Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

Most of the prisoners lay stretched out on the deck. A hundred and twenty of the two hundred between-deck passengers were in irons. They wore chains at their right wrist and right ankle. Those who were not fettered seemed almost like free men beside the chained men. Now and again there appeared a policeman, an inquisitive sailor. The prisoners took no notice either of their guards or their visitors. Although it was quite early in the evening and food was due to be handed out in half an hour, most slept, tired after the long march they had covered. The government was sending them on the slow cheap route by water, after having made them go a long distance on foot. The day after tomorrow they were to be freighted on the railroad. They were stocking up well on sleep.

Some of them already knew their way around. It was not the first time they had made this trip. These were experienced, settled down in a practical manner, and gave advice to the novices. They enjoyed a certain authority among their comrades. With the gendarmes they were linked by a kind of intimate hostility.

They were called to meals as if to an execution. They lined up behind one another, chains clanking between them. It seemed as if they were all strung on a single chain. A spoon landed with a regular splashing stroke in the cauldron, then there was the soft gurgle of a stream of soup flowing softly downwards, a damp mass fell on a hard metal plate. Heavy feet shuffled, a chain dragged clanking, and ever and again another detached himself from the line as if he had been unstrung. The lower space became filled with the vapour rising from two hundred metal plates and mouths. All ate. And, although they themselves conducted the spoon to their lips, it seemed as if they were being fed by alien arms which did not belong to their bodies. Their eyes, which were sated much sooner than their stomachs, already had the vacant look of repletion which characterizes the head of a family at table, the look that is already advancing into the domain of sleep.

‘When I look at these men as they feed,’ said Friedrich to Berzejev, a former lieutenant, ‘I am convinced that they need nothing more than a ball and chain on the leg, a spoon in the right hand, and a tin plate in the left. The heart is so near the bowels, tongue and teeth so closely adjacent to the brain, the hands that write down thoughts can so easily slaughter a lamb and turn a spit, that I find myself as much at a loss before human beings as before a legendary dragon.’

‘You talk like a poet,’ replied Berzejev, smiled, and showed in his black beard two rows of gleaming teeth which seemed to confirm Friedrich’s conjecture. ‘I cannot find such words. But I too have seen that man is a puzzle, and above all that it is not possible to help him.’

Both felt alarmed. Were they not here because they wanted to help him? They turned away from each other.

‘Good night,’ said Berzejev.

Outside the guard was relieved.

After four days they were disembarked, led into a large room and entrained. They were refreshed as they trod solid ground again, and their chains gave a livelier ring. Even beneath the turning wheels of the train they felt the earth. Through the barred windows they saw grass and fields, cows and herdsmen, birches and peasants, churches and blue smoke over chimneystacks, the entire world from which they were cut off. And yet, it was a consolation that it had not perished, that it had not even altered. As long as houses stood and cattle grazed, the world awaited the return of the prisoners. Freedom was not like a possession which each one of them had lost. It was an element like the air.

Rumours circulated through the waggons. In recollection of the tidings heard and exchanged in recent prisons, they were called ‘latrine reports’. Some said that the entire transport would go straight to Vierchoiansk, which was denounced by the knowledgeable as nonsense. Adrassionov, the NCO, had told one of the old hands whom he was now transporting for the second time, that they would be taken to Tiumen, to one of the biggest prisons, the Tiuremni Zamok, or central prison for exiles. The experienced, who had already been there, began to depict the horrors of this jail. At first they shuddered at their own words and made their listeners shudder. But gradually, during their narration, the thrill they derived from their narrative exceeded its content, and the curiosity of the listeners dominated their terror. They sat there like children listening to stories of glass palaces. Panfilov and Sjemienuta, two old white-bearded Ukrainians, even described the solitary cells with a kind of nostalgia; and, so forgetful is the human heart and because the journey still seemed unending and its destination still uncertain despite the affirmations of the old hands, all of them believed for a few short hours that it was not they themselves but quite other strangers who were travelling towards the miseries of the prisons.

Friedrich and Berzejev resolved to stay together as far as possible. Berzejev had money. He knew how to bribe, swap lists and names and — while the other ‘politicals’ discussed the peasants, anarchy, Bakunin, Marx and the Jews — calculated whom he should give a cigarette and whom a rouble.

Although they travelled slowly, waited for hours at goods stations, the railway journey nevertheless seemed shorter than they had expected. Once again the chains rattled, once again there was a roll-call. They stood at the last station and took their leave of the attractive appurtenances of the railway, of its technical playthings, its green signals and red flags, the shrill bells of glass and the hard bells of iron, the indefatigable ticking of the telegraph and the yearning swerving gleam of the rails, of the panting breath of the locomotive and the hoarse screech it sent up to the sky, the guard’s hail and the wave of the station officials, a wall and a garden fence, of the meagre refreshment room at this forlorn station and the girl who stood behind the bottles and tended a samovar. Especially this girl. Friedrich contemplated her as if she were the last European woman he would be allowed to look at and had to memorize carefully. He recalled Hilde as he might a girl he had talked to twenty years ago. At times he could no longer picture her face. It seemed to him that she had become old and grey in the interim, a grandmother.

They climbed into waggons, halted every twenty-five kilometres, changed horses. Only the driver remained the same throughout the journey. A large part of the convoy had remained behind and was indeed due to be delivered to one of the large collective prisons. Now they consisted only of a few groups. Friedrich and Berzejev, Freyburg and Lion sat in one waggon. Without everyone seeing, Friedrich pressed Berzejev’s hand. They sealed a silent compact.

When any of the prisoners removed his cap, one saw the left half of his skull shaved bare, and his face took on the foolish imprint of a lunatic. Each shrank from the other, but each hid his horror under a smile. Only Berzejev had succeeded in bribing the barber. He had his whole scalp shaved bare.

The prisoners sang one song after another. The soldiers and the driver joined in. At times one man would sing alone, and then it was as if he sang with the strength of all. His voice was drowned in the many-voiced refrain, which was like an echo from heaven to earth.

The best singer was Konov, a weaver from Moscow, at whose house a secret printing-press had been discovered. He was on his way to fifteen years’ imprisonment.

One morning they began their march. Across a desolate flat landscape deployed the trail of human beings with bundles, fetters, sticks in hands.

Of the fifty men thus making their way, in groups of eight, six and ten guarded by sharp bayonets on long rifles, only the oldest manifested fatigue. According to regulations, each was allowed to carry only fifteen poods of baggage. Some who had refused to cut down on their belongings at the last station now discarded useful with unnecessary objects. The soldiers collected all of these and left them behind in the jurts which they passed, and which they would revisit on the return journey. Only Berzejev threw nothing away. His bulky pack was carried by the soldiers. He would say a good word to them, stick a cigarette in their mouths, and click his tongue at them as if they were horses.