Joseph Roth - Tarabas

They were in their accustomed places, father and mother, his sister and his cousin Maria. They were eating kasha.

His first greeting was for the long-missed, steaming scent of this dish, the scent of fried onions but also of blissful memories of field and grain gathered to an aromatic cloud. For the first time since he had left the ship he was conscious of hunger. Behind the faint vapour that rose from the well-filled bowl in the centre of the table the faces of his family showed dimly. It was seconds later that Tarabas noticed their astonishment, and heard the clatter of spoons put down, and the noise of chairs pushed back. Old Tarabas was the first to rise. He opened his arms. Nicholas hastened towards him, and could not help remarking two or three grains of kasha upon his father’s moustache. The sight of them considerably lessened the son’s tenderness. After loud kisses had been exchanged between them, Nicholas turned to greet his mother, who had just risen with a sob; then his sister who had left her place and come round the table to reach him, and lastly his cousin Maria, coming towards him more slowly in her turn. Nicholas embraced her.

“I’d never have known you again,” he said to Maria.

Through the strong stuff of his uniform he felt her warm breast. In that moment his desire for his cousin Maria was so violent and impatient that he forgot his hunger. Her cool pursed lips no more than brushed his cheek. Old Tarabas drew up a chair and bade his son sit at his right hand. Nicholas sat down. He was once more hungry for kasha, but looking at his cousin again he felt ashamed of this.

“Have you eaten anything?” asked his mother.

“No!” said Nicholas — he almost shouted it.

They pushed plate and spoon towards him. Whilst he ate, and told them how he had arrived and climbed unseen up to his room, and how he had changed his clothes there, he watched his cousin. She was strongly built, thick-set almost, for a girl. At once tamed and untame, her two brown plaits hung over her shoulders and met beneath the table-cloth, probably in her lap. Sometimes she took her hands off the table and played with the ends of her plaits. Striking in her young and indifferent, expressionless peasant face were only the eyelashes. They were soft, silky, and black, very long and curving, frail curtains over the grey half-shut eyes. A sturdy silver crucifix lay on her breast. “Sin,” thought Tarabas; the cross excited him. It was a holy sentinel before Maria’s alluring bosom.

Tarabas in his uniform looked handsome; broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped. They asked him to tell them about America. They waited; he was silent. They began to talk about the war. Old Tarabas said that it would last three weeks. Not every soldier fell, and, as for officers, certainly not many of them would die. Now his mother began to weep again, but to this old Tarabas paid not the least attention. As though it belonged to the attributes of a mother to shed tears while others ate and talked, he held forth discursively upon the weakness of the enemy and the strength of the Russians, and not for one moment did he guess that the haggard hands of death were folded already over the whole land and over Nicholas too, his son. Dense and deaf was old Tarabas. The mother wept.

The fence of birch rods stood round the yard and orchard as of old. It was the season of the apple harvest, with the lads shaking the trees into which the maids had clambered high among the branches to pluck the fruit and to be seen the better by those below. They lifted their glowing red skirts and showed their strong white calves and thighs. Late swallows flew in big triangular flocks towards the south. The larks were trilling still, invisible in the sky. The windows were open. And one heard the lancinating song of the scythes — the last blades were being cut in all the fields, and in haste, his father told him. For the peasants were being called up, tomorrow, the day after, or in another week’s time.

To the homecomer it seemed that it all came to him from infinitely far away. He could not understand why home and countryside, father and mother, had been so much nearer to him in the remoteness of that New York of stone than here. He had come back to embrace them and feel them close to his heart again. Tarabas was disappointed. They would greet him as the prodigal returned, as their deliverer, the hero — that was how his imagination had painted the scene. Their welcome was too casual. His mother had wept, but that was her nature, Tarabas said to himself. The mother he used to see in New York was different, desperate and more tender, the kind of mother his vain child’s heart had need of. Could it be that during his long absence the household of Tarabas had grown used to being without its only son? He had wanted to surprise them; he had got in through the window, still in a boy’s harmless fun he had put on his uniform and gone into the dining-room as though America had never been. But to them it had seemed the most ordinary thing in the world that he should suddenly be there again.

He ate on, his feelings hurt, silently and with undisturbed appetite. Without a word he carried spoonful after spoonful to his mouth, and felt that it was not he himself eating but someone else feeding him. At last he was satisfied. With a look towards Maria he said:

“Well, I’ll be off again tomorrow morning. I must report the day after tomorrow at the latest.”

Were they asking him to stay a while longer? Nothing of the sort!

“Very well, very well!” said his father.

His mother sobbed a little harder. His sister was unmoved. Maria cast down her eyes. The big crucifix shone upon her breast. At last they left the table.

In the afternoon Tarabas paid a few visits, to the priest, to neighbours. He had the carriage brought round. In the full glory of his uniform, splendid in blue and silver, he drove through the green and yellow of the autumn, not yet entirely at home in it all. He clicked his tongue to animate the horses, and everywhere he stopped he brought them round in an elegant and dashing sweep, tightening the reins, and they halted short and stood like bronze horses on a monument. That had always been Tarabas’s way. All the small farmers greeted him. Windows opened for him as he passed, leaving a great cloud of sunlit dust behind. He enjoyed the drive and the respect that everyone was showing him. But none the less he thought he saw a great and unfamiliar fear in all their faces. The war had not yet begun, but already the terror of it had taken up its dwelling in the people’s hearts. They tried to say agreeable things to Tarabas, but it was a painful effort, and they kept much back that they were feeling. Tarabas was a stranger in his country — it had become the home of war.

Evening fell. Tarabas was reluctant to go home. He drove with slackened reins, letting the horses take their dreamy pace. When he came to the avenue of birches which led up to the house, he descended. The horses knew their way. They would go straight to the big stables to the left of the house and stop there; sagaciously they would announce themselves by whinnying, and the watch-dog would start barking if the groom did not come at once. Only the horses had really welcomed Tarabas. He felt how much he loved them. He stroked the shining chestnut bodies, hot after the drive, laid his forehead against each one’s forehead, inhaled the vapour from their nostrils and felt the good coolness of their leathern skin. All the love in the world seemed to him to shine out of their large eyes.

For the second time that day he took the by-path where the willows grew. The frogs sent forth their din on either side; it smelt like rain, although the sky was clear of clouds and the autumn sun was going down in brightness to a clear horizon. It dazzled him. He had to keep his eyes upon the path before him so as not to take a false step. Thus he did not see that somebody was coming towards him. A shadow close before his feet surprised him; he guessed instantly to whom it belonged, and stopped. Maria was coming down the path. She had missed him, then. She set her high-laced boots daintily and carefully one before the other along the narrow path. Suddenly Tarabas was seized with a desire to slit the intricate lacings open. A rage of passion filled him. There was no help for it now. He let Maria come. He put one arm round her. They walked, pressed hard against each other, and carefully, for fear of the swamp on either side, and out of the homesickness that was in them; their feet touched sometimes on the narrow path. They turned back, into the wood. Late birds were calling. They spoke no word. Suddenly they embraced. They turned, both at the same moment, towards each other, were locked in each other’s arms, staggered, and sank down upon the ground.