The Silent Prophet

1

Friedrich was born in Odessa, in the house of his grandfather, Kargan, the rich tea merchant. He was an unwanted, because illegitimate, child, the son of an Austrian piano-teacher named Zimmer to whom the rich tea merchant had refused his daughter. The piano-teacher vanished from Russia, old Kargan had him sought for in vain after he had learned of his daughter’s pregnancy.

Six months later he sent her and the new-born child to his brother, a wealthy merchant in Trieste. In this man’s home Friedrich spent his childhood. It passed not altogether unhappily, even though he had fallen into the hands of a benefactor.

Only when his mother died — at an early age and of a disease that was never accurately identified — was Friedrich quartered in a servant’s room. On holidays and special occasions he was allowed to eat at the same table as the children of the house. He preferred the company of the domestics, from whom he learned the pleasures of life and a distrust of the lords and masters.

At primary school he proved far more gifted than the children of his benefactor. Therefore the latter did not allow him to continue his education but apprenticed him to a shipping agent’s, where Friedrich had the prospect, after several years, of becoming a skilled official with a monthly wage of a hundred and twenty kronen.

At that time a growing number of deserters, emigrants and refugees from the pogroms were crossing the Austrian border from Russia. The shipping agencies therefore began to set up branch establishments in the border states of the Monarchy to intercept the emigrants and despatch them to Brazil, Canada and the United States.

These branch agencies enjoyed the goodwill of the authorities. It was the government’s unconcealed desire to remove these poor, unemployed and not altogether innocuous refugees from Austria as quickly as possible; but also to convey the impression that Russian deserters would be supplied with sailing tickets and recommendations to countries overseas — to such an extent that the desire to quit the army should affect an increasing number of Russian malcontents. The authorities were probably tipped off not to keep too close an eye on the shipping agents.

However, it was not easy to find reliable and skilled staff for the frontier establishments. The older employees did not want to leave their districts, homes and families. In addition, they were unfamiliar with the languages, manners and inhabitants of the border territories. Lastly, they were also scared of a somewhat risky occupation.

In the office where Friedrich worked he was regarded as capable and diligent. He mastered several languages, among them Russian. He was a thoughtful young man. What was not appreciated was that his quiet and always alert courtesy concealed a shrewd and silent arrogance. His taciturn pride was taken for reserve. However, he hated his superiors, his instructors, his benefactor and every kind of authority. He was timid, did not participate in sports with those of his own age, he dealt no blows and received none, evaded every danger, and his fearfulness always exceeded his curiosity. He prepared to revenge himself on the world which, he believed, treated him as a second-class person. It thwarted his ambition that he could not go to high school like his fellows and cousins. He made up his mind to complete his studies one day nevertheless, to enter the high school and become a statesman, politician, diplomat — in any case someone powerful.

When it was suggested to him that he should go to one of the border subsidiaries, he immediately assented, in the hope of a lucky change of fortune and an interruption of the normal routine, which he detested. On this first journey he took with him his foresight, his cunning, and his ability to dissemble, qualities bestowed on him by nature.

Before he climbed into the passenger train which left for the east, he cast a yearning and yet reproachful glance at an elegant coffee-coloured international sleeping-car which was due to depart from Trieste for Paris.

‘One day I shall be one of the passengers in that coach,’ thought Friedrich.

2

Forty-eight hours later he arrived at the little border town where the Parthagener family ran a branch of the shipping agency. Old Parthagener had owned the inn, ‘The Ball and Chain’, for over forty years. It was the first house on the wide street that ran from the frontier to the town. Here the fugitives and deserters came and encountered the pure and calm serenity of the old man with the silver beard, who seemed to be a manifestation of nature’s blind intent ultimately to clothe all men, irrespective of their sins or deserts, with the white colour of dignity. Over his weak and light-sensitive eyes Herr Parthagener wore blue spectacles. They merely deepened further the serenity of his face and were reminiscent of a dark curtain over the window of a bright and luminous house-front. The agitated refugees at once placed their trust in the old man and left him a good part of the possessions they had brought with them.

The three Parthagener sons had an official, even nautical, appearance, thanks to their white sailor-hats and armbands of navy blue. They distributed among the emigrants illustrated prospectuses inviting one to contemplate dark-green meadows, brindled cows, cabins with blue smoke rising, endless fields of tobacco and rice. From the prospectuses wafted an air of lush and peaceful surfeit. The refugees became homesick for South America and the Parthageners sold steamship tickets.

Not all the emigrants possessed the necessary papers. Thus they were turned back on their arrival in foreign parts. They remained confined in mass hutments, endured one disinfection after another, and finally embarked on a long tour of the police cells of several countries. However, for those who could pay, papers were manufactured at the frontier. A man named Kapturak supplied the circumspect and well-to-do with false documents.

Who was Kapturak? A diminutive man with a greenish-grey complexion, spindly limbs, deft movements, a quack doctor and a shady lawyer by calling, renowned as a smuggler and on good terms with the border officials. His smuggling of goods was only a cover for his traffic in human beings. The many terms he served in the various jails of the territory were his voluntary concessions to the law. Every year, in spring, he appeared at the frontier like a bird of passage. He emerged from one of the many jails of the interior. The snow melted. It rained warm and fragrant in the veiled nights. And the frontier slept. One could cross it silently and invisibly.

During the months of February, March and April he worked. In May he sat in the train in broad daylight with his pack of uncustomed wares, pretended to escape from the inspectors and allowed himself to be imprisoned. Sometimes he treated himself to a vacation and travelled to Karlsbad, for the good of his stomach.

He and the Parthagener family worked together. In the morning, an hour after sunrise, he would bring his protégés to ‘The Ball and Chain’. They would pay for three days’ board and lodging in advance. At this point a young Parthagener would appear with prospectuses.

From time to time, however, someone from the agency had to make a so-called ‘spot-check’, at night, across the frontier. For it occasionally happened that Kapturak led his fugitives to another town, to other Parthageners, in other inns, handed them over to other branches of the firm. So one had to catch him unawares on Russian territory, in the so-called ‘border taverns’.

Friedrich arrived at the Parthageners’ on a sunny day in March 1908. There was a steady cheerful drip from the icicles on the gutters. The sky was light blue. Old Parthagener sat in front of his inn door. A dirty dark-grey crust lay over the large piles of snow on either side of the highroad. The winter was beginning to break up.

Friedrich was young enough to note all the processes of nature and relate them to his experiences. He drank in the special light of this day. It was strong like the warm young south-west wind, the darkness of the crooked gateway and the silvered dignity of the old man.

‘He might as well bring a “batch” across next week!’ said the ancient to his sons, who were standing at the open window in their gleaming white sailor-hats.

‘Come along in,’ he then said to Friedrich, ‘and have something to drink!’

From then on Friedrich remained at ‘The Ball and Chain’.

3

A week later he was sent to the border tavern to bring a ‘batch’ across. The train had arrived at eleven at night, they were not due to cross the frontier until three in the morning. Four deserters slept huddled together on the floor, a double row of bodies, heads on their bundles. Behind the counter sat the deaf and dumb landlord. He opened his eyes wide, for they served him instead of ears and he could hear with them. But now there was nothing to hear. Kapturak had nodded off in a chair. Against the door, haggard and menacing, leaned the swarthy Caucasian, Savelli. He refused to sit down, he was afraid of falling asleep. He mistrusted Kapturak. The authorities would have been prepared to pay a high price for Savelli. Who knew whether Kapturak might not intend to turn him in?

The adventurousness of this nocturnal hour intrigued no one but Friedrich. For those who had been engaged in smuggling for years it was usual and ordinary. It was not until years later and in distant lands that the deserters, who were now overcome by fatigue, would remember the weirdness of this place between death and freedom, and the stillness of the encircling night in the midst of which this tavern was the only lighted place, the bright focus of an immense darkness. Only Friedrich listened to the regular slow ticking of a clock which counted out its seconds as if time consisted of the costly drops of a rare and noble metal. Only he observed the large sluggish flies on the wide petroleum lamp whose wick was turned down to a narrow strip and whose broad shade of brown cardboard darkened the upper half of the room. And only he noted the distant whistle of a locomotive which resounded in the night like a frightened man’s call for help.

Towards two in the morning another whistle sounded, cut short, suppressed, fearful. Kapturak heard it. He jumped up and woke the sleepers. Each put his bundle on his back. They went outside. The night was dim and humid, the ground moist. The steps of each were audible. They went through a wood. Kapturak stood still. ‘Lie down!’ he whispered, and all quietly lay down. A twig snapped.

After a while Kapturak jumped up and began to run. ‘Follow me!’ he shouted. Behind him they all jumped over a ditch. They continued running to the edge of the wood. Behind them a shot rang out and died away in a long echo.

They were over the border. The men walked slowly, silently, heavily. Each one’s breathing could be heard. Friedrich could not see them but he remembered their faces clearly, simple snub-nosed peasant faces, eyes under puny foreheads, massive trunks and heavy limbs.

He loved them, for he was sensitive to their distress. He thought of the innumerable frontiers of the gigantic empire. This very night hundreds of thousands were leaving, moving from misfortune to misfortune. The boundless silent night was peopled with human fugitives, flattened wretched faces, massive trunks, heavy limbs.

