Joseph Roth: Three Novellas

“A very nice letter,” said his wife and put the letter aside. Her eyes were steel blue, conscientious and not in the least concerned. Frau Klara Fallmerayer had the ability even to raise worries to the level of duties and to derive satisfaction from feeling concerned. It seemed to Fallmerayer, to whom ideas and insights of this sort had always been alien, that he was suddenly aware of this. And that night he gave as a pretext some urgent official duty in order to avoid the room they shared and to lie down to sleep in his office, where he tried to persuade himself that the foreigner was still sleeping above him, in his own bed.

Days went by, and months. Two picture postcards flew in from Sicily, with fleeting messages. Summer, a hot summer, arrived. As the time of his leave approached, Fallmerayer decided not to go anywhere. He sent his wife and children to the mountains in Austria. He stayed behind and continued to attend to his duties. For the first time since his marriage he was separated from his wife. In the quiet of his heart he had promised himself much too much from this solitude. Only when he found himself alone did he begin to realize that he had no wish whatever to be alone. He rummaged in all the drawers; he was looking for the stranger’s letter. But he could no longer find it. Frau Fallmerayer had perhaps destroyed it long before.

His wife and children returned, July drew to a close.

Then came general mobilization.

V

Fallmerayer was an ensign in the reserve of the twenty-first battalion of Jäger. As he occupied a relatively responsible post it would have been possible for him, as for a number of his colleagues, to have remained for a time at home. Fallmerayer alone put on his uniform, packed his kit, embraced his children, kissed his wife and rejoined his regiment. He turned his duties over to his deputy. Frau Fallmerayer wept; the twins were jubilant to see their father in a different uniform. Frau Fallmerayer did not fail to be proud of her husband, but only at the moment of departure. She dammed her tears. Her blue eyes were full of the bitter consciousness of her duty.

As far as the stationmaster was concerned, it was only when he found himself in a compartment with a few comrades that he first appreciated the grimness of this hour of decision. In spite of which it seemed to him that a quite unreasonable gaiety set him apart from all the other officers in the compartment. They were officers on the reserve. Each of them had left a home he loved. And each of them at this moment was a keen soldier. Each of them at the same time was a desolate father, a desolate son. To Fallmerayer alone it seemed as if the war had freed him from a situation with no prospects. Assuredly, he was sorry for the twins. Also for his wife. Certainly, for his wife, too. But whilst his companions, if they began to speak of home, would by look and gesture reveal all the warmth and tenderness of which they were capable, it seemed to Fallmerayer that in order to emulate them, once he began speaking of his own family, he must put even more gloom into his voice and aspect. In fact he would much sooner have talked to his comrades about the Countess Walewska than about his own home.

He forced himself to silence. And it came to him that he was a double liar: first, because he withheld what was nearest his heart; second because now and again he spoke of his wife and children, from whom at that moment he was further removed than from the Countess Walewska, a woman from an enemy country. He began slightly to despise himself.

VI

He reported. He went to the front. He fought. He was a brave soldier. He sent the customary hearty letters home on service letterforms. He was decorated and promoted to lieutenant. He was wounded and sent to hospital. He was entitled to leave, which he declined, and returned to the front. He was fighting in the east.

In his time off between actions, inspections and assaults he began to learn Russian out of books which came his way by chance. Almost lustfully. In the midst of stinking gas and the smell of blood, in rain, in morasses of mud, amidst the sweat of the living and the miasma of the decomposing dead, Fallmerayer pursued the alien whiff of cuir de Russie and the nameless scent of the woman who had once lain in his bed, upon his pillow, under his bedclothes. He learned this woman’s mother tongue and imagined that he spoke with her in her own language. He learned terms of endearment, inflections of meaning, subtle Russian hints of affection. He would talk to her. Separated from her by the whole of a great world war, he would still talk to her. He conversed with Russian prisoners of war. He tuned his ear a hundredfold, marked the most delicate of intonations and copied them fluently. With every new inflection of this alien tongue he drew nearer to the stranger. He knew nothing more of her than what he had last seen: a fleeting word and a fleeting signature on a banal picture postcard. But he lived for her, waited for her and intended soon to speak with her. Because he spoke Russian, and because his battalion was drafted away to the southern front, he was transferred to one of the regiments which, a little later, were incorporated into the so-called Army of Occupation. Fallmerayer was first posted to Divisional Headquarters as interpreter, and subsequently to the “Information and Intelligence Bureau.” His final destination proved to be in the Kiev area.

VII

The name Solowienki he had indeed remembered, and more than remembered, for it had become familiar and native to him.

It was very simple to discover the name of the estate which belonged to the Walewski family. Solowki was its name and it lay three versts to the south of Kiev. Fallmerayer was stricken by a sweetly oppressive and painful excitement. He had a feeling of infinite gratitude towards Fate which had guided him through war to this destination, and at the same time a nameless fear of all that it was now preparing for him. War, going over the top, being wounded, the nearness of death; all these were quite shadowy events compared with what now faced him. All that had befallen him had merely been a preparation — perhaps an unavailing one, who knows — for his meeting with the woman. Was he truly armed against all eventualities? Was she in fact in her house? Had the advance of an enemy not driven her to a place of greater safety? And if she were living at home, would her husband be with her? At all costs he had to go there and see.

Fallmerayer had the horses harnessed and drove off.

It was a fairly early morning in May. The light, little two-wheeled waggonette drove past flowering meadows along a winding, sandy country road through an almost deserted neighborhood. Soldiers marched clattering and rattling along it on their way to their usual training exercises. Hidden in the bright, high, blue vault of the sky, larks were trilling. The thick, dark, belts of little pinewoods alternated with the bright and merry silver of the birches. The morning breeze brought from a great distance broken snatches of soldiers’ songs from outlying encampments. Fallmerayer thought of his childhood and of the countryside of his own home. He had been born and raised not far from the railway station for which at the outbreak of war he had been responsible. His father, too, had been an employee of the railway, a minor employee, a storekeeper. Fallmerayer’s whole childhood, just like his later life, had been filled with the sounds and smells of the railway, as of the sounds and scents of nature. The locomotives whistled and he held duets with the jubilation of the birds. The heavy smoke of the brown coal settled over the scent of the flowering meadows. The smoky gray of the tracks blended with the blue haze over the mountains to form a mist of nostalgia and longing.

Things were very different here, at once gay and melancholy. No friendly farms here, perched on gentle falls of land, few lilacs to be seen, no saxifrage nor pennywort nor coriander behind fresh painted fences. Only squat huts with wide, deep roofs of thatch resembling cowls, tiny villages lost in the immense landscape and almost invisible even on these plains. How different countries were! Was it also true of the human heart? Will she be able to understand me, Fallmerayer asked himself, will she be able to understand me? And the nearer he came to the Walewski estate, the more fiercely burned this question in his heart. The nearer he came, the more certain he grew that the woman was at home. Soon he had no doubt that he was only separated from her by a matter of minutes. Yes, she was at home.