Joseph Roth: The Silent Prophet

‘Since the day before yesterday,’ replied Scheller, beaming. ‘I accosted her in the park.’

‘And engaged already?’

‘There’s nothing else for it — either, or.’

‘And your Club?’

‘I’m resigning. Because she doesn’t care for it. I wrote today to ask her father for her hand. He is a bank-clerk in Milan. My fiancée is with relatives here. We are getting married in two months’ time. How do you like her?’

‘Enormously!’

‘Don’t you agree? She is beautiful? She is unique?’ And he laid a small piece of tissue-paper over the photograph and tucked it away again in his pistol pocket.

Although Friedrich did not consider Scheller’s happiness lasting and feared disillusion for his friend, he nevertheless experienced in the proximity of this infatuation the warming reflection of a bliss not previously encountered, and he sunned himself in the other’s love as if he lay in a strange meadow. Scheller was an entirely happy man. From lack of understanding he was incapable of a moment’s doubt — a condition that normally accompanies love as shadow accompanies light. As the bliss he received was boundless, he radiated it again outwards. It was a bliss mightier than Scheller himself. Friedrich envied him and simultaneously relished the misery of his own solitude. He now imagined that his entire life would acquire meaning and expression when he met the woman he sought. Although he considered Scheller’s method of picking up a girl in the park foolish, he did betake himself to the green spaces, which is not the colour of hope but of yearning. Moreover, everything was already autumnal and yellow. And the impatience of his searching heart waxed as the world approached winter.

He began to study with redoubled zeal. But as soon as he put down a book, it seemed to him as foolish as Scheller himself. Scholarship concealed what was really important as the rock strata concealed the earth’s centre — secret, ever burning, ever invisible, not to be revealed before the end of the world. One learned about amputating legs, Gothic grammar, canon law. One could just as easily have learnt how to store furniture, manufacture wooden legs or pull teeth. And even philosophy made up its own answers and interpreted the sense of the question in relation to the answer that suited it. It was like a schoolboy who alters the problem set him to fit the false result of his mathematical labours.

Before long Friedrich began to become a less frequent attender in the lecture theatres. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’d rather pass the time with Grünhut. I have seen through them all. This intellectual flirtation of the elegant professors who lecture to the daughters of high society in the evenings from six to eight. A light-hearted excursion into philosophy, Renaissance art history, with lantern-slides in a darkened hall, national economy with sarcastic remarks about Marxism — no, that’s not for me. And then, the so-called strict professors, who give lectures at a quarter past eight in the mornings, just after sunrise, so as to be free for the rest of the day — for their own work. The bearded senior lecturers who are on the look-out for a good marriage so that, through some connection with the Minister of Education, they may at last become established professors with salaries. And the malicious smiles of spiteful examiners, who carry off glorious victories over failed candidates. The University is an institution for the children of good middle-class homes with well-organized primary teaching, eight years of middle school, private coaching by tutors, the prospect of a judgeship, of a prosperous legal practice or a government office through marrying a second cousin — not a first cousin, because of consanguinity. And finally for the blockheads of the uniformed students’ societies who fight each other, for pure Aryans, pure Zionists, pure Czechs, pure Serbs. Not for me! I’d rather write addresses with Grünhut.’

Once he discovered Savelli’s name in one of the library catalogues. The book was entitled International Capital and the Petroleum Industry . He looked for the book and did not find it. It was out on loan. And as if this incident had been a sign from above he immediately betook himself from the library to Savelli.

In Savelli’s room, on the fifth floor of a grey tenement in a proletarian district, there were three men. They had removed their jackets and hung them over the chairs they were sitting on. An electric bulb on a long flex hung from the ceiling and swung low over the rectangular table, constantly moved by the breath of the men talking but also by their repeated attempts to shift the lamp out of their field of vision whenever it hid one or the other. Sometimes, irritated by the annoying bulb but without recognizing it as the cause of his impatience, one of the three would get up, walk twice round the table, cast a searching glance at the sofa by the wall, and resume his original place. It was impossible just to sit down on the sofa. Heavy books and light newspapers, coloured pamphlets, prospectuses, dark-green library volumes, manuscripts and unused octavo sheets yellowing at the edges lay there higgledy-piggledy, and all subject to unknown laws which prevented the heavy volumes of an encyclopaedia from sliding off a thin stack of green pamphlets Savelli had relinquished the chairs to his guests and sat on a pile of eight thick books, but still so low that his chin just projected above the table-top.

One of those present was powerful and broad-shouldered. He kept his large hairy fists on the table. His skull was round and bald, his eyebrows so thin and sparse as to be barely visible, his eyes small and bright, his mouth red and fleshy, his chin like a block of marble. He wore a red Russian blouse of some shiny material with a strong reflection, and no one could see him without at once thinking of an executioner. He was Comrade P., a Ukrainian, placid, even-tempered and trustworthy, and with a remarkable cunning which was hidden under his bulk like silver under the earth. Next to him sat Comrade T., a yellow-brown face with a black moustache and a wide black imperial, eyeglasses on his prominent nose, and dark eyes which seemed to betray a kind of restless hunger. Opposite him stood the momentarily empty chair of the third comrade. He was the most restless of them all and the frailty of his limbs, the pallor of his skin, justified his unease.

He had just been speaking when Friedrich entered and was now drumming with lean fingers on the dark window-pane as if telegraphing morse signals into the night. His face bore a modest thin nautical beard like a faded frame round a portrait. His eyes were hard and bright when he removed his spectacles. Behind them they looked thoughtful and wise. This was R., with whom Friedrich struck up a rapid friendship at the time, and whose enemy he was later to become.

The sentence which still rang in Friedrich’s ears immediately revealed the speaker to him. ‘I’ll be hanged,’ he had said, before at once correcting himself, ‘that is, they can hang me if we have a war within five years.’

Then there was silence for a time. Savelli got up, recognized Friedrich at once, and signed to him to sit where he liked. Friedrich looked round in vain and sat down cautiously on a pile of books on the sofa.

No one paid him any attention. P. stood up. His great bulk immediately darkened the room. He took up a stance behind the back of his chair and said: ‘There’s no other possibility. One of us has to go. The situation is so critical that we may all be for it overnight. Then the connection will be broken and the money lost over there for good. Berzejev is an officer, he has to look after his own interests. Desertion will be difficult for him. I have a direct report. He writes that he was jittery right through the manoeuvres. When he got back, Levicki was in Kiev, Gelber in Odessa. No one in Kharkov.’