Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

He collected them together and became serious again. ‘Distractions are necessary,’ he said. ‘I work ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day.’ And he raised his arm high and made a few gymnastic movements reminiscent of those music-hall acrobats who give their muscles a work-out before their act, as an indication that the weights they are about to lift are really heavy.

‘The executive Herr von Derschatta,’ Friedrich wrote subsequently in his report, ‘is a good-natured man. His income is large, his family life peaceful, his industry boundless. He is incorruptible. He loves his country, for it is a branch of his firm. The conditions I set out below do not seem to me to be the last word. It would be easier to deal with him if one intimidated him. He is servile by preference.’

Friedrich wrote such reports with great care, although he knew that they had a long and devious route ahead of them and that they availed little. Even as he folded them up and put them in an envelope, he saw the many stages of the journey they had to make and the faces of the men who would be dealing with them. He knew personally some of the members of the new bureaucracy which had spread over the entire country like flocks of crows, left behind by war and revolution. He recalled their subordinate faces, on which the inflexibility of a rigid outlook conferred the traits of a cruel piety. A small envy determined their brave words and their hesitant deeds, a minute and narrow envy, the brother of an early disillusioned ambition. Friedrich recalled how all of them — photographers and minor authors, shady lawyers and small accountants, book-keepers and nervous tradesmen — had dashed for the empty office-stools about which the soldiers of the Revolution did not concern themselves. The soldiers returned to their fields, which could not yet be tilled, to the machines which were still at a halt. The others, who had written and copied manifestoes, ordinances, plans, textbooks and pamphlets during the civil war, kept the pens in their hands, the pens, the thin steel instruments, the strongest tools of power. But it so happened that the men who were at liberty to demonstrate their talents and strength possessed no talents, and only sufficient strength to shove their opposite number away from the desk with their elbows and to reappear at the desk if the other had succeeded in dislodging them. He recalled the triumph afforded him during the war by the awareness of not being a cipher like the others, and not having to disobey sealed orders that were issued somewhere behind thick oppressive walls by anonymous tools of an unknown authority. He had succeeded in cheating the register that had waited, blank and white, for his names and dates, in evading the pointed pens coloured with poisonous green ink which a hundred thousand clerks had aimed at him like lances. He could still see an official at the police station, a mixture of bull and farmhand, to whom he had handed the false registration form with a childish rage. ‘Was it really necessary?’ Parthagener had asked.

Now Friedrich himself wrote reports for registers. And all the acrobatics with which he had assumed and discarded names, disguised and simulated existences, had only led him to become himself a tool, an object of the offices and bureaux. Would the paperwork never cease? What kind of decree was it that conferred on the most fragile and delicate of materials — paper, pencil and pen — power over blood and iron, brains and brawn, fire and water, hunger and epidemic? Only a moment ago the thousand chancelleries had been burnt down. He himself had set fire to them. He himself had seen their crumbling ashes. And already they were writing again in a hundred thousand chancelleries, and already there were new small books with green and red lines, and already every man had a code-number in an office as small children have a guardian angel in heaven. ‘I will not!’ cried Friedrich. ‘I will not!’ he thought, while he himself sat in an office and dictated to a girl in a blue sailor’s costume. How nimbly the pen ran with her hand! It was a Koh-i-noor, shiny yellow with a long black tip. Then the girl went into the big general office and the machine began to clatter. And the report found itself in the courier’s briefcase. He entered a secretariat. There sat Dr M., a small plump man with a face which seemed to consist of nothing but protuberances, and tiny malevolent eyes under a brow full of meaningless furrows, the consequences of a mood of the skin and not of careful thought. He hated Friedrich. He wanted to be abroad writing reports himself. Just as the front-rank party chiefs did not desire to go abroad, but endeavoured to remain in Moscow at any price, so the mediocre subordinates desired nothing more ardently than a sojourn in a bourgeois foreign country where they could live out their bourgeois tendencies. They wanted to drink good beer, to sit at a well-laid table. Was that not what one meant by the cause of the proletariat?

But what was the cause of the proletariat? These deputies, who let themselves be imprisoned and were set free again, these anonymous proletarians who were forgotten in the penitentiaries, the shot and the hanged, what use were they? How did it come about that the very ones who were attempting to construct a new world behaved according to the oldest superstition, the oldest, most absurd superstition of the profit and sanctity of sacrifice? Was it not the Fatherland that demanded sacrifice? Was it not religion that demanded sacrifice? Alas, the Revolution too demanded it! And it drove men to the altars, and everyone who submitted himself to sacrifice died in the conviction that he died for something great. And meanwhile it was the living who came off best! The world had grown old, blood was a familiar sight, death a trivial matter. All died to no purpose and were forgotten a year later. Only romanticism, like paper, was immortal.

‘I serve without belief,’ Friedrich told himself. ‘Twenty years ago it would have been called villainy. I draw my salary without convictions. I despise the men with whom I associate, I do not believe in the success of this Revolution. Between the lines of the brazen materialistic statutes that govern at least the civilized part of the world, on the other hand, there are still unknown, unreadable secrets.’

He stood there like a captain whose ship has sunk and who, contrary to duty and against his will, remains alive thanks to a malicious fate: preserved for life on earth, on an alien planet.

Friedrich fell ill.

He lay alone in his room, in fever’s soft delirium, and cosseted by solitude for the first time. Till now he had known only its cruel constancy and its obstinate muteness. Now he recognized its gentle friendship and caught the quiet melody of its voice. No friend, no loved one and no comrade. Only thoughts came, like children, simultaneously begotten, born and grown. For the first time in his life he learned to know illness, the beneficent pressure of soft hands, the wonderful deceptive feeling of being able to get up but unwilling to rise, the capacity to lie and float suspended at the same time, the strength that comes from loneliness like grace from misfortune, and the mute colloquy with the wide grey sky that filled the window of his high-up room, the only guest from the outside world. ‘When others are ill,’ he thought, ‘a friend comes, asks if he may smoke a cigarette, gives the patient his hand, which it then occurs to him to wash — on hygienic grounds. The sweetheart deploys her maternal instinct, proves to herself that she can love, makes a small flirtatious sacrifice, overcomes her reluctance to take hold of ugly objects with a delicate hand. The comrades come with optimistic bustle, bringing the tenor of events to the bedside in forced witty disguise, laugh too loudly and smile indulgently and obtain an assurance of their own health, just as the charitable involuntarily feel in their own pockets to check their spare change at the sight of a beggar. Only I am alone. Berzejev has stayed in Russia. He has a fatherland. I have none. It is possible that in a hundred or two hundred years time no human being in the world will have a place they can call home or asylum. The earth will look the same everywhere, like a sea, and just as a sailor is at home wherever there is the sound of water, so everyone will be at home wherever grass grows, or rock or sand. I was born too late or too early. I am one of the experiments that Nature makes here and there before she decides to bring forth a new species. When my fever wanes I shall get up and go away. I shall literally fulfil my fate to be a stranger. I shall prolong the mild abandonment of the fever a little, and wandering will transform my solitude into good fortune, as the illness has almost done.’