Joseph Roth - Tarabas

He went into the hall, sat down on a bench and waited. When the dinner-hour was over and the counters began to open again, and the people began to fill the hall, the elder Tarabas also appeared. He had grown very old. He went now supported on two sticks. They were ebony sticks, with silver handles. The old man’s mighty moustache fell like an imposing chain across his mouth, parted in the middle and falling down low on either side, silver-white, and the two fine points touched the high snow-white collar. The old Tarabas crossed the hall unsteadily from one end to the other. The lesser folk made way for him. Upon the flagstones each of his dragging steps could be heard, and the dull, almost ghostly tapping of his two sticks with rubber tips. As the old man came to the counter, the clerk thrust his head through the window towards him.

“Good day, sir!” said the clerk.

Tarabas the younger left his bench and approached the counter where his father stood. He saw him hang one of his sticks on the ledge of the counter, pull out his wallet, fumble in it till he found some coupons, and hand these over to the clerk. Then he departed. He almost brushed against his son in passing. But with his eyes fixed on the ground, and without a look around him, he hobbled out of the building.

Nicholas followed him. He stood at the gate and saw a sympathetic stranger help the old man into the trap. Both sticks were propped beside him against the driver’s box. He gathered the reins into his hands. The horse set off. And old Tarabas drove home.

Home.

ONE day — it was already the end of May — Tarabas felt that the time had come to go back home and see his father and mother and sister once again. Often during his wanderings he had found himself near his native village, but had always made a wide detour round it. He was not yet sufficiently prepared; for it needs much preparation before one is ready to go home again.

Tarabas was cut off from all the world. But he was still afraid to visit the places of his childhood. He did not love his father. He never had loved his father. He could not remember his father’s ever having either kissed or beaten him. For old Tarabas was seldom angry, and as seldom was his humour good. He ruled in his household which contained his wife and children, like a king who belonged neither there nor to them. A simple, bare, and iron ritual regulated his days, his evenings, his meals, his conduct, and that of the mother and the children. It seemed as though he had never been a young man. It was as though he had come into the world with his established ritual, a complete timetable of his life and days; that he must have been begotten and born according to special laws, and grown up according to rules and regulations of extreme rigidity, and contrary to nature. It was most probable that he had never experienced any form of passion, and certainly he had never known hardship. His own father’s life had ended early, “in an accident,” so it was always said. Nobody knew what manner of accident it had been. As a boy young Tarabas used to imagine that his grandfather had been killed out hunting, in a fight with wolves or bears. For a few years his grandmother had lived on in her son’s house, in the room which was given to his little sister after the old woman’s death had left it vacant.

His sister — she was ten years old at the time — had been afraid lest the dead grandmother return. Even in life she had been a majestic ghost moving through the house, tall and big, with a broad coif on her head, snow-white and stiffly starched, her imposing figure enveloped in solemn, stiff black silk, a kind of stone silk, and in her plump and soft white hands she always held a purple rosary. Without visible reason, and apparently with the sole purpose of showing that her silent majesty was still alive, she descended the stair to the kitchen every day, received the obeisances of the cook and servants with a silent inclination of the head, billowed across the yard towards the stables, vouchsafed the groom a cold glance from her big brown eyes, which stood out from their sockets and were perpetually moist, and returned the way she had come. At meals she was enthroned at the head of the table. Father, mother, and the children approached her and kissed her soft, muscleless, and doughy hand before the soup was brought on to the table. In the presence of the grandmother no word was ever spoken. There was no sound but the imbibing of the soup and the soft clink of spoons against the dishes. After the soup, when the meat course arrived, the old woman left the table. She went to lie down. Nobody knew whether she really slept, or even rested. During the evening she appeared again, to depart as before after a quarter of an hour. Although she never spoke, or interfered in anything concerning the house or the estate, and was so seldom to be seen, yet her presence was felt by everyone — except by her son, perhaps — as a burden no less unbearable for being never mentioned. The servants hated her and called her “the shadow-queen.” Her eyes, perpetually moist, glittered with malevolence, and her wordless hauteur aroused those about her to a hatred equally silent and vindictive. They would gladly have put an end to the shadow-queen, if the opportunity had offered. The children, too, Nicholas and his sister, hated the grandmother in her wicked majesty moving within the folds of heavy stuffs which muffled every sound. And when she died one day, suddenly and without warning, and as silently as she had lived, the entire household breathed again — but only for a while.

Father Tarabas succeeded to his mother’s throne, inheriting the deathly, icy majesty that had been hers. Thenceforth it was he who sat at the head of the table. Thenceforth it was his hand the children kissed before the meal began. He differed from his mother only in that he remained after the soup, partaking of the meat course and dessert with chilly appetite, and only then departed to lie down. If in former days, while his mother was still alive, he had now and then, naturally in her absence, talked a little, and even unbent to an occasional jest, now, after her death, he seemed to emanate her entire ponderous sombreness. And they called him after his mother, “the shadow-king.”

His wife submitted to him with unquestioning obedience. She often wept. With her tears she washed away all the small store of strength with which nature had endowed her. She was thin and pale. With her peaked face and sunken chin, her red-rimmed eyes and the eternal blue apron which covered her whole dress, she looked like a servant, a kind of privileged cook or housekeeper. And the kitchen was where she spent most of her day. Her hard, dry hands, with which she sometimes stroked her children, shyly, almost timidly, as though committing some forbidden action, smelt of onions. When she put them out towards the children, her tears began to flow simultaneously and irresistibly; it was as though she wept at the tenderness which she bestowed upon the little ones. Nicholas and his sister began to avoid their mother. Every approach to her was bound up inevitably with tears and onions. She frightened them.

And yet it was home. Stronger than the sombre majesty of the father and the tearful helplessness of the mother, were the silver magic of the birches, the dark mystery of the pine wood, the fragrance of potatoes roasting in autumnal fields, the joyous trilling of larks in the sky, the wind’s monotonous song, the gay regatta of the clouds in spring, the eerie tales of the maids indoors on winter evenings, the crackling of fresh logs burning in the stove, the oily, resinous scent that went out from them, and the ghostly light the snow cast into the room through the windows, before the lights were lit. All this was home. The strange, inaccessible father and the poor, insignificant mother received a measure of the sentiments which all the rest invoked so powerfully, and Tarabas gave them part of the love he felt for all the things which went into the making of his childhood’s landscape. Memories of the strength and sweetness of that earth cloaked all the strangeness of his parents in a mantle of reconciliation.