Flight Without End

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One day there appeared at the Austrian Consulate in Moscow a stranger in a black leather jacket, in frayed shoes, with a stubbly beard on a brown and craggy face, with an old fur cap which looked older than it was because outside the first warm March sun was shining. The sunlight fell through two wide windows on the brown wooden barrier behind which sat an official; it shone on coloured brochures for the spas of Salzburg and the Tyrol. The stranger spoke with a faultless official dialect, the dialect of the Austrian better class which even tolerates many High German words if they are spoken melodiously, and at a distance sounds like a kind of nasal Italian. This dialect supported and confirmed the stranger’s story better than any document would have done. And this story needed some confirmation, since it sounded improbable.

The stranger stated that he had arrived in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp in the year 1916 as an Austrian first lieutenant. He had managed to escape from there. From the day of his escape he lived in the Siberian forests with a hunter who owned a house on the edge of the taiga. Both men supported themselves by hunting. Eventually, one of them was overcome by homesickness. He started out without money. He travelled for six months. He could only cover short stretches by train. He still had an old document, an open order. It could be seen from this that the stranger’s name was Franz Tunda, and that he had been a first lieutenant in the old Austrian Army. He had not lost his Austrian citizenship after the downfall of the Monarchy, because he carried on his father’s business in Linz, in Upper Austria. A telegram to Linz with a prepaid reply confirmed the former officer’s statements. The old class-registers of the Cadet School, which likewise corroborated the first lieutenant’s assertions, were still preserved in the archives of the War Ministry in Vienna. The Consul’s remaining doubts were dispelled by the likeable and frank manner of the stranger, who gave the impression that he had never lied in his life, and by the fact that the wily official could not credit a former officer with the intelligence required for a lie.

No statute existed under which anyone returning belatedly from Siberia could undertake a journey home at the expense of the frugal Austrian Government. However, there did exist a relief fund for ‘special cases’ and the Austrian Minister agreed — after some hesitation, which he owed more to his office than his conscience — that Tunda could be included under ‘special cases’.

Tunda received an Austrian passport, an exit permit from the Russian Commissariat for Foreign Affairs through the mediation of the legation, and a travel pass to Vienna via Katowicz. It was all arranged more quickly than he had expected, so that he was not able to carry out his intention of travelling to Baku to say farewell to his wife. For he assumed that he would be under police supervision, and that his return home would be regarded as suspicious. He found himself in one of those situations in which one is compelled by external circumstances to commit an injustice knowingly and wilfully, even to aggravate it, in the face of one’s own conscience. He was a wretch to leave a woman on her own; but he made himself still more despicable by not taking his leave of her in person. He merely wrote to her that he had to be away for some months. He enclosed some banknotes because he had doubts about sending a postal order. He even informed his wife of his brother’s address, the poste restante at Irkutsk, if it should be required.

Then, one evening, he sat in a train travelling westward and felt as if he was not making this journey of his own free will. Things had turned out as they always had in his life, as indeed much that is important does in the lives of others, who are deceived by the more noisy and deliberate nature of their activities into believing that an element of self-determination governs their decisions and transactions. However, they forget that over and above their own brisk exertions lies the hand of fate.

On one of those fine April mornings, when the Inner City of Vienna is as joyful as it is elegant, on one of those mornings when beautiful women stroll along the Ringstrasse with leisured gentlemen, when dark-blue siphons shine on the bright café terraces and the Salvation Army organizes musical processions, Franz Tunda appeared on the crowded sunny side of the Graben* in the same garb in which he had presented himself at the consulate in Moscow, and created an undoubted sensation. To a chemist standing in front of his aromatic establishment on the corner, he looked like a ‘Bolshevik’. Tunda’s long legs seemed even longer because he was wearing riding-breeches and high soft knee-boots. They exuded a strong odour of leather. The fur cap sat low over his sullen eyes. The chemist read danger to his shop in this face.

So Tunda found himself in Vienna. He drew unemployment relief, lived wretchedly, and looked up a few of his old friends. They informed him that his fiancée was married, and probably living in Paris.