Second Army intended us to. Early one morning, the Russians laid into us. We had no time to dig in. This was the historic battle of Krasne-Busk, in which one third of our regiment was wiped out, and another third taken prisoner.
We were among the prisoners, Joseph Branco, Manes Reisiger and I. That was the ignominious outcome of our first encounter with the foe.
I would like very much at this point to write about the feelings and perspectives of a prisoner of war. But I know how little interest there is in such a subject nowadays. Being a prisoner is bad enough, being the author of prison reminiscences is beyond endurance. People today would hardly understand me if I started writing about freedom and honour, much less about captivity. Nowadays, silence is the better policy. I am writing purely to obtain clarity for myself, and, so to speak, pro nomine dei. May He forgive me my sin!
Well, so we were prisoners of war, the whole of our platoon. Joseph Branco and Manes Reisiger and I managed to stay together. We were so to speak birds of a feather. “The war is over for us,” said Manes Reisiger. “I’ve never been taken prisoner before,” he added sometimes, “no more than you. But I know that life and not death awaits us. You will both remember that when we return. If only I knew what my Ephraim is doing. The war will go on for a long time. My son will join up. Remember! Manes Reisiger from Zlotogrod, an ordinary cabbie, said so!” Whereupon he clacked his tongue, like the crack of a whip. For the next few weeks he did not speak.
On the evening of October 2 we were to be parted. As was the accepted practice in those days, our captors intended to separate the officers from the men. We were all to be held in the interior, but the men were to be shipped much further away. The name Siberia fell. I volunteered for Siberia. To this day I don’t know or want to know how Manes Reisiger managed to get me to Siberia. Never, it seems to me, can a man have been so happy to have secured disadvantages for himself by bribery and cunning. All the credit was Manes Reisiger’s. From the moment we were taken prisoner, he had assumed command over us, all our platoon. What is there that can’t be learned from horses, with the grace of God, if you happen to be a cabbie! And a Jewish one at that, from Zlotogrod . . .
I won’t describe the highways and byways by which we got to Siberia. There are always highways and byways. At the end of six months, we found ourselves in Viatka.
XXI
Viatka is on the river Lena, in the depths of Siberia. The journey there takes half a year. In the course of getting there, we had forgotten the innumerable and identical sequence of days. Who counts the corals on a sixfold chain? Our transport took six months. It was in September that we were taken prisoner, it was March when we reached our destination. In the Augarten in Vienna, the laburnum would be flowering soon; before long the elderflower would spread its scent. Here, vast floes of ice drifted down the river, you could get across it dry-footed, even at its widest point. During our transport three men in our platoon had died of typhoid. Fourteen had tried to run away, six members of our escort had deserted with them. The young Cossack lieutenant who was in command of this latest stage of the transport left us in Chirein: he had to catch both the fugitives and the deserters. Andrei Maximovitch Krassin was his name. On his return, he and I played cards together while his patrols combed the area looking for the absconded men. We spoke French together. He drank the home-distilled samogonka brought to him by the rare Russian settlers in the area, out of a pouchy field-flask, and he was personable and grateful for each kind look I gave him. I liked his laugh, the dazzling strong white teeth under the short coal-black moustache, and the eyes that were reduced to sparks when he squeezed them shut. He was a grand master of laughter. I would say to him: “Won’t you laugh for me?” and in a trice — generous, noisy, large-hearted — he would be laughing. One day his patrols caught up with the fugitives. Those that were left, anyway, eight of the original twenty. The rest were either lost or hidden or dead somewhere. Krassin was playing tarock with me in the station building. He summoned the apprehended men, gave them tea and schnapps, and ordered me who was subject to his orders, to determine the punishment both for the members of my platoon, and the two recaptured Russian deserters. I told him I wasn’t au fait with his army’s regulations. First he asked, then he threatened, and finally I said: “Since I don’t know what punishments should be handed down according to your rulebook, it is my decision that all shall remain unpunished.”
He laid his pistol on the table and said: “This is a conspiracy. I will have you arrested, lieutenant, and taken away!” “Shouldn’t we finish our game first?” I asked, picking up my cards. “Of course,” he said, and we went on playing, while soldiers,
Austrians and escorts milled around us. He lost. I could easily have let him win, but I was concerned lest he might notice. Childlike as he was, suspicion was an even greater source of pleasure to him than laughter, and his readiness to suspect was always there. So I beat him. He knitted his brows and scowled at the NCO in command of the escort as though he was about to order all eight men to be shot. “Won’t you laugh?” I asked. He laughed straightaway, generous, large-hearted, with all his dazzling teeth. I thought I had saved the lives of all eight men.
He laughed for about two minutes, and then suddenly, as was his wont, was serious again, and commanded the NCO: “I want all eight clapped in irons! Dismiss! Await further instructions.” Then, once the men had left the building, he started to shuffle the cards. “All right. Payback time.” We played another round. He lost again. At that point he picked up his revolver, got up and walked out, saying: “I’ll be back.” I remained seated; two petroleum lamps were lit. The Karvasian landlady wobbled in, with a new glass of tea. The fresh tea had the same slice of lemon in it. The landlady was as broad in the beam as a tugboat, but she smiled like a good sort, confiding and motherly. When I made to take the old used lemon slice out of the glass, she reached in two of her fat fingers and fished it out for me. I gave her a look of thanks.
I sipped my hot tea. Lieutenant Andrei Maximovitch didn’t return. It grew late, and I was due to go back to my men in the camp. I stepped outside, in front of the balcony door, and called Krassin’s name a couple of times. At last he answered. The night was so cold that I first thought a shout would shiver to pieces in the air and never reach its intended destination. I looked up at the sky. The silver stars didn’t look as though they belonged to it, more as though they were gleaming nails knocked into its canopy. A strong wind out of the East, the tyrant among the Siberian winds, took the breath out of my throat, stopped my heart, and briefly blinded me. The lieutenant’s reply to my call, carried to me on that bad wind, struck me as a comforting message from a human being, the first I’d heard for a long time, and that even though I’d only been waiting outside in the hostile night for a few minutes. But then this human message turned out to be anything but comforting.
