by Joseph Roth
Elisabeth was sitting with my mother. She must have come with Herr von Stettenheim. I sensed something different in our rooms, like an unusual, strange smell. Something unexpected must have taken place while I was gone. The two women were talking together when I walked in, but it was a sort of forced conversation, and I could tell its only purpose was to mislead me.
“I ran into Herr von Stettenheim in our gateway just now,” I began. “Yes,” said Elisabeth, “he gave me a lift. He was just here for ten minutes.” “He’s worried, poor fellow!” said my mother. “Does he need money?” I asked. “That’s just it!” replied Elisabeth. “There was a scene in the workshop today! Not to beat about the bush: Jolanth asked for money. We had to give her some. It’s the first time she’s asked for money. She’s getting a divorce, you see. Stettenheim needs money urgently. My father has some bills due in the next few days, he says. I came here with Stettenheim.” “Did my mother give him money?” “Yes!” “Cash?” “A cheque!” “What amount?” “Ten thousand!”
I knew that my mother had just fifty thousand crowns left in Ephrussi’s Bank, where they were gradually losing what was left of their value, according to the “Jew” ’s report.
I began to pace up and down the room, as I had never dared to do before, in front of the stern and alarmed eyes of my mother. For the first time in my life I raised my voice in her presence, almost to a shout. At any rate, I was vehement. My whole accumulated anger with Stettenheim, with Jolanth, with my father-in-law overwhelmed me; and also my anger with my own weak nature. Anger with my mother was involved as well, jealousy of Stettenheim. For the first time in my mother’s presence I dared to use an expression that was not acceptable outside officers’ messes: “Prussian swine.” It gave me quite a fright.
I allowed myself another liberty: I forbade my mother to issue cheques without my approval. In the same breath, I forbade Elisabeth to introduce anyone in need of money to my poor mother; any Tom, Dick or Harry was the expression I used. And since I knew myself, and knew very well that it was only once in a blue moon that I would express my will, my revulsion, yes, even my honest opinion of people, I deliberately worked myself into a deeper rage. I yelled: “And I don’t want to see the Professor ever again!” And: “I’ve had it up to here with arts and crafts. I’m going to set things straight, Elisabeth! You’re moving in here with me.”
My mother looked at me with her big sad eyes. It was obvious that she was equally frightened and delighted at my sudden outburst. “His father was just the same,” she remarked to Elisabeth. Today, I even think it was possible that my father was speaking through me. I felt an impulse to stalk out of the house right away.
“His father,” my mother continued, “was a force of nature. He broke so many plates! So many plates when he was in a temper!” She spread out both arms to give Elisabeth a suggestion as to how many plates my father broke. “Every six months!” my mother said. “It was an illness, especially when we were packing our suitcases for Bad Ischl. He never liked that. My boy neither,” she added, even though she had never seen me do anything when we were packing.
I felt like taking her in my arms, the poor, deaf old lady. It was just as well she no longer heard the noises of the present time. She could hear those of the past, the smashed plates of my irascible father, for instance. She was also beginning to lose her memory, as is apt to happen with older persons who are hard of hearing. And that too was just as well! How kindly nature is! The infirmities it bestows upon age are actually a mercy. It gives us forgetfulness, deafness and dimmed eyesight when we are old; a little confusion too, shortly before death. The shadows it sends ahead of it are cool and beneficent.
XXIX
Like many others of his sort, my father-in-law had bet on the fall of the French franc. It was a bad bet. Of all those “many irons in the fire,” he was left with not one. The “Jolan-Workshops” didn’t bring in any money either. The lemon yellow furniture stayed on the shelf. The designs of Professor Jolanth Szatmary were hopeless. My wife Elisabeth’s incomprehensible sketches were worth nothing.
My spry father-in-law lost his interest in arts and crafts. All of a sudden, he turned towards the newspaper industry. The press, people began to say in Austria, following the German usage. He took a share in the so-called Monday paper. There too he wanted to take me “on board.” He was a tipster. He made money on it. Our house, once we had deducted the mortgages, had lost two-thirds of its value. And when the new currency was introduced, it turned out that my mother’s savings in Ephrussi’s Bank were barely worth a couple of thousand schillings.
