Joseph Roth - Tarabas

The telephone rang and the colonel himself took up the receiver.

“General Lakubeit!”

Tarabas prepared to give a brief report.

But the distinct, soft voice of the little general, sounding as though it came from the life beyond, said: “Don’t interrupt!” And thereupon proceeded to give short and concise instructions: the regiment was to be held in readiness, reinforcements from the distant garrison at Ladka could not be sent out for another forty-eight hours; fresh outbreaks were to be expected; all the peasants of the district were gathering, to go and see the miracle; the local priest must be asked to keep the people quiet; all Jews were to remain inside their houses—“so far as there are any left,” those were the general’s actual words — and Colonel Tarabas caught the rebuke and scorn of the remark.

“That is all!” the general concluded; then “Wait a minute!” he called.

Tarabas waited.

“Repeat, please!” commanded Lakubeit.

Tarabas went rigid with rage and fright. He repeated obediently.

“That’ll do!” said Lakubeit.

Thunderstruck, impotent and full of rage, annihilated by the feeble, distant voice of a feeble old man, not even a soldier but “only a lawyer” at that, the mighty Tarabas left the post-office. It almost surprised him to be greeted by the clerk, who had been waiting outside the entrance. Strong in appearance but in reality weak and devoid of his old pride, the great Tarabas walked through the ruins of the little town of Koropta. On either side of the high street were places where the fire still smoked and smouldered. And Tarabas, in spite of the undoubted tangibility of his flesh and muscle, looked like a gigantic ghost moving amidst the ashes and the debris and the needlessly salvaged, ownerless objects in miscellaneous heaps outside the houses.

Without a glance towards the soldiers, he went back into the inn. Astonishment brought him to a standstill in the parlour, for behind the bar, nodding and bowing as though nothing had happened, stood the Jew Kristianpoller. As though nothing had happened, the servant Fedya was washing up the glasses.

At the sight of the Jew, going about his everyday business as casual and unscathed as though suddenly emerged from behind a cloud which had hidden and protected him until that moment, a suspicion awoke in Tarabas that there might in fact be sorcerers among these Jews, and that this one actually was responsible for the desecration of the Madonna’s image. The whole great wall, the insuperable wall of clearest ice and cut and polished hatred, of strangeness and mistrust, which stands, no less today than a thousand years ago, between Jews and Christians, as though God himself had put it there, rose now before the eyes of Tarabas. Visible through the transparency of the ice stood Kristianpoller, no longer a harmless fellow of an inn-keeper and tradesman, no longer merely a contemptible but harmless member of an inferior caste, but an alien, incomprehensible, mysterious personage, equipped with hellish weapons for his war against men and saints, against heaven and God. Out of the unfathomable deep of Tarabas’s mind rose now, as yesterday out of the devout prostrations of the soldiers and peasants, unconscious of what currents flowed beneath their fervour, a blind and lusting hatred of the Jew, scatheless now, and emerging by some power unscathed for ever from every other peril likewise. This time his name was Nathan Kristianpoller. Another time it would be something else. A third time he would have yet another name. Upstairs in Tarabas’s room lay his dear, good Kontsev, dead to all eternity, and he had died for this immune and diabolic Kristianpoller. Tarabas would have given a hundred thousand Jews and more for one boot from his dead Kontsev’s foot! Tarabas did not return Kristianpoller’s deferential greeting. He sat down. He did not even order tea or vodka. He knew the man would bring him something of his own accord.

And Kristianpoller did. He brought a glass of hot and steaming golden tea. He knew that Tarabas was not in the mood for alcohol at that moment. Tea is calming. Tea clears the tangled mind, and in clarity is no danger for reasonable men. It went through Tarabas’s brain: He’s cooked this tea in hell. How did he know what I was wanting? When I came in I had decided to order tea. — And yet, suspicion notwithstanding, the colonel felt it as a compliment that Kristianpoller had divined his wish. He could not deny the Jew a certain admiration. He was moreover curious to learn by what means Kristianpoller had contrived to hide himself, and reappear this morning fresh and unconcerned.

He began a cross-examination: “Do you know what’s been going on here?”

“Yes, Your Excellency!”

“It’s your fault that your fellow-Jews were beaten and ill-treated. Some of my men were killed in the fighting. My good old Kontsev is dead — on your account! I’m going to have you hanged, my friend! You’re an inciter to rebellion, a desecrator of churches; you’re doing what you can to sabotage the new state which took us centuries to get back again. Well, what have you to say?”

“Your Excellency,” said Kristianpoller, and he unbent his back and stood straight up, and looked the terrible one full in the face with his one good eye, “I have incited no one to rebellion, I have desecrated no church, nor anything belonging to one; I love this country as much and as little as everybody else. May I make a general remark, Your Excellency?”

“You may,” said Tarabas.

“Your Excellency,” said Kristianpoller, and bent his back again, “I am only a Jew!”

“That’s just the point,” said Tarabas.

“Your Excellency,” replied Kristianpoller, “I should like most respectfully to mention that I became a Jew through no will of my own.”

Tarabas said nothing. It was no longer the terrible Colonel Tarabas who sat there saying nothing, but beginning to turn things over in his mind. It was the youth Tarabas, thought to have died long since, once a revolutionary, a member of a secret group which assassinated the governor of Kherson; the student Tarabas who had spent a thousand nights listening to discussions; the pliable, passionate Tarabas, rebellious son of a stony father, endowed with gifts of mind to think and to consider, but also the Tarabas who never grew and ripened, whose senses ruled and confused his head, who plunged headlong into whatever came his way — manslaughter, love or jealousy, or superstition, or war, cruelty, drunkenness, or despair.

The cause which the Jew Kristianpoller defended with his implacable common sense had nothing whatsoever to do with the mighty Tarabas and the chequered career which had been his! And yet it shed a light into the darknesses which had had Tarabas in their possession for many years. Kristianpoller’s answer fell upon the colonel’s brain like a flash of light into a cellar, illuminating for a moment lost and secret depths, and corners full of shadow. And although the colonel had meant, when he began his catechism, to learn and elucidate the mysterious faculties of this uncanny Jew, now he was forced inwardly to confess that Kristianpoller’s answer had come like a sudden beam of light, sooner to illuminate the darkness in his own heart than that in which the Jew went wrapped, together with all his strange race. For a while Tarabas said nothing. For a moment his loud, heroic life showed itself to him in all its worthlessness, stupidity, and emptiness; he wondered if he ought not rather envy the despised Kristianpoller his unfailing reason, and the well-ordered existence that he doubtless led. The moment of insight did not last. For in the mighty Tarabas that pride had not yet abated which crushes reason in the minds of all the great ones of this earth, enveloping as in a cloud of spurious gold the rare intimations of the truth which sometimes come to them. Pride spoke now out of Tarabas: