Joseph Roth - Tarabas

“Is he? Well … And his son?”

“He said nothing about his son.”

“Pity!” said Tarabas, and lay back on the pillows.

“I should like,” he said then, “to be buried in Koropta. Please let someone send word to my father and mother and sister; and General Lakubeit must also be told.”

Those were Tarabas’s last words. He died that evening as the sun was going down. Through the cell’s iron window-bars it cast eight burnished squares upon the coverlet, over which a gentle quiver passed, in the last second.

They buried Colonel Nicholas Tarabas in Koropta with all the military honours due to his rank. There was music, and a volley was fired over the grave. The Jews of Koropta were at the cemetery too. Accompanying the father, who hobbled to the graveside on his two handsome ebony sticks, the veiled mother and the old servant Andrey had come.

After the funeral the parents entered the black carriage, and Andrey drove them away. None of those present had seen a tear in the eyes of old Tarabas.

On the road the carriage overtook the troop returning to the barracks to the bright music of the brass.

Brother Eustachius ordered a head-stone for the dead man, a beautiful stone of black marble. Eustachius knew no more about him than the dates of his birth and death. Had it been possible, he would have had the stone inscribed with the words: “A fool that deserved to enter heaven.” But this could not be called suitable as an epitaph. Therefore Brother Eustachius meditated over the matter of a suitable one.

A WEEK later he went with the notary to the Jew Nissen. They climbed, all three, the ladder up to Shemariah’s attic. Shemariah rose from his seat, and shut the book.

He no longer fled before the sight of strangers. He merely rose, and remained standing by the table, with his closed book in front of him.

In the presence of the two witnesses, the reverend Brother Eustachius and Nissen Pichenik, general dealer, he declared Shemariah Korpus, sexton, sole heir of Colonel Nicholas Tarabas, recently deceased. The legacy consisted of a bag of gold coins to the value of five hundred and twenty gold francs, and a few hundred bank-notes.

The notary put the money down on the table. Brother Eustachius and the dealer Nissen counted the gold pieces, and the notary shovelled them back into the bag. The bag was then handed to Shemariah across the table.

He balanced it in his right hand, tittered, transferred it to his left. He held it by the string, flicked at it with one finger of his right hand and set it spinning with a clinking sound. He gazed at it a while with an expression of happiness, and finally let it fall upon the table.

“I don’t need it,” said Shemariah at last. “Take it away. You can have it.”

As, however, nobody moved to take it, he began without another word to offer them the little bag one after the other, first the notary, then the dealer Nissen, and lastly the monk Eustachius. But each one pushed it back.

Shemariah waited a while. Then he took the bag, went over to his bed, and put it underneath the pillow.

The three men left him. On the way down the ladder the notary said: “All that good money wasted — too bad! So he lived in vain after all, that Tarabas!”

“That we don’t know,” said Brother Eustachius. “That is something we can never know.”

They took their leave of the dealer Nissen.

“Let’s go over to Kristianpoller’s for a moment,” the notary proposed.

A few moments later they were sitting in Kristianpoller’s parlour. The one-eyed inn-keeper came to their table. “Well, he’s dead now,” he said.

“He was one of your guests,” remarked the notary.

“For a long time,” the Jew Kristianpoller answered. “He was a queer guest in the Kristianpoller inn.”

“I should say,” said the notary, “that he was a queer guest on earth altogether.”

This struck the ear of the monk Eustachius. And he decided to have Tarabas’s gravestone inscribed with this inscription:

COLONEL NICHOLAS TARABAS

A GUEST ON EARTH

It seemed to him a modest, just, appropriate epitaph.

AT the moment when these lines are being written, some fifteen years have passed since the death of the strange man whose story they have told. Over the grave of Colonel Nicholas Tarabas stands a simple cross of black marble, paid for by old father Tarabas.

The stranger visiting Koropta today can find no trace of these remarkable, sad, and wonderful events. All the houses in the little town have been renovated within and painted white without, and a building committee, modelled according to the western-European pattern, takes care that they are all put in order at the same time, and that they resemble each other to the last detail, like soldiers.

The old priest died a year or two ago. The foolish Shemariah still lives in the dealer Nissen’s attic; he keeps the useless bag of gold underneath his pillow and can hardly be induced to touch it, let alone show it or give it out of his hand. As the new government of the country has its own coinage now, the old gold franc and ruble pieces have — as the dealer Nissen correctly observes — lost much of their original value. The attempt to convey this fact to Shemariah proved completely fruitless. He only tittered. It may be that the fool was indeed laughing at the wise ones for their wisdom. Perhaps it was clear to him alone that the value of these gold coins never had been, nor could be, a value of the kind that is noted on the quotation lists of the world’s banks and exchanges. Doubtless the dealer Nissen nourishes an unspoken hope that he will one day inherit the bag of money. It would be, at that, no more than the obvious reward for his benefactions to the foolish Shemariah. Moreover, other poor and needy ones would have their share of it, if it fell to him. For the dealer Nissen will be a man diligent in charity and good works until he dies. He owes it to God, to his reputation, and to his business also. And probably the dealer Nissen is right.

In all Koropta he and the inn-keeper Kristianpoller are the only ones who sometimes, over a glass of mead — and the dish of salted dried peas which goes with it — talk of the strange Colonel Tarabas, and how he came, a mighty king, into the little town, to be buried there a beggar. In Kristianpoller’s out-house there still stands an altar before the miraculous picture of the Virgin, but services are held there less and less often as time goes on. A new generation is growing up which knows nothing of the old story. As in all the years before it happened, the people go to the church to pray. And the new generation is little given to praying at the best of times.

The pig-market comes round often. The little horses neigh, the pigs squeal, the peasants get very drunk. When they have reached the stage of helplessness, the servant Fedya takes their arms and drags them to their carts, where he sobers them with a flood of cold water. The Jews continue to deal in beads and kerchiefs, pocket-knives, scythes, and sickles. Every year hop-merchants from other parts come to Koropta. Many a one, taking a look round the neat little town, strolls down the high street, climbs the hill with the church on its summit, wanders through the grave-yard, and notices the odd epitaph:

COLONEL NICHOLAS TARABAS

A GUEST ON EARTH

The stranger returns to Kristianpoller’s inn, drinks a beer, a mead, or a glass of wine, and says to the inn-keeper: “And by the way, I came across a very curious grave up there in that churchyard of yours!”

Nathan Kristianpoller — he himself knows not why — likes these guests best of all who come into his house. He sits down at the stranger’s table and tells him the story of Tarabas.