Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

‘How tedious,’ she said.

We arrived at Sabuntschi.

I said: ‘There’s no point in looking at the town. It would be too tiring, it’s hot. We must wait for the next train. We’ll go back.’

We travelled back.

When we got out in Baku we were ashamed of ourselves. After some minutes we looked at each other simultaneously and laughed.

We drank soda-water in a small booth, buzzing with flies; a nauseating fly-paper hung at the window.

I became very hot though I drank water incessantly. I had nothing to say, the silence was even more oppressive than the heat. But she sat there, unaffected by the heat, the dust, the filth which surrounded us, and only occasionally repelled a fly.

‘I love you,’ I said — and, although I was already quite red from the heat, became even redder.

She nodded.

I kissed her hand. The soda-water seller regarded me with malice. We left.

I walked with her through the Asiatic old town. It was still broad daylight. I cursed it.

We wandered about for two hours. I was afraid that she would get tired or that we might encounter her husband and the secretary. We reached the sea for no special reason. We sat on the quay, I kissed her hand repeatedly.

Everyone looked at us. A few acquaintances greeted me.

Night fell quickly. We went into a small hotel; the owner, a Levantine Jew, recognized me. He thinks I am a man of influence and is probably glad to know something intimate about me. He has probably promised himself to make use of his secret sometime.

It was dark, we felt the bed, we could not see it.

‘Something’s stinging me,’ she said later.

But we did not turn on the light.

I kissed her, her finger pointed now here, now there, her skin glowed in the dark, I pursued her dancing finger with trembling lips.

She got into a carriage, she will return tomorrow morning with her husband and the secretary. She will say goodbye. They are travelling to the Crimea, and then from Odessa to Marseilles.

I am writing this two hours after having made love to her. It seems to me that I must write it down so that tomorrow I shall still know that it really happened.

Alja has just gone to bed.

I don’t love her any more. I find the quiet curiosity with which she has received me for months artful. She receives my love as a silent person submits to the tipsy or talkative …

They came next day to say goodbye to Tunda.

‘I purposely detained Monsieur de V. yesterday,’ said the lawyer. ‘I am convinced that one cannot show two persons as much as one. According to what my wife told me yesterday, you must have seen a great many interesting things.’

The lawyer really resembled a dwarf, though no longer the harmless kind standing on a green lawn but one dwelling among sinister rocks.

They made their farewells like strangers. ‘Here,’ said the lady before she left, giving Tunda a piece of paper with her address.

He did not read it till an hour had passed.

From that day on, Tunda realized that there was nothing left for him to do in Baku. The women we encounter excite our imagination rather than our hearts. We love the world they represent and the destiny they mark out for us.

What remained from the foreign woman’s visit was her remark about the shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix. Tunda thought of the shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix as he looked out his old papers.

It was an open order, Number 253, with a round stamp, signed by Kreidl, Colonel, made out by Sergeant Palpiter. The yellow paper, frayed in its creases, had become a sort of sacrament; it was smooth, it felt like tallow and had the slipperiness of candles. Its purport was unmistakable. It stated that First Lieutenant Franz Tunda was to proceed to Lemberg for kitting out.

Had he not been taken prisoner a day later, this official journey would have become a small furtive spree to Vienna.

The name Franz Tunda stood there so large, so strong, so meticulously recorded, that it almost emerged from the surface of the document to assume a life of its own.

Names have their own kind of vitality, as do clothes. Tunda, who had been Baranowicz for several years, saw the real Tunda emerge from the document.

Next to the open order lay Irene’s photograph. The pasteboard was crumpled, the portrait faded. It showed Irene in a dark, high-necked dress, a serious dress of the kind one puts on when being photographed for a warrior in the field. The expression was still lively, flirtatious and shrewd, an accomplished blending of natural talent and the retoucher’s art.

While Tunda was looking at the picture he was thinking of the shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix.

One day there appeared at the Austrian Consulate in Moscow a stranger in a black leather jacket, in frayed shoes, with a stubbly beard on a brown and craggy face, with an old fur cap which looked older than it was because outside the first warm March sun was shining. The sunlight fell through two wide windows on the brown wooden barrier behind which sat an official; it shone on coloured brochures for the spas of Salzburg and the Tyrol. The stranger spoke with a faultless official dialect, the dialect of the Austrian better class which even tolerates many High German words if they are spoken melodiously, and at a distance sounds like a kind of nasal Italian. This dialect supported and confirmed the stranger’s story better than any document would have done. And this story needed some confirmation, since it sounded improbable.

The stranger stated that he had arrived in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp in the year 1916 as an Austrian first lieutenant. He had managed to escape from there. From the day of his escape he lived in the Siberian forests with a hunter who owned a house on the edge of the taiga . Both men supported themselves by hunting. Eventually, one of them was overcome by homesickness. He started out without money. He travelled for six months. He could only cover short stretches by train. He still had an old document, an open order. It could be seen from this that the stranger’s name was Franz Tunda, and that he had been a first lieutenant in the old Austrian Army. He had not lost his Austrian citizenship after the downfall of the Monarchy, because he carried on his father’s business in Linz, in Upper Austria. A telegram to Linz with a prepaid reply confirmed the former officer’s statements. The old class-registers of the Cadet School, which likewise corroborated the first lieutenant’s assertions, were still preserved in the archives of the War Ministry in Vienna. The Consul’s remaining doubts were dispelled by the likeable and frank manner of the stranger, who gave the impression that he had never lied in his life, and by the fact that the wily official could not credit a former officer with the intelligence required for a lie.

No statute existed under which anyone returning belatedly from Siberia could undertake a journey home at the expense of the frugal Austrian Government. However, there did exist a relief fund for ‘special cases’ and the Austrian Minister agreed — after some hesitation, which he owed more to his office than his conscience — that Tunda could be included under ‘special cases’.

Tunda received an Austrian passport, an exit permit from the Russian Commissariat for Foreign Affairs through the mediation of the legation, and a travel pass to Vienna via Katowicz. It was all arranged more quickly than he had expected, so that he was not able to carry out his intention of travelling to Baku to say farewell to his wife. For he assumed that he would be under police supervision, and that his return home would be regarded as suspicious. He found himself in one of those situations in which one is compelled by external circumstances to commit an injustice knowingly and wilfully, even to aggravate it, in the face of one’s own conscience. He was a wretch to leave a woman on her own; but he made himself still more despicable by not taking his leave of her in person. He merely wrote to her that he had to be away for some months. He enclosed some banknotes because he had doubts about sending a postal order. He even informed his wife of his brother’s address, the poste restante at Irkutsk, if it should be required.