Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

In the course of a few days we saw: a man running amok and a procession; a film premiere, filming on location, the death leap of an artist in the Unter den Linden, the victim of an assault, the centre for the homeless, a love-scene in the Tiergarten in broad daylight, revolving advertising pillars turned by donkeys, thirteen clubs for homosexual and lesbian couples, a shy normal couple of between fourteen and sixteen who had carved their names on the trees and had their names taken by a park attendant because they had damaged public property, a man who had to pay a fine because he had walked diagonally across a square instead of at right angles, a meeting of the onion-eating sect and of the Salvation Army.

I also conducted my friend Tunda to the café where the artists met.

This was the time when literary men, actors, film-producers and painters were once more making money. It was the time following the stabilization of the German currency, when new bank-accounts were being opened, when even the most radical journals carried well-paid advertisements, and when radical writers earned honoraria in the literary supplements of the bourgeois papers. The world was so firmly back on its feet that even the feuilletons dared to be revolutionary; civil war was now so remote that revolutionary writers contemplated lawsuits and public prosecutors with a certain gratification and took their threats as friendly compliments.

I pointed out all the famous personalities to Tunda: the writer who sat there with beautiful prematurely bleached hair, his head silvered as if by a jeweller, the originator of gentle spitefulnesses in a style compounded in equal measure of good taste and the avoidance of sentimentality; the publisher of a journal who tendered his kindness of heart to all and sundry — even those who were not particularly interested — exhibited a commonplace masculine conceit instead of literary ambition, and was endowed with a great aptitude for stock-exchange transactions, making money and campaigning against big business. The famous artist of mediocre talent, who went on drawing the various celebrities until they had no option but to reflect their own lustre onto him. The revolutionary author of revolutionary tales who, a victim of the law, had spent three months in jail for freedom, for justice, for a new world, without securing anything but his own, not unwelcome, notoriety.

I showed Tunda the young people, a self-perpetuating throng greeting those already present with the arrogance of late arrivals, discussing foreign successes in order to promote their own, wearing monocles and coloured cravats, calling to mind the progeny of rich bankers, and oscillating indecisively between being the grandsons of Jewish grandmothers or the illegitimate sons of Hohenzollern princes.

I showed Tunda all those who look down on me, and whom I have to acknowledge because I make my living as a writer.

The following day Tunda sent money to his wife in Baku and to Baranowicz at Irkutsk. He wrote Baranowicz a detailed letter.

I was not to meet him again until the 27th of August, in Paris.

He arrived in Paris on the 16th of May, at seven in the morning.

He had seen the sunrise. Over a landscape of dark green, in which the familiar deciduous forests showed up like cypress groves, a glowing sphere rolled aloft as if taken with a slow-motion camera and faded visibly.

Tunda felt as if he had seen the sun rise for the first time. Always before it had climbed out of those mists which obscure the transition from night to day and make a mystery of the dawn. But this time night and day seemed to him sharply demarcated from each other by a few neat bands of cloud on which the dawn mounted as if up a staircase.

He had expected a clear blue morning sky in Paris. But the morning in Paris is drawn with a soft pencil. The dispersed smoke of factories blends with the invisible residues of silvery gas lamps and hangs above the façades of the houses.

In every city of the world, at seven in the morning, it is the women who are the first to emerge: servant-girls and typists. In every city Tunda had so far seen, it was the women who carried with them out into the streets an aura of love, of night, of beds and of dreams. But the Parisian women who set foot in the morning streets seemed to have forgotten the night. On their lips and faces they wore fresh new make-up which miraculously resembled a sort of morning dew. These women were as perfectly dressed as if they were going to the theatre. Instead, they walked with calm bright eyes into a calm bright day. They walked fast, on sturdy legs and sound feet which seemed to know how to deal with paving-stones. As Tunda watched them walk he had the impression that they never used either their soles or their heels.

He passed through ugly old alleys with torn-up paving and cheap shops. But when he lifted his gaze above the shop-signs, they were palaces which suffered tradesmen at their feet with unconcerned indifference. There were always the same old window-panes, divided into eight parallelograms, the same grey, thin-grooved, half-lowered blinds. Only rarely was a window open, and rarely did an unclothed person stand at an open window.

In front of the shops sat cats; they waved their tails like flags. Like watchdogs, they sat with carefully observant eyes over the crates of green lettuces and yellow turnips, lustrous bluish cabbages and rose-pink radishes. The shops looked like vegetable gardens and, despite the soft, lead-coloured atmosphere which veiled the sun, despite the smoke and heat suddenly rising from the asphalt, Tunda felt as if he were wandering in open country and smelled the odours rising from the ground.

He came to a small, circular, open place with a ridiculous monument in the middle. In fact, when he saw this monument he laughed out so loudly that he thought people would emerge from their houses. But not even those who were already there took any notice of him. They were a stout dark woman, who was standing before a milliner’s, and a tall man with a glossy black moustache who was just opening up his small chocolate shop. They conversed, appeared to see Tunda but deliberately ignored him. They cracked jokes in the early morning. Tunda laughed in front of the monument.

It portrayed a smooth-shaven man in a flowing overcoat, life-size, on a pedestal. That death had not interrupted his everyday life seemed self-evident. A minor disturbance, nothing more. Comfortably settled in the centre of the circus instead of embarking on the long road to the next world, a small theatre with classical columns in the background, he continued to pursue his vocation, namely poetry.

The open space, except for its two shops, was still asleep. The houses gently encircled it as a ring does a finger. From various openings alleys radiated outwards in all directions, and one of these intimated the gleaming dark green proximity of a park, resonant with birdsong.

At the corner was an hotel, an hotel like a shop.

Tunda went inside, it was dark, a bell whimpered, and a made-up young woman emerged from behind a cheap flowered curtain. She appeared bold, worthy of respect, because she had the courage to live in darkness behind this curtain, because she asked Tunda what he wanted in a tone that was unfeeling, almost aggressive and yet kind. She seemed to him bold indeed, she seemed to have the splendid gift of passing through dreams as a creature of flesh and blood, and to be herself a miracle in the midst of miracles.

In this hotel, and because of this woman, Tunda rented a room on the sixth floor. From the window he could see the stone poet’s soft hat, the sparrows dancing on his head, the theatre roof with its three-cornered jutting gable, all the radiating streets, the dark green of the garden on the right, and chimneys springing up far and wide like children in a blue haze.