The Silent Prophet

by Joseph Roth

  He retained enough curiosity to engage in experiences. But it was no longer the primal curiosity, which would have wanted to know what was happening, but a sort of second-class curiosity, which sought only for confirmation of what it had already accurately surmised. Once, when Friedrich had to negotiate with the executive of an aviation company, he said to himself: 'He will be a big broad-boned man in a new light-grey suit, with hair cut short and parted on the left, a wedding-ring on his finger, no other jewellery. On his desk stands a photograph of his wife. The telephone will ring every five minutes to intimidate me. The best quality cigars and cigarettes are shut away in the drawer, so-called "smoking material" for guests lies on the table. The functional nature of the office furnishings does not exclude a certain cool leathery comfort. On the arms of soft light-yellow armchairs, squat yellow shiny ashtrays rubbed over with metal polish. The man is conservative, a moderate monarchist. He acts the honest businessman with principles, but readily lets it be recognized that he is not stupid.'

  When Friedrich entered he found his conjectures confirmed. The discussion bored him from the first moment. He could have supplied an exact report of it without having taken part. To make a change and to disconcert the executive he suddenly said: 'Would you disconnect your telephone while we're talking!' The great man immediately obeyed. He pressed a button with his foot; his desk was equipped with the latest technical devices and pedals like a piano. Underneath, as if by magic, all the electrical controls came out of the floor. One saw no flex leading to the lamp or the telephone, no bell on the table, no locks on the drawers, the inkwell rested in a depression in the desk and, without the executive having to make the slightest movement, he summoned his secretary by an act of simple lightning-quick volition. Friedrich noticed how the wall suddenly opened and the secretary appeared, as if he had all along been lodged in a cleft between the bricks. 'Would you just disconnect the circuit?' said the executive, and the secretary disappeared in a trice and the wall was whole again. 'We are not as electrified as that in Russia yet!' said Friedrich, pointing to the mysterious wall. 'That I can believe!' answered the executive. 'We are far ahead in Germany.' And like a man who, out of pride at the beauty of his country, shows a foreigner the landscape and tells him the names of the mountains, valleys and rivers, the executive began to explain to Friedrich the technical secrets of his office. He said 'our' with the same emphasis with which the party leaders spoke of their party and the Fatherland. 'Our installation,' he said, 'was completed only three months ago. All the wiring is in the floor, under the carpet. Here, under the desk, you see three buttons that light up red, green and yellow. The red is an alarm signal, the green is my secretary, and the yellow my lady secretary. If I press the wall here, the picture springs out.' He pressed, and the portrait, which showed the head of the firm, flew out of its frame like a window pushed open by a gust of wind, and revealed a secret compartment containing banknotes and documents. 'I need only draw this curtain,' continued the executive, 'and I am in the midst of my family circle.' The curtain opened and Friedrich saw a niche with life-sized coloured pictures showing a woman and two boys in sailor-suits. In the ceiling above the pictures a small lamp burned, so that the niche appeared like an altar. He drew nearer and recognized Hilde's portrait. It had been painted by the painter with the bushy eyebrows. He immediately resolved to find out where the Director General lived, just in case and not in order to disturb family life. 'Your wife,' Friedrich ventured to say, 'is very beautiful.' 'We have been married ten years,' replied the executive confidingly, 'but we are no longer deeply in love!' And he glanced at a shiny steel ruler as if the word 'deeply' were a term for a specific measure of love. He stood up again and seemed to reflect. He returned to the smooth wall, touched a yellow flower on the wallpaper, and immediately a small door sprang open and revealed the gilt back of a thick leather volume. This back also opened and now Friedrich perceived that it was not a book, but a small cupboard for glasses and liqueur bottles. 'One can't talk properly without a drink!' said the executive. After one glass, he became loud and exuberant, slapped Friedrich a few times on the knee and made one of the secret drawers in the green desk fly open, revealing to Friedrich pornographic postcards and hygienic objects of an erotic nature. 'Dear friend,' said the executive, 'the sexual department. Sexuality is an important factor.' And he began to spread out his pictures.

