The Silent Prophet

by Joseph Roth

  'This poor Efrejnov is confused by Lion. He is too unsuspecting to find arguments. I could have found them for him. Russia's faults are really the consequence of hasty endeavours to copy the West. In all probability, Russia would be sound and rich without the stupid aspiration held by a certain section of its ruling class to become civilized, and to be regarded in the fashionable spas of Western Europe as proper Europeans. The bigoted Agrarians are no less right than we ourselves, the thoroughgoing revolutionaries. They lack only understanding. Everything that lies in the middle, between thoroughgoing reaction and thoroughgoing revolution, is foolish in Russia. The bourgeois class has developed before there was a place ready for it. Now it is demanding its industries. The Tsar is helpless. He is turning himself into an Emperor on the old Western model, rather like the present German Kaiser. Autocracy gives way to bureaucracy and the officials are the vanguard of the bourgeoisie. It begins with the entry of the sons of the nobility and the rich bourgeoisie into official posts, that is, into the great cities. And the cities are the enemy of the countryside. The intelligentsia follows. It is the outpost of the Revolution. The semi-revolutionary ideals of the intelligentsia are foreign to the instincts of the Russian people. The cruelty of the Agrarian autocracy is really closer to them. You see, therefore, the imminence of an explosion. The intellectual bureaucrat renders the Agrarians impotent. He can topple the Tsar but not govern the people. His dominance will be an insignificant intermission. It is we who hold the power. Russia can only become a proletarian, not a bourgeois, republic. Only a war is needed, and the old Russia is done for. And the war is coming; we shan't be staying in Siberia much longer.'

  Flour was unaffordable. In this region the housewives could bake only three times a year. Bread was scarcer than meat. For the first time Friedrich felt the immediate relation between sun and earth. For the first time he understood the simple meaning of the prayer man addresses to Heaven for his daily bread. At the breadless table where he sat down twice a day he thought of the bakers' shops in the bustling towns. He closed his eyes. He conjured up the different colours of the flour and the different shapes of the loaves.

  'What are you dreaming about?' asked Berzejev.

  'Of bread. When I picture the world from which we are exiled, I think of quite trivial things—flat matches, for instance, for the waistcoat pocket and round lids for beer-mugs, inkwells one can open by pressing, celluloid paper-knives and quite ordinary things like a picture-postcard. I remember one that used to hang in the shop-window of the stationer's on the corner of the street where I lived. It was old and yellowed, had been in the window for years. It was a miserable little stationer's and an ugly card. It had a wide gold edge, speckled black by flies. It showed a well-known picture. On the globe, poised in space—the space, if I remember rightly, was pale blue—sits a woman with a blindfold on the North Pole.'

  'Yes, yes,' said Berzejev, 'I've seen that picture too. Wait a minute, I think the woman held something in her hand and she wore a watery blue dress. But I don't recall the wide gold margin.'

  'But it was a wide gold margin,' insisted Friedrich, 'and fly-speckled, and there was a yellow post-box at the street-corner. You could stick down a letter and push it inside and even hear the way it fell—with a thud if the box was empty and with a rustle if there were letters already inside.'

  'Let's stick to bread,' said Berzejev. 'You're distracting me from it. To begin with, there were two main kinds, white and black. Once in France—I was there with my father when I was fourteen—I ate hard, white, long batons of bread with a golden-brown crust. But the Russian country bread, black and reddish, with rather coarse soft grains, is the one I like best.'

  'I remember,' continued Friedrich, 'how it smelled when one passed a baker's shop.'

  'Especially at night!' cried Berzejev.

  'Yes, at night, when it was winter, you were struck all of a sudden by a warmth from the cellars, almost like an animal warmth.'

  'A bread-like warmth,' exulted Berzejev.

  'And in the morning, in summer, when I woke very early and went into the street, the white baker's boys were trotting around with covered baskets. How those baskets smelled! And you could hear the birds singing then, because the streets were still quiet.'

  They fell silent for a time.

  Suddenly Berzejev said: 'How stupid we have become!'

  'No, not stupid,' cried Friedrich, 'only human. We were ideologists, not human beings. We wanted to reshape the world and we are dependent on postcards and must eat bread.'

  'It's because not everyone has bread,' said Berzejev quietly, 'that we are sitting here. How simple it all is. One doesn't need theory or economics. Because not everyone has bread—very simple and quite stupid.'

  'R. might have put that better,' thought Friedrich. 'R. might possibly have said: "We want to help. But we are not born for that. Because of our impotence, nature has endowed us with too strong a love, it exceeds our powers. We are like a man who is unable to swim, but who jumps in after a drowning man and goes under himself. But we have to jump. Sometimes we help the other, but usually both of us go under. And no one knows whether, at the last moment, one feels happiness or a kind of bitter anger." '

  'When I was fourteen years old,' began Berzejev, 'my father took me on a journey. I saw foreign railway stations for the first time, and that was really the best part. Do you still remember railway stations?'

  They both thought of the station they had last seen.

  'Did you see that girl?' asked Friedrich.

  And Berzejev knew at once which girl he meant.

