Joseph Roth: Flight Without End

Then, one evening, he sat in a train travelling westward and felt as if he was not making this journey of his own free will. Things had turned out as they always had in his life, as indeed much that is important does in the lives of others, who are deceived by the more noisy and deliberate nature of their activities into believing that an element of self-determination governs their decisions and transactions. However, they forget that over and above their own brisk exertions lies the hand of fate.

On one of those fine April mornings, when the Inner City of Vienna is as joyful as it is elegant, on one of those mornings when beautiful women stroll along the Ringstrasse with leisured gentlemen, when dark-blue siphons shine on the bright café terraces and the Salvation Army organizes musical processions, Franz Tunda appeared on the crowded sunny side of the Graben* in the same garb in which he had presented himself at the consulate in Moscow, and created an undoubted sensation. To a chemist standing in front of his aromatic establishment on the corner, he looked like a ‘Bolshevik’. Tunda’s long legs seemed even longer because he was wearing riding-breeches and high soft knee-boots. They exuded a strong odour of leather. The fur cap sat low over his sullen eyes. The chemist read danger to his shop in this face.

So Tunda found himself in Vienna. He drew unemployment relief, lived wretchedly, and looked up a few of his old friends. They informed him that his fiancée was married, and probably living in Paris.

At the end of April I received the following letter from Franz Tunda:

My dear Roth,

Last night I happened to come across your address. I have been home again for two months; I don’t know whether the word ‘home’ is appropriate. For the time being I live on unemployment relief and am applying for a place as a clerk with the Vienna municipality. This is probably hopeless. Forty per cent of the inhabitants are looking for some sort of job. What’s more — I frankly confess that I would be unhappy if I did obtain a position here.

You will naturally ask why I left Russia. I don’t know the answer. I am not even ashamed. I don’t think there is anyone in the world who could tell you with a clearer conscience why he has or has not done this or that. I don’t know whether I wouldn’t go to Australia, America, China or back to Siberia, to my brother Baranowicz, tomorrow if I had the chance. I only know that I have not been driven by any so-called ‘unrest’; on the contrary, I am totally calm. I have nothing to lose. I am neither filled with courage nor looking for adventure. I drift with the wind and I am not afraid of ruin.

I have a cold meal once a day and drink tea in a small working man’s café.

I wear a blue rubashka and a grey cap and attract attention.

If you can, send me an old suit and a new hat. I stroll along the Ringstrasse at least three times a day, also along the Graben in the mornings, when the smart public take the air. Meanwhile I am growing a beard because I am already conspicuous anyhow.

Ten years ago I was one of the smart public myself. It was on my last leave. Fraulein Hartmann walked on my right, my sabre slapped against my left side. At that time all I wished for was to be transferred to the cavalry after the war. Old Herr Hartmann could have fixed it. Now he lies in the central cemetery. I visited his grave, out of piety and boredom. It is a so-called family vault. Violets bloom there eternally under a red lamp held by a winged boy. The inscription is dignified and simple, as Hartmann himself always was.

I hear that my fiancée has been married for only four years, so she must have waited for me quite a long time. Four years ago I might still possibly have made a husband for her.

But today — I think I have become very much of a stranger in this world.

You ask whether I felt at home in Russia?

During my last months there I lived in a state for which there is no name, either in Russian or German, probably in no language in the world, a state between resignation and expectation. I imagine that the dead find themselves temporarily in this situation, when they have abandoned the earthly life and have not yet begun the other. It seemed to me as if I had fulfilled a task, fulfilled it so completely, so thoroughly, that I no longer had the right to remain contemplating its inexorable completion. It seemed to me as if Baranowicz had perished and Tunda had yet to be born.

I lived in Baku with Alja, my Caucasian wife, in a state of endless preparation for nothing. My work consisted of making or commissioning photographic and cinematographic records of the life of the Caucasian peoples. I did not exert myself. But the administrative system of the Soviet state is large and extensive and intricate — a deliberate, skilled and very refined intricacy within which every individual is only a smaller or larger point, linked with the next larger point and with no notion of his significance in relation to the whole. In the streets, in the offices, you see nothing but such points, points that exist in a mysterious and important, in fact a very close, relationship to you; but what this relationship is you do not know. There exist several elevated points which are aware of all the relationships; they have a bird’s eye view, as it were. But you yourself do not perceive that they are placed at a higher level. You do not know whether you will be left undisturbed in your place. It is possible that soon, at the very next moment, you will be removed — and not just from above, but, in a sense, by something emerging from the foundation on which you stand. Imagine a chessboard with the pieces not standing on it but stuck into it and manipulated by the hand of the player, who sits under the table.

You are not only left to fear and hope. You have duties and functions also. You have your idealism, there is room for personal ambition. At times you can even predict the success or failure of some enterprise. But in many cases what happens is contrary to all your expectations. For instance, you have entirely neglected some duty and anticipate a very unpleasant outcome. But what transpires is either nothing at all or something very pleasant. So you never know whether the unpleasant outcome has not become manifest in the guise of a pleasant one. You can trust neither your successes nor your failures.

The worst is that you are under constant surveillance, without knowing by whom. In the office where you work, someone is a member of the secret police. It may be the charwoman who scrubs the floor every week, or it may be the learned professor who is in process of drawing up an alphabet of the Tartar language. It may be the secretary to whom you dictate your letters, or the manager who deals with the supply of office equipment and the replacement of broken windows. They all, without exception, call you Comrade. You, too, call all of them Comrade. But you suspect each one of being a spy and realize at the same time that each takes you for a spy. You do not have a guilty conscience, you are a revolutionary, you are not afraid of being observed. But you fear that, at least, you may be taken for an informer. You are harmless, but because you must strive to appear so the others notice your endeavours. That in turn makes you anxious that they may no longer consider you harmless.

One needs steady nerves for this kind of existence, and a large quota of revolutionary zeal. For one must allow that the Revolution, surrounded as it is by declared enemies, has no other chance of maintaining its power than by sacrificing any individual when necessary. Imagine yourself lying on the altar for years without being slaughtered!

For all that, I would have stayed in Russia — at least, so I believe — if one day a party had not arrived from France, on a pleasure rather than a study trip, a lawyer and his wife and secretary. The secretary was the wife’s lover, and the lawyer managed so to arrange matters that I spent a day alone with his wife and an unforgettable evening in a hotel. I was the tool of his revenge. When she left, the woman, who took me for a dangerous informer of the Tcheka, handed me a card on which she had written in a triumphant hand: ‘So you are from the secret police after all!’, after I had endeavoured to rid her of the absurd idea. For that was why she had slept with me.