Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

But life is not like that.

The hotel servant was the first to sense that Tunda’s money had run out. In the course of a long life he had developed his natural instinct for the fortunes of a fluctuating clientele to prophetic dimensions. He had seen millions of razor-blades grow blunt, millions of cakes of soap grow smaller, millions of toothpaste tubes go flat. He had seen a thousand suits make their exodus from the wardrobes. He had learned to recognize whether a man was returning hungry from the park or satisfied from a restaurant.

Tunda still did not know Europe. He had fought for a year and a half for a great Revolution. But only now did it become clear to him that revolutions were not waged against the ‘bourgeoisie’ but against bakers, against waiters, against small greengrocers, insignificant butchers and defenceless hotel servants.

He had never feared poverty, barely experienced it. But in the capital of the European world, the source of all the ideas and songs about freedom, he saw that even a dry crust is not to be had for nothing. There are specific sources of charity for beggars; every compassionate individual who is appealed to will put up the engaged sign!

He went once to see Madame G.

For the first time it occurred to him that there was nothing whatever between her and himself, that that afternoon, that evening in Baku, meant no more than the encounter of two persons at a railway station before they board different trains. He realized that her capacity to experience, to feel sorrow, joy, anguish, grief, ecstasy or anything that goes to make up life, had become extinct. He could not decide whether it was her possessions, the material security in which she lived, that had made her apathetic. She had the admirable and mysterious gift of touching objects and people with slender fingers and the ground with beautiful narrow feet and toes. So her every movement had its meaning, a remote, a poetic meaning, which remained outside and yet transcended any immediate purpose. She contained within herself that domain of European culture discussed by those averters of calamity, the Europeans. There was no need for any other, any more convincing evidence for the existence of a European culture than this Madame G. But to guarantee her existence, people were heartless, bakers obdurate, and the poor without bread. And she, the product of these misfortunes, did not know, was not allowed to know, was not even allowed to experience a great passion because passion is noxious to beauty. Nevertheless, the world was not as simple as Natasha had once declared. There are other antitheses than between rich and poor. But there is a kind of poverty to which one owes a multitude of experiences, even life itself, and a kind of abundance which renders everything lifeless — lifeless and beautiful, lifeless and enchanting, lifeless, happy and finite.

As though by some obligatory decree, Tunda said: ‘I love you!’, perhaps merely to announce his presence.

For what else was there for him to seek here? Like a man who loses someone, he was driven to seek — by that instinct which is sometimes stronger than the instinct of self-preservation — some last means of keeping her.

All the time he wondered what she would say if he took the liberty of asking her for money. How repulsive it would be to her, first, that he had no money, second, that he mentioned it in her presence, third, that his most immediate worry was what he was going to eat the next day! How she would despise him! How loathsome is the money we do not have! And how much more loathsome when we need it from a beautiful woman in the heart of the most beautiful city in the world. In her eyes, poverty was the epitome of unmanliness — and not in her eyes alone. This was the world where poverty meant lack of masculinity, weakness, folly, cowardice and depravity.

He left her with that forced and hopeless gaiety which resembles the smile of a tired vaudeville artist, with the gaiety we assume a hundred times a day, as if we were taking our bows before an audience. He departed from her quietly, like one bent on suicide from a loved and despised existence.

He walked the length of the Rue de Berri, in which she lived, reached the Champs Elysees, and found himself brushing against people yet feeling quite detached from them. It was as if he was standing outside the world like a beggar, looking at it only through a hard, impenetrable pane of glass, menacing despite its friendliness.

It was a bright afternoon; the little motorcars careered along the broad streets like straying children, playful, cheerful and noisy. Handsome old gentlemen strolled about, light gloves on their hands, light spats on their feet, but the rest of their clothing was dark — they looked both solemn and cheerful. They were going to the Bois de Boulogne to spend the evening of their lives there — a merry evening, like a second dawn. Little girls walked along, well-bred, mature, sagacious metropolitan children who lead their mothers by the hand and wander over the pavement with the graceful assurance of grown ladies — fabulous creatures, half-animal, half-princess. On the terraces sat the real grown-up ladies, yellow stalks like slender flutes between their red lips. The world lay behind glass, as old and precious tapestries lie in a museum, hovering on the point of disintegration.

Tunda encountered the friend of the great poet, for it was the hour in Paris when those who belong to a certain social stratum throng the Champs Elysées — that is, if one is permitted to apply the word ‘throng’ to the strolling of these ladies and gentlemen.

It was as if they were being led by someone, as animals in a zoo or in a menagerie can be led around at certain times of the day; it was like opening a section of a museum for a few hours in the week to afford a special view of some rare and ancient precious objects.

Who directed these people? Who displayed them in this museum called the Champs Elysees, who bade them walk and turn around like mannequins? Who brought them together in the salons of the Presidents and at the tea-parties of the beautiful women? How did the great poets come to their friends and the friends to the great poets? How did M. de V. come to the President?

Not by accident but by decree.

Ah, the things they did! At times they seemed to Tunda like grave-worms, the world was their coffin, but there was no one in the coffin. The coffin lay in the ground and the worms bored tunnels through the wood, bored holes, came together, bored further until the coffin became one great hole and worms and coffin were no more, while the earth was astonished that no corpse had been laid therein.

One day Tunda made up his mind to ask the worthy President for help. He had hesitated for some weeks. For he did not know whether it would be better to write a frank, albeit brief and polite, letter to the old gentleman — who probably weighed his own actions very carefully and had never allowed himself to step even slightly out of line — or to pay him a visit.

Tunda discovered that all his experience did not suffice to give him assurance in a world where he was not at home. All at once he understood the timidity of invalids, those invalids who lose their eyes, ears, noses and legs in the purgatory of war and, back home again, obey the order of a servant-girl who turns them away from the front-door. His heart was beating. Whatever courage and vigour he had once been able to summon up had been only in response to some particular situation; cowardice was the condition of domesticated men.

He wrote several letters and tore them up again. He made an effort to recall the red nights, the flaming crimson of those vanished days, the immense, limitless, absolute whiteness of the Siberian ice, the tremendous silence of the forests through which he had wandered and in which nothing was audible but the breath of death, the choking hunger which had gnawed at his vitals, his perilous flight, and the day when he was slung over the back of a galloping horse, the moment when he lost consciousness — like a sudden and yet gradual descent into a dark-red gulf of softness, terror and death. But his recollections were of no avail. For the present is a thousand times more compelling than the most compelling past — and he could understand the suffering of persons who heroically endured a dangerous operation ten years ago and are overwhelmed by a present toothache.