Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

The manufacturer betook himself to an adjoining room. He lay down, half-hidden by a copper font, a Catholic rarity, on a broad sofa. He had loosened his patent-leather shoes, undone his collar, his shirt-front gaped like a double folding door, a silk handkerchief lay on his bare chest. That was how Tunda found him.

‘I understood you perfectly well earlier, Herr Tunda,’ said the manufacturer. ‘I understood perfectly what you meant about the wind in Baku. I understood perfectly that you have experienced a great deal, and that we come along in our ignorance and ask you stupid questions. As far as I’m concerned, I put my practical questions for purely selfish reasons. It was, to some extent, my duty. You won’t understand that just yet. You’ll have to live with us a little longer first. Then you too will have to pose specific questions and give specific answers. Everyone here lives by established rules and against his will. Naturally, in the beginning, that is when he first came here, we each had our own opinion. We arranged our lives perfectly freely, no one interfered with us. But after a time, almost without our noticing it, what we had arranged out of free choice became, without actually being written down, a divine decree and so ceased to be the consequence of our choice. All our later thoughts and actions had to be forced through against this decree. Or else we had to circumvent it in some way; we had, so to speak, to wait until it closed its eyes for a moment, out of fatigue. But you are not yet acquainted with this decree.

‘You haven’t as yet any idea what terribly wide-open eyes it has, eyelids stuck to its brows which never close. For instance, when I first came here, I liked wearing coloured shirts with attached collars and without cuffs; but, as time passed it was really in obedience to a very powerful and immutable decree that I should wear this kind of shirt. You cannot imagine how difficult it was for practical reasons — for this was a period when things were going badly for me — to wear white shirts with detachable collars. The decree ordained: manufacturer X wears coloured shirts with attached collars, thereby establishing that he is one of the working people, like his workers and employees. He need only undo his tie, and at once he appears a proletarian. Then, gradually and quite circumspectly, as if I had stolen them from someone, I began to wear white shirts. First once a week, for on that day the decree deigns occasionally to turn a blind eye, then on Saturday afternoons, then on Fridays. When I wore a white shirt for the first time on a Wednesday — Wednesday is my unlucky day anyway — everyone, including my secretary at the office and my foreman in the factory, looked at me reproachfully.

‘Now shirts may not be very important. But they are symbolic. At least, in this case. And it is the same with the really important things. If I came here as a manufacturer, do you think I could ever become a conductor, even if I were ten times better than your brother? Or do you think that your brother could ever become a manufacturer? Now, for all I care, vocation is not such an important matter. It’s not so important how one makes one’s living. But what is important, for example, is love for one’s wife and child. Once you elect voluntarily to be a good paterfamilias, do you think you can ever stop? If, one day, you have announced to your cook: “I don’t like white meat,” do you think you can change your mind ten years later? When I first came here I was very busy, I had to make money, organize a factory — for you must know that I am the son of a Jewish pedlar — I had no time for the theatre, art, music, crafts, religious objects, the Jewish community or Catholic cathedral. So if anyone got too close to me in any connection, I repelled him in a boorish manner. I was, so to say, a boor or a man of action, people were amazed at my energy. The decree seized hold of me, ordained my boorishness, my uncouth behaviour — you will understand that I am compelled to speak to you as the decree lays down. Who ordered me to take up concessions in this stinking Russia? The decree! Don’t you think the wind in Baku interests me more than petroleum? But dare I ask you about the wind? Am I a meteorologist? What would the decree have to say about it?

‘And everyone lies, just as I do. Everyone says what the decree prescribes. The little actress who was asking you earlier about a Russian writer is probably more interested in petroleum. But no, the roles are all allotted. The music critic and your brother, for instance. I know they both gamble on the stock exchange. But what do they talk about? About cultural matters. When you enter a room and see other people present, you know at once what each has to say. Each has his role. That’s how it is in our city. The skin in which each one hides is not his own. And just as it is in our city, so it is everywhere, in at least a hundred great cities in our country.

‘Look, I was in Paris. Let’s forget the fact that, after my return, I dared tell no one that I would rather live as a poor man in Paris under a Seine bridge than in our city with an average-sized factory. No one would believe me, I even doubt myself whether it is what I really wanted. But there’s something else I want to tell you. Someone accosts me in the Avenue de l’Opéra. He wants to show me the brothels. Naturally I am cautious; the man seeks to dispel my scruples. He enumerates his clients. He mentions the name of the very Minister with whom I had been negotiating the previous week. He not only names names, he has proof. He shows me letters. Yes, it is the Minister’s handwriting. “Dear Davidowiczi,” writes the Minister, obviously a good friend of Davidowiczi. Why does he call him “Dear”? Because the Minister has a very peculiar perversion. Because day and night he things only of goats, and nothing else. I ask you, goats! And he is not even the Minister of Agriculture! He sets about the negotiations with unbelievable zeal. One feels sure that his department can rely on him. And on what are his thoughts fixed? On animals. Who forbids him to speak of what really concerns him? The decree.’

The manufacturer had hurriedly to rearrange his clothing because of the approach of two ladies. Strange to relate, it was one of the prosaic group with one of the Parisian group. They were discussing clothes; it looked as if the prosaic lady was seeking information from the elegant one.

‘He need not,’ whispered the manufacturer, ‘have spoken as freely about animals to Davidowiczi as he did. He could have referred to them in a roundabout way, for instance to their usefulness in domestic economy. But he did not even do that. Who does? How many things do you think would be uncovered if we could rummage in the closets of each individual — and, more than that, in their innermost secret recesses?

‘When you spoke of the wind, tears came to my eyes. But do you think I would have dared to weep? I dared only bluster.

‘I confess to you that I sometimes go to the cinema just to have a good cry. Yes, the cinema.’

A lady approached, saw Tunda and smiled at him in a gracious, enticing yet aloof manner, as if she held a tape measure in front of her body, as if there were a specific law which laid down that only a certain number of teeth should be exposed when smiling.

‘And were you never homesick?’ she enquired. ‘We used to speak of you occasionally. Because you were missing.’ She inclined her head as she mentioned the word. She found it embarrassing to have to say to a man’s face that he had been missing. It was a painful, possibly even an improper condition to be missing. It was something like telling a living person that he has been taken for dead.

‘Your brother has often told us about you. How you were both in love with your cousin Klara when you came home for Christmas and Easter, and how you almost got angry with each other on that account. And how you said goodbye when you went off to the war (she very nearly said ‘marched’) and kissed your brother who was so grieved that he was compelled to stay at home on account of his leg. Yes, we often spoke of you. Did you sometime think that people might be talking about you, as if …’