Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

These were no longer momentous times. The post functioned normally. The letter reached Hilde after an interval of three days. Then, one evening, when Friedrich returned to his hotel, someone was waiting for him.

He sat for a long time in his overcoat, damp and steaming from the rain, hat in hand and silent. She told him about her husband and children, of her bitter years, of her old father. She had, incidentally, brought him with her. He intended to visit a spa. He was there to reassure her jealous husband. They were now doing well. Her husband had made good use of his mediocrity. The others, the speculators with the inborn instinct for business, had been overwhelmed by the storms they had conjured up, like warriors fallen in adventures they had themselves provoked. Herr von Derschatta, however, was one of those mediocre bureaucrats of the business world who gain much though they risk nothing. She spoke in the jargon which is the mother tongue of Director Generals, of the ‘position’ that permitted certain things but not yet, or no longer, permitted others. A few strangers entered the room where they were sitting. She ceased her account. But the silence that ensued was capable of expressing all the admissions and completing all the half-admissions that she had minimized and half suppressed earlier. This silence disconcerted her the more in the presence of the other people. As if they were both as young as they had once been in the café, the fortuitousness of the external situation left them at a loss. Outside it was raining. Here strangers were sitting. ‘If she comes to my room now,’ he thought, ‘it is decided. She is expecting it.’ He said nothing.

‘Perhaps we should go up to your room?’ After the long silence it seemed as if she had prepared herself for this question.

They walked up the stairs; the presence of a stranger in the lift, a witness of their confusion, would have embarrassed them. They walked in silence, separated by a great distance, as if they were going upstairs to settle an old score. She sat down without removing her coat. Her small hat-brim shaded her eyes. Her coat was fastened up to her chin and her gaze held something valiant, ready for battle. She still felt the resolve with which she had got into the train. Friedrich walked over to the window, a movement made by every other man embarrassed by the presence of a woman in his room. ‘Why are you silent?’ she said suddenly. Anxiety trembled in her question. He heard the fear and, at the same time, the first Du that had passed between them. It was like the first lightning in spring. He turned round, thought, ‘Now she is going to cry’, and saw two moist eyes that gazed straight at him, fearless because armed with tears.

He wanted to say: ‘Why did you come here? He corrected himself. He considered which would be less hurtful, ‘why’ or ‘what for’, and finally settled for a harmless ‘how’ in conjunction with a Du . So he said: ‘How did you get here?’

With the rapid presence of mind that women achieve when they embark on a rash adventure, she had brought her father to assuage the vigilance of the Director General. This novelettish inventiveness alarmed him. So as not to be silent any longer, he said: ‘Then you’re here with your father?’

‘Say what you’re thinking,’ she began. ‘Say that you never expected me, that it was only a mood, that letter. You had probably been drinking when you wrote it.’

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘it was a sort of deep serious mood. I did not expect you. What I say now is in sorrow, not reproach: you should have come ten years ago. Too much has happened in between.’ ‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘It’s not possible straight off. I would not know where to begin. Neither would I know what was important. It occurs to me that the facts are less important than the things one can’t recount. For instance, what is more serious than any battle I have taken part in is the despair I go around in, or a word someone lets fall here and there that sometimes reveals human beings to me and sometimes humanity as a whole. But it will probably suffice to tell you the name under which I have lived for the past ten years.’ And he told her his pseudonym, of which he had been so proud.

As if this name, which she had heard and read without realizing whom it concealed, were conclusive evidence of her blindness and guilt, she began to cry. ‘Now I ought to go and kiss her,’ thought Friedrich. He noticed how, in the midst of her despair, she took off her hat and smoothed her hair, which she now wore cut short like everyone else, and he approached, glad that he had something to do, and took the hat from her hand.

She shook her head, rose, asked with her eyes for the hat, and said quietly: ‘I must go.’

‘I shall let her go,’ he thought.

But now, when she lifted both arms to put on her hat, she seemed to him in despair, and therefore doubly beautiful, as he had never seen her before. She was young, she had let the years pass by like zephyrs, she had borne children and was young. He saw her again in the softly rolling carriage and in the shop, trying on gloves, and in the café, beside him in the corner, and in the street in the rain. In this one movement, when she raised her arms, lay all her beauty. Her movement simultaneously evoked every aspect of beauty, supplication, disrobing, denial and submission. She lowered her arms. The right hand began to stretch a glove over the left with scrupulous care.

‘Stay!’ he said suddenly. And he added to this: ‘Don’t go!’, more gently, tenderly, and a little sharply, as he noticed in self-reproach a moment later.

‘All it needs is for me to turn the key, and it’s settled.’ He saw how Hilde glanced at the door and slowly and scrupulously stripped off her glove again. Now it was an unclothed hand, not just a naked one. It seemed as if he were seeing her for the first time. He took a single rapid step to the door and locked it.

Old Herr von Maerker was due to travel on for his cure the next day. Friedrich saw him that evening. The festive glow of the many lamps in the restaurants made his white-haired old age more venerable, his daughter’s beauty more radiant. Herr von Maerker looked older than he was, and more important. He resembled old portraits, faces that time has moulded more than nature or art, endowed with the lustre of a melancholy solemnity by the irrevocability of the vanished epochs which they mirror. Herr von Maerker had never been astute. Now, as occasionally happens, his age deputized for wisdom. And, because he was one of those men who have outlived their epoch, he evoked in Friedrich the courteous respect one owes to an old forgotten monument. He did not seem to suspect that Hilde’s encounter with Friedrich was other than pure coincidence. But even had he suspected, his respect for his daughter’s life and privacy was too great for him to seek to discern relationships that were not voluntarily disclosed to him. Like the men of his generation, he still took it for granted that wives and daughters had a natural instinct for the decorous and the unseemly, for honour and appearance, for reputation and worth. Herr von Maerker still belonged to the last generation of well-mannered Middle Europeans who cannot remain seated when a woman is standing in front of them, who, without venturing a reproof, are continually amazed by the manners of the young, who still speak gracefully while they are eating, and who can still say something sensible without being intelligent themselves, who are chivalrous and harmless and distribute compliments like little declarations of love committing them to nothing. He was aware of his daughter’s unhappy marriage, but it did not occur to him to reproach himself for having compelled the Director General to marry Hilde. He had not known his daughter for many a year. Now age made him clearsighted. But he kept silent, not only because he would have been embarrassed to ask, but because he would have been even more embarrassed to let it be noticed that he possessed the capacity to guess.