Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

He decided to call on the President. He had not given notice of his arrival and as he stood at the door he found some consolation in thinking that he could occupy the first two minutes with excuses for his sudden visit. To which the President would certainly reply, with his accustomed and beautifully convincing cordiality, that he was especially delighted that Tunda should visit him. Then Tunda would summon up the courage to disillusion him.

M. le President was at home, and he was alone. Once again Tunda admired the precise, unsuspecting and inexorable protocol, the formality which was never for a moment interrupted, which was unconcerned with the purpose of his visit, according him the same respect that was due to an independent, proud and free individual. The servant still treated him politely today; tomorrow, when he had finally and visibly sunk into the wretched category of rejected supplicant, he would refuse him admission just as imperturbably. There are no exceptions. Tunda thought of the decree of which the tipsy manufacturer had once spoken. One may have long since accomplished one’s escape from class, position, social category, but the protocol is still unaware of this, and before it has registered either an ascent or descent, this and that detail may no longer be true. Tunda was like a man who comes from an earthquake stricken city and is received by those who know nothing about it as if he had just descended from a train arriving on schedule.

But if ante-room and servant still seemed to him as in former times — how suddenly the few weeks had lengthened into decades! — he perceived in the President’s gaze the whole alteration in his own position. For the owners of property, the serene, the untroubled, yes, even those only modestly provided for, develop a defensive instinct against any invasion of their protected territory, they shun even the slightest contact with one from whom they may expect a request and scent the proximity of helplessness with the certainty of prairie animals detecting a forest fire. The President would have divined the change in Tunda’s condition; and even if he had been known to him up till then as a millionaire and fellow clubman of the Citroens, he would have divined it at the very moment when Tunda approached him to avow his poverty — the President would have divined it, thanks to the prophetic gift that goes with property, security, the bourgeois condition, as the sheepdog accompanies the blind brushmaker.

The President’s nobility was transformed into fear, his reserve into severity, his prudence into peevishness. Yes, even his handsomeness was now revealed as cheap, superficial, easily explicable vanity. His beautiful silver beard was the product of a brush and comb, his smooth brow an index of thoughtless and complacent egoism, his well-tended fingernails the counterpart of sophisticated claws, his gaze the expression of a glassily smooth eye that received images of the world as indifferently as a mirror.

‘I’m in a bad way, M. le President!’ said Tunda.

The President’s expression became even graver and he indicated a comfortable leather armchair, like a doctor prepared to listen and to take in the details with the cheerful interest medical men show in a case-history which might further their studies. He sat there like God the Father, shaded as in a cloud, while a broad beam of sunlight fell through the window onto Tunda so that his knees were illuminated and the light stood before him like a golden transparent wall behind which the President sat and listened, or did not listen. But then a remarkable thing came to pass; the President arose, the wall of crystalline gold advanced towards him, he broke through it, it turned into a golden veil which conformed to the shape of his body, lay on his shoulders and showed up a little white scurf on his blue suit. The President stood there, human now, extended a hand to Tunda, and said: ‘Perhaps I can do something for you.’

Tunda walked through the bright streets with a great void in his heart, feeling like a released convict on his first emergence to freedom. He knew that the President could not help him, even if he made it possible for him to eat and to buy a suit. As little as one makes a convict free by releasing him from prison. As little as one renders a parentless child happy by finding him a place in an orphanage. He was not at home in this world. Where then? In the mass graves.

The blue light shone on the grave of the Unknown Soldier. The wreaths withered. Young Englishmen stood there, soft grey hats in their hands, their hands behind their backs. They had left the Café de la Paix to visit the memorial. An old father thought of his son. Between him and the young Englishmen lay the tomb. Deep under both lay the remains of the Unknown Soldier. The old man and the young ones exchanged glances over the tomb. There was a tacit understanding between them. It was as if they sealed a pact, not to join in mourning for the dead soldier, but to join in forgetting.

Tunda had already passed by this memorial a number of times. There were always tourists standing around, hat in hand, and nothing upset him more than their marks of respect. It was like globe-trotters, who happened also to be devout, visiting a famous church during a service and kneeling, guidebook in hand, before the altar, out of habit and in order not to incur self-reproach. Their devotion is a blasphemy and a ransom for their conscience. The blue flame burned under the Arc de Triomphe, not to honour the dead soldier but to reassure those who survived him. Nothing was more gruesome than the unsuspecting devotion of a surviving father at the tomb of his son, whom he had sacrificed without knowing it. Tunda sometimes felt as if he himself lay there in the ground, as if we all lay there, all those of us who set out from home and were killed and buried, or who came back but never again came home — for it is a matter of indifference whether we are buried or alive and well. We are strangers in this world, we come from the realm of the dead.

A few days later the President asked him to call.

Between the two there now existed that distance which exists between the man who gives help and the one who accepts it, a distance different from that between an older and a younger man, a native and a foreigner, someone powerful and someone who, though weak, is still independent. Although there was no contempt in the President’s gaze, it no longer showed that quiet preparedness for respect, the open-minded hospitality, which distinguished people reserve for foreigners. It may be that Tunda had touched his heart. But they were no longer as free with each other as they had been. Perhaps, after this, the old man would have trusted Tunda with one of his secrets, but he would no longer trust him with one of his daughters.

‘I have found something,’ said the President. ‘There is a M. Cardillac, whose daughter is taking a trip to Germany and needs a little conversational practice. The usual thing in such cases is to find some elderly lady from Alsace. But I am against that kind of teacher in principle because, though they certainly have a command of the language, it is quite another branch of the language — not at all what a young lady from a wealthy family requires. These teachers lack the necessary vocabulary. On the other hand I felt that a young man from a good background, a man of the world, knowledgeable and with much experience’ — the list of Tunda’s virtues grew noticeably — ‘would be versed in exactly the right sort of parlance. It will also be a matter of explaining to the young lady the conditions in the areas she is about to visit, naturally quite objectively and without stirring up any preconceptions. Such prejudices would be all the worse since M. Cardillac — between ourselves, that is not his real name — has relations, distant relations naturally, in Germany — in Dresden and Leipzig if I am not mistaken.’