Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

‘Who’s this beautiful woman?’

‘She was my fiancée.’

‘And she is dead?’ she asked in a tranquil voice. Nothing was simpler in the world than Irene’s death. Not just Irene, all women were dead, buried.

‘I think she’s still alive,’ said Tunda timidly, as if begging her pardon.

He kissed her hand, she put a cigarette in her mouth with her left hand, and he jumped up to fetch some matches.

Suddenly it seemed that nothing in the entire world was as important as these matches. The match burned, a small, blue, festal fire.

‘Goodbye!’ she said, but did not look at him, only at Irene’s photograph which still lay on the bed.

The sky was still blue.

Tunda had a few letters of introduction from his brother and from acquaintances. He paid calls.

They were calls of the most tedious nature. There were learned and semi-learned men, worthy, but with a worth adulterated by wit. There were men with smooth, old, well-preserved faces and carefully brushed grey beards which still showed the marks of the comb. These men, holders of public offices, were professors or authors or presidents of humanitarian or so-called cultural associations. For thirty years they had had little else to do than to keep up appearances. They were distinguished from their German colleagues by their precise, rounded, polished gestures and their polite manner of speech.

Tunda got to know the President Marcel de K. He lived in a Parisian suburb, in a villa which he left only two or three times a year to attend special ceremonial sessions of the Academy.

He assured Tunda of his love for Germany.

‘Mr President,’ said Tunda, ‘you do me great honour in assuring me, a private person, of your esteemed love for Germany. But I am hardly in a position to accept your cordial assurances. I am not a public servant, not even a private one. I would find it embarrassing if I were asked to tell you what my occupation was. I returned from Russia not long ago, and have barely had time to look around in Germany. I spent two weeks in Berlin and stayed only a little longer with my brother in the town of X. on the Rhine. I did not even have time to find my bearings in Austria, my home country.’

He had caused the venerable old gentleman a certain embarrassment. So he added: ‘However, I could tell you about Siberia, if that interests you.’

They spoke of Russia. The President had the impression that the shooting was still going on in St Petersburg.

Tunda came to realize that the President’s refined tastes permitted him every kind of ignorance. He had the right to know absolutely nothing. France gave him everything he needed: mountains, sea, mystery, clarity, nature, art, science, revolution, religion, history, pleasure, grace and tragedy, beauty, wit, satire, enlightenment and reaction.

Tunda regarded the old gentleman with the pure delight experienced by some people when they stroll in a well-kept garden. He contemplated his elderly regular features, on which sorrow had acted with discretion; disappointments lay in predetermined furrows; the minor pleasures of life had left a fine, clear brightness in the eyes; round the thin, sharp lips and wide mouth the beard was spread in its silver repose; the head had lost only so much hair as was necessary to display a fine, intelligent, distinguished forehead. What an elder! No one could be more entitled to the name of President than he.

Tunda had adopted the habit of mistrusting beauty. Thus, initially, he did not believe a single word the President said, not even the most insignificant. When, for instance, he related how, twenty years before, he had taken some Minister or other aside in the Chamber of Deputies, in order to tell him the truth in private, Tunda took this for an exaggeration, an indulgence of his old age. For the truths M. de K. had to tell could have been uttered in public without fear of possible consequences.

But after he had conversed with this friendly gentleman three or four times, he began to suspect that the old man in no wise exaggerated. He did not overstate the facts, merely the degree and dangers of his truthfulness. That which, with a certain frisson , he called the truth, was an equivocal, almost a ridiculous, aspect of the truth. He certainly did not consciously exaggerate. If he expressed some commonplace, oft-repeated remark of abysmal banality about Germany, it was no thoughtless repetition in his mouth, but something like a polite discovery. Time and time again he relived the experiences of the past. When he said paternally: ‘I value your society, my dear young man,’ Tunda was compelled to feel himself really singled out. In this circumspect mouth, because of the slow movements of the tongue, every phrase acquired its old and original meaning. And it was plain that the old gentleman had to see a Minister in private in order to be able to tell him: ‘I have clearly noted the double meaning of your speech.’

Tunda learned from this man’s example that an important aspect of a distinguished bearing is fear of exaggeration (even the unadorned truth is an exaggeration) and a faith in the aptness and the appropriateness of tried and tested phrases. For him any new turn of phrase overstepped the mark.

At the worthy President’s he made the acquaintance of a number of persons: the editor of an ‘important’ newspaper; his colleagues; a woman to whose relations with a Minister allusions were made; a nobleman who hailed from the Rhine and had relatives in ruined castles in France, Italy and Austria. He was one of those aristocrats who publish magazines in order to prove themselves worthy of their illustrious names by means of a species of creative activity. They have not yet come to terms with the accepted impotence of the aristocracy, and while they allay their appetites at the tables of their successors, the industrialists, they never for a moment forget that they adorn these tables at the same time. Because, unlike many of their fellows, they do not even possess the ability to distinguish themselves as factory directors or personnel managers in coal-mining areas, they busy themselves with politics. And because they can no longer hope to increase their possessions through war, they indulge in the politics of peace. Moreover, the particular charm of the man under discussion lay in the fact that he was in favour of a dictatorship, of the iron hand. He looked forward to a united Europe under the dominion of a Pope with the temporal power of a dictator, or something of the kind. When he spoke, he placed his hands together so that the fingertips touched; he must at some time have learnt this habit of making steeples out of hands from a priest. He spoke with the persuasive, soft and sonorous voice of a professional hypnotist and clothed sober statements with a mystic radiance. Beyond that, he readily made himself out to be a poor devil — even this can be an attraction in good society.

The wives of rich manufacturers, who always think themselves misunderstood, but have little opportunity to acquire close contact with literature — because literary men can on occasion be quite dangerous — surrender willingly to aristocrats with literary leanings, where the female soul finds everything it needs: understanding, tenderness, nobility, a dash of bohemianism. This man not only ate at the tables of the industrialists, he slept in their beds. In the irregular intervals between, he published his magazine. He had collaborators in every camp; for even honourable men exist who take an interest in the peace of Europe.

As, for example, the diplomat who was employed at the French Embassy in Berlin, and had staked his career on a Franco-German entente. He had lived in Germany for years and cordially hated it. But what could this hate avail against self-love? Every step towards the so-called rapprochement was counted in his favour, he achieved results against his will, he was a specialist in Germanophilia.