Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

His fever waned. He got up. Because he had known no childhood and no mother, and because he had grown up without hearing the names of diseases and discussions as to their causes, he was not even curious to know what had been wrong with him. But he had to specify a disease to obtain his leave. He allowed himself to be told what people called the condition he had suffered from. He took six months’ leave. ‘I am now committing what is known as a shabby trick,’ he told himself. ‘According to the moral attitudes of this stupid world, it is bad enough to work for a cause of which one is not as convinced as the majority of stewards of that cause. But it’s even worse to break off from this sort of work and take money for it. Both bourgeois society and its revolutionary opponents have the same appropriate term for a character such as myself. They call such behaviour cynical. Cynicism is never permitted to the individual. Only countries, parties and guardians of the future may make use of it. For the individual there is nothing left but to show his true colours. I am a cynic.’

He therefore supplied himself with money and — as so many times in his life — with a passport in a false name. The Revolution had become legitimized by diplomatic subterfuge. A false passport no longer gave Friedrich any pleasure. Even a reactionary police force acknowledged the pseudonym of a revolutionary like the incognito of a Balkan prince. Only the newspapers, which were paid by fearful industrialists, sometimes thought they were giving the government of their country a piece of information when they reported that this or that dangerous emissary of the revolution had arrived under a false name. In reality, it was the government who strove to conceal the dangerous man from the newspapers. The times were past when Friedrich had conceived himself as waging a personal battle against the world order and its defenders by means of hazardous stratagems and superfluous dissembling. Now he possessed an unwritten but internationally recognized right to illegality.

And he travelled through the great cities of the civilized world. He saw the museums, in which the treasures of the past were hoarded in depositories like furniture for which one cannot find a use. He saw the theatres, on whose stages a slice of life was picked out, divided into acts, and portrayed by persons in pink make-up for an entrance fee. He read the newspapers in which reports were spread over current events like seductive veils over uninteresting objects. He sat in the cafés and the restaurants, in which people were collected like goods in a shop-window. He frequented the poor taverns where that part of society termed the ‘people’ diverted itself and enjoyed the vigorous robust glitter which is associated with the pleasures of poverty. As if he had never belonged to them, he visited like a stranger the halls in which they had gathered to hear about politics and to feel that they were part of the world’s bustle. And, as if he himself had never addressed them, he marvelled at their naïve enthusiasm, which greeted the hollow sound of a phrase as the devotion of the pious greeted the dull clang of a cheap bell. As if there had been no Revolution and no war! Nothing! Obliterated! Young men with wide floating trousers, with padded shoulders and flirtatious soft hips, a whole generation of sexless aviators permeated every layer of society. Football strengthened the muscles of the young workers in the same measure as those of the young bankers’ sons and gave the faces of both the same traits of presence of mind and absence of thought. The proletarians trained for revolution, the bourgeois for enjoyment. Flags waved, men marched, and just as particular vaudeville acts were repeated in every large town, so in every large town an Unknown Soldier lay buried. Even in the smaller places Friedrich encountered monuments to the fallen, as he did tap-dancing Negroes.

Now his eyes saw that ‘life’ whose distant, mysterious and wonder-revealing reflection had been shed over the wishes of his early years. It was exactly as if he had taken the play of the dark-red light, cast by an advertising sign on the window-panes opposite, for the reflection of a great and sinister conflagration. Now he saw the sources of his fine illusions. And he derided himself with the satisfaction a clever man experiences when he uncovers errors. He went around and uncovered one source after another, and he was triumphant because he won the day against himself.

In time all the sources were exposed, quicker than he had expected. Thus he learned to know forlornness in strange cities, the aimless wandering through the early twilight of evenings, when the silvery lanterns light up and afflict the body of the abandoned with the pain of a thousand sudden needle pricks. He walked through rain-soaked streets, over the gleaming asphalt of wide squares like stony lakes, coat-collar turned up, fastened from outside, and before him only his gaze to steer him through a foreign land. He rose early, walked in the bright morning full of hurrying people. Women he did not look at illuminated him with their beauty, children laughed from gardens, a forgiving clemency emanated from slow old men who seemed doubly venerable and doubly slow among the hurrying throng. Finally, there were days that revealed all the simple and indestructible beauty, days on which his wish to be able to begin life anew was almost exceeded by the solace that he could begin again without effort.

When the spring came, he found himself in Paris. Every night he walked through smooth and silent streets, encountered the fully-laden waggons on their way to the market halls, the even trot of the heavy shaggy horses, the pious rural tinkling of their bells, the shiny green of the neatly stacked bundles of cauliflowers and the smooth whiteness of their faces among the broad drooping leaves, the artificial pale red of the thin-tailed carrots, the bloody, moist and heavy glisten of the massive butchered cattle. Every night he visited a cellar where people danced, sailors, street-girls, whites and coloured men from the colonies. The accordion poured gay march tunes into the bright room, it was the instrument of exuberant melancholy. He liked it because it reminded him of his revolutionary comrades, because it was the music of abandonment and carefreeness, because it called to mind both peaceful evenings in eastern villages and the brooding heat of African deserts, because it contained both the song of the frost and the eternal stillness of summer. From every wall wide mirrors reflected the lavish rows of lamps on to the ceiling, made twenty rooms out of one, multiplied the dancing-girls a hundredfold. He no longer noticed the stairs and the door that led outside to the nocturnal streets. The mirrored walls sealed off the room more finally than stone and marble and transformed the cellar into a single endless subterranean paradise. He sat at a table and drank Schnapps. Once, in a moment when it seemed to him that he need have no fear of revealing himself because it was the last night of the world and there would be no morrow, he asked for a piece of paper and wrote, without any form of address:

‘I have not thought of you for many years. For several days I have been unable to get you out of my mind. I know that you no longer think of me. You lead a life which, today as always, is as remote from mine as one planet from another. However, this gives you my address. To be candid, I must confess that it is in no way an irresistible compulsion that induces me to write to you. Perhaps it is only an irresistible hope. …’

He went into the street. Dawn began to break, today as ever; the world had not perished. A blue light lay over the houses, someone opened a window. A car engine growled obstinately and rebelliously. In the light of the waking day Friedrich put the letter into the post-box.