Joseph Roth - Tarabas

Meanwhile Tarabas ate his plate clean, thoroughly, without haste and serene in spirit. It grew dark; Kristianpoller in the parlour was lighting the big round lamp.

“I must go now,” said Fedya, and took Tarabas’s empty plate. He wanted to say: “And so must you!” But he waited a while yet.

“Have you still far to go?” he asked.

“No,” said Tarabas. “I’m almost home now.”

He got up, thanked Fedya, and went down the high street of Koropta. On either side they had begun to rebuild the houses that the fire had burnt and devastated. In front of the half-finished buildings the women sat and gossiped as before. Girls were driving a new generation of hens and ducks and geese home for their night’s rest; they urged them forward with waving arms and billowing skirts. Infants mewed. Children cried. Jews were returning, black and hurrying, from the occupations of the day. They had begun to shut their garish little shops. Iron bars clattered. The first stars glittered in the sky.

Tarabas’s way was straight ahead. At the end of the high street a by-path turned into a field. It led to the Jews’ cemetery. The little grey wall shimmered through the blue of the summer night. The gate was locked. In the cottage where the caretaker lived light was still burning. Tarabas vaulted the wall without a sound. For a while he groped up and down among the hundreds of gravestones, all alike in rows; he lit a match each time to light the angular characters which he could not read, and paused to look at the strange drawings — two hands outspread in benediction with the thumbs joined at their tips, a lion with eagle’s wings upon its back, a six-pointed star, two open pages of a book covered with the indecipherable writing.

In front of the last row of graves — a small space still waited for the next dead Jews — Tarabas scooped out a little hole in the earth with his hands, undid one of the two bags from round his neck, laid it in the hole, filled up the hole with earth again, and smoothed it with his hands. An owl cried somewhere, a bat flew by, the sky of night streamed forth its deep and luminous blue and the brilliance of its stars.

“It was a red beard,” said Tarabas to himself. “It frightened me. I have buried it.”

He left the cemetery by the way he had entered it, over the wall, and turned back along the by-path. It was quite quiet in the little town. Only the dogs, hearing Tarabas go by, began to bark. He found a shelter for the night in one of the cottages which had only just begun to be rebuilt. It smelt of damp mortar and fresh lime. Tarabas slept the night in a corner, awoke with the sunrise, and went out into the street. He met the earliest of the pious Jews, hurrying to the synagogue, stopped them, and asked where Shemariah lived. They were astonished at his question, gave no answer, but stood and looked at him a long while.

“You needn’t be afraid of me,” said Tarabas — and it seemed to him that someone laughed, as he spoke these words. Was anybody still afraid of him? It was the first time in his life that he had said such a thing. Would it have ever occurred to him to say it while he was still the mighty Tarabas — could he have done so then? “We’ve known each other for a long time, Shemariah and I,” he went on.

The Jews exchanged inquiring, knowing glances, then one of them said: “If it’s Shemariah you want, you’d better ask at Nissen’s. The blue shop, three doors from the market-place.”

The shop-keeper Nissen was sitting beside a samovar in which maize was cooking. His many-coloured wares were spread out all around him, and he was on the look-out for customers. He was a comfortable, elderly man with a grey beard and the portliness that denotes the man of substance. An esteemed citizen of Koropta and a passionate philanthropist, he seemed already to have received the safe assurance that his benefactions on earth had caused a place to be reserved for him in the Jews’ heaven, ready for him to enter when the time came.

“Yes,” he said. “Shemariah lives here with me, in the attic. The poor simple creature! You used to know him in the old days, did you? Do you know his story? Well, there was a colonel here — a new one; Tarabas was his name — may it be wiped out! But they say he died of a stroke soon after — what a merciful death for such a villain! Well, this colonel — he pulled out poor She-mariah’s beard. Just as he was on his way to bury a Torah. Ever since then he’s been quite foolish. He couldn’t work any more, or anything. So I said to myself: ‘You take him in, Nissen!’ What can you do? Someone has to look after these poor souls. He lives with me, like my brother. You can go upstairs to him if you like.”

It was a tiny attic which housed Shemariah, with a round sky-light instead of a window. A wooden bench was spread with Shemariah’s bed-clothes; this bench was what he slept on. As Tarabas entered, he was sitting at the bare table with a large book open in front of him; he was humming to himself as he read. He must have thought that it was someone he knew who had come into the room, for it was some time before he raised his head. But then a shock of terror transformed his face. His terror blazed, an icy fire, in his staring eyes. His humming song broke off; he gazed at Tarabas in a paralysis of fear. His lips moved, but no sound came from them.

“I am a beggar,” said Tarabas. “Don’t be afraid, Shemariah.” Then he added: “Have you a piece of bread to spare for me?”

It was a long time before the Jew Shemariah could grasp the words. The language he could hardly understand; he must have realized Tarabas’s wish simply by the ragged clothes he wore, his attitude, his gestures. He uttered a shrill titter, rose, clung fearfully to the wall, and slunk along it, with one shoulder half turned to the stranger, still tittering, to the bed. From underneath the pillow he pulled out a piece of dry bread, laid it on the table, and pointed to it with his finger. Tarabas approached the table, Shemariah pressed himself against the bed. Tarabas saw that all round the Jew’s thin, freckled face a short and meagre, fan-like beard of silver hair had grown, with bare scars between, as though it had been gnawed by mice. It was a shabby garland of pitiful silver which had begun to clothe the marred face again.

Tarabas’s eyes fell; he took the bread and said: “I thank you.” He left the room. On the way down the narrow ladder which led to the attic, he began to eat the bread. It tasted of Shemariah’s sweat and bed.

“He didn’t recognize me,” said Tarabas to the shopkeeper Nissen, when he came downstairs again. “God be with you!”

“Here’s a maize-cob just done,” said Nissen. “Take it with you to eat on the way!” One should do good to all the poor, said the shop-keeper to himself. But a poor man may also be a thief; one need not let him remain in one’s shop longer than necessary.

“All in good order,” Tarabas thought, and went his way. “It is all in good order now.”

A FEW weeks later — the summer was already nearing its end, the chestnuts were ripening and the Jews of Koropta were getting ready to celebrate their high festivals — there came to the general store kept by the shop-keeper Nissen the gentle Brother Eustachius from the Lobra monastery near by. The good brethren of Lobra occupied themselves with the care of the sick; some of the brethren were accomplished surgeons and physicians, and there were even Jews in Koropta who, when they fell ill, went neither to the local quacks nor to the doctors, but to the monks.

Sometimes, at certain seasons of the year, they would come — always only two — to the little town to make a collection for the poor. A strange feeling would then take possession of the Jews — compounded of the alien and the familiar, of gratitude, respect, and fear. While the little round caps worn by the monks upon their shorn skulls were things that they knew well, so much the greater was their terror of the great metal crucifixes which hung like a weapon upon each brother’s hip, the cross which their forefathers were accused of having erected for an unspeakably dreadful purpose, which was a symbol to all the peoples of the earth that they would be blest, and to them only the token of suffering and damnation.