The Silent Prophet

by Joseph Roth

  She left the shop. He had no time to move away. Her first glance fell on him and, as he involuntarily removed his hat, she stood there as if she intended to acknowledge him, as if she was considering whether she should assume the indifferent smile suited to acquaintances one has forgotten. Eventually, as he made no move, she turned to go. He came a step closer. She was visibly embarrassed. The urge to fly seized him together with the fear of ridicule. The awareness that he must say something the very next moment was surpassed by the silent avowal that he could think of nothing to say. The soft oval of her brown face confused him by its proximity, like her startled dark gaze and the delicate bluish skin of her eyelids, and even the small parcel she held in her hand. 'If only she didn't continue to smile,' he thought. 'I must make it clear to her at once that I am not one of her acquaintances.' So, hat in hand, he said: 'I can't help it if you're alarmed. The situation was too much for me. I followed you unintentionally. You left the shop before I expected. I accosted you without knowing you. I have therefore misled you without intending to do so. Please forgive me.'

  As he was speaking he was surprised by the calmness and precision of his words. Her smile vanished and reappeared. It was like a light that comes and goes.

  'I quite understand,' she said.

  Friedrich bowed, she likewise attempted an acknowledgment, and both laughed.

  He was surprised to find that she was not married. He could not understand now why he had taken her for a married woman. Also, it was not her carriage in which she had been travelling that August day. The carriage belonged to her friend, Frau G., to whom she had been invited. Was she a student? No, she only attended the lectures of Professor D., who was a family friend. Her father, as is the way of some old gentlemen, did not permit her to study. She would certainly have had her way if her mother had been alive. Her mother would have been helpful. And a transient sadness passed over her face.

  She stood in front of a cab-rank, she was due at the theatre, she had an appointment. Already Friedrich saw a coachman jump down from his box and strip the blankets from the back of his horse.

  'I should very much like to come with you, if you've the time,' said Friedrich quickly.

  She laughed. He was embarrassed. 'Let's go then,' she said, 'but right away.'

  Now it was done he could no longer speak calmly. The talk was only on neutral topics, the hard winter and Professor D., the tedious public and private balls, the meanness of rich people and the poor street lighting. She vanished into the theatre.

  He abandoned himself to an animated aimlessness, a sort of holiday. He entered the foyer in which she had disappeared. It was a quarter of an hour before the start of the performance. One heard the carriages driving up, the horses' solemn neighing, the clatter of their hoof-beats and the murmured exhortations of the coachmen. The foyer wafted an odour of perfume, powder, clothes, a confusion of greetings. Many men were waiting there, leaning against the walls, removing their hats, bowing more or less deeply, only bowing or smiling while bowing. He could deduce the status of those who entered from the mien and attitude of those who awaited them. The people stood in their corners like living mirrors. But they themselves also had rank and character and were repeatedly confirmed in the position they held in the world by the response they received. The beautiful women seemed to see no one; nevertheless they scanned all those present with the alert and unobtrusive gaze with which commanders inspect regiments ready to march one last time before the General arrives. None of those present escaped these beautiful women. They did not overlook even the doorman or the policeman. Their eyes scattered rapid questions and received slow and languishing answers. Officers in every shade of blue and brown, all in gleaming patent leather boots and narrow black trousers, spread an amiable cadence of sound and a harmless motley of colour. For the first time Friedrich felt no hatred toward them and even a certain solidarity with the policeman, who was to be thanked because the harmony of this elegant turmoil was undisturbed by drunkards or criminals. 'No one here suspects what I am,' he thought. 'They take me for a little student.' When a woman's gaze rested on him, he felt gratitude towards the entire sex. 'These creatures have instinct,' he told himself. 'The men are coarse.' Suddenly he pitied these society ladies. They mourned away their lives, their beauty wilted, at the side of boorish lieutenants and brutish moneylenders. They needed quite different men. Naturally, he thought of himself.

  A shrill bell rang through the house like a joyous alarm. People's movements quickened, the hubbub grew louder. The doors flew open and three minutes later the foyer was empty. The policeman sat down on an empty chair in the corner. The box-office window was slammed to from within by an invisible hand. The silvery arc-lights in front of the entrance went out. The performance had ended in the foyer, another was just beginning on the stage. The coachmen came inside, little men who looked like postmen out of uniform. They gathered round the doorman and parleyed with him. They were sub-agents and fly-by-night ticket touts. The policeman turned away so as not to have to see them. In the foyer there was no longer any fragrance of women's perfume. These poor folk diffused an aroma of goulash, old clothes and rain. It was as if the poor now gathered in the foyer stood, like the figures in a weather-house, at the opposite end of the same gang-plank to which the rich too were nailed, and as if fixed rules governed the appearance, now of the fortunate, and now of the wretched.

  Friedrich left the theatre. It was time to seek out his friends in the café. But on this particular day he would rather not have seen them. He felt embarrassed before them. 'They are bound to see,' he told himself, 'that I am in love. R. will immediately unmask me as a "romantic", a description which, in his mouth, sounds like the word "parricide".' No, he could not meet the comrades. Savelli, for instance, did not fall in love, Comrade T. loved only the Revolution. The Ukrainian had subjected his entire colossal bulk to the Idea as one subjects a race to a master. And as for R., he obviously denied the possibilities of love. Only he, Friedrich, had room in his breast for renunciation and ambition, revolution and infatuation.

