Joseph Roth - The Leviathan

“What are your corals made of?” asked Nissen Piczenik.

“Celluloid, my dear fellow, celluloid!” cried a delighted Lakatos. “It’s no good arguing with science! Anyway, rubber trees grow in Africa, and it’s rubber that you make celluloid out of. What’s unnatural about that? Are rubber trees any less part of nature than corals? How is a rubber tree in Africa any worse than a coral tree on the seabed? Well, so what do you say? Do you want to do a deal with me? Just say the word! A year from now, all your customers will have gone over to me, and you can take all your fine real corals back to the seabed they came from. So, will you come in with me or not?”

“Give me two days to think it over,” said Nissen Piczenik, and he went home.

AND THAT WAS how the Devil first came to tempt the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik. The Devil was Jenö Lakatos from Budapest, who introduced artificial coral to Russia — celluloid coral that burns with a bluish flame, the same color as the ring of purgatorial fire that burns around Hell.

When Nissen Piczenik got home, he kissed his wife indifferently on both cheeks, he greeted his threaders, and he started looking at his beloved corals with confused eyes, eyes confused by the Devil, his living corals that didn’t look nearly as flawless as the fake celluloid corals that his rival Jenö Lakatos had shown him. And so the Devil inspired the honest coral merchant Nissen Piczenik with the idea of mixing fake corals with real.

One day he went to the public clerk in the post office and dictated a letter to Jenö Lakatos in Sutschky, and a few days later he received no less than twenty pud of fake coral. Dazzled and led astray by the Devil, Nissen Piczenik mixed the fake and the real corals, and thereby he betrayed both himself and the real corals.

The harvest was in progress out in the countryside, and hardly any farmers were coming to buy corals. But from the few who did occasionally turn up, Nissen Piczenik now earned more than he had before when he had had many customers, thanks to the fake corals. He mixed genuine and fake — which was even worse than selling only fake. Because that is what happens to people when they are led astray by the Devil — they come to outdo him in devilishness. And so Nissen Piczenik outdid Jenö Lakatos from Budapest. And all that Nissen Piczenik earned he took conscientiously to Pinkas Warschawsky. And so corrupted had the coral merchant been by the Devil that he took real pleasure in the thought of his money being fruitful and multiplying.

Then one day the usurer Pinkas Warschawsky suddenly died, and at that Nissen Piczenik panicked, and he went right away to the usurer’s heirs, and he demanded his money back with interest. It was paid out on the spot, and the sum came to no less than five thousand four hundred and fifty rubles and sixty kopecks. With that money he paid Lakatos for his fake corals, and he ordered another twenty pud .

One day, the rich hop farmer came to Nissen Piczenik and asked for a chain of corals for one of his grandchildren, to ward off the Evil Eye.

The coral merchant threaded a chain made up entirely of fake corals, and he said: “These are the most beautiful corals I have.”

The farmer paid him the price for real corals, and returned to the village.

A week after the fake corals had been placed round her neck, his granddaughter came down with diphtheria, and died horribly of suffocation. And in the village of Solovetzk where the rich farmer lived (and also in the surrounding villages), the news spread that the corals of Nissen Piczenik from Progrody brought bad luck and illness — and not only to those who had bought from him. For diphtheria began to rage in the surrounding villages, it took away many children, and the rumor spread that Nissen Piczenik’s corals brought sickness and death.

And so that winter no more customers came to Nissen Piczenik. It was a hard winter. Every day brought with it an iron frost, hardly any snow fell, and even the rooks seemed to freeze as they crouched on the bare boughs of the chestnut trees. It grew very still in Nissen Piczenik’s house. He dismissed his threaders one by one. On market days he sometimes ran into one of his old customers, but they never greeted him.

Yes, the farmers who in the summer had embraced him, now behaved as if they no longer knew the coral merchant.

The temperature fell to forty degrees below. The water froze in the water carrier’s cans. A thick sheet of ice covered Nissen Piczenik’s windows, so that he could no longer see what was going on in the street. Great heavy icicles hung from the crossbars of the iron grilles, and blinded the windows still further. Nissen Piczenik had no customers, but he blamed the severe winter for it, rather than the fake corals. And yet Mr. Lakatos’s shop in Sutschky was continually bursting at the seams. The farmers bought his perfect cheap celluloid corals in preference to Nissen Piczenik’s real ones.

The streets of the small town of Progrody were icy and treacherous. All the inhabitants teetered along with iron-tipped canes. Even so, some of them fell and broke their legs or their necks.

One evening, Nissen Piczenik’s wife took a fall. She lay there unconscious for a long time before kind neighbors had pity on her and took her home.

She began to vomit violently. The army doctor of Progrody said she had a concussion.

She was taken to the hospital, and the doctor there confirmed the diagnosis of his army colleague.

The coral merchant visited his wife every day in the hospital. He sat down at her bedside, listened for half an hour to her meaningless babble, looked at her fevered eyes, her thinning hair, remembered the few tender times he had given her, sniffed the acrid camphor and iodine, and went back home, stood in front of the stove and prepared borscht and kasha for himself, cut bread and grated radish and brewed tea and lit the fire, all for himself. Then he tipped all the corals from his many bags onto one of his four tables, and started to sort them. Mr. Lakatos’s celluloid corals he stored separately in the chest. The genuine corals had long since ceased to be like living creatures to Nissen Piczenik. Ever since Lakatos had turned up in the area, and since he, the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik, had begun mixing up the flimsy celluloid stuff with the heavy real stones, the corals in his house were dead. Corals nowadays were made from celluloid! A dead substance to make corals that looked like live ones, and even more beautiful and perfect than the real live ones! Compared to that, what was the concussion of his wife?

Eight days later, she died; it must have been of the effects of the concussion. But Nissen Piczenik told himself that she had not died only from her concussion, but also because her life had not been linked to that of any other human being in this world. No one had wanted her to remain alive, and so she had died.

Now the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik was a widower. He mourned his wife in the customary fashion. He bought her a relatively durable gravestone and had some pious phrases chiseled into it. He spoke the kaddish for her morning and night. But he did not miss her at all. He could make his own meals and his own tea. With his corals, he didn’t feel lonely. All that saddened him was the fact that he had betrayed them to their false sisters, the celluloid corals, and himself to the dealer Lakatos.

He longed for spring, but when it came, Nissen Piczenik realized that his longing had been pointless. In former years before Easter, when the icicles started melting a little at noon, the customers had come in their creaking wagons or on their jingling sleighs. They needed corals for Easter. But now spring had come, the sun was growing warm, with every day the icicles on the roofs grew shorter and the melting piles of snow by the side of the road grew smaller — and no customers came to Nissen Piczenik. In his oaken coffer, in his wheeled trunk which stood iron-hooped and massive next to the stove, the finest corals lay in piles, bunches, and chains. But no customers came. It grew ever warmer, the snow vanished, balmy rains fell. Violets sprang up in the woods, and frogs croaked in the swamps: no customers came.