It began to lighten in the east. As if by command they all suddenly stood still and turned back in the direction from which they had come, as if the night they were abandoning had become their homeland and the dawn only a frontier. They stood still and bade farewell to their homeland, to a farm, an animal, a mother, this one to a hundred acres and another to a single strip of ground, to the striking of a particular clock, the crow of a cock, the creaking of a familiar door. They stood there as if conducting some rite. Suddenly Savelli began to sing a soldier’s song in a strong clear voice. All joined in and sang with him. They still had a good hour to go to reach Parthagener’s inn.

4

‘That is probably his hymn of praise,’ said Kapturak rather loudly to Friedrich. Though everyone was singing Savelli heard the remark and retorted: ‘Of the two of us, Kapturak, you are the one who should be singing a hymn of praise! You can thank God that you didn’t hand me over. I would have killed you.’

‘I know,’ said Kapturak, ‘and I should not have been the first or the last. Is it true that you did away with Kalashvili?’

‘I was around,’ replied Savelli. It sounded mysterious. However, Savelli did not give the impression that he had anything to conceal in the affair.

‘I saw him die,’ he went on. ‘I never for a moment thought that he also had a private life, outside his police duties. Anyway, he could not have continued to live in peace. I don’t believe in the peace of a traitor.’

‘You must have hated him,’ Friedrich ventured to ask.

‘No!’ replied Savelli. ‘I did not feel hate. I believe one can only hate if one has suffered personally at the hands of another. But I’m not capable of that. I am a tool. People use my head, my hands, my constitution. My life is not my own. I no longer belong to myself. I would have to transgress the rights befitting a tool if I wanted to hate him. Or love him, even!’

‘But you do love?’

‘What?’

‘I mean,’ answered Friedrich slowly, for he was shy of using a large word, ‘the Idea, the Revolution.’

‘I have worked eight years for it,’ said Savelli quietly, ‘and cannot say sincerely whether I love it. Is it possible to love something that is so much bigger than I am? I don’t understand how believers can love God! I think of love as a force which can grasp and possess its object. No! I don’t believe that I love the Revolution — not in that sense.’

‘One can love God,’ uttered Kapturak decisively.

‘Maybe a believer sees him,’ opined Savelli. ‘Maybe I ought to see the Revolution. …’

‘If you run away,’ said Kapturak, ‘who will make the Revolution?’

‘Who needs make it?’ cried Savelli. ‘It’s coming. Your children will see it.’

‘God help my children!’ said Kapturak.

Friedrich knew who Savelli was. He figured under the name of Tomyshkin in the newspaper reports. He had carried out the notorious bank-raids and illegal movement of money in the Caucasus and in south-west Russia. The police had sought him for years in vain.

‘He could have stayed on longer,’ remarked Kapturak. ‘He wasn’t worried about the police. But they need him abroad.’

Savelli remained at the inn for a few days. ‘Are you related to the Parthageners?’ he once asked Friedrich. And when Friedrich denied this, ‘Then what are you doing in the company of these bandits?’

‘I must save money in order to learn,’ said Friedrich. ‘Soon I shall return to Vienna.’

‘Then come and see me sometime!’ said Savelli. And he gave him his addresses in Vienna, Zürich and London.

Friedrich felt the same kind of embarrassed gratitude for this notorious man that a patient feels for his doctor when he announces the protracted course of a disease with kindness and consideration. Savelli was strange, hard, sinister. Friedrich detested the sacrifice, the anonymity of the sacrifice, the voluntary association the Caucasian cultivated with death.

Life stretched before Friedrich’s youth, immense in its extent, incalculably rich in years and adventure. When he set the word ‘World’ before him, he saw pleasures, women, fame and riches.

He accompanied Savelli to the station. In a single short moment, when Savelli was already standing on the footboard, Friedrich had the feeling that the stranger had assumed control of his youth, his life, his future. He wanted to hand back the addresses and say: ‘I shall never look you up.’ But now Savelli was holding out his hand. He took it. Savelli smiled. He closed the carriage door. Friedrich watched for a while. Savelli did not return to the window.

5

Friedrich learned how to lie, to forge papers, to exploit the impotence, the stupidity, and even sometimes the brutality of the officials. Others of his age were still dreading a black mark or a bad reference at school. He was already aware that there were no incorruptible persons in the world, that everything could be accomplished with the aid of money and nearly everything with the aid of intelligence. He began to save. In his spare time he prepared for matriculation. To this end he had become acquainted with a law student who had had to leave the university for some undisclosed reason. This student was currently living there as clerk to a solicitor and announced his intention of awaiting a more favourable era. He called himself a ‘free revolutionary’ and still adhered to the ideals of the French Revolution. He sighed for the one that had failed in 1848. He spoke of the great days in Paris, of the guillotine, of Metternich, of the minister Latour as of recent and immediate matters. He wanted one day to become a politician, an Opposition deputy. And he already possessed the robust, unruffled, solid aggressiveness of a parliamentarian that might well discountenance a suave minister of the old régime. In the meantime he confined his political activities to participation in the meetings which were held twice a week at Chaikin’s, the cobbler’s.

Chaikin was one of those Russian émigrés whose poverty had prevented him from leaving this border town. Although he earned barely enough for a cup of tea, a piece of bread, a radish, he supported the revolutionaries who came over the border. Every month he expected the outbreak of the world revolution. He prided himself on performing important duties on its behalf and eventually became the head of an impotent conspiracy. Round him gathered the rebellious and dissatisfied. For even in this town, on the periphery of the capitalist world, in which the statute books had only a diminished and debased effect, the unwritten laws of the establishment and of bourgeois morality were nevertheless observed in their full validity. Amidst the striking and unEuropean local colour, in the bizarre tumult of adventurers, doubtful nationalities and the babel of tongues, the putrescent gleam of a patriarchal entrepreneurial benevolence still lingered, the wages of the small artisans and workmen were kept low, the poor were maintained in their submissiveness, which was exposed in the streets beside the infirmities of the beggars. Here, too, those who had settled showed their hatred towards the migrants; all the newly-arrived poor — and some arrived every week — were greeted with the same hostility that the others had themselves received. And even the beggars, who lived on charity, were as afraid of competitors as the shopkeepers. From the officers of the garrison there emanated a metallic glitter to which the daughters of the lower middle class succumbed. At election times soldiers and police moved into the town and spread fear, and the townsfolk were just as cowed as their brethren in the larger European cities.

The rebels met at Chaikin’s. In compliance with theory, he called the few municipal watchmen ‘capitalist lackeys’, a merchant who did not pay his apprentices ‘an exploiter and entrepreneur’, the town councillors ‘beneficiaries of society’, the apprentices ‘beasts of burden’, and 120 brush-makers the ‘proletarian masses’. He organized discussions. He expounded the small and the major programmes. He arranged demonstrations on various occasions. Nothing would have made him happier than to be arrested. But no one regarded him as dangerous.

Friedrich attended Chaikin’s meetings regularly. He went out of curiosity. He stayed out of ambition. In the discussion he learned how to make his point at any price. He developed his marked talent for false formulations. He enjoyed the hush which settled when he rose to speak, in which he imagined he could hear his voice even before it rang out. For days on end he prepared himself to counter every possible objection. He learned to feign a quickwittedness that he did not really possess. He reproduced strange sentences from pamphlets as if they were his own. He enjoyed triumphs. And yet he sincerely loved the poor folk who listened to him, and the red world conflagration he intended to kindle.

The World! What a word! He heard it with youthful ears. It radiated a great beauty and concealed great injustice. Twice a week he deemed it necessary to destroy it and on the other days he readied himself to conquer it.

To this end he studied so zealously that one day his student friend was able to say:

‘I think you could sit the examination in two months’ time. See if you can make it this autumn.’

Friedrich counted the money he had saved. It was enough for six months. He consulted Kapturak about documents. There was some satisfaction to be obtained in appearing before the authorities of the capitalist world with false papers. He had no father and no country. His birth had not been registered anywhere. He took this as a sign and went to Kapturak.

‘In what names?’

‘Friedrich Zimmer.’

‘Why Zimmer?’

‘That was my father’s name.’

‘Russian or Austrian?’

‘Austrian.’

‘Quite right,’ said Kapturak. ‘A young man should not stay in our town. Go out into the world and study law. That’s useful. You may yet be a district commissioner.’

It was on a July day that Freidrich took his departure. The sun beat down on the low roofs of the cottages between which the path led to the station and drove the smoke from the chimneys in front of the low doors. In the middle of the street, which was bordered on both sides by wooden sidewalks, there was a bustle of women and children, peaceful poultry and aggressive dogs. All was pervaded by a fragrant summery influence, and over the smoke from the chimneys prevailed a distant smell of hay and of the trunks of the spruce forest behind the station.

Friedrich was determined to resist any kind of traditional emotion. The fear of melancholy conferred on him the false steadfastness of which young men are unnecessarily proud, and which they take for manliness. He exaggerated the significance of this moment. He had read too much. All of a sudden he re-experienced a hundred scenes of parting. But as the train began to move he forgot the town he was leaving and thought only of that world into which he was travelling.

