Joseph Roth - Tarabas

An hour later there was nothing to be seen but the last blue flickering, yellow smouldering, red subsiding embers of the wholly and partly gutted houses of Koropta, and the blue-grey, suffocating smoke enveloping the town. Tired out, inert, the soldiers lay and sat about in the street. Fortunately there was not a breath of wind. Of the few houses which the fire had spared, only one still sheltered living inhabitants — the inn of the White Eagle, the inn of the vanished Jew Kristianpoller. Hither, in the yard and in the rooms, in the spacious parlour and in the cellar, Jews and peasants had come, and were coming still in crowds. Fright and fatigue, drink and the deafening uproar and their pains, had put a number of them to sleep. The peasants and the Jews lay side by side. There were no more soldiers in sight. The deserters, under Ramzin’s leadership, had already left Koropta. Some of the children screamed out in their sleep, women were weeping. A few Jews sat cowered together on the floor, unable to summon strength enough to rise, humming and murmuring their prayers, and rocking back and forward to the rhythm of their ancient melodies.

When the dawn came, a fair dawn heralding another of the golden days of that protracted and unusual autumn, the peasants were the first to wake. They rose somewhat unsteadily to their feet, woke their wives, and went out to see after their carts and horses. Dully and laggingly remembrance of the evening came back to them, and of the night, the fire, the fight, the miracle, and the Jews. They went into the out-house. And lo! the marvellous picture of the Madonna was still there upon the wall; innumerable logs lay on the ground beneath it, and on the logs were stuck innumerable burnt-out stumps of candles.

So it was true, then. The Virgin’s mild countenance was unaltered in the grey light of the morning. Tender, smiling, grieved, it rose in luminous ivory above the crimson robe. Its tenderness, its pain, its divine sadness, its celestial beauty, were more real than the morning, than the rising sun, than the memory of the bloody, fiery terrors of the night. The memory of all those things vanished before the picture’s holiness. And if in this or that one of the peasants there was a stirring of remorse, he felt that everything was pardoned in that it was vouchsafed him to look upon the lovely countenance.

For all that — they were peasants. They thought of their farmyards and their farms, of the pigs and of the money in the bags around their necks. They must get home, back to their various villages in the neighbourhood. And they made double, triple haste to do so, for those who had remained behind at home must now receive the tidings of the miracle in Koropta. And simultaneously the thought lay in their minds that there might still be danger in store from Colonel Tarabas and the regiment which they had somehow managed to escape by flight the night before. They climbed into their little carts. They whipped up their little horses and galloped away towards the neighbouring villages.

When Colonel Tarabas entered the Kristianpoller inn, he found there only the unhappy Jews; they came to meet him with lacerated, desperate faces drawn with weeping, hands uplifted in entreaty, nameless pain and terror in their eyes. He ordered them to leave the inn, to betake themselves to such houses as were still whole and not to show themselves or move from there before they received new orders to do so. And because they stirred his pity, he gave them his assurance that the soldiers would keep guard over their safety so long as they stayed shut up inside the houses, and quite still. They departed.

One or two officers arrived. Tarabas went with them into the out-house to see the miraculous picture of the Madonna. They bared their heads before it. Tarabas’s soldiers had told how Ramzin had shot at his indecent drawings, and how this picture had suddenly appeared from behind the plaster of the wall. Tarabas crossed himself. His first impulse was to kneel. But he reflected swiftly that it was incumbent upon him to maintain an attitude of sober common sense after the incidents of the previous night, which were the murderous consequence of all too blind belief. Behind him stood his officers. He was ashamed. He must not by the slightest gesture betray the bigotry within him. He crossed himself again and turned, and left.

In Tarabas’s opinion the inn-keeper Kristianpoller was of a certainty in hiding somewhere in the building. He ordered every nook and cranny to be searched. Meanwhile they were bringing in the soldiers who had been killed that night. There were five of them, Kontsev among the rest.

“Take Kontsev to my room!” commanded Colonel Tarabas.

He gave a few instructions for the next hour. He ordered them to connect him by telephone with the capital, he wished to speak to General Lakubeit. Then he went into his own room, bolted the door, and sat down by the bed on which the dead Kontsev had been laid.

NOW Tarabas was alone with the dead Kontsev. They had washed the face, cleaned the uniform of the traces of blood and mud, polished the high boots, brushed the mighty moustache. Sword and pistol lay beside him, to the right and to the left; the powerful, hairy hands with their large and damaged finger-nails were folded low over the body. The eternal peace into which he had entered hovered over the soldierly, sharp features with a softening shine. But the features of Colonel Tarabas wore an expression of bitterness and unrest and distraction. He wished that he could weep, that he might give way to an insane fit of rage. But Colonel Tarabas could not weep. He noticed that the sergeant-major was grey at the temples; he passed his hand over the grey hair at the temples, but drew it away at once, taken aback by his own tenderness. He thought about the gipsy’s prophecy. Nothing so far announced his saintliness!

Foolish words, buried long since under the weight of fearful happenings, drowned in the blood that one had shed, submerged, like the years in New York, the café-owner, the girl Katharina, Cousin Maria, father, mother, and home! Tarabas tried hard to call these pictures that rose before him “memories,” and thus to deprive them of their power. These thoughts that had come now to torture him, he would gladly have given them those trivial titles which would have stamped them as mere harmless, insignificant shadows of the past, no sooner come than gone again. He tried to take flight before them in his bitterness at the death of Kontsev, the best man he had, and to lash up his thirst to be revenged for that death. Now he hated them all, these Jews, these peasants, this Koropta, this regiment, this whole new country, this peace, this revolution which had brought it forth and made it what it was. What should he do? Ah yes — how rapid were all Tarabas’s decisions! — he would put things in order first and then resign, tell little General Lakubeit a home truth or two, and then get up and go! Get up and go! But where to, mighty Tarabas? Was there still an America? Was there still the house where he was born? Where was home? Was there no war anywhere in all the world?

Tarabas was roused out of these meditations — they were, as one can see, nothing but ideas in an incoherent chain — by the orderly’s voice announcing through the closed door that the call for General Lakubeit would come through in twenty minutes, and would the colonel kindly go down to the post-office to receive it. Tarabas swore at the primitive and inconvenient postal arrangements — another evil consequence of founding new and superfluous states. He ordered candles, a vigil for the dead, a priest, and departed for the post-office. He sent away the single clerk on duty, saying that he had business of state to conduct. The clerk went away.