Joseph Roth - Tarabas

It was a clear and perfect autumn day. In its matchless azure brilliance the dilapidated little houses with their crooked shingled roofs, the wooden sidewalks, the dried-out, silver-gleaming mud between, the ragged uniforms — all looked like a splendid painting in continuous movement; the figures and all its separate parts seemed to be still in search of their final place in it. In amongst the coloured uniforms flitted the quick, fearsome shadows of Jews in long caftans, and the light-yellow sheepskins of the peasant men and women. Women with variegated flowered kerchiefs on their heads sat on the low thresholds in the open doorways of the little houses, engaged in purposeless, agitated chatter. The children played in the middle of the street. And through the silvery slush ducks and geese waded towards such black puddles as had happily not yet been dried up by the sun.

Amidst this scene of peace the poor inhabitants of Koropta were at their wits’ end and terribly excited. They lived in expectation of something dreadful, worse perhaps than anything the war had brought them yet. Its immense, burning boots had trodden into the poor rows of Koropta’s houses and left their blackened, wasted track behind. The old low wall round the graveyard on the hill had many holes to show where senseless shots had missed their aim; there the war had buried its murderous fingers in the stone. With those same fingers it had lately strangled many a son of the little town. Peaceful in their lives the people of Koropta had always been, without a thought beyond their meagre days and quiet nights, intent upon the simple course of their simple destinies. Suddenly overtaken by the war, they first stood petrified before its dreadful face, then turned and fled before it, but turned back again, made up their minds to stay, spellbound in its fiery breath. They all were innocent, they knew nothing of history’s murderous laws, stolid and uncomplaining they bore the blows God dealt them as they had borne the Tsar’s blows years without end before. They hardly could believe the tidings that the Tsar no longer sat upon his golden throne in St. Petersburg, still less the second and more awful news that he had been shot like a dog too old to be of any more use. And now they were being told that they themselves were no longer part of Russia, but an independent country. Now, said the teachers, the lawyers, the educated folk, they were a free, delivered nation. What was the meaning of such talk as this? And of what dire peril was this tumult in their town the promise?

Captain Tarabas troubled his head as little about the laws of history as did the inhabitants of Koropta. The deliverance of the nation enabled him to continue his life as a soldier. What had he to do with politics? That was for the teachers, the lawyers, the educated folk! Captain Tarabas was a colonel now. It was his task to get together a first-rate regiment and to command it. No other man than Nicholas Tarabas would have been capable of gathering a whole regiment together with a handful of men. He had a definite plan. In the diminutive railway-station of Koropta, immediately in front of the wooden barracks, where an old Russian major still gave orders to one non-commissioned officer and the station sentry, Tarabas drew his men up in a double row and put them through a little drill. He had them kneel down and shoulder arms, and fire a volley or two into the air, all in the presence of a few astonished spectators, some in civilian clothes and some in uniform; the station sentry and the old major were also in the audience. Tarabas, visibly gratified at the number of spectators whom the meaningless shooting had lured to watch the remarkable proceedings, thereupon addressed his company.

“You men,” spoke Tarabas, “who have followed me into many battles and the rests between them, into the war against the enemy and against the revolution, you have no wish to lay down your arms now and go back peacefully to your homes. You, and I, too, we want to die as soldiers, and as soldiers only! With your help I am going to form a new regiment in this place, to serve the new country fate has given us. Fall out!”

The little troop shouldered arms. All of them were terrible to see, more terrible by far than the menacing and ragged figures on the station and about the town. For they possessed all the accoutred, rattling, clinking, spurred, and well-groomed frightfulness of their leader and master. Bright gleamed the diligently oiled rifle-barrels; the shoulder-straps were taut and strong across the broad chests and shoulders, and belted the close jackets without spot or wrinkle. Like Tarabas they all wore martial, neatly brushed, enormous moustaches for the adornment of their faces, sleek with good nourishment. And the eyes of all of them were cold and hard, good, vigilant steel. Tarabas himself, although Heaven knows his strength of purpose needed no heartening sight to feed and strengthen it still more, even Tarabas felt his power confirmed when he looked at those men of his. Each one of them was a faithful and devoted image of himself. Together they were as six-and-twenty Tarabases, six-and-twenty replicas of the great Nicholas Tarabas, and but for him non-existent. That is what they were, his twenty-six reflections.

He told them to wait for the time being, and strode with clanking footsteps into the station headquarters. He found nobody there. For the old major, likewise his sergeant, were still outside on the platform whence they had witnessed Tarabas’s remarkable drill-parade and the remarkable discipline of his troops. Colonel Tarabas struck the table with his riding-crop. It was a blow that must surely be heard all over the now silent station. And the major appeared at once.

“I am Colonel Tarabas,” said Nicholas. “I have been charged with the formation of a regiment in this town. I shall also be taking over the command of the town until further orders. For the present I should be obliged if you will inform me where I shall find billets for myself and my twenty-six men.”

The old major remained quietly beside the door through which he had just entered. It was many a long day since he had heard talk like this. It was the soldier’s music, familiar to him since boyhood and heard no more since the outbreak of the revolution, a melody he had thought never to hear again. The grey-haired major — Kisilaika was his name — felt his limbs stiffen under Tarabas’s words. He felt his bones hardening, his poor old bones; his muscles tightened and obeyed the military language they knew.

“Very good, sir,” said Major Kisilaika. “The main barracks lie half a mile outside the town. But I’m afraid the commissariat has run very low. I don’t know—”

“I’m not going another step,” said Colonel Tarabas. “What food there is I want brought here. Who are all those fellows loafing about the station? Let them bring it. I’ll place a guard at each exit.”

And Tarabas returned to his men.

“Nobody in this station is to leave it,” cried Tarabas.

And there was general consternation. Pure curiosity and unthinking idleness had brought them there to gather near the strange newcomers and gaze at them. And now they were prisoners. For a long time they had been accustomed to bearing hunger and thirst and privations of every kind. But freedom had been theirs. Now at one blow even their freedom had been taken from them. They were prisoners. They no longer even dared to look about them. Of Tarabas’s former audience one only, a little skinny civilian Jew, inspired by timorous recklessness or the hope of God knows what miracle, attempted to gain one of the exits. But on the instant Tarabas shot at the fugitive — and the poor thing fell; with a loud, unhuman bellow he fell down, hit in the left thigh in the precise spot at which Tarabas had aimed. The thin, bony little head with its sparse goatee lay stretched face upwards right on the edge of a pile of gravel which was used to show the engine-drivers where to stop, and the wretched boots with their ripped soles and misshapen toes pointed towards the glass roof. Tarabas himself went over to the casualty, picked up the feather-weight Jew, and carried him across both arms, as he would have carried a thin little birch tree, into the office of the station headquarters. There was complete silence. When the report of the shot had died away, not another sound was to be heard. It was as though it had hit everyone there, and struck them dumb and numb. Tarabas laid the weightless body of his now unconscious victim on the major’s paper-strewn table, ripped up the Jew’s ancient, shiny, dark-grey trouser-leg, pulled out his own handkerchief, inspected the wound, and said to the startled major: “Flesh-wound!” And then he called out: “Bandage!” And one of his men who had been a hairdresser and performed the ambulance duties to the troop came in and began to render swift and careful first-aid to the wounded Jew.