6

At noon on a fine day in August, a certificate in his pocket, he emerged from the great brown doorway of a Viennese high school. He made his way homeward through the still heat. The streets were empty. They contained only shadows, sun and stones.

He encountered a carriage. The noiseless rubber tyres glided over the paving as if over a polished table. Only a cheerful feudal clatter of horses’ hooves could be heard. In the carriage, under a light sunshade currently the fashion, sat a young woman. As she passed by she had time enough to study Friedrich with the protracted and insulting indifference with which one contemplates a tree, a horse or a lamp-post. He passed before her eyes as before a mirror.

‘She has no idea,’ he thought, ‘who I am. My suit is wretched and no wonder; the youngest Parthagener sold it to me cheap. It has a shabby false brightness. The pockets are too deep, the trousers too wide. It’s like deceptive sunshine in February. I’m wearing a hat of coarse straw, it presses like heavy wire netting and is spuriously summery. Beautiful women look past me in-differently.’

She was a beautiful woman. A narrow nose with delicate nostrils, brown cheeks, a narrow rather over-straight mouth. Her neck, slender and probably brown, disappeared in the collar of her high-necked dress. A foot in a dove-grey shoe sat like a bird on the facing seat cushioned in red velvet. The sunlight flowed over her body, over the cream-coloured dress and filtered through the parasol which stretched like a tiny sky over its own small world. The coachman in his ash-grey livery held the reins tightly. His forearms hung parallel over his knees. The almost golden glint of the black horses had a festive jollity. Their docked tails betrayed a flirtatious strength. They rose and fell governed by the secret rules of a rhythm not to be fathomed by pedestrians.

This encounter with a beautiful woman was like the first encounter with an enemy. Friedrich assessed his position. He weighed up his forces. He summed them up and pondered whether he dared to go into battle. He had just taken a barricade. He had, through a laughable examination, become fit for society. He could become anything: a defender of mankind, but also its oppressor; a general and a minister; a cardinal, a politician, a people’s tribune. Nothing — apart from his clothes — hindered him from advancing far beyond the position the young woman might occupy; from becoming idolized by her and her kind; and from rejecting her. Naturally, rejecting her.

What a long way for one who was poor and alone! For one without even a name or papers! Everyone else was rooted in a home. Everyone else was fixed as fast as bricks in a wall. They had the precious certainty that their own downfall would also mean the end of the others. The streets were quiet and filled with peaceful sunshine. Closed windows. Lowered blinds. Happiness and love dwelled unalloyed behind the green and yellow curtains. Sons honoured their fathers, mothers understood their children, women embraced their husbands, brothers hugged each other.

He could not divorce himself from this quiet, prosperous, fortunate district in which he happened to be. He made detours as if, by some miracle, he might suddenly find himself in front of his house without having to traverse the noisy dirty streets which led to his lodging. The chimney-stacks of the factories emerged straight behind the roofs. The people had slept in tenements, could not keep their balance and seemed as if drunk. The haste of poverty is frightened and soundless and yet begets an indistinct uproar.

He lodged with a tailor, in a gloomy little room. The window had tarnished panes and opened on the hall. It prevented light from entering and the neighbours from looking in. Sewing machines clattered in the landlord’s bedroom. The ironing-board lay across the bed, the dress-maker’s dummy was propped against the door, customers were measured in the kitchen and the wife, stuck by the stove with flushed face, scolded the four children at their play.

‘If I go to the restaurant first,’ reflected Friedrich, ‘the family will have eaten by the time I get back. There’ll be only the washing-up left to do.’

He entered a small restaurant. A man sat down at his table. His ears were strikingly large and withered as if made of yellow paper, his head batlike.

‘I think you must be my neighbour,’ said the man. ‘Don’t you live across the road at Number 36?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve seen you around for some weeks. Do you always eat here?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I suppose you’re a student.’

‘Not yet! I have to get enrolled first.’

‘What kind, may I ask?’

‘Don’t know yet!’

‘I’m an address-writer,’ said the man. ‘My name is Grünhut. I was a student once too. But I had bad luck.’ It was as if he really meant: ‘You won’t escape that fate either.’

‘Do you manage all right?’ asked Friedrich.

‘As an address-writer! Three heller an envelope. A hundred a day, sometimes a hundred and twenty. I can get work for you too. Willingly! I’d be glad to do so. Is your handwriting good? Come tomorrow!’

They went to a linen warehouse. The book-keeper handed them a list and a hundred and fifty green envelopes.

‘Where are you eating tonight?’ asked Grünhut. ‘Come with me.’

They ate in a cellar. They were given soup made of sausage scraps. A long table. Hurrying rattling spoons. Metal tableware. Noises of lips smacking, spoons scraping, throats gurgling. ‘Good soup!’ said Grünhut. ‘I’ll show you about the coffee, we have that across the road, at Grüner’s. Soon you won’t have to bother any more, you’ll be eating in the college refectory. I used to feed there once.’

‘I could find myself in the same situation,’ said Friedrich.

‘What, really? What situation? My situation, of course! Do you really think so? Yes, it’s a good thing that I’ve shown you all these places. I had to discover them myself.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, not at all! Not at all! When I came out of prison, I was all alone. Wife divorced! Brother a stranger. Didn’t know me any more. Apart from Frau Tarka, I didn’t know a soul. Her brother was in clink with me. So he recommended me. Connections are what count in our circles too. Do you know Frau Tarka? She’s the midwife, just over your tailor’s. My room’s above yours. I checked. You wouldn’t believe how many come to Frau Tarka. Yesterday, for example, Dr D.’s daughter. Six months ago it was the wife of a proper Excellency. And the young men! Sons of public prosecutors and generals! Bring their careless little girls. And all I did was to undo the blouse of the pupil I was teaching geography and history in the sixth form, at the high school in the Floriangasse, a private school. Good children from good homes. A working man’s daughter wouldn’t have said anything. But the well-off! I know a lawyer who raped his ward. A lieutenant who sleeps with his batman. I could write them each a little anonymous letter if I were a scoundrel. But I’m not, in spite of everything. Where do you stand politically? Left, of course! What? I’ve no opinions. But I think a revolution would do us good. A small short revolution. Three days, for instance.’

7

A peculiar relationship developed between Friedrich and myself at that time. I might call it intimacy without friendship or comradeship without affection. And even the fellow-feeling which later linked us was not present at the outset. It arose from the attention we began to pay each other one day and from the mutual mistrust we detected in each other. Finally we began to respect each other. Trust grew slowly, was fostered by the glances we exchanged, almost without realizing it, in the company of others and less by the words that passed than by the silences in which we often sat and strolled together. Had our lives not taken such differing courses, Friedrich would probably have become my friend, as did Franz Tunda.

It was a long time before Friedrich decided to look up Savelli, who was still living in Vienna at that time. He was afraid. He felt that, for the time being, he still had the choice between what he termed ‘revolutionary asceticism’ and the ‘world’, the vague romantic notion of pleasures, struggles, triumphs. Already he hated the governance of this world, but he still believed in it.

The finely soaring ramp of the University did not yet seem to him — as it did to me — the fortress wall of the national students’ association, from which every few weeks Jews or Czechs were flung down, but as a kind of ascent to ‘Knowledge and Power’. He had the respect of the self-taught for books, which is even greater than that contempt for books which distinguishes the wise. When he leafed through a catalogue, stood in front of the bookshop windows, sat in the quiet mildly dusty rooms of the library, regarded the dark-green backs of innumerable books on the tall wide shelves, the military ranks of green lampshades on the long tables, the deep devotion which makes every reader in the library look like a pious worshipper in a church, he was seized by the fear that he did not know the All-Important, and that one life might be too short to gain experience of it. He read and learned hastily, unsystematically, following changing inclinations, attracted by a title or a recollection of having heard of it before. He filled notebooks with observations that he took to be ‘fundamental’ and was almost inconsolable if a phrase, a date, a name escaped him. He listened to all lectures, necessary and unnecessary. He was always to be seen in the auditorium, always in the last row, which was also usually the highest. From there he overlooked the bent heads of the audience, the open white notebooks, the tiny blurred shorthand. The professor was so far away that to a certain extent he had lost his private humanity, was no more than a purveyor of knowledge. But Friedrich remained solitary, surrounded by candid faces in which nothing was evident but youth. One could, at a pinch, distinguish the races. Social differences were recognizable only by secondary characteristics. The well-to-do had manicured fingernails, tiepins, well-cut suits. All around a stone-deaf stolid wellbeing.

Only in the eyes of some Jewish students there shone a shrewd, a crafty or even a foolish melancholy. But it was the melancholy of blood and race, handed down to the individual and acquired by him without risk. In the same way, the others had inherited their wellbeing. Only groups distinguished themselves from each other by ribbons, colours, convictions. They prepared themselves for a barrack-room life and each already carried his rifle, his so-called ‘Ideal’.

At that time we had a common acquaintance named Leopold Scheller, who happened to be the only student with whom Friedrich associated. He concealed nothing, always told the truth, naturally only the truth as he knew it, and put up with any insult that was flung at him. He did not believe it could be meant personally. If anyone offended his honour, as he saw it, by a look or a deliberate or chance shove in the Great Hall, it was not so much a matter of his honour, as that of the students’ club to which he belonged. When Friedrich was bored he went to Scheller, who did not seem to be acquainted with boredom. He was always preoccupied with his philosophy of life.

