Joseph Roth - Tarabas

The sky was grey and leaden, a narrow sky in narrow streets, between high stone buildings. One told oneself that a storm would come. It did not. This country was ruled by other laws; nature allowed the practical mankind of this country to say what she should do and not do. They, for the moment, did not need a storm. Tarabas left the park. He rode down to the café, to Katharina. So he was a murderer and a saint. He had been set apart for great things.

The nearer he came to Katharina’s café, the clearer grew, so he believed, the meaning of the prophecy. The gipsy’s words began to string themselves together on a cord of sense. So, thought Tarabas, I am first to be a murderer and then a saint. (Fate, spinning her threads without regard to Tarabas, could not be met, as it were, half-way by means of changing the course of life from that moment on by an act of will — this was not possible.)

Tarabas, entering the café, was disturbed at missing Katharina from among the waitresses, and at receiving, upon asking where she was, the answer that she had asked for a day off, which had been given her. She should, however, be back again by nine o’clock, they said. Therein he saw the first beginning of the fate which had been foretold him. He sat down at a table and ordered a gin of the waitress who knew him well as Katharina’s friend; and he concealed his unrest behind one of those witticisms which waiters everywhere are accustomed to receive from old habitués. But as he found the time very long, he followed the first order with another, and a third. And as he was a poor drinker, he soon began to lose his sane grasp of the things of this world, and of the circumstances and occasion, and began superfluously to make a great deal of noise.

Hereupon the owner, a powerful, well-nourished fellow with whom Tarabas had been out of favour for a long time, came over and requested him to leave the café. Tarabas swore, paid, left the café, but, to the other’s chagrin, remained standing at the entrance to wait for Katharina. A few minutes later she came, her face flushed, her hair dishevelled, clearly in extreme haste, fear in her eyes, and, to Tarabas, prettier than he had ever seen her.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“At the post-office,” said Katharina. “There was a registered letter, I had to go and fetch it; I wasn’t here when the postman came. My father’s ill; he’s going to die maybe. I must go back home. As soon as I can. Can you help me? Have you got any money?”

Jealous and mistrustful, Tarabas searched the eyes, the voice, the face of his beloved, to find a lie and a deception lurking somewhere. He looked at her with penetrating and reproachful sadness for a long while, and she, now utterly confused, bent her head. Then — and already rage was seething in him — he said:

“A lie — I thought so. Well, where were you?”

At the same instant he remembered that today was Wednesday, and the cook would be free as well. This was a reality, a living figure for his suspicion to seize upon. Terrible pictures rolled with the speed of lightning across his mind. His fists clenched, he pushed Katharina in the side. She staggered, losing her hat; her hand-bag fell to the ground. Tarabas snatched it up and rummaged in it wildly, asking over and over again what she had done with her father’s letter. It was not to be found.

“I must have lost it. I was so upset,” Katharina stammered, and big tears stood in her eyes.

“Lost it, eh?” roared Tarabas.

A few passers-by had noticed them and stopped. Now the owner of the café came out. He put his left arm round Katharina for protection and pushed her behind him; he thrust his right arm towards Tarabas and cried:

“No rows outside my place! You clear out! And don’t let me see you around here any more!”

Tarabas raised his fist and drove it full into the man’s face. A tiny drop of blood appeared upon the wide bridge of the nose, ran down the cheek, became a thin red stripe. “Good hit,” thought Tarabas; his heart rejoiced; his fury was still rising. The blood that he had shed kindled desire to see more. It was the moment when his blood began to flow that seemed to make the owner of the café Tarabas’s real, great enemy, the only one he had in all New York, that mighty place of stone. When now the enemy put his hand into his pocket to look for a handkerchief to wipe away the blood, Tarabas believed that he was feeling for his gun. Therefore he hurled himself upon him; like talons his fingers bit deep into the neck and choked until the café-owner came down with his head striking the glass door of the bar. A monstrous din filled Tarabas’s brain. The splintering crash of the glass, the dull impact of the enemy’s body, the simultaneous cry of gaping onlookers, at once frightened and amused, of the waitresses and customers from the café, all flowed together into a sea of fearful sound. Together with his man, his hands on the powerful throat, Tarabas too had fallen to the ground. He felt the muscular, taut belly through the coat and vest; the enemy’s staring mouth showed the red maw, the pale grey gums with the tongue moving between them like some strange beast, the flashing white of the strong teeth. Tarabas saw the bubbles of froth at the corners of the mouth, the bluely tarnished lips, the jerked-up chin.

All at once an unknown grip had Tarabas by the scruff of his neck; it closed on him, strangled him, lifted him up. The pain and the force of it were too much. His own grip slackened. He looked round no more. He neither looked nor saw another thing. Suddenly fear had caught him. With strong shoves he parted the crowd, tumult still in his ears, immense vague terror in his breast. With great leaps he bounded across the street, pursuers and shouts and the shrill whistle of a policeman in his wake. He ran. He felt himself running. He ran as though he had six pairs of legs, magnificent power in thighs and feet, freedom before his eyes, death at his back. He ran into a side street, and threw a glance behind. No sign of his hunters. He fled into a dark doorway, cowered behind the staircase, saw and heard the pursuing horde speed past the house. People were coming downstairs. He held his breath. An eternity, it seemed to him, he crouched there in silence.

It might have been inside a grave. It was a coffin he was crouched in. Somewhere an infant wailed. Children were shouting in the yard. These voices reassured Tarabas. He pulled his shirt, his suit, his tie, to rights. He got up and went warily to the outside door. The street wore an ordinary look. Tarabas left the house. Evening had come. Already the street-lamps were alight, and the shop windows shone out up and down the road.

SOON, to his consternation, Tarabas discovered himself returning to the café. He faced about, turned a corner into a side street, where he lost his bearings, argued that he must keep to the left, only to realize a few seconds later that he had described a right-angle and had come out near the restaurant again. Meanwhile, according to his wont, he had kept a look-out for some sign of good or evil omen, a white horse, a nun, a red-haired person, a red-haired Jew, an old woman, a hunchback. No sign forthcoming, he decided to endow other things with fateful import. He began to count lamp-posts and paving-stones, the little square holes in the gratings underfoot, the shut and open windows of this house and that, and the number of his own steps from a set point on the sidewalk to the next crossing. Thus busy testing oracles of every kind, he came on one of those early moving-picture theatres, long, narrow, and mercifully dark, which in those days were still called bioscopes, and sometimes kept their variegated programmes turning the whole night through until daybreak without interruption. As it now seemed to Tarabas that this theatre had suddenly appeared before him — as opposed to his having approached it consciously — he took this for a sign, bought a ticket, and entered the unlighted hall, escorted by the usher’s yellow lamp.