  There was nothing left for him to do but to climb the poorly-lit stairs to Grünhut, for he could not remain alone. He smelled the stink of the cats which rushed helter-skelter away from him in inexplicable panic, heard the voices from behind the doors ranked closely in the corridors, numbered as in hotels. The midwife's door bore the notice: 'Knock loudly, bell out of order.' He heard Grünhut's light step.

  'Long time no see,' said Grünhut. And immediately after: 'Psst, there's clients inside.'

  He was writing his addresses. He could now easily manage up to 400 a day. Was Friedrich writing still? No, he was working now, still had enough money for two months, and intended to find something else soon.

  Grünhut now resumed his old complaints against the world. As always he returned in the end to the question: 'What do you think of an anonymous letter to the man I told you about?'

  He didn't want Friedrich's advice, he was thinking of writing an unusual sort of letter, by two hands, each word written alternately. He already knew the attested experts. In any complicated case they were at a loss. A second person must be involved, and not just on account of the handwriting. It might be necessary to arrange a rendezvous. Still, in Grünhut's opinion two would so confuse anonymity that no one would know what was going on.

  Friedrich's opposition pained him. His unshakable belief in the young man's criminal nature was transformed into an injured respect for the youth who, in Grünhut's opinion, was probably planning far more important and profitable crimes.

  Various noises emerged from the midwife's room. Water, words murmured in a woman's deep voice, a chair pushed back, a metal object in contact with glass and wood.

  'Do you hear that?' said the little man. 'On a spring evening, in a private room in a hotel, you hear very different things. Nightingales sing, a gipsy plays the violin, champagne corks pop. Where are they now, the nightingales? Frau Tarka hinted to me who it is in there. The wife of a professor, be
cause of an affair with a sculptor. What's more, a good friend of mine. Put some business my way. An extremely productive man, thinks himself as irresistible as any blackguard. Frau Tarka has to thank sculptors and painters for most of her little jobs.

  'People have their portraits painted so much nowadays. They live it up in the studios. Do you think a woman can resist a studio? Such lovely disorder under the blue sky, high up on the top floor where only God peers in through the glass roof. You lie there and look up. You see the white clouds passing, interspersed by flocks of birds, and you yearn and yearn again. A canvas in the corner, a witness that another woman was once naked here. And the painter goes on talking. Everything he knows he has acquired from pornographic works and erotic books. His eye lusts after contour and sticks to the surface. "What a line, dear lady," he says, "connects your neck with the swell of your breast!" Believe me, if a lieutenant said that it would be an insult and the husband would shoot it out with him in the woods at dawn. When a painter says it, it's an artistic judgment. These so-called connoisseurs aren't paying compliments, they're merely making technical appraisals. They apply these to the entire body. "What a provocative thigh!" they say, palette in hand. Some talk about the Renaissance. The sculptor B., for instance, who comes to visit Madame here from time to time, I often have a little chat with him. That is, he does the chatting. Nothing but false rubbish from the erotic books. Gives me an order once. Pornographic engravings; because I happen to know a bookseller, I have to go and make the purchase. He still owes me my commission and the bookseller his money. The bookseller goes along, makes a fuss. "Come tomorrow," says the Master. Next day, he smilingly gives him the book back. Then he tells me, a few weeks later, he only wanted the pictures for just that one afternoon, for a girl from a good family. And all I did was to undo a blouse. Because I'm no artist. Plain as a pikestaff, the way things have changed. We've already had the question of art. The emancipation of women, too. Notice how the two connect? So-called family ties are loosening. The daughters of the privy councillors have their portraits painted and study German philology. And, as for what I did—of course it was many years ago—nowadays you get respect for that kind of thing. My public prosecutor is still alive. He'll never see another such indictment. My defence counsel even in those days supported the theory of demonic possession. He talked nonsense about irresistible urges, heredity and so on. Fair is fair. My father was an inoffensive man, he ran an exchange-office, had serious worries and not the slightest interest in morality.'

  It grew quiet in the next room, a door opened, a key rattled. Grünhut detained Friedrich a few minutes longer.

  'Until they've gone downstairs,' he said. 'I don't want any indiscretions.'