He once surprised Friedrich with the information that he had got engaged. And he at once reached into his trouser-pocket, where he usually carried his pistol in a leather case. On this occasion he took out a wallet and out of the wallet a photograph. He noted Friedrich’s amazement and said: ‘My fiancée has taken my pistol away. She won’t permit it.’

The photograph showed a pretty young woman of some eighteen years. She had black eyes and hair. ‘She’s certainly not a blonde then,’ said Friedrich.

‘She is Italian,’ replied Scheller evenly, as if he had never been a Teuton.

‘But,’ persisted Friedrich, ‘what are you doing with an Italian girl?’

‘Love conquers all,’ began Scheller. ‘It is the greatest power on earth. Besides, I shall be making a German of her.’

‘And how long have you known the lady?’

‘Since the day before yesterday,’ replied Scheller, beaming. ‘I accosted her in the park.’

‘And engaged already?’

‘There’s nothing else for it — either, or.’

‘And your Club?’

‘I’m resigning. Because she doesn’t care for it. I wrote today to ask her father for her hand. He is a bank-clerk in Milan. My fiancée is with relatives here. We are getting married in two months’ time. How do you like her?’

‘Enormously!’

‘Don’t you agree? She is beautiful? She is unique?’ And he laid a small piece of tissue-paper over the photograph and tucked it away again in his pistol pocket.

Although Friedrich did not consider Scheller’s happiness lasting and feared disillusion for his friend, he nevertheless experienced in the proximity of this infatuation the warming reflection of a bliss not previously encountered, and he sunned himself in the other’s love as if he lay in a strange meadow. Scheller was an entirely happy man. From lack of understanding he was incapable of a moment’s doubt — a condition that normally accompanies love as shadow accompanies light. As the bliss he received was boundless, he radiated it again outwards. It was a bliss mightier than Scheller himself. Friedrich envied him and simultaneously relished the misery of his own solitude. He now imagined that his entire life would acquire meaning and expression when he met the woman he sought. Although he considered Scheller’s method of picking up a girl in the park foolish, he did betake himself to the green spaces, which is not the colour of hope but of yearning. Moreover, everything was already autumnal and yellow. And the impatience of his searching heart waxed as the world approached winter.

He began to study with redoubled zeal. But as soon as he put down a book, it seemed to him as foolish as Scheller himself. Scholarship concealed what was really important as the rock strata concealed the earth’s centre — secret, ever burning, ever invisible, not to be revealed before the end of the world. One learned about amputating legs, Gothic grammar, canon law. One could just as easily have learnt how to store furniture, manufacture wooden legs or pull teeth. And even philosophy made up its own answers and interpreted the sense of the question in relation to the answer that suited it. It was like a schoolboy who alters the problem set him to fit the false result of his mathematical labours.

Before long Friedrich began to become a less frequent attender in the lecture theatres. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’d rather pass the time with Grünhut. I have seen through them all. This intellectual flirtation of the elegant professors who lecture to the daughters of high society in the evenings from six to eight. A light-hearted excursion into philosophy, Renaissance art history, with lantern-slides in a darkened hall, national economy with sarcastic remarks about Marxism — no, that’s not for me. And then, the so-called strict professors, who give lectures at a quarter past eight in the mornings, just after sunrise, so as to be free for the rest of the day — for their own work. The bearded senior lecturers who are on the look-out for a good marriage so that, through some connection with the Minister of Education, they may at last become established professors with salaries. And the malicious smiles of spiteful examiners, who carry off glorious victories over failed candidates. The University is an institution for the children of good middle-class homes with well-organized primary teaching, eight years of middle school, private coaching by tutors, the prospect of a judgeship, of a prosperous legal practice or a government office through marrying a second cousin — not a first cousin, because of consanguinity. And finally for the blockheads of the uniformed students’ societies who fight each other, for pure Aryans, pure Zionists, pure Czechs, pure Serbs. Not for me! I’d rather write addresses with Grünhut.’

Once he discovered Savelli’s name in one of the library catalogues. The book was entitled International Capital and the Petroleum Industry. He looked for the book and did not find it. It was out on loan. And as if this incident had been a sign from above he immediately betook himself from the library to Savelli.

In Savelli’s room, on the fifth floor of a grey tenement in a proletarian district, there were three men. They had removed their jackets and hung them over the chairs they were sitting on. An electric bulb on a long flex hung from the ceiling and swung low over the rectangular table, constantly moved by the breath of the men talking but also by their repeated attempts to shift the lamp out of their field of vision whenever it hid one or the other. Sometimes, irritated by the annoying bulb but without recognizing it as the cause of his impatience, one of the three would get up, walk twice round the table, cast a searching glance at the sofa by the wall, and resume his original place. It was impossible just to sit down on the sofa. Heavy books and light newspapers, coloured pamphlets, prospectuses, dark-green library volumes, manuscripts and unused octavo sheets yellowing at the edges lay there higgledy-piggledy, and all subject to unknown laws which prevented the heavy volumes of an encyclopaedia from sliding off a thin stack of green pamphlets Savelli had relinquished the chairs to his guests and sat on a pile of eight thick books, but still so low that his chin just projected above the table-top.

One of those present was powerful and broad-shouldered. He kept his large hairy fists on the table. His skull was round and bald, his eyebrows so thin and sparse as to be barely visible, his eyes small and bright, his mouth red and fleshy, his chin like a block of marble. He wore a red Russian blouse of some shiny material with a strong reflection, and no one could see him without at once thinking of an executioner. He was Comrade P., a Ukrainian, placid, even-tempered and trustworthy, and with a remarkable cunning which was hidden under his bulk like silver under the earth. Next to him sat Comrade T., a yellow-brown face with a black moustache and a wide black imperial, eyeglasses on his prominent nose, and dark eyes which seemed to betray a kind of restless hunger. Opposite him stood the momentarily empty chair of the third comrade. He was the most restless of them all and the frailty of his limbs, the pallor of his skin, justified his unease.

He had just been speaking when Friedrich entered and was now drumming with lean fingers on the dark window-pane as if telegraphing morse signals into the night. His face bore a modest thin nautical beard like a faded frame round a portrait. His eyes were hard and bright when he removed his spectacles. Behind them they looked thoughtful and wise. This was R., with whom Friedrich struck up a rapid friendship at the time, and whose enemy he was later to become.

The sentence which still rang in Friedrich’s ears immediately revealed the speaker to him. ‘I’ll be hanged,’ he had said, before at once correcting himself, ‘that is, they can hang me if we have a war within five years.’

Then there was silence for a time. Savelli got up, recognized Friedrich at once, and signed to him to sit where he liked. Friedrich looked round in vain and sat down cautiously on a pile of books on the sofa.

No one paid him any attention. P. stood up. His great bulk immediately darkened the room. He took up a stance behind the back of his chair and said: ‘There’s no other possibility. One of us has to go. The situation is so critical that we may all be for it overnight. Then the connection will be broken and the money lost over there for good. Berzejev is an officer, he has to look after his own interests. Desertion will be difficult for him. I have a direct report. He writes that he was jittery right through the manoeuvres. When he got back, Levicki was in Kiev, Gelber in Odessa. No one in Kharkov.’

‘You’ll have to go yourself,’ interrupted Savelli.

‘Make your will!’ cried R.

‘Comrade R. is nervous as usual,’ said Savelli very softly.

‘I don’t deny it,’ retorted R. smilingly, thereby displaying two rows of strikingly white and even teeth which no one would have suspected behind his narrow lips. The teeth emitted a fearsome gleam so that the sensitive peaceable nature of his face vanished and even his eyes became malicious.

‘I’ve never claimed to be a hero and don’t intend to risk my life. In any case, Savelli gives me no opportunity.’

They all laughed, except for the one with the dark hair. He shook his head, his pince-nez quivered and, as he gave the dangling lamp which now obstructed his view a shove so that it began to swing even more wildly, looking like a large irritated moth, he banged his other hand on the table and said resentfully: ‘Don’t be funny.’

When they broke up they shook Friedrich’s hand, as if he were an old acquaintance.

‘I saw you once on the Ring,’ Savelli said to him. ‘What are you doing now? Are you working? I don’t mean studying.’ He meant whether Friedrich was working for the Cause. Friedrich confessed that he was doing nothing. Savelli spoke of the war. It might break out within a week. The Russian General Staff was at work in Serbia. Russian agents trailed the émigrés in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Suspicious customers had appeared several weeks ago in a café they frequented in the 9th precinct. Would Friedrich put in an appearance?

‘I’ll meet you again, here or at the café,’ said Friedrich.

‘Good-day!’ said Savelli, as if he were taking leave of a man who had given him a light.

R. was without doubt the most interesting man besides P., Dr T., and Savelli. A number of younger men gathered round him and formed his ‘group’. They walked through the late still nights. R. addressed them, they hung on his words.

