The Silent Prophet

by Joseph Roth

  When the spring came, he found himself in Paris. Every night he walked through smooth and silent streets, encountered the fully-laden waggons on their way to the market halls, the even trot of the heavy shaggy horses, the pious rural tinkling of their bells, the shiny green of the neatly stacked bundles of cauliflowers and the smooth whiteness of their faces among the broad drooping leaves, the artificial pale red of the thin-tailed carrots, the bloody, moist and heavy glisten of the massive butchered cattle. Every night he visited a cellar where people danced, sailors, street-girls, whites and coloured men from the colonies. The accordion poured gay march tunes into the bright room, it was the instrument of exuberant melancholy. He liked it because it reminded him of his revolutionary comrades, because it was the music of abandonment and carefreeness, because it called to mind both peaceful evenings in eastern villages and the brooding heat of African deserts, because it contained both the song of the frost and the eternal stillness of summer. From every wall wide mirrors reflected the lavish rows of lamps on to the ceiling, made twenty rooms out of one, multiplied the dancing-girls a hundredfold. He no longer noticed the stairs and the door that led outside to the nocturnal streets. The mirrored walls sealed off the room more finally than stone and marble and transformed the cellar into a single endless subterranean paradise. He sat at a table and drank Schnapps. Once, in a moment when it seemed to him that he need have no fear of revealing himself because it was the last night of the world and there would be no morrow, he asked for a piece of paper and wrote, without any form of address:

  'I have not thought of you for many years. For several days I have been unable to get you out of my mind. I know that you no longer think of me. You lead a life which, today as always, is as remote from mine as one planet from another. However, this gives you my address. To be candid, I must confess that it is in no way an irresistible compulsion that induces me to write to you. Perhaps it is only an irresistible hope ...

  He went into the street. Dawn began to break, today as ever; the world had not perished. A blue light lay over the houses, someone opened a window. A car engine growled obstinately and rebelliously. In the light of the waking day Friedrich put the letter into the postbox.

  6

  These were no longer momentous times. The post functioned normally. The letter reached Hilde after an interval of three days. Then, one evening, when Friedrich returned to his hotel, someone was waiting for him.

  He sat for a long time in his overcoat, damp and steaming from the rain, hat in hand and silent. She told him about her husband and children, of her bitter years, of her old father. She had, incidentally, brought him with her. He intended to visit a spa. He was there to reassure her jealous husband. They were now doing well. Her husband had made good use of his mediocrity. The others, the speculators with the inborn instinct for business, had been overwhelmed by the storms they had conjured up, like warriors fallen in adventures they had themselves provoked. Herr von Derschatta, however, was one of those mediocre bureaucrats of the business world who gain much though they risk nothing. She spoke in the jargon which is the mother tongue of Director Generals, of the 'position' that permitted certain things but not yet, or no longer, permitted others. A few strangers entered the room where they were sitting. She ceased her account. But the silence that ensued was capable of expressing all the admissions and completing all the half-admissions that she had minimized and half suppressed earlier. This silence disconcerted her the more in the presence of the other people. As if they were both as young as they had once been in the café, the fortuitousness of the external situation left them at a loss. Outside it was raining. Here strangers were sitting. 'If she comes to my room now,' he thought, 'it is decided. She is expecting it.' He said nothing.

  'Perhaps we should go up to your room?' After the long silence it seemed as if she had prepared herself for this question.

  They walked up the stairs; the presence of a stranger in the lift, a witness of their confusion, would have embarrassed them. They walked in silence, separated by a great distance, as if they were going upstairs to settle an old score. She sat down without removing her coat. Her small hat-brim shaded her eyes. Her coat was fastened up to her chin and her gaze held something valiant, ready for battle. She still felt the resolve with which she had got into the train. Friedrich walked over to the window, a movement made by every other man embarrassed by the presence of a woman in his room. 'Why are you silent?' she said suddenly. Anxiety trembled in her question. He heard the fear and, at the same time, the first Du that had passed between them. It was like the first lightning in spring. He turned round, thought, 'Now she is going to cry', and saw two moist eyes that gazed straight at him, fearless because armed with tears.

  He wanted to say: 'Why did you come here? He corrected himself. He considered which would be less hurtful, 'why' or 'what for', and finally settled for a harmless 'how' in conjunction with a Du. So he said: 'How did you get here?'

  With the rapid presence of mind that women achieve when they embark on a rash adventure, she had brought her father to assuage the vigilance of the Director General. This novelettish inventiveness alarmed him. So as not to be silent any longer, he said: 'Then you're here with your father?'

  'Say what you're thinking,' she began. 'Say that you never expected me, that it was only a mood, that letter. You had probably been drinking when you wrote it.'

  'Yes,' he replied, 'it was a sort of deep serious mood. I did not expect you. What I say now is in sorrow, not reproach: you should have come ten years ago. Too much has happened in between.' 'Tell me,' she said.