  'Yes,' he said, 'she was standing behind the buffet and gave me a glass of tea. She had her plaits braided in two round coils over her ears.'

  'And red cheeks.'

  They spoke of the strange girl as of a lost loved one.

  'But there was something else besides railway stations when I was fourteen,' resumed Berzejev, 'and that was that there was a woman in our compartment with whom my father got into conversation. He treated her to chocolate bonbons, lifted her heavy cases down from the luggage-rack and put them back again, took the lady to the dining-car and said to the waiter: "A table for three, the fourth seat's empty, understood?" "Yes, your Honour," said the waiter. For my father was a high official, a landowner and a gentleman. You could see that at once. I spent much of the time in the corridor, which I enjoyed. You really feel that you are travelling there. When you stand the train goes faster, and then you fancy yourself freer and closer to the attendant. When a station arrives you climb out quickly. And even the lavatory is fine. I often used to go in there and if anyone rattled the door vigorously I stayed in all the longer. Once, when I went back to the compartment, the lady gave a start, screamed out, and my father was looking through the window at the landscape. I sat down in my corner, covered myself with my overcoat and pretended to be asleep. Then my father went out, I noticed how he stepped over my legs. The next moment the lady pulled the coat off my face and kissed me quickly on the mouth and sat down again. So I thought: "She kisses me so that I shouldn't be naughty or tell tales at home." But we met her again at Nice. She had arranged it with my father, and once, in the afternoon, she took me into her room. We were staying at the same hotel. It was already evening and the dinner-gong was sounding when I came out of her room. My father was waiting for me in the corridor. I tried to run past him, he grabbed me and gave me a box on the ear.'

  'And then?'

  'Just think, after that I never spoke another word to my father until his death, which I only heard of two days later, not a word! I began to hate him. I saw his fleshy mouth under the worthy mottled moustache. As soon as we got back he sent me to the military academy. He wrote to me twice a year and I wrote to him. They were like the letters of a professional letter-writer. But when I went home, for Easter, we kissed and did not speak and the whole year I used to dread the kiss that awaited me.'

  'He should have spoken,' said Friedrich.

  'Then I would probably not b
e here,' said Berzejev.

  6

  Sometimes Colonel Lelewicz came himself. Sometimes he would send one of his friends. He brought bread, tinned food, newspapers. At irregular intervals there was a visit from Len-Min-Tsin, the Chinese trader, with newspapers, books and cheap pornography. This consisted of packets of postcards like those offered to foreigners in the dazzling nights of great cities by timid little dealers with encouraging whispers. The Chinaman purveyed the postcards in series through the lost townships of Siberia and lent them out like books. He would then collect them again from his subscribers and exchange them for new ones. The pictures were worn like old playing-cards by the covetous fingers of many hundreds. Efrejnov, Lion and Berzejev scrutinized the cards together in unpolitical and purely sexual accord. Efrejnov kept a dignified silence as he became engrossed in the details. He puckered his eyebrows, combed his fair beard with his fingers, narrowed his eyelids and peered at the cards through a narrow slit with the appraising glance of a connoisseur. Against his will, he simultaneously opened his bewhiskered lips in the same measure as he closed his eyelids. His tongue crept inquisitively between his teeth, he began to smile, his face relaxed and, despite the powerful neck on which it rested, despite the beard in which it was framed and embedded, acquired a boyish expression. Lion held his pince-nez in his hand, hard against his eyes, and tapped one foot incessantly, causing his body to break into a delicate rocking tremor. Berzejev was red under the normal brown of his countenance and it seemed, not that his skin was flushed, but that the red complexion of his second inner self was appearing through the brown of the outer man. Impatient as he was, he wanted to turn over faster than the others, who appeared to have a more thorough approach.

  'That's my friend,' thought Friedrich. 'He's loyal, he has a fine passion, he is kind, clever and cautious. One can rely on him. He can command a regiment. He can stand up to hunger, but a postcard. ... If I take the pictures away from him now. . . .' He stepped to the table and took the pack that lay in front of Berzejev. Berzejev raised his hand to rescue his cards from Friedrich's grasp. But he did not lower it, he held it in the air for a while as if taking an oath. Suddenly he laughed out loud.

  'I felt sorry for you,' said Friedrich.

  'Perhaps it was ridiculous,' said Berzejev. They said no more about it.

  But a few days later Berzejev suddenly brought out: 'I have slept with Efrejnov's wife. He was with Lion in our room.'

  And, as Friedrich did not enquire further, very quickly and seriously: 'I only wanted to let you know.'