‘Tell me,’ he began, ‘whether this world isn’t as quiet as a cemetery. People sleep in their beds like graves, they read a leading article, dunk a crisp croissant in their coffee, the whipped cream spills over the edge of the cup. Then they tap their egg carefully with the knife, out of respect for their own breakfast. The children saunter off to school with satchels and dangling blackboard sponges to learn about emperors and wars. The workers have already been at work in the factories for a long time, young girls glueing cartridges, big men cutting steel. For some hours, soldiers have been at exercise in the fields. Trumpets blare. Meanwhile it’s ten o’clock, councillors and ministers drive up to their offices, sign, sign, telegraph, dictate, telephone; typists sit in editorial offices and take dictation, pass it to editors who conceal and disclose, disguise and reveal. And as if nothing eventful had happened during the day, bells shrill to signal in the evening and the theatres fill with women, flowers and perfume. And then the world falls asleep again. But we are awake. We hear the ministers come and go, the kings and emperors groaning in their sleep, we hear how the steel is sharpened in the factories, we hear the birth of the big guns and the soft rustle of papers on the desks of diplomats. Already we see the great conflagration, from which men can no longer salvage their small sorrows and their small joys. …’

8

Friedrich now worked — as he and his friends tended to say — ‘for the Cause’. He got himself into the habit of obtaining the enthusiasm, without which he could not live, from renunciation and anonymity. He even charmed a stimulus from the inexorability he had so feared, comfort from despair. He was young. And he believed not only in the efficacy of sacrifice, but also in the reward which engarlands sacrifice like flowers a grave. And yet there were hours, his ‘weak’ ones as he called them, in which he indulged a private hope that the Idea might triumph, and that he might live to experience it. But he owned to this only when he met R.

‘Don’t worry about that!’ said R. ‘I believe only in the altruism of the dead. We would all like to experience the right moment and a sweet revenge.’

‘Except Savelli!’ said Friedrich.

‘You deceive yourself,’ replied R., not without malevolence, or so it seemed to me at the time. ‘You don’t know Savelli. People will only understand him when it’s too late. He acts the part of a man who no longer owns his heart because he has presented it to mankind. But don’t be taken in, he has none. I prefer an egoist. Egoism is a sign of humanity. But our friend is not human. He has the temperament of a crocodile in the drought, the imagination of a groom, the idealism of an Izvoschik.’

‘But what about all he’s done so far?’

‘A stupid error, to judge men by their deeds. Forget the bourgeois historians! Men get involved with affairs as innocently as they do with dreams. Our friend could just as well have organized pogroms as robbed banks!’

‘Then why does he stay in our camp?’

‘Because he’s not talented enough, in our view, not versatile enough to free himself from the weight of his past. Men of his kind keep to their chosen path. He’s no traitor. But he is our enemy. He hates us, as Russian peasants hate city intellectuals. He hates me in particular.’

‘Why you in particular?’

‘Because he has good cause to. Look at it properly. I’m no Russian. I’m a European. I know that I am separated from our comrades much more than most of us intellectuals are from the proletarians. I’m unlucky. I have a western education. Although I’m a radical, I like the centre. Although I prepare for the great uprising, I like moderation. I can’t help myself.’

R. abandoned himself to the gusto of his formulation. And Friedrich copied him. Both began to outdo each other in contradictions. From both at that time one could hear a statement which was startling then and today sounds almost obvious: ‘The Tsar is no gentleman, he’s a bourgeois. He marks the beginning of the democratic era in Russia, the era of a democracy of small peasants — and you’ll see, Savelli’s friends will push on with the work. If the Tsar doesn’t hang us, they will.’

It was as if R. had set out systematically to destroy Friedrich’s fervour, his romantic enthusiasm for all the trappings of secret conspiracy. In R.’s company, even danger gained a ridiculous aspect. ‘It’s no lie,’ he would say in the halls which stank of beer, pipe tobacco and sweat, ‘that it’s easier to die for the masses than to live with them.’ Then he would step onto the platform, demand stronger support for the Party, threaten the ruling class, shout for blood, and cry: ‘Long live the World Revolution!’

The police inspector would blow his whistle, the officers stormed into the hall, the meeting broke up. R. disappeared in a flash. He did not expose himself to the fists of the police.

It may well be that Friedrich would have taken another path if he had not become R.’s friend. For ultimately it was R. who instigated Friedrich to go to Russia, who aroused the younger man’s ambition, the naïve ambition to demonstrate that one was not a ‘fainthearted intellectual’. But there was also another factor.

I have the suspicion that Friedrich’s voluntary journey to Russia, which ended ultimately in a compulsory spell in Siberia, was the foolish outcome of a foolish infatuation which he took for hopeless at the time and whose importance he plainly exaggerated. But we have no right to enquire into the personal motives for an action that Friedrich wanted to carry out in the service of his Idea. We must content ourselves with a description of certain events.

9

He thought no more of the woman in the carriage — or he imagined that he had forgotten her. But one day, by chance, he saw her again — and he was startled. For it was like an encounter with a picture come to life which had been left in store in a particular room in a particular museum, or an encounter with a forgotten idea which has remained in a deep and hidden region of the memory. He no longer remembered who she was when she asked him in a corridor at the University where Lecture Theatre 24 was. He only recognized her after she had disappeared. Like a distant star, she had occupied a few seconds in impinging on his retina. He followed her. In the darkened room someone was reading aloud about some painter or other, someone was showing various lantern-slides, and the darkness was like a second smaller room within the hall. It enclosed both her and him with equal density.

He waited. He did not hear a single word or see a single picture. He saw that the door opened, and that she left the hall.

He followed her at a distance which seemed to be ordained and laid down by adoration. He was afraid that a side-street might swallow her, a carriage bear her away, an acquaintance await her. His tender gaze seized the distant brown shimmer of her profile between the edge of her fur collar and her dark hat. The regular rhythm of her steps imparted gentle wavy movements to the soft material of her jacket, to her hips and back. She stopped in front of a small shop in a quiet side-street and laid a hesitant, pensive hand on the door-handle. She went in. He came nearer. He looked through the window. She was sitting at the table, face turned towards him, trying on gloves. She was leaning on her left hand, her fingers were outspread in patient expectation. She slipped on the new leather, closed her hand into a fist and opened it again, stroked the left hand caressingly with the right, and unfolded joints and fingers in attractive and absorbing play.

She left the shop. He had no time to move away. Her first glance fell on him and, as he involuntarily removed his hat, she stood there as if she intended to acknowledge him, as if she was considering whether she should assume the indifferent smile suited to acquaintances one has forgotten. Eventually, as he made no move, she turned to go. He came a step closer. She was visibly embarrassed. The urge to fly seized him together with the fear of ridicule. The awareness that he must say something the very next moment was surpassed by the silent avowal that he could think of nothing to say. The soft oval of her brown face confused him by its proximity, like her startled dark gaze and the delicate bluish skin of her eyelids, and even the small parcel she held in her hand. ‘If only she didn’t continue to smile,’ he thought. ‘I must make it clear to her at once that I am not one of her acquaintances.’ So, hat in hand, he said: ‘I can’t help it if you’re alarmed. The situation was too much for me. I followed you unintentionally. You left the shop before I expected. I accosted you without knowing you. I have therefore misled you without intending to do so. Please forgive me.’

As he was speaking he was surprised by the calmness and precision of his words. Her smile vanished and reappeared. It was like a light that comes and goes.

‘I quite understand,’ she said.

Friedrich bowed, she likewise attempted an acknowledgment, and both laughed.

He was surprised to find that she was not married. He could not understand now why he had taken her for a married woman. Also, it was not her carriage in which she had been travelling that August day. The carriage belonged to her friend, Frau G., to whom she had been invited. Was she a student? No, she only attended the lectures of Professor D., who was a family friend. Her father, as is the way of some old gentlemen, did not permit her to study. She would certainly have had her way if her mother had been alive. Her mother would have been helpful. And a transient sadness passed over her face.

She stood in front of a cab-rank, she was due at the theatre, she had an appointment. Already Friedrich saw a coachman jump down from his box and strip the blankets from the back of his horse.

‘I should very much like to come with you, if you’ve the time,’ said Friedrich quickly.

She laughed. He was embarrassed. ‘Let’s go then,’ she said, ‘but right away.’

Now it was done he could no longer speak calmly. The talk was only on neutral topics, the hard winter and Professor D., the tedious public and private balls, the meanness of rich people and the poor street lighting. She vanished into the theatre.

He abandoned himself to an animated aimlessness, a sort of holiday. He entered the foyer in which she had disappeared. It was a quarter of an hour before the start of the performance. One heard the carriages driving up, the horses’ solemn neighing, the clatter of their hoof-beats and the murmured exhortations of the coachmen. The foyer wafted an odour of perfume, powder, clothes, a confusion of greetings. Many men were waiting there, leaning against the walls, removing their hats, bowing more or less deeply, only bowing or smiling while bowing. He could deduce the status of those who entered from the mien and attitude of those who awaited them. The people stood in their corners like living mirrors. But they themselves also had rank and character and were repeatedly confirmed in the position they held in the world by the response they received. The beautiful women seemed to see no one; nevertheless they scanned all those present with the alert and unobtrusive gaze with which commanders inspect regiments ready to march one last time before the General arrives. None of those present escaped these beautiful women. They did not overlook even the doorman or the policeman. Their eyes scattered rapid questions and received slow and languishing answers. Officers in every shade of blue and brown, all in gleaming patent leather boots and narrow black trousers, spread an amiable cadence of sound and a harmless motley of colour. For the first time Friedrich felt no hatred toward them and even a certain solidarity with the policeman, who was to be thanked because the harmony of this elegant turmoil was undisturbed by drunkards or criminals. ‘No one here suspects what I am,’ he thought. ‘They take me for a little student.’ When a woman’s gaze rested on him, he felt gratitude towards the entire sex. ‘These creatures have instinct,’ he told himself. ‘The men are coarse.’ Suddenly he pitied these society ladies. They mourned away their lives, their beauty wilted, at the side of boorish lieutenants and brutish moneylenders. They needed quite different men. Naturally, he thought of himself.

