Joseph Roth: The Silent Prophet

It began to lighten in the east. As if by command they all suddenly stood still and turned back in the direction from which they had come, as if the night they were abandoning had become their homeland and the dawn only a frontier. They stood still and bade farewell to their homeland, to a farm, an animal, a mother, this one to a hundred acres and another to a single strip of ground, to the striking of a particular clock, the crow of a cock, the creaking of a familiar door. They stood there as if conducting some rite. Suddenly Savelli began to sing a soldier’s song in a strong clear voice. All joined in and sang with him. They still had a good hour to go to reach Parthagener’s inn.

‘That is probably his hymn of praise,’ said Kapturak rather loudly to Friedrich. Though everyone was singing Savelli heard the remark and retorted: ‘Of the two of us, Kapturak, you are the one who should be singing a hymn of praise! You can thank God that you didn’t hand me over. I would have killed you.’

‘I know,’ said Kapturak, ‘and I should not have been the first or the last. Is it true that you did away with Kalashvili?’

‘I was around,’ replied Savelli. It sounded mysterious. However, Savelli did not give the impression that he had anything to conceal in the affair.

‘I saw him die,’ he went on. ‘I never for a moment thought that he also had a private life, outside his police duties. Anyway, he could not have continued to live in peace. I don’t believe in the peace of a traitor.’

‘You must have hated him,’ Friedrich ventured to ask.

‘No!’ replied Savelli. ‘I did not feel hate. I believe one can only hate if one has suffered personally at the hands of another. But I’m not capable of that. I am a tool. People use my head, my hands, my constitution. My life is not my own. I no longer belong to myself. I would have to transgress the rights befitting a tool if I wanted to hate him. Or love him, even!’

‘But you do love?’

‘What?’

‘I mean,’ answered Friedrich slowly, for he was shy of using a large word, ‘the Idea, the Revolution.’

‘I have worked eight years for it,’ said Savelli quietly, ‘and cannot say sincerely whether I love it. Is it possible to love something that is so much bigger than I am? I don’t understand how believers can love God! I think of love as a force which can grasp and possess its object. No! I don’t believe that I love the Revolution — not in that sense.’

‘One can love God,’ uttered Kapturak decisively.

‘Maybe a believer sees him,’ opined Savelli. ‘Maybe I ought to see the Revolution. …’

‘If you run away,’ said Kapturak, ‘who will make the Revolution?’

‘Who needs make it?’ cried Savelli. ‘It’s coming. Your children will see it.’

‘God help my children!’ said Kapturak.

Friedrich knew who Savelli was. He figured under the name of Tomyshkin in the newspaper reports. He had carried out the notorious bank-raids and illegal movement of money in the Caucasus and in south-west Russia. The police had sought him for years in vain.

‘He could have stayed on longer,’ remarked Kapturak. ‘He wasn’t worried about the police. But they need him abroad.’

Savelli remained at the inn for a few days. ‘Are you related to the Parthageners?’ he once asked Friedrich. And when Friedrich denied this, ‘Then what are you doing in the company of these bandits?’

‘I must save money in order to learn,’ said Friedrich. ‘Soon I shall return to Vienna.’

‘Then come and see me sometime!’ said Savelli. And he gave him his addresses in Vienna, Zürich and London.

Friedrich felt the same kind of embarrassed gratitude for this notorious man that a patient feels for his doctor when he announces the protracted course of a disease with kindness and consideration. Savelli was strange, hard, sinister. Friedrich detested the sacrifice, the anonymity of the sacrifice, the voluntary association the Caucasian cultivated with death.

Life stretched before Friedrich’s youth, immense in its extent, incalculably rich in years and adventure. When he set the word ‘World’ before him, he saw pleasures, women, fame and riches.

He accompanied Savelli to the station. In a single short moment, when Savelli was already standing on the footboard, Friedrich had the feeling that the stranger had assumed control of his youth, his life, his future. He wanted to hand back the addresses and say: ‘I shall never look you up.’ But now Savelli was holding out his hand. He took it. Savelli smiled. He closed the carriage door. Friedrich watched for a while. Savelli did not return to the window.

Friedrich learned how to lie, to forge papers, to exploit the impotence, the stupidity, and even sometimes the brutality of the officials. Others of his age were still dreading a black mark or a bad reference at school. He was already aware that there were no incorruptible persons in the world, that everything could be accomplished with the aid of money and nearly everything with the aid of intelligence. He began to save. In his spare time he prepared for matriculation. To this end he had become acquainted with a law student who had had to leave the university for some undisclosed reason. This student was currently living there as clerk to a solicitor and announced his intention of awaiting a more favourable era. He called himself a ‘free revolutionary’ and still adhered to the ideals of the French Revolution. He sighed for the one that had failed in 1848. He spoke of the great days in Paris, of the guillotine, of Metternich, of the minister Latour as of recent and immediate matters. He wanted one day to become a politician, an Opposition deputy. And he already possessed the robust, unruffled, solid aggressiveness of a parliamentarian that might well discountenance a suave minister of the old régime. In the meantime he confined his political activities to participation in the meetings which were held twice a week at Chaikin’s, the cobbler’s.

Chaikin was one of those Russian émigrés whose poverty had prevented him from leaving this border town. Although he earned barely enough for a cup of tea, a piece of bread, a radish, he supported the revolutionaries who came over the border. Every month he expected the outbreak of the world revolution. He prided himself on performing important duties on its behalf and eventually became the head of an impotent conspiracy. Round him gathered the rebellious and dissatisfied. For even in this town, on the periphery of the capitalist world, in which the statute books had only a diminished and debased effect, the unwritten laws of the establishment and of bourgeois morality were nevertheless observed in their full validity. Amidst the striking and unEuropean local colour, in the bizarre tumult of adventurers, doubtful nationalities and the babel of tongues, the putrescent gleam of a patriarchal entrepreneurial benevolence still lingered, the wages of the small artisans and workmen were kept low, the poor were maintained in their submissiveness, which was exposed in the streets beside the infirmities of the beggars. Here, too, those who had settled showed their hatred towards the migrants; all the newly-arrived poor — and some arrived every week — were greeted with the same hostility that the others had themselves received. And even the beggars, who lived on charity, were as afraid of competitors as the shopkeepers. From the officers of the garrison there emanated a metallic glitter to which the daughters of the lower middle class succumbed. At election times soldiers and police moved into the town and spread fear, and the townsfolk were just as cowed as their brethren in the larger European cities.