Joseph Roth - Tarabas

And so he went, so let himself be ordered, from fire to fire, from murder to murder, and neither hurt nor harm befell him. A higher power kept watch over him and preserved him to live his strange life out. His men loved him and feared him, too. His glance was a command, and the least gesture of his hand. And when it happened that one among them revolted at some act of Tarabas’s cruelty, scarcely a single comrade stood by the malcontent. They all loved Tarabas; and none but was afraid of him.

And Tarabas loved his men, he loved his men in his own fashion, because he was their lord and master. He saw many of them die. He liked it. He liked to have men die all round him, and when, in the intervals between the onslaughts, he went — the only one in all the regiment to do so — through the trenches calling the roll of his men, and the answer “Fallen” came, he marked it with a cross in his note-book. At such moments he enjoyed the fancy that he himself was dead, that all the happenings amongst which he moved were taking place in the beyond, and that the others, the fallen, had passed as certainly into a third life as he into this second.

He was not once wounded or once sick; he never asked for leave. He was the only one in the regiment who neither received mail nor expected any. His home he never mentioned. And this confirmed the general opinion that there was something very strange about him.

Thus he spent the war.

When the revolution broke out, he kept his company savagely in hand, by looks and gestures, fists, pistol, and stick. It was not for him to understand what politics had brought to pass. It did not disturb him that the Tsar had been deposed. In his troop he was the Tsar. It could only please him when his superior officers, the staff and general headquarters, began to send out confused and contradictory orders. He need pay the less attention to them. Soon, because he was the only one in all the regiment whom the revolution had not bewildered or transformed, he acquired more power than the colonel himself. He became the virtual commander of the regiment. And he transferred it hither and thither as he thought fit, went into independent scrimmages, broke into unoffending villages and town-lets, cheerful and fresh as in the first weeks of the war.

One day — it was a Sunday — there appeared in his regiment a soldier he had never seen before. For the first time since he had seen service he felt a shock, and the cause of it was a simple, ordinary private. They were encamped in a tiny Galician village, half shot to pieces but with a few cottages still fairly intact. In one of these Captain Tarabas had spent the night with the peasant woman’s fourteen-year-old daughter, and in the morning had ordered his servant to bring him coffee and brandy. It was a sunny day, about nine o’clock in the morning. In freshly polished boots and wide riding-breeches, brushed and cleaned, riding-crop in hand, shaved and equipped with all the sense of well-being that could fill a man like Tarabas on a brilliant autumn morning after a thoroughly agreeable night, the captain left the hut and the girl, who was crouching at the door in her chemise. Tarabas tapped her on the shoulder gently with his riding-switch. The girl rose. He asked her what her name was.

“You asked me last night what my name was, Master,” she said, “when I came into bed.”

She had tiny green eyes deeply imbedded in the cheeks; a mischievous and wicked spark burnt in them. Tarabas saw her young bosom underneath her shift, and a thin chain round her neck. He thought of the crucifix Maria had worn and said, touching her head with his whip: “Your name’s Maria from now on, as long as I stay here!”

“Yes, Master!” said the girl.

And Tarabas went away whistling.

He was in excellent spirits. He tried to disperse the glistening strands of the gossamers with the handle of his crop. He did not succeed; the mysterious creatures made of nothing wound themselves, on the contrary, round the handle, positively caressing it. That too pleased Tarabas. Thereupon he made himself a cigarette, taking the tobacco loose out of his pocket, and slackened his pace. He was nearing his men’s encampment. The sergeant was already coming towards him to report. It was Sunday. The soldiers lay about on the sloping meadows and in the mown fields, lazy and inert.

“Stay where you are!” called Tarabas as he neared them. One, however, rose from his place at the edge of the road, one nearest Tarabas. And although this soldier saluted as prescribed, stiff and immovable as a post and with extreme deference even, the captain found something insubordinate and insolent, something incomprehensibly superior in the whole figure of the man. No, he had not been trained in Tarabas’s school! This was a stranger in the company!

Tarabas came on — and instantly stepped back. At that moment the bell of the little Greek church began to ring. The first peasant women appeared upon the road that led to the church. Today was Sunday. Tarabas crossed himself, still with his eyes fixed upon the strange soldier. And it was as though he had crossed himself in fear of him. For in that instant he had seen distinctly that the strange soldier was a red-haired Jew. A red-haired Jew. Red-haired, Jew — and it was Sunday!

For the first time since he was in the army his old superstitiousness awoke in Tarabas. He knew at once that from that moment on his life would undergo a change.

“How did you come here?” asked Tarabas. The soldier pulled a paper out of his pocket, by which one saw that he had come from the fifty-second infantry regiment, which had been wiped out, partly through desertions and partly by going over to the Bolsheviki.

“All right!” said Captain Tarabas. “Are you a Jew?”

“Yes,” said the soldier. “My parents were Jews. But I don’t believe in God!”

Nicholas Tarabas fell back another step. He beat against his high boot with his riding-whip. The redheaded man had grey-green eyes and short flaming bushes over them instead of eyebrows.

“So that’s what you are!” said the captain. “An atheist! Hm! Hm!”

He went on. The soldier lay down again on the edge of the road. Tarabas turned round once only. He saw the stranger’s red hair; it shone out amidst the meagre grass of the slope, a little fire on the grey and dusty highway.

FROM that very day the world of Captain Tarabas began to undergo a change. His men no longer obeyed him as before; they seemed to like him less and fear him less. And when he chastised any one of them, he felt an indefinable, invisible, inaudible resentment go through the ranks. The men no longer looked him straight in the face. One day two of his non-commissioned officers vanished, the best men in the regiment, at whose side he had fought since his first day in the field. A private or two followed them a week later. But the red-haired atheist did not leave, the only one whose desertion the captain ardently desired. He was certainly a faultless soldier. He was punctual and obedient. But Captain Tarabas seldom gave him any order. The others felt it. Yes, they knew. Sometimes Tarabas watched the red-haired one talking to the soldiers. They listened to him, surrounded him, hung on his words. Tarabas would then call one of them at random to him.

“What is he telling you, that red-headed one?”

“Stories, sir!” the soldier would answer.

“What sort of stories?”

“Oh, funny ones, sir — about women!”

And Tarabas knew the man was lying. But he was ashamed that he had been lied to, and asked no further questions.

One morning the captain found among his orderly’s things something he had never set eyes on until then, a Bolshevist pamphlet. He put a match to it; the pages burnt only half-way and then the flame went out. Tarabas threw it down. Thereafter he kept a more watchful eye upon his servant.