Joseph Roth - The Leviathan

Just two days before the sailor’s departure, there surfaced in the coral merchant the notion of accompanying young Komrower to Odessa. A notion like that arrives suddenly, lightning is slow by comparison, and it hits the very place from where it sprang, which is to say the human heart. If you like, it strikes its own birthplace. Such was Nissen Piczenik’s notion. And from such a notion to a resolution is only a short distance.

On the morning of the departure of the young sailor Komrower, Nissen Piczenik said to his wife: “I have to go away for a few days.”

His wife was still in bed. It was eight in the morning, the coral merchant had just returned from morning prayers in the synagogue.

She sat up. Without her wig on, her thin hair in disarray and yellow crusts of sleep in the corners of her eyes, she looked unfamiliar, even hostile to him. Her appearance, her alarm, her consternation all confirmed him in a decision which even to him had seemed rash.

“I’m going to Odessa!” he said with unconcealed venom. “I’ll be back in a week, God willing!”

“Now? Now?” stammered his wife amongst the pillows. “Does it have to be now, when all the farmers are coming?”

“Right now!” said the coral merchant. “I have important business. Pack my things!”

And with a vicious and spiteful delight he had never previously felt, he watched as his wife got out of bed, saw her ugly toes, her fat legs below the long flea-spotted nightgown, and he heard her all-too familiar sigh, the inevitable morning song of this woman with whom nothing connected him beyond the distant memory of a few nocturnal tendernesses, and the usual fear of divorce.

But within Nissen Piczenik there was a jubilant voice, a strange and familiar voice inside him: Piczenik is off to the corals! He’s off to the corals! Nissen Piczenik is going to the home of the corals!. .

SO HE BOARDED the train with the sailor Komrower and went to Odessa. It was a long and complicated journey, with a change at Kiev. It was the first time the coral merchant had been on a train, but he didn’t feel about it the way most people do when they ride on a train for the first time. The locomotive, the signals, the bells, the telegraph masts, the tracks, the conductors, and the landscape flying by outside, none of it interested him. He was preoccupied with water and the harbor he was headed for, and if he registered any of the characteristic features of railway travel, it was only in order to speculate on the still unfamiliar features of travel on board ship. “Do you have bells, too?” he asked the sailor. “Do they ring three times before the ship leaves? Does the ship have to turn round, or can it just swim backward?”

Of course, as inevitably happens on journeys, they met other passengers who wanted to get into conversation, and so he had to discuss this and that with them. “I’m a coral merchant,” said Nissen Piczenik truthfully, when he was asked what it was he did. But when the next question came: “What brings you to Odessa?” he began to lie. “I have some important business there.” “How interesting,” said a fellow passenger, who until that moment had said nothing, “I, too, have important business in Odessa, and the merchandise I deal in is not unrelated to coral, although it is of course far finer and dearer.” “Dearer it may be,” said Nissen Piczenik, “but it can’t possibly be finer!” “You want to bet it isn’t?” cried the man. “I tell you it’s impossible. There’s no point in betting!” Well then,” crowed the man, “I deal in pearls.” “Pearls aren’t at all finer,” said Piczenik. “And besides, they’re unlucky.” “They are if you lose them,” said the pearl trader.

By now, everyone was listening to this extraordinary dispute. Finally, the pearl merchant reached into his trousers and took out a bag full of gleaming, flawless pearls. He tipped a few into the palm of his hand, and showed them to the other travelers. “To find a single pearl,” he said, “hundreds of oyster shells have to be opened. The divers command very high wages. Among all the merchants of the world, we pearl traders are the most highly regarded. You could say we’re a special breed. Take me, for example. I’m a merchant of the first guild, I live in Petersburg, I have a distinguished clientèle, including two Grand Dukes whose names are a trade secret, I’ve traveled halfway round the world, every year I go to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Ask anywhere for the pearl trader Gorodotzky, even little children will be able to direct you.”

