Joseph Roth - Tarabas

This was the aspect of the world, as the terrifying apparition ran headlong into Tarabas.

This terrifying apparition was a skinny, wretched, feeble, but nonetheless extraordinarily red-haired Jew. Like a flaming garland the short beard surrounded his pale, freckled face. On his head he wore a shimmering skull-cap of black corded silk, now green with age, from which fiery red curls escaped to join the flaming beard on either cheek. The man’s greenish-yellow eyes, surmounted by thick red eyebrows like two tiny, blazing brushes, seemed also to shoot forth flames, sparks of a different kind, jets of icy fire. To Tarabas nothing worse than this could happen on a Sunday.

His mind went back to that ill-fated other Sunday from which his whole misfortune dated. That, too, had been a glorious day like this one; in the Galician village, too, the church bells had been ringing when it happened. And there, on the edge of the road, the new, red-headed soldier had stood before him, the messenger of doom. Ah! Had the mighty Colonel Tarabas imagined that doom could be outwitted? That one could escape it? That one could continue wars on one’s own account, when they were done and over?

A rufous Jew on Sunday morning! Hair of such red as this, a beard like this, that did not merely flame but positively blazed forth sparks, Tarabas had not seen in all his life before, and there were few with eyes as trained as his to distinguish red from red in hair. At the sight of this Jew, Tarabas was not simply alarmed. Alarm was what he had felt then, the first time, when the new soldier greeted him. This time he was completely paralysed with horror. Of what avail were all the battles he had fought? What did the terrors all amount to now, those he had experienced and those that he had caused? For now it was apparent that Tarabas bore the greatest terror of all these in himself, one that he could not overcome, a fear that brought forth other fears continually, a dread that fathered spectres, and a weakness that created other weaknesses without end. He had rushed from act of heroism into act of heroism, mighty Tarabas! But not through his own will; it was the fear in his heart that had driven him through all those battles. Denying faith, he had lived on superstition, brave out of fear, powerful out of weakness.

Not less than the colonel’s consternation was that of the Jew Shemariah. He was carrying two scrolls in his arms, like two dead children, each dressed in red velvet embroidered with gold. The round wooden handles had been burnt, likewise the velvet hoods, leaving exposed the lower edges of the parchment which the fire had curled up and singed. Twice that day Shemariah had managed to convey scrolls to the cemetery, two each time. Before daybreak he had slipped out of the house. None of the soldiers had noticed him. He was convinced by now that God had specially appointed him, and him alone, to perform this holy work. Leaving the synagogue for the third time he had let imagination go so far as to believe, pitiful, credulous, simple as he was, that on this errand he was being kept invisible by that cloud of which the Bible tells. Meeting the colonel now, never doubting the cloud was round him, he stepped aside, as though thus to escape the mighty one unseen. This movement sent Tarabas into a frightful rage. He seized the Jew by the bosom of his caftan, gave him a shake, and thundered:

“What are you doing here?”

Shemariah did not answer.

“Don’t you know you’re all to stay indoors?”

Shemariah only nodded. At the same time he hugged the scrolls still closer to him, as though the colonel might try to take them from him.

“What’s that you’ve got? What are you doing with those things?”

Shemariah, too terrified to utter a word, and moreover not very familiar with the language of the country, answered by signs. When he had transferred the scroll from his right arm on to his left one, he looked more like a supernatural being than ever. Pressing his heavy burden to his breast with his weak left arm, he pointed with his skinny right hand, overgrown likewise with red stubble, to the ground, making the gesture of digging and shovelling, then began to stamp and scrape with his foot as though to smooth the fresh mound of a grave. Most of this, naturally, Tarabas could not understand. The obstinate silence of the Jew aroused his rage; it was already rising dangerously.

“Talk!” he shouted, and lifted his clenched fist.

“Your honour!” stammered Shemariah. “See, they’ve been burnt. They can’t stay this way. They must be buried. In the cemetery!” And he stuck out a hand in the direction of the burial-ground of the Koropta Jews.

“Burying’s none of your business!” thundered Tarabas.

Poor Shemariah, not quite understanding, thought he was being called upon to give further explanations. And he told, as best he could, stuttering and stammering, but radiant, how he had twice that day performed his sacred duty. This, however, could but increase the other’s anger. For to Tarabas the fact that the Jew was in the street now for the third time was a particularly dreadful crime. It was the last straw. A Jew and redhaired — on a week-day it might be overlooked; but a Sunday made this apparition horrible and ghastly; and a Sunday like this one made of it a horrible and ghastly personal affront to the colonel himself. Ah, poor, mighty, angry Tarabas!

All at once he felt the faint voice of the poor, other Tarabas. “Keep quiet! Keep quiet!” it said. But Tarabas, the mighty, did not listen. On the contrary, his rage increased.

“Be off!” he roared at the Jew. And as Shemariah went on standing there distraught and paralysed, Tarabas thrust out his hand and pushed the scrolls out of his arm. They fell with a thump to the ground, into the mire.

The next moment the appalling thing had happened. The crazed Shemariah put down his head and butted at the colonel’s mighty breast, beating upon it with both his fists. He looked like a clown in a circus giving an imitation of a raving bull. It was absurd and heartbreaking to see. It was the first time since there had been Jews in Koropta that one of them had lifted up his hand against a colonel — and what a colonel! It was the first, and it was, in all likelihood, the last time, too.

Never in his life would Tarabas have believed that such a thing as this could happen to him. Had he needed any further proof that red-haired Jews on Sunday were his especial harbingers of evil, this attack would have furnished it in plenty. It was something different from an affront. It was — for something so impossible, it was impossible to find a word. If until this moment Tarabas had been filled with bear-like rage, there now began to seethe within him a fiendish, slow, and cruel fury, an ingenious fury, resourceful, full of cunning. A change came over Tarabas’s face. All at once it had turned very white. He smiled. Like a clamp the smile lay between his lips, a cold, hard-frozen clamp. With two fingers of his left hand he flicked the red one off him. Then, with thumb and finger of his right hand he gripped poor Shemariah by the ear-lobe and pinched until a drop of blood appeared. This done — still smiling — with both hands Tarabas seized the fan-like, flaming beard. And with his whole gigantic strength he began to shake the puny, quaking body to and fro. A few of the hairs came out. He put them calmly and without haste right and left into his coat-pockets. He was still smiling, Colonel Tarabas! And like a child who has found amusement in the destruction of a toy, and with a childish, almost idiotic expression in his eyes, he took the beard between his hands again. Between the shakings, he spoke.

“You’ve got a son, haven’t you? His hair’s red, like yours, eh?”

“Yes, yes,” stammered Shemariah.