  He collected them together and became serious again. 'Distractions are necessary,' he said. 'I work ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day.' And he raised his arm high and made a few gymnastic movements reminiscent of those music-hall acrobats who give their muscles a work-out before their act, as an indication that the weights they are about to lift are really heavy.

  'The executive Herr von Derschatta,' Friedrich wrote subsequently in his report, 'is a good-natured man. His income is large, his family life peaceful, his industry boundless. He is incorruptible. He loves his country, for it is a branch of his firm. The conditions I set out below do not seem to me to be the last word. It would be easier to deal with him if one intimidated him. He is servile by preference.'

  Friedrich wrote such reports with great care, although he knew that they had a long and devious route ahead of them and that they availed little. Even as he folded them up and put them in an envelope, he saw the many stages of the journey they had to make and the faces of the men who would be dealing with them. He knew personally some of the members of the new bureaucracy which had spread over the entire country like flocks of crows, left behind by war and revolution. He recalled their subordinate faces, on which the inflexibility of a rigid outlook conferred the traits of a cruel piety. A small envy determined their brave words and their hesitant deeds, a minute and narrow envy, the brother of an early disillusioned ambition. Friedrich recalled how all of them—photographers and minor authors, shady lawyers and small accountants, book-keepers and nervous tradesmen—had dashed for the empty office-stools about which the soldiers of the Revolution did not concern themselves. The soldiers returned to their fields, which could not yet be tilled, to the machines which were still at a halt. The others, who had written and copied manifestoes, ordinances, plans, textbooks and pamphlets during the civil war, kept the pens in their hands, the pens, the thin steel instruments, the strongest tools of power. But it so happened that the men who were at liberty to demonstrate their talents and strength possessed no talents, and only sufficient strength to shove their opposite number away from the desk with their elbows and to reappear at the desk if the other had succeeded in dislodging them. He recalled the triumph afforded him during the war by the awareness of not being a cipher like the others, and not having to disobey sealed orders that were issued somewhere behind thick oppressive walls by anonymous tools of an unknown authority. He had succeeded in cheating the register that had waited, blank and white, for his names and dates, in evading the pointed pens coloured with poisonous green ink which a hundred thousand clerks had aimed at him like lances. He could still see an official at the police station, a mixture of bull and farmhand, to whom he had handed the false registration form with a childish rage. 'Was it really necessary?' Parthagener had asked.

  Now Friedrich himself wrote reports for registers. And all the acrobatics with which he had assumed and discarded names, disguised and simulated existences, had only led him to become himself a tool, an object of the offices and bureaux. Would the paperwork never cease? What kind of decree was it that conferred on the most fragile and delicate of materials—paper, pencil and pen—power over blood and iron, brains and brawn, fire and water, hunger and epidemic? Only a moment ago the thousand chancelleries had been burnt down. He himself had set fire to them. He himself had seen their crumbling ashes. And already they were writing again in a hundred thousand chancelleries, and already there were new small books with green and red lines, and already every man had a code-number in an office as small children have a guardian angel in heaven. 'I will not!' cried Friedrich. 'I will not!' he thought, while he himself sat in an office an
d dictated to a girl in a blue sailor's costume. How nimbly the pen ran with her hand! It was a Koh-i-noor, shiny yellow with a long black tip. Then the girl went into the big general office and the machine began to clatter. And the report found itself in the courier's briefcase. He entered a secretariat. There sat Dr M., a small plump man with a face which seemed to consist of nothing but protuberances, and tiny malevolent eyes under a brow full of meaningless furrows, the consequences of a mood of the skin and not of careful thought. He hated Friedrich. He wanted to be abroad writing reports himself. Just as the front-rank party chiefs did not desire to go abroad, but endeavoured to remain in Moscow at any price, so the mediocre subordinates desired nothing more ardently than a sojourn in a bourgeois foreign country where they could live out their bourgeois tendencies. They wanted to drink good beer, to sit at a well-laid table. Was that not what one meant by the cause of the proletariat?

