Joseph Roth - The Leviathan

At about this time, a certain striking transformation in the person of Nissen Piczenik was first observed in Progrody. Yes, for the first time, the people of the town began to suspect that the coral seller was an eccentric, even a peculiar fellow — and some lost their former respect for him and others laughed openly at him. Many of the good people of Progrody no longer said: “There goes the coral merchant”; instead, they said: “There goes Nissen Piczenik, he used to be a great coral merchant.”

He had only himself to blame. He failed to behave in the way that the law and the dignity of widowerhood prescribed. If his strange friendship with the sailor Komrower was forgiven him, and their visit to Podgorzev’s notorious bar, then his own further visits to that establishment could not be taken so lightly. For almost every day since the death of his wife, Nissen Piczenik visited Podgorzev’s bar. He acquired a taste for mead, and when in time it got to be too sweet for him, he started mixing it with vodka. Sometimes, one of the girls would sit beside him. And he, who all his life had known no other woman than his now dead wife, who had taken no pleasure in anything but stroking, sorting, and threading his true loves, the corals, suddenly in Podgorzev’s dive he succumbed to the cheap white flesh of women, to the pulsing of his own blood which mocked the dignity of a respectable existence, and to the wonderful narcotizing heat that radiated from the girls’ bodies. So he drank and he stroked the girls who sat next to him or occasionally even on his lap. He felt pleasure, the same pleasure he felt when playing with his corals. And with his tough, red-haired fingers he groped, less expertly — with laughable clumsiness, in fact — for the nipples of the girls, which were as rosy red as some corals. And, as they say, he let himself go more and more, practically by the day. He felt it himself. His face grew thin, his bony back grew crooked, and he no longer brushed his coat or his boots, or combed his beard. He recited his prayers mechanically every morning and evening. He felt it himself. He was no longer the coral merchant; he was Nissen Piczenik, formerly a great coral merchant.

He sensed that within a year, or maybe only six months, he would be the laughingstock of the town — but what did he care? Progrody wasn’t his home, his home was the ocean.

And so one day he made the fateful decision of his life.

But before that he went back to Sutschky one day — and there in the shop of Jenö Lakatos from Budapest he saw all his old customers, and they were listening to the blaring music on the phonograph, and buying celluloid corals at fifty kopecks a chain.

“So, what did I tell you last year?” Lakatos called out to Nissen Piczenik. “You want another ten pud , twenty, thirty?”

Nissen Piczenik said, “I don’t want any more fake corals. I only want to deal in real ones.”

AND HE WENT home, back to Progrody, and he discreetly looked up the travel agent Benjamin Broczyner, who sold boat tickets to people who wanted to emigrate. These were for the most part deserters from the army or else the very poorest Jews, who had to go to Canada and America, and who provided Broczyner with his livelihood. He represented a Hamburg shipping company in Progrody.

“I want to go to Canada!” said the coral seller Nissen Piczenik. “And as soon as possible.”

“The next sailing is on the Phoenix , which leaves Hamburg in two weeks. We can have your papers all ready by then,” said Broczyner.

“Good. Good,” replied Piczenik. “And I don’t want anyone to know about it.”

And he went home and packed all his corals, his real ones, in his wheeled suitcase.

As for the celluloid corals, he placed them on the copper tray of the samovar, and he set fire to them and watched them burning with a blue flame and a terrible stench. It took a long time: there were more than fifteen pud of fake corals. Indeed, all that was left of the celluloid was a gigantic heap of gray-black scrolled ashes, and a cloud of blue-gray smoke twisting round the oil lamp in the middle of the room.

That was Nissen Piczenik’s farewell to his home.

On 21 April, he boarded the steamship Phoenix in Hamburg, as a steerage passenger.

The ship had been four days at sea when disaster struck: perhaps some still remember it.

More than two hundred passengers went down with the Phoenix . They were drowned, of course.

But as far as Nissen Piczenik was concerned, who went down at the same time, one cannot simply say that he was drowned along with the others. It is truer to say that he went home to the corals, to the bottom of the ocean where the huge Leviathan lies coiled.

And if we’re to believe the report of a man who escaped death — as they say — by a miracle, then it appears that long before the lifeboat was filled, Nissen Piczenik leaped overboard to join his corals, his real corals.

I, for my part, willingly believe it, because I knew Nissen Piczenik, and I am ready to swear that he belonged to the corals, and that his only true home was the bottom of the ocean.

May he rest in peace beside the Leviathan until the coming of the Messiah.

The Radetzky March was published in September, 1932. The Jewish-Austrian novelist Joseph Roth (1894–1939) had completed his masterpiece sometime in May or June; serialization in the Frankfurter Zeitung had been underway since April. By Roth’s standards, such a pace was sedate. The Radetzky March promised to transform Roth’s standing, from a successful and admired newspaper writer with a sideline in (mostly bracingly short) novels, to an important contemporary novelist who once upon a time used to write for the papers. Such pleasant things as sales and advances earned-out and foreign translations for the first time loomed into prospect. It seems that Roth meant to follow his success with another major novel (which he called meinen Erdbeeren-Roman , “my Strawberries novel”) set in his Eastern Jewish homeland (he was born and grew up in Galicia, an Austrian ‘Crown land’, now divided between Poland, Ukraine, and Slovakia).

On January 30, 1933, all that changed. Hitler became Chancellor; that same day, Roth left Berlin, and never set foot in Germany again; soon to be instituted Nazi laws saw to it that he never earned anything from The Radetzky March ; and a word was found for what had been and remained his wandering and short-run modus vivendi of hotels and trains and bars: exile. Thenceforth, his energies were divided between furious anti-Fascist articles — mainly read by other furious anti-Fascists — and a string of short, would-be potboilerish novels ( Tarabas [1934], The Hundred Days [1935], Confession of a Murderer [1936]) read by nobody very much, which he wrote at an insane pace, and distributed among three, more or less unwilling, Dutch publishers, who always lost money on them, and were not always reconciled to the fact. It meant basically the end of anything resembling a literary career. Roth outdid Kafka: he was simultaneously strapped to two writing machines: one present and public and political, and one past and private and narrative-fantastical; one that depressed the writer, and offered challenge and confrontation, and one that — if everything went well — distracted the writer, and offered refuge and alleviation; one that was duty, and one that felt like dereliction; one that was urgent, and one that he merely needed for his survival; and each was antidote and poison to the other. Not surprisingly, in view of his drinking, his uncertain circumstances, financial troubles, a short temper, the hours he kept, and more “further complications” than one can shake a stick at, his health failed rather quickly. He died on May 27, 1939, not quite forty-five years old.