A shrill bell rang through the house like a joyous alarm. People’s movements quickened, the hubbub grew louder. The doors flew open and three minutes later the foyer was empty. The policeman sat down on an empty chair in the corner. The box-office window was slammed to from within by an invisible hand. The silvery arc-lights in front of the entrance went out. The performance had ended in the foyer, another was just beginning on the stage. The coachmen came inside, little men who looked like postmen out of uniform. They gathered round the doorman and parleyed with him. They were sub-agents and fly-by-night ticket touts. The policeman turned away so as not to have to see them. In the foyer there was no longer any fragrance of women’s perfume. These poor folk diffused an aroma of goulash, old clothes and rain. It was as if the poor now gathered in the foyer stood, like the figures in a weather-house, at the opposite end of the same gang-plank to which the rich too were nailed, and as if fixed rules governed the appearance, now of the fortunate, and now of the wretched.

Friedrich left the theatre. It was time to seek out his friends in the café. But on this particular day he would rather not have seen them. He felt embarrassed before them. ‘They are bound to see,’ he told himself, ‘that I am in love. R. will immediately unmask me as a “romantic”, a description which, in his mouth, sounds like the word “parricide”.’ No, he could not meet the comrades. Savelli, for instance, did not fall in love, Comrade T. loved only the Revolution. The Ukrainian had subjected his entire colossal bulk to the Idea as one subjects a race to a master. And as for R., he obviously denied the possibilities of love. Only he, Friedrich, had room in his breast for renunciation and ambition, revolution and infatuation.

There was nothing left for him to do but to climb the poorly-lit stairs to Grünhut, for he could not remain alone. He smelled the stink of the cats which rushed helter-skelter away from him in inexplicable panic, heard the voices from behind the doors ranked closely in the corridors, numbered as in hotels. The midwife’s door bore the notice: ‘Knock loudly, bell out of order.’ He heard Grünhut’s light step.

‘Long time no see,’ said Grünhut. And immediately after: ‘Psst, there’s clients inside.’

He was writing his addresses. He could now easily manage up to 400 a day. Was Friedrich writing still? No, he was working now, still had enough money for two months, and intended to find something else soon.

Grünhut now resumed his old complaints against the world. As always he returned in the end to the question: ‘What do you think of an anonymous letter to the man I told you about?’

He didn’t want Friedrich’s advice, he was thinking of writing an unusual sort of letter, by two hands, each word written alternately. He already knew the attested experts. In any complicated case they were at a loss. A second person must be involved, and not just on account of the handwriting. It might be necessary to arrange a rendezvous. Still, in Grünhut’s opinion two would so confuse anonymity that no one would know what was going on.

Friedrich’s opposition pained him. His unshakable belief in the young man’s criminal nature was transformed into an injured respect for the youth who, in Grünhut’s opinion, was probably planning far more important and profitable crimes.

Various noises emerged from the midwife’s room. Water, words murmured in a woman’s deep voice, a chair pushed back, a metal object in contact with glass and wood.

‘Do you hear that?’ said the little man. ‘On a spring evening, in a private room in a hotel, you hear very different things. Nightingales sing, a gipsy plays the violin, champagne corks pop. Where are they now, the nightingales? Frau Tarka hinted to me who it is in there. The wife of a professor, because of an affair with a sculptor. What’s more, a good friend of mine. Put some business my way. An extremely productive man, thinks himself as irresistible as any blackguard. Frau Tarka has to thank sculptors and painters for most of her little jobs.

‘People have their portraits painted so much nowadays. They live it up in the studios. Do you think a woman can resist a studio? Such lovely disorder under the blue sky, high up on the top floor where only God peers in through the glass roof. You lie there and look up. You see the white clouds passing, interspersed by flocks of birds, and you yearn and yearn again. A canvas in the corner, a witness that another woman was once naked here. And the painter goes on talking. Everything he knows he has acquired from pornographic works and erotic books. His eye lusts after contour and sticks to the surface. “What a line, dear lady,” he says, “connects your neck with the swell of your breast!” Believe me, if a lieutenant said that it would be an insult and the husband would shoot it out with him in the woods at dawn. When a painter says it, it’s an artistic judgment. These so-called connoisseurs aren’t paying compliments, they’re merely making technical appraisals. They apply these to the entire body. “What a provocative thigh!” they say, palette in hand. Some talk about the Renaissance. The sculptor B., for instance, who comes to visit Madame here from time to time, I often have a little chat with him. That is, he does the chatting. Nothing but false rubbish from the erotic books. Gives me an order once. Pornographic engravings; because I happen to know a bookseller, I have to go and make the purchase. He still owes me my commission and the bookseller his money. The bookseller goes along, makes a fuss. “Come tomorrow,” says the Master. Next day, he smilingly gives him the book back. Then he tells me, a few weeks later, he only wanted the pictures for just that one afternoon, for a girl from a good family. And all I did was to undo a blouse. Because I’m no artist. Plain as a pikestaff, the way things have changed. We’ve already had the question of art. The emancipation of women, too. Notice how the two connect? So-called family ties are loosening. The daughters of the privy councillors have their portraits painted and study German philology. And, as for what I did — of course it was many years ago — nowadays you get respect for that kind of thing. My public prosecutor is still alive. He’ll never see another such indictment. My defence counsel even in those days supported the theory of demonic possession. He talked nonsense about irresistible urges, heredity and so on. Fair is fair. My father was an inoffensive man, he ran an exchange-office, had serious worries and not the slightest interest in morality.’

It grew quiet in the next room, a door opened, a key rattled. Grünhut detained Friedrich a few minutes longer.

‘Until they’ve gone downstairs,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any indiscretions.’

10

As, in accordance with the promise he had given his dying wife, he could not marry again, but could not live without a woman and did not want his child to become acquainted with the habits of a lusty widower, Herr Ludwig von Maerker, then still departmental head in a ministry, decided to send his daughter to a children’s home and later to a girls’ boarding school where she would be brought up together with orphans of the same social standing. Therefore, after he had disposed of Hilde, he engaged a housekeeper but took her only to the circus and music-halls. The theatres remained closed to her. She called this an injustice and so granted herself the right to embitter Herr von Maerker’s life and make increasing demands in the house. She controlled his every step and every outlay. And whenever he complained about the restriction of his liberty, she replied with that bitter sarcasm which can herald a fainting-fit as well as an apoplexy: ‘So I can’t have this little entitlement? I, a woman whom you don’t even take to the theatre?’ Once a year Herr von Maerker escaped from the housekeeper. He travelled to Switzerland to visit his daughter. She grew too tall for him, was soon a teenager. He found her beautiful and regretted, in his most private moments, that he was her father and not her seducer. But she had been seduced long before by her own fantasies. Although Herr von Maerker had read a number of French novels about nunneries and girls’ boarding schools, he believed — like most men — in the depravity of all women except his nearest and dearest. Lack of principle begins only with cousins. A good deal was said about the prospect of having Hilde back at home again soon. And, before he was aware of it, Herr von Maerker was going grey at the temples, his housekeeper grew old and wrinkled, her hopes of marriage to her friend and the prospect of a joint box at the theatre vanished, Hilde blossomed — as they say — into a young woman, returned to her father’s house and began to lead her own life.

The times were strongly in favour of freedom for the female sex; not so Herr von Maerker, who had meanwhile become permanent head of a ministerial department and was therefore well aware of the lack of masculine freedom. His daughter’s opinions made him feel half embittered and half ashamed at belonging to the previous generation, for men feel shame at becoming old as if it were a secret vice. He retreated silently before his daughter’s vigorous offensive. He suffered and even gradually became wise. He belonged to that breed of average men who acquire understanding only in later years because they have had to keep silent for so long, and for whom nothing remains but to become meditative. When Hilde, on behalf of all the daughters of the world, exclaimed: ‘Our mothers were exploited and betrayed!’ Herr von Maerker felt it as a calumny on his dead wife and an insult by his daughter. He wondered where Hilde had acquired so much robust callousness and shocking rhetoric. He still knew nothing about his daughter.

