Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

The rebels met at Chaikin’s. In compliance with theory, he called the few municipal watchmen ‘capitalist lackeys’, a merchant who did not pay his apprentices ‘an exploiter and entrepreneur’, the town councillors ‘beneficiaries of society’, the apprentices ‘beasts of burden’, and 120 brush-makers the ‘proletarian masses’. He organized discussions. He expounded the small and the major programmes. He arranged demonstrations on various occasions. Nothing would have made him happier than to be arrested. But no one regarded him as dangerous.

Friedrich attended Chaikin’s meetings regularly. He went out of curiosity. He stayed out of ambition. In the discussion he learned how to make his point at any price. He developed his marked talent for false formulations. He enjoyed the hush which settled when he rose to speak, in which he imagined he could hear his voice even before it rang out. For days on end he prepared himself to counter every possible objection. He learned to feign a quickwittedness that he did not really possess. He reproduced strange sentences from pamphlets as if they were his own. He enjoyed triumphs. And yet he sincerely loved the poor folk who listened to him, and the red world conflagration he intended to kindle.

The World! What a word! He heard it with youthful ears. It radiated a great beauty and concealed great injustice. Twice a week he deemed it necessary to destroy it and on the other days he readied himself to conquer it.

To this end he studied so zealously that one day his student friend was able to say:

‘I think you could sit the examination in two months’ time. See if you can make it this autumn.’

Friedrich counted the money he had saved. It was enough for six months. He consulted Kapturak about documents. There was some satisfaction to be obtained in appearing before the authorities of the capitalist world with false papers. He had no father and no country. His birth had not been registered anywhere. He took this as a sign and went to Kapturak.

‘In what names?’

‘Friedrich Zimmer.’

‘Why Zimmer?’

‘That was my father’s name.’

‘Russian or Austrian?’

‘Austrian.’

‘Quite right,’ said Kapturak. ‘A young man should not stay in our town. Go out into the world and study law. That’s useful. You may yet be a district commissioner.’

It was on a July day that Freidrich took his departure. The sun beat down on the low roofs of the cottages between which the path led to the station and drove the smoke from the chimneys in front of the low doors. In the middle of the street, which was bordered on both sides by wooden sidewalks, there was a bustle of women and children, peaceful poultry and aggressive dogs. All was pervaded by a fragrant summery influence, and over the smoke from the chimneys prevailed a distant smell of hay and of the trunks of the spruce forest behind the station.

Friedrich was determined to resist any kind of traditional emotion. The fear of melancholy conferred on him the false steadfastness of which young men are unnecessarily proud, and which they take for manliness. He exaggerated the significance of this moment. He had read too much. All of a sudden he re-experienced a hundred scenes of parting. But as the train began to move he forgot the town he was leaving and thought only of that world into which he was travelling.

At noon on a fine day in August, a certificate in his pocket, he emerged from the great brown doorway of a Viennese high school. He made his way homeward through the still heat. The streets were empty. They contained only shadows, sun and stones.

He encountered a carriage. The noiseless rubber tyres glided over the paving as if over a polished table. Only a cheerful feudal clatter of horses’ hooves could be heard. In the carriage, under a light sunshade currently the fashion, sat a young woman. As she passed by she had time enough to study Friedrich with the protracted and insulting indifference with which one contemplates a tree, a horse or a lamp-post. He passed before her eyes as before a mirror.

‘She has no idea,’ he thought, ‘who I am. My suit is wretched and no wonder; the youngest Parthagener sold it to me cheap. It has a shabby false brightness. The pockets are too deep, the trousers too wide. It’s like deceptive sunshine in February. I’m wearing a hat of coarse straw, it presses like heavy wire netting and is spuriously summery. Beautiful women look past me in-differently.’

She was a beautiful woman. A narrow nose with delicate nostrils, brown cheeks, a narrow rather over-straight mouth. Her neck, slender and probably brown, disappeared in the collar of her high-necked dress. A foot in a dove-grey shoe sat like a bird on the facing seat cushioned in red velvet. The sunlight flowed over her body, over the cream-coloured dress and filtered through the parasol which stretched like a tiny sky over its own small world. The coachman in his ash-grey livery held the reins tightly. His forearms hung parallel over his knees. The almost golden glint of the black horses had a festive jollity. Their docked tails betrayed a flirtatious strength. They rose and fell governed by the secret rules of a rhythm not to be fathomed by pedestrians.

This encounter with a beautiful woman was like the first encounter with an enemy. Friedrich assessed his position. He weighed up his forces. He summed them up and pondered whether he dared to go into battle. He had just taken a barricade. He had, through a laughable examination, become fit for society. He could become anything: a defender of mankind, but also its oppressor; a general and a minister; a cardinal, a politician, a people’s tribune. Nothing — apart from his clothes — hindered him from advancing far beyond the position the young woman might occupy; from becoming idolized by her and her kind; and from rejecting her. Naturally, rejecting her.

What a long way for one who was poor and alone! For one without even a name or papers! Everyone else was rooted in a home. Everyone else was fixed as fast as bricks in a wall. They had the precious certainty that their own downfall would also mean the end of the others. The streets were quiet and filled with peaceful sunshine. Closed windows. Lowered blinds. Happiness and love dwelled unalloyed behind the green and yellow curtains. Sons honoured their fathers, mothers understood their children, women embraced their husbands, brothers hugged each other.

He could not divorce himself from this quiet, prosperous, fortunate district in which he happened to be. He made detours as if, by some miracle, he might suddenly find himself in front of his house without having to traverse the noisy dirty streets which led to his lodging. The chimney-stacks of the factories emerged straight behind the roofs. The people had slept in tenements, could not keep their balance and seemed as if drunk. The haste of poverty is frightened and soundless and yet begets an indistinct uproar.

He lodged with a tailor, in a gloomy little room. The window had tarnished panes and opened on the hall. It prevented light from entering and the neighbours from looking in. Sewing machines clattered in the landlord’s bedroom. The ironing-board lay across the bed, the dress-maker’s dummy was propped against the door, customers were measured in the kitchen and the wife, stuck by the stove with flushed face, scolded the four children at their play.

‘If I go to the restaurant first,’ reflected Friedrich, ‘the family will have eaten by the time I get back. There’ll be only the washing-up left to do.’

He entered a small restaurant. A man sat down at his table. His ears were strikingly large and withered as if made of yellow paper, his head batlike.

‘I think you must be my neighbour,’ said the man. ‘Don’t you live across the road at Number 36?’