  10

  As, in accordance with the promise he had given his dying wife, he could not marry again, but could not live without a woman and did not want his child to become acquainted with the habits of a lusty widower, Herr Ludwig von Maerker, then still departmental head in a ministry, decided to send his daughter to a children's home and later to a girls' boarding school where she would be brought up together with orphans of the same social standing. Therefore, after he had disposed of Hilde, he engaged a housekeeper but took her only to the circus and music-halls. The theatres remained closed to her. She called this an injustice and so granted herself the right to embitter Herr von Maerker's life and make increasing demands in the house. She controlled his every step and every outlay. And whenever he complained about the restriction of his liberty, she replied with that bitter sarcasm which can herald a fainting-fit as well as an apoplexy: 'So I can't have this little entitlement? I, a woman whom you don't even take to the theatre?' Once a year Herr von Maerker escaped from the housekeeper. He travelled to Switzerland to visit his daughter. She grew too tall for him, was soon a teenager. He found her beautiful and regretted, in his most private moments, that he was her father and not her seducer. But she had been seduced long before by her own fantasies. Although Herr von Maerker had read a number of French novels about nunneries and girls' boarding schools, he believed — like most men—in the depravity of all women except his nearest and dearest. Lack of principle begins only with cousins. A good deal was said about the prospect of having Hilde back at home again soon. And, before he was aware of it, Herr von Maerker was going grey at the temples, his housekeeper grew old and wrinkled, her hopes of marriage to her friend and the prospect of a joint box at the theatre vanished, Hilde blossomed—as they say—into a young woman, returned to her father's house and began to lead her own life.

  The times were strongly in favour of freedom for the female sex; not so Herr von Maerker, who had meanwhile become permanent head of a ministerial department and was therefore well aware of the lack of masculine freedom. His daughter's opinions made him feel half embittered and half ashamed at belonging to the previous generation, for men feel shame at becoming old as if it were a secret vice. He retreated silently before his daughter's vigorous offensive. He suffered and even gradually became wise. He belonged to that breed of average men who acquire understanding only in later years because they have had to keep silent for so long, and for whom nothing remains but to become meditative. When Hilde, on behalf of all the daughters of the world, exclaimed: 'Our mothers were exploited and betrayed!' Herr von Maerker felt it as a calumny on his dead wife and an insult by his daughter. He wondered where Hilde had acquired so much robust callousness and shocking rhetoric. He still knew nothing about his daughter.

  She was no different from the young women of her time and station. She transformed the submissive romanticism of her mother into an Amazon martiality, demanded the recognition of civil rights, including, in passing as it were, free love. Under the slogan 'Equal rights for all!' the daughters of good homes at that period rushed into life, into the high schools, into railway trains, luxury liners, into the dissecting-room and the laboratory. For them there blew through the world that familiar fresh breeze that every new generation believes it has discovered. Hilde Weis determined not to surrender herself in marriage. Her 'closest friend' had committed the betrayal of marrying the enormously wealthy Herr G.; she owned carriages, horses, flunkeys, coachmen, liveries. But Hilde, who gladly enjoyed sharing in her friend's wealth and laid claim to the carriages and the liveries for shopping expeditions, asserted: 'Irene's happiness means nothing to me, she has sold her freedom.' The men to whom she said this found her charming, unusually intelligent, delightfully self-willed. And as, on top of this, she had a dowry and a father with good connections, one or the other thought of marrying her despite her principled objection, in their old-fashioned masculine way.

  Her father would only have given her to certain of her acquaintances. Certainly not to everyone of those with whom she associated, less out of interest than from the need to demonstrate her independence. She formed a so-called circle. Through her father she knew some hopeful young officials and officers, through Professor D., a few lecturers and students of art history. Through her rich married friend, whose husband fancied himself a Maecenas, a composer, two painters, a sculptor and three writers.

  All these young people, none of whom suspected that they would soon be decimated in a world war, behaved as if they had to burst out of never-ending bondage. The young officials spoke of the dangers which threatened the old Empire, of the necessity for far-reaching national autonomy or a strong centralizing grip, of the dissolution of Parliament, a careful choice of ministers, a break with Germany, a rapprochement with France, or else an even closer tie with Germany and a challenge to Serbia. Some wanted to avoid war, others to provoke it; both thought that it would be a question of only a lighthearted little war. The young officers held slow promotion and the stupidity of the general staff responsible for everything. The lecturers, meek as young theologians, concealed under their store of knowledge a hunger for position and dowries. The artists let it be understood that they had a direct line to Heaven, derided authority, simultaneously championed Olympus, the café and the studio. Each was audacious,
and yet each was really rebelling only against his own father. Hilde regarded each as a personality and at the same time as a good comrade. She believed she was maintaining pure friendship, but if anyone failed to pay her a compliment, she began to doubt his personality. To be sure, she had no time for outmoded love but she broke off relationships with any man who did not give her to understand that he was in love with her.

  She listed her encounter with Friedrich under her 'notable experiences'. His obvious poverty was a novel feature in her circle of acquaintances. His far-reaching radicalism marked him off from the minor rebels. Nevertheless, she was a little excited the next time she went to the lecture.

  'Perhaps I might come with you,' he said. Naturally, she thought, but merely said: 'If it amuses you.' And, as it was raining, she imagined that she would go with him to his room or a café. 'But perhaps he's no money,' she mused, and from then on no longer registered what he said. Outside in the street, where the wet, the wind and the showers threw people into confusion, he endeavoured several times to take her by the arm. Her arm anticipated his hand. It will be obvious how slight an effect emancipation had actually had on Hilde.

  They reached the little café where he was a regular customer, and where he could owe or borrow money without embarrassment. As if it had only just occurred to him, he said: 'We're wet, come along in.' She felt the faint intimation of happiness a young woman feels when her lover guides her into a room.