Joseph Roth - Confession of a Murderer

But that is not the most important thing. The chief thing was that suddenly, thanks to the friendly disposition of my colleague, a revolver was discovered in Lutetia’s trunk. The dressmaker ran helplessly around. Several times he called for me, he invoked my name, as one invokes the names of one’s gods — but still I refused to show myself. From my spy hole I peeped out, evil and contented, a god and a spy, and I saw Lutetia, pale, desperate. She did what all women have to do in such situations: she began to cry. And I remembered that I had watched her through a similar spy hole, scarcely two weeks before, and that I had seen her in the arms of the young Krapotkin, happy and laughing. Oh, I had not forgotten the sound of that laugh. And so vile was I, my friends, that I had an intense feeling of satisfaction. Let the train wait, two hours, three hours! I had time enough.

At last, when matters had got so far that Lutetia, bereft of words, had fallen upon the dressmaker’s neck, and all the other girls had begun to flutter round so that the whole scene looked like a cross between a tragic massacre, an excited chicken yard, and the romantic adventure of a romantic dressmaker — I appeared on the scent. Immediately my colleague bowed before me and said: “Your Highness, at your service!”

I took no notice of him. I called into the room, without looking at any of the numerous people there: “What is the matter here?”

“Your Highness,” began my colleague, “a revolver has been found in a lady’s trunk.”

“That is my revolver,” I said. “The ladies are under my protection.”

“At your command, Highness,” said the official.

We returned to the train.

Of course — as I expected — scarcely had we got into the train than the dressmaker began pouring out his gratitude. “Who is that lady with the revolver,” I asked. “A harmless girl,” he said. “I cannot understand it.” “I would like to speak to her,” I said. “Immediately,” he replied. “I will bring her to you.”

He brought her to me. And he left us forthwith. We were alone, Lutetia and I.

It was already growing dark, and the train seemed to race ever faster through the gathering twilight. It seemed extraordinary to me that she did not recognize me. It was as though everything were in league to prove to me how little time I had to reach my goal. Therefore it seemed to me advisable to say at once: “Where is my revolver now?”

Instead of an answer — which would still have been possible — Lutetia fell into my arms.

I took her on to my lap. And in the twilight of the evening, which came in through the two windows on each side of us — it was no longer one evening, but two — there began those caresses which you all know, and which so often prelude the tragedy of our lives.”

When he had reached this stage in his story, Golubchik fell silent for a long while. His silence appeared to us even longer than it was, because he drank nothing. We, too, only sipped at our glasses, out of shame and reserve, because Golubchik scarcely seemed to notice his glass. His silence therefore seemed in a way a double silence. A storyteller who breaks his narrative and does not raise to his lips the glass which stands before him, arouses an extraordinary feeling of uneasiness in his hearers. We all of us, Golubchik’s audience, felt uneasy. We were ashamed of looking Golubchik in the face; we stared almost stupidly at our glasses. If only we could have heard the ticking of a clock. But no. Not even a clock ticked, not a fly buzzed, and from the dark streets outside not a sound came through the thick iron shutters. We were at the mercy of the deathly silence. Long, long eternities seemed to have passed since the moment when Golubchik had begun his story. Eternities, I say, not hours. For since the clock on the wall had stopped, and since each of us threw a stealthy glance at it, although we all knew that it had stopped, it seemed as though Time had ceased; and the hands on the white face were no longer simply black, but frankly ominous. Yes, they were as ominous as eternity. They were unchanging in their obstinate, almost treacherous, immobility, and it seemed to us as though they stood still, not because the dock work had stopped, but from a sort of malice and as if to prove that the story which Golubchik was telling us was an eternally recurring, eternally hopeless story, independent of time and space, of day and night. And since time stood still, the room too, in which we were sitting, became exempt from all laws of space; and it was as though we were no longer on solid earth, but floating on the eternal waters of the eternal sea. It seemed as though we were in a ship. And our sea was the night.

Now at last, after that long pause, Golubchik took a gulp from his glass.

“I have considered”—he began again—“whether I should relate to you my subsequent experiences on the train. But I would rather omit that. I will therefore begin immediately with my arrival in Paris.

So I arrived in Paris. I need not tell you what Paris meant to me, to Golubchik, the spy who despised himself, to the false Krapotkin, the lover of Lutetia. It cost me an immense effort not to believe that my passport was false and to forget that my vile task of watching refugees, who were a so-called “menace to the State,” was my own. But it cost me unbelievable agony at last to persuade myself that my existence was a living lie, my name a borrowed one, if not stolen, and my passport the infamous document of an infamous spy. And from the moment when I recognized all that, I began to hate myself. I had always hated myself, my friends! After all that I have told you, you will have realized that. But the hatred which I now felt for myself was hatred of a different kind. For the first time I felt contempt for myself. Previously I had never realized that a false existence, founded on a borrowed and stolen name, could destroy one’s own, one’s real existence. But now I learned in my own person the inexplicable magic of a word; of a written, an inscribed word. Of course a stupid, thoughtless police official had made me out a passport in the name of Krapotkin; and he had not only not thought anything about it, but had taken it as a matter of course that a spy called Golubchik should be lent the name of Krapotkin. Nevertheless, it was magic. There is magic in every spoken, let alone every written, word. Through the simple fact of possessing a passport made out in the name of Krapotkin, I was Krapotkin; but at the same time this passport proved to me, in a different, quite irrational way, that I had obtained it not only unrighteously but also for dishonest purposes. To a certain extent it was a constant witness of my evil conscience. It compelled me to become a Krapotkin, while, all the times I could never cease to be a Golubchik. I was a Golubchik, I am a Golubchik, and a Golubchik I will remain, my friends…! But moreover — and that “moreover” is significant and important — I was in love with Lutetia. And she, who had given herself to me, was perhaps — who can tell? — in love with that Prince Krapotkin whom I was impersonating. To myself, therefore, I was to a certain extent Golubchik, even if with the firm belief that I was a Krapotkin; but to her who at that time had to imagine my past life, I was a Krapotkin, a cousin of the young lieutenant of the Guards, my half-brother, whom I hated and who had embraced her before me.

I say: before me. For at the age at which I then was, it is usual for a young man to hate with a deep hatred all those men who have, as they say, “possessed” his beloved before him. But why should I not hate my false half-brother? My father, my name, and the woman I loved, he had taken from me! If I could call any man my enemy, he was that man. I had not yet forgotten how he had burst into the room of my father — not his father — in order to drive me out. I hated him. Ah, how I hated him! Who, if not he, was responsible for my entering the foulest of all professions? Again and again he crossed my path. I was powerless against him; he was omnipotent against me. Yes, again and again he stood in my way to thwart me. Not Prince Krapotkin had begot him. Another had done that. And already in the moment when that other had begot him, he had begun to defraud me. Oh, I hated him, my friends! How I hated him!