  'It's not possible straight off. I would not know where to begin. Neither would I know what was important. It occurs to me that the facts are less important than the things one can't recount. For instance, what is more serious than any battle I have taken part in is the despair I go around in, or a word someone lets fall here and there that sometimes reveals human beings to me and sometimes humanity as a whole. But it will probably suffice to tell you the name under which I have lived for the past ten years.' And he told her his pseudonym, of which he had been so proud.

  As if this name, which she had heard and read without realizing whom it concealed, were conclusive evidence of her blindness and guilt, she began to cry. 'Now I ought to go and kiss her,' thought Friedrich. He noticed how, in the midst of her despair, she took off her hat and smoothed her hair, which she now wore cut short like everyone else, and he approached, glad that he had something to do, and took the hat from her hand.

  She shook her head, rose, asked with her eyes for the hat, and said quietly: 'I must go.'

  'I shall let her go,' he thought.

  But now, when she lifted both arms to put on her hat, she seemed to him in despair, and therefore doubly beautiful, as he had never seen her before. She was young, she had let the years pass by like zephyrs, she had borne children and was young. He saw her again in the softly rolling carriage and in the shop, trying on gloves, and in the café, beside him in the corner, and in the street in the rain. In this one movement, when she raised her arms, lay all her beauty. Her movement simultaneously evoked every aspect of beauty, supplication, disrobing, denial and submission. She lowered her arms. The right hand began to stretch a glove over the left with scrupulous care.

  'Stay!' he said suddenly. And he added to this: 'Don't go!', more gently, tenderly, and a little sharply, as he noticed in self-reproach a moment later.

  'All it needs is for me to turn the key, and it's settled.' He saw how Hilde glanced at the door and slowly and scrupulously stripped off her glove again. Now it was an unclothed hand, not just a naked one. It seemed as if he were seeing her for the first time. He took a single rapid step to the door and locked it.

  7

  Old Herr von Maerker was due to travel on for his cure the next day. Friedrich saw him that evening. The festive glow of the many lamps in the restaurants made his white-haired old age more venerable, his daughter's beauty more radiant. Herr von Maerker looked older
than he was, and more important. He resembled old portraits, faces that time has moulded more than nature or art, endowed with the lustre of a melancholy solemnity by the irrevocability of the vanished epochs which they mirror. Herr von Maerker had never been astute. Now, as occasionally happens, his age deputized for wisdom. And, because he was one of those men who have outlived their epoch, he evoked in Friedrich the courteous respect one owes to an old forgotten monument. He did not seem to suspect that Hilde's encounter with Friedrich was other than pure coincidence. But even had he suspected, his respect for his daughter's life and privacy was too great for him to seek to discern relationships that were not voluntarily disclosed to him. Like the men of his generation, he still took it for granted that wives and daughters had a natural instinct for the decorous and the unseemly, for honour and appearance, for reputation and worth. Herr von Maerker still belonged to the last generation of well-mannered Middle Europeans who cannot remain seated when a woman is standing in front of them, who, without venturing a reproof, are continually amazed by the manners of the young, who still speak gracefully while they are eating, and who can still say something sensible without being intelligent themselves, who are chivalrous and harmless and distribute compliments like little declarations of love committing them to nothing. He was aware of his daughter's unhappy marriage, but it did not occur to him to reproach himself for having compelled the Director General to marry Hilde. He had not known his daughter for many a year. Now age made him clearsighted. But he kept silent, not only because he would have been embarrassed to ask, but because he would have been even more embarrassed to let it be noticed that he possessed the capacity to guess.

  'I remember you very well,' he said to Friedrich. 'You visited us once.' Friedrich thought of the candid journalist who had so obstinately assured him that he did not recognize him. 'Much has happened since then. And yet it seems to me that we knew it all beforehand. Year by year I was able to see with my own eyes how the country was disintegrating, how people were becoming indifferent. But malicious too, yes, malicious,' he added. He said this with the hindsight of one beyond the tomb.

  'We made jokes, we all laughed at them,' he continued. 'I have to reproach myself for a few. Believe me, jokes alone are enough to destroy an ancient country. All races have mocked. And yet in my time, when the man was more important than his nationality, the possibility existed of making a homeland for all out of the old monarchy. It could have been the prototype in miniature of a great future world, and at the same time the last reminder of a great European era in which North and South had been united. It is all over,' concluded Herr von Maerker, with a slight movement of the hand with which he seemed to disperse the last remnants of his recollections.

  Even his sadness was accompanied by serenity. His sombre obituary on his fatherland did not prevent him from enjoying to the full, and with a mild deliberation, his black coffee and thin cigarette and it seemed as if he enjoyed life the more because it still continued beyond his own time, and as if he enjoyed each day, each evening, each meal that heaven granted him with the pleasure one derives from unexpected and unearned holidays. The destruction of the monarchy had put an end only to the active period of his life, he had only ceased to exist as a contemporary, but he continued to live on as the passive observer of a new era which, though it did not please him at all, did not bother him in the slightest because it did not in any way concern him.

  He took leave of Friedrich, Hilde accompanied him. They decided to meet again in an hour.

  During this hour Friedrich walked up and down in front of the hotel, just as he would have done ten years before. 'Everything's alive again!' he thought. 'Nothing has happened between the day I first saw her in the carriage and today. I am young and happy. Shall I yet believe in the miracle of love? It is obviously a miracle when what has happened is obliterated.'

