Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

Here we break off the quotations from Friedrich’s diary. In any case, from now on his entries become increasingly rare. The diary now contains only news of a general nature which may in the meantime have acquired an historical value but does not interest us in this context. We know that his fear, expressed above, that the war would not come to an end proved false. It remains to report, however, that on a day of that memorable early spring of the year 1917, when the world began once again to alter its aspect, he left Switzerland. This was the period in which the rebellious Duma, in two short days, decided on the arrest of the Tsar. The intellectual revolutionaries and the workers demonstrated on the Nevski Prospekt. The first eighty-three dead of the Russian Revolution lay on the damp stones, and spilled into the melting heaps of snow, the Tsar took his last farewell of his weeping officers. Rodzianko, Goutshkov, Kerenski and Shipov took over power, Skoropadski placed himself at the disposal of the German Kaiser. The Russian general Lukomski dictated the deed of abdication at GHQ, General Alekrejev informed the entire Russian front that Russia had ceased to be a Tsardom and the historic railway train carried the leader of the definitive Russian Revolution through Germany to Petrograd. The Tsar was in Pskov. He received all the telegrams in which his army leaders declared their agreement with his abdication. And while Russia began to transform itself into a democratic republic, the man who was preparing the Soviet Republic was already living in the Tschesinka Hotel in Petrograd. The spring was changeable as ever, the snow melted, ran and froze again. Friedrich and Berzejev were working in Moscow. They had access to a weapons arsenal and every night, witnessed only by the bribed sentries, they conveyed to the factories a quantity of rifles and munitions covered with straw in small brisk carts.

For the second time — and just as when he used to traverse the border forest with Kapturak and the deserters — he imagined he could hear the cry of an entire people. He recalled the five deserters. They had stood still suddenly, like a commando, at the first light of day to take leave of their homeland. Where were they now? Cripples on the hard asphalt of American cities, murdered in the prisons of the world, withered to shadows by pestilence in concentration camps, persecuted by the police, or long rotted in graves. He recalled grey police quarters, narrow-browed clerks, the hard stony fists of sergeant-majors and the soft slimy hands of spies, four-edged bayonets, the pyramid of the bourgeois world, and public prosecutors under pictures of the Kaiser, the Magi of the ruling class. He heard the rattling sound of chains and the blaring brass of regimental bands. He saw the officers who passed through the zones of communication laced like the demimondaines of the war, and the painters in fantastic uniforms who painted heroic pictures of military commanders, the journalists, those soothsayers of the modern bourgeoisie, and the majors with their Jewish jokes, the midwives and the patriotically transformed Grünhuts, the beggars’ canteen and Hilde’s literary circle.

‘We shall destroy this world!’ he said to Berzejev. They rolled through the dark suburban streets, dressed as peasants coming from their villages to sell vegetables in the morning markets. The neatly packed rifles lay quietly in the straw. The two men saw the stars glittering cold and remote as ever, and felt the spring advancing as ever, and the wind that wafts it from the south-west like every other year. The horses’ hooves struck an incessant display of sparks on the uneven cobblestones, kindled from the night and in the night expiring.

The train took over eighteen hours to cover the short stretch between Kursk and Voronezh. It was a cold and clear winter’s day. For a few niggardly hours the sun shone so strongly from a dark-blue, almost southern, sky that the men jumped out of the cold dark carriages at each of the frequent stopping-places, doffed their coats as if for some heavy work in the heat of summer, washed themselves with crunchy snow and dried off in the air and sun. In the course of this short day they had all acquired brown faces like folk in winter on the sportive heights of Switzerland. But twilight came suddenly and a sharp crystalline monotonous singing wind sharpened the dark cold of the long night and seemed incessantly to polish the frost, so that it became even more cutting and piercing. The windows of the coaches lacked panes. They had been replaced by boards, newspapers and rags. Here and there flickered a forlorn candle-stump, stuck on some chance metal projection on a wall or door, the purpose of which no one could any longer explain and which, paltry as it appeared, thanks to its very purposelessness recalled the long-lost luxury of trains and travel. There were first and third class coaches as it happened, coupled together, but all the passengers froze. Now and again someone stood up, took off his boots, blew inside them, rubbed his feet with his hands, and drew his boots on again carefully as if he wanted not to have to take them off again in the course of that night. Others considered it better to stand on tiptoe every few minutes and to make hopping movements. Each envied the other. Each thought his neighbour was better off, and the only remarks to be heard in the entire train were to do with the presumed goodness and warmth of this overcoat or that fur cap. Under the sleeves of a soldier a comrade had discerned grey and red striped mittens, whose origin even the owner himself could not account for. He swore that they were absolutely useless. One man, in his forties, with a wildly-grown red beard, reminiscent of a hangman, a satyr and a blacksmith all in one, but who two years before had run a peaceful grocery business, insisted on seeing the mittens. Since the Revolution, in which he had lost everything, he had wandered from one army to another until finally remaining with the Reds. He played the part of a much experienced man, a prophet who could foresee everything. He divined many things. With all his goodness of heart, he could live scarcely an hour without starting a quarrel. It seemed as if he found his own changeable existence tedious. The owner of the mittens was a shy peasant lad from the Tambov district, who would not hand them over out of embarrassment. Finally he had to submit to their removal by a neighbour who was a sailor, a jack-of-all-trades, a conjurer, a cook and a tailor, with the face of a provincial actor. The sailor knew about that kind of thing and declared that the English had invented mittens and human life resided entirely in the pulses. Consequently, as long as one protected them, one had no need to wear a fur. One after the other, they pulled on the scraps of wool and asserted that they really warmed like an oven. The sailor claimed to know that the girl who had presented these mittens to the lad from the Tambov district was an even better warming agent, and everyone asked if it were true.

The men who were just now discussing warmth came from the Siberian front, where they had beaten back the Czech legionaries, and where they had hoped to stay longer and relax for a few weeks after a victory which was a decisive one in their eyes but which, in reality, signified only a provisional success. Instead of this, they had to go to the Ukraine, where the cold seemed crueller to them than in Siberia, even though their commandant, Comrade B., showed them with a thermometer in his hand that it did not reach more than 25 degrees below zero. The red-bearded one said there was nothing so unreliable as mercury. He himself had once had a fever and had a thermometer stuck in his mouth by a doctor. When he took it out it showed no more than 36 degrees, about as much as, say, a fish. However, the doctor had said that his pulse was too rapid for such a low temperature, and that might prove to be the case with the frost. Why did one have two or even three kinds of degrees of heat and cold? Because even the men of science were not at one over Celsius or Réaumur.