The Silent Prophet

1

It was evening. The water splashed softly and caressingly against the steamer floating on the Volga. The heavy regular thump of the engines could be heard between decks. The swaying lanterns cast light and shadow over the two hundred men who had lain down there, each exactly where he happened to have been standing when he set foot on the ship. At the quiet way-stations the engines fell silent and one heard the low shouts of sailors and porters and the slap of water against wood.

Most of the prisoners lay stretched out on the deck. A hundred and twenty of the two hundred between-deck passengers were in irons. They wore chains at their right wrist and right ankle. Those who were not fettered seemed almost like free men beside the chained men. Now and again there appeared a policeman, an inquisitive sailor. The prisoners took no notice either of their guards or their visitors. Although it was quite early in the evening and food was due to be handed out in half an hour, most slept, tired after the long march they had covered. The government was sending them on the slow cheap route by water, after having made them go a long distance on foot. The day after tomorrow they were to be freighted on the railroad. They were stocking up well on sleep.

Some of them already knew their way around. It was not the first time they had made this trip. These were experienced, settled down in a practical manner, and gave advice to the novices. They enjoyed a certain authority among their comrades. With the gendarmes they were linked by a kind of intimate hostility.

They were called to meals as if to an execution. They lined up behind one another, chains clanking between them. It seemed as if they were all strung on a single chain. A spoon landed with a regular splashing stroke in the cauldron, then there was the soft gurgle of a stream of soup flowing softly downwards, a damp mass fell on a hard metal plate. Heavy feet shuffled, a chain dragged clanking, and ever and again another detached himself from the line as if he had been unstrung. The lower space became filled with the vapour rising from two hundred metal plates and mouths. All ate. And, although they themselves conducted the spoon to their lips, it seemed as if they were being fed by alien arms which did not belong to their bodies. Their eyes, which were sated much sooner than their stomachs, already had the vacant look of repletion which characterizes the head of a family at table, the look that is already advancing into the domain of sleep.

‘When I look at these men as they feed,’ said Friedrich to Berzejev, a former lieutenant, ‘I am convinced that they need nothing more than a ball and chain on the leg, a spoon in the right hand, and a tin plate in the left. The heart is so near the bowels, tongue and teeth so closely adjacent to the brain, the hands that write down thoughts can so easily slaughter a lamb and turn a spit, that I find myself as much at a loss before human beings as before a legendary dragon.’

‘You talk like a poet,’ replied Berzejev, smiled, and showed in his black beard two rows of gleaming teeth which seemed to confirm Friedrich’s conjecture. ‘I cannot find such words. But I too have seen that man is a puzzle, and above all that it is not possible to help him.’

Both felt alarmed. Were they not here because they wanted to help him? They turned away from each other.

‘Good night,’ said Berzejev.

Outside the guard was relieved.

2

After four days they were disembarked, led into a large room and entrained. They were refreshed as they trod solid ground again, and their chains gave a livelier ring. Even beneath the turning wheels of the train they felt the earth. Through the barred windows they saw grass and fields, cows and herdsmen, birches and peasants, churches and blue smoke over chimneystacks, the entire world from which they were cut off. And yet, it was a consolation that it had not perished, that it had not even altered. As long as houses stood and cattle grazed, the world awaited the return of the prisoners. Freedom was not like a possession which each one of them had lost. It was an element like the air.

Rumours circulated through the waggons. In recollection of the tidings heard and exchanged in recent prisons, they were called ‘latrine reports’. Some said that the entire transport would go straight to Vierchoiansk, which was denounced by the knowledgeable as nonsense. Adrassionov, the NCO, had told one of the old hands whom he was now transporting for the second time, that they would be taken to Tiumen, to one of the biggest prisons, the Tiuremni Zamok, or central prison for exiles. The experienced, who had already been there, began to depict the horrors of this jail. At first they shuddered at their own words and made their listeners shudder. But gradually, during their narration, the thrill they derived from their narrative exceeded its content, and the curiosity of the listeners dominated their terror. They sat there like children listening to stories of glass palaces. Panfilov and Sjemienuta, two old white-bearded Ukrainians, even described the solitary cells with a kind of nostalgia; and, so forgetful is the human heart and because the journey still seemed unending and its destination still uncertain despite the affirmations of the old hands, all of them believed for a few short hours that it was not they themselves but quite other strangers who were travelling towards the miseries of the prisons.

Friedrich and Berzejev resolved to stay together as far as possible. Berzejev had money. He knew how to bribe, swap lists and names and — while the other ‘politicals’ discussed the peasants, anarchy, Bakunin, Marx and the Jews — calculated whom he should give a cigarette and whom a rouble.

Although they travelled slowly, waited for hours at goods stations, the railway journey nevertheless seemed shorter than they had expected. Once again the chains rattled, once again there was a roll-call. They stood at the last station and took their leave of the attractive appurtenances of the railway, of its technical playthings, its green signals and red flags, the shrill bells of glass and the hard bells of iron, the indefatigable ticking of the telegraph and the yearning swerving gleam of the rails, of the panting breath of the locomotive and the hoarse screech it sent up to the sky, the guard’s hail and the wave of the station officials, a wall and a garden fence, of the meagre refreshment room at this forlorn station and the girl who stood behind the bottles and tended a samovar. Especially this girl. Friedrich contemplated her as if she were the last European woman he would be allowed to look at and had to memorize carefully. He recalled Hilde as he might a girl he had talked to twenty years ago. At times he could no longer picture her face. It seemed to him that she had become old and grey in the interim, a grandmother.

They climbed into waggons, halted every twenty-five kilometres, changed horses. Only the driver remained the same throughout the journey. A large part of the convoy had remained behind and was indeed due to be delivered to one of the large collective prisons. Now they consisted only of a few groups. Friedrich and Berzejev, Freyburg and Lion sat in one waggon. Without everyone seeing, Friedrich pressed Berzejev’s hand. They sealed a silent compact.

When any of the prisoners removed his cap, one saw the left half of his skull shaved bare, and his face took on the foolish imprint of a lunatic. Each shrank from the other, but each hid his horror under a smile. Only Berzejev had succeeded in bribing the barber. He had his whole scalp shaved bare.

The prisoners sang one song after another. The soldiers and the driver joined in. At times one man would sing alone, and then it was as if he sang with the strength of all. His voice was drowned in the many-voiced refrain, which was like an echo from heaven to earth.

The best singer was Konov, a weaver from Moscow, at whose house a secret printing-press had been discovered. He was on his way to fifteen years’ imprisonment.

3

One morning they began their march. Across a desolate flat landscape deployed the trail of human beings with bundles, fetters, sticks in hands.

Of the fifty men thus making their way, in groups of eight, six and ten guarded by sharp bayonets on long rifles, only the oldest manifested fatigue. According to regulations, each was allowed to carry only fifteen poods of baggage. Some who had refused to cut down on their belongings at the last station now discarded useful with unnecessary objects. The soldiers collected all of these and left them behind in the jurts which they passed, and which they would revisit on the return journey. Only Berzejev threw nothing away. His bulky pack was carried by the soldiers. He would say a good word to them, stick a cigarette in their mouths, and click his tongue at them as if they were horses.

After they had been marching in silence for a long time, Berzejev ordered: ‘Sing’. They sang. But they stopped right after the first verse. A hesitant pause ensued, then the refrain was taken up by a timorous voice, and it was a long time before the others joined in. The melody did not quicken their lagging feet. Exile itself advanced towards them. The railway, horses, carriages and men, all had been left far behind. The sky arched over the flat earth like a round roof of grey lead, soldered around its edges. They were sealed down under the sky. In prison, at least, one knew that a sky still arched above the walls. But here the very freedom was an imprisonment. In the leaden sky there were no bars through which one could spy another sky of blue air. The vastness of this space was more confining than a cell.

Gradually they broke up into ever smaller groups. With tears in their eyes and their beards they bade each other farewell. Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion stayed together. On the first day they still spoke of one or other with whom they had sung together. As soon as they struck up in a threesome the songs that had flowed from everyone’s throats a few days previously, they remembered those others whose voices they would never hear again. The songs had become a kind of resonant bond of amity. They had brought strangers together with the power of blood shed in common and pain suffered in common. Then the departed were gradually forgotten. Only now and again did there revive in memory a face that no longer bore a name, a tear in a black beard that no longer belonged to any face, and a word would ring out whose speaker was no longer known.

They were led far and stragglingly, they saw the unpeopled shores of the Obi. The two small settlements of Hurgut and Narym seemed to them large and lively towns. They stayed overnight in Narym. They learned to collect bugs in their fists and drown them in large buckets, also to coax the small white files of lice from the walls into paper cornets and burn them. They began to esteem the lonely scattered jails where they chanced to halt as welcoming homes. They saw distant forest fires, bartered with Chinese merchants from Chifu for Siberian fur gloves and boots of reindeer hide. They listened to the legends of the Yakuts about the Indiguirka River, and the Dogdo rivulet which carries gold along its bed.

Winter came. They became accustomed to 67 degrees Celsius below zero and to the frosted windowpanes of ice in the jurts. And they awaited the forty sunless days in the town of Vierchoiansk, the town with the twenty-three houses.

It was laid down that their fixed location should be ten versts from a town, ten versts from a river and ten versts from a high-road. Yet they managed to settle by a river, the Kolyma River. It is bigger than the Rhine, only three towns are situated on it. One had nine inhabitants, another a hundred inhabitants in thirty military barracks. Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion decided on the third town of Sredni Kolymsk. Here there were huts placed far apart and only three houses with glazed windows. But within a circle of many miles it was the only place with a church, a steeple and bells — bells that had been cast in the civilized world and whose ringing was like a mother tongue.

4

The Siberian officials of the Tsar did not always deserve the bad reputation they enjoyed among the inhabitants, the condemned and even their superior authorities. Some, who considered themselves as exiles, and not without reason, were resolved to share the lot of the prisoners rather than intensify it. Many started off by avenging their fate on the condemned but mellowed after a few years when they saw that their harshness brought them no advantage. Arrogance, vanity and terror dwindled, since the controlling authorities were so far away. Others again allowed themselves to be bribed and lived on with a bad conscience. A bad conscience can make both autocrats and thugs indulgent.

Berzejev had made friends with Colonel Lelewicz, a Pole, who had assumed command of an infantry detachment in Siberia in order to have an opportunity of helping his exiled fellow-countrymen. He enjoyed such good connections in Petersburg that he did not need to conceal his sentiments behind a martial loyalty to the Tsar like other officers and officials. With his help Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion established themselves in one of the three houses furnished with windowpanes. Thus they lived in a steady private relationship with the authorities and were allowed to play cards with the officials and conduct political discussions.

Once a week the newspapers arrived, ten days old. The news they spread in this desolation resembled the stars we still see shining in the heavens though they were extinguished centuries ago. Lion affirmed that it was unimportant when one read the papers. For the very transmission of an event changes it and even denies it. That is why we find every report in the newspapers so improbable.

Lion asserted that he had been exiled only on account of his kinship with a well-known revolutionary of the same name, and that he would probably soon be released. He was, in fact, only a mild opponent of the State, favoured the introduction of a constitutional monarchy, modernization of the bureaucracy on the western model and a settlement of domestic political questions on properly applied economic principles. Between two fingers he held his pince-nez which were knotted to a broad black ribbon, threatened with them, designed interweaving arabesques in the air with them, and only settled them on the lower part of his nose when he was compelled to listen, as if Lion wanted to study his opponent better through the glass while nevertheless peering at him only over the rims of the lenses. Everything to do with natural processes was strange and disconcerting to him. He had the same respect for dogs as for wolves and bears. He hardly noticed the passage of the seasons and it made no difference to him whether the temperature was 20 or 60 degrees.

He was a constant herald of the war. ‘The Social Democrats in Germany,’ he exclaimed, ‘have at last revealed their loyalty to the Kaiser. Herr Stücklen says: “We Social Democrats love the country in which we were born, we are better patriots than people think.” Noske: “We have never entertained the idea that the frontiers of the Reich can be left unfortified without a considerable defensive army.” Because the Social Democrats are for the capital levy on principle, they vote for military credits. Thus they vote for the option of throwing half a million men against the French frontier in four days. The representatives of the International concede one and half milliards to the War Minister. That is war, gentlemen,’ concluded Lion, swinging his pince-nez in the air like a flag.

Berzejev and the official Efrejnov were for Germany, suspicious of France. Berzejev defended the German workers. Finally, he even compared the Tsar to the German Kaiser. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘the Kaiser doesn’t send anyone to Siberia.’