“And I,” said Nissen Piczenik, “have never left our small town of Progrody, and all my customers are farmers. But you will agree that a simple farmer’s wife, decked out in a couple of chains of fine, flawless corals, is not outdone by a Grand Duchess. Corals are worn by high and low alike, they raise the low and grace the high. You can wear corals morning, noon, and night, wear them to ceremonial balls, in summer and in winter, on the Sabbath and on weekdays, to work and in the home, in times happy and sad. There are many different varieties of red, my dear fellow passengers, and it is written that our Jewish king Solomon had a very special kind for his royal robes, because the Phoenicians who revered him had made him a present of a special kind of worm that excretes red dye in its urine. You can’t get this color anymore, the purple of the Tsars is not the same, because after Solomon’s death the whole species of that worm became extinct. Nowadays, it is only in the very reddest corals that the color still exists. Now who ever heard of such a thing as red pearls?”

Never had the quiet coral merchant held such a long and impassioned address in front of a lot of complete strangers. He put his cap back and mopped his brow. He smiled round at his fellow passengers, and they all applauded him: “He’s right, he’s right!” they all exclaimed at once.

And even the pearl merchant had to admit that, whatever the facts of the case, Nissen Piczenik had been an excellent advocate of corals.

They finally reached the glittering port city of Odessa, with its blue water and its host of bridal-white ships. Here the armored cruiser was waiting for the sailor Komrower, as a father’s house awaits his son. Nissen Piczenik wanted very much to have a closer look at the ship. He went with the young fellow to the man on watch and said, “I’m his uncle, can I see the ship?” His own temerity surprised him. Oh yes, this wasn’t the old terrestrial Nissen Piczenik who was addressing an armed sailor, it wasn’t Nissen Piczenik from landlocked Progrody, this was somebody else, a man transformed, a man whose insides were now proudly on the outside, an oceanic Nissen Piczenik. It seemed to him that he hadn’t just got off the train, but that he had climbed out of the water, out of the depths of the Black Sea. He felt at home by the water, as he had never felt at home in Progrody, where he was born and had lived all his life. Wherever he looks, he sees nothing but ships and water, water and ships. There are the ships, the boats, the tugs, the yachts, the motorboats apple blossom white, raven black, coral red, yes, coral red — and there is the water washing against their sides, no, not washing but lapping and stroking, in thousands of little wavelets, like tongues and hands at once. The Black Sea isn’t black at all. In the distance, it’s bluer than the sky; close to, it’s as green as grass. When you toss a piece of bread in the water, thousands and thousands of swift little fishes leap, skip, slip, slither, flit, and flash to the spot. A cloudless blue sky arches over the harbor, pricked by the masts and chimneys of the ships. “What’s this? What’s the name of that?” asks Nissen Piczenik incessantly. This is a mast, that’s a bow, these are the life preservers, there is a difference between a boat and a barge, a sailing vessel and a steamship, a mast and a funnel, a battleship and a merchantman, deck and stern, bow and keel. Nissen Piczenik’s poor undaunted brain is bombarded by hundreds of new terms. After a long wait — he is very lucky, says the first mate — he is given permission to accompany his nephew on board, and to inspect the cruiser. This ship’s lieutenant appears in person to watch a Jewish merchant go on board a vessel of the Imperial Russian Fleet. His Honor the lieutenant is pleased to smile. The long black skirts of the lanky red-haired Jew flutter in the gentle breeze, his striped trousers show, worn and patched, tucked into scuffed boots. The Jew Nissen Piczenik even forgets the laws of his faith. He doffs his black cap in front of the brilliant white and gold glory of the officer, and his red curls fly in the wind. “Your nephew’s a fine lad,” says His Honor, the officer, and Nissen Piczenik can think of no suitable reply. He smiles, he doesn’t laugh, he smiles silently. His mouth is open, revealing his big yellow horsey teeth and his pink gums, and the copper-colored goatee drops down almost to his chest. He inspects the wheel, the cannons, he’s allowed to peer down the ship’s telescope — and by God, the far is brought near, what is a long way off is made to seem close at hand, in that glass. God gave man eyes, but what are ordinary eyes compared to eyes looking through a telescope? God gave man eyes, but He also gave him understanding that he might invent the telescope and improve the power of his eyesight! And the sun shines down on the top deck, it shines on Nissen Piczenik’s back, and still he doesn’t grow hot, for there is a cooling breeze blowing over the sea, yes, it’s as though the wind came out of the sea itself, a wind out of the very depths of the sea.