Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

But there is dust, white and exceptionally thick. It is as though it were not the accidental product of waste and separated matter but an independent element like water, like fire or earth, and as though it were less like the latter than the wind by which it is swirled around in a thick haze. It lies in the street like flour, powder or chalk and envelops every vehicle and pedestrian, seeming to act according to its own impulse or instinct. It has a quite special relationship with the rays of the burning sun, as though it were its duty to complete the sun’s task. And when it rains the dust transforms to an ash-grey, damp, sticky mass that coagulates in every tiny hollow into a greenish puddle.

So here is where oil is obtained. This city was just a village a couple of decades ago. Now about thirty thousand people live here. A single street — about six kilometres long — connects three towns, and it is impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. Adjacent to the houses there stretches a wooden footpath made of short, sturdy stakes. It is not possible to build a pavement because the oil is carried to the rail station by pipes under the street. The difference between the level of the footpath and the carriageway, but also the little houses, is great, so that the pedestrian is as high as or even above the level of the rooftops and one can look down at an angle into the windows. All the little houses are made of wood. Only once in a while does a large house of brick, whitewashed and stony-faced, interrupt the sad rows of crooked, decaying and broken-down dwellings. They all sprang up overnight at a time when the stream of oil-seekers began to flow into this place. It is as though these planks had not been hastily pieced together by human hands but, rather, that the breath of human greed had accidentally piled up chance materials; not a single one of these temporary homes seems to have been meant to accommodate sleeping people but, rather, for the purpose of preserving and increasing the restlessness of insomnia. The rancid odour of oil, a stinking wonder, was what brought them here.

The incalculable illogicality, even from a geological perspective, of the laws of the underground, heightened the diggers’ excitement to the point of lust, and the constantly acute possibility of being separated by scarcely three hundred metres from a fortune worth countless millions was bound to cause an intoxication stronger than that of possession. And, although they were all exposed to the unpredictability of a lottery or a game of roulette, none of them gave in to the fatalism of waiting that would gradually prepare them for disappointment. Here, at petroleum’s source, each person indulged in the illusion that destiny could be dominated through work, and his passion in the search aggravated the dismal result into a disaster that he could bear no longer.

The small well-owners were only freed from the unbearable alternation between hope and discouragement by the powerful intervention of the large ones and of the ‘corporations’. These could purchase several properties at the same time and wait on the whims of the subterranean element with the relative calm that is one of the manly virtues of wealth. Besides these powerful interests, for whom patience cost nothing and who could quickly sow millions in order to reap an eventual harvest of billions, there came speculators on a smaller scale, whose lower credit was balanced by smaller risk, and these diminished even further the chances of the working-class adventurers. These gradually gave up their dreams. They kept to their shacks.

Many wrote their names over their doors and began to trade — in soap, in bootlaces, in onions, in leather. They withdrew from the stormy and tragic domain of the fortune-seeker to the pathetic modesty of the small shopkeeper. The shacks that had been built to last a couple of months stood for years, and their provisional frailty became stabilized into a characteristic of local colour. They resemble the flimsy constructions of a film studio or the primitive book-cover illustrations of Californian stories or hallucinations. It seems to me, having seen many great industrial areas, that nowhere else does such a sober business undertaking take on such a fantastic physiognomy. Here, capitalism wandered into the territory of expressionism.

And it seems that this place will hold on to its fantastic nature. For the town moves — and not only in a metaphorical sense. As the old wells stagnate, new ones are opened, and the dusty street wanders towards the oil.

It shoves its little houses ahead, winds into a curve and extends itself zealously in the wake of the capricious oil.

So I can hardly give up the idea that this street will one day be endless, a long, white, dusty ribbon going over hills and into valleys, crooked and straight, temporary and yet permanent, short lived as human happiness and long lived as human desire.

I will admit to you that the appearance of this large town, consisting principally of a single great street, caused me to forget the actual conditions of its social order. For a time, speculation and the passion of money-making seemed to me elemental and almost mysterious. The grotesque faces of greed here, the persistently tense atmosphere, where frightening catastrophes could suddenly occur each day, at any time, awakened my interest more for the destinies that were suited to literary treatment than for those of the everyday. The fact that even here there must be workers and clerks, wage rates and unemployed, was often surpassed by the seemingly fictional quality of the individuals. Fantasy was more alive than conscience.

At any rate, the oil workers are incomparably better off than, for example, coal miners. They are skilled workers even here. The working conditions are relatively favourable. The men work in places that, while not airy, are at least not closed off from air, and the smell of the oil is by no means unpleasant and is even said to be healthful for the lungs.

To the layman, all the instruments that are used for boring appear to be disappointingly primitive. Motors drive the drills. A man circles continuously around a type of basin, holding an iron rod horizontally in his hand. As simple as his motions and activities look, they are in reality equally difficult. The experts say that the skill of a workman consists of his ability to feel by hand the degree and type of difficulty with which the drill meets, the low or high level of resistance offered by the rock. The worker’s hand must therefore have a highly refined sense of touch and, in part, provide a substitute for the function of the eye, which in well-drilling is completely useless. If the bore hole is accidentally blocked by some object falling into it — for example, a large screw — ingenious and crafty methods are used to extract the blockage with the aid of instruments that grope around in the darkness before they grasp and remove it. Their endeavours remind one of attempts to bring to the light a cork that has fallen into a dark and narrow-necked bottle. Hours, months and money are lost on it.

Money, money, so very much money! Remember that boring to a depth of fifteen hundred metres costs about ninety thousand dollars. It is a lottery game for people who don’t need one, for bankers, consortiums, and American multi-millionaires. The men for whom a fortune may erupt out of the ground here have already lost the ability to become happy through material gain. There is a distinct contrast between the fabulous way in which the earth offers its treasures and the stoical calm with which the shareholders of oil stock can await the coming of the miraculous event. These poor treasure hunters live somewhat removed from the scene of Nature’s wonders, in the great cities of the West, and the fact that they are far away, invisible and practically impersonal, bestows upon them the brilliance of gods who direct engineers and workers through mysterious transmissions. Foreign financial titans own the great majority of the oilfields. The employees are paid from a kind of magically replenished chest. Somewhere in the distance, on the great international stock exchanges, shares are traded and transactions take place according to unfathomable laws. Astronomers are more familiar with the genesis and fading of heavenly bodies in space than are the managers and directors of oilfields with the changes in ownership of the wells at which they work. The minor officials can only sit and tremble as their ears perceive the reverberations of larger storms in the world markets. For example, three large enterprises were recently sold to a Western consortium. A small conference was held at one of the world’s markets. Three or four gentlemen took out their fountain pens and scrawled their signatures on contracts. And here in this oil town five hundred officials were put out of work; starvation peered through their windows and was already raising the door latch, all because the Master of a Thousand Oil Wells had spoken a brief sentence: ‘We are going to centralize!’