Joseph Roth: Perlefter: The Story of A Bourgeois

Because the homes in our town lacked writing materials he carried ink and quill with him from one student to the next. At home we wrote the lessons with coal from the stove. Professor Tobias was the only man in our town with a top hat. As he had holes in his pockets he needed to wear such a hat. On his head he comfortably hid an inkwell and a feather. This had the disadvantage that he could not offer greetings to anyone. His index finger always rested upon the rim of his hat.

I was, as I said, perfectly happy to become a coachman. But my father’s twenty-three colleagues were pleased that he was now in the ground under them. The richest among them, Coachman Manes, bought our horse, our sleigh and our cab. From then on he drove with two horses. He acquired a new whip with a lacquered shaft and a grip of braided straw. On the lash of Coachman Manes were no less than six knots. The whip crackled like a rifle.

Half of the money for the wagon and horse came to me and the other half to the Barkeeper Grzyb, a creditor of my father’s. The drivers held a meeting, and it was decided that I should not become a coachman since I had received an education. They said it would be best if I went to stay with my rich relative Perlefter who ran a large timber business in Austria. Rumours circulated that Herr Perlefter was a millionaire. People spoke his name only with awe. The coachmen drank a total of forty-six schnapps one day and gained courage. They sent for Professor Tobias and had him write a letter to my relative Perlefter. The rich Herr Ritz knew the address and gave it to them. The letter was sent, and we awaited an answer. I broke bread every day with one or other of the coachmen.

Winter passed, and as the icicles hanging from the eaves began to melt and the renewing rain began to fall, putting an end to the snow, I became drunk with wanderlust. I was certain that a letter from Perlefter was coming soon.

On one of the first days of March came a brief letter from Herr Perlefter. He would be happy to have me.

I packed for a month. During this time an arrangement was made with Tewje the tobacco smuggler to take me across the border. Easter had already passed by the time the arrangements were finalized. At around the same time my suitcases were ready. On a rainy night I set out from the border with Tewje and five deserters. The customs officer waited until we had vanished, and then out of a sense of duty he fired three times into the air.

On the 28th of April 1904 I arrived in Vienna.

It was six in the morning. The streets of the great city were just awakening. The big ones first and then the small ones. It was as if morning were a family. First the parents awoke and then the children.

Tremendous wagons arrived from the countryside laden with farmers and vegetables. From other wagons came the clinking of milk churns. The houses seemed to me immeasurably high. Behind them the sun was creeping up. It was still chilly. Women with brooms swept their doorsteps. The first streetcars squealed reluctantly on their rails. The conductors rang the bells although the tracks were clear. They clanged out of morning arrogance. The policemen looked on like proud princes. They wore gleaming white gloves. Many of the streets were regal, wide and quiet and clean and guarded by trees. Much was in the air, a rural calm and the slumbering voice of an urban world. The fragrance wafted out of the gardens and into the streets. For the first time in my young life I saw laburnum. I had never read fairy-tales. Nevertheless I knew that these bushes were the fabled trees. Back home there were no laburnum. As I left my city spring had not yet arrived. Back there the snow had just started to melt. Here one could already perceive summer’s approach …

I think that now is the time to reveal Perlefter’s first name. He was called Alexander. It is certainly a meaningless coincidence that he was so named — and I don’t wish to give in to the seductive urge to make a strong connection with the character and name of my hero — yet I can’t help but relate that I lost my respect for Alexander Perlefter for the first time as I recalled how Alexander the Great hewed the Gordian knot with his sword; I imagined that Herr Perlefter had never done anything of the sort. On the contrary. As I have already mentioned, Alexander Perlefter had no love for decisive negotiations or irrevocable resolve. He was not happy entering into those areas from which there were no straight and easy paths back. He liked to linger on the bridges that link one to both here and there because they allowed the person upon them to choose neither. Alexander Perlefter always crossed bridges. He had his cautious nature to thank for all that he achieved. His nature was forged by his own experiences. He was cautious.

Had he been named Florian, Ignatz or Emanuel my respect for him would have lasted longer. He was the first Alexander I had ever known in my young life. To me this name embodied the entirety of Herr Perlefter’s personality. But, if I took him for the great Macedonian King Alexander, he naturally failed to measure up by comparison. Yes, as soon as I saw him I had to smile. From the first glance he was unremarkable, just an ordinary man. But when I got a closer look, when I examined the individual parts of his face, his right profile and his left, I knew that there were many secrets that lay hidden within that merited further exploration; I realized, above all, that the name Alexander did not suit him and that such a name as would suit him did not exist. It must be a word, both soft and yet tough, fading away from its own edges into other sounds, indecipherable and thus unusual, of an extraordinary ordinariness. Unfortunately such a name does not exist. Such a word does not exist.

Perlefter’s body size was indeterminate. He could seem very small and at the same time very large. If he was unhappy, but also if he was lying, it seemed that he sank into himself like a body made of flaccid rubber. He might sometimes sit on a little children’s chair and other times in a large leather armchair. Yes, I find myself in no small amount of embarrassment when I am unable to say whether Herr Perlefter was large, small or medium in size.

He could also, as the situation required, seem either strong or weak, infirm but also mighty. He was able (probably without even realizing it) to change the shape of his stomach, and, as nature had given him a narrow chest and delicate shoulders that gained muscle and fat over time, it remained uncertain whether he was actually broad-shouldered or narrow-framed.

He had a round, balding head and above the neck a small shiny bulge, so that it looked as though his brain could not find a place in its natural shell and therefore made itself a sort of back room. One could not tell at what point the forehead ended and the hair began. The bare skull lent Perlefter’s entire personality a rather naked appearance, shiny and needlessly revealing, as if he had bared himself to force your embarrassment. His ears stood very far apart, were small, feminine and could even have been called dainty if had they been pressed closer to the head. They were eavesdroppers, listening to the world from distant outposts.

I could never determine the colour of his eyes. They didn’t change — no, they remained ever the same — but they were without colour, rather, a collection of different residues, colours from an old palette that had commingled. Brown, grey, green and amber-yellow at the edges. By day, by night and in the twilight, ever were these eyes so, of an indistinct colour — round, small, open and naked. They were truly the eyes of a difficult-to-comprehend, ever-astonished and good-natured man. They stood very far apart, so that his nose had space to spread, and yet he had been given a narrow, well-shaped girlish nose, slightly flattened at the tip, that glowed like ivory between his round, rose-tinted cheeks. His mouth was also small and his lips red. All the more notable was the space in the middle of his sinuate chin, in which the entire majesty of Perlefter rested and out of which it radiated.