Joseph Roth - Tarabas

“Out of the way!” he said.

They made way for him. Ramzin retreated to the open doorway, took aim, and shot. He hit all the six pictures in succession, the whole of the top row. There was applause. They stamped their booted feet upon the ground. They shouted: “Bravo!” and “Well done, Ramzin!”

Now each was impatient to get a gun into his hand. Tarabas’s men shot first, then handed their pistols to the strangers. They all tried, and every one of them missed.

“They’re bewitched,” said someone. “Ramzin’s bewitched his pictures!”

The very devil was in it. Even the good shots whose hand and eye had never failed them fired too high or too low now. After a few more bullets had gone wide, they told themselves that an invisible presence touched the weapons in the instant when the ball left the barrel. Now Ramzin shot again. He did not miss. He had certainly drunk no less than all the rest. They had seen what he had had. How came it, then, that his hand was more sure than every other hand? Ramzin chose his target, took aim, shot, and hit it. Yes, as though goaded by some diabolical command, he began to ask the others to tell him the exact spot they wanted him to hit. The questions aroused in most of them the lust of sheer destruction, a hot and smouldering desire to see certain parts of the naked, ever more naked, bodies of the three women struck by the bullets and exterminated. Ramzin’s first question as to what his target should be remained unanswered. Shame and passion choked them. Ramzin helped them on.

“Left breast of the third one from the middle, second woman?” he asked; or: “The hem of her chemise?” “Ankle or nipple?” “Face?” “Nose?”

Gradually it became impossible to withstand the questions which found out their most secret wishes even more accurately than the marksman’s eye infallibly found its target in the pictures. Ramzin’s shameless questions called forth answers as shameless. Ramzin shot, and missed not one of all the targets that they called to him to put a bullet through.

Little by little the yard was filled with curious peasants, attracted by the gay crack of the shots and the men’s guffaws. What they saw confused them utterly. Now they had all deserted their little carts. They stood there with their mouths and eyes and ears wide open. They pushed and stretched the better to see what was taking place there in the out-house.

Suddenly Ramzin, having disposed of three full rounds of ammunition, called out: “Give me a rifle!”

They brought him one. He aimed and pulled the trigger. Scarcely had the sound of the shot died away when a cry went up from every throat. A large patch of blue-distempered lime, bearing the last four of Ramzin’s obscene drawings, had loosed itself from the wall; it had sprung off and burst, and fallen to the ground in dust and fragments. And before the eyes of the dumfounded audience a veritable miracle took place — on the cracked surface of the wall, illumined by the deep golden brightness of the setting sun, there appeared, in place of Ramzin’s carnal drawings, the mild, celestial countenance of the Virgin. They saw the face first, then the figure. Her heavy crown of hair was raven-black, a semi-circular silver diadem adorned it. Her black and beaming eyes seemed to look down upon the men with pain and sorrow beyond words, and yet with sisterly and blissful solace and child-like wonderment. The ivory skin gleamed against the carmine of her robe; one guessed the curve of the lovely, gracious bosom at which the little Saviour drew his sustenance. Burnished in the reflection of the setting sun, which on this day seemed loath to leave the sky, the revelation of the Virgin’s image in that place stood before all of their eyes, a miracle of heaven; none could doubt it.

Suddenly someone in the crowd began to sing in a loud voice, fervent and deep and clear: “Mary, thou sweet Mother,” a hymn well known and loved in that religious land, centuries old and born out of the people’s hearts. Instantly, struck down by the lightning of their faith, they fell upon their knees, the little peasants, the huge soldiers, the deserters and Tarabas’s old guard alike. An immense intoxication seized them. They felt that they were floating in the air, whilst in reality they knelt upon the ground. They felt a heavenly power grasp them by the shoulders and press them down, but simultaneously it bore them to the heights. The lower they bowed their backs the lighter rose their souls to those high places. With vague, bewildered voices they joined in the hymn. All the songs of praise to the Virgin sang themselves with their helpless tongues, and slowly, as they sang, the sunset faded from the wall. Soon there remained of it only one narrow beam, gilding her brow. It grew smaller and smaller still. Now in the shadow of the room nothing more shone except the mild countenance and the ivory of the breast. The carmine robe mingled with the surrounding dusk. It was submerged in the oncoming night.

They pressed forward towards the wondrous apparition. Many rose now from the ground where they had kneeled or lain prostrate. Others did not yet dare to stand. They slid and shuffled forward on their knees and bellies. In each one was the shuddering fear lest the miraculous image vanish no less suddenly than it had come. They tried to get as near to it as possible; they hoped that they might touch it with their hands. How long it was since their poor hearts had been vouchsafed a miracle like this! For years and years war had filled all the world! They sang every hymn to the Virgin they had learnt in school and church, as, standing, lying, kneeling, they approached the figure on the wall.

And suddenly the last gleam of daylight was gone, as though erased by an unseen, ruthless hand. The tender ivory of breast and throat and face, the silver crown, were now but pale shadows on the dark wall. Those who stood nearest rose and put out their hands to touch the Virgin’s image.

“Stop!” cried a voice at the back of the room. It was Ramzin. Drawn up to his full height with the kneeling horde all round him, he stood there and cried out in a ringing voice: “Stop! Let no one touch it! This room is a church. That wall where you see that picture is where the altar used to be! The Jew removed it! He defiled the church. He painted the holy pictures over with blue lime. Pray, brothers, pray! Repent! This place shall be a church again. And the Jew Kristianpoller shall do penance here as well. Let us find him and bring him here. He is in hiding. But we shall find him sure enough.”

No one answered. It was now night. Through the open door blue darkness poured into the room, strong and cool. It intensified the terrible silence. The blue wall had almost turned to black. Only a grey, irregular, jagged patch could still be seen upon it, nothing else. The people who had not yet risen scrambled to their feet at last, cautiously, as though they first must loose the shackles from their limbs.

A wild fury, scarcely known even to themselves, implanted in their hearts from earliest childhood, caught in the blood and driven into every vein, awoke now and grew strong within them, fed by the alcohol they had consumed that day, increased by the excitement of the miracle they had experienced.

A hundred confused voices cried out for vengeance for the mild, the gentle, the outraged and desecrated Mother of God. Who had insulted her, smeared her with cheap, blue lime and buried her in cement and vodka-fumes? The Jew! — The ancient spectre, sown thousandfold in the length and breadth of all the land, the festering enemy in the flesh, incomprehensible, nimble-witted, gentle and yet blood-thirsty, cruel and yielding, more frightful than all the frightfulnesses of the war that they had just been through — the Jew! In that hour he bore the name of the inn-keeper Kristianpoller.