Joseph Roth - Three Novellas

So he reached the neighborhood of the church, and unfortunately he was once again late for the ten o’clock Mass, and once again people streamed past him out of the church, and when he once again turned aside to go to the bistro, he heard a shout behind him, and felt a rough hand descend on his shoulder. He turned round, and saw that it was a policeman’s.

At this our Andreas, who, as we know, had no valid papers, like many of his ilk, was frightened, and he reached into his pocket to give at least the illusion that he might have some valid papers there. But the policeman said: “I know what you’re looking for. But you won’t find it in your pocket! You’ve just dropped your wallet. Here it is, and,” he added good-naturedly, “remember that’s what comes of drinking so many aperitifs so early on a Sunday morning! …”

Andreas quickly took the wallet; he barely had the presence of mind to tip his hat to the policeman in gratitude, and swiftly dived into the bistro.

He found Wojtech already there, though it took him a while to recognize him, so that when he finally did so, he greeted him with relief and fervor. Then each man simply wouldn’t stop taking it in turn to buy the other a drink, and Wojtech, a polite fellow like the majority of mankind, got up from the bench, gave Andreas pride of place on it, and staggeringly circumnavigated the table and sat down on a chair opposite him, chatting away to him politely. They drank nothing but Pernod.

“Something peculiar happened to me again,” said Andreas. “As I’m on my way to our rendezvous, a policeman taps me on the shoulder and says: ‘You’ve lost your wallet.’ And he hands me one that doesn’t even belong to me, and I take it, and now I want to have a look and see what I’ve been given.”

And he takes out the wallet and looks at it, and there are various bits of paper in it that he doesn’t bother about, and he sees there’s some money in it too, and he counts the bills, and they come to exactly two hundred francs. And Andreas says: “You see! It’s a sign from the Almighty! Now I’m going to go over there and pay my debt at last!”

“That,” said Wojtech, “can wait till Mass is over. What do you need Mass for? You can’t pay the money back while Mass is going on. Go along to the vestry when it’s over, and until then we can sit here and drink!”

“All right,” replied Andreas, “whatever you say.”

Just at that moment the door opened, and Andreas felt a lightness in his head and a terrible pang in his heart when he saw a girl come in and sit down on the bench directly opposite him. She was very young, younger than any girl he’d ever seen, and she was dressed entirely in sky blue. She was as blue as only the sky can be, and then only on certain blessed days.

So he staggered across to her, bowed and said to the little girl: “What are you doing here?”

“I’m waiting for my parents to come out of Mass; they’re meeting me here. Every fourth Sunday,” she said, and was quite abashed by the older man who had suddenly come over and started speaking to her. She was a bit afraid of him.

Andreas asked: “What’s your name?”

“Thérèse,” she said.

“Ah!” cried Andreas, “that’s lovely! I never thought that such a great little saint, such a great little creditress would do me the honor of coming to me after I’ve failed to go to her for such a long time.”

“I don’t understand you,” said the little miss, who was rather bewildered by this.

“That’s just your civility,” Andreas replied. “That’s just your civility, but I recognize it for what it is. I’ve owed you two hundred francs for a long time, and I didn’t manage to get to you and pay them back, holy miss!”

“You don’t owe me any money, but I’ve got some in my purse — please take it and leave me alone. My parents are going to be here any minute.”

And she gave him a hundred-franc note from her purse.

Wojtech was watching all this in the mirror, and he got up out of his chair, ordered a couple of Pernods, and was on the point of dragging Andreas up to the bar to drink them with him. But just as Andreas gets up to go to the bar, he collapses on the floor like a sack, and everyone in the bistro is alarmed, including Wojtech, and the little girl most of all. And because there is no doctor close at hand, and no chemist’s shop, he is dragged across the square to the church, to the vestry in fact, because even the unbelieving waiters believe that priests know something about living and dying; and the girl called Thérèse, she too accompanies them.

So they bring our poor Andreas into the vestry, and unfortunately he’s no longer capable of speech, all he can do is to reach for the left inside pocket of his jacket where he has the money he owes his little creditress, and he says: “Miss Thérèse!”—and he sighs once, and he dies.

May God grant us all, all of us drinkers, such a good and easy death!

The Legend of the Holy Drinker is Joseph Roth’s last work of fiction, quite deliberately so. Like Andreas’s repayment of the two hundred francs, it was his last detail. Again like Andreas, he took his time over it, didn’t rush — as most of his books were rushed — but worked at it slowly, with pleasure and pride, for the first four months of 1939. At the end of the fifth, he died. He was not quite forty-five years old.

It is an invidious thing to knock away the props of a dead man, but it is clear that Roth for some time had been running out of reasons to remain alive. Being an exiled writer was attritional, and beyond that, it was perspectiveless. Politically, economically, emotionally and physically he was under threat. Alcoholism had destroyed his health; in 1938 he suffered a heart attack, and he could walk no more than a few steps. He advanced a sophisticated argument that while drink shortened his life in the medium term, in the short term it kept him alive — and he worked hard at testing its logic. After his beloved Hôtel Foyot was pulled down in 1937 (for twelve years it had been “home” to this inveterate and committed hotel-dweller), he moved to the Hôtel de la Poste, above the Café Tournon. His attic room was so tiny that he would fall out of bed straight into the corridor, and thence plunge downstairs into the bar. There he would spend the rest of the day and all night holding court, working, and, increasingly, drinking and brooding beside a small Babel of saucers. His friends and colleagues were dying, often in grotesque circumstances. In 1938, he went to Horváth’s funeral, and told friends that the next obituary they would write would be his own. It was the news of another friend’s death, the suicide of the playwright Ernst Toller, that precipitated his own collapse, hospitalization and death after four days of bungled treatment.

In the circumstances, it is miraculous that Roth should still have been able to write anything at all, doubly miraculous that it should have come out as light and elegant and sparkling as The Legend of the Holy Drinker. The word “legend” is rather soggy in English, but the first dictionary definition of it is “the life of a saint,” and Andreas is indeed the unlikeliest of saints. But there are many unlikely saints, and Andreas is as much imbued with hope, faith and charity as the best of them. A merciful irony plays over Andreas — the irony of a loving god who drinks, and who can understand his “hunger,” his courtliness, his choice of hostelry, his behavior in the ritzy hotel room. Drink in the book is a philosophy, almost a formal device (as in farce); it is certainly not content, still less milieu. A drinker’s blackouts, confusions and carelessness — or liberality — are a way of experiencing the world. The suggestion throughout is, to say it with Robert Frost, “One could do worse.”