Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

He lived for some weeks in the house of a relatively well-to-do Tartar, who practised hospitality on religious grounds and treated inconvenient strangers with friendly solicitude.

Little remained for Tunda to do. Some of the young folk had already taken control of culture, formed clubs and composed wall-newspapers.

It emerged that the people were not learning fast enough. They had to be helped with films. Tunda became the director of a cinema, which was however only able to operate three times a week.

Among his regular visitors was a girl called Alja, daughter of a Georgian father and a Tadzhik mother.

The girl lived with her uncle, a potter, who practised his vocation in the open air and with quite a marked talent, but who had also become somewhat stupid as a result of his monotonous existence. He was unable to converse and, to make himself understood, employed only a few fragmentary phrases which he seemed to extract slowly from his brain with the aid of his fingers.

The girl was beautiful and placid. She moved around as if cloaked in silence. Many animals engender such a silence in which they then spend their lives, as if they had made a vow to serve some secret and elevated purpose. The girl was silent, her great brown eyes lay in dark blue pools, she walked as erect as if she carried a pitcher on her head, her hands lay always on her lap as if under an apron.

This girl was Tunda’s second love.

From time to time, Tunda’s vocation took him to Moscow. Every night he visited the Red Square. The Red Square was silent, all the gates were closed, the sentries at the entrances to the Kremlin stood like wooden figures in their long cloaks, Lenin’s mausoleum was black; up on the roof the red flag licked the sky, illuminated from below. Here was the only place where one still felt the Revolution, and midnight the only time when one dared to feel it.

Tunda thought of the Red War, of the years when one only knew how to die and in which life, the sun, the moon, the earth, the sky, were only the setting or the background for death. Death, red Death, strode day and night over the earth to magnificent marching music, with great drum-rolls which sounded like hooves galloping over iron and shattered glass, shards flew from its hands, the shots resounded like the shouts of marching masses.

Now this great red death had become the order of the day, it had become a quite ordinary death which slunk from house to house like a beggar claiming its corpses as so much charity. They were buried in red coffins, choirs cast verses into the graves, the living went away and settled down again in their offices, wrote records and statistics, enrolment forms for new members and edicts against the excommunicated.

It is no solace to reflect that it is probably impossible to build a new world without desks and pens, without marble busts and revolutionarily draped shop-windows, without monuments and blotting-paper bearing Bebel’s head as a handle; it is no solace, it is no help.

‘But a Revolution never comes to grief,’ said Kudrinski, a sailor who had been expelled from the Party, had commanded a warship for an entire year, and was now vainly looking for something to do.

He had met Tunda one night in the Red Square. One must suppose that Kudrinski, too, had come there to look at the red flag, the flag tossing on the Kremlin roof.

‘A Revolution never comes to grief,’ said Kudrinski. ‘It has absolutely no bounds. The great ocean has no bounds; and a great fire — there must, somewhere be a great fire like this, as great, as boundless as the ocean, perhaps inside the earth, perhaps in the skies — a great fire has no bounds. The Revolution is like that. It has no body, its body is the flames if it is fire, or the flood if it is water. We ourselves are only drops in the water or sparks in the fire, without it we are nothing.’

Natasha lived in a requisitioned hotel. From six in the evening she applied herself to love — naturally of the sexual variety in which the heart, which belonged to the people, is not involved — explicitly irreproachable and hygienic love. No objection could be made to this from the standpoint of the equal rights of women. Comradeship was sacred to her. Since Tunda was no longer eligible as a man, there was no occasion to despise him. He was merely, and more nearly, a comrade of equal status. How zealously she strove to help him! With what earnestness she strove in their discussions. But Tunda, when he was by her side, saw her as in a pallid mirror. He came to her as a man comes to a place where he has once been young. She was no longer herself; she was, as it were, merely the setting of her own earlier life. Natasha used to live here: so Tunda told himself whenever he looked at her. She wore a blue overall, she reminded one of a nurse, an overseer, a stewardess, but not a loved one and no longer a soldier of the Revolution. There even emanated from her a kind of chastity — although she needed love and had suffered its ravages — an inexplicable kind of arid virginity which is as typical of abandoned girls as it is of women who perform the act of love with intelligence and as a matter of principle. She lived in a narrow poorly-lit hotel room. Between a chair, on which lay tattered pamphlets, and the bed on which she performed for equal sexual rights, she stood as if on the bridge of a ship or on a speaker’s platform, her hair combed straight back from her forehead, her lips compressed and no longer half-open as they had been when they had still kissed Tunda.

Tunda said to her:

‘I can’t go on listening to your lectures any longer; please stop! I remember how I used to love and admire you. I was very proud of you! During the war your voice was fresh, your lips were fresh, we lay together in the gloomy forest with death only half-an-hour away, our love was greater than the danger. I would never have believed that I could learn so quickly. You were always greater and stronger than I; suddenly you’ve become smaller and weaker. You are very miserable, Natasha! You can’t live without war. You are beautiful only when fires are raging against the night sky.’

‘Won’t you ever get rid of your bourgeois ideas?’ said Natasha. ‘What fancies you have about women! Fires raging against the night sky! How romantic! I am a human being like you who happens to belong to another sex. It is much more important to run a hospital than to make love in fiery nights. We never understood each other, Comrade Tunda. The fact that we were once in love, as you call it, doesn’t give you any right to shed faint-hearted tears over what I have become today. Better go and apply for admission to the Party. I’ve no more time! I’m waiting for Anna Nikolaievna, we’ve a report to write.’

It was Tunda’s last encounter with Natasha.

She took a mirror from her brief-case and inspected her face. She saw two tears trickle slowly and evenly from her eyes, to the corners of her mouth. She was surprised that her eyes were crying although she herself felt nothing. The woman whom she saw crying in the mirror, was a stranger. Only when Anna Nikolaievna entered did it occur to her to wipe her face with her hand. She reflected quickly that it was more sensible not to hide one’s tears. She planted her damp face opposite Anna’s, like a threat or a shield or a proud admission.

‘Why are you crying?’ asked Anna.

‘I’m crying because everything is so useless, so pointless,’ said Natasha, as if she blamed something universal, which Anna Nikolaievna could never understand.

I have already mentioned that Tunda was attracted to the quiet girl in the Caucasus named Alja, niece of the dunder-headed potter. Of all Tunda’s actions and experiences which sometimes seem strange to me, the one I can most easily understand is his relationship with Alja. In the midst of Revolution, of historical and personal chaos, she lived like an emissary from another world, an ambassador from an unfamiliar power, cool and curious, probably as little capable of love as of intelligence, stupidity, good or evil, of all the earthly qualities which go to form a character. It was mere chance that she happened to have a human face and a human body! She betrayed no sign of emotion, of joy, anger or sorrow. Instead of laughing she showed her teeth, two white rows, neatly locked, a beautiful prison for any utterance. Instead of crying — she rarely wept — she allowed a few large bright tears to flow from wide-open eyes over a friendly placid face, tears which could not possibly be thought of as salty like all the common tears of this world. Instead of expressing a wish she indicated the desired object with her eyes; it seemed as if she was unable to long for anything outside her field of vision. Instead of refusal or rejection, she shook her head. She only displayed evidence of great agitation when, at the cinema, someone in front obstructed her view of the screen. In any case the surface of the screen was too small for her; she had to see every detail; she was probably more interested in the clothes of the characters or the impersonal matter of the furnishing of a room than in drama or catastrophe.