Efrejnov, who attributed everything bad in Russia to western influences, to which society, the intelligentsia and the Tsar himself were subject, felt offended. His fair beard, his broad shoulders shivered. ‘It just shows,’ he cried, ‘how all alike you are. You believe that somewhere Russia is like the rest of the world, in one small detail at least. Not true. Russia is oriental and everything else is the rotten decaying West. Whether it’s your German Kaiser, Berzejev, or your German workers, it’s all one. A Kaiser who rules through Parliament and democracy, that’s already the beginning of Socialism. The Kaiser, the republic, Marxism, all western ideas. The Tsar in Russia is more democratic than a socialist parliamentarian. He is sovereign by the will of the people and of the land it cultivates. The Tsar is the product of the Russian peasant. He looks after the affairs of state for which the people have no time. When did your dissatisfaction begin? Since you looked to the West and envied its civilization. Witte goes to do business with the American Jews. The Anglomaniac snob Isvolski is sent out into the world so that he can report what ties they are wearing in London and Paris. And thus you destroy the old holy autocracy of the Tsars.’

For some time Lion had been drawing restless curves in the air with his pince-nez. ‘Do you imagine,’ he shouted, ‘that we can shut ourselves off from the West? We can’t compete with world economy.

‘Russia is not going to remain a nation of peasants. It is becoming industrialized. But industry dictates the political set-up. Two-thirds of our industries are in foreign hands. We produce our iron and petroleum so slowly that they do not suffice even for our own feeble production. Our coalmines deliver only 2,250 million poods as against 18 milliards in Germany and 32 milliards in the United States. The average income of a Russian subject amounts to 53 roubles a year, of a Frenchman 233, an Englishman 273, an American 345. The average Russian saves only 16 roubles a year. Our national debt amounts to 9 milliards, that is 2 roubles 80 kopecks a head. But England, which in your view belongs to the degenerate West, has a national budget of 160 million pounds sterling and underpins its economy with a further 170 millions.’

Nothing availed against Lion’s figures, which he recited without the least hesitation, like a poem. As he uttered them, he drew them briskly in the air as if writing them with chalk on a blackboard. Efrejnov shook his head. Evidently he considered statistics, like Marxism, to be a product of the West and figures as crimes like assassinations. Lion had probably been sent to Siberia with more justification than the others. He regarded the ikon in the corner and the small red lamp lit a soothing gentle consolation in his heart.

5

Friedrich lit the slender candle of transparent paraffin wax.

From the ground the earth’s frozen breath entered the room like a steeply rising wind. Around the house sang the still, aching cold. It was like the singing of telegraph wires. Friedrich imagined to himself that there, in front of the house, in the impenetrable darkness, stood the smooth-planed tall posts topped with their flowers of white porcelain, linked by wires with the living world, whose forlorn voice they transformed into the clear, comforting and trustful monotony of a lullaby. When he lay down to sleep there flashed through his first slumber a rapid fancy, less than a thought and more than a dream, that his sleep would carry him towards a morning in the middle of the lively and bustling city. Berzejev still spoke to him for long stretches and did not wait for a reply. He loved his quiet younger comrade, his thin face and reserved look, and the courage with which he had joined the Revolution. ‘He has no discretion,’ observed Berzejev. ‘His rashness hinders him from anticipating situations. But when they come he bears them steadfastly. He is easily inspired and easily disillusioned. But despondency and enthusiasm are only physiological phenomena. In reality he is melancholy, uniformly melancholy.’ And Berzejev said out loud:

‘This poor Efrejnov is confused by Lion. He is too unsuspecting to find arguments. I could have found them for him. Russia’s faults are really the consequence of hasty endeavours to copy the West. In all probability, Russia would be sound and rich without the stupid aspiration held by a certain section of its ruling class to become civilized, and to be regarded in the fashionable spas of Western Europe as proper Europeans. The bigoted Agrarians are no less right than we ourselves, the thoroughgoing revolutionaries. They lack only understanding. Everything that lies in the middle, between thoroughgoing reaction and thoroughgoing revolution, is foolish in Russia. The bourgeois class has developed before there was a place ready for it. Now it is demanding its industries. The Tsar is helpless. He is turning himself into an Emperor on the old Western model, rather like the present German Kaiser. Autocracy gives way to bureaucracy and the officials are the vanguard of the bourgeoisie. It begins with the entry of the sons of the nobility and the rich bourgeoisie into official posts, that is, into the great cities. And the cities are the enemy of the countryside. The intelligentsia follows. It is the outpost of the Revolution. The semi-revolutionary ideals of the intelligentsia are foreign to the instincts of the Russian people. The cruelty of the Agrarian autocracy is really closer to them. You see, therefore, the imminence of an explosion. The intellectual bureaucrat renders the Agrarians impotent. He can topple the Tsar but not govern the people. His dominance will be an insignificant intermission. It is we who hold the power. Russia can only become a proletarian, not a bourgeois, republic. Only a war is needed, and the old Russia is done for. And the war is coming; we shan’t be staying in Siberia much longer.’

Flour was unaffordable. In this region the housewives could bake only three times a year. Bread was scarcer than meat. For the first time Friedrich felt the immediate relation between sun and earth. For the first time he understood the simple meaning of the prayer man addresses to Heaven for his daily bread. At the breadless table where he sat down twice a day he thought of the bakers’ shops in the bustling towns. He closed his eyes. He conjured up the different colours of the flour and the different shapes of the loaves.

‘What are you dreaming about?’ asked Berzejev.

‘Of bread. When I picture the world from which we are exiled, I think of quite trivial things — flat matches, for instance, for the waistcoat pocket and round lids for beer-mugs, inkwells one can open by pressing, celluloid paper-knives and quite ordinary things like a picture-postcard. I remember one that used to hang in the shop-window of the stationer’s on the corner of the street where I lived. It was old and yellowed, had been in the window for years. It was a miserable little stationer’s and an ugly card. It had a wide gold edge, speckled black by flies. It showed a well-known picture. On the globe, poised in space — the space, if I remember rightly, was pale blue — sits a woman with a blindfold on the North Pole.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Berzejev, ‘I’ve seen that picture too. Wait a minute, I think the woman held something in her hand and she wore a watery blue dress. But I don’t recall the wide gold margin.’

‘But it was a wide gold margin,’ insisted Friedrich, ‘and fly-speckled, and there was a yellow post-box at the street-corner. You could stick down a letter and push it inside and even hear the way it fell — with a thud if the box was empty and with a rustle if there were letters already inside.’

‘Let’s stick to bread,’ said Berzejev. ‘You’re distracting me from it. To begin with, there were two main kinds, white and black. Once in France — I was there with my father when I was fourteen — I ate hard, white, long batons of bread with a golden-brown crust. But the Russian country bread, black and reddish, with rather coarse soft grains, is the one I like best.’

‘I remember,’ continued Friedrich, ‘how it smelled when one passed a baker’s shop.’

‘Especially at night!’ cried Berzejev.

‘Yes, at night, when it was winter, you were struck all of a sudden by a warmth from the cellars, almost like an animal warmth.’

‘A bread-like warmth,’ exulted Berzejev.

‘And in the morning, in summer, when I woke very early and went into the street, the white baker’s boys were trotting around with covered baskets. How those baskets smelled! And you could hear the birds singing then, because the streets were still quiet.’

They fell silent for a time.

Suddenly Berzejev said: ‘How stupid we have become!’

‘No, not stupid,’ cried Friedrich, ‘only human. We were ideologists, not human beings. We wanted to reshape the world and we are dependent on postcards and must eat bread.’

‘It’s because not everyone has bread,’ said Berzejev quietly, ‘that we are sitting here. How simple it all is. One doesn’t need theory or economics. Because not everyone has bread — very simple and quite stupid.’

‘R. might have put that better,’ thought Friedrich. ‘R. might possibly have said: “We want to help. But we are not born for that. Because of our impotence, nature has endowed us with too strong a love, it exceeds our powers. We are like a man who is unable to swim, but who jumps in after a drowning man and goes under himself. But we have to jump. Sometimes we help the other, but usually both of us go under. And no one knows whether, at the last moment, one feels happiness or a kind of bitter anger.”’

‘When I was fourteen years old,’ began Berzejev, ‘my father took me on a journey. I saw foreign railway stations for the first time, and that was really the best part. Do you still remember railway stations?’

They both thought of the station they had last seen.

‘Did you see that girl?’ asked Friedrich.

And Berzejev knew at once which girl he meant.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she was standing behind the buffet and gave me a glass of tea. She had her plaits braided in two round coils over her ears.’

‘And red cheeks.’

They spoke of the strange girl as of a lost loved one.

‘But there was something else besides railway stations when I was fourteen,’ resumed Berzejev, ‘and that was that there was a woman in our compartment with whom my father got into conversation. He treated her to chocolate bonbons, lifted her heavy cases down from the luggage-rack and put them back again, took the lady to the dining-car and said to the waiter: “A table for three, the fourth seat’s empty, understood?” “Yes, your Honour,” said the waiter. For my father was a high official, a landowner and a gentleman. You could see that at once. I spent much of the time in the corridor, which I enjoyed. You really feel that you are travelling there. When you stand the train goes faster, and then you fancy yourself freer and closer to the attendant. When a station arrives you climb out quickly. And even the lavatory is fine. I often used to go in there and if anyone rattled the door vigorously I stayed in all the longer. Once, when I went back to the compartment, the lady gave a start, screamed out, and my father was looking through the window at the landscape. I sat down in my corner, covered myself with my overcoat and pretended to be asleep. Then my father went out, I noticed how he stepped over my legs. The next moment the lady pulled the coat off my face and kissed me quickly on the mouth and sat down again. So I thought: “She kisses me so that I shouldn’t be naughty or tell tales at home.” But we met her again at Nice. She had arranged it with my father, and once, in the afternoon, she took me into her room. We were staying at the same hotel. It was already evening and the dinner-gong was sounding when I came out of her room. My father was waiting for me in the corridor. I tried to run past him, he grabbed me and gave me a box on the ear.’

‘And then?’

‘Just think, after that I never spoke another word to my father until his death, which I only heard of two days later, not a word! I began to hate him. I saw his fleshy mouth under the worthy mottled moustache. As soon as we got back he sent me to the military academy. He wrote to me twice a year and I wrote to him. They were like the letters of a professional letter-writer. But when I went home, for Easter, we kissed and did not speak and the whole year I used to dread the kiss that awaited me.’

‘He should have spoken,’ said Friedrich.

‘Then I would probably not be here,’ said Berzejev.

6

Sometimes Colonel Lelewicz came himself. Sometimes he would send one of his friends. He brought bread, tinned food, newspapers. At irregular intervals there was a visit from Len-Min-Tsin, the Chinese trader, with newspapers, books and cheap pornography. This consisted of packets of postcards like those offered to foreigners in the dazzling nights of great cities by timid little dealers with encouraging whispers. The Chinaman purveyed the postcards in series through the lost townships of Siberia and lent them out like books. He would then collect them again from his subscribers and exchange them for new ones. The pictures were worn like old playing-cards by the covetous fingers of many hundreds. Efrejnov, Lion and Berzejev scrutinized the cards together in unpolitical and purely sexual accord. Efrejnov kept a dignified silence as he became engrossed in the details. He puckered his eyebrows, combed his fair beard with his fingers, narrowed his eyelids and peered at the cards through a narrow slit with the appraising glance of a connoisseur. Against his will, he simultaneously opened his bewhiskered lips in the same measure as he closed his eyelids. His tongue crept inquisitively between his teeth, he began to smile, his face relaxed and, despite the powerful neck on which it rested, despite the beard in which it was framed and embedded, acquired a boyish expression. Lion held his pince-nez in his hand, hard against his eyes, and tapped one foot incessantly, causing his body to break into a delicate rocking tremor. Berzejev was red under the normal brown of his countenance and it seemed, not that his skin was flushed, but that the red complexion of his second inner self was appearing through the brown of the outer man. Impatient as he was, he wanted to turn over faster than the others, who appeared to have a more thorough approach.

‘That’s my friend,’ thought Friedrich. ‘He’s loyal, he has a fine passion, he is kind, clever and cautious. One can rely on him. He can command a regiment. He can stand up to hunger, but a postcard. … If I take the pictures away from him now. …’ He stepped to the table and took the pack that lay in front of Berzejev. Berzejev raised his hand to rescue his cards from Friedrich’s grasp. But he did not lower it, he held it in the air for a while as if taking an oath. Suddenly he laughed out loud.

‘I felt sorry for you,’ said Friedrich.

‘Perhaps it was ridiculous,’ said Berzejev. They said no more about it.

But a few days later Berzejev suddenly brought out: ‘I have slept with Efrejnov’s wife. He was with Lion in our room.’

And, as Friedrich did not enquire further, very quickly and seriously: ‘I only wanted to let you know.’