  But what was the cause of the proletariat? These deputies, who let themselves be imprisoned and were set free again, these anonymous proletarians who were forgotten in the penitentiaries, the shot and the hanged, what use were they? How did it come about that the very ones who were attempting to construct a new world behaved according to the oldest superstition, the oldest, most absurd superstition of the profit and sanctity of sacrifice? Was it not the Fatherland that demanded sacrifice? Was it not religion that demanded sacrifice? Alas, the Revolution too demanded it! And it drove men to the altars, and everyone who submitted himself to sacrifice died in the conviction that he died for something great. And meanwhile it was the living who came off best! The world had grown old, blood was a familiar sight, death a trivial matter. All died to no purpose and were forgotten a year later. Only romanticism, like paper, was immortal.

  'I serve without belief,' Friedrich told himself. 'Twenty years ago it would have been called villainy. I draw my salary without convictions. I despise the men with whom I associate, I do not believe in the success of this Revolution. Between the lines of the brazen materialistic statutes that govern at least the civilized part of the world, on the other hand, there are still unknown, unreadable secrets.'

  He stood there like a captain whose ship has sunk and who, contrary to duty and against his will, remains alive thanks to a malicious fate: preserved for life on earth, on an alien planet.

  5

  Friedrich fell ill.

  He lay alone in his room, in fever's soft delirium, and cosseted by solitude for the first time. Till now he had known only its cruel constancy and its obstinate muteness. Now he recognized its gentle friendship and caught the quiet melody of its voice. No friend, no loved one and no comrade. Only thoughts came, like children, simultaneously begotten, born and grown. For the first time in his life he learned to know illness, the beneficent pressure of soft hands, the wonderful deceptive feeling of being able to get up but unwilling to rise, the capacity to lie and float suspended at the same time, the strength that comes from loneliness like grace from misfortune, and the mute colloquy with the wide grey sky that filled the window of his high-up room, the only guest from the outside world. 'When others are ill,' he thought, 'a friend comes, asks if he may smoke a cigarette, gives the patient his hand, which it then occurs to him to wash—on hygienic grounds. The sweetheart deploys her maternal instinct, proves to herself that she can love, makes a small flirtatious sacrifice, overcomes her reluctance to take hold of ugly objects with a delicate hand. The comrades come with optimistic bustle, bringing the tenor of events to the bedside in forced witty disguise, laugh too loudly and smile indulgently and obtain an assurance of their own health, just as the charitable involuntarily feel in their own pockets to check their spare change at the sight of a beggar. Only I am alone. Berzejev has stayed in Russia. He has a fatherland. I have none. It is possible that in a hundred or two hundred years time no human being in the world will have a place they can call home or asylum. The earth will look the same everywhere, like a sea, and just as a sailor is at home wherever there is the sound of water, so everyone will be at home wherever grass grows, or rock or sand. I was born too late or too early. I am one of the experiments that Nature makes here and there before she decides to bring forth a new species. When my fever wanes I shall get up and go away. I shall literally fulfil my fate to be a stranger. I shall prolong the mild abandonment of the fever a little, and wandering will transform my solitude into good fortune, as the illness has almost done.'

  His fever waned. He got up. Because he had known no childhood and no mother, and because he had grown up without hearing the names of diseases and discussions as to their causes, he was not even curious to know what had been wrong with him. But he had to specify a disease to obtain his leave. He allowed himself to be told what people called the condition he had suffered from. He took six months' leave. 'I am now committing what is known as a shabby trick,' he told himself. 'According to the moral attitudes of this stupid world, it is bad enough to work for a cause of which one is not as convinced as the majority of stewards of that cause. But it's even worse to break off from this sort of work and take money for it. Both bourgeois society and its revolutionary opponents have the same appropriate term for a character such as myself. They call such behaviour cynical. Cynicism is never permitted to the individual. Only countries, parties and guardians of the future may make use of it. For the individual there is nothing left but to show his true colours. I am a cynic.'