  That was all. But as if Berzejev's adventure had opened some new door in his memory Friedrich began to think of the millions of far-off women with the yearning with which he had thought of the taste, the smell, the shape of bread. He recalled a hundred little events without significance and without a sequel. The platform of a street-car, in front of him a woman, arm elevated, hand on one of the leather straps dangling from the carriage roof. Distinct, the line of her taut breast, her neck. He can no longer see her face. He hears the gentle tripping of a young girl through a narrow quiet street, the echo that meets her shoes like an affectionate answer from the cobbles. Hilde's dove-grey narrow shoe on the red velvet of the carriage. Grey on red. They were the colours of his love. He thought of them as a patriot thinks of his country's flag. The little glove shop, the patient expectation of the outspread fingers and the delicate play of the hands. The narrow bracelet between the sleeve and the edge of the glove. The warmth his hand encountered when he stroked her arm. Many fleeting contacts, intentionally willed, intentionally feigned, scarce-born anticipations of a contact, others that flitted like shadows over the bodies. He tears up the letter. She cries. He does not recall distinctly seeing her tears. He believes he only heard them. Hilde goes through the door of the little café, behind the half-curtained window pane her outline shows for a moment longer in the street. She disappears in the city. He steps outside, she is no longer there. Why has he been in any doubt that he loves her? He had been ashamed before his conscience, before R., before his ambition.

  For weeks now he has spoken only when it was absolutely essential. He has heard the endless discussions as a confused and meaningless din. Proletariat, autocracy, finance, ruling class, militarism. Simple formulae, one had to make use of them in order to act. But they embraced only a minor part of what they aspired to contain. Life is stuck fast in these concepts like a fully-grown child in too-short clothes. A single hour of life comprises a thousand enigmatic stirrings of the nerves, the muscles, the brain and a single large empty word wants to express them all.

  There was at this time only one word that had any meaning: Flight!

  One could flee. He felt as if he had been abstracted from his own life for years and as if he were living somebody else's. Somewhere his own waited like a good home, unjustly abandoned. To flee, to escape the leaden sky, the breadless table. As yet the idea hung only in the air, like a child's red balloon. Life was short. Sixty years of freedom were less than ten years of Siberia.

  'What's up with you?' asked Berzejev.

  The days were still long. But clouds came in the early evening, the moon destroyed them. They were there again in the morning cradling the red sun. It was an effort for it to rise. They prepared themselves for winter. The Cheldony said it would come earlier than usual, that winter was already upon them. The Chinaman would fail to appear, the newspapers become fewer, one must stock up with candles and oil.

  'I must escape,' said Friedrich.

  'Out of the question now, we're going to be free.'

  'Depend on me, I think of it every day.' At that moment Lion burst through the door. He waved a newspaper.

  The heir to the Austrian throne had been shot.

  7

  That night they slept peacefully, as if it were quite an ordinary night.

  Meanwhile war was brewing in Europe. In the barracks trumpets sounded the alarm. Large posters were put up at all the street-corners of towns small and great. The trains rolled from the stations garlanded with green and the men had military uniforms and caps and rifles. All the women wept.

  One day Colonel Lelewicz appeared in Kolymsk with a few friends. There was nothing striking about that. Small squads had already passed through. Efrejnov rejoiced. The newspapers arrived more quickly, as if impelled by the speed of the reports they contained. The whole region was almost invigorated.

  Lelewicz bade farewell to his friend.

  He left a blue packet lying on Berzejev's table. Berzejev did not notice it. He was standing at the door. He accompanied the colonel. Lelewicz climbed into the saddle. He waved for the last time. Berzejev turned back into the room. He sighted the packet, quickly seized it and ran outside after the colonel. He shouted, Lelewicz seemed not to hear. He was only a small blue-black speck on the horizon.

  Friedrich held Berzejev fast. 'That's for us!' he said with eyes staring, pale, breathless and unable to speak.

  When Efrejnov awoke next morning, Friedrich and Berzejev had disappeared.

  8

  They were afraid of attracting the attention of the secret police more readily if they stayed together. So they decided to separate for a few days, then to meet up again, and to make the journey to the first large town in stages. The first to arrive was to wait for the other, the latecomer to move on later. If one of them were captured, the other would realize that he must not show himself for the time being. They were ready at any moment to fall into the hands of the police. But each of the pair trembled more for the other than for himself. The constant apprehension sealed their friendship more than the need to face every danger together would have done, and bestowed on them in turn all the kinds and grades of love included in the terms of friendship: they were fathers, brothers and children to one another. Always, when they came together again after several days, they fell into each other's arms, kissed and laughed. Even when neither had encountered any real danger on the way, each yet remained shaken by the dangers he had imagined as threatening th
e other. And although their splitting up had the object of saving at least one of them from arrest, both had nevertheless privately decided to give themselves up if anything should befall the other.

  At last they reached European Russia. They saw the country's warlike enthusiasm. These were the last happier moments of the Tsar, as it later appeared, almost—as it were—brought about by a conscious intent of world history to mislead a doomed system. The Radicals embraced the Conservatives and, as always when strangers come together in danger and opponents are reconciled, there was faith in a miraculous rebirth of the country because the miracle of fraternization is enough to make men believe in one even more improbable. Enmity is familiar to human nature, while reconciliation is foreign to it. Patriotic alliances were hurriedly formed. A hundred new names and insignia were invented. People marched through the streets and smashed German shop-signs.

  'How puzzling,' said Friedrich to Berzejev, as they sat in their hotel room, 'that the individuals of which the mass is composed surrender their characteristics, lose even their primary instincts. The individual loves his life and fears death. Together with others, he discards life and despises death. The individual does not want to join the army and pay taxes. With others, he voluntarily enlists and empties his pockets. And the one is as genuine as the other.'