Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

There was nothing left for him to do but to climb the poorly-lit stairs to Grünhut, for he could not remain alone. He smelled the stink of the cats which rushed helter-skelter away from him in inexplicable panic, heard the voices from behind the doors ranked closely in the corridors, numbered as in hotels. The midwife’s door bore the notice: ‘Knock loudly, bell out of order.’ He heard Grünhut’s light step.

‘Long time no see,’ said Grünhut. And immediately after: ‘Psst, there’s clients inside.’

He was writing his addresses. He could now easily manage up to 400 a day. Was Friedrich writing still? No, he was working now, still had enough money for two months, and intended to find something else soon.

Grünhut now resumed his old complaints against the world. As always he returned in the end to the question: ‘What do you think of an anonymous letter to the man I told you about?’

He didn’t want Friedrich’s advice, he was thinking of writing an unusual sort of letter, by two hands, each word written alternately. He already knew the attested experts. In any complicated case they were at a loss. A second person must be involved, and not just on account of the handwriting. It might be necessary to arrange a rendezvous. Still, in Grünhut’s opinion two would so confuse anonymity that no one would know what was going on.

Friedrich’s opposition pained him. His unshakable belief in the young man’s criminal nature was transformed into an injured respect for the youth who, in Grünhut’s opinion, was probably planning far more important and profitable crimes.

Various noises emerged from the midwife’s room. Water, words murmured in a woman’s deep voice, a chair pushed back, a metal object in contact with glass and wood.

‘Do you hear that?’ said the little man. ‘On a spring evening, in a private room in a hotel, you hear very different things. Nightingales sing, a gipsy plays the violin, champagne corks pop. Where are they now, the nightingales? Frau Tarka hinted to me who it is in there. The wife of a professor, because of an affair with a sculptor. What’s more, a good friend of mine. Put some business my way. An extremely productive man, thinks himself as irresistible as any blackguard. Frau Tarka has to thank sculptors and painters for most of her little jobs.

‘People have their portraits painted so much nowadays. They live it up in the studios. Do you think a woman can resist a studio? Such lovely disorder under the blue sky, high up on the top floor where only God peers in through the glass roof. You lie there and look up. You see the white clouds passing, interspersed by flocks of birds, and you yearn and yearn again. A canvas in the corner, a witness that another woman was once naked here. And the painter goes on talking. Everything he knows he has acquired from pornographic works and erotic books. His eye lusts after contour and sticks to the surface. “What a line, dear lady,” he says, “connects your neck with the swell of your breast!” Believe me, if a lieutenant said that it would be an insult and the husband would shoot it out with him in the woods at dawn. When a painter says it, it’s an artistic judgment. These so-called connoisseurs aren’t paying compliments, they’re merely making technical appraisals. They apply these to the entire body. “What a provocative thigh!” they say, palette in hand. Some talk about the Renaissance. The sculptor B., for instance, who comes to visit Madame here from time to time, I often have a little chat with him. That is, he does the chatting. Nothing but false rubbish from the erotic books. Gives me an order once. Pornographic engravings; because I happen to know a bookseller, I have to go and make the purchase. He still owes me my commission and the bookseller his money. The bookseller goes along, makes a fuss. “Come tomorrow,” says the Master. Next day, he smilingly gives him the book back. Then he tells me, a few weeks later, he only wanted the pictures for just that one afternoon, for a girl from a good family. And all I did was to undo a blouse. Because I’m no artist. Plain as a pikestaff, the way things have changed. We’ve already had the question of art. The emancipation of women, too. Notice how the two connect? So-called family ties are loosening. The daughters of the privy councillors have their portraits painted and study German philology. And, as for what I did — of course it was many years ago — nowadays you get respect for that kind of thing. My public prosecutor is still alive. He’ll never see another such indictment. My defence counsel even in those days supported the theory of demonic possession. He talked nonsense about irresistible urges, heredity and so on. Fair is fair. My father was an inoffensive man, he ran an exchange-office, had serious worries and not the slightest interest in morality.’

It grew quiet in the next room, a door opened, a key rattled. Grünhut detained Friedrich a few minutes longer.

‘Until they’ve gone downstairs,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any indiscretions.’

As, in accordance with the promise he had given his dying wife, he could not marry again, but could not live without a woman and did not want his child to become acquainted with the habits of a lusty widower, Herr Ludwig von Maerker, then still departmental head in a ministry, decided to send his daughter to a children’s home and later to a girls’ boarding school where she would be brought up together with orphans of the same social standing. Therefore, after he had disposed of Hilde, he engaged a housekeeper but took her only to the circus and music-halls. The theatres remained closed to her. She called this an injustice and so granted herself the right to embitter Herr von Maerker’s life and make increasing demands in the house. She controlled his every step and every outlay. And whenever he complained about the restriction of his liberty, she replied with that bitter sarcasm which can herald a fainting-fit as well as an apoplexy: ‘So I can’t have this little entitlement? I, a woman whom you don’t even take to the theatre?’ Once a year Herr von Maerker escaped from the housekeeper. He travelled to Switzerland to visit his daughter. She grew too tall for him, was soon a teenager. He found her beautiful and regretted, in his most private moments, that he was her father and not her seducer. But she had been seduced long before by her own fantasies. Although Herr von Maerker had read a number of French novels about nunneries and girls’ boarding schools, he believed — like most men — in the depravity of all women except his nearest and dearest. Lack of principle begins only with cousins. A good deal was said about the prospect of having Hilde back at home again soon. And, before he was aware of it, Herr von Maerker was going grey at the temples, his housekeeper grew old and wrinkled, her hopes of marriage to her friend and the prospect of a joint box at the theatre vanished, Hilde blossomed — as they say — into a young woman, returned to her father’s house and began to lead her own life.

The times were strongly in favour of freedom for the female sex; not so Herr von Maerker, who had meanwhile become permanent head of a ministerial department and was therefore well aware of the lack of masculine freedom. His daughter’s opinions made him feel half embittered and half ashamed at belonging to the previous generation, for men feel shame at becoming old as if it were a secret vice. He retreated silently before his daughter’s vigorous offensive. He suffered and even gradually became wise. He belonged to that breed of average men who acquire understanding only in later years because they have had to keep silent for so long, and for whom nothing remains but to become meditative. When Hilde, on behalf of all the daughters of the world, exclaimed: ‘Our mothers were exploited and betrayed!’ Herr von Maerker felt it as a calumny on his dead wife and an insult by his daughter. He wondered where Hilde had acquired so much robust callousness and shocking rhetoric. He still knew nothing about his daughter.