That was all. But as if Berzejev’s adventure had opened some new door in his memory Friedrich began to think of the millions of far-off women with the yearning with which he had thought of the taste, the smell, the shape of bread. He recalled a hundred little events without significance and without a sequel. The platform of a street-car, in front of him a woman, arm elevated, hand on one of the leather straps dangling from the carriage roof. Distinct, the line of her taut breast, her neck. He can no longer see her face. He hears the gentle tripping of a young girl through a narrow quiet street, the echo that meets her shoes like an affectionate answer from the cobbles. Hilde’s dove-grey narrow shoe on the red velvet of the carriage. Grey on red. They were the colours of his love. He thought of them as a patriot thinks of his country’s flag. The little glove shop, the patient expectation of the outspread fingers and the delicate play of the hands. The narrow bracelet between the sleeve and the edge of the glove. The warmth his hand encountered when he stroked her arm. Many fleeting contacts, intentionally willed, intentionally feigned, scarce-born anticipations of a contact, others that flitted like shadows over the bodies. He tears up the letter. She cries. He does not recall distinctly seeing her tears. He believes he only heard them. Hilde goes through the door of the little café, behind the half-curtained window pane her outline shows for a moment longer in the street. She disappears in the city. He steps outside, she is no longer there. Why has he been in any doubt that he loves her? He had been ashamed before his conscience, before R., before his ambition.

For weeks now he has spoken only when it was absolutely essential. He has heard the endless discussions as a confused and meaningless din. Proletariat, autocracy, finance, ruling class, militarism. Simple formulae, one had to make use of them in order to act. But they embraced only a minor part of what they aspired to contain. Life is stuck fast in these concepts like a fully-grown child in too-short clothes. A single hour of life comprises a thousand enigmatic stirrings of the nerves, the muscles, the brain and a single large empty word wants to express them all.

There was at this time only one word that had any meaning: Flight!

One could flee. He felt as if he had been abstracted from his own life for years and as if he were living somebody else’s. Somewhere his own waited like a good home, unjustly abandoned. To flee, to escape the leaden sky, the breadless table. As yet the idea hung only in the air, like a child’s red balloon. Life was short. Sixty years of freedom were less than ten years of Siberia.

‘What’s up with you?’ asked Berzejev.

The days were still long. But clouds came in the early evening, the moon destroyed them. They were there again in the morning cradling the red sun. It was an effort for it to rise. They prepared themselves for winter. The Cheldony said it would come earlier than usual, that winter was already upon them. The Chinaman would fail to appear, the newspapers become fewer, one must stock up with candles and oil.

‘I must escape,’ said Friedrich.

‘Out of the question now, we’re going to be free.’

‘Depend on me, I think of it every day.’

At that moment Lion burst through the door. He waved a newspaper.

The heir to the Austrian throne had been shot.

7

That night they slept peacefully, as if it were quite an ordinary night.

Meanwhile war was brewing in Europe. In the barracks trumpets sounded the alarm. Large posters were put up at all the street-corners of towns small and great. The trains rolled from the stations garlanded with green and the men had military uniforms and caps and rifles. All the women wept.

One day Colonel Lelewicz appeared in Kolymsk with a few friends. There was nothing striking about that. Small squads had already passed through. Efrejnov rejoiced. The newspapers arrived more quickly, as if impelled by the speed of the reports they contained. The whole region was almost invigorated.

Lelewicz bade farewell to his friend.

He left a blue packet lying on Berzejev’s table. Berzejev did not notice it. He was standing at the door. He accompanied the colonel. Lelewicz climbed into the saddle. He waved for the last time. Berzejev turned back into the room. He sighted the packet, quickly seized it and ran outside after the colonel. He shouted, Lelewicz seemed not to hear. He was only a small blue-black speck on the horizon.

Friedrich held Berzejev fast. ‘That’s for us!’ he said with eyes staring, pale, breathless and unable to speak.

When Efrejnov awoke next morning, Friedrich and Berzejev had disappeared.

8

They were afraid of attracting the attention of the secret police more readily if they stayed together. So they decided to separate for a few days, then to meet up again, and to make the journey to the first large town in stages. The first to arrive was to wait for the other, the latecomer to move on later. If one of them were captured, the other would realize that he must not show himself for the time being. They were ready at any moment to fall into the hands of the police. But each of the pair trembled more for the other than for himself. The constant apprehension sealed their friendship more than the need to face every danger together would have done, and bestowed on them in turn all the kinds and grades of love included in the terms of friendship: they were fathers, brothers and children to one another. Always, when they came together again after several days, they fell into each other’s arms, kissed and laughed. Even when neither had encountered any real danger on the way, each yet remained shaken by the dangers he had imagined as threatening the other. And although their splitting up had the object of saving at least one of them from arrest, both had nevertheless privately decided to give themselves up if anything should befall the other.

At last they reached European Russia. They saw the country’s warlike enthusiasm. These were the last happier moments of the Tsar, as it later appeared, almost — as it were — brought about by a conscious intent of world history to mislead a doomed system. The Radicals embraced the Conservatives and, as always when strangers come together in danger and opponents are reconciled, there was faith in a miraculous rebirth of the country because the miracle of fraternization is enough to make men believe in one even more improbable. Enmity is familiar to human nature, while reconciliation is foreign to it. Patriotic alliances were hurriedly formed. A hundred new names and insignia were invented. People marched through the streets and smashed German shop-signs.

‘How puzzling,’ said Friedrich to Berzejev, as they sat in their hotel room, ‘that the individuals of which the mass is composed surrender their characteristics, lose even their primary instincts. The individual loves his life and fears death. Together with others, he discards life and despises death. The individual does not want to join the army and pay taxes. With others, he voluntarily enlists and empties his pockets. And the one is as genuine as the other.’

‘I shall be interested to see,’ said Berzejev, ‘how long this enthusiasm will last, and whether one cannot turn it into its opposite. I shall also be interested to see whether things are exactly like this, or much the same, in other countries. Lion was right. The German Social Democrats are marching.’

According to documents that Lelewicz had procured for them, they were due to enlist for a year’s service in an artillery regiment in Volynia. They had the following expedients: either they enlisted and awaited an opportunity to be captured and then to escape from captivity again; or they hid in the country for the time being and waited for an opportunity to reach a foreign country with the aid of their friends, there to be interned as civilians. At that time they did not contemplate a third possibility. Chance helped them.

This was that, in Kharkov, they heard from a hotel porter due to enlist in the same regiment, that it was already in occupied territory, on Austrian soil. They could therefore depart, fail to report, but mingle with the inhabitants of one of the occupied towns and, with the aid of Friedrich’s old connections at the frontier, play the part of honest citizens under the occupation.

9

Thus he found himself once more at The Ball and Chain’. Yet again it stood in his path. He left Berzejev to wait in the large empty tap-room and climbed the stairs that led to old Parthagener’s room.

Friedrich looked through the keyhole; the door was locked. Old Parthagener was sleeping on the green sofa, as always in the afternoon from two to four. He slept as if to refute the war. The old furniture was still in the room. An unfolded newspaper lay on the table, watched by the blue spectacles. Friedrich wondered whether to wake the old man. It seemed dangerous to wait. At any moment a patrol might enter the tavern. He knocked. The old man jumped up. ‘Who’s there?’ Still the same cry. He opened the door. ‘Ah, it’s you! We’ve been expecting you for a long time. Kapturak heard a week ago that you’d escaped with your comrade Berzejev. You’ve been gone a long time, poor young man! You must have been through a lot! But now you’re here! Was it really necessary?’

‘So nothing has changed!’ thought Friedrich. ‘Kapturak and Parthagener have been expecting me as if I had gone across to fetch a “batch”.’ And to Parthagener: ‘So Kapturak is here?’

‘And why not! He has enlisted as a medical orderly. Didn’t you see the big Red Cross flag on our roof? We are, you might say, a hospital without patients. Kapturak marched in with the victorious army in the very first week. Just a common medical orderly! But actually involved in espionage. With connections with the army command. He brings us healthy soldiers and we treat them with various prescriptions. We give them civilian clothing and documents, injections, narcotics, symptoms of paralysis and defective vision. Unfortunately, I am quite alone. My sons have enlisted. At this very time. Not that I fear for their lives! A Parthagener doesn’t get killed in the war! But I’m an old man and can’t cope with the many deserters.’

More and more deserters came to Parthagener. The fear of a war that was only a possibility had turned into the much greater fear of a war that already existed. The old man sat in his inn and sold remedies against danger as an apothecary might sell powders against fever.

‘And where is your friend?’ asked the old man.

‘He’s waiting downstairs!’

Parthagener put on his glasses and combed his fine white beard before the mirror. Then he turned round again. Until now he had spoken personally. Henceforth he was the official landlord, ready to offer a stranger what he had — quiet dignity and spiritual comfort.

In the early evening twilight, Kapturak arrived. He was in uniform and seemed more composed than in more settled times. Then he had been an adventurer. Now, in the midst of the great adventure, he was an honest man who had not abandoned his civilian calling.

It was quiet in the tap-room. At times the heavy step of a patrol could be heard, making its way through the town. It was possible to forget that here the war, which had been in preparation so long, was at home, here on this frontier which was its homeland. Old Parthagener sat over a large book and calculated. Berzejev slept, head on the table-top. Only his tangled brown hair was visible.

‘Are you going to stay with him?’ asked Kapturak. The glance he cast in Berzejev’s direction was physical, like an outstretched index finger.

‘He intends to go to Switzerland via Rumania, the Balkans, Italy. I would rather go by Vienna.’

‘You both leave tomorrow!’ decided Kapturak. ‘As Swiss Red Cross. I’ll arrange the departure.’

They slept in the bar-parlour. Friedrich was woken a few times by distant shots which rang with a long echo through the still night, and by the distant pale gleam of the searchlights which lit up the horizon and the windows for short seconds. He saw himself, in a dream, running along a narrow path between fields. The path led into a wood. It was night. A broad band of light from a search-light sped over the fields to find the track along which Friedrich was running. The track had no end. The dark mass of the wood was visible close by. But the path took unexpected bends, evaded a rock and a puddle, and whenever Friedrich decided to abandon it and run straight across the fields the wood disappeared from his sight. A naked sky, shamelessly stripped by white searchlights, lay flat and endless over the world. Hastily he sought again for the treacherous path and he ran, carefully despite his haste, one foot in front of the other, so as not to step to one side and lose sight of the wood.

In the morning he walked once more through the little town. The shops were closed. No one showed himself at the windows of the low houses. Soldiers were encamped on the square market-place. The horses whinnied. Enormous cauldrons gave forth greasy warm odours. The supply waggons rolled incessantly and apparently aimlessly over the uneven cobblestones. On the stone threshold of a house whose door was closed sat a soldier. He held a sack between his knees, bent his head over it and looked inside. As Friedrich passed he closed the sack with startled haste and lifted his head. He had a pale broad face with faded brows over narrow light-grey eyes. His cap sat crooked on his hair and squashed one ear. His yellow uniform of coarse linen was too small and his broad shoulders bulged out the upper part of the sleeves. He was like a lunatic in a strait-jacket. A gradual fear spread over his face. His much too short lips, which could never quite be closed, revealed the gums over his long yellow teeth. He gave the appearance of laughing and crying, friendliness and rage. ‘I’ve frightened you!’ said Friedrich. The soldier nodded. ‘What have you got in the sack? Don’t be afraid!’ The soldier opened it quickly and let Friedrich look inside. Friedrich saw silver spoons, chains, candlesticks and watches. ‘What are you going to do with these?’ The soldier shrugged his shoulders and held his head on one side like a naughty child. At last he begged: ‘Give me your watch!’ ‘You’ve got so many!’ said Friedrich, ‘I’ve none.’ ‘Let’s see!’ pleaded the soldier. He stood up and put his hands in Friedrich’s pockets. He found papers, pencils, an old newspaper, a knife, a handkerchief. ‘No, you haven’t got one!’ said the soldier. ‘Here, help yourself!’ And he opened the sack. ‘I don’t want a watch!’ said Friedrich. ‘Go on. You must take one!’ insisted the man and put a watch in his coat pocket.

Friedrich went away. The soldier ran after him, the sack swinging in his hand. ‘Halt!’ he cried. And, as Friedrich stood still: ‘Give me back the watch!’ He took it back again with a trembling hand. Officers returned from breakfast, with jingling spurs, belted waists, with the warlike elegance that confers the badge of manhood on them together with a certain resemblance to female models. They swayed their hips, at which pistols hung like pieces of jewellery in their cases. The soldiers in the streets saluted. And the officers responded gaily and lightly. As they passed among respectful salutes, dumb submissiveness, infatuated devotion, they resembled society ladies passing through a ballroom.

Ambulances arrived from which wounded men with white bandages were removed like plaster figures from a drawer; a horse lay dying in the middle of the street, without anyone taking any notice; an officer rode by. He came up to the level of the house-tops and seemed to be visiting the world like a blue deity.

They left the same day for Rumania. Berzejev went on to Switzerland via Greece and Italy, Friedrich continued to Vienna by way of Hungary. They arranged to meet in Zürich. They travelled with Red Cross armbands and with identification papers of Kapturak’s manufacture as members of a Swiss medical mission.

10

In Rumania Friedrich parted from his friend. At the time, when I heard that he was going to Vienna, I found it inexplicable that he did not make the detour by way of Italy and Switzerland together with Berzejev. And when, in the field, I received the first letter from Friedrich for a long time — I quote a typical passage in one of the following pages — I still assumed that it was something important, probably on behalf of his Party, that took him to Austria. But he had nothing to do there. I cannot conceive that a man who had lived for over a year in a Siberian prison camp should return to a city in order to meet an acquaintance, or even a woman. Yet Friedrich seems to have had no other reason. Savelli was no longer in Vienna. The Ukrainian comrade P. had been living for a year in a concentration camp for civilian internees in Austria. R. had moved to Switzerland — a month before the outbreak of war. Friedrich could not even go safely through the streets without military papers. People — as one knows — had all become the shadows of their documents. Friedrich’s age group had long ago been called up. He must have appeared suspicious to every policeman on the streets. The large mobilization notices, in which he was named, clung faded and tattered to the walls, as if in confirmation that the members of this age-group had already fallen and begun to rot. Friedrich, to whom a definite citizenship could not be allotted, could be arrested and end up in a camp. At the frontier and en route he had stated that he had come from Rumania to enlist. People had believed him, there were many like him on the train. A gendarme who checked his papers told him as much. Men came from distant countries to take up a rifle. Here, too, the trains were decorated with foliage. The soldiers sang different songs and wore different colours from those in Russia. A month before they had all been in mufti, both here and over there, barely distinguishable. Why, then should they all at once be able to sing? They had never sung before when they had sat in trains as travellers in perfumery, as lawyers, as officials going on leave or returning to their duties. Had they no respect for death? Did they respect it only when it appeared with the festive insignia which they liked to bestow on it at proper times and in proper churchyards, at coffin-makers and in funeral parlours?

‘I gradually came to recognize my old anger against authority,’ Friedrich wrote to me later in the field. ‘I was rebelling against authority as it is at the present time. For it is not based on legal assumptions. The book-keeper who goes off singing to the war is no more a hero than the policeman is a policeman, the minister a minister, or the Kaiser a Kaiser. One does not see this in times of peace. But now the hundred thousand lawyers and headmasters who have suddenly turned into officers, expose this illegality which applies even to the regular officers. There is no doubt that society reveals its identity, however it disguises itself.

‘I was in the Union of Young Workers, which you know. The Thursday evening meetings still take place. I read the programme in the entrance-hall. These were the titles of the lectures: “The Central Powers and the War”, “Socialism and Germany”, “Tsarism and the Proletariat”, “The Middle European idea and Freedom of the Peoples”. I sought the chairman, a young metal worker. Despite his youth, he was currently exempted from military service because he worked in a munitions factory and on account of his expert knowledge. “Oh, Comrade!” said the young man, overjoyed. He wore a badge in his buttonhole whose design I could not quite make out and which combined a cross, a star and a hammer. A draughtsman in the munitions factory had designed it and it had become officially adopted as the insignia of the heroes of the home front as the metal workers are known. “How marvellous, that you’ve escaped!” said the young man. “When do you enlist? Will you give us a talk beforehand? There aren’t many of us now, most have joined up!” While he was speaking he had the cheerfulness of the president of a festival committee. On his table lay piles of pink field postcards, there was an ashtray he had made himself out of the grenades he helped to produce. On the wall hung one of the familiar prints showing Karl Marx, and a red flag wrapped up with string leaned in a corner. It was rather like a rolled-up sunshade, the ones the flower-sellers spread over their stalls on hot summer days. And because it was snowing outside, it seemed to me in a fit of strange confusion that the flag was really an umbrella.’

He remembered Grünhut as one remembers a medicine one has already used a few times with success. Grünhut was a lost individual, even a war could not relieve him of his excommunication. And as society was waging war, Friedrich concluded with the consistency of a man who has not yet experienced a war, that the previously convicted must be normal.

Grünhut jumped up. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said, and drew Friedrich to the table and lit the gas-lamp which began to diffuse a humming green chill. However, he endeavoured to warm his frozen hands at the flame.

Friedrich told of his escape. Grünhut walked around in the room and rubbed his hands. ‘What heroism!’ he said. ‘You’ve earned a decoration even before going into the field! It ought to be published in the papers! What a hero! What a hero!’

And he began to talk of the imminent siege of the city of Paris, of Hindenburg’s march towards Petersburg, of a regiment that had passed under his window that very day on its way to the station, and of his hopes of being rehabilitated at last. He now referred to his old unhappy story as ‘a tragic case’. He had put in a request to the regiment in which he had served as a one-year volunteer years ago; he had been a sergeant and been considered for a commission. He had kept a copy, which he took from his pocket and began to read aloud. In it he talked about the exceptional times, about the Fatherland and the Kaiser, about his ‘youthful misdemeanour’ and his yearning to die as a soldier and a gentleman, to make up for a wasted life with a splendid death. Despite his age, he wanted to go to the front.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead although his red hands betrayed that he was freezing. He was hot and cold at the same time. His head was in quite another climate than his body. At the moment, so Grünhut said, there were no addresses to write. A large tailoring firm, which had a contract for uniforms, gave him so-called home work. He fetched twenty pairs of military trousers and a hundred and fifty buttons from the workshop every third day and delivered the trousers with the buttons sewn on three days later. He delivered only good work. Others were satisfied with drawing one thread through each hole in the button. Then, the first time a soldier fastened his braces, the button tore off. People had no conscience. But Grünhut sewed the buttons on so carefully that they were as firm as iron. Although spot-checks were made on all the other home workers, he was taken on trust. Also he received a higher wage. Only now things weren’t too good. Frau Tarka was gradually losing her clientèle. The men were enlisting, the women becoming nurses. They gradually learned to be careful and to avoid becoming pregnant. It was practice. Sexual matters could no longer remain secret. And the girls’ fear of their fathers also grew less with the times. So Frau Tarka pestered him. She demanded more money for his room. Letting to refugees from the east was so profitable now. He put her off with his prospects of rehabilitation.

‘Shall we go and eat?’

Yes, they went to the canteen.

The weather had suddenly changed, a warm wind blew and turned the snow into rain. The slightly wounded and convalescents walked with sticks, with black and white bandages, many on the arms of dark-blue nurses. The street-lamps had been turned down, the lights in the shop-windows were put out early, many shops had closed because their proprietors had been called up. The lowered iron doors were reminiscent of graves, and the bills that gave the reason for the absence of the shopkeepers were like the inscriptions on tombstones. In many streets it was so dark that the stars were visible between the ragged clouds. It was an invasion of nature among the houses and street-lamps. The rows of windows were blind. Sky and clouds were mirrored in the windowpanes.

The feebly lit room of the canteen seemed brighter and friendlier than in peacetime. More women than men now sat at the long tables. They talked of sons and husbands, took crumpled field postcards and old newspapers from hidden pockets. A few grey-haired men, who greeted Grünhut with a brief silence, spoke of politics. Grünhut, whom the old men called Doctor, explained to them the strategic position of the Allied armies and comforted them over the advance of the Russians into Galicia with an allusion to Napoleon, who in 1812 had to thank his very advance for his misfortunes. ‘I reported to the military authorities yesterday of my own free will!’ he said, as a final and conclusive proof that the victory of the Central Powers was certain. The old men shook their heads. ‘How old are you?’ they asked. ‘Fifty-two!’ said Grünhut, with the same emphasis with which he had previously said ‘thirty thousand prisoners.’

Friedrich suddenly noticed, hanging on the walls, a large coloured oleograph of the Kaiser in coronation robes. The portrait had already been there in peacetime, but so high up on the wall and so dusty that it had always been taken for a landscape. Now it hung in a more prominent position, like a renewed plighting of troths by the beggars and the poor who came there.

11

Friedrich still had enough money to last him for about a month. Berzejev had divided the ready money with him. Friedrich was waiting for a letter from his friend in Zürich. He had no proof of identity to satisfy the police about himself. He lived in his old room at the tailor’s, who had been rejected for the time being on grounds of general physical debility. This good fortune made him affable. He warned Friedrich against his wife and advised him to tell her that he was expecting a telegram to report for duty any day.

Friedrich was afraid of the neighbours, an anonymous denunciation, a policeman’s glance, and even Grünhut the patriot.

He wanted to see Hilde again. He wrote to her, asking her to come to the café. He waited in the corner; an old gentleman sat opposite him, a newspaper in front of his face. Only his snow-white hair was visible, parted in the middle. He did not stir. He did not lay the newspaper down, nor did he turn it over. It was as if he had fallen asleep but went on reading through closed eyelids. A full glass of water which he had not touched stood on his table, covered by a page of the newspaper. He was probably holding quite an old issue of the paper, one announcing the outbreak of war. He could no longer put it down. On the wall to the right hung a long narrow mirror which had never been completely visible because it had always been obscured by a customer’s back. It only provided a fleeting glimpse to the passer-by. Now, for the first time, Friedrich could see his face even though he was sitting down. Only two lamps burnt in the whole room. The wall where the mirror was still lay in the darkening grey of the departing day, and the mirror seemed far removed from the lighted part of the room. It held the image of one of the burning lamps, diminished in its unfathomable depths. Friedrich beheld his face like that of a stranger. If he turned his glance sideways without moving his head he could see his profile, and it alarmed him that he could scarcely recognize himself. His mouth was narrow, his lower lip projected and pulled the chin up with it. His hair was receding, his forehead bulged white and gleaming, and the first hint of a silvery sheen showed at his temples. His nose drooped gently and wearily over his mouth.

Night already lay behind the windows when Hilde entered. He went towards her. He looked in her face for a long time, as he had just been looking in the mirror. He wanted to find changes in her, too, shadows cast by the times. But the months had passed over her smooth dark face like harmless caressing summer airs. Time had found no place on her cheeks to leave a trace behind. The dark gleam of her eyes, the glimmer of the soft silvery down on her skin, the red bow of her lips, the graceful hesitance of her body, which seemed to reflect before every movement as if the limbs had sense and the nerves intelligence — all these were for ever. Friedrich waited for the first sound of her voice as for a gift. He wanted to see and hear all at once. The waiter, hailed by her, came as a deliverance. ‘What would you like to order?’ he asked. And once again he heard her voice.

She had been informed of his fate. She had often revisited the café. Once R. had sat down at her table and told her about Friedrich. But now it was wartime. And he had a twofold reason for fighting against Tsarism. The cause of freedom was now so splendidly identical with the cause of the Fatherland that all class distinctions and class conflicts were annulled. She was well aware of this. At last she had found an opportunity to get to know the people, for she nursed the wounded in hospital every morning. And finally came the inevitable question: ‘When are you joining up?’

‘Next week,’ he said mechanically.

Could he come round tomorrow afternoon? Some of her old friends would be there, many of course in uniform.

‘No!’ he said. But he already saw a shadow on her face and was touched by the fact that she was sad and might miss him.

‘Yes!’ he corrected himself. ‘I’ll come.’

In the entrance hall at Herr von Maerker’s he already noted signs that the Fatherland was in danger. On the clothes-racks at either side of the mirror hung officers’ caps and blue cloaks with metal buttons, and two sabres leaned in the stands appointed for umbrellas in times of peace. As Friedrich handed his hat to the servant girl it seemed to him that she hung it on a rather remote hook with faint disdain, alongside two dark forlorn civilian overcoats. The servant girl had a distant resemblance to a camp-follower.

Most of the friends of the household had joined up. Herr von Maerker himself had become a captain and was currently commandant of a railway station. Twice a day he went to the station and observed the departing regiments and the arriving transports of wounded with an enthusiastic interest. The unwonted exercise did him good. Every day, for decades, he had walked along the same two streets. The sojourn at a station that he had only fleetingly traversed twice a year, on his departure for and his return from the holidays, gave him the pleasant illusion after years of monotonous office work of finding himself caught up in an exciting life. He had to thank his connections at the War Ministry for various items of knowledge about goings-on in politics and at G.H.Q., and for the comforting feeling that he would remain at one of the stations in Vienna for as long as it was possible. Naturally, he did not for a moment think that the protection he enjoyed was inconsistent with his love for the Fatherland. He lacked any understanding of the close connection between patriotism and danger to life. He did not take into account that the direct consequence of war was death, rather than variety. After all, like so many of his social class, he hardly realized that the phrase ‘Fallen on the Field of Honour’ necessarily implied the irrevocable end of the fallen.

Herr von Maerker’s housekeeper now went about with the cheering prospect of becoming the bride of her employer after victory. In its very first months the war had upset a few social prejudices which, despite their stupidity, had nevertheless been more moralistic than the war. A new era was seen as imminent. Because it had become necessary to endow proletarians with the aristocratic attributes of heroes and knights, members of the social class to which Herr von Maerker belonged imagined that they had become democratic. Some young women, so-called ‘liaisons’ of the sons of the aristocracy and high finance, were fortunate enough, through a quick wartime wedding, to become the legitimate spouses of their princes instead, as was usually the case in peacetime, of acquiring a drapery shop or a glove business as a peace-settlement. Through the mediation of their pretty daughters, a few hundred of the lower middle class acquired connections with elevated circles and got into the army medical service when they enlisted. Patriotic unity was therefore no longer a matter for doubt. All the ladies were nurses or manifested some kind of lively charitable impulse. They went so far as to send unknown war widows articles of clothing that would otherwise have been given to the sewing-women in order to forestall any demands for increased wages. Golden wedding-rings were exchanged for iron ones, even though there was some willingness to retain the precious stones. Watch-chains, especially unfashionable ones, were also exchanged. Wherever one looked there was iron. Many sons found themselves risking their lives, to the gratification of their parents. Even the ne’er-do-wells who had squandered money, were forgiven, since they were now heroes and no longer capable of squandering. The mothers of the dead wore their sorrow as generals their golden collars, and the death of the fallen became a kind of decoration for the bereaved. But even the relatives of heroes who were engaged in quite safe duties were as proud as if they had a dead man to mourn, and the nuances between mothers of the deceased and mothers of the living were effaced in the familiar general ‘gravity of the times’. Since all alike was tragic, all imagined themselves as making a sacrifice.

Already appeals for the first War Loan were posted on every wall, alongside notices of the third call-up. The portrait-painter was in uniform, even if a fanciful one hastily invented by some military official. There had not been adequate preparations for artists to participate in the war. The war propaganda department could not cope with so many painters and writers, historians and journalists, dramatists and drama critics. The journalists wore leather gaiters and revolvers and an arm-band on which the word ‘Press’ was stitched in gold letters. The drama critics went into the archives and were allowed to wear civilian clothes so as not to have to appear as NCO’s. The painters were left to their own devices. They made portraits of the army leaders, painted the walls of military hospitals in gay and cheerful colours, and wrote diaries or letters which they then published as the ‘guests of Literature’. They too went for medical examinations, but usually had a number of disorders that kept them from the shooting. Some of the dramatists began to write regimental histories.

At Herr von Maerker’s house, where Hilde acted as mediator between literature, art and the history of art, there gathered not only fighting men but also painters and writers. Friedrich found their glances curious and quizzing. His revolutionary opinions and his Siberian experiences, together with his readiness to struggle against Tsarism — which people took for granted — fitted in with their conception of the identity of freedom and the cause of the Fatherland. His very presence attested to this identity.

The writer G., one of the cultivated satirists who knew how to combine a decadent manner, elegant posturing and large debts with a sensitive feeling for language, was immersed in a discussion with young Baron K. about the French literature of the Enlightenment. He avoided the discussion of current events. He was, in fact, a sceptic and might have upset the general optimism. If he had expressed his opinions, it would have been all over with his congenial occupation and civilian clothing. However, in order not to appear as a man without any kind of attachment to the Fatherland, he said ‘The war is the very time in which one is able to think. Never before have I been able to read so extensively and with so few distractions. At present I am reading the French. It affords me a special pleasure to get to know our enemies better. They are cruel and clever. The entire race is impelled by their so-called “raison”. It is quite obvious to me, of course, that such sound commonsense rears a thrifty lower middle class but not a heroic nation. Great occasions call for a sweet unreason.’

Hilde smiled and exchanged a glance with the writer. She understood that he had spoken for her and not to the lieutenant. She did not much care for the cavalry. For whereas the writer and the ‘intellectuals’ — this word was used increasingly often — discussed the very simplest battle reports in such a manner that nothing remained of their actuality but a faint echo, which Hilde found agreeable, the lieutenant named names, numbers, kilometres and divisions, which bored her. And although he said nothing that the others could not have said, had they wished to, it seemed as if he alone knew what war was all about.

Besides this lieutenant, Hilde’s father alone among all the men present remained an object for her particular disdain. Only since the war had the ministerial adviser participated in his daughter’s entertainments, so changed was he by the great event. Among all the groups of that social class which produced no officers, no ministerial officials, no diplomats and no landed proprietors, the one he most detested consisted of what he called the ‘Bohemians’, of whom his notions were infantile. Even now when, revolutionized by wartime enthusiasm, he yielded to the general illusion that differences would be abolished and that a painter in travelling clothes and riding-breeches who painted a base hospital and a base commandant was part of the baggage-train of heroes, even now he winced imperceptibly when the painter P., as soon as anything exciting was mentioned, took his foot in his hands as if this manipulation was a necessary aid to better hearing, or when the drama critic R., in a quiet moment, broke a match between his teeth. In this unsuspecting state, which he owed to a secluded youth in a feudal institution, Herr von Maerker did not understand that these men did not display the free ways of an artistic disposition but the miserable ones of a lower middle-class upbringing. He regarded it as a method of expressing the artistic temperament.

Friedrich looked around. The war correspondent who had just returned from the front was talking with a lieutenant, a lawyer in mufti, about the excellent equipment of the troops. He wanted next to go to Belgium and describe the victory parade. A Liberal deputy, middle-aged and at that time not liable for service, was explaining to a one-year volunteer, to whom it was of no concern, that the war would constitute the final overthrow of clericalism and that non-denominational schools would come about in a matter of weeks. The ironic author was now talking to Hilde. He had left the young cavalryman sitting in silence, and although their chairs were touching the literary man was separated from the officer by a whole world, a world that abounded with French writings of the Enlightenment. The writer now wore round his mouth a smile that could be put on and taken off like a moustache-trainer, one that he used to make an impression on women. His suit, his deportment, his hairstyle, were the careful work of an entire morning. Out of sceptical protest he wore his elegant civilian suit, for which he had a special permit in his pocket. But it was as provocative as an injustice in contrast with the entire uniformed world. The painstakingness revealed by the knot of his necktie alone was a demonstration against the confusion of a whole epoch. The glance, full of gentle appraisal, with which he followed Hilde’s gestures and seemed to note them behind his forehead, held the melancholy renunciation of a critical genius who had yielded to the censor and was compelled to conceal deep within himself the many witticisms that occurred to him at every communiqué from the front. Friedrich hated him even more than the painter.

He looked at Hilde. A slight flush, which darkened the brown of her cheeks, disclosed that she felt herself to be the centre of a circle of the elect who adored her and whom she herself venerated, and Friedrich asked himself if there was a causal connection between the adoration that pleased her and the veneration she rendered in return. She seemed strange and remote and almost hostile to him in the midst of these others. He would have liked to extract the immediate significance of every movement she made in order to detach her from her connection with this world, and the meaning of every word she said so that her beloved voice might continue as nothing but an innocuous sound. He loved her voice, but not her words. He loved her eyes, but hated what they recorded.

12

It was not until August that the Ukrainian P. returned from the camp. In the meantime it had become known that the Russian revolutionaries had for some time been the natural allies of the Central Powers. P.’s liberation from the camp was doubtless politically motivated. He remained in Vienna, the authorities were aware of it and even supported him. Some days after P.’s return Friedrich set out on his journey through Germany to Zürich. P. had been in contact with Zürich throughout, even during his stay in the camp, and with Comrade Tomkin in M. in Brandenburg — one of the middlemen between the comrades and the secret police. He was unchanged. Robust and carefree as he was, he seemed to regard the years up to the war, the straits in which he always lived and his sufferings in the concentration camp, as a kind of necessary gymnastic exercise, which he was able to surmount. He was unafraid, not because he was brave but because the bulk and strength of his muscles, the inexhaustible elasticity of his tendons and nerves and a healthly abundance of red blood left no room for fear. He was as little capable of being afraid as a tree. But, like every fearless man, he understood that anxiety did not always flow from cowardice but was also a quality connected with one’s physical constitution and nerves.

‘Your worrying was unnecessary,’ said P. to Friedrich. ‘If you’d been locked up, they’d soon have let you out. We are allies for the time being and under the protection of a powerful institution. Our comrades even receive passports. You’ll be taken care of too. You will now go to M., here is an address. You will report to this man and he’ll give you money and papers for Switzerland. Give my greetings to the comrades. I’m staying here for the moment. I might be able to cross the lines to Russia.’

He said ‘cross the lines to Russia’ as if it were a matter of going for a pleasant drive. He had decided to make a rendezvous with the comrades as one arranges an excursion to a well-known and popular beauty spot. He sat, powerful and calm on his old sofa which was wide and large enough for a grown man but seemed narrow, short and fragile under the weight and force of his body.

‘In order to avoid any unpleasantness just now, you will travel first class,’ said P. ‘You’ll find yourself in the good society of higher officers and war contractors and no policeman will dare to demand your identity card. But if it should happen, make a fuss and snarl at any officials who cross your path.’

They walked slowly through the streets. P. had the solemn deliberation of a burgomaster. ‘If one has my kind of appearance,’ he said, ‘no one in Central Europe will be the least bit suspicious. The Germans, and the smaller races within the German cultural sphere, have an indestructible trust in broad shoulders. Compare, for instance, the popularity of Hindenburg with the anonymity of Hötzendorf, who is small and elegant. The Russians command respect, although they are enemies. But the Russian generals have broad epaulettes, like the Germans. Striplings like yourself evoke mistrust.’

In order to see Friedrich safely on his way, P. accompanied him to the station. And with the joviality that sprang from his nature, he delivered Friedrich into the care of the conductor. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘my friend is ill and must have agreeable neighbours.’ ‘Thank you, Excellency,’ said Friedrich, so loudly that the policeman who was due to accompany the train must have heard. ‘Take care of yourself,’ said P. and bade him farewell. The conductor and the policeman saluted as P. left the platform with great strides.

Friedrich was not left alone in the compartment. A German colonel and an Austrian major climbed in. They exchanged greetings. It was wartime and one could be sure that no common travellers sat in the first class. Nowadays, whoever got on the train and wore civilian clothes was even mightier than a uniform. Clever officers, therefore, had gradually accustomed themselves to regard civilians they encountered in the first class as superiors.

They were the more resentful when, just before the train departed, the conductor squeezed in one more passenger who would have made a more suitable first-class passenger in peacetime. Both officers exchanged a quick glance. While the eyebrows of each were raised in astonishment, their moustaches were already smiling. Both moved nearer each other as if they now had to join in mutual defence. The passenger so suspiciously received did not seem to notice anything for the moment. He sat very free and comfortable because the others had made themselves so small. He was shortsighted, as was betrayed by the thick lenses of his pince-nez, the way his head was permanently poked forwards, and his uncertain searching movements. He had evidently been in a hurry not to miss the train, his panting was clearly audible. His short legs dangled slightly above the floor, continually sought by the tips of his toes. His plump white hands lay on his knees and his fingers drummed inaudibly on the soft material of his trousers.

A black goatee in which the first grey hairs sprouted gave the gentleman the appearance of a high banking official. ‘A pimp!’ Friedrich heard the German colonel whisper. ‘Army rabbi!’ whispered the Austrian major.

The man whose vocation was not yet definitely established was meanwhile gazing affably and cordially at his fellow-passengers. His panting had gradually stopped. It was clear that he was satisfied with his present situation.

Finally he stood up, bowed slightly, first to the colonel, then to the major, and lastly — but only with a slight nod — to Friedrich. ‘Doctor Süsskind,’ he said out loud. His voice conveyed more assurance than his body.

‘You’re probably enlisting as an army chaplain, your reverence?’ said the Austrian major, while a shadow fell over the face of the silent colonel. ‘No!’ said the man, who had sat down again in the corner with feet dangling. ‘I am a war correspondent.’ And he gave the name of a Liberal newspaper. ‘Ah — war correspondent?’ said the major.

‘I was recently in your country, touring the Austro-Hungarian monarchy,’ replied the correspondent authoritatively.

‘Well, I hope everything turned out to your liking,’ said the major lightly and indifferently.

‘Not everything, unfortunately!’ began the journalist. ‘I had the opportunity of talking with several important personalities and with clever men not in office. It seemed to me, in Austria’ — he corrected himself, with an emphatic bow in the direction of the German colonel — ‘with our allies, that a stronger central driving force was needed. The organization leaves much to be desired. The Austrian is sanguine and the nations he rules are still uncivilized. It would also be as well to impose a little silence on the different national demands as long as we are fighting. Yes, gentlemen!’

What countries had he seen? asked the major.

‘The Poles, among others,’ replied the correspondent. In Cracow he had eaten well but slept badly from fear of vermin. And in Budapest he had seen two bugs in one night. The Hungarians refused to speak German to him. Yet they understood everything. A lieutenant of hussars had been very charming but had had no idea of the importance of the artillery on the Western Front. Yes!

‘There are lice at the front,’ said the Austrian major, as if he intended to tell quite another story. But he said no more.

In Pressburg, related the journalist, he had heard how soldiers in a tavern had spoken a Slav dialect. ‘It must have been Slovak,’ he stated, ‘with a German word now and again.’

‘Perhaps it was Czech,’ said the major.

‘Could be,’ replied the reporter, ‘but isn’t it all the same?’ Even Czech wasn’t so very different.

‘A Bavarian can’t understand a Prussian,’ remarked the major.

‘You’re mistaken!’ said the newsman excitedly. ‘They are only dialects.’ And he began to praise the unity of all German strains, not taking his eyes off the German colonel the while. The latter looked out of the window.

Suddenly the colonel turned round and said: ‘Talking of dialects, you are from Frankfurt, aren’t you?’

‘No! From Breslau!’ retorted the correspondent in a firm, almost military, voice.

‘Not bad either,’ said the colonel and regarded the landscape anew.

‘So you are from the press,’ began the Austrian major, as if he had only just realized that the reporter had something to do with a newspaper. ‘The seventh great power, eh?’ he enquired amiably.

The journalist smiled. ‘Now,’ continued the major, ‘you know better than we do when it will end. What’s your opinion?’

‘Who can tell!’ replied the journalist. ‘Our armies are deep in enemy territory. The nation is united as never before. The Social Democrats are fighting like everyone else. Who would have thought this miracle possible! You are on your way to Germany, aren’t you? Well, you’ll see how all our distinctions of class and creed have vanished. The old dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism is over.’

‘Really,’ said the major. ‘Well, and how about the Israelites?’

The journalist was silent and the colonel smiled at the landscape.

‘A dwindling number!’ said the bearded one, as if he would have liked to say: ‘There aren’t any at all.’

‘Our Israelites are very brave,’ continued the major perseveringly.

‘Excuse me,’ said the journalist and left the compartment. They saw him through the glass of the door. He went right and then left.

‘Occupied!’ intimated the colonel. And, as if the occupied W.C. were a matter of geography, he said: ‘He’s from Breslau.’

When the correspondent sat down in his place again he began to talk about Paris at the outbreak of war, where he had been working for several years for his newspaper. He spoke at length about the measures the Parisians had taken against the Germans, who were destined to be sent off to camps. Often and again he mentioned the names of the German ambassador, some military attachés and embassy counsellors. He seemed to wish to attribute a special significance to the fact that he had left the country in the same train in which the staff of the German embassy had travelled. And some ten times in his narrative he returned to the phrase: ‘We, a dozen German gentlemen’. The colonel continued to look out at the landscape. A German delegation which had left the enemy country at the same time as Dr Süsskind meant less to him than the troop kitchen of a foreign regiment. It was easy for the reporter to talk of military attachés. The Austrian major paid no more attention. He drew out a notebook and asked: ‘Do you know any Jewish jokes, Doctor?’ And as the correspondent did not reply the major began reading out jokes from his notebook, which all began with the words: ‘Two Jews were sitting in a train.’ The colonel regarded the major with a despairing and reproachful seriousness. The journalist had assumed a fixed smile to oblige, which became neither more nor less marked but remained the same at the point of the jokes as at their beginning. And only Friedrich laughed. Once, when the major used one of those Yiddish expressions that had already become part of the German vocabulary of wags and tailors, which he could reasonably assume everyone present would understand, the interested journalist asked what it meant. ‘What, you don’t know what it means?’ asked the major. ‘No.’ The correspondent claimed not to know. Only gradually did he recall that once, on a journey through Egypt, he had heard a similar sounding Turkish word. And he mentioned Egypt as if that country had never played an important part in the history of his race. The colonel redoubled his attentions to the windowpane, as if the landscape had become even more interesting.

They were nearing the German frontier. The major had finished his jokes. He was turning the pages in his little book in the hope of finding a hidden anecdote. But he found no more.

The journalist became restless, got up, and lifted his case from the luggage-rack with a visible effort.

‘Are you getting out?’ asked the colonel, without looking up and in a tone that he might have used to say: ‘Have we got rid of you?’

‘Yes, indeed, Colonel!’ came the firm and soldierly reply.

As the train travelled more slowly and the first signs of an approaching station became evident, the journalist put his case in the corridor, returned to the compartment, clicked his heels together with a snap one would not have credited him with and said goodbye.

To the ire of the Prussian colonel, the Austrian major held out his hand and said: ‘It’s been a pleasure!’

The colonel contented himself with saying: ‘Likewise!’ It sounded like an oath.

The journalist stood on the platform and embraced his wife. She was wearing a wide black feathered hat which sat flat as a saucer on her head. Her large red ears were aflame in the cold. In her hand she carried an umbrella with a yellow handle of twisted horn.

The train started to move off again slowly.

13

‘So that’s the newspaper correspondent Süsskind,’ thought Friedrich. He knew the name and the newspaper in which this man’s initials figured so often and so prominently. No connection could be found between the style that singled out this correspondent from his colleagues and the servility with which he denied his Jewishness. ‘This Süsskind,’ said the colonel, as if he meant to pursue Friedrich’s thoughts aloud, ‘would do better to stay out of sight.’

The train was delayed; it did not arrive at M. until the early morning.

M. was a small town in which it was raining. Most of the houses were built of dark red brick. In the middle of the town was a green square, and in the middle of the square rose a steep red-brick building. It was a Protestant church.

Opposite the entrance to the church stood a school for boys and girls, made of red brick. To the right of the school stood a revenue office of red brick. And to the left of the school was the town hall with a pointed spire. It too was made of red brick.

In the wide shop-windows were leather goods made of paper, wristwatches for soldiers, cheap novels, and mittens for Christmas in the field.

From inside the boys’ and girls’ school came the sound of clear children’s voices singing: In der Heimat, in der Heimat. From time to time a dark-green tramcar glided by rapidly, swaying and emanating a brisk clanging. And it rained, heavily, slowly, monotonously from a deep dark-grey leaden sky that had not been blue for a single hour since the creation of the world.

It rained. Friedrich found a seat in a large empty café on whose wide windows were posted patriotic and puristic notices such as: ‘Don’t say adieu but auf Wiedersehn!’ and ‘Don’t use foreign languages!’, alongside picture postcards with verses by Theodor Körner in heavy type. A waitress brought him a pallid coffee with a pinkish tinge at the edges. He sat by the window and watched the rain trickling down. It struck twelve from the town hall, and the girl workers and a few isolated workmen emerged from the munitions factory. They were a silent crowd. Only their steps could be heard on the damp cobbles. Even the young girls did not speak. They walked at the head of the irregular file because they had nimbler legs than the others. He had plenty of time. Tomkin was not available before five in the afternoon.

Friedrich got into a tram. It was empty. A conductress sold him his ticket. She had left her ears exposed and done up her hair so tightly at the nape of her neck that she could have been taken for a man. A tin trumpet hung at her bosom like a brooch. The poor woman wore pincenez. She walked with long strides through the swaying car like old sea-dogs on deck in a tempest. As no one was sitting in the car, Friedrich asked her if she would not sit down. She directed her pince-nez at him and said: ‘Conductors aren’t allowed to.’ Friedrich felt offended by the masculine plural in which she had so firmly included herself. And, irritated, he said to her: ‘You’re no conductor!’ using the masculine form. ‘I’d have you know,’ she replied, pince-nez directed straight at him, ‘that you have committed an offence against an official. I shall report you!’ ‘In this town,’ Friedrich thought, ‘Babel had lived. Women and Socialism. This country is the home of the proletarian idea. Here the proletariat is most strongly organized.’

The conductress continued to walk to and fro as if she had passengers to look after. ‘She will report me!’ thought Friedrich. And, although he now had cause enough to avoid any encounter with the authorities, he decided to stay in the tram.

The tram reached the terminus. He remained seated. The conductress went up to him and said: ‘Get out!’ ‘I’m going back again!’ said Friedrich. ‘Then you must buy another ticket!’ ‘Obviously!’

‘It’s not obvious at all,’ said the conductress. ‘I can let you travel back again even without a ticket.’ And once again the pince-nez stared straight at him.

‘Be friendly to me!’ he begged. ‘I’m on duty!’ she retorted.

He travelled once more through the entire town. No one got in.

‘Do you always have so few passengers?’ he asked. ‘Fares!’ she corrected him, without answering the question.

He was finally reduced to silence. He looked through the dirty windows, read the posters, the call-up notices. At last he got out and sat down again in the café. He was brought a beer without being asked.

And it rained.

He asked for paper and wrote a letter to Hilde. It was one of the most remarkable love-letters that have ever been written. It ran as follows:

‘Most gracious and esteemed Fräulein, I did not speak the truth when I told you that I should be enlisting next week. I shall never enlist. I am on my way to Switzerland. I did not have the opportunity to tell you what I feel about this war; I shall not even try. You know enough of my life to realize that I am no coward. If I tell you that I shall not enlist to fight for your Franz Joseph, the French war industry, the Tsar, Kaiser Wilhelm, it is not because I fear for my life but because I wish to preserve it for a better war. I shall await its outbreak in Switzerland. It will be a war against society, against the fatherlands, against the poets and painters who come to your house, against cosy family life, against the false authority of the father and the false obedience of the children, against progress and against your “emancipation”, in a word against the bourgeoisie. There are others besides who will fight with me in this war. But not many who have been so well prepared for it by their private destiny. I should certainly have hated the family, even if I had known one. I should certainly have mistrusted patriotic catchwords even if I had been reared in love of my country. But my conviction has become a passion because I am what in your vocabulary is called “stateless”. I shall go to war for a world in which I can be at home.

‘I send you this avowal only because I have to follow it with another, which is that I love you. Or — because I mistrust the ideas the bourgeois vocabulary supplies us with and the words so often misused in your society — I believe that I love you. When I saw you that first time in the carriage, you were so to speak part of a goal I was not yet fully familiar with but which I had nevertheless set myself. You were one of the aims towards which I was striving. I intended to conquer the power within the society to which you belonged. But the impotence of this society has been revealed to me earlier than I might then have thought. Even if I did not have the conviction that one must annihilate a rotten world, even if I were merely an egoist, I could not continue to strive for a power that is only a fiction. Although my aim today differs from the one of which you once seemed to me to form a part, I have never ceased to think of you. I should like to forget you, and indeed have had opportunity enough to do so. That I cannot do so seems to me a proof that I love you.

‘I should therefore really strive to win you. But then it would first be necessary for one of us to convert the other. And that is impossible. I shall therefore, as they say, renounce you. I confess that I tell you this in the very vague hope that you might sometime give me occasion, not to find renunciation unnecessary, but at least to regret it. And in this so indefinite and yet so comforting hope I kiss your hands, for which I yearn.

Farewell!

Your Friedrich’

At five he went to meet Tomkin.

He was one of those revolutionaries whom R. called ‘harsh ascetics’. A tailor by calling and of a dogged faith. ‘I’ve been living here for five years,’ he announced. ‘And you like it here?’ asked Friedrich, and he thought of the rain, the factory, the conductress, the café. Tomkin did not understand the question. Perhaps he is hearing it for the first time, thought Friedrich. ‘I found work here!’ Tomkin answered at last, as if he had only just arrived at the sense of the question. And, as if statistics formed part of the answer, he continued: ‘Eight thousand workers live here, all in Red organizations, you can rely on them. The unions are alright. Four thousand women are organized, including the conductresses and municipal auxiliaries.’

‘Really!’ said Friedrich.

‘This war is leading to the Revolution,’ said the tailor. ‘You know that as well as I do, don’t you, comrade? We have much to expect from the German proletariat,’ he continued. ‘Even though it has gone to war?’ asked Friedrich. ‘An act of the party bosses!’ said the tailor. ‘One of them lives here. I’ve got to know him. When I told him you were coming, he begged me to bring you to him. Will you see him?’ ‘Take me to him!’ said Friedrich.

He was one of those men whose patriotic speeches since the outbreak of war were quoted in the bourgeois French and English newspapers as evidence of the downfall of proletarian solidarity and the triumph of national sentiment.

He lived in three rooms, whose furniture had been gradually accumulated, piece by piece, each one newer than the other. The two sons of the house had joined up. Their photograph, showing them arm-in-arm in uniform, stood in a frame with pale-blue forget-me-not ornamentation on the father’s desk. At either side of the large mirror, which hung between two windows like a third, but reflecting the light of the room and not that of the street, hung two paintings depicting the harvest and a red sunset, one of a farmer with scythe flying over thick golden ears of corn, another of three women bent over binding sheaves. A small fragile table displayed so-called knick-knacks, a chimney-sweep of blue porcelain and a lucky mascot of red clay in the form of a pig, a doll’s kitchen with tiny pots and pans, a shepherd playing the flute, the photograph of a bearded man in a broad red plush frame with the same pale-blue forget-me-not ornaments which decorated the frame of the soldiers’ photograph. An enormous inkstand reposed on the desk. It was of metal, a bronze knight in full array held his shield horizontally like a tray so that pen-nibs could be placed on it. Two little pots at either side with small cupolas attached to iron lids, held ink, one red, the other blue. A bronze paperknife lay alongside. It was shaped like a sabre. The chairs were hard, despite being upholstered.

He was a fine fellow who had worked his way up through diligence and a creditable lack of original ideas. He had maintained a happy marriage with one and the same woman from his twenty-first year, partly by following the advice of a popular nature-cure doctor. He was a fine fellow with a slight hint of a belly and with simple features that a child might have traced. He helped his guests to cigars from a box, from whose lid the German and Austrian emperors looked out into the world, red-cheeked and cheerful, framed by a small gold-rimmed oval.

‘In Zürich, comrade,’ he said to Friedrich, ‘you’ll see how the world treats us. People can’t get over our invasion of Belgium. I was against it from the start. But the war has quickly taught us to distinguish the solid basis of fact from theory. In peacetime it’s a different matter. One can make claims in a flourishing economy. But if the entire economy is imperilled one must try to preserve it, whether one is an employer or an employee. I know that you and your comrades don’t share our opinions. But it’s easier for you. You simply can’t compare us, proletarians but with equal civil rights as citizens of a western, civilized, constitutional monarchy, with the oppressed Russian proletariat. It is clear that the Russian proletarian is no patriot in the sense that the German proletarian is. After the war our Kaiser will have to be contented with a purely decorative role, like the King of England for example. A victory for the Tsar would lead only to greater oppression of the Russian proletariat, a German victory to the liberation of the German. Then we shall take giant strides towards the Republic.’

Friedrich took his leave before midnight, when he heard the party leader’s wife calling from the bedroom. It was still raining. The town was dark. Not a single one of its many windows showed a gleam of light. The people slept in the midst of war. Was there no widow mourning her husband? Could mothers sleep whose sons had fallen? He recalled the night when he had walked through the streets of Vienna. Then, too, all were asleep with few exceptions. Those who had woken then were now in the field, in concentration camps, in prisons or, at best, in Switzerland. The others slept. They slept when it was still peacetime and the war was only getting under way, they were sleeping now. ‘Today, as then, I am the only unsleeping being in the world. Each has his tomb, his grave, his stone with its inscription, his baptismal certificate, his documents, his military pass, his Fatherland. That gives them security. They can sleep. The codings in the chancellery offices register their fate. There is no government office in the world that has my coding. I have no number. I have nothing.’

In that town, and on that night, he was the only human being awake. He opened the window and looked out into the dark street. From the second floor on which his window lay he saw the feeble rectangular glimmer on the wall opposite and that gave him a certain satisfaction, as if the glimmer were his reward.

It was still raining.

It also rained the next two days, while he had to wait for his passport. ‘The German authorities,’ said the tailor consolingly, ‘are even making conditions in places where they are themselves becoming illegal.’

‘How quickly Kapturak manages it!’ thought Friedrich.

Nevertheless, he was delighted when he had the passport and the tailor handed him his travelling money. ‘For the first time,’ he said to himself, ‘I have proper documents. The authorities themselves have become my accomplices. Such are the miracles of war. Things are progressing.’

The next day he travelled to Zürich.

He sat in the third class and listened to the soldiers talking. They spoke of quite ordinary things: of bacon, meat dishes, a medical officer, a field hospital, brands of cigarettes. They had already domesticated the war. They were already living at their ease. The violent and premature death that was now stalking them had become as familiar as natural death in times of peace, familiar and remote. The war, once an unnatural phenomenon, had become a natural one.

At the last station before the frontier, he put Hilde’s letter in the post. ‘By the time it reaches her, I’ll be over there.’

He telegraphed his arrival to Berzejev.

14

From that moment he thought only of Berzejev. He would be seeing him soon. He remembered the origin of this friendship. Even more easily recalled than troubles suffered in common and dangers endured together during their escape, were Berzejev’s words and gestures, fixed in Friedrich’s memory without any particular association. He remembered how Berzejev slept and how he ate, how he held his left knee between his hands when he sat down and was pensive, and how he used to wash himself in the morning, rapidly and carefully and with a visible enjoyment of cold and water that was like a daily reaffirmation of the union of man with the elements.

He was already travelling over Swiss soil. No more martial posters on the station walls and no more trains full of uniformed men. It was as if he had come straight from a battle, not just from a country at war. Only here did the peaceful world he had yearned for in Siberia begin. It seemed to him that peace held a strange and unfamiliar aspect and that war had been the more obvious and natural condition. Throughout the entire journey across Russia, Austria and Germany he had grown accustomed to the idea of the sovereignty of certain death in Europe. All of a sudden, at a frontier, ordinary life began. It was as if he had reached the edge of a downpour and had been allowed to glimpse briefly how sharp the separation was between blue and cloudy sky, damp and dry earth. Suddenly he saw young men in civilian clothes who should long ago have worn uniform. Suddenly he saw men tranquilly taking their leave of women, heard how they said to each other: ‘Till we meet again’. It was evident that all were secure in their lives. At the newsstands the newspapers of every country hung side by side, as if they did not contain reports of bloodshed. ‘So this is the substance of neutrality, he told himself. ‘Even from the train I can feel how unimportant the war is. The awareness that so much blood is flowing no longer fills everyone’s thoughts. I begin to understand the disinterestedness of God. Neutrality is a kind of divinity.’

‘He’ll be at the station,’ he said. And, immediately afterwards, ‘He won’t come to the station, he’ll wait for me at the house. There’s no point in waiting for someone at the station. Besides, so far I’ve always arrived alone. No one has ever expected me or accompanied me. All the same, I shall be pleased if he is at the station.’

But Berzejev really was waiting, placid as ever. ‘You got my telegram, then?’ asked Friedrich. ‘No,’ said Berzejev, ‘I’ve been meeting every train coming from Germany for a week.’ ‘But whom were you expecting?’ ‘You!’ said Berzejev.

For the first time they saw each other in European civilian clothes. For the first time each noticed in the other’s dress a few minor features that were like the ultimate and most irrefutable evidence of the community of their way of thought. ‘So you’re wearing your hat, then!’ said Friedrich. ‘You don’t like it?’ asked Berzejev. ‘On the contrary, I can’t picture it otherwise.’ And they talked like two young men of the world about neckties, hats, double-breasted and single-breasted coats, as if there were no war and as if they were not there to await the Revolution.

‘If Savelli could hear us!’ said Berzejev, ‘how he’d despise us. Even here he obstinately insists on going around without a collar, to spite us, to spite R. and myself, and especially all “intellectuals”. It’s no ordinary ostentation. With him, it’s real hatred.’

As a matter of fact things weren’t going well for any of them. They had nothing to live on. It was a struggle for them to raise enough money each week for the flat. Savelli ate only once a day, R. urgently needed a pair of trousers. He wrote for a review, for which Savelli despised him. ‘And you?’ asked Friedrich. ‘I have money,’ said Berzejev. ‘I’m working. I’ve found work at a theatre. An actor I’ve become friendly with got a place for me. It wasn’t easy. The Swiss theatrical employees were not friendly at first; finally they found me congenial. I’ve even saved money. We could both live for a month without lifting a finger. You’re staying at my place. No rooms available. Deserters and pacifists have occupied the whole of Switzerland.’

And they resumed their old life.

15

In Zürich Friedrich began to keep a proper diary. I reproduce below those of its passages that seem to me important.

From Friedrich’s diary:

‘I met R. again today. He was the same as ever. He spoke to me as if we had parted only yesterday. I remembered exactly our last conversation before my departure to Russia. But naturally he had forgotten it. It’s thanks to him that I decided to write this diary. “What?” he said, “you’re not keeping notes? Wrong! First it is a manifestation of individuality. Pencil in hand, a sheet of white paper in front of me. From a small piece of paper, not to mention a large sheet, there emanates a stillness and a solitude. A desert could not be more tranquil. Sit down with an empty notebook in a noisy café — you are at once alone. Second, it’s practical, because there are various things one shouldn’t forget. Third, a diary is a safeguard against the all too hectic activity to which our calling condemns us, as it were. It helps us to distance events. Fourth, I write because Savelli would despise it as bourgeois sentimentality if he knew about it.”

‘I, too, have a natural propensity for things that Savelli terms bourgeois sentimentality. I have met him again. Not a word about Siberia. Not a word about my escape. Only: “Berzejev tells me things have gone very well for you.” And it seemed for a moment as if I ought to demand pardon because I had been arrested. For the first time I have become really convinced that he hates me, at those times when he does not despise me too greatly. He repeated to me what Berzejev had already said: it would have been better if we had both remained in Russia. There was more to do there. I could not restrain myself from telling him that Russia was not, in fact, my home. “So much the worse!” he replied. It was a striking demonstration of nationalism. At that moment I felt like a European, as it were, just as R. terms himself. He means the great European traditions: Humanism, the Catholic Church, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Socialism. He said recently that Socialism was a concern of the West and that it would be as foolish to speak of Socialism in Russia as of Christianity to Hottentots. R. might be my older brother. We probably have more in common than qualities alone. It seems to me that we share a similar destiny. We are both sceptics. We both hate the same things. We want the Revolution for the same reasons. We are both cruel. It is laid down that we shall prepare a revolution but probably not experience its victorious outcome. I cannot believe, any more than he, that anything in the world will change except nomenclature. We hate society, personally, privately, because it happens not to please us. We hate the fat and bloody cosiness in which it lives and dies. Had we been born in a previous century we should have been reactionaries, possibly priests, lawyers, aides-de-camp, anonymous secretaries in a European court. We ought both to have been born in an age when extraordinary men could still determine their own fate, while average men remained insignificant.

‘A week ago I took the place of the correspondent of a Danish radical newspaper. My duties are to take an interest in society, politics, the theatre; and I believe that I do my work well. “You have,” says R., who secured me this job as a correspondent, “the first quality of a journalist: you are curious.”

‘The deserters who live here are not to be distinguished from the pacifists. None of those fortunate enough to have crossed the frontier admits that he fled from a private love for life. As if love for life needed any excuse! It is an attribute of the middle classes to conceal the simple necessities of nature behind complicated ideals. The men of past times might lose their life in a stupid duel. But they died for their personal honour and did not deny for a moment that life was dear to them. The men of today, at least most of the men now to be found in neutral countries, allege that they are the victims of their convictions.

‘I am interested above all in those who have come to Switzerland with the permission of their own countries. In fact, one can learn most from them. They come here to spy on the pacifists of their own countries and to make official propaganda for their ideals. There are two living in our boarding-house, a German and a Frenchman. The German’s name, ostensibly, is Dr Schleicher, the Frenchman’s Bernardin. That they sit at my table for breakfast is due to the naïvety of our landlady. The landlady believes that the two have something in common because of their pacifist ideas, and find pleasure in eating at the same table, two poor victims of their fatherlands. Instead of which, each is the paid spy of his country. Dr Schleicher is a decent, easygoing man. He gets up late, goes to the toilet in slippers and dressing-gown, and stays there a very long time. He wears glasses, which make his eyes friendly, his broad face even broader, and which lie like a second gold-rimmed glassy smile over the permanent natural smile of his cheeks. Whenever I go by his door I hear a machine clattering. He is a naïve spy, who believes one to be convinced that he is not writing reports for his superiors, but typing love-letters. Bernardin is a man in his forties. He has the solemn sombre elegance of a provincial Frenchman who looks every day as if he were going to a funeral; only the cheerful expression with which he awaits his meals softens his solemnity. His shoes are always shiny and often covered by dark-grey spats, his trousers are always creased, his jacket looks as if it had just come from the tailor, his high stiff collar is always white and glossy. He continually strokes his small black moustache, which emphasizes the brownish-red of his cheeks, with two thoughtful fingers. He wears small bow-ties, as if in a conscious demonstration against the heavy silk knitted neckties of Dr Schleicher. Neither says a word to the other. They acknowledge each other smilingly and silently when they sit down and when they get up. They know about each other. Only the Frenchman writes his reports by hand, and it is quiet when one passes his door.

‘Yesterday the German and the Frenchman conversed for the first time. They very nearly did not come to eat at all. They remained together for a long time after everyone was ready, they drank coffee and smoked. I was curious as usual. I know Dr Schleicher from the café, we have a mutual acquaintance, Dr Gold. This Dr Gold has not yet decided which side to take among the warring countries. He has lived a long time in Germany and in France and, from fear that one of the two countries might possibly win and that he might learn of it too late, he remains neutral. He sometimes sits at Dr Schleicher’s table, sometimes at Bernardin’s. He is on good terms with both. He reports on the one to the other. From fear that one day both might turn on him, he has been trying for months to bring them together. Yesterday he finally succeeded. He told me the course of events as follows: “Unfortunately, it occurred to me yesterday,” said Dr Gold, “to say to Dr Schleicher that Bernardin had been wanting for a long time to make his acquaintance. And then I discovered that they sit together at table every day. I was in despair. If I were not as adept as I am, I should have blamed myself. But with my innate aplomb, I replied coolly: ‘Then he cannot know with whom he has the honour of sitting at table.’ And Dr Schleicher believed it. Only he happens to find Bernardin extremely uncongenial, and not only on grounds of nationality. And now I made my second mistake. ‘He is, after all, a man of the law,’ I said to Schleicher, ‘a pleasant man in civilian life. But the war goes to the heads of these people.’ ‘What? A lawyer?’ asks Schleicher. ‘But I too am a lawyer.’ At that moment in came Bernardin and Schleicher was the first to greet him, all smiles. At last I’ve brought them together. And what do you know! In half an hour the two were as thick as thieves. They talked only of pupils and teachers!”

‘So much for Dr Gold. He soon left me, as busy as ever. He talks breathlessly, almost panting, and always on the go. What’s more, he whispers. And he takes care that everyone around sees how diligent he is in retailing secrets. He is continually being greeted and continually responding. He knows all the pacifists. He is a regular contributor to European Peace. Berzejev calls him the “freemason” in the jaunty manner in which he confuses freemasons with pacifists. The great extent of his stupidity is astonishing, combined as it is with a knowledge of literature, languages and countries, insignificant people and so-called personalities. He is credulous and takes every piece of information seriously, and considers everything he is told important. Obviously, he must be credulous to be able to tell another person anything with conviction.

‘What is extraordinary and incomprehensible is the readiness of everyone to listen to him. But that seems to be a feature of most gregarious natures; they accept information from people as if from newspapers, as if the sound of a voice, the expression of a face and the character of the narrator were not much more important than what they have to say, as if his look might never have given the lie to his lips.

‘Dr Schleicher and Bernardin are now always seen together. They evidently do not suspect that, in such proximity, they constitute a striking phenomenon, even for wartime Zürich. Beside Bernardin’s ceremonial black, which gives him a resemblance to the manager of a large department store, Dr Schleicher’s blond brightness suggests a sunny carefree holiday. The gold frame of his spectacles, the glittering glass, the sand-coloured overcoat, his tan shoes, his light-brown trousers, his brown bowler-hat and his pale face diffuse a lustre visible at a distance, and when he walks towards one he is like a stray piece of the sun, whereas the dark Bernardin at his side appears like a sort of long and narrow ray of darkness. They have gradually become the object of joking remarks even among the pacifists, whose surveillance has brought them here. But both the German and the Frenchman seem to feel the common nature of their calling more strongly than their difference of nationality. I have heard that the German teaches French and the Frenchman German. The governments of the belligerent states seem to regard a knowledge of the enemy’s language as an adequate qualification for espionage and diplomacy. R. tells me that there is a shortage of spies, as there is of guns and bread and sugar, and that the employment of a legal official in secret diplomacy and in the press corps roughly corresponds to the employment of a Home Guard unit at the front.

‘Every day one sees new faces. Again and again new refugees. The longer the war lasts, the stronger becomes the army of convinced or chance pacifists. Switzerland could deploy an immense foreign legion to defend its neutrality.

‘Favourable news from Russia. A strike in Moscow, twenty-six factories at a standstill in the Ukraine. From Comrade P. a report that he has made every preparation to break through the front, as he calls it, and get to Russia. He asks for equipment. Someone must go and take it to him. I would gladly go. No one has money for the journey. Nothing can be sent by post because of the censorship. Tomorrow I shall go again to L. to fetch the equipment.

‘I was with L. yesterday, for the third time now. Plainly, things are worse and worse for him. He is ill at the moment, wears a thick coloured shawl round his neck and refuses to go to bed although he has been two weeks in an unheated room. He lodges with a decent chap whose respectability does not restrain him from punctually collecting the rent. T. was at L.’s. They were discussing an article that G. had just submitted. “He can’t get away from metaphysics,” complained L. “Why is he always on about God!” This was with not the least pleasure in blasphemy, such as I have often noticed with convinced atheists. Chaikin, for example, lived on terms of permanent hostility with God, and assumed an expression of sneering anxiety when he said the words: heaven, priest, church, God. When Berzejev jeers he looks like a boy who has lied to the catechists. He assumes an artful expression and reminds me of a street urchin who has pressed the knob of an electric doorbell to make a fool of the porter. It is as if he supposes that, because the door stays shut, there is really no porter there. I have also heard T. talk about religion. He treats God as an entrepreneur and a being with a mundane interest in the preservation of the existing order. However, scorn, like infantile jeers and serious antagonism, still seem to me to be confirmation of the existence of God. But L. scours out heaven with one little word so that one can almost hear its great emptiness. It is as if he had removed the clapper from a bell so that it swings soundlessly and without echo, still metal and yet the shadow of a bell. L. has the gift of removing obstacles with one hand, of opening vistas. He does not readily admit the possibility of surprises. “We must reckon with obstacles,” he said, “but not with those that we cannot foresee. If we once allow ourselves to make allowances for incalculable contingencies, we shall lapse into the complacency that prevents us from wanting to see even those that are probable. We live on the earth. Our understanding is terrestrial. Supernatural forces do not intervene in earthly affairs. So why should we cudgel our brains over them! Only the possible exists on earth. And everything possible can be taken into account.”

‘L.’s secret lies in this deliberate limitation. I do not believe that he experiences emotion, hate, anger or love. He resembles a minor official. He has deliberately disciplined himself to inconspicuousness, and has probably used as much effort to this end as others do, for instance, to develop a significant profile. He lives in the cold. He suffers illness and want as an example to us. And the only affecting thing about him is his incognito. His beard is like an intentionally superfluous prolongation of his physiognomy. His skull is broad and white. His cheekbones are broad like his skull and his beard forms the black apex of a ghostly pale heart which has eyes and can see.

‘I was in Vienna for two days. I travelled with our material and with L.’s commissions to P., on the eve of his “breakthrough”. Otherwise I saw no one. I tried to speak to Grünhut. The Madame, as he always calls the midwife, told me with almost maternal pride that Grünhut really was rehabilitated. “Now he will at least have a beautiful death,” she said, the handkerchief that a woman of her sort always has at hand in the same mysterious way that a bourgeois woman always mislays hers, already covering her eyes and with a soft sob in her voice. “The good Doctor!” “Perhaps he may still come back,” I said in a slightly thoughtless attempt to comfort her. It became apparent that I had offered quite the wrong kind of comfort. “When anyone is as far away as he is,” said the midwife, “they never come back. Besides I’ve let the room. Polish Jews live there now. Refugees.” She uttered this word with a spiteful glassy brightness. “Dirty types, they don’t join up, the man is quite free and both sons are unarmed Home Guards. I shall have to go on raising their rent. Don’t you agree? Everything gets dearer and these people earn a lot of money!” In order not to have to listen to her further, I resorted to the death sentence she had passed on Grünhut. “You can safely keep the refugees,” I said. “Grünhut will certainly perish.” She produced the handkerchief once more. In wartime tears can also be an expression of hope.

‘I have not written to Hilde. I have thought of her continually and haven’t for a moment wanted to see her. If I had not undertaken to be sincere at all costs as soon as I sat down alone in front of this paper, shame would have prevented me from writing down that I have been to the photographer’s show-case where a large portrait of Hilde had been on display for some time. It is not there any more. A lieutenant, in colour, now hangs in the window.

‘Savelli now reveals an open hatred towards all of us. Only in L.’s room is he silent and discreet. L. curbs him by the very simple method of telling him the truth to his face, as if he were reading it to him out of a book. Even Savelli cannot accuse him of saying anything for private reasons. He has only convictions. “He is a phenomenal figure,” says R. “He is loved, although he barely understands how to accept love. He is feared, although he has no power to spread fear. With him nature appears to be attempting an entirely new type of saint. A saint without a halo, without clemency and without the reward of eternity. I find this sanctity rather chilling. Note how Savelli attempts to imitate L., and how he fails. He is simply a cold-blooded swine. He pretends to be someone who has killed personal interests. But he has them. Only his blood is so cold that his ambition appears like opinion and his hatred like good sense.” Thus R.

‘After being away from Zürich for two days, I no longer feel here the freedom of a neutral country. On the return journey I imagined the whole time that I should find everything changed, my friends and the crowded cafés and all the spies. I felt as if I were returning after ten years, although the days in Vienna had passed so quickly. The war has grown old, it becomes dull and sluggish and even resembles one of the many cripples it has produced. I no longer took any interest in my fellow-passengers because I believe I know exactly what they are thinking. If I were sitting in a compartment with Süsskind again today, I could prompt him in his opinions and play his role. Also those of the Prussian colonel and the Austrian major. I also know exactly what R. has to say, what Savelli and Berzejev assert. We live in this city like prisoners, not like escapees. This geographically limited neutrality seems like a prison now that the war has become geographically unlimited. It often occurs to me that we are afloat in a small boat, good and bad, decent people and scoundrels. And the journey has no end to it. Sometimes I wish that something terrible might happen, that Switzerland might declare war on someone and intern all of us or send us to the front. So much happens here and the air is filled with so-called items of news. But the events are always the same, and one victory is like another, one defeat like another, the enemy is like his enemy and the contestants are as little distinguishable as rifles. The events beat against our city, waves against a ship, always the same, always the same. And I write about them in the radical newspapers. When I read one of my sentences in print it sounds like the soft, peculiarly feeble echo of the idea I had intended to write down. When shall I ever be able to express it? I begin to doubt whether the war serves our ends, it simply cannot cease, it is too monstrous. It has outgrown earthly laws and speeds along like one of the heavenly bodies, obedient to the mysterious decree of an inertia that knows no end.’

16

Here we break off the quotations from Friedrich’s diary. In any case, from now on his entries become increasingly rare. The diary now contains only news of a general nature which may in the meantime have acquired an historical value but does not interest us in this context. We know that his fear, expressed above, that the war would not come to an end proved false. It remains to report, however, that on a day of that memorable early spring of the year 1917, when the world began once again to alter its aspect, he left Switzerland. This was the period in which the rebellious Duma, in two short days, decided on the arrest of the Tsar. The intellectual revolutionaries and the workers demonstrated on the Nevski Prospekt. The first eighty-three dead of the Russian Revolution lay on the damp stones, and spilled into the melting heaps of snow, the Tsar took his last farewell of his weeping officers. Rodzianko, Goutshkov, Kerenski and Shipov took over power, Skoropadski placed himself at the disposal of the German Kaiser. The Russian general Lukomski dictated the deed of abdication at GHQ, General Alekrejev informed the entire Russian front that Russia had ceased to be a Tsardom and the historic railway train carried the leader of the definitive Russian Revolution through Germany to Petrograd. The Tsar was in Pskov. He received all the telegrams in which his army leaders declared their agreement with his abdication. And while Russia began to transform itself into a democratic republic, the man who was preparing the Soviet Republic was already living in the Tschesinka Hotel in Petrograd. The spring was changeable as ever, the snow melted, ran and froze again. Friedrich and Berzejev were working in Moscow. They had access to a weapons arsenal and every night, witnessed only by the bribed sentries, they conveyed to the factories a quantity of rifles and munitions covered with straw in small brisk carts.

For the second time — and just as when he used to traverse the border forest with Kapturak and the deserters — he imagined he could hear the cry of an entire people. He recalled the five deserters. They had stood still suddenly, like a commando, at the first light of day to take leave of their homeland. Where were they now? Cripples on the hard asphalt of American cities, murdered in the prisons of the world, withered to shadows by pestilence in concentration camps, persecuted by the police, or long rotted in graves. He recalled grey police quarters, narrow-browed clerks, the hard stony fists of sergeant-majors and the soft slimy hands of spies, four-edged bayonets, the pyramid of the bourgeois world, and public prosecutors under pictures of the Kaiser, the Magi of the ruling class. He heard the rattling sound of chains and the blaring brass of regimental bands. He saw the officers who passed through the zones of communication laced like the demimondaines of the war, and the painters in fantastic uniforms who painted heroic pictures of military commanders, the journalists, those soothsayers of the modern bourgeoisie, and the majors with their Jewish jokes, the midwives and the patriotically transformed Grünhuts, the beggars’ canteen and Hilde’s literary circle.

‘We shall destroy this world!’ he said to Berzejev. They rolled through the dark suburban streets, dressed as peasants coming from their villages to sell vegetables in the morning markets. The neatly packed rifles lay quietly in the straw. The two men saw the stars glittering cold and remote as ever, and felt the spring advancing as ever, and the wind that wafts it from the south-west like every other year. The horses’ hooves struck an incessant display of sparks on the uneven cobblestones, kindled from the night and in the night expiring.