Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

‘This country,’ said the just man, ‘will perhaps give over all of its shadows and skyscrapers to other countries and itself arrive at life and truth. Perhaps the people here will one day have time and will build little houses and love people of every colour; perhaps they will love permanence and hate transience and despise money. This country is a young heir of older countries. And the heirs have inherited before their elders were dead. Let the elders lie under the ground first, and then the young ones may become magnificent heirs.

‘You must have patience!’

I, however, who am not a just man, don’t have the virtue of patience.

I am a weak man, and I fear the Antichrist.

I went to many other countries in the service of the master who had a thousand tongues at his disposal.

I descended eight hundred metres beneath the surface of the earth and saw men who for eight hours a day, eight hours on a daily basis, lie on their backs eight hundred metres under the earth. With hammers they broke off the coal over their heads, coal that is plentiful below the earth.

They are threatened by poisonous gases, by falling stones, by rocks that collapse suddenly and block the way out. And many workers had already died such a death.

God Himself made the coal form underground so that it may warm us, so that it may heal us, drive our machines and support the works of our reason.

But I also met people who deal in coal. And these did not lie on their backs for eight hours a day, eight hundred metres below the earth.

It is certainly true that God granted them the intelligence to trade just as He gave the others the strength and endurance to lie on their backs and hack at the coal above their heads.

The men who deal in coal can thus not be less in the eyes of God than the men who mine it.

Before God, I said, they aren’t less. But before people, they are less, for their work is less strenuous and they earn more money.

Human justice is not as perfect as divine justice. People look at the degree of toil and the amount of its reward.

Every half-hour a lift brought the men below, eight hundred metres deep. When one is underground, eight hundred metres from the light of the world, one not only loses the light that illuminates the earth but one longs for the sky; one has nostalgia for the heavens.

We were not made as hamsters, moles, salamanders or worms but as humans; the earth is meant to be under our feet and the sky above our heads.

We were created to walk upright, on two legs not on four feet. Our arms and hands are not for crawling around the earth but for working, for embracing our neighbour and to stretch towards the heavens.

Through this also are we differentiated from the animals, in that we alone, among all the beings of creation, have the ability to stretch our arms and hands towards the sky.

We are also different from animals through the fact that our forefather Adam received the breath of God. It is as though we had been granted this power because we yearn for contact with He of whom we are a reflection.

When we descend into the earth, however, no more can we stretch our arms skywards. No longer can we create the symbol of redemption, the sign of the Cross, with our bodies while we stand.

The Cross is not just the instrument of torture upon which the Redeemer of mankind suffered. It is first and foremost the simplest depiction of man with his arms outstretched, his feet planted on the earth, his head towards the sky. Every person on earth who stretches out his arms in distress forms a cross. He redeems himself, as it were, from his afflictions through the sign of the Cross, which he does not make but himself depicts.

Eight hundred metres under the earth, however, one cannot stand upright or stretch out one’s arms. One creeps around like an animal, on all fours, through narrow, gloomy passageways. Water drips from the walls. Water and slime coat the hands and feet. The damp air paralyses the lungs and shortens the breath.

And one can plainly see that we were not made to be without the sky. Yes, when first we descend below the surface of the earth we understand that we cannot really live without the dome of the heavens over our heads.

It is because of this that miners refer to the heavy earthen ceiling that weighs down upon them, eight hundred metres deep, as the sky.

Men are so dependent on the sky that they would call a layer of earth eight hundred metres thick ‘the sky’.

The word alone consoles them over the loss of the actual heavens.

It is the same as when emigrants who leave their old home and seek a new one in far-away lands give the names of their old cities and villages to the new cities and villages they found.

Our true home is the sky, and we are but guests upon this earth.

Under the earth itself, even when we descend eight hundred metres below, we never cease to feel that the heavens are our home, and that is why miners call the black ceiling above their heads the sky. Into this word they place all the blue sweetness of the true sky, as many people who have left their home sing to themselves a tune of their country, and all the sweetness of the homeland lives within this song.

But the men who call the ceiling above their heads the sky must work at it with hammers, picks and drills. They lie flat upon their backs and drill holes in their pitiful sky from which they collect coal. Sometimes this sky over them falls upon them and buries them beneath its black weight. Nevertheless, they still call it ‘sky’.

It is not merciful to them. It is the most unmerciful sky one might imagine. It is a black sky.

The man who took me underground showed me his house. It was a Sunday. The man was old. For thirty years he had been descending into the bowels of the earth every day, eight hundred metres and even deeper. Each Sunday he spent at home, attending to his garden and his children. He had six sons. Five times he had been buried alive by a fall of coal and then rescued. Of all the companions of his youth none was still alive. They had all been crushed and killed by the black and merciless sky.

‘And what are your six sons doing?’ I asked.

‘They are all miners,’ he replied. ‘My grandfather suffocated in the mine, my father also. I suppose I’ll suffocate there, and perhaps also my children. But maybe they’ll live to see the day when larger and safer tunnels are built. In that case, it will no longer pay to produce coal, as the prices are too low. Engineers are expensive. Once the safest tunnels are constructed, mining coal will no longer pay. Then the pits will be closed, and we’ll have nothing to eat.’

‘What leads you,’ I asked him, ‘to figure the lives of your fore-bears, your own and that of your children into the price of the coal that you don’t even sell? Why do you think coal is more important than life?’

‘I’m not saying that,’ answered the man. ‘The coal itself says so. We are prisoners of the coal. If it isn’t sold, we all must die. If, however, it’s sold for a good price, only one or another of us will die, but not all of us. That is why we reckon the price of our lives into the price of the coal, exactly as our masters, our breadgivers do. Just as they reckon, so do we.’

‘Don’t you love life?’ I asked the man.

‘I once came across a book,’ he said, ‘in which I read about and saw pictures of the ships of antiquity that were called triremes. These ships were rowed by slaves, each of whom was chained to his seat and had only one arm free — but it was the one with which he rowed. From time to time an overseer with a whip walked among the ranks of rowing slaves. And when one of them grew tired and didn’t stroke the oar with enough energy he received a lash from the whip.