by Joseph Roth
The frost rushed round the Inspector’s face, the frost was a silent storm and the night was as clear as glass, as crystal even. One did not see the stars for one had to watch the road, but one could feel them hard and clear above one’s head, as if they too were made of ice. One could feel them so keenly that one could almost see them, although one had to watch the road. One speeded along.
Where was one speeding to behind the grey horse Jacob? The grey knew the way. He was galloping to Szwaby.
And where in Szwaby was he going? He was going to Jadlowker’s border tavern. One might think that, like his master, he too was yearning for the gypsy Euphemia Nikitsch.
13
Inside Jadlowker’s border tavern it was warm and good and cheerful. One drank, one played cards, one smoked. The smoke rose above the men’s heads. There were no women present, and that was good. Inspector Eibenschütz would have found it hard to tolerate the presence of a woman, unless it had been that of Euphemia Nikitsch. But she did not appear. Eibenschütz was not aware at all that he had come here to see her. Only after he had taken a seat and a swallow did he begin to acknowledge to himself that he had really come here to see the woman once more. Occasionally Leibusch Jadlowker came to his table and sat down for a while, fleetingly, as a bee alights on honey, or a butterfly on a flower. The more serious Inspector Eibenschütz became – and he became increasingly serious the more he drank – the more cheerful Jadlowker seemed to him. More cheerful and more spiteful. He, Inspector Eibenschütz, was well aware that most of the informing letters came from Jadlowker’s hand. Very probably, Jadlowker wanted to draw the Inspector’s attention away from himself and towards others. He, Eibenschütz, knew it; he thought he knew it. Nevertheless, he suffered the landlord’s fulsome friendliness with imperturbable patience, with a kind of devout meekness, even. He regarded Jadlowker’s obnoxious, broad face with its fixed smirk. It was adorned with a small pointed, reddish-blond beard. One might well say ‘adorned’; nothing could have disfigured it. It was pallid, with a waxen pallor. In it glowed two tiny little greenish eyes like lights that have already died down but still remain lights; or stars that the astronomers know to have been extinct for thousands of years although to us they still appear to be shining. The only living thing was the red goatee. It looked like a triangular speck of fire which springs, somewhat surprisingly, from matter long thought to be dead and extinguished.
‘At your service, Herr Inspector!’ said Leibusch repeatedly, whenever he approached the table. It was as if, in the course of a single evening, he was repeatedly setting eyes on the Inspector for the first time. Eibenschütz sensed a certain irony in this behaviour; he was also able to see it as ironic that Jadlowker never came to his table without carrying a full bottle in his hand. Admittedly, this might well form part of the prescribed conduct of an innkeeper. But when Jadlowker who, to Eibenschütz’s certain knowledge, had false weights, then asked: ‘How is your gracious wife?’, the Inspector thought he could bear it no longer; and, in order to bear it, he ordered more schnapps. He drank, he continued to drink, until the first light of day. For some time now the deserters had been snoring heavily and horribly under the tables and on the tables. Day had not yet dawned but there was already a hint of it in the air when the Inspector rose. Onufrij escorted him. Always, when climbing onto the sleigh, he felt relieved and depressed. When he reached the boundary of the town of Zlotogrod, a grey winter morning was already dawning. Eibenschütz did not return home. He stopped at Leider’s, the barber’s, for a shave and a hairwash in cold water. Then he went into Zlotogrod’s only café, the Bristol. He drank a coffee and ate two croissants, which were so fresh that they still smelled of the baker’s. Then he drove to the office, sat dully behind the empty table – on which, as was to be expected, no post lay as yet – and awaited the fat sluggish clerk with impatience. He went outside and, just as he was, in fur and boots, he washed his face and hands, under the fearfully cold pump that stood in the courtyard of the district government office to serve the horses of the mounted gendarmerie.
