Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

The same kind of yearning for the edge of the world could equally well have been expressed by Friedrich. Whether one changes the direction of one’s life or not does not seem to depend on a voluntary decision. The bliss of having once suffered for a great ideal and for humanity governs our decisions, even after doubt has long made us clearsighted, knowledgeable and without hope. One has gone through the fire and remains marked for the rest of one’s life. Perhaps, too, the woman entered Friedrich’s life too late. Perhaps his old friend meant more to him than she did.

The old friend — and the same bitterness which nurtured this friendship today, as formerly the same idealism had done. Did they not both walk about with the proud grief of silent prophets, did they not both record in their invisible writing the symptoms of an inhuman and technically accomplished future, whose emblems are the aeroplane and the football and not the hammer and sickle? ‘Compulsorily and yet willingly’ — as Berzejev wrote — others too made their way to Siberia.

That is possibly why Friedrich obeyed the order to come to Moscow. He stood in Savelli’s office. It was situated in the often described and, one may say, most feared building in Moscow. A light bare room. The customary portraits of Marx and Lenin were absent from the light-yellow walls. There were three wide comfortable leather chairs, two in front of the large desk and one behind it. Savelli occupied the latter, back to the window, face turned to the door. On the shining plate-glass over the desk there lay nothing but a single blank yellow octavo sheet. The glass reflected the dim sky admitted by the window. It was somewhat surprising, in this cold room which seemed still to be waiting for its furnishings, in which however Savelli had lived for over two years, to tread on a thick soft red carpet that was intended to absorb not only the sound of footsteps but all sound of any kind. Savelli still looked as he did on the morning when he had crossed the frontier. As R. had said of him, he had changed as little as a principle.

‘Sit down,’ said Savelli to Friedrich.

‘Will it take that long?’

‘I can’t very well sit while you stand.’

‘I don’t wish to make it comfortable for either of us.’ Savelli rose.

‘If you wish,’ began Savelli, ‘you can have company. R. is leaving tomorrow. He is going to Kemi, sixty-five kilometres from Solovetsk. These are, as you know, pleasant islands, 65 degrees north latitude, 36 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich. Their shores are rocky, with romantic ravines. There are eight thousand, five hundred romantics there already. And please, don’t despise the monastery, which dates from the fifteenth century. It even has gilded domes. We’ve only removed the crosses. That should make R. sad.’

‘R. is no friend of mine,’ replied Friedrich. ‘You’re mistaken, Savelli. At a very important period, R. was your friend and not mine. You know well enough that I want to be with Berzejev.’

‘I’m at a loss where friendships are concerned. R. had his duty to do, like you and me, no more. He does not choose to go on with it — any more than you.’

‘There are such things as rewards.’

‘Not in our cause. We are not our own historians. I have never received a reward. I am only a tool.’

‘You told me that once before.’

‘Yes, some twenty years ago. I have a good memory. There was a good friend of yours present then. Would you like to see him?’

Savelli went to the door and said something softly to the guard. The door stayed half-open. A few minutes later Kapturak appeared in its frame. As if he had come for just this purpose, he began:

‘Parthagener is dead at last. And I’m alive, as you can see.’

He began to move about the room, as if he had to prove it. Cap on his head, hands behind his back.

‘You see, it’s not true that Comrade Savelli is ungrateful. Do you remember? I could have got fifty thousand roubles for him once.’

‘And what do you earn here?’

‘All kind of experiences, experiences. The expenses on the train don’t bring in much. Sometimes I accompany people I know well in the sleeping-car. Do you remember how we used to foot it? I couldn’t do it any more nowadays. Look!’ Kapturak removed his cap and showed his thick snow-white hair, as white as Parthagener’s beard used to be.

He accompanied Friedrich to P. Friedrich no longer travelled between decks, nor in a barred railway carriage. Kapturak was sent with him, not out of mistrust but as a guide, and because Savelli possessed a certain relish for underlining the events that depended on his ukase.

While these lines are being written, Friedrich is living in P., together with Berzejev. Just as in Kolymsk.

Only P. is a larger town. It must comprise some five hundred inhabitants. And moreover, as a consolation, a man called Baranowicz lives there, a Pole, who has remained in Siberia since his youth of his own free will, without any curiosity about world events, which only reach the walls of his lonely house like a distant echo. He lives as a contented eccentric with his two large dogs, Jegor and Barin, and for several years has given shelter to the beautiful silent Alja, the wife of my friend Franz Tunda, who abandoned her when he left for the West. Foresters and bear-hunters drop in on Baranowicz. Once a year the Jew Gorin comes with new technical devices. On the basis of information received, Friedrich and Berzejev have made friends with Baranowicz. A man one can trust.

And so they lead the old new life as once before. The frost sings in the winter nights. Its melody may remind the prisoners of the secret humming voices of the telegraph wires, the technical harps of civilized countries. The twilights are long, slow and oppressive, and obscure as much as half of the stunted days. What might the friends find to talk about? They no longer have the consolation of being exiled for the cause of the people, to be sure. Let us hope then that they are contemplating escape.

For in our view it is the mark of a disappointed man to suppress his nostalgia for the old solitude and bravely to endure the present in the clamorous void. To determined onlookers like Friedrich, without any hope, the old solitude offers every pleasure: the putrescent smell of water and fish in the winding alleys of old harbour towns, the paradisiacal glitter of lights and mirrors in the cellars where made-up girls and blue sailors dance, the melancholy ecstasy of the accordion, the profane organ of popular desire, the fine and foolish bustle of the wide streets and squares, the rivers and lakes of asphalt, the illuminated green and red signals in the railway stations, those glassed-in halls of yearning. And finally the hard and proud melancholy of a solitary who wanders on the fringes of pleasures, follies and sorrows. …

The Silent Prophet , first published in Germany in 1966 as Der Stumme Prophet , is one of Joseph Roth’s most characteristic and revealing works. It is also something of a problem novel in that the manuscript was never revised or prepared for publication in the author’s lifetime and did not appear in its present form until twenty-seven years after his death.

Together with Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without End ), 1927, Zipper und sein Vater , 1928, and Rechts und Links , 1929, it belongs to a group of novels all sharing a theme that was central to the author’s own experience and view of life: that of the outsider unable to settle in western European society after the 1914–1918 war. Immediately after these biographical novels with their avowed objectivity and reporting of ‘observed fact’, and with heroes who all represent some aspect of Roth’s own personality (real or imagined), he turned to the freer inventions of works like Hiob (Job ), 1930, and Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March ), 5932, for which he is more widely known.