Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

‘Favourable news from Russia. A strike in Moscow, twenty-six factories at a standstill in the Ukraine. From Comrade P. a report that he has made every preparation to break through the front, as he calls it, and get to Russia. He asks for equipment. Someone must go and take it to him. I would gladly go. No one has money for the journey. Nothing can be sent by post because of the censorship. Tomorrow I shall go again to L. to fetch the equipment.

‘I was with L. yesterday, for the third time now. Plainly, things are worse and worse for him. He is ill at the moment, wears a thick coloured shawl round his neck and refuses to go to bed although he has been two weeks in an unheated room. He lodges with a decent chap whose respectability does not restrain him from punctually collecting the rent. T. was at L.’s. They were discussing an article that G. had just submitted. “He can’t get away from metaphysics,” complained L. “Why is he always on about God!” This was with not the least pleasure in blasphemy, such as I have often noticed with convinced atheists. Chaikin, for example, lived on terms of permanent hostility with God, and assumed an expression of sneering anxiety when he said the words: heaven, priest, church, God. When Berzejev jeers he looks like a boy who has lied to the catechists. He assumes an artful expression and reminds me of a street urchin who has pressed the knob of an electric doorbell to make a fool of the porter. It is as if he supposes that, because the door stays shut, there is really no porter there. I have also heard T. talk about religion. He treats God as an entrepreneur and a being with a mundane interest in the preservation of the existing order. However, scorn, like infantile jeers and serious antagonism, still seem to me to be confirmation of the existence of God. But L. scours out heaven with one little word so that one can almost hear its great emptiness. It is as if he had removed the clapper from a bell so that it swings soundlessly and without echo, still metal and yet the shadow of a bell. L. has the gift of removing obstacles with one hand, of opening vistas. He does not readily admit the possibility of surprises. “We must reckon with obstacles,” he said, “but not with those that we cannot foresee. If we once allow ourselves to make allowances for incalculable contingencies, we shall lapse into the complacency that prevents us from wanting to see even those that are probable. We live on the earth. Our understanding is terrestrial. Supernatural forces do not intervene in earthly affairs. So why should we cudgel our brains over them! Only the possible exists on earth. And everything possible can be taken into account.”

‘L.’s secret lies in this deliberate limitation. I do not believe that he experiences emotion, hate, anger or love. He resembles a minor official. He has deliberately disciplined himself to inconspicuousness, and has probably used as much effort to this end as others do, for instance, to develop a significant profile. He lives in the cold. He suffers illness and want as an example to us. And the only affecting thing about him is his incognito. His beard is like an intentionally superfluous prolongation of his physiognomy. His skull is broad and white. His cheekbones are broad like his skull and his beard forms the black apex of a ghostly pale heart which has eyes and can see.

‘I was in Vienna for two days. I travelled with our material and with L.’s commissions to P., on the eve of his “breakthrough”. Otherwise I saw no one. I tried to speak to Grünhut. The Madame, as he always calls the midwife, told me with almost maternal pride that Grünhut really was rehabilitated. “Now he will at least have a beautiful death,” she said, the handkerchief that a woman of her sort always has at hand in the same mysterious way that a bourgeois woman always mislays hers, already covering her eyes and with a soft sob in her voice. “The good Doctor!” “Perhaps he may still come back,” I said in a slightly thoughtless attempt to comfort her. It became apparent that I had offered quite the wrong kind of comfort. “When anyone is as far away as he is,” said the midwife, “they never come back. Besides I’ve let the room. Polish Jews live there now. Refugees.” She uttered this word with a spiteful glassy brightness. “Dirty types, they don’t join up, the man is quite free and both sons are unarmed Home Guards. I shall have to go on raising their rent. Don’t you agree? Everything gets dearer and these people earn a lot of money!” In order not to have to listen to her further, I resorted to the death sentence she had passed on Grünhut. “You can safely keep the refugees,” I said. “Grünhut will certainly perish.” She produced the handkerchief once more. In wartime tears can also be an expression of hope.

‘I have not written to Hilde. I have thought of her continually and haven’t for a moment wanted to see her. If I had not undertaken to be sincere at all costs as soon as I sat down alone in front of this paper, shame would have prevented me from writing down that I have been to the photographer’s show-case where a large portrait of Hilde had been on display for some time. It is not there any more. A lieutenant, in colour, now hangs in the window.

‘Savelli now reveals an open hatred towards all of us. Only in L.’s room is he silent and discreet. L. curbs him by the very simple method of telling him the truth to his face, as if he were reading it to him out of a book. Even Savelli cannot accuse him of saying anything for private reasons. He has only convictions. “He is a phenomenal figure,” says R. “He is loved, although he barely understands how to accept love. He is feared, although he has no power to spread fear. With him nature appears to be attempting an entirely new type of saint. A saint without a halo, without clemency and without the reward of eternity. I find this sanctity rather chilling. Note how Savelli attempts to imitate L., and how he fails. He is simply a cold-blooded swine. He pretends to be someone who has killed personal interests. But he has them. Only his blood is so cold that his ambition appears like opinion and his hatred like good sense.” Thus R.

‘After being away from Zürich for two days, I no longer feel here the freedom of a neutral country. On the return journey I imagined the whole time that I should find everything changed, my friends and the crowded cafés and all the spies. I felt as if I were returning after ten years, although the days in Vienna had passed so quickly. The war has grown old, it becomes dull and sluggish and even resembles one of the many cripples it has produced. I no longer took any interest in my fellow-passengers because I believe I know exactly what they are thinking. If I were sitting in a compartment with Süsskind again today, I could prompt him in his opinions and play his role. Also those of the Prussian colonel and the Austrian major. I also know exactly what R. has to say, what Savelli and Berzejev assert. We live in this city like prisoners, not like escapees. This geographically limited neutrality seems like a prison now that the war has become geographically unlimited. It often occurs to me that we are afloat in a small boat, good and bad, decent people and scoundrels. And the journey has no end to it. Sometimes I wish that something terrible might happen, that Switzerland might declare war on someone and intern all of us or send us to the front. So much happens here and the air is filled with so-called items of news. But the events are always the same, and one victory is like another, one defeat like another, the enemy is like his enemy and the contestants are as little distinguishable as rifles. The events beat against our city, waves against a ship, always the same, always the same. And I write about them in the radical newspapers. When I read one of my sentences in print it sounds like the soft, peculiarly feeble echo of the idea I had intended to write down. When shall I ever be able to express it? I begin to doubt whether the war serves our ends, it simply cannot cease, it is too monstrous. It has outgrown earthly laws and speeds along like one of the heavenly bodies, obedient to the mysterious decree of an inertia that knows no end.’