Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

The only times when I become tender and melancholy are when I think of Irene. She is not even the Irene, my betrothed, whom I knew when I was still a stupid first lieutenant and her fiancé. It is some unknown woman I love, who lives I know not where.

When George told me he had heard that she was in Paris, I felt hot and cold, I was dazzled, it was like that time in Baku when the lady told me of the ridiculous shop windows of the Rue de la Paix. It is as if I had been seeking Irene all my life and every now and again someone told me he had come across her. But in reality I don’t seek her at all. I don’t even yearn for her. Perhaps she really is something quite different from the rest of the world; and thinking of her is the least residue of my credulity. It’s probably necessary to be a writer to express this accurately.

From time to time I feel that it is necessary for me to seek her out. If I went to Paris I would perhaps run into her. That would take money. But I can’t accept anything from George. That is a ridiculous inhibition. He would probably give it me and rejoice into the bargain that I was leaving him. But, though I may take George’s money for other reasons, I won’t for this one.

And it’s about time that I earned something. In this kind of world it is not important for me to work, but it is necessary for me to have an income. A man without an income is like a man without a name or like a shadow minus its body. One feels like a phantom. This does not contradict what I have written above. I have no pangs of conscience as regards my indolence, it is just that my indolence brings in no money whereas the indolence of everyone else is well remunerated. Only money confers the right to live.

At that time I was living in Berlin. One day M. said to me: ‘I ran into Irene Hartmann. I greeted her. But she did not recognize me. I turned back, thinking I might have made a mistake, and greeted her again. But she did not recognize me.’

‘You’re sure you weren’t mistaken?’

‘Yes!’ said M.

I thereupon wrote to Franz Tunda.

‘Dear friend,’ I wrote, ‘I am not sure that I understand the reasons for your return. Perhaps you don’t know yourself. But if it is because you want to find Irene, Herr M. came across her in Berlin recently.’

Tunda arrived a few days later.

I liked him enormously.

It takes a long time for men to acquire their particular countenances. It is as if they were born without their faces, their foreheads, their noses or their eyes. They acquire all these with the passage of time, and one must be patient; it takes time before everything is properly assembled. Tunda had only now achieved his countenance. His right eyebrow was higher than the left. This gave him an expression of permanent surprise, of a man arrogantly astonished at the singular circumstances of this world; he had the face of a very aristocratic man compelled to sit at table with ill-mannered persons and observing their conduct with condescending, patient but in no way indulgent curiosity. His glance was at once shrewd and tolerant. He had the look of a man who puts up with much suffering in order to gain experience. He seemed so sagacious that one might almost take him for benevolent. But, in reality, he seemed to me already to possess that degree of sagacity that makes a man truly indifferent.

‘Then you want to see Irene?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When I got your letter I wanted to see her. Now I feel less certain about it again. Maybe it would be enough just to look at her and then go away satisfied.’

‘Let’s assume that you do meet up with her. She is happily married, probably loves her husband with the kind of love which is composed of habit, gratitude, shared experiences — the physical experience that results from many hours of intimacy — occasional eruptions of passion, the familiarity that no longer has a place for modesty. Do you believe that she would fling her arms around your neck simply out of the grateful recollection of an engagement which didn’t come off? Do you love her with the passion to which she would be entitled? Above all, would it be what you really want?’

‘These are things,’ said Tunda, ‘which have to happen before I can tell whether there is any basis for them. If I had gone straight home to Irene, my life would have taken another turn. A chain of circumstances prevented me from doing so. I will admit to you that I reproach myself. I reproach myself for having submitted to circumstances without putting up a fight. I now feel that I must seek out Irene in order to rehabilitate myself. The fact is that I don’t know what I should do. Should one not have an aim in life?’

‘An aim in life,’ I replied, ‘is always better than a so-called ideal.’

‘Always better,’ said Tunda, ‘if it is really an aim.’

We discovered that Irene had stayed at the Bellevue Hotel for three weeks and had then left for Paris.

‘I shall go there,’ said Tunda.

The idea occurred to him to have his Siberian stories published. The book was unfinished. I wrote an epilogue in which I stated that the author had disappeared in Siberia, and that the manuscript had come into my possession in some miraculous fashion. It appeared under the name of Baranowicz, in Tunda’s translated version. It was brought out by a large Berlin publishing house.

I still recall how amazed Tunda was by the streets, the houses, how he noted improbable incidents and activities because to him even the ordinary appeared remarkable. He sat on the tops of buses. He stood before each of the hundred ghastly wooden posts which indicate direction or bar entry in Berlin. He possessed the uncanny capacity of seizing the uncannily sensible frenzy of this city. He had almost forgotten Irene.

‘This city,’ he said, ‘exists outside Germany, outside Europe. It is its own capital. It does not draw its supplies from the land. It obtains nothing from the earth on which it is built. It converts this earth into asphalt, bricks and walls. It shades the plain with its houses, it supplies the plain with bread from its factories, it determines the plain’s dialect, its national mores, its national costume. It is the very embodiment of a city. The country owes its existence to it, and expresses its gratitude by becoming absorbed by it. It has its own animal kingdom in the Zoological Gardens and the Aquarium, the Aviary and the Monkey House, its own vegetation in the Botanic Garden, its own stretches of sand on which foundations are laid and factories erected, it even has its own harbour, its river is a sea, it is a continent. Of all the cities I have seen, this one alone has humanity — for lack of time and other practical reasons. Many more people would perish here if it were not for a thousand cautious, circumspect measures to defend life and health, created not because of any dictates of the heart but because an accident interferes with the traffic, costs money, and offends against order. This city had the courage to be built in an ugly style, and this inclines it to further ugliness. It places signposts, boards, hoardings, loathsome, glassy, internally illuminated toads on the roadsides, at the intersections, on the squares. Its traffic police stand there with metal signals which look as if they were on temporary loan from the railway administration, and use them wearing spectral white gloves.

‘What is more, it still tolerates the German provinces as part of itself, if only in order to devour them one day. It nourishes the natives of Düsseldorf, of Cologne, of Breslau, and draws nourishment from them. It has no culture of its own as have Breslau, Cologne, Frankfurt, Königsberg. It has no religion. It has the most hideous churches in the world. It has no society. But it has everything that society alone provides in every other city: theatres, art, a stock-exchange, trade, cinema, subways.’