  He therefore supplied himself with money and—as so many times in his life—with a passport in a false name. The Revolution had become legitimized by diplomatic subterfuge. A false passport no longer gave Friedrich any pleasure. Even a reactionary police force acknowledged the pseudonym of a revolutionary like the incognito of a Balkan prince. Only the newspapers, which were paid by fearful industrialists, sometimes thought they were giving the government of their country a piece of information when they reported that this or that dangerous emissary of the revolution had arrived under a false name. In reality, it was the government who strove to conceal the dangerous man from the newspapers. The times were past when Friedrich had conceived himself as waging a personal battle against the world order and its defenders by means of hazardous stratagems and superfluous dissembling. Now he possessed an unwritten but internationally recognized right to illegality.

  And he travelled through the great cities of the civilized world. He saw the museums, in which the treasures of the past were hoarded in depositories like furniture for which one cannot find a use. He saw the theatres, on whose stages a slice of life was picked out, divided into acts, and portrayed by persons in pink make-up for an entrance fee. He read the newspapers in which reports were spread over current events like seductive veils over uninteresting objects. He sat in the cafés and the restaurants, in which people were collected like goods in a shop-window. He frequented the poor taverns where that part of society termed the 'people' diverted itself and enjoyed the vigorous robust glitter which is associated with the pleasures of poverty. As if he had never belonged to them, he visited like a stranger the halls in which they had gathered to hear about politics and to feel that they were part of the world's bustle. And, as if he himself had never addressed them, he marvelled at their naïve enthusiasm, which greeted the hollow sound of a phrase as the devotion of the pious greeted the dull clang of a cheap bell. As if there had been no Revolution and no war! Nothing! Obliterated! Young men with wide floating trousers, with padded shoulders and flirtatious soft hips, a whole generation of sexless aviators permeated every layer of society. Football strengthened the muscles of the young workers in the same measure as those of the young bankers' sons and gave the faces of both the same traits of presence of mind and absence of thought. The proletarians trained for revolution, the bourgeois for enjoyment. Flags waved, men marched, and just as particular vaudeville acts were repeated in every large town, so in every large town an Unknown Soldier lay buried. Even in the smaller places Friedrich encountered monuments to the fallen, as he did tap-dancing Negroes.

  Now hi
s eyes saw that 'life' whose distant, mysterious and wonder-revealing reflection had been shed over the wishes of his early years. It was exactly as if he had taken the play of the dark-red light, cast by an advertising sign on the window-panes opposite, for the reflection of a great and sinister conflagration. Now he saw the sources of his fine illusions. And he derided himself with the satisfaction a clever man experiences when he uncovers errors. He went around and uncovered one source after another, and he was triumphant because he won the day against himself.

  In time all the sources were exposed, quicker than he had expected. Thus he learned to know forlornness in strange cities, the aimless wandering through the early twilight of evenings, when the silvery lanterns light up and afflict the body of the abandoned with the pain of a thousand sudden needle pricks. He walked through rain-soaked streets, over the gleaming asphalt of wide squares like stony lakes, coat-collar turned up, fastened from outside, and before him only his gaze to steer him through a foreign land. He rose early, walked in the bright morning full of hurrying people. Women he did not look at illuminated him with their beauty, children laughed from gardens, a forgiving clemency emanated from slow old men who seemed doubly venerable and doubly slow among the hurrying throng. Finally, there were days that revealed all the simple and indestructible beauty, days on which his wish to be able to begin life anew was almost exceeded by the solace that he could begin again without effort.