Joseph Roth - Tarabas

The paralysed spectators in the station were some forty in number. Tarabas had them lined up. He put two of his men in charge of them. They were to go and fetch food. The remainder stayed on the wide platform in the sunshine and waited. Tarabas stood at the edge of the platform and looked at the bluely gleaming, narrow, hurrying railway-tracks; meanwhile, indoors, in the major’s office, the wounded Jew was coming to himself again. His thin and feeble wailing could be heard through the open door. In the blue sky sparrows twittered.

It was not long before the men came back with food. The clatter of tin vessels and the regular tramp of men’s boots could be heard. They came into sight. The distribution of the meal began. The first bowlful was for Tarabas. In the midst of the opaque grey soup rose a piece of dark-brown meat like a rock out of the sea. Tarabas pulled a spoon out of his boot, and at the same moment his men followed suit. The forty prisoners who had gone with them stood by and did not move or speak. Hunger dwelt in their wide eyes. The water gathered in their mouths. The busy clatter of tin spoons against the bowls was almost more than they could bear. Some of them tried, by putting their fingers in their ears, to shut out the sound. Tarabas was the first to put down his spoon. To the prisoner standing nearest him he handed the rest of his meal, together with the spoon. And, without a word from him, all his men did likewise. Each put down his bowl with a jerk and handed it to the prisoner nearest him. The whole proceeding took place without a word. There was now no sound but the clatter of tin spoons against bowls, smacking of lips, teeth chewing, and sparrows twittering under the glass roof of the station.

When everyone had eaten, Colonel Tarabas ordered the march into the town. The men who had been thus suddenly and accidentally taken prisoners found their changed situation suddenly more tolerable. They let themselves be drawn up between Tarabas’s troops. And flanked by a living wall of armed soldiery they marched, contented and indifferent, many of them joyfully, under Tarabas’s command into the little town of Koropta.

They marched through the half-dried silvery mud of the roads — and the geese, the ducks, and the children scattered before them with loud and frightened cries. The little regiment spread a strange terror. The townsfolk of Koropta did not know what new kind of war could now have broken out. For the march of Colonel Tarabas upon their town seemed like a new kind of war to them. Swift and terrible rumours had flown out in advance of Tarabas. He was the new king of the new country, said some. And others declared he was the son of the Tsar himself, and had come to take revenge for his father’s fate.

But as for the Jews, of whom a few hundred lived in Koropta, they were all busily occupied, this being a Friday and the Sabbath drawing near on holy feet, in shutting up their tiny shops with all possible haste, and in the firm belief that their Sabbath could place a check upon the course of history, just as it did upon their businesses.

Tarabas, at the head of his dangerous troop, did not understand why the little shops were being shut so hurriedly, and took it as a personal affront. The gossiping women got up from their doorsteps as he approached. The iron rattle of chains and bolts and padlocks on the wooden shops were heard. Here and there the dark shadow of a Jew flitted by, coming towards Tarabas, clinging to the meagre protection the houses afforded. Before his eyes and all along his route, Tarabas saw nothing but fugitives. That anyone could be afraid of him was something he could not understand. And as he marched on, care and worry gained upon him. Yes, the townlet of Koropta had care in store for him.

He halted outside the government building, mounted the broad steps, followed by two of his armed men, and opened a folding door behind which he assumed that he would find the chief of police. And there indeed he sat, a pitiful, aged man, haggard and diminutive and lost in the mighty chair of office, a figure belonging to a bygone age.

“I have taken over the command of this town,” said Tarabas. “I am to form a new regiment here. Let me have a list of the principal buildings. Where are the barracks? Then you had best go home.”

“With pleasure,” said the little old creature. And began, in a cobwebby, extraordinarily thin voice, which seemed to come out of an antique cupboard, to recite what had been asked of him. Then he rose. His bald, yellowish, spotted skull hardly came up to the top of the chair-back. He took his hat and stick from the rack, bowed and smiled, and was gone.

“Sit down there!” said Tarabas to one of his escort. “Until I come back, you are the chief of police!” And Tarabas went from one of the few public departments in Koropta to the other, making a clean sweep everywhere. Then he took possession of the empty barracks, and talked to the assembled prisoners in the yard.

“Which of you have been soldiers?” he asked. “Which of you want to go on being soldiers under me?”

They all came forward. They all wanted to be soldiers under Tarabas.

WHEN word of the terrible Tarabas and his terrible companions reached the inn of “The White Eagle,” the inn-keeper, the Jew, Nathan Kristianpoller, decided to close up his home without delay and send his wife and seven children to her parents in Kyrbitki. It was not the first time the Kristianpoller family had made that journey. It had begun with the outbreak of the war, and was repeated when a strange regiment of Cossacks had come into the town, and again when the Germans had marched in and occupied parts of western Russia. On the first journey there were five children, then six, and finally no less than seven girls and boys. For, independent of the ever-changing terrors of the war, nature continued to bestow upon the Kristianpollers her blessings, kindly but no less implacable.

The inn of “The White Eagle”—it was the only one in Koropta — had come down to the Jew, Kristianpoller, from his forefathers. For more than a hundred and fifty years Kristianpollers had owned and managed it. Nathan Kristianpoller, their heir, knew nothing of his ancestors but this. He had grown up within its thick and crumbling walls, overgrown with wild grapevines and cracked in many places. A wide double-door painted reddish brown at once interrupted and completed the walls’ continuity, as a stone breaks and completes the circle of a ring. In that doorway the father and grandfather of Nathan Kristianpoller had waited and welcomed the peasants who came to the Koropta market on Thursdays and Fridays to sell their pigs and buy scythes and sickles, and horse-shoes, and bright kerchiefs, of the tradesmen in the little shops. Until the day when war broke out, the inn-keeper Kristianpoller had had no cause to think of change. But as time went on he very soon grew accustomed to the altered aspect of the world, and, like many of his brethren, he contrived to avert all danger from himself and his. With cunning and the help of God he was able to hold his inborn and acquired wits like a shield against the soldiers of his own and other lands, and keep a whole skin for himself and his family.

Now, however, with the arrival of the terrible Tarabas, the inn-keeper Kristianpoller became possessed with a terror entirely foreign to his nature and unlike any he had ever felt before. An unknown apprehension filled his heart which had grown used to all the usual, established fears. “Who is this Tarabas?” asked Kristianpoller’s heart. Like a glittering king of steel he comes to Koropta. New and iron troubles, full of danger, he has brought with him to Koropta. Other times will come, and God knows what new laws! Have mercy, Lord, upon us all, and upon Nathan Kristianpoller in particular!