Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

That is by the way. What matters is that the arrival of these foreigners suddenly made it clear to me that I had yet to begin my life, even though I had already experienced so much. It was remarkable that as soon as I saw this lady I thought of my fiancée’s name: Irene. I yearn for her. Perhaps because I cannot discover where she lives and to whom she is married, possibly because I know that she waited for me for a long time.

I believe that the foreign woman’s arrival at Baku was more than fortuitous. It was as if someone had opened a door which I had always thought of, not as a door, but as part of the wall that surrounded me. I saw a way out and used it. Now I am outside and very much at a loss.

So this is your world! Again and again I marvel at its solidity. In Russia, when we were fighting for the Revolution, we thought we were fighting the world, and when we were victorious we thought that victory over the whole world was near. Even now, over there, they have no idea how firm this world is. I feel a stranger in it. It is as if I was protesting against it in saying it to you twice over. I go around with alien eyes, alien ears, an alien attitude to people. I meet old friends, acquaintances of my father, and find I have to make an effort to understand what they are saying to me.

I continue to play my part as a ‘Siberian’ just returned home. People ask about my experiences and I lie as best I can. To avoid contradicting myself, I have begun to write down everything I have invented during the last few weeks; it has grown into fifty large quarto pages, it amuses me to do this, I am fascinated by what I shall write next.

This has turned into a very long letter. You won’t be surprised at this — it is a long time since we last spoke to each other. I greet you in the name of old friendship.

Franz Tunda.

Why had he left Russia? Tunda might be labelled immoral and unprincipled. Men who have a clear sense of direction and a moral objective, as well as those who are ambitious, look different from my friend Tunda.

My friend was the very model of an unreliable character. He was so unreliable that no one could even accuse him of egoism.

He did not strive for so-called personal advantage. His ideas were as little egoistic as they were moralistic. If it were absolutely necessary to characterize him by some particular attribute, I would say that his most significant quality was the desire for freedom. For he was as willing to throw away his assets as he was able to avert what was of disadvantage. For the most part he behaved as the mood took him, occasionally from conviction, always from necessity. He possessed more vitality than the Revolution could dispose of at the time. He possessed more independence than can be utilized by any theory that endeavours to make life conform to it. Basically he was a European, an ‘individualist’, as educated people say. He required complex situations to enjoy life to the full. He needed an atmosphere of tangled falsehoods, false ideals, seeming health, arrested decay, red-painted ghosts, the atmosphere of cemeteries that look like ballrooms, or factories, or castles, or schools or drawing-rooms. He required the proximity of skyscrapers that always look as if they are about to topple and yet are certain to endure for centuries.

He was a ‘modern man’.

Admittedly, he found the thought of his fiancée, Irene, enticing. If he had strayed somewhat from the path he had taken six years before, he now returned to it. Where did she live? How did she live? Did she love him? Had she waited for him? What would he be like today if he had reached her then?

I confess that, after reading Tunda’s letter, these were the questions I considered first, rather than the more immediate one of how to help Tunda. I knew that he was one of those men to whom material security means absolutely nothing. He was never afraid of going under. He was never concerned about hunger, which determines almost all present-day human activities. It is a kind of talent for survival. I know a few men of this kind. They live like fish in water: always on the lookout for plunder, never in fear of destruction. They are proof against both wealth and poverty. They do not show the signs of deprivation; and they are thereby equipped with a hard-heartedness which allows them not to register the private needs of others. They are the greatest enemies of compassion and of the so-called social conscience.

They are therefore the natural enemies of society.

It did not occur to me to help Tunda till a week later. I sent him a suit and wondered whether I should not write to his brother, to whom Tunda had not spoken since he entered the Cadet School.

Tunda’s brother George was an orchestral conductor in a medium-sized German city.

Franz himself should really have become a musician. But old Major Tunda failed to appreciate the musical gifts of his younger son. He was a soldier, for him a musician was a military bandmaster, a civilian functionary attached to the Army by an ordinary contract, always in the embarrassing position of being subject to dismissal with a meagre pension entitlement if things went wrong. The Major would have liked to have made one son into a civil servant, the other into an officer.

George fell down one day, broke his leg, and was to limp for the rest of his life. He was unable thereafter to attend school regularly. Franz had received some musical instruction and wanted to become a musician. But as his brother’s illness was very expensive, and as the Major had in any case lost interest in George because of his infirmity, he decided that George should have the music lessons from then on.

On grounds of economy Franz entered the Cadet School.

In those days Franz hated his brother. He envied him the good fortune of having fallen and broken his leg. He wanted to quit the Cadet School at any price. He hoped that he too might fall over one day and break a leg or an arm. He did not worry about what would happen afterwards. At the very least he wished for heart-disease. He thought himself very crafty. But the outcome of his exertions was the delight of his teachers and his father and excellent prospects for a military career.

The greater his success at the Cadet School, the stronger grew his hatred for his brother. Meanwhile George studied at the musical academy. Both brothers had to go home for the Christmas and Easter holidays. They slept in the same room, ate at the same table, and did not say a word to each other. They differed markedly in outward appearance. Franz took after his father, George after his mother. It is possible that it was because of his infirmity and the necessity to keep to his room, because of solitude and introspection and preoccupation with books, that he acquired the melancholy expression which is characteristic of so many Jews and sometimes gives them a superior air. But Franz, because of his mode of life, was able to suppress any tragic predisposition which he might have inherited from his Jewish mother. Moreover, I am prepared to concede that a man’s occupation may have a greater influence on his features than his race. (I have even seen anti-semitic librarians who might easily have passed for ministers in some Western Jewish synagogue without being at all conspicuous.)

So the two brothers were not on speaking terms.

It was my friend Franz who was the originator of this sullen silence. For George, as will soon be apparent, was of a conciliatory nature. He was the pampered darling of his mother and Franz envied him this almost more than his lame leg. He would gladly have lived in the warm proximity of his mother rather than in the arid, indifferent, alcoholic atmosphere which enveloped his father. Any praise from his father distressed him. Any caress that George might receive from his mother distressed him even more.