  And then he said to Hilde: 'Once, during my escape from Siberia, I thought of taking you with me to a remote and peaceful country. There are still peaceful foreign countries. Let us be on our way.'

  'We do not need them in order to be happy.'

  They walked through broad unlighted streets, across animated squares, avoided dangers unthinkingly, only by means of the waxing instinct to remain alive and to live. They would have succeeded in saving themselves from a catastrophe, among a thousand who perished they would have been the only survivors.

  He was spared none of the follies with which masculine infatuation is so well endowed. Jealousy possessed him, not so much against particular men but a jealousy for the whole of the long period that Hilde had passed without him. And he even finally asked that most stupid and masculine of all the questions contained in the lexicon of love: 'Why didn't you wait for me?' And he received the inevitable reply, which any other woman would have given, and which is far from a logical answer but rather a continuation of this question: 'I have never loved anyone but you!'

  And so love began to lead him from an abnormal to a normal existence, and he got to know its mortal and yet eternal delights and, for the first time in his life, the happiness that consists in giving up great goals in favour of small ones and of overestimating the attainable so extravagantly that there is nothing more to seek. They travelled through white cities, stood in great harbours, saw ships sail for foreign shores, met trains that sped into the unknown, and could never catch sight of a ship or a train without envisaging themselves travelling off into the distance, the future, the void. They anxiously counted the days they could still remain together, and the fewer they became the richer and more full of improbable happenings the remainder seemed to be. If the first week had been an indivisible unit of time, the second already split into days, the third into hours, and in the fourth, in which they began to savour every moment as an entire rich day, they regretted having allowed the first to pass so prodigally.

  'I shall follow you everywhere,' said Hilde, 'even to Siberia!'

  'Why should I go there? I no longer intend to place myself in dangerous situations.'

  'What else do you want to do then?'

  'Nothing at all.'

  Hilde fell into a deep and disappointed silence. It was the first time that they had suddenly arrived at a point where they ceased to understand each other. These moments recurred more and more often, only they forgot them over again. Both delayed explanations for more favourable opportunities. But such opportunities generally failed to arrive and the silent hours became increasingly common. There were tendernesses that Friedrich did not reciprocate. Words fell from the lips of each without an echo, like stones into a bottomless abyss.

  Once she said, perhaps to propitiate him: 'I admire you, for all that.' And he could not restrain himself from replying: 'Whom haven't you admired before now? A painter, a gifted author, the war, the wounded. Now you're admiring a revolutionary.'

  'One gets more clever,' she replied.

  'One gets more stupid,' he said.

  And there began a rapid to-and-fro of empty meaningless words, a battle with empty nutshells.

  'She has to have someone to admire,' thought Friedrich. 'At the moment, I am her hero. Too late, too late. She turns to me at a moment when I am beginning to disown myself. I am no longer my old self, I merely continue to play the part—out of chivalry.'

  However, it was settled between them that Hilde would leave her husband and children.

  'Don't forget,' she said as she got on the train, 'that I shall follow you everywhere. . . .' 'Even to Siberia,' she added as the train began to gather speed.

  He could no longer answer.

  She was due to join him a week later.

  8

  Actually, the story of our contemporary, Friedrich Kargan, might have come to a satisfactory ending here, if by that one understands the final homecoming to a loved woman and the prospect of a kind of domestic happiness that offers itself in the last pages of a book. But Friedrich's peculiar destiny, or the inconstancy of his nature with which we have become acquainted in the present account, res
isted so gentle an exit from a stormy existence. Some weeks ago we were startled by the news that he and some members of the so-called 'opposition' who, as is generally known, had declared an open resistance to the ruling régime in Russia, had gone to Siberia for a long spell. What occasioned him to suffer once again for a cause of which he was clearly no longer convinced? On the basis of what little we can deduce from the most recent events in his life, we can only surmise and conjecture as follows.

  After he had left Hilde, he found a communication from his friend Berzejev. 'I am not sorry,' wrote the latter, 'that I did not follow you abroad, but I regret that I shall presumably never see you again. Call it the sentimentality of a clearly anarchistically disposed man, which no longer embarrasses me now that I have been publicly stripped of the rank of a revolutionary. To console you, let me say that I go into exile compulsorily and yet willingly. If Savelli only suspected how he is actually satisfying my secret yearning, he would probably assign me to a perpetual couriership between Moscow and Berlin as a punishment; I mean to the post of an upholder of culture, a herald of the electrification of the proletariat, its transformation into an efficient middle class. For men like us, Siberia is the only possible abode.'

  The same kind of yearning for the edge of the world could equally well have been expressed by Friedrich. Whether one changes the direction of one's life or not does not seem to depend on a voluntary decision. The bliss of having once suffered for a great ideal and for humanity governs our decisions, even after doubt has long made us clearsighted, knowledgeable and without hope. One has gone through the fire and remains marked for the rest of one's life. Perhaps, too, the woman entered Friedrich's life too late. Perhaps his old friend meant more to him than she did.