Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

Shadows suddenly grew dense over the city, a brisk downpour descended, women in white revealed their frilly petticoats like a second summer of linen.

Black umbrellas were hoisted over shining bright clothes. It all resembled a dreamlike, somewhat precipitate, wet funeral.

Tunda became hungry, forgot that he had no money, and entered a wine-cellar. When he saw the prices on the menu he decided to turn back, but three waiters barred his way.

‘I’ve no money!’ said Tunda.

‘Just tell us your name,’ said a waiter.

When he did give his name, Tunda was treated as if it were he who was the conductor.

He began to be impressed by his brother.

A hunchback entered the establishment, wretched and ill; with imploring eyes and timorous shaky legs he slunk from table to table, laying a handbill on each.

On the handbill Tunda read:

Dance and gymnastics.

Physical training: relaxation and muscular exercise.

Elasticity, vaulting, impulse, walking, running.

Jumping, eurhythmics, spatial perception, choreography.

Harmonious movement, eternal youth.

Group improvisation to musical accompaniment.

He ate, drank and went out.

The street now seemed unfamiliar. The wet stones had dried quickly. There was a rainbow in the sky. The trams went ponderously by, packed with people seeking nature’s embrace. Drunks tripped over themselves. The cinemas opened their doors. The commissionaires, in gold-rimmed caps, stood shouting and distributing handbills to the passers-by. The sun lay on the upper stories of the houses.

Wizened old women walked through the streets in cloth bonnets trimmed with tinkling glass cherries. The women looked as if they had emerged from old chests-of-drawers which Sunday had opened wide. When they stepped into the wide squares in the late sun, they cast oddly long shadows; there were so many of them that they resembled a procession of legendary old witches.

The clouds that passed across the sky were made of mother-of-pearl, like shirt-studs. They stood in an enigmatic but clearly perceptible relationship to the thick amber cigarette-holders which a large number of men held between their lips.

The sunlight became more and more intermittent, the mother-of-pearl more pallid. People were crowding back from the sports-grounds, bringing sweat in their train and releasing dust. Motor-horns moaned like run-over dogs.

Prostitutes appeared in dark doorways, pulled along by St Bernards and poodles. Spectral caretakers, glued to their chairs, glided out of doors to savour the Sunday evening.

Young working-class girls shrieked, workers walked in their Sunday-best, with green hats, in lopsided suits, their hands feeling heavy and superfluous.

Soldiers passed like walking advertisements. The scent of dead flowers recalled All Souls’ Day.

High above the streets arc-lights swayed precariously, like storm-lanterns. Balls of paper swirled in dusty parks. A hesitant wind arose, gust after gust.

It was as if the town were quite uninhabited, as if — on Sundays only — the dead came on leave from the cemeteries.

One imagined yawning waiting tombs.

When it was evening Tunda went home.

The conductor was giving a small celebration in his honour.

It was a small Sunday party, although the guests did not give the impression that they needed to wait for Sunday to participate in such a gathering. For they belonged to the elevated ranks, those ranks which could also be invited on Wednesdays, or Thursdays, or even Mondays, and were so invited. They included artists, academics and councillors. A deputy mayor who had musical interests was among the guests; also a professor from the University, who gave readings on Friday evenings between six and eight and was frequented by society ladies; an actor who had played successfully at the Staatstheater in Berlin; a petite young actress who had undoubtedly slept with the stout deputy mayor, but had re-emerged from his embrace unharmed and even, to some extent, invigorated; a museum director who had written about some of van Gogh’s works, though his heart lay with Böcklin; the music critic of one of the larger newspapers, who seemed to have concluded an implicit pact with the conductor.

One or two of them had brought their wives. These ladies fell into two categories: the elegant, who exhibited Parisian leanings; and the prosaic, who reminded one of the Masurian lakes. The latter were burnished with a glitter of steel and victory. Three groups formed: first, the prosaic ladies; second, the elegant ladies; and third, the men. Only Franz and his sister-in-law oscillated between the three groups, dispensing refreshments. Around Franz, decked in his Siberian halo and exhaling the great breath of the steppes and the polar sea, competed the bold glances of a number of the elegant women. Men clapped him on the back and told him what it was like in Siberia. The music critic enquired about the new music in Russia. But he did not wait for an answer and began a discourse on the conductorless Moscow Orchestra, The museum director knew the Hermitage in St Petersburg inside out. The professor, who despised Marx, quoted the places in which Lenin contradicted himself. He was even familiar with Trotsky’s book about the genesis of the Red Army.

There was no particular structure to the conversation. To bring this about, a manufacturer was called on who only arrived around midnight. He had an honorary doctorate and was a member of the Club. Red-faced, with the desperately clutching hands of a drowning man, even though he was standing with both feet on solid ground, he began to cross-examine Tunda.

The manfacturer had concessions in Russia. ‘What is the state of the industries in the Urals?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Tunda confessed.

‘And what about the petroleum in Baku?’

‘Quite good,’ said Tunda, feeling that he had lost ground.

‘Are the workers contented?’

‘Not always!’

‘Exactly,’ said the manufacturer. ‘So the workers are not satisfied. But you know damn-all about Russia, my dear friend. One loses one’s perspective about things when one is close to them, I know. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, dear friend.’

‘Yes,’ said Tunda, ‘one loses perspective. One is so close to things that they cease to be of concern. Just as you give no thought to how many buttons there are on your waistcoat. One can live in the present as if deep in a forest. One encounters people and sheds them again as trees shed leaves. Can’t you understand that it doesn’t seem to me to be of the slightest importance how much petroleum they extract in Baku? It’s a marvellous city. When a wind springs up in Baku …’

‘You are a poet,’ said the manufacturer.

‘Do they read Ilya Ehrenburg in Russia?’ asked the little actress. ‘He is a sceptic.’

‘I’ve never heard that name; who is he?’ said the professor severely.

‘He is a young Russian author,’ said Frau Klara, to the general astonishment.

‘Are you going to Paris this year?’ one of the Parisian group of women asked another.

‘I’ve been looking at the latest hats in Femina , potshaped again, and the costume jackets are slightly belled out. I don’t think it’s worth the trouble this year.’

‘My husband and I were in Berlin last week,’ said the music critic’s wife. ‘There’s a city that’s growing at a tremendous rate. The women get more elegant every day.’

‘Fantastic, fantastic,’ opined the manufacturer. ‘That city leaves the rest of Germany speechless.’

He introduced some story on the theme of Berlin. He always knew exactly when to provide a new focus for the flagging conversation.

He talked about industry and of the new Germany, the workers and the decline of Marxism, politics and the League of Nations, art and Max Reinhardt.