Joseph Roth - Tarabas

When they stood up again, the stars were gleaming through the tree-tops. It was chilly. Clinging together, they returned to the house along the avenue. At the door they stopped and exchanged long kisses, as though their parting was for ever.

“You go in first,” said Tarabas. These were the only words that either had said in all the time.

Tarabas followed slowly.

The family assembled for supper. The elder Tarabas asked his son when he would have to leave. At four o’clock in the morning, said Nicholas, so as to be quite certain not to miss the train. Just as he had reckoned it out himself, said the old man.

The special meal which the father had ordered in the afternoon was now brought in — a steaming milk-porridge, boiled pork and potatoes, vodka and a light Burgundy in between, white sheep’s cheese at the end. The talk grew loud. The old man asked many questions. Nicholas told about America. On the spur of the moment he invented a factory in which he had just begun to work. A film factory; typically American. At five o’clock one morning, the hour at which he had been going to his work for weeks, he heard the newsboys shouting the news about the war. And so he had gone straight to the Russian Embassy. One evening before that there had been a fight between himself, Tarabas, and the owner of a café, a vile fellow. He had insulted and even maltreated an innocent girl, probably a waitress in the café. You came across such people in New York.

Even the nonchalant sister’s attention was won by this story, and his mother kept repeating: “God bless you, my boy!” Nicholas himself was convinced that he had been telling the perfect truth.

And then they all got up. The farewell was celebrated standing. And old Tarabas said that they would see their son again in four weeks’ time. And they all kissed him. Tomorrow morning he would rather not see anyone. Maria’s kiss was light. His mother held him a while in her arms, swaying backwards and forwards with him as they stood. Perhaps she was remembering the time when she had rocked him in her lap. The servants came. With each one, men and maids, Nicholas exchanged the kiss of parting.

He went up to his room. He lay down as he was, with the wet mud still on his boots, upon the bed. He must have been asleep an hour when an unfamiliar sound woke him; he saw that his door was open and went to close it. The window opposite was open too.

He could not get to sleep again. It occurred to him that it could not have been merely the wind. Had Maria wanted to meet him again? He knew her room. She lay there in her nightdress now, and the crucifix hung above her bed. It frightened him a little.

He opened the door. He slid down the banisters with both hands so as not to tread upon the stairs with his heavy boots. Now he was opening Maria’s door. He bolted it behind him. He stood there for a moment without sound or movement. There was the bed; he knew it well. As a boy he and Maria and his sister had often pulled the sheets off it to play funeral processions. Each had been the corpse in turn. Through the wide square of the window shone the clear blue night. Tarabas approached the bed. The floor creaked, and Maria started up. Still half asleep and wholly terrified, she opened her arms. She received Tarabas as he was, booted and clad, felt with rapture the roughness of his unshaven face against her own, and groped for his neck with awkward hands.

Appeased, domineering and noisy, he got up. Maria’s hands, which she stretched out towards him still, he laid back on the coverlet, gently but with a faint touch of impatience.

“You’re mine!” said Tarabas. “When I come back we’ll get married. And you’ll be faithful to me; don’t you look at another man while I’m away. Good-bye!”—And he left the room. Careless of the noise he made, he went upstairs to fetch his things.

He found his father in his room. “Spying on me,” the thought flashed into Nicholas’s mind. “I’m being spied on.” The old fierce resentment against his father woke again, the resentment against the old man who had cruelly driven him from home out into the cruelty of New York. Old Tarabas rose; his dressing-gown gaped open, showing the peasant shirt and the long tubes of the underpants tied at the massive ankles. With both hands the father seized Nicholas by the epaulettes.

“I degrade you!” he said. Oh, that was a voice one knew of old, it was no louder than usual. Only the Adam’s apple rose and fell more violently than otherwise — and cold fury stood in the eyes, clear, icy fury.

“Something’s going to happen now,” Nicholas said to himself, and fear for his epaulettes bewildered him.

“Let go!” he shouted. The next moment the paternal hand had struck him savagely across the cheek. Nicholas fell back; the old man put his dressing-gown to rights.

“If nothing happens to you in the war, you marry!” said old Tarabas. “Now go! At once! Get out!”

Nicholas Tarabas seized his sword and coat and turned to go. He opened the door, paused a moment, turned back again and spat. Then he slammed the door behind him and hastened out of the house. Horses, coachman, and carriage were already waiting to take him to the station.

THE war became his home. The war became his wide and bloody home. He moved from one sector to another. He came to peaceful territory, set villages on fire, left the debris of smaller and larger towns behind him, and mourning women, orphaned children, beaten, hanged, and murdered men. He turned about, learnt the suspense of flight before the enemy, took last-minute revenge on supposed traitors, destroyed bridges, roads, railways, obeyed and commanded, and all with equal relish. He was the bravest officer in his regiment. He led patrols with the caution and cunning of a beast of prey out for booty, and with the confident daring of a foolish man to whom his life means nothing. He drove his timorous peasants to the attack with pistol and whip, but fired the brave ones with his own example. — He was first into everything. In the art of invisible motion, when, masked by trees, shrubs, or undergrowth, covered by darkness or wrapped in the mists of dawn, he would steal upon barbed-wire barricades to the undoing of the enemy, he was unequalled. He never needed to look at any map; his whetted senses divined the secrets of every territory. Muffled and distant sounds came clearly to his ears. His watchful eye caught every suspicious movement. His certain hand went out, shot, and never missed its mark, held what it grasped, came down without mercy upon backs and faces, shut to a fist with cruel knuckles, but opened readily to the pressure of comradeship, answering it with warmth and steel. Tarabas liked none but his own kind. He was mentioned in dispatches and promoted to captain. Whoever in his company showed a tendency to hesitate, let alone a hint of cowardice, he was Tarabas’s enemy, no different from the enemy against whom the whole army was at war. But whoever, like Tarabas, held his life cheap and had no fear of death, he was the friend of his bosom. Hunger and thirst, pain and fatigue, days and nights sleepless on the march, strengthened his heart, rejoiced it even. Failing utterly to give proof of strategic talent, and incapable of comprehending what in military idiom is called “larger actions,” he was an extraordinary front officer, an admirable hunter on a small ground. Yes, he was a hunter, a wild hunter was Nicholas Tarabas.

He became acquainted with heavy drinking and light loving. Forgotten were house and home, father and mother and Cousin Maria. When one day he remembered them again, it was too late to send them any news, for by that time Tarabas’s home was in possession of the enemy. Little he cared; the war had become his vast and bloody home. Forgotten were New York and Katharina. And yet in many a pause between danger and fighting, drunkenness and sobriety, passing intoxication and passing murder, for seconds together — though for seconds only — it became clear to him that ever since the hour in which the gipsy had told his fortune at that Coney Island booth he had lived like one transformed, transformed and bewitched, like one caught in the toils of a dream. Ah, this was not his own life any more! — At times it seemed to him that he had died, and that the life he led was taking place in the beyond. But these seconds of reflection were no sooner come than gone again, and Tarabas went down once more into the narcosis of blood that flowed all round him and that he caused to flow, the odour of dead bodies, the incendiary smoke-clouds, and his love of ruin and destruction.