On mornings such as these the Inspector thought of very little or of nothing at all. He thought that the clock on the church tower would soon strike eight and that the new clerk must arrive shortly. When at last it struck eight from the church tower, Eibenschütz went outside again to take a turn through the town. It had to be a short turn as the town was tiny. All he wanted was not to be there before the clerk. He also thought that a trip through the town and through the frost might make him not only appear but also feel like a man who has slept through the night in normal circumstances.
So he drove off, with his sleigh, through the crunching morning snow. Then he turned back. First he drove Jacob and the sleigh to the house. Then, not without a malicious glance at the still unopened shutters of his home, he went on foot to the office.
14
Even in the office he could not restrain himself from thinking of Jadlowker’s mistress, of the gypsy Euphemia Nikitsch. In a strange manner his professional and personal loathing for the innkeeper mingled in him with a wondrous yearning for Frau Euphemia. Poor Inspector Eibenschütz, he did not know at all what was happening to him. It troubled, even shook, his conscience, that he was compelled to think of Jadlowker’s legal transgressions as constantly, as relentlessly and as unremittingly as he found himself thinking of Euphemia’s beauty. He thought of both simultaneously and with the same intensity. One did not happen without the other.
This hard winter, too, passed, and one night the ice on the Struminka river cracked once more. And, just as in the year when he had first arrived – only now, so it seemed to him, it was happening to someone greatly aged and completely transformed – he experienced, one March night, the cracking of the ice over the river and the excitement of the local inhabitants. This time, however, the irruption of spring signified something else. He felt greatly aged when he saw the year and the world renewing itself and no hope of any kind awoke in his heart as it had done in the first year of his arrival. Today, too, as in the first year of his arrival, people stood there on both banks of the river, with flares and lanterns, and jumped suddenly onto the shifting ice-floes and skipped back onto the bank. It was spring. Spring had come!
Inspector Eibenschütz, however, went home with a heavy heart. What did the spring mean to him now? What did it mean to him now? Three days later his wife was confined. In the kitchen. It was an easy birth. No sooner had the midwife been called than he arrived, the son of Josef Nowak. Inspector Eibenschütz reflected that only bastards come into the world so quickly and easily.
The night during which the son of Josef Nowak was born to him, the Inspector spent in Jadlowker’s tavern. And on this same evening Jadlowker’s woman appeared again at his table. As on the first occasion Euphemia said: ‘Aren’t you drinking?’ ‘If you want me to drink, then I’ll drink,’ he replied. She snapped her fingers and the servant Onufrij came and filled the Inspector’s glass to the brim.
She too demanded a glass. It was brought to her. She drank the ninety-degree schnapps at one gulp.
She brought her face close to the Inspector and he had the feeling that her ears with the large, gently clashing earrings were almost closer to him than her bright eyes. He saw her snow-white face very clearly but his ear was even more alert than his eye. He perceived quite distinctly the low, soft tinkling caused by the gentle clash of the gold coins against the hoops at the woman’s ears every time she stirred. At the same time he noticed that her fingers were firm and strong and brown; strange to say, he no longer knew why he had to think of her fingers while he was looking at her ears and perceiving the tinkling of the small coins.
For a fleeting moment Leibusch Jadlowker also sat down at the table. A moment as short as the time a butterfly spends resting on a flower. An instant later he had gone. Euphemia bent over to the Inspector and whispered: ‘I don’t love him! I hate him!’ Whereupon she leaned back and sipped at her glass. And the tinkling at her earlobes was sweet and soft.
&
nbsp; Eibenschütz could endure it no longer. He caught the eye of the tapster Onufrij and paid and climbed onto his sleigh and drove home.
He could not remember whether or not he had said good-night to the woman Euphemia. It suddenly seemed very important to him.
The snow was still quite firm and the little sleigh flew along as if it were the depth of winter.
But the breeze from above was already mild and reminiscent of Easter, and when one looked up at the sky one could see that the stars standing there no longer looked quite so cold and pitiless. It felt as if they had moved a little closer to the earth. At the same time, a very benevolent, very gentle wind made itself felt.
A marked sharp sweetness was already present in the air. The grey sped along as never before and yet Eibenschütz had hardly tightened the reins. The grey tossed his head from time to time as if to see whether the stars really had come closer to the earth. He too felt that spring was near.
But it was Inspector Anselm Eibenschütz who felt it especially. While he glided towards his gloomy home, through the smooth snow, under the mild sky, he remembered that a bastard awaited him in his own home. But at heart he was very pleased about this. For even more clearly he remembered the remark Euphemia had made to him: ‘I don’t love him. I hate him!’
He heard the tinkling of her earrings!
15
At home the infant was crying. What a miracle! Infants cry. They don’t know whether they are bastards or not. They have a right to whimper and cry. Besides, in Eibenschütz’s ears the sound of Euphemia’s softly tinkling earrings rose even above the loud crying of the infant. Eibenschütz no longer thought about his wife or about Josef Nowak’s child.
When he entered his house the Inspector’s only thought was not to encounter the midwife. That was his only worry. But he was altogether unsuccessful. She had heard and seen him arrive. And she went to meet him with her customary professional cheerfulness and reported to him everything he did not wish to know: the boy was a fine child and the mother was doing well.
Eibenschütz thanked her with rancour. The gold coins on the golden earrings were still tinkling in his memory and in his heart. He felt very insecure, very insecure indeed. At times he felt as if he were no longer a man but a house, as if he were capable of foreseeing his imminent downfall, as if he were a house or a wall: things burst and crumbled inside him and he hardly any longer felt the ground under his feet. He himself swayed, the whole house swayed, the chair on which he sat to have his breakfast also swayed. Because of the midwife he went straight to the bedroom, in which his wife Regina had again been accommodated since her confinement. He did not want a scandal. On account of the midwife.
He said ‘Good morning’ to his wife, hastily and spitefully, and contemplated Josef Nowak’s infant, whom the midwife held out to him with professional zeal. The infant whimpered. It smelled obtrusively of mother’s milk and urine. Eibenschütz thanked God that it was not his own son. He experienced a small malicious pleasure at the thought that it was the son of the hated Josef Nowak. But louder still than the malicious pleasure there rang in his ears the sound of the tinkling earrings.
In the afternoon he had to go on an official journey to Slodky with Sergeant Slama. It bored him, this official journey. Why wasn’t he going to Szwaby? Euphemia’s earrings tinkled softly.
Sergeant Slama came to collect him. The grey was harnessed to the gig. It was April, shortly after Easter. The bright blue sky with its delicate white clouds had a youthful air. The little wind that blew against the Inspector was downright teasing and wanton. The fields on either side of the highway were just beginning to turn a merry green and the patches of snow in the ditches were as grey as ash.
‘Today or tomorrow the swallows will arrive,’ said Sergeant Slama. It struck the Inspector as strange but nonetheless pleasant that the sergeant, despite the spiked helmet on his head, despite the rifle with the fixed bayonet between his knees, was talking of swallows.
‘Do they arrive so late in these parts?’
‘Yes,’ said Sergeant Slama, ‘they have a long way to come.’
And they were silent. And the gig rolled on and the little wind blew and the youthful sky with its pale blue cloudlets spanned the world.
It was Friday, a day the Inspector did not like: not because of superstition but because it was a market day throughout the district, in the entire neighbourhood. That made for a lot of work, not in the shops but in the open markets. The customers simply ran away when they saw gendarmes and officials arrive.
On this occasion, too, a great alarm arose in the market place of Slodky. When the yellow gig appeared on the outskirts of the tiny market town someone, a lad who had been posted as sentry, cried: ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’ The women dropped the fish they had been just about to buy back into the barrels. Freshly slaughtered chickens, still bleeding, landed on the stall tables with a violent smack.
Even the live poultry seemed to take fright. Hens, geese, ducks and turkeys ran kicking, squawking, screeching, cackling, beating their wings clumsily and rapidly, through the broad muddy passage that ran between the stalls. While the merchants who really had no reason whatever to flee the authorities did so merely from folly, from hatred and mistrust and from ill-defined fear, the merchants who dared not abandon their stalls because to do so might have rendered them really suspicious, considered how to act. First they flung their weights into the middle of the street, into the silver-grey slime. It looked almost like a battle; as if they were fighting each other with their heavy weights on both sides of the market street.
The only one among the dealers who kept a cool head was Leibusch Jadlowker. True, he had no licence to sell fish in Slodky. Nevertheless, he sold fish in Slodky. Strong and sturdy, he stood beside his barrel, almost as wide as the barrel. True, he had no licence but neither did he have false weights. He knew the law: an Inspector of Weights and Measures had nothing to do with licences. Let him come if he liked. Meanwhile he observed the pike and carp which frolicked about in the barrel. Stupid fish, they probably thought they were still living in the river. They don’t have much sense!
Ah, but how much sense does a poor man have, Leibusch Jadlowker for example?
Even if he knows all the statutes and all the habits and customs and temperaments of the officials, there comes a moment when an unknown paragraph may crop up, or, if not a paragraph, when an unsuspected passion may stir in an official. Officials are human too.
16
Inspector Eibenschütz too was only human. He could not forget the soft tinkling of Euphemia’s earrings. Sometimes he put his hands over his ears. But the tinkling was inside his head, not outside. It was hardly bearable. If he were to inspect the market at Slodky quite quickly and perfunctorily there might still be time to drive back to Szwaby.
He drove through the devastated waste of a market. The wheels of his gig rolled briskly along over the discarded weights, and Jacob’s hoofs buried themselves ever deeper in the mud. Eibenschütz stopped in the middle of the market. The traders stood stiff and silent behind the stall tables like wax figures in a waxworks. Anselm Eibenschütz went from stall to stall, the gendarme at his side. He was shown scales and weights, proper scales, proper weights. Ah, he was well aware that they were the false ones, which were never used. He checked the hallmarks, he investigated scoops, pigeon-holes, drawers, corners, hiding-places. At mother Czaczkes’, the poultry-dealer’s, he found seven false pound and kilo weights. He took down her name, he felt sorry for her. She was a haggard old Jewess, with reddened eyes, a firm nose and a wrinkled parchment countenance. It was really a matter for amazement that so many wrinkles could find their way onto such a thin covering of skin. He felt sorry for her, for poor mother Czaczkes. Nevertheless, he had to take down her name. Obviously her hands had been too feeble to throw away the weights in time, as the others had done.
She immediately began to cry: ‘Murder! Murder! Help! Murder!’ without rhyme or reason, in a hoarse voice that was rem
iniscent of crickets, of crows, of cackling. ‘Not in the book, not in the book!’ she cried, flapping her arms and tearing at the brown wig which sat on her silver-grey hair. And at once she began to fling her skinny hens and her miserable wares into the middle of the road, into the mud. ‘Thieves, robbers, murderers!’ she cried. ‘Take all I’ve got! Take my life!’ Then, without a break her screams turned into heartrending sobs. But, far from calming her, this seemed to provoke her to still greater vehemence. For while the tears streamed from her inflamed eyes and flowed over her haggard cheeks like rain, she continued to throw out everything that came to hand – a tea-glass, a spoon, the samovar. In vain did Inspector Eibenschütz endeavour to calm her. At last she seized the knife she used to cut up the poultry. She dashed out of her booth with the large saw-toothed knife in her hand. Her wig went awry, the true disorderly tangle of her grey locks was visible under the false brown hair, and the Inspector retreated a step, not on account of the knife but on account of the hair. The sergeant of gendarmerie, Slama, still stood motionless with shouldered rifle.
