Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

‘You’ll have to go yourself,’ interrupted Savelli.

‘Make your will!’ cried R.

‘Comrade R. is nervous as usual,’ said Savelli very softly.

‘I don’t deny it,’ retorted R. smilingly, thereby displaying two rows of strikingly white and even teeth which no one would have suspected behind his narrow lips. The teeth emitted a fearsome gleam so that the sensitive peaceable nature of his face vanished and even his eyes became malicious.

‘I’ve never claimed to be a hero and don’t intend to risk my life. In any case, Savelli gives me no opportunity.’

They all laughed, except for the one with the dark hair. He shook his head, his pince-nez quivered and, as he gave the dangling lamp which now obstructed his view a shove so that it began to swing even more wildly, looking like a large irritated moth, he banged his other hand on the table and said resentfully: ‘Don’t be funny.’

When they broke up they shook Friedrich’s hand, as if he were an old acquaintance.

‘I saw you once on the Ring,’ Savelli said to him. ‘What are you doing now? Are you working? I don’t mean studying.’ He meant whether Friedrich was working for the Cause. Friedrich confessed that he was doing nothing. Savelli spoke of the war. It might break out within a week. The Russian General Staff was at work in Serbia. Russian agents trailed the émigrés in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Suspicious customers had appeared several weeks ago in a café they frequented in the 9th precinct. Would Friedrich put in an appearance?

‘I’ll meet you again, here or at the café,’ said Friedrich.

‘Good-day!’ said Savelli, as if he were taking leave of a man who had given him a light.

R. was without doubt the most interesting man besides P., Dr T., and Savelli. A number of younger men gathered round him and formed his ‘group’. They walked through the late still nights. R. addressed them, they hung on his words.

‘Tell me,’ he began, ‘whether this world isn’t as quiet as a cemetery. People sleep in their beds like graves, they read a leading article, dunk a crisp croissant in their coffee, the whipped cream spills over the edge of the cup. Then they tap their egg carefully with the knife, out of respect for their own breakfast. The children saunter off to school with satchels and dangling blackboard sponges to learn about emperors and wars. The workers have already been at work in the factories for a long time, young girls glueing cartridges, big men cutting steel. For some hours, soldiers have been at exercise in the fields. Trumpets blare. Meanwhile it’s ten o’clock, councillors and ministers drive up to their offices, sign, sign, telegraph, dictate, telephone; typists sit in editorial offices and take dictation, pass it to editors who conceal and disclose, disguise and reveal. And as if nothing eventful had happened during the day, bells shrill to signal in the evening and the theatres fill with women, flowers and perfume. And then the world falls asleep again. But we are awake. We hear the ministers come and go, the kings and emperors groaning in their sleep, we hear how the steel is sharpened in the factories, we hear the birth of the big guns and the soft rustle of papers on the desks of diplomats. Already we see the great conflagration, from which men can no longer salvage their small sorrows and their small joys. …’

Friedrich now worked — as he and his friends tended to say — ‘for the Cause’. He got himself into the habit of obtaining the enthusiasm, without which he could not live, from renunciation and anonymity. He even charmed a stimulus from the inexorability he had so feared, comfort from despair. He was young. And he believed not only in the efficacy of sacrifice, but also in the reward which engarlands sacrifice like flowers a grave. And yet there were hours, his ‘weak’ ones as he called them, in which he indulged a private hope that the Idea might triumph, and that he might live to experience it. But he owned to this only when he met R.

‘Don’t worry about that!’ said R. ‘I believe only in the altruism of the dead. We would all like to experience the right moment and a sweet revenge.’

‘Except Savelli!’ said Friedrich.

‘You deceive yourself,’ replied R., not without malevolence, or so it seemed to me at the time. ‘You don’t know Savelli. People will only understand him when it’s too late. He acts the part of a man who no longer owns his heart because he has presented it to mankind. But don’t be taken in, he has none. I prefer an egoist. Egoism is a sign of humanity. But our friend is not human. He has the temperament of a crocodile in the drought, the imagination of a groom, the idealism of an Izvoschik.’

‘But what about all he’s done so far?’

‘A stupid error, to judge men by their deeds. Forget the bourgeois historians! Men get involved with affairs as innocently as they do with dreams. Our friend could just as well have organized pogroms as robbed banks!’

‘Then why does he stay in our camp?’

‘Because he’s not talented enough, in our view, not versatile enough to free himself from the weight of his past. Men of his kind keep to their chosen path. He’s no traitor. But he is our enemy. He hates us, as Russian peasants hate city intellectuals. He hates me in particular.’

‘Why you in particular?’

‘Because he has good cause to. Look at it properly. I’m no Russian. I’m a European. I know that I am separated from our comrades much more than most of us intellectuals are from the proletarians. I’m unlucky. I have a western education. Although I’m a radical, I like the centre. Although I prepare for the great uprising, I like moderation. I can’t help myself.’

R. abandoned himself to the gusto of his formulation. And Friedrich copied him. Both began to outdo each other in contradictions. From both at that time one could hear a statement which was startling then and today sounds almost obvious: ‘The Tsar is no gentleman, he’s a bourgeois. He marks the beginning of the democratic era in Russia, the era of a democracy of small peasants — and you’ll see, Savelli’s friends will push on with the work. If the Tsar doesn’t hang us, they will.’

It was as if R. had set out systematically to destroy Friedrich’s fervour, his romantic enthusiasm for all the trappings of secret conspiracy. In R.’s company, even danger gained a ridiculous aspect. ‘It’s no lie,’ he would say in the halls which stank of beer, pipe tobacco and sweat, ‘that it’s easier to die for the masses than to live with them.’ Then he would step onto the platform, demand stronger support for the Party, threaten the ruling class, shout for blood, and cry: ‘Long live the World Revolution!’

The police inspector would blow his whistle, the officers stormed into the hall, the meeting broke up. R. disappeared in a flash. He did not expose himself to the fists of the police.

It may well be that Friedrich would have taken another path if he had not become R.’s friend. For ultimately it was R. who instigated Friedrich to go to Russia, who aroused the younger man’s ambition, the naïve ambition to demonstrate that one was not a ‘fainthearted intellectual’. But there was also another factor.

I have the suspicion that Friedrich’s voluntary journey to Russia, which ended ultimately in a compulsory spell in Siberia, was the foolish outcome of a foolish infatuation which he took for hopeless at the time and whose importance he plainly exaggerated. But we have no right to enquire into the personal motives for an action that Friedrich wanted to carry out in the service of his Idea. We must content ourselves with a description of certain events.