Joseph Roth - Tarabas

Of those whom the former Colonel Nicholas Tarabas met on his wanderings here and there, were many who put this kind of question to him. He gave no answers. Kristianpoller’s clothes had long since gone to rags. His boots were torn. Tarabas still wore his soldier’s great-coat. He had taken off the epaulettes and put them in a pocket. Sometimes he put his hand into his pocket to feel them, sometimes he took them out and looked at them. The tarnished silver was yellow now, old toys. He put them back again into the pocket. He had taken the cockade off his cap. It sat upon his shaggy, unshorn mane of hair like a little wheel, far too small. It had lost its pretty grey colour. It shimmered white in some places, also greyish, yellow, and green. Round his neck, underneath his shirt, the former colonel wore two little twin bags. In one were banknotes and coins. In the other he kept an object which he would not have parted with if his life and hope of heaven had depended on his doing so.

Whenever he came upon a shrine or crucifix along the way, he knelt down and prayed long prayers before it. He prayed with fervour, although he thought he had nothing left to implore. He was content, serene, and happy in spirit. He went to great pains to find troubles and suffering and harsh treatment. But people were too good to him. Seldom was he refused a bowl of soup, a piece of bread, a shelter for the night. Did this occur, however, he answered with a blessing. He even had a gentle word for dogs who came and barked at him or tried to bite him. And if he came where they said to him: “Go away, we’ve nothing for ourselves,” then Tarabas would answer: “God’s blessing be on you! May He give you everything you need.”

Only the first week had been hard.

The lovely autumn had changed overnight to harshest winter. First the fierce rains had come; the drops had frozen singly as they fell and struck the body and face like grains of ice. Then they had become monstrous hail-stones which had swept down in a sloping, savage wall. Tarabas had welcomed the first snow, the winter’s good and gentle son. The roads became soft and bottomless. The snow melted. One longed for a solid, bitter frost. One day it came, in company with its brother, the steady, calmly moving wind from out of the north, which comes like a sword, flat, broad, and whetted to a fearful keenness. It cuts through armour. No garment can resist it. One puts one’s hands deep into one’s pockets. But the north wind blows through stuff as though it were tissue-paper. Under its breath the earth is frozen instantly, and sends its own icy breath up into the air. The wanderer grows light — yes, lighter than down; the wind can blow him clean away like the spat-out shell of a pumpkin-seed. The nearest village is far away, farther than usual. No living thing but has crept away into hiding. Even the ravens and the crows, the birds of coldest winter, the heralds of death itself, are dumb. And on either side of the frozen road, to right and left of the wanderer, spreads the plain; as far as the eye can see lie fields and meadows, covered with a thin, transparent, brittle skin of whitish ice.

In the country where the story of our Nicholas Tarabas took place, there was a guild of beggars and tramps. A well-tried, good community of the homeless, with its own customs, its own laws and now and then its own jurisdiction, its own symbols, and its own speech. These beggars are the proprietors of certain houses, too: sheds, abandoned shepherds’ huts, partially burnt-out houses, forgotten railway cars, certain caves they know of. Whoever has spent four weeks on the road has learnt, taught by mankind’s two greatest teachers, poverty and solitude, to read the secret symbols which announce a shelter in the neighbourhood. Here lies a piece of string, there a rag torn from a handkerchief, yonder a charred twig. Here, in a declivity at the roadside, one comes upon the remains of a fire. There, underneath the varnish of the frost, the print of human footsteps may be seen, all going one way and in one direction. The frost cuts into the flesh, and whets the wits as well.

Tarabas learnt to know the signs that promise warmth and safety. The war had left a great deal of useful material lying about the countryside, corrugated iron and sheet-iron, wood, broken motor-cars, train-cars left astray on narrow, improvised rails, tumble-down barracks, half-burnt cottages, abandoned trenches, well reinforced with cement. In a land where war has destroyed the possessions of the settled ones, the wanderers on the highways are well off.

When the former Colonel Tarabas entered one of these shelters, he felt that he was being rewarded far beyond his merits. And he almost regretted having come there. Yes, sometimes it happened that he had hardly arrived and let the warmth envelop him when he had got up and was gone again, having stayed there only a few moments. He was not entitled to enjoy more warmth and shelter than were absolutely needed to keep life in him. For he enjoyed his torments, and wished to prolong them if he could.

And so he went out again into the snow and ice and darkness. If another wanderer, making for the refuge, met him on the way and asked him whither he was bound, Tarabas would answer that he must reach a certain destination that day — that night.

One evening he came to one of these asylums, and found someone else already there. It was a damaged second-class train-carriage standing on the disused rails of an old cross-country railway. The windows of the compartments were broken and had been replaced with boards and cardboard. The doors between the corridor and the compartments would not shut. The leather upholstery of the seats had long since been cut away. The hard grey horse-hair sprouted in clumps out of the seats. Through chinks and apertures the wind blew mercilessly without a pause. Tarabas went into the first compartment. A second-class carriage, such as Tarabas had travelled in a thousand times in other days. He was very tired and went to sleep immediately. He carried with him into sleep the memory of the day when, as a “special courier of the Tsar on a secret mission,” he had come back to his home. “Guard!” he had called, “I want some tea!” And: “Guard! Fetch me some grapes!”—Room, room the people in the corridor had made for the special courier of the Tsar. Ah, what a man Nicholas Tarabas had been! What were his old guard doing without Tarabas? Look, said Tarabas to himself, a man can live with all that power and magnificence, and be a mighty Tarabas, and think the world will be a different place the day he ceases to be there. But now I’ve left the world — and it has not changed its looks in the very least. We’re nothing to the world one way or the other, none of us, not even such a man of power as I was!

Tarabas slept for two hours, then awoke. He opened his eyes and saw another figure in the darkness, an aged tramp. His white hair flowed over the collar of his dark coat, and his beard almost met the rope around his waist.

“You must be one of the Seven Sleepers,” said the old man. “Here I’ve been standing for a quarter of an hour, coughing and spitting, and not a thing did you hear. I heard you when you came, though, but you never even noticed that someone else was living in this car. You’re young still. I’ll bet it’s not long since you took to the road!”

“How do you know that?” asked Tarabas, and sat up.

“Because the first thing even a half-way experienced tramp does is to go through every place he comes into. How easily you might find something useful! A coin, tobacco, a candle, a piece of bread, or even a gendarme! Those queer fellows have a way of hiding in our places and waiting till the likes of us arrive, and then they want to see our papers. … But I’m all right, I’ve got mine,” he added after a pause. “I could show them to you if we had a light.”