The first person to disappear out of our world was Herr von Stettenheim. He “made a break for it,” one of those phrases he was so given to using. He didn’t even write a goodbye letter. He just wired: “Urgent rendezvous elsewhere. Will be back! Stettenheim.” Professor Jolanth Szatmary held on for longest. For weeks now, the auspicious premises with the lemon yellow furniture had been let to a firm called Iraq Ltd, which imported Persian carpets. For weeks now, my father-in-law had been negotiating the sale of his house to the city of Vienna. The world was changing fast, but Frau Jolanth Szatmary remained where she had always been: in the Regina Hotel. She was determined not to give up any of her habits, customs or usages. She was still designing. Her divorce had gone through: her ex-husband was sending her monthly cheques. She talked about going to San Francisco. Foreign parts appealed to her, Europe in her view was “a mess.” But she didn’t leave. She didn’t quit. She appeared to me sometimes in nightmares. I saw her as a kind of infernal female, set on destroying my life and Elisabeth’s. Why did she stay? Why was she still designing? Why did Elisabeth go to see her every day? To her hotel, to pick up perfectly redundant never-to-be-realized sketches?
“I feel I’m stuck,” Elisabeth confessed to me one day. “I love you!” she said. “But that woman won’t let me go, I don’t know what her game is.” “Let’s talk to my Mama!” I said. We went together to my house, to our house.
It was already late but my mother was still up. “Mama,” I said, “I’ve brought Elisabeth.” “Good!” said my mother, “so long as she stays!”
For the first time I slept with Elisabeth in my room, under our roof. It was as though my father’s house heightened our love, blessed it. I will always remember that night, a true bridal night, the only bridal night of my life. “I want your baby,” said Elisabeth, already half-asleep. I took it to be an expression of devotion. But in the morning, when she awoke — and she was always the first to wake — she embraced me, and there was a calm, almost a coldness to her voice when she said: “I am your wife. I want to be pregnant by you. I want to finish with Jolanth, she disgusts me, I want a baby.”
From that morning on, Elisabeth stayed in our house. Professor Jolanth Szatmary sent a short farewell note. She wasn’t going to San Francisco, as she had threatened to, she was going to Budapest, where she quite possibly belonged. “What’s Professor Keczkemet doing with herself?” my mother asked from time to time. “She’s in Budapest, Mama!” “She’ll be back!” predicted my mother. She would prove to be correct.
Now we were all living in one house, and it was going pretty well. My mother even did me the kindness of dropping her spiteful expressions. She no longer spoke about “the Jew,” but of Dr Kiniower, as she had for years previously. He was adamant that we should open a boarding house. He was one of those so-called practical people, who are unable to give up a so-called good idea, even if the people to whom he entrusts its execution are wholly unequal to such a task. He was a realist, which means he was as incorrigible as any fantast. He was incapable of seeing anything beyond a certain project’s usefulness; and he lived in the conviction that all people, regardless of their nature, are equally able to carry out useful projects. It was as if a tailor were instructed to start making furniture, and without being told the dimensions of the houses, the rooms, the doors. And so we opened a boarding house. With the enthusiasm which an obsessive brings to the execution of his p
atented ideas, Dr Kiniower set about obtaining the licence we needed to go into business. “You have so many friends!” he said to me. “You have in all twelve rooms you can let. Your mother will be left with two. You and your wife will have four. All you need is a maid, a telephone, eight beds and bells.” And before we knew where we were, he was bringing in maid, telephone, engineers, beds. Then it was a matter of finding lodgers. Chojnicki, Stejskal, Halasz, Grünberger, Dvorak, Szechenyi, Hallersberg, Lichtenthal, Strohhofer: the lot of them were in a manner of speaking homeless. I introduced them all to our boarding house. The only one who paid in advance was Baron Hallersberg. Son of a wealthy Moravian sugar manufacturer, he espoused the expensive (and in our circle rather rare) habit of punctuality. He neither borrowed nor lent money. Impeccably brushed and pressed and correct, he lived with us and in our midst, tolerated on account of his gentleness, his discretion and his perfect lack of irony. “The factory’s going through hard times,” he would tell us, for instance. And straightaway, with paper and pencil, he would calculate his father’s financial position. He expected us to look worried for him, and we obliged. “I need to tighten my belt,” he would then say.
Well, in our boarding house, he tightened his belt. He paid punctually and in advance. He was afraid of debts and bills — they “add up,” he would say — and he took a dim view of the rest of us, because we let them “add up.” At the same time he envied us for being able to let things “add up.” The past master of this was Chojnicki. Accordingly, he was the one Hallersberg envied the most.
To my surprise, my mother was thrilled with our “boarding house.” The sight of workmen in blue overalls crawling through our rooms obviously cheered her, and hearing the bells go, and lots of loud, cheerful voices. Obviously she saw this as a new life, and she was pleased to begin all over again. With a brisk step and a blithe cane she walked through the rooms, up and down the three floors of our house. Her voice was loud and cheerful. I had never seen or heard her like this.
At night, she sometimes dropped off in her chair. Her stick, like a trusty dog, lay at her feet.
But the “boarding house,” as Kiniower liked to say, was “up and running.”
XXX
I now slept in our house at the side of my wife. It soon turned out that she was blessed with an exceptional sense of so-called domesticity. She was positively obsessed, as many women are, with organization and cleanliness. Related to this fateful inclination was her jealousy. For the first time in my life I understood why women love their houses and homes more than they love their husbands. They are readying nests for their offspring. With unconscious cunning, they enmesh a man in a hopeless tangle of daily duties from which he has no hope of escaping. So there I was, sleeping in our house, at the side of my wife. It was my house. She was my wife. Indeed! Bed becomes like a second, discreet house in the middle of the public and plainly visible house, and the woman who awaits us there is loved, simply because she is there and available. She is there and available at any time we happen to return home. Therefore we love her. We love what is certain and safe. And if she waits up for us patiently, why, then we love her even more.
We now had about a dozen telephones in our house, and a dozen bells. Half a dozen men in blue overalls were at work on our water pipes. Dr Kiniower advanced us the money to pay for the improvements and rebuilding work. For my mother, he wasn’t the Jew any more. He had been promoted to the rank of “good fellow.”
In autumn we had an unexpected visitor: my cousin Joseph Branco. He arrived one morning, just like the very first time, and as though nothing had happened since then; as though we hadn’t been through a World War; as though he and Manes Reisiger and I hadn’t been prisoners of war, and then with Baranovich, and then in the camp; as though our country hadn’t fallen to pieces; that was how he came to us, my cousin, the chestnut-roaster, with his chestnuts and his mule, brown of visage, black of hair and moustache, and for all that glowing golden like a sun, like every other year and as though nothing had happened, so Joseph Branco came to us, to sell his chestnuts. His son was healthy and quick-witted. He was going to school in Dubrovnik. His sister was happily married. His brother-in-law had managed to survive the War. They had two children between them, both boys, and for simplicity’s sake both were called Branco.
And what had become of Manes Reisiger, I asked. “Well, that’s a long story,” my cousin Joseph Branco replied. “He’s waiting downstairs, he didn’t want to come up.”
I ran downstairs to get him. I didn’t recognize him right away. He had a wild tangle of grey beard, like a personification of winter in children’s storybooks. Why hadn’t he come up, I asked him. “For a year, Lieutenant,” he replied, “I wanted to visit you. I was in Poland, in Zlotogrod. I wanted to be the cabbie Manes Reisiger again. But what is the world, what is a town, what is a man, what is a cabbie come to that, against God? God confused the world and he destroyed the little town of Zlotogrod. Crocuses and daisies grow where once our houses stood, and my wife is dead as well. A shell tore her in pieces, along with other inhabitants of Zlotogrod. So I went back to Vienna. At least I have my son Ephraim here.” Of course! His son Ephraim! I remembered the prodigy, and how Chojnicki had got him a place in the Music Academy. “What’s he doing now?” I asked Manes the cabbie.
“My Ephraim is a genius!” replied the old cabbie. “He no longer plays. He doesn’t need to, he says. He is a Communist, the editor of the ‘Red Flag.’ He writes splendid articles. Here they are.”
We went into my room. The cabbie Manes had all the articles of his brilliant son Ephraim in his pocket, quite a sizeable pile. He demanded that I read them aloud to him. I read them one after the other, in a loud voice. Elisabeth came out of her room; later on, as usual in the afternoons, all our residents gathered in my room, my friends. “I’m not allowed to remain in Vienna,” said Manes Reisiger. “I’ve been given an eviction order.” His beard bristled, his face shone. “But my son Ephraim got me a false passport. Here it is.” And with that he showed us his false Austrian passport, combed his beard with his fingers, and said: “Illegal!” and looked proudly at us.
“My son Ephraim,” he began again, “no longer needs to play. When the revolution comes, he will be a cabinet minister.”
He was as convinced of the coming of the world revolution as of the fact that in calendars Sunday is printed in red.
“This year the chestnuts have been poor,” said my cousin Joseph Branco. “Many are wormy as well. I sell more apples now than I do chestnuts.”
“How did you manage to escape?” I asked.
“With God’s help!” replied the cabbie Manes Reisiger. “We were lucky enough to kill a Russian corporal. Joseph Branco tripped him up, and beat his brains out with a rock. Then I put on his uniform, took his rifle, and escorted Joseph Branco to Shmerinka. There we met the army of occupation. Branco joined up right away. He fought as well. I stayed with a good Jew, in civilian clothes. Branco had the address. As soon as the war was over, he came to me.”
“Splendid army!” cried Chojnicki, stepping into the room, to drink coffee with me, as he did every day. “And what’s your son Ephraim, the musician, doing?”
“He doesn’t need music any more,” replied Manes Reisiger, the cabbie. “He’s making revolution.”
“We already have a few of that sort,” said Chojnicki. “Not that you should imagine I’m in any way unsympathetic! But there’s something wrong with the revolutions of today. They don’t succeed. Your son Ephraim might have done better to stick to music.”
“You need a separate visa for each country now!” said my cousin Joseph Branco. “I’ve never seen the like in all my born days. Each year I was able to go and sell my roast chestnuts wherever I felt like: in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia . . .” He listed all the lost Crown Lands. “And now they’re all off limits. Even though I have a passport. With a picture.” He took his passport out of his jacket pocket, and it went the rounds of everyone.
“He’s just a
chestnut-roaster,” said Chojnicki, “but if you think about it, there is no more symbolic profession. Symbolic of the old Monarchy. This gentleman was able to sell his chestnuts all over, in half of Europe, you might say. Wherever people ate his roast chestnuts was Austria, and Franz Joseph was Emperor there. Now chestnuts require a visa! What a world! What am I doing in your B&B? I should be with my brother in Steinhof!”
My mother came along, we heard her hard tread on the stairs. She dignified us with a visit every day at five o’clock. So far not one of our boarders had paid any money. Once Chojnicki, and once Szechenyi had shyly attempted to ask for their bill. Thereupon my mother had said that the caretaker was responsible for making out bills. But that wasn’t true. In fact it was Elisabeth’s job. She would take money from one or other of our guests, when the opportunity presented itself, and when the opportunity presented itself, she also paid our expenses. The bells shrilled all day long. We had two maids now. They ran up and down three flights of stairs like a couple of weasels. We enjoyed credit in the whole quarter. My mother was happy about the bells which she was still able to hear, the noise made by our guests, and the credit her house enjoyed. She didn’t know, the poor old soul, that it was no longer her house. She believed it was hers because silence would fall in our rooms when she came down, with her white hair and black stick. Today she recognized Joseph Branco, and she greeted Manes Reisiger as well. Altogether, since we had opened our boarding house, she had become a little gregarious. She would have welcomed a lot of complete strangers. Only, she was getting increasingly deaf, and it seemed her infirmity was also affecting her reason — not because she was so tormented by it, but because she insisted on pretending it didn’t exist, and on denying it.
XXXI
In April of the following year, Elisabeth had her baby. She didn’t give birth to it in hospital, but, as my mother demanded and insisted, at home.
