Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

‘I remember you very well,’ he said to Friedrich. ‘You visited us once.’ Friedrich thought of the candid journalist who had so obstinately assured him that he did not recognize him. ‘Much has happened since then. And yet it seems to me that we knew it all beforehand. Year by year I was able to see with my own eyes how the country was disintegrating, how people were becoming indifferent. But malicious too, yes, malicious,’ he added. He said this with the hindsight of one beyond the tomb.

‘We made jokes, we all laughed at them,’ he continued. ‘I have to reproach myself for a few. Believe me, jokes alone are enough to destroy an ancient country. All races have mocked. And yet in my time, when the man was more important than his nationality, the possibility existed of making a homeland for all out of the old monarchy. It could have been the prototype in miniature of a great future world, and at the same time the last reminder of a great European era in which North and South had been united. It is all over,’ concluded Herr von Maerker, with a slight movement of the hand with which he seemed to disperse the last remnants of his recollections.

Even his sadness was accompanied by serenity. His sombre obituary on his fatherland did not prevent him from enjoying to the full, and with a mild deliberation, his black coffee and thin cigarette and it seemed as if he enjoyed life the more because it still continued beyond his own time, and as if he enjoyed each day, each evening, each meal that heaven granted him with the pleasure one derives from unexpected and unearned holidays. The destruction of the monarchy had put an end only to the active period of his life, he had only ceased to exist as a contemporary, but he continued to live on as the passive observer of a new era which, though it did not please him at all, did not bother him in the slightest because it did not in any way concern him.

He took leave of Friedrich, Hilde accompanied him. They decided to meet again in an hour.

During this hour Friedrich walked up and down in front of the hotel, just as he would have done ten years before. ‘Everything’s alive again!’ he thought. ‘Nothing has happened between the day I first saw her in the carriage and today. I am young and happy. Shall I yet believe in the miracle of love? It is obviously a miracle when what has happened is obliterated.’

And then he said to Hilde: ‘Once, during my escape from Siberia, I thought of taking you with me to a remote and peaceful country. There are still peaceful foreign countries. Let us be on our way.’

‘We do not need them in order to be happy.’

They walked through broad unlighted streets, across animated squares, avoided dangers unthinkingly, only by means of the waxing instinct to remain alive and to live. They would have succeeded in saving themselves from a catastrophe, among a thousand who perished they would have been the only survivors.

He was spared none of the follies with which masculine infatuation is so well endowed. Jealousy possessed him, not so much against particular men but a jealousy for the whole of the long period that Hilde had passed without him. And he even finally asked that most stupid and masculine of all the questions contained in the lexicon of love: ‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’ And he received the inevitable reply, which any other woman would have given, and which is far from a logical answer but rather a continuation of this question: ‘I have never loved anyone but you!’

And so love began to lead him from an abnormal to a normal existence, and he got to know its mortal and yet eternal delights and, for the first time in his life, the happiness that consists in giving up great goals in favour of small ones and of overestimating the attainable so extravagantly that there is nothing more to seek. They travelled through white cities, stood in great harbours, saw ships sail for foreign shores, met trains that sped into the unknown, and could never catch sight of a ship or a train without envisaging themselves travelling off into the distance, the future, the void. They anxiously counted the days they could still remain together, and the fewer they became the richer and more full of improbable happenings the remainder seemed to be. If the first week had been an indivisible unit of time, the second already split into days, the third into hours, and in the fourth, in which they began to savour every moment as an entire rich day, they regretted having allowed the first to pass so prodigally.

‘I shall follow you everywhere,’ said Hilde, ‘even to Siberia!’

‘Why should I go there? I no longer intend to place myself in dangerous situations.’

‘What else do you want to do then?’

‘Nothing at all.’

Hilde fell into a deep and disappointed silence. It was the first time that they had suddenly arrived at a point where they ceased to understand each other. These moments recurred more and more often, only they forgot them over again. Both delayed explanations for more favourable opportunities. But such opportunities generally failed to arrive and the silent hours became increasingly common. There were tendernesses that Friedrich did not reciprocate. Words fell from the lips of each without an echo, like stones into a bottomless abyss.

Once she said, perhaps to propitiate him: ‘I admire you, for all that.’ And he could not restrain himself from replying: ‘Whom haven’t you admired before now? A painter, a gifted author, the war, the wounded. Now you’re admiring a revolutionary.’

‘One gets more clever,’ she replied.

‘One gets more stupid,’ he said.

And there began a rapid to-and-fro of empty meaningless words, a battle with empty nutshells.

‘She has to have someone to admire,’ thought Friedrich. ‘At the moment, I am her hero. Too late, too late. She turns to me at a moment when I am beginning to disown myself. I am no longer my old self, I merely continue to play the part — out of chivalry.’

However, it was settled between them that Hilde would leave her husband and children.

‘Don’t forget,’ she said as she got on the train, ‘that I shall follow you everywhere. …’ ‘Even to Siberia,’ she added as the train began to gather speed.

He could no longer answer.

She was due to join him a week later.

Actually, the story of our contemporary, Friedrich Kargan, might have come to a satisfactory ending here, if by that one understands the final homecoming to a loved woman and the prospect of a kind of domestic happiness that offers itself in the last pages of a book. But Friedrich’s peculiar destiny, or the inconstancy of his nature with which we have become acquainted in the present account, resisted so gentle an exit from a stormy existence. Some weeks ago we were startled by the news that he and some members of the so-called ‘opposition’ who, as is generally known, had declared an open resistance to the ruling régime in Russia, had gone to Siberia for a long spell. What occasioned him to suffer once again for a cause of which he was clearly no longer convinced? On the basis of what little we can deduce from the most recent events in his life, we can only surmise and conjecture as follows.

After he had left Hilde, he found a communication from his friend Berzejev. ‘I am not sorry,’ wrote the latter, ‘that I did not follow you abroad, but I regret that I shall presumably never see you again. Call it the sentimentality of a clearly anarchistically disposed man, which no longer embarrasses me now that I have been publicly stripped of the rank of a revolutionary. To console you, let me say that I go into exile compulsorily and yet willingly. If Savelli only suspected how he is actually satisfying my secret yearning, he would probably assign me to a perpetual couriership between Moscow and Berlin as a punishment; I mean to the post of an upholder of culture, a herald of the electrification of the proletariat, its transformation into an efficient middle class. For men like us, Siberia is the only possible abode.’