Joseph Roth - Three Novellas

“So, I see you’re a rich man,” said Caroline when they were outside. “I suppose you’ve got that little Thérèse working for you?”

Again, he made no reply, and so she was convinced that her suspicion was well-founded. She demanded to be taken to the cinema. He took her to the cinema. It was the first film he’d seen in ages. In fact it was so long since he’d seen one that he could barely follow it, and he fell asleep on Caroline’s shoulder. Then they went on to a dance-hall where there was an accordionist, and it was so long since he’d last danced that he didn’t know how to dance properly any more when he took to the floor with Caroline. Other dancers kept cutting in and taking her away from him, for she was still young and desirable. He sat by himself at a table and drank Pernod, and it felt just like old times, when Caroline would go off dancing with other men, and he would sit and drink by himself. Finally he had enough, and he got up, pulled her violently away from her partner, and said: “We’re going home now!” He gripped her neck, refused to let go, and paid and went home with her. She lived nearby.

It was all just like old times again, just like the old times before he’d gone to prison.

5

He woke up very early in the morning. Caroline was still asleep. A solitary bird twittered outside the open window. He lay there for a while with open eyes, no more than a couple of minutes. During those minutes he was thinking. It seemed to him that not for a long time had so many remarkable things happened to him as now, in the space of this single week. He turned his head abruptly and saw Caroline lying beside him. He saw what he had failed to notice yesterday, at their meeting: that she had aged; pale and puffy and breathing heavily, she slept on into the morning like a woman past her best. He recognized the changes wrought by the years, which seemed to have passed him by. But he also felt the changes in his heart, and he decided to get up immediately, without waking Caroline, and to leave just as fortuitously, or rather just as fatefully, as the two of them had run into one another yesterday. He quietly dressed and went off, into another day, another of his familiar days.

Or rather, into an unfamiliar sort of day. Because when he felt in his left inside jacket pocket, where he used to keep whatever money he had managed to find or to earn, he noticed that all he had left was a fifty-franc note and some loose change. And at that, he, who for many years had not known the meaning of money, and had not been remotely interested in what it might mean — at that, he was taken aback, in the way that a man would be taken aback who expected to have money in his pocket at all times, and who suddenly found himself in the unwonted position of having very little. Suddenly, on the gray, empty pavement of early morning, he, who had had no money whatsoever for months, he seemed to himself to have become poor because he didn’t have quite as many notes in his pocket as he had had in the last couple of days. It seemed to him that the time of his impecuniousness was terribly remote, and that what he had done was to take the sum which should have been there to guarantee an appropriate standard of living for himself, and spend it recklessly and rather frivolously on Caroline.

It made him angry with Caroline. And all at once he, to whom the possession of money had never meant a thing, began to have a sense of what money was worth. All at once, he felt that the possession of a single fifty-franc note was demeaning to a man such as himself, and that, to appreciate his true worth again, he urgently needed to be able to reflect on the subject at leisure, and over a glass of Pernod.

He identified the most welcoming of the circumjacent hostelries, sat down and ordered a Pernod. Over his drink, he recalled that he was actually living in Paris without a residence permit, and he checked through his papers. And there he found that he had in fact been expelled from the country, because he had come to France as a coalminer, from Olschowice in Polish Silesia.

6

Then, laying his tattered papers out on the table in front of him, he remembered that he had come here one day, many years ago, because he had read an announcement in the newspaper saying that they were looking for coalminers in France. All his life he had longed to go to far-off places. And so he had gone to work in the mines at Quebecque, and he had sub-let a room from some compatriots of his, a married couple by the name of Shebiec. And he had fallen in love with the wife, and one day the husband had tried to kill her, and so he, Andreas, had killed the husband. Thereupon he had gone to prison for two years. The wife was Caroline.

All this was going through Andreas’s head as he looked at his now invalid documents. And then he felt such unhappiness that he ordered another Pernod.

When he finally got up, he felt hungry, but it was hunger of a particular sort that only affects drunkards. It is a rather specialized type of craving (not for food at all) that only lasts for a few moments, and that can be immediately stilled if the person who suffers it imagines to himself the exact drink he feels like at that exact moment.

Andreas had long since forgotten his surname. But now, after he had been looking at his invalid papers, he remembered it. It was Kartak. His full name was Andreas Kartak. And he felt as though he had rediscovered himself after many years.

But he still felt a little angry with fate for making it impossible for him to earn any more money, by refusing to direct the fat, baby-faced man with the moustache to this cafe, when it had sent him to that other one. There is really nothing that people get used to so readily as miracles, once they have experienced them two or three times. Yes! In fact, such is human nature that people begin to feel betrayed when they don’t keep getting all those things that a chance and fleeting circumstance once bestowed on them. People are like that — so why should Andreas be any different? He spent the rest of the day in various other establishments, and was soon quite reconciled to the fact that the age of miracles he had lately experienced was now, finally, at an end, and that the preceding age had resumed. And so, with his heart set on that slow decline for which a drunkard is always available — and which no sober person can possibly understand! — Andreas took himself back to the banks and bridges of the Seine.

There he slept, half in the daytime, half at night, as he had been used to doing for over a year, every so often managing to borrow a bottle of brandy from one or other of his confrères —until the Thursday night.

During the night he dreamed that St Thérèse came to him as a little girl with fair curls, and said to him: “Why didn’t you come and see me on Sunday?” And the little saint looked just the way he had imagined his own daughter would look, many years ago. And he had no daughter! And in his dream, he said to little Thérèse: “That’s no way to talk to me! Have you forgotten that I’m your father?” The girl answered: “Sorry, father, but will you please, please come and see me on Sunday, the day after tomorrow, at Sainte Marie des Batignolles.”

On the morning after his dream, he rose refreshed, as he had done a week earlier, when the miracles were still happening to him, as though this dream was itself a miracle. He felt once more like going to the river and washing himself. But before taking off his jacket to that end, he looked in the left inside pocket, in the vague hope that there might still be some money there that he had perhaps overlooked. He reached into his jacket pocket, and while he didn’t find any banknotes, there was still the leather wallet that he had bought some days earlier. He took it out. It really was extremely cheap and tatty — but what else could be expected from a second-hand one? Split leather. Cow’s leather. He looked at it, because he could no longer remember having bought it, or when or where. How did I come by that? he asked himself. Finally he opened it, and saw that it had two compartments. Curious, he peered into both of them, and saw that one contained a banknote. He took it out. It was one thousand francs.