She was no different from the young women of her time and station. She transformed the submissive romanticism of her mother into an Amazon martiality, demanded the recognition of civil rights, including, in passing as it were, free love. Under the slogan ‘Equal rights for all!’ the daughters of good homes at that period rushed into life, into the high schools, into railway trains, luxury liners, into the dissecting-room and the laboratory. For them there blew through the world that familiar fresh breeze that every new generation believes it has discovered. Hilde was determined not to surrender herself in marriage. Her ‘closest friend’ had committed the betrayal of marrying the enormously wealthy Herr G.; she owned carriages, horses, flunkeys, coachmen, liveries. But Hilde, who gladly enjoyed sharing in her friend’s wealth and laid claim to the carriages and the liveries for shopping expeditions, asserted: ‘Irene’s happiness means nothing to me, she has sold her freedom.’ The men to whom she said this found her charming, unusually intelligent, delightfully self-willed. And as, on top of this, she had a dowry and a father with good connections, one or the other thought of marrying her despite her principled objection, in their old-fashioned masculine way.

Her father would only have given her to certain of her acquaintances. Certainly not to everyone of those with whom she associated, less out of interest than from the need to demonstrate her independence. She formed a so-called circle. Through her father she knew some hopeful young officials and officers, through Professor D., a few lecturers and students of art history. Through her rich married friend, whose husband fancied himself a Maecenas, a composer, two painters, a sculptor and three writers.

All these young people, none of whom suspected that they would soon be decimated in a world war, behaved as if they had to burst out of never-ending bondage. The young officials spoke of the dangers which threatened the old Empire, of the necessity for far-reaching national autonomy or a strong centralizing grip, of the dissolution of Parliament, a careful choice of ministers, a break with Germany, a rapprochement with France, or else an even closer tie with Germany and a challenge to Serbia. Some wanted to avoid war, others to provoke it; both thought that it would be a question of only a lighthearted little war. The young officers held slow promotion and the stupidity of the general staff responsible for everything. The lecturers, meek as young theologians, concealed under their store of knowledge a hunger for position and dowries. The artists let it be understood that they had a direct line to Heaven, derided authority, simultaneously championed Olympus, the café and the studio. Each was audacious, and yet each was really rebelling only against his own father. Hilde regarded each as a personality and at the same time as a good comrade. She believed she was maintaining pure friendship, but if anyone failed to pay her a compliment, she began to doubt his personality. To be sure, she had no time for outmoded love but she broke off relationships with any man who did not give her to understand that he was in love with her.

She listed her encounter with Friedrich under her ‘notable experiences’. His obvious poverty was a novel feature in her circle of acquaintances. His far-reaching radicalism marked him off from the minor rebels. Nevertheless, she was a little excited the next time she went to the lecture.

‘Perhaps I might come with you,’ he said. Naturally, she thought, but merely said: ‘If it amuses you.’ And, as it was raining, she imagined that she would go with him to his room or a café. ‘But perhaps he’s no money,’ she mused, and from then on no longer registered what he said. Outside in the street, where the wet, the wind and the showers threw people into confusion, he endeavoured several times to take her by the arm. Her arm anticipated his hand. It will be obvious how slight an effect emancipation had actually had on Hilde.

They reached the little café where he was a regular customer, and where he could owe or borrow money without embarrassment. As if it had only just occurred to him, he said: ‘We’re wet, come along in.’ She felt the faint intimation of happiness a young woman feels when her lover guides her into a room.

They were sitting in the corner. ‘He is a regular customer and at home here,’ she concluded rapidly, and had already made up her mind to surprise him there from time to time. At times their hands touched on the table-top, quickly withdrew from each other, and independently experienced embarrassment, yearning, curiosity, as if they had their own hearts. Her sleeve rubbed against him. Their feet touched. Their plates clashed, became alive. Every movement one of them made conveyed a hidden meaning to the other. He loved her bracelet as much as her fingers, her narrow sleeve as well as her arm. He asked her about her mother because he wanted to see her looking sad again. But she did not. She merely described the photograph she had of the dead woman and promised to show it to him. The time at boarding-school, he thought, would have been strict and dreary. She recalled the secret nightly talks that she had long forgotten, comfortably included in the category of ‘childish behaviour’. Recollections distressed her. She yearned for one of his casual and startled contacts. She wanted to grasp his hand and blushed. She recalled some painter’s unambiguous importunity and now transferred this to Friedrich. His remarks made her impatient, but at the same time she thought: ‘He is intelligent and remarkable.’

‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘I must go home.’

He had been on the point of telling her about the goings-on at the midwife’s as an illustration of the decadence of society, a symptom of its decline. She propitiated him with a smile. He consoled himself with the length of the walk. Once outside, she began to talk of her youth. It was dark. The street-lamps burned dimly, sparse and damp. The walls seemed to cast double shadows. Suddenly she took his arm as if to tell him more. ‘Maybe he’ll ask,’ she thought. But he did not ask. She began:

‘At night-time we used to sleep four in a large room, one in each corner. My bed was on the left, by the window. Opposite me slept little Gerb. Her father was a German finance official, from Hessen, I think. In the night she got into my bed. We were sixteen then. She told me that her cousin, a military cadet, had explained everything to her, as it were. That’s frightful, isn’t it?’

Friedrich did not understand what she wanted to be asked. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you wouldn’t have found it so frightful if you had realized that sixty per cent of all working-class children between twelve and sixteen are no longer virgins. Have you any idea what it’s like in the tenements?’ His old rage! He resumed with a bitter zeal and took away all her appetite for confidences. In a good boarding school, where only four girls slept in a room, one could have no idea of a worker’s dwelling. He described one to her. He explained what it was like not to have a bed of one’s own, a casual ward, the life of the exiles and the politically condemned.

She comforted herself. ‘What strange company!’ she thought arrogantly. She asked him about his youth. He told her about his activities on the frontier. ‘I envy you,’ she said. ‘You are free and strong. Will you call on me? Wednesday afternoon?’

Her smile illuminated the dark hall like a light.

Most young men seemed to her as tedious as her father. She longed to be a man and despised men who did nothing with their masculinity. She would have had Friedrich suave like the lieutenant and importunate like the painter, and for the first time in many years she cried in bed, naked and abandoned to the darkness, a poor girl without a trace of emancipation.

In the morning she reviewed the week’s programme with the vague intent of reforming her life. It was Sunday. The seamstress came on Monday, Tuesday she was going with Frau G. to the theatre, guests on Wednesday, lecture on Thursday, her aunt on Friday, Saturday two gentlemen from the Ministry for dinner and an hour’s sitting for the portrait-painter in the afternoon. She wanted to invite Frau G. to accompany her, but her friend had no time, she had to make a long-planned excursion with her husband to his relatives, three hours in the train. Within the next five minutes she forgot about the excursion, looked in the paper to see what performances there were on Saturday, blushed, became confused, and turned quickly to another topic. For the first time there was an element of hostility in her farewell, and neither the deliberately hearty handshake nor the customary embrace, which this time even lasted some seconds longer than usual, had quite the power to erase it. ‘She regards me as her rival,’ Hilde reflected quickly. Her ‘best friend’.

She went into the little café in order to surprise Friedrich, did not find him, and left an invitation for Saturday afternoon.

He came and met the painter. He already knew this striking man by sight. He detested the prominent overweening skull, the broad white forehead, the bushy eyebrows which their owner seemed to water daily like cultivated fields. They overshadowed his empty eyes in such a way that their dark depths appeared like enigmatic oceans. He detested the high, soft and contrived casual collar, from which emerged a massive double chin as if to support the chin itself. He detested so-called ‘fine heads’ in general. They employed a great part of their energy in appearing even more important than nature had intended, and it was as if they had transferred their talents to the mirror when they got up every morning.

Hilde gave the painter preference. She was annoyed with Friedrich because she had had a bad night on his account. She blamed him for appearing different on a gloomy rainy evening than on a bright afternoon. Moreover, he was now sullen and silent. He watched while the painter produced ten sketches in the course of half an hour with flying fingers and a menacing gaze which jumped from Hilde to the paper and back again. Hilde was restive. Although her features seemed to remain unchanged, sudden transformations took place beneath her skin and beneath her features, and only in her eyes was it possible to see how a light was extinguished and then rekindled.

Friedrich’s silence caused the painter to lose his self-control. ‘I must have you alone,’ he said softly, as if to make it plain to Friedrich that the remark referred to a private matter. Friedrich got up, the painter cast his eyes up at the ceiling. He had the ability to see the world with his eyebrows rather than his eyes. He collected his sheets together with hasty resignation. As Hilde feared that he might be offended, she begged him to stay. But she allowed Friedrich to leave and he departed, silent and sullen, with the resolve to write her a meaningful letter to make it clear that she was leading an unworthy and untruthful life, that she would have to change, that she must break with this bourgeois behaviour and this mock rebellion.

He wrote all this hurriedly, as a man does who wants to save himself from an imminent danger. As he reached the fourth side, he reflected. He wanted to destroy the letter, but he recalled that, in all the books, there were lovers who tore up letters. On no account did he wish to appear ridiculous. And he quickly posted the letter.

R. came to his table. ‘Been in love long? So it’s true you’ve fallen in love, nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a drive, like health, but just as one shouldn’t use health to become even healthier, so you shouldn’t feed love with your love. Sublimate it. Put it to good use. Otherwise it’s trash.’

There was a pamphlet to translate into Italian. In a week it was May Day. Meetings. Having to be here and there. Saying a few words. P. threatened with expulsion. Savelli asked after Friedrich.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Friedrich, ‘I’ll make a start right away.’ He set to work. It was not really love that he could convert into action, at most the productive melancholy of the infatuated.

One evening, while he was writing, Hilde came into the café. He pretended indifference, to her and even to himself. She was not to believe that he was a bourgeois portrait-painter. No, he had to work for the world’s salvation. No small thing. He experienced a malicious triumph that she had brought her youth, her elegance, her beauty into the small grey room.

She sat helplessly beside him, his long letter in her hand. She had intended to discuss every sentence with him. He begged her to wait, he had an article to write. It’s explosive, he thought, stimulated by the prospect of reading it aloud to her if she begged him. She waited. He had finished. It did not occur to her to ask. She was thinking only of the letter. Almost meekly she began: ‘I brought the letter with me.’ Her meekness irritated him. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘I wrote that letter in a crazy mood. Don’t think of it any more as a letter addressed to you.’

She was still holding the paper in her hand. He seized it and began to tear it up. She would have liked to grasp his hand and was embarrassed. Her eyes filled with hot tears. ‘I’m crying again,’ she thought, angered by her relapse into an outdated past.

It was only a little moment, he did not look at her. Convincingly, he played a hard arrogant part and his hands tore up the letter mechanically. Now it was fifty scraps of paper. They lay like small white corpses on the dark marble slab. The waiter came, swept them with one hand into the other and took them away.

‘Buried,’ she thought.

He wanted to say something conciliatory. Nothing conciliatory came. Over both of them there already reigned the eternal decree that governs misunderstandings between the sexes.

Now she was on her feet again, a stranger from another world in this café. He saw her once more through the window as she passed. And he did not realize that only a pane of glass separated her from him. He felt as if there were no chance, ever again, of leaving this café. As if, at this moment, the door had been walled up and his place were here, at this table, for eternity. He did not stir. Five minutes later he stepped outside. She was no longer to be seen.

11

From then on he thought about undertaking ‘a long and dangerous journey’. An unaccountable sadness accompanied his work, endowed his efforts with a golden warmth and his voice with a melancholy resonance, and drew the first sharp furrows on his countenance. He seemed to have become taciturn. His bright gaze came from a remote distance and fixed itself on a remote objective. He wanted to go away and never return.

‘I’m a poor man,’ he once said to R., ‘on the side of the poor. The world is not kind to me, I shall not be kind to it. It is full of injustice. I suffer from this injustice. Its capriciousness afflicts me. I want to afflict the mighty.’

‘If I wanted to be fair, like Savelli for instance,’ answered R., ‘I should tell you that your place is with the saints of the Catholic Church and not with the anonymous heroes of the Party. I’ve discussed you with T. We are both of the opinion that, in the strict sense of the word, you are unreliable. If you are personally disillusioned, you want to hang the ministers. You belong to the eternal European intellectuals. Just now you are in sympathy with the proletariat, with whom you associate. But wait a bit, one day you’ll see the open hatred of the human scum shining in the sad eyes of the young men whom you now lecture. Has that ever occurred to you? Whenever a working-man shakes my hand, it occurs to me that one day his hand might strike me as mercilessly as the hand of a policeman. Your outlook is false, it’s the same as my own, that is why I can tell you this and that is why you can believe me. We might more usefully recognize that the poor are no better than the rich, the weak no nobler than the strong, and that, on the contrary, there must be power before there can be goodness.’

‘I am going away,’ said Friedrich.

‘Quite right,’ replied R. ‘You must expose yourself to danger. Go to Russia. Take the risk of ending up in Siberia. T. has been there, K. was there, I was there. Get to know the strongest and stupidest proletariat in the world. You will find that it has in no way attained nobility through suffering. It’s cruel of me to have to give a young man this advice, but you will find yourself cured of all illusions. Every one. And you won’t ever fall in love again, to give just one example.’

He began his next lecture with the information that he had decided to go away, that someone else would take his place. He glimpsed Hilde in one of the back rows in a deliberately unpretentious coat. What a masquerade, he thought angrily. He felt responsible for her presence. He felt it as a betrayal committed against those he was addressing. He began to read out the leading article of a bourgeois newspaper. It was an account of the determination of the Central Powers to safeguard the peace of the world, and of the strivings of this very world towards the conflagration of war. He produced a Russian, a French, an English newspaper and demonstrated to his audience that they all wrote the same. The lamp hung low over the lectern at which he stood and dazzled him. When he wanted to survey the small room, he saw the walls as a grey obscurity. They lost their solidity. They receded even further, like veils dispersed by the ring of his words. The faces that shone towards him out of the darkness multiplied tenfold. He listened attentively to his own voice, the ringing resonance of his speech. He stood there as if on the verge of a darkling sea. His best words were derived from the expectancy of his listeners. It seemed to him as if he spoke and listened at the same time, as if he said things and at the same time suffered things to be said to him, as if he were resonant and simultaneously heard the resonance.

There was a moment’s quietness. The quietness was an answer. It sanctioned his authority like a seal of silence.

When he got down from the platform, Hilde had disappeared. He was annoyed at having looked for her. A few persons pressed his hand and wished him a good journey.

12

His departure was fixed for the evening of the following day. He still had over twenty-four hours to wait. Savelli had provided him with money, letters and commissions. He was to report first to Frau K. and stay with her. To return at the first safe available opportunity with part of the money, which was urgently needed here. He had a trunk full of newspapers. They were stuffed in the pockets, the sleeves, the linings of strange clothing with which he had been provided.

He was not afraid. He was pervaded by a current of peace, like a dying man conscious of a long and righteous life behind him. He could perish, nameless, forgotten, but not without trace. A drop in the ocean of the Revolution.

‘I have taken a cordial farewell from R.,’ he told me. ‘R., whom everyone calls treacherous, whom no one can really tolerate, knows more than the others. He does not forget the infirmity of men where sentiment is concerned. He is aware of the hidden diversity of which we are all made up. No one trusts him entirely because he is many-sided. But, beyond that, he doesn’t even trust himself, his incorruptible intelligence.’

He went to say goodbye to Grünhut.

‘Where are you off to?’

There was silence for a few moments. Grünhut went to the window. It was as if he looked, not at the street, but only in the windowpane which had ceased to be transparent.

‘What’s got into you?’ Grünhut cried in a tearful voice. ‘I don’t ask the reason for your journey, that I can guess. But why you?’

‘I’m not even sure myself.’

Back to the windowpane.

‘I’m seeing him for the last time,’ thought Friedrich.

His thoughts, which he had already directed towards death, suddenly made a volte-face.

‘You don’t realize, you don’t realize,’ said Grünhut. ‘You’re young. Do you really imagine that you will ever again be in a position to say: “I’m going far away”? Do you think life is endless? It’s short, and has a few miserable possibilities to offer, and you must know how to cherish them. You can say “I want” twice, “I love” once, “I shall” twice, “I’m dying” once. That’s all. Look at me. I’m certainly no one to envy. But I don’t wish to die. I can probably still say once more ‘I want” or “I shall”. No great expectations at present but I can wait. I intend to suffer for nothing and for nobody. The tiny pain you feel when you prick your finger is considerable in relation to the shortness of your life. Yes, and to think that there are folk who let their hands be chopped off and their eyes put out for an idea, for an idea! For Humanity, in the name of Freedom! It’s frightful!

‘I understand well enough, you can’t go back on this. One commits some act or other, one simply has to do it. Then we are held responsible, we are given a medal for a so-called heroic deed, we are thrown in jail for a so-called crime. We aren’t responsible for anything. At most, we’re responsible for what we don’t do. If we were held responsible on that account, we’d be beaten up a hundred times a day and lie in jail a hundred times and be hanged a hundred times.’

He returned to the windowpane. And, his back turned to Friedrich, said quite gently: ‘Go then, and see you come back. I’ve seen many go before now.’

Voices were suddenly audible in Frau Tarka’s room next-door.

‘Quiet,’ whispered Grünhut, ‘sit quite still where you are. A new client. The painter was here yesterday. I thought then that someone might be coming today. Won’t stay long. First consultation. Stay here till she’s gone.’

Soon they heard the door. ‘Quick, before Madame comes in,’ said Grünhut. A fleeting handshake, as if Grünhut had forgotten that it was farewell for ever.

13

Two days later he was sitting with old Parthagener at the inn ‘The Ball and Chain’. It had not changed. Kapturak still continued to bring in deserters. Folk drank schnapps and ate salted peas. The rebels met at Chaikin’s. The jurist still hoped to become a Deputy.

Kapturak arrived next morning. ‘So you’ve not become a district commissioner? Yes, we’re leaving already. The trunks I’ll take with me. Expect them at the border tavern.’ It was a holiday, the frontier officials were already sitting with the deserting soldiers, drinking and singing. Behind the counter stood the landlord, open-mouthed and goggle-eyed.

Friedrich stepped outside. The moist stars twinkled. A soft wind blew. One scented the wide plains from which it came.

A small tubby man with a black goatee suddenly stood next to Friedrich.

‘A fine night,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Friedrich, ‘a fine night.’

‘I’m arresting you, my dear Kargan,’ said the man amiably. He had a chubby, white, almost feminine hand and short fingers. ‘Get going!’ he ordered.

Two men who suddenly came into view took Friedrich between them.

He felt only the wind, like a consolation from infinite space.