Joseph Roth - Tarabas

Tarabas picked these up, and put them in his pockets, one right and one left. He shut the door behind him, listened, and once again, as he had so often done before, slid down the banister on his hands. He opened the dining-room door. His father was in an arm-chair by the window, asleep. Tarabas stood on the threshold and looked at him. If anyone should find him there, he could say he had made a mistake in the door. He stood a while watching his father’s cheeks puff in and out, and the moustache rise and fall with them, and Tarabas’s heart was quite cold. His father’s hands lay inert on either arm of the chair; wasted hands along the backs of which the thick veins stood out, powerful blood-streams, swollen yet congealed, underneath the thin coating of the skin. There had been a time when Tarabas had kissed those hands; they were brown and muscular then, they smelt of tobacco and stables, earth and weather, and were not merely hands, but also more, the symbols of royal-parental power, a special kind of hand, unlike all others, which only a father, his father, might possess.

The window was wide open. The scent of the sweet May rain was in the room, and the perfume of the chestnut-candles, late in blooming. The father’s lips, invisible behind the thick moustache, opened and closed with every breath he drew, emitting loud noises that were strange and funny, yes, ribald. They seemed to mock the dignity of sleep and sleeper, and came between the son and the reverence to which he would gladly have given himself up in unseen contemplation of his father. He longed for the cold awe, even for the fear, with which his father had inspired him in the olden days. But he found his feeling rather one of pity for the faint absurdity of this old man asleep, so helplessly, so utterly surrendered to the organs of his body as they struggled weakly, whistling, for air; and far, far from lying there a mighty king wrapped in repose, he looked rather like a comical victim of sleep and broken health.

And yet for a moment the son felt that he was in duty bound to kiss his father’s lifeless hand. Yes, for a moment it seemed to him that he had come there for that purpose only. The feeling grew so strong that he no longer thought of what danger might threaten him if anyone were suddenly to open the door and find him there. He moved very quietly over to the arm-chair, knelt down cautiously, and breathed a kiss over the back of his father’s nearest hand. Then he turned away immediately, and reached the door again in three silent strides. Noiselessly he pressed the latch and opened the door, and went out of the house through the hall, as he had come. He returned to the yard and sat down again beside Andrey.

“Well, you were long enough in that elegant place,” the old man jested. “We’ve only had those new-fangled ones about a year. That’s the English style of water-closets, and we had them put in because there was no making the others decent again after we’d had the soldiers billeted on us time after time.”

“Yes, they’re very fine closets,” said Tarabas. “Pity there’ll be no one to inherit them.”

“Oh, well — our young lady will go on living here. If she ever does marry, there’ll be something put aside for her dowry, so they say. But it isn’t likely that she’ll find anyone now. The men have all been wiped out — those that might have done. There’s none of them left, far and wide. And then, of course, she’s not pretty, our young lady, poor thing. She looks just like her mother even now, young as she is. Sickly and thin, and as if she’s always crying. Now her cousin Maria, she wasn’t like that. She’s in Germany now. Went off with one of those Germans, she did. They say he married her, but I’ve my doubts about it. She was engaged to our young master, too — there was plenty of talk about that. They say he was in too much of a hurry to wait for the wedding — you know. And ‘once fell, never well,’ as the saying goes. They say, she had no fault to find with the war — well, the German gentleman must have noticed that too. …”

“All sorts of things go on among the rich folk,” said Tarabas.

“There’s no rich at all any more,” Andrey gossiped on. “Poor things! Everywhere else in Russia except here, they’ve had everything taken away from them, and shared out among the poor. God save me from such things, I say! I know my own luck, that I’m here, not there. … Look, there goes the mistress — see, over yonder.”

She was wearing a long, black dress and a black lace cap. Her trembling head drooped down so low that Tarabas could catch no more than a fleeting glimpse of waxen skin, shimmering yellowly, and the pointed profile of her nose. She crossed the yard with little, irregular steps. A swarm of cackling hens greeted her with noise and flapping of wings.

“She feeds the chickens, poor soul!” said Andrey.

Tarabas watched her. He heard how his mother, imitating the voices of the fowl, sent forth clucking, crowing, cheeping, quacking sounds. Greyish-yellow wisps of hair escaped from underneath her cap and fell about her face. His mother herself became, in that setting, something like a clucking hen. The whole picture of her there was foolish in the extreme; he saw her as an aged, black-clad simpleton, and it was clear beyond a doubt that the stupid fowl surrounding her had been for many years her only companions.

And Tarabas watched her, saying to himself: “Her womb bore me, she nursed me at her breasts, her voice sang me to sleep. That is my mother.”

He got up, went to her, stepping into the midst of the fowl, bent very low, and murmured: “Lady!”

Her pointed chin came up; her little red-rimmed eyes, with a few wisps of whitish-yellow hair blowing over them, cast not a look at Tarabas. She turned round and screamed: “Andrey! Andrey!” in a croaking voice.

At the same moment a window opened in the upper story of the house. Old Tarabas’s head appeared. He shouted:

“Andrey! Where is that good-for-nothing? Throw the tramp out! Go through his pockets! Where’s Yury? How many times have I got to tell the lot of you that I won’t have beggars in my place! To hell with you all!”—The old man’s voice capsized; he leaned still farther over the window-sill, the blood rushed to his head, and he screeched: “Get rid of him! At once! At once!” countless times without stopping.

Andrey took Tarabas gently by the arm and led him to the back gate.

“Go with God!” said Andrey softly. Then shut the heavy gate with much noise. It creaked on its hinges and fell to with a heavy crash of irretrievable finality. It quivered a little with the force of it.

Tarabas took the willow-path, the narrow way between the marshes.

A FINE, dry summer set in. But it did not warm the heart of Tarabas. The torn boots in which he had gone home for the last time he had thrown away in the swamps behind the house. They were lost to sight in a moment. There was first a slight gurgling, then the green face of the marsh had smoothed itself out again without a wrinkle to show where they had sunk. Before leaving the narrow path beside the willow trees, Tarabas put on the other shoes that he had brought with him. Trusty and faithful shoes, they had waited for him all the years of the war, and since, at the foot of his own bed. He had worn them in America. In those shoes — they pinched a little now — he had roamed the stone streets of New York every evening on his way to fetch Katharina from her work. This must be the very spot, too, where he had met Maria years ago. He remembered the rage of passion with which he had stared at the lacings of her boots; and how the two of them had trod the narrow way, one behind the other with such care, lest they miss the path and step into the marsh; and the turmoil of their senses as they pressed on impatiently towards the wood.