Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

In the morning she reviewed the week’s programme with the vague intent of reforming her life. It was Sunday. The seamstress came on Monday, Tuesday she was going with Frau G. to the theatre, guests on Wednesday, lecture on Thursday, her aunt on Friday, Saturday two gentlemen from the Ministry for dinner and an hour’s sitting for the portrait-painter in the afternoon. She wanted to invite Frau G. to accompany her, but her friend had no time, she had to make a long-planned excursion with her husband to his relatives, three hours in the train. Within the next five minutes she forgot about the excursion, looked in the paper to see what performances there were on Saturday, blushed, became confused, and turned quickly to another topic. For the first time there was an element of hostility in her farewell, and neither the deliberately hearty handshake nor the customary embrace, which this time even lasted some seconds longer than usual, had quite the power to erase it. ‘She regards me as her rival,’ Hilde reflected quickly. Her ‘best friend’.

She went into the little café in order to surprise Friedrich, did not find him, and left an invitation for Saturday afternoon.

He came and met the painter. He already knew this striking man by sight. He detested the prominent overweening skull, the broad white forehead, the bushy eyebrows which their owner seemed to water daily like cultivated fields. They overshadowed his empty eyes in such a way that their dark depths appeared like enigmatic oceans. He detested the high, soft and contrived casual collar, from which emerged a massive double chin as if to support the chin itself. He detested so-called ‘fine heads’ in general. They employed a great part of their energy in appearing even more important than nature had intended, and it was as if they had transferred their talents to the mirror when they got up every morning.

Hilde gave the painter preference. She was annoyed with Friedrich because she had had a bad night on his account. She blamed him for appearing different on a gloomy rainy evening than on a bright afternoon. Moreover, he was now sullen and silent. He watched while the painter produced ten sketches in the course of half an hour with flying fingers and a menacing gaze which jumped from Hilde to the paper and back again. Hilde was restive. Although her features seemed to remain unchanged, sudden transformations took place beneath her skin and beneath her features, and only in her eyes was it possible to see how a light was extinguished and then rekindled.

Friedrich’s silence caused the painter to lose his self-control. ‘I must have you alone,’ he said softly, as if to make it plain to Friedrich that the remark referred to a private matter. Friedrich got up, the painter cast his eyes up at the ceiling. He had the ability to see the world with his eyebrows rather than his eyes. He collected his sheets together with hasty resignation. As Hilde feared that he might be offended, she begged him to stay. But she allowed Friedrich to leave and he departed, silent and sullen, with the resolve to write her a meaningful letter to make it clear that she was leading an unworthy and untruthful life, that she would have to change, that she must break with this bourgeois behaviour and this mock rebellion.

He wrote all this hurriedly, as a man does who wants to save himself from an imminent danger. As he reached the fourth side, he reflected. He wanted to destroy the letter, but he recalled that, in all the books, there were lovers who tore up letters. On no account did he wish to appear ridiculous. And he quickly posted the letter.

R. came to his table. ‘Been in love long? So it’s true you’ve fallen in love, nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a drive, like health, but just as one shouldn’t use health to become even healthier, so you shouldn’t feed love with your love. Sublimate it. Put it to good use. Otherwise it’s trash.’

There was a pamphlet to translate into Italian. In a week it was May Day. Meetings. Having to be here and there. Saying a few words. P. threatened with expulsion. Savelli asked after Friedrich.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Friedrich, ‘I’ll make a start right away.’ He set to work. It was not really love that he could convert into action, at most the productive melancholy of the infatuated.

One evening, while he was writing, Hilde came into the café. He pretended indifference, to her and even to himself. She was not to believe that he was a bourgeois portrait-painter. No, he had to work for the world’s salvation. No small thing. He experienced a malicious triumph that she had brought her youth, her elegance, her beauty into the small grey room.

She sat helplessly beside him, his long letter in her hand. She had intended to discuss every sentence with him. He begged her to wait, he had an article to write. It’s explosive, he thought, stimulated by the prospect of reading it aloud to her if she begged him. She waited. He had finished. It did not occur to her to ask. She was thinking only of the letter. Almost meekly she began: ‘I brought the letter with me.’ Her meekness irritated him. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘I wrote that letter in a crazy mood. Don’t think of it any more as a letter addressed to you.’

She was still holding the paper in her hand. He seized it and began to tear it up. She would have liked to grasp his hand and was embarrassed. Her eyes filled with hot tears. ‘I’m crying again,’ she thought, angered by her relapse into an outdated past.

It was only a little moment, he did not look at her. Convincingly, he played a hard arrogant part and his hands tore up the letter mechanically. Now it was fifty scraps of paper. They lay like small white corpses on the dark marble slab. The waiter came, swept them with one hand into the other and took them away.

‘Buried,’ she thought.

He wanted to say something conciliatory. Nothing conciliatory came. Over both of them there already reigned the eternal decree that governs misunderstandings between the sexes.

Now she was on her feet again, a stranger from another world in this café. He saw her once more through the window as she passed. And he did not realize that only a pane of glass separated her from him. He felt as if there were no chance, ever again, of leaving this café. As if, at this moment, the door had been walled up and his place were here, at this table, for eternity. He did not stir. Five minutes later he stepped outside. She was no longer to be seen.

From then on he thought about undertaking ‘a long and dangerous journey’. An unaccountable sadness accompanied his work, endowed his efforts with a golden warmth and his voice with a melancholy resonance, and drew the first sharp furrows on his countenance. He seemed to have become taciturn. His bright gaze came from a remote distance and fixed itself on a remote objective. He wanted to go away and never return.

‘I’m a poor man,’ he once said to R., ‘on the side of the poor. The world is not kind to me, I shall not be kind to it. It is full of injustice. I suffer from this injustice. Its capriciousness afflicts me. I want to afflict the mighty.’

‘If I wanted to be fair, like Savelli for instance,’ answered R., ‘I should tell you that your place is with the saints of the Catholic Church and not with the anonymous heroes of the Party. I’ve discussed you with T. We are both of the opinion that, in the strict sense of the word, you are unreliable. If you are personally disillusioned, you want to hang the ministers. You belong to the eternal European intellectuals. Just now you are in sympathy with the proletariat, with whom you associate. But wait a bit, one day you’ll see the open hatred of the human scum shining in the sad eyes of the young men whom you now lecture. Has that ever occurred to you? Whenever a working-man shakes my hand, it occurs to me that one day his hand might strike me as mercilessly as the hand of a policeman. Your outlook is false, it’s the same as my own, that is why I can tell you this and that is why you can believe me. We might more usefully recognize that the poor are no better than the rich, the weak no nobler than the strong, and that, on the contrary